Small Gods

‘I am? Oh. Yes. Trust me for a fair wind. Flat as a mill-race the whole way, don’t you worry.’

‘I meant mill-pond! I meant mill-pond!’

Brutha clung to the mast.

After a while a sailor came and sat down on a coil of rope and looked at him interestedly.

‘You can let go, Father,’ he said. ‘It stands up all by itself.’

‘The sea … the waves …’ murmured Brutha carefully, although there was nothing left to throw up.

The sailor spat thoughtfully.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘They got to be that shape, see, so’s to fit into the sky.’

‘But the boat’s creaking!’

‘Aye. It does that.’

‘You mean this isn’t a storm?’

The sailor sighed, and walked away.

After a while, Brutha risked letting go. He had never felt so ill in his life.

It wasn’t just the seasickness. He didn’t know where he was. And Brutha had always known where he was. Where he was, and the existence of Om, had been the only two certainties in his life.

It was something he shared with tortoises. Watch any tortoise walking, and periodically it will stop while it files away the memories of the journey so far. Not for nothing, elsewhere in the multiverse, are the little travelling devices controlled by electric thinking-engines called ‘turtles’.

Brutha knew where he was by remembering where he had been — by the unconscious counting of footsteps and the noting of landmarks. Somewhere inside his head was a thread of memory which, if you had wired it directly to whatever controlled his feet, would cause Brutha to amble back through the little pathways of his life all the way to the place he was born.

Out of contact with the ground, on the mutable surface of the sea, the thread flapped loose.

In his box, Om tossed and shook to Brutha’s motion as Brutha staggered across the moving deck and reached the rail.

To anyone except the novice, the boat was clipping through the waves on a good sailing day. Seabirds wheeled in its wake. Away to one side — port or starboard or one of those directions — a school of flying fish broke the surface in an attempt to escape the attentions of some dolphins. Brutha stared at the grey shapes as they zigzagged under the keel in a world where they never had to count at all—

‘Ah, Brutha,’ said Vorbis. ‘Feeding the fishes, I see.’

‘No, lord,’ said Brutha. ‘I’m being sick, lord.’

He turned.

There was Sergeant Simony,^{23} a muscular young man with the deadpan expression of the truly professional soldier. He was standing next to someone Brutha vaguely recognized as the number one salt or whatever his title was. And there was the exquisitor, smiling.

‘Him! Him!’ screamed the voice of the tortoise.

‘Our young friend is not a good sailor,’ said Vorbis.

‘Him! Him! I’d know him anywhere!’

‘Lord, I wish I wasn’t a sailor at all,’ said Brutha. He felt the box trembling as Om bounced around inside.

‘Kill him! Find something sharp! Push him over-board!’

‘Come with us to the prow, Brutha,’ said Vorbis. ‘There are many interesting things to be seen, according to the captain.’

The captain gave the frozen smirk of those caught between a rock and a hard place. Vorbis could always supply both.

Brutha trailed behind the other three, and risked a whisper.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Him! The bald one! Push him over the side!’

Vorbis half-turned, caught Brutha’s embarrassed attention, and smiled.

‘We will have our minds broadened, I am sure,’ he said. He turned back to the captain, and pointed to a large bird gliding down the face of the waves.

‘The Pointless Albatross,’ said the captain promptly. ‘Flies from the Hub to the Ri—’ he faltered. But Vorbis was gazing with apparent affability at the view.

‘He turned me over in the sun! Look at his mind!’

‘From one pole of the world to the other, every year,’ said the captain. He was sweating slightly.

‘Really?’ said Vorbis. ‘Why?’

‘No-one knows.’

‘Excepting the God, of course,’ said Vorbis.

The captain’s face was a sickly yellow.

‘Of course. Certainly,’ he said.

‘Brutha?’ shouted the tortoise. ‘Are you listening to me?’

‘And over there?’ said Vorbis.

The sailor followed his extended arm.

‘Oh. Flying fish,’ he said. ‘But they don’t really fly,’ he added quickly. ‘They just build up speed in the water and glide a little way.’

‘One of the God’s marvels,’ said Vorbis. ‘Infinite variety, eh?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the captain. Relief was crossing his face now, like a friendly army.

‘And the things down there?’ said the exquisitor.

‘Them? Porpoises,’ said the captain. ‘Sort of a fish.’

‘Do they always swim around ships like this?’

‘Often. Certainly. Especially in the waters off Ephebe.’

Vorbis leaned over the rail, and said nothing. Simony was staring at the horizon, his face absolutely immobile. This left a gap in the conversation which the captain, very stupidly, sought to fill.

‘They’ll follow a ship for days,’ he said.