Small Gods tds-13

by Terry David John Pratchett

  "And I'm hungry."

  "You had a whole melon rind last night."

  "And who had the melon, eh?"

  "No, he didn't," said Brutha. "He eats stale bread and water."

  "Why doesn't he eat fresh bread?"

  "He waits for it to get stale."

  "Yes. I expect he does," said the tortoise.

  "Om?"

  "What?"

  "The captain just said something odd. He said the world is flat and has an edge."

  "Yes? So what?"

  "But, I mean, we know the world is a ball, because . . .

  The tortoise blinked.

  "No, it's not," he said. "Who said it's a ball?"

  "You did," said Brutha. Then he added: "According to Book One of the Septateuch, anyway."

  I've never thought like this before, he thought. I'd never have said "anyway."

  "Why'd the captain tell me something like that?" he said. "It's not normal conversation."

  "I told you, I never made the world," said Om. "Why should I make the world? It was here already. And if I did make a world, I wouldn't make it a ball. People'd fall off. All the sea'd run off the bottom."

  "Not if you told it to stay on."

  "Hah! Will you hark at the man!"

  "Besides, the sphere is a perfect shape," said Brutha. "Because in the Book of-”

  "Nothing amazing about a sphere," said the tortoise. "Come to that, a turtle is a perfect shape."

  "A perfect shape for what?"

  "Well, the perfect shape for a turtle, to start with," said Om. "If it was shaped like a ball, it'd be bobbing to the surface the whole time."

  "But it's a heresy to say the world is flat," said Brutha.

  "Maybe, but it's true."

  "And it's really on the back of a giant turtle?"

  "That's right."

  "In that case," said Brutha triumphantly, "what does the turtle stand on?"

  The tortoise gave him a blank stare.

  "It doesn't stand on anything," it said. "It's a turtle, for heaven's sake. It swims. That's what turtles are for."

  "I . . . er . . . I think I'd better go and report to Vorbis," said Brutha. "He goes very calm if he's kept waiting. What did you want me for? I'll try and bring you some more food after supper."

  "How are you feeling?" said the tortoise.

  "I'm feeling all right, thank you."

  "Eating properly, that sort of thing?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  "Pleased to hear it. Run along now. I mean, I'm only your God. " Om raised its voice as Brutha hurried off. "And you might visit more often!

  "And pray louder, I'm fed up with straining!" he shouted.

  Vorbis was still sitting in his cabin when Brutha puffed along the passage and knocked on the door. There was no reply. After a while, Brutha pushed the door open.

  Vorbis did not appear to read. Obviously he wrote, because of the famous Letters, but no one ever saw him do it. When he was alone he spent a lot of time staring at the wall, or prostrate in prayer. Vorbis could humble himself in prayer in a way that made the posturings of power-mad emperors look subservient.

  "Um," said Brutha, and tried to pull the door shut again.

  Vorbis waved one hand irritably. Then he stood up. He did not dust off his robe.

  "Do you know, Brutha," he said, "I do not think there is a single person in the Citadel who would dare to interrupt me at prayer? They would fear the Quisition. Everyone fears the Quisition. Except you, it appears. Do you fear the Quisition?"

  Brutha looked into the black-on-black eyes. Vorbis looked into a round pink face. There was a special face that people wore when they spoke to an exquisitor. It was flat and expressionless and glistened slightly, and even a half­-trained exquisitor could read the barely concealed guilt like a book. Brutha just looked out of breath but then, he always did. It was fascinating.

  "No, lord," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "The Quisition protects us, lord. It is written in Ossory, chapter VII, verse-”

  Vorbis put his head on one side.

  "Of course it is. But have you ever thought that the Quisition could be wrong?"

  "No, lord," said Brutha.

  "But why not?"

  "I do not know why, Lord Vorbis. I just never have."

  Vorbis sat down at a little writing table, no more than a board that folded down from the hull.

  "And you are right, Brutha," he said. "Because the Quisition cannot be wrong. Things can only be as the God wishes them. It is impossible to think that the world could run in any other way, is this not so?"

  A vision of a one-eyed tortoise flickered momentarily in Brutha's mind.

  Brutha had never been any good at lying. The truth itself had always seemed so incomprehensible that complicating things even further had always been beyond him.

  "So the Septateuch teaches us," he said.

  "Where there is punishment, there is always a crime," said Vorbis. "Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God."

  "That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically.

  "Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady."

  "She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha.

  "A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind," said Vorbis, with his chin on one hand. "Were it not for the deficiency of her sex, it sounds as though she would have made an excellent inquisitor."

  Brutha nodded. Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.

  "And now," said Vorbis, with no change in his tone, "you will tell me what you saw in the desert."

  "Uh. There were six flashes. And then a pause of about five heartbeats. And then eight flashes. And another pause. And two flashes."

  Vorbis nodded thoughtfully.

  "Three-quarters," he said. "All praise to the Great God. He is my staff and guide through the hard places. And you may go."

  Brutha hadn't expected to be told what the flashes meant, and wasn't going to enquire. The Quisition asked the questions. They were known for it.

  Next day the ship rounded a headland and the bay of Ephebe lay before it, with the city a white smudge on the horizon which time and distance turned into a spilling of blindingly white houses, all the way up a rock.

  It seemed of considerable interest to Sergeant Simony. Brutha had not exchanged a word with him. Fraternization between clergy and soldiers was not encouraged; there was a certain tendency to unholiness about soldiers . . .

  Brutha, left to his own devices again as the crew made ready for port, watched the soldier carefully. Most soldiers were a bit slovenly and generally rude to minor clergy. Simony was different. Apart from anything else, he gleamed. His breastplate hurt the eyes. His skin looked scrubbed.

  The sergeant stood at the prow, staring fixedly as the city drew nearer. It was unusual to see him very far away from Vorbis. Wherever Vorbis stood there was the sergeant, hand on sword, eyes scanning the surroundings for . . . what?

  And always silent, except when spoken to. Brutha tried to be friends.

  "Looks very . . . white, doesn't it?" he said. "The city. Very white. Sergeant Simony?"

  The sergeant turned slowly, and stared at Brutha.

  Vorbis's gaze was dreadful. Vorbis looked through your head to the sins inside, hardly interested in you except as a vehicle for your sins. But Simony's glance was pure, simple hatred.

  Brutha stepped back.

  "Oh. I'm sorry," he muttered. He walked back sombrely to the blunt end, and tried to keep out of the soldier's way.

  Anyway, there were more soldiers, soon enough . . .

  The Ephebians were expecting them. Soldiers lined the quay, weapons held in a way that stopped just short of being a direct insult. And there were a lot of them.

  Brutha trailed along, the voice of the tortoise insinuating itself in his head.

  "So the Ephebians wa
nt peace, do they?" said Om. "Doesn't look like that. Doesn't look like we're going to lay down the law to a defeated enemy. Looks like we took a pasting and don't want to take any more. Looks like we're suing for peace. That's what it looks like to me."

  "In the Citadel everyone said it was a glorious victory," said Brutha. He found he could talk now with his lips hardly moving at all; Om seemed able to pick up his words as they reached his vocal chords.

  Ahead of him, Simony shadowed the deacon, staring suspiciously at each Ephebian guard.

  "That's a funny thing," said Om. "Winners never talk about glorious victories. That's because they're the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterward. It's only the losers who have glorious victories."

  Brutha didn't know what to reply. "That doesn't sound like god talk," he hazarded.

  "It's this tortoise brain."

  "What?"

  "Don't you know anything? Bodies aren't just handy things for storing your mind in. Your shape affects how you think. It's all this morphology that's all over the place."

  "What?"

  Om sighed. "If I don't concentrate, I think like a tortoise!"

  "What? You mean slowly?"

  "No! Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst."

  ,Why?"

  "I don't know. Because it often happens to them, I suppose."

  Brutha stared around at Ephebe. Guards with helmets crested with plumes that looked like horses' tails gone rogue marched on either side of the column. A few Ephebian citizens watched idly from the roadside. They looked surprisingly like the people at home, and not like two-legged demons at all.

  "They're people," he said.

  "Full marks for comparative anthropology."

  "Brother Nhumrod said Ephebians eat human flesh," said Brutha. "He wouldn't tell lies."

  A small boy regarded Brutha thoughtfully while excavating a nostril. If it was a demon in human form, it was an extremely good actor.

  At intervals along the road from the docks were white stone statues. Brutha had never seen statues before. Apart from the statues of the SeptArchs, of course, but that wasn't the same thing.

  "What are they?"

  "Well, the tubby one with the toga is Tuvelpit, the God of Wine. They call him Smimto in Tsort. And the broad with the hairdo is Astoria, Goddess of Love. A complete bubblehead. The ugly one is Offler the Crocodile God. Not a local boy. He's Klatchian originally, but the Ephebians heard about him and thought he was a good idea. Note the teeth. Good teeth. Good teeth. Then the one with the snakepit hairdo is-”

  "You talk about them as if they were real," said Brutha.

  "They are."

  "There is no other god but you. You told Ossory that."

  "Well. You know. I exaggerated a bit. But they're not that good. There's one of 'em that sits around playing a flute most of the time and chasing milkmaids. I don't call that very divine. Call that very divine? I don't."

  The road wound up steeply around the rocky hill. Most of the city seemed to be built on outcrops or was cut into the actual rock itself, so that one man's patio was another man's roof. The roads were really a series of shallow steps, accessible to a man or a donkey but sudden death to a cart. Ephebe was a pedestrian place.

  More people watched them in silence. So did the statues of the gods. The Ephebians had gods in the same way that other cities had rats.

  Brutha got a look at Vorbis's face. The exquisitor was staring straight ahead of himself. Brutha wondered what the man was seeing.

  It was all so new!

  And devilish, of course. Although the gods in the statues didn't look much like demons-but he could hear the voice of Nhumrod pointing out that this very fact made them even more demonic. Sin crept up on you like a wolf in a sheep's skin.

  One of the goddesses had been having some very serious trouble with her dress, Brutha noticed; if Brother Nhumrod had been present, he would have had to hurry off for some very serious lying down.

  "Petulia, Goddess of Negotiable Affection," said Om. "Worshiped by the ladies of the night and every other time as well, if you catch my meaning."

  Brutha's mouth dropped open.

  "They've got a goddess for painted jezebels?"

  "Why not? Very religious people I understand. They're used to being on their-they spend so much time looking at the-look, belief is where you find it. Specialization. That's safe, see. Low risk, guaranteed returns. There's even a God of Lettuce somewhere. I mean, it's not as though any one else is likely to try to become a God of Lettuce. You just find a lettuce-growing community and hang on. Thunder gods come and go, but it's you they turn to every time when there's a bad attack of Lettuce Fly. You've got to . . . uh . . . hand it to Petulia. She spotted a gap in the market and filled it."

  "There's a God of Lettuce?"

  "Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything . . ."

  Om stopped himself and waited to see if Brutha had noticed. But Brutha seemed to have something else on his mind.

  "That's not right. Not treating people like that. Ow."

  He'd walked into the back of a subdeacon. The party had halted, partly because the Ephebian escort had stopped too, but mainly because a man was running down the street.

  He was quite old, and in many respects resembled a frog that had been dried out for quite some time. Something about him generally made people think of the word "spry," but, at the moment, they would be much more likely to think of the words "mother naked" and possibly also "dripping wet" and would be one hundred percent accurate, too. Although there was the beard. It was a beard you could camp out in.

  The man thudded down the street without any apparent self­consciousness and stopped outside a potter's shop. The potter didn't seem concerned at being addressed by a little wet naked man; in fact, none of the people in the street had given him a second glance.

  "I'd like a Number Nine pot and some string, please," said the old man.

  "Yes sir, Mr. Legibus." The potter reached under his counter and pulled out a towel. The naked man took it in an absent-minded way. Brutha got the feeling that this had happened to both of them before.

  "And a lever of infinite length and, um, an immovable place to stand," said Legibus, drying himself off.

  "What you see is what I got, sir. Pots and general household items, but a bit short on axiomatic mechanisms."

  "Well, have you got a piece of chalk?"

  "Got some right here from last time," said the potter.

  The little naked man took the chalk and started to draw triangles on the nearest bit of wall. Then he looked down.

  "Why haven't I got any clothes on?" he said.

  "We've been having our bath again, haven't we?" said the potter.

  "I left my clothes in the bath?"

  "I think you probably had an idea while you were in the bath?" prompted the potter.

  "That's right! That's right! Got this splendid idea for moving the world around!" said Legibus. "Simple lever principle. Should work perfectly. It's just a matter of getting the technical details sorted out."

  "That's nice. We can move somewhere warm for the winter," said the potter.

  "Can I borrow the towel?"

  "It's yours anyway, Mr. Legibus."

  "Is it?"

  "I said, you left it here last time. Remember? When you had that idea for the lighthouse?"

  "Fine. Fine," said Legibus, wrapping the towel around himself. He drew a few more lines on the wall. "Fine. Okay. I'll send someone down later to collect the wall."

  He turned and appeared to see the Omnians for the first time. He peered forward and then shrugged.

  "Hmm," he said, and wandered away.

  Brutha tugged at the cloak of one of the Ephebian soldiers.

  "Excuse me, but why did we stop?" he said.

  "Philosophers have right of way," said the soldier.

  "What's a philosopher?" said Brutha.

  "Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting," s
aid a voice in his head.

  "An infidel seeking the just fate he shall surely receive,' said Vorbis. "An inventor of fallacies. This cursed city attracts them like a dung heap attracts flies."

  "Actually, it's the climate," said the voice of the tortoise. "Think about it. If you're inclined to leap out of your bath and run down the street every time you think you've got a bright idea, you don't want to do it somewhere cold. If you do do it somewhere cold, you die out. That's natural selection, that is. Ephebe's known for its philosophers. It's better than street theater."

  "What, a lot of old men running around the streets with no clothes on?" said Brutha, under his breath, as they were marched onward.

  "More or less. If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants. And ninety-nine out of a hundred ideas they come up with are totally useless."

  "Why doesn't anyone lock them away safely, then? They don't sound much use to me," said Brutha.

  "Because the hundredth idea," said Om, "is generally a humdinger."

  "What?"

  "Look up at the highest tower on the rock."

  Brutha looked up. At the top of the tower, secured by metal bands, was a big disc that glittered in the morning light.

  "What is it?" he whispered.

  "The reason why Omnia hasn't got much of a fleet any more," said Om. "That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does a Falling Tree in the Forest Make a Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles," he added. "Always coming up with amazing new ideas, the philosophers. The one before that was some intricate device that demonstrated the principles of leverage by incidentally hurling balls of burning sulphur two miles. Then before that, I think, there was some kind of an underwater thing that shot sharpened logs into the bottom of ships."

  Brutha stared at the disc again. He hadn't understood more than one-third of the words in the last statement.

  "Well," he said, "does it?"

  "Does what?"