Brutha crawled forward, Vorbis held unsteadily by one limp arm. He didn’t dare stop. His grandmother would hit him again. And there was Master Nhumrod, too, drifting in and out of vision.
“I am really disappointed in you, Brutha. Mmm?”
“Want…water…”
“—water,” said Nhumrod. “Trust in the great God.”
Brutha concentrated. Nhumrod vanished.
“Great God?” he said.
Somewhere there was some shade. The desert couldn’t go on forever.
The sun set fast. For a while, Om knew, heat would radiate off the sand and his own shell would store it, but that would soon go and then there would be the bitterness of a desert night.
Stars were already coming on when he found Brutha. Vorbis had been dropped a little way away.
Om pulled himself level with Brutha’s ear.
“Hey!”
There was no sound, and no movement. Om butted Brutha gently in the head and then looked at the cracked lips.
There was a pecking noise behind him.
The scalbie was investigating Brutha’s toes, but its explorations were interrupted when a tortoise jaw closed around its foot.
“I old oo, ugger ogg!”
The scalbie gave a burp of panic and tried to fly away, but it was hindered by a determined tortoise hanging on to one leg. Om was bounced along the sand for a few feet before he let go.
He tried to spit, but tortoise mouths aren’t designed for the job.
“I hate all birds,” he said, to the evening air.
The scalbie watched him reproachfully from the top of a dune. It ruffled its handful of greasy feathers with the air of one who was prepared to wait all night, if necessary. As long as it took.
Om crawled back to Brutha. Well, there was still breathing going on.
Water…
The god gave it some thought. Smiting the living rock. That was one way. Getting water to flow…no problem. It was just a matter of molecules and vectors. Water had a natural tendency to flow. You just have to see to it that it flowed here instead of there. No problem at all to a god in the peak of condition.
How did you tackle it from a tortoise perspective?
The tortoise dragged himself to the bottom of the dune and then walked up and down for a few minutes. Finally he selected a spot and began digging.
This wasn’t right. It had been fiery hot. Now he was freezing.
Brutha opened his eyes. Desert stars, brilliant white, looked back at him. His tongue seemed to fill his mouth. Now, what was it…
Water.
He rolled over. There had been voices in his head, and now there were voices outside his head. They were faint, but they were definitely there, echoing quietly over the moonlit sands.
Brutha crawled painfully toward the foot of the dune. There was a mound there. In fact, there were several mounds. The muffled voice was coming from one of them. He pulled himself closer.
There was a hole in the mound. Somewhere far underground, someone was swearing. The words were unclear as they echoed backward and forward up the tunnel, but the general effect was unmistakable.
Brutha flopped down, and watched.
After a few minutes there was movement at the mouth of the hole and Om emerged, covered with what, if this wasn’t a desert, Brutha would have called mud.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the tortoise. “Tear off a bit of your robe and pass it over.”
Dreamlike, Brutha obeyed.
“Turnin’ around down there,” said Om, “is no picnic, let me tell you.”
He took the rag in his jaws, backed around carefully, and disappeared down the hole. After a couple of minutes he was back, still dragging the rag.
It was soaked. Brutha let the liquid dribble into his mouth. It tasted of mud, and sand, and cheap brown dye, and slightly of tortoise, but he would have drunk a gallon of it. He could have swam in a pool of it.
He tore off another strip for Om to take down.
When Om re-emerged, Brutha was kneeling beside Vorbis.
“Sixteen feet down! Sixteen bloody feet!” shouted Om. “Don’t waste it on him! Isn’t he dead yet?”
“He’s got a fever.”
“Put him out of our misery.”
“We’re still taking him back to Omnia.”
“You think we’ll get there? No food? No water?”
“But you found water. Water in the desert.”
“Nothing miraculous about that,” said Om. “There’s a rainy season near the coast. Flash floods. Wadis. Dried-up riverbeds. You get aquifers,” he added.
“Sounds like a miracle to me,” croaked Brutha. “Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.”
“Well, there’s no food down there, take it from me,” said Om. “Nothing to eat. Nothing in the sea, if we can find the sea again. I know the desert. Rocky ridges you have to go around. Everything turning you out of your path. Dunes that move in the night…lions…other things…”
…gods.
“What do you want to do, then?” said Brutha. “You said better alive than dead. You want to go back to Ephebe? We’ll be popular there, you think?”
Om was silent.
Brutha nodded.
“Fetch more water, then.”
It was better traveling at night, with Vorbis over one shoulder and Om under one arm.
At this time of year—
—the glow in the sky over there is the Aurora Corealis, the hublights, where the magical field of the Discworld constantly discharges itself among the peaks of Cori Celesti, the central mountain. And at this time of year the sun rises over the desert in Ephebe and over the sea in Omnia, so keep the hublights on the left and the sunset glow behind you—
“Did you ever go to Cori Celesti?” said Brutha.
Om, who had been nodding off in the cold, woke up with a start.
“Huh?”
“It’s where the gods live.”
“Hah! I could tell you stories,” said Om darkly.
“What?”
“Think they’re so bloody elite!”
“You didn’t live up there, then?”
“No. Got to be a thunder god or something. Got to have a whole parcel of worshipers to live on Nob Hill. Got to be an anthropomorphic personification, one of them things.”
“Not just a Great God, then?”
Well, this was the desert. And Brutha was going to die.
“May as well tell you,” muttered Om. “It’s not as though we’re going to survive…See, every god’s a Great God to someone. I never wanted to be that great. A handful of tribes, a city or two. It’s not much to ask, is it?”
“There’s two million people in the empire,” said Brutha.
“Yeah. Pretty good, eh? Started off with nothing but a shepherd hearing voices in his head, ended up with two million people.”
“But you never did anything with them,” said Brutha.
“Like what?”
“Well…tell them not to kill one another, that sort of thing…”
“Never really given it much thought. Why should I tell them that?”
Brutha sought for something that would appeal to god psychology.
“Well, if people didn’t kill one another, there’d be more people to believe in you?” he suggested.
“It’s a point,” Om conceded. “Interesting point. Sneaky.”
Brutha walked along in silence. There was a glimmer of frost on the dunes.
“Have you ever heard,” he said, “of Ethics?”
“Somewhere in Howondaland, isn’t it?”
“The Ephebians were very interested in it.”
“Probably thinking about invading.”
“They seemed to think about it a lot.”
“Long-term strategy, maybe.”
“I don’t think it’s a place, though. It’s more to do with how people live.”
“What, lolling around all day while slaves do the real work? Take it from
me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place while those fellows are living like—”
“—gods?” said Brutha.
There was a terrible silence.
“I was going to say kings,” said Om, reproachfully.
“They sound a bit like gods.”
“Kings,” said Om emphatically.
“Why do people need gods?” Brutha persisted.
“Oh, you’ve got to have gods,” said Om, in a hearty, no-nonsense voice.
“But it’s gods that need people,” said Brutha. “To do the believing. You said.”
Om hesitated. “Well, okay,” he said. “But people have got to believe in something. Yes? I mean, why else does it thunder?”
“Thunder,” said Brutha, his eyes glazing slightly, “I don’t—
“—is caused by clouds banging together; after the lightning stroke, there is a hole in the air, and thus the sound is engendered by the clouds rushing to fill the hole and colliding, in accordance with strict cumulodynamic principles.”
“Your voice goes funny when you’re quoting,” said Om. “What does engendered mean?”
“I don’t know. No one showed me a dictionary.”
“Anyway, that’s just an explanation,” said Om. “It’s not a reason.”
“My grandmother said thunder was caused by the Great God Om taking his sandals off,” said Brutha. “She was in a funny mood that day. Nearly smiled.”
“Metaphorically accurate,” said Om. “But I never did thundering. Demarcation, see. Bloody I’ve got-a-big-hammer Blind Io up on Nob Hill does all the thundering.”
“I thought you said there were hundreds of thunder gods,” said Brutha.
“Yeah. And he’s all of ’em. Rationalization. A couple of tribes join up, they’ve both got thunder gods, right? And the gods kind of run together—you know how amoebas split?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s like that, only the other way.”
“I still don’t see how one god can be a hundred thunder gods. They all look different…”
“False noses.”
“What?”
“And different voices. I happen to know Io’s got seventy different hammers. Not common knowledge, that. And it’s just the same with mother goddesses. There’s only one of ’em. She just got a lot of wigs and of course it’s amazing what you can do with a padded bra.”
There was absolute silence in the desert. The stars, smeared slightly by high-altitude moisture, were tiny, motionless rosettes.
Away toward what the Church called the Top Pole, and which Brutha was coming to think of as the Hub, the sky flickered.
Brutha put Om down, and laid Vorbis on the sand.
Absolute silence.
Nothing for miles, except what he had brought with him. This must have been how the prophets felt, when they went into the desert to find…whatever it was they found, and talk to…whoever they talked to.
He heard Om, slightly peevish, say: “People’ve got to believe in something. Might as well be gods. What else is there?”
Brutha laughed.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t think I believe in anything any more.”
“Except me!”
“Oh, I know you exist,” said Brutha. He felt Om relax a little. “There’s something about tortoises. Tortoises I can believe in. They seem to have a lot of existence in one place. It’s gods in general I’m having difficulty with.”
“Look, if people stop believing in gods, they’ll believe in anything,” said Om. “They’ll believe in young Urn’s steam ball. Anything at all.”
“Hmm.”
A green glow in the sky indicated that the light of dawn was chasing frantically after its sun.
Vorbis groaned.
“I don’t know why he won’t wake up,” said Brutha. “I can’t find any broken bones.”
“How do you know?”
“One of the Ephebian scrolls was all about bones. Can’t you do anything for him?”
“Why?”
“You’re a god.”
“Well, yes. If I was strong enough, I could probably strike him with lightning.”
“I thought Io did the lightning.”
“No, just the thunder. You’re allowed to do as much lightning as you like but you have to contract for the thundering.”
Now the horizon was a broad golden band.
“How about rain?” said Brutha. “How about something useful?”
A line of silver appeared at the bottom of the gold. Sunlight was racing towards Brutha.
“That was a very hurtful remark,” said the tortoise. “A remark calculated to wound.”
In the rapidly growing light Brutha saw one of the rock islands a little way off. Its sand-blasted pillars offered nothing but shade, but shade, always available in large quantities in the depths of the Citadel, was now in short supply here.
“Caves?” said Brutha.
“Snakes.”
“But still caves?”
“In conjunction with snakes.”
“Poisonous snakes?”
“Guess.”
The Unnamed Boat clipped along gently, the wind filling Urn’s robe attached to a mast made out of bits of the sphere’s framework bound together with Simony’s sandal thongs.
“I think I know what went wrong,” said Urn. “A mere overspeed problem.”
“Overspeed? We left the water!” said Simony.
“It needs some sort of governor device,” said Urn, scratching a design on the side of the boat. “Something that’d open the valve if there was too much steam. I think I could do something with a pair of revolving balls.”
“It’s funny you should say that,” said Didactylos. “When I felt us leave the water and the sphere exploded I distinctly felt my—”
“That bloody thing nearly killed us!” said Simony.
“So the next one will be better,” said Urn, cheerfully. He scanned the distant coastline.
“Why don’t we land somewhere along here?” he said.
“The desert coast?” said Simony. “What for? Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, easy to lose your way. Omnia’s the only destination in this wind. We can land this side of the city. I know people. And those people know people. All across Omnia, there’s people who know people. People who believe in the Turtle.”
“You know, I never meant for people to believe in the Turtle,” said Didactylos unhappily. “It’s just a big turtle. It just exists. Things just happen that way. I don’t think the Turtle gives a damn. I just thought it might be a good idea to write things down and explain things a bit.”
“People sat up all night, on guard, while other people made copies,” said Simony, ignoring him. “Passing them from hand to hand! Everyone making a copy and passing it on! Like a fire spreading underground!”
“Would this be lots of copies?” said Didactylos cautiously.
“Hundreds! Thousands!”
“I suppose it’s too late to ask for, say, a five percent royalty?” said Didactylos, looking hopeful for a moment. “No. Probably out of the question, I expect. No. Forget I even asked.”
A few flying fish zipped out of the waves, pursued by a dolphin.
“Can’t help feeling a bit sorry for that young Brutha,” said Didactylos.
“Priests are expendable,” said Simony. “There’s too many of them.”
“He had all our books,” said Urn.
“He’ll probably float with all that knowledge in him,” said Didactylos.
“He was mad, anyway,” said Simony. “I saw him whispering to that tortoise.”
“I wish we still had it. There’s good eating on one of those things,” said Didactylos.
It wasn’t much of a cave, just a deep hollow carved by the endless desert winds and, a long time ago, even by water. But it was e
nough.
Brutha knelt on the stony floor and raised the rock over his head.
There was a buzzing in his ears and his eyeballs felt as though they were set in sand. No water since sunset and no food for a hundred years. He had to do it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and brought the rock down.
The snake had been watching him intently but in its early-morning torpor it was too slow to dodge. The cracking noise was a sound that Brutha knew his conscience would replay to him, over and over again.
“Good,” said Om, beside him. “Now skin it, and don’t waste the juice. Save the skin, too.”
“I didn’t want to do it,” said Brutha.
“Look at it this way,” said Om, “if you’d walked in the cave without me to warn you, you’d be lying on the floor now with a foot the size of a wardrobe. Do unto others before they do unto you.”
“It’s not even a very big snake,” said Brutha.
“And then while you’re writhing there in indescribable agony, you imagine all the things you would have done to that damn snake if you’d got to it first,” said Om. “Well, your wish has been granted. Don’t give any to Vorbis,” he added.
“He’s running a bad fever. He keeps muttering.”
“Do you really think you’ll get him back to the Citadel and they’ll believe you?” said Om.
“Brother Nhumrod always said I was very truthful,” said Brutha. He smashed the rock on the cave wall to create a crude cutting edge, and gingerly started dismembering the snake. “Anyway, there isn’t anything else I can do. I couldn’t just leave him.”
“Yes you could,” said Om.
“To die in the desert?”
“Yes. It’s easy. Much easier than not leaving him to die in the desert.”
“No.”
“This is how they do things in Ethics, is it?” said Om sarcastically.
“I don’t know. It’s how I’m doing it.”
The Unnamed Boat bobbed in a gully between the rocks. There was a low cliff beyond the beach. Simony climbed back down it, to where the philosophers were huddling out of the wind.
“I know this area,” he said. “We’re a few miles from the village where a friend lives. All we have to do is wait till nightfall.”
“Why’re you doing all this?” said Urn. “I mean, what’s the point?”
Small Gods: Discworld Novel, A Page 21
