Small Gods

Brutha was shaking with anger.

‘And the Prophet Abbys? I suppose someone just happened to give him the Codicils, did they?’

‘It wasn’t me—’

‘They’re written on slabs of lead ten feet tall!’

‘Oh, well, it must have been me, yes? I always have a ton of lead slabs around in case I meet someone in the desert, yes?’

‘What! If you didn’t give them to him, who did?’

‘I don’t know. Why should I know? I can’t be everywhere at once!’

‘You’re omnipresent!’

‘What says so?’

‘The Prophet Hashimi!’

‘Never met the man!’

‘Oh? Oh? So I suppose you didn’t give him the Book of Creation, then?’

‘What Book of Creation?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘No!’

‘Then who gave it to him?’

‘I don’t know! Perhaps he wrote it himself!’

Brutha put his hand over his mouth in horror.

‘Thaff blafhngf!’

‘What?’

Brutha removed his hand.

‘I said, that’s blasphemy!’

‘Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I’m a god!’

‘I don’t believe you!’

‘Hah! Want another thunderbolt?’

‘You call that a thunderbolt?’

Brutha was red in the face, and shaking. The tortoise hung its head sadly.

‘All right. All right. Not much of one, I admit,’ it said. ‘If I was better, you’d have been just a pair of sandals with smoke coming out.’ It looked wretched. ‘I don’t understand it. This sort of thing has never happened to me before. I intended to be a great big roaring white bull for a week and ended up a tortoise for three years. Why? I don’t know, and I’m supposed to know everything. According to these prophets of yours who say they’ve met me, anyway. You know, no one even heard me? I tried talking to goatherds and stuff, and they never took any notice! I was beginning to think I was a tortoise dreaming about being a god.^{12} That’s how bad it was getting.’

‘Perhaps you are,’ said Brutha.

‘Your legs to swell to tree-trunks!’ snapped the tortoise.

‘But — but,’ said Brutha, ‘you’re saying the prophets were … just men who wrote things down!’

‘That’s what they were!’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t from you!’

‘Some of it was, perhaps,’ said the tortoise. ‘I’ve … forgotten so much, the past few years.’

‘But if you’ve been down here as a tortoise, who’s been listening to the prayers? Who has been accepting the sacrifices? Who has been judging the dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the tortoise. ‘Who did it before?’

‘You did!’

‘Did I?’

Brutha stuck his fingers in his ears and opened up with the third verse of Lo, the infidels flee the wrath of Om.

After a couple of minutes the tortoise stuck its head out from under its shell.

‘So,’ it said, ‘before unbelievers get burned alive … do you sing to them first?’

‘No!’

‘Ah. A merciful death. Can I say something?’

‘If you try to tempt my faith one more time—’

The tortoise paused. Om searched his fading memory. Then he scratched in the dust with a claw.

‘I … remember a day … summer day … you were … thirteen…’

The dry little voice droned on. Brutha’s mouth formed a slowly widening O.

Finally he said, ‘How did you know that?’

‘You believe the Great God Om watches everything you do, don’t you?’

‘You’re a tortoise, you couldn’t have—’

‘When you were almost fourteen, and your grand-mother had beaten you for stealing cream from the stillroom, which in fact you had not done, she locked you in your room and you said, “I wish you were—”’

There will be a sign, thought Vorbis. There was always a sign, for the man who watched for them. A wise man always put himself in the path of the God.

He strolled through the Citadel. He always made a point of taking a daily walk through some of the lower levels, although of course always at a different time, and via a different route. Insofar as Vorbis got any pleasure in life, at least in any way that could be recognized by a normal human being, it was in seeing the faces of humble members of the clergy as they rounded a corner and found themselves face-to-chin with Deacon Vorbis of the Quisition. There was always that little intake of breath that indicated a guilty conscience. Vorbis liked to see properly guilty consciences. That was what consciences were for. Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned.

He rounded a corner and saw, scratched crudely on the wall opposite, a rough oval with four crude legs and even cruder head and tail.

He smiled. There seemed to be more of them lately. Let heresy fester, let it come to the surface like a boil. Vorbis knew how to wield the lance.

But the second or two of reflection had made him walk past a turning and, instead, he stepped out into the sunshine.

He was momentarily lost, for all his knowledge of the byways of the church. This was one of the walled gardens. Around a fine stand of tall decorative Klatchian corn, bean vines raised red and white blossoms towards the sun; in between the bean rows, melons baked gently on the dusty soil. In the normal way, Vorbis would have noted and approved of this efficient use of space, but in the normal way he wouldn’t have encountered a plump young novice, rolling back and forth in the dust with his fingers in his ears.