Small Gods

‘Remarkable.’ Another pause, a tar-pit of silence ready to snare the mastodons of unthinking comment. Earlier exquisitors had shouted and ranted confessions out of people. Vorbis never did that. He just dug deep silences in front of them.

‘They seem to like them,’ said the captain. He glanced nervously at Brutha, who was trying to shut the tortoise’s voice out of his head. There was no help there.

Vorbis came to his aid instead.

‘This must be very convenient on long voyages,’ he said.

‘Uh. Yes?’ said the captain.

‘From the provisions point of view,’ said Vorbis.

‘My lord, I don’t quite—’

‘It must be like having a travelling larder,’ said Vorbis.

The captain smiled. ‘Oh no, lord. We don’t eat them.’

‘Surely not? They look quite wholesome to me.’

‘Oh, but you know the old saying, lord …’

‘Saying?’

‘Oh, they say that after they die, the souls of dead sailors become—’

The captain saw the abyss ahead, but the sentence had plunged on with a horrible momentum of its own.

For a while there was no sound but the zip of the waves, the distant splash of the porpoises, and the heaven-shaking thundering of the captain’s heart.

Vorbis leaned back on the rail.

‘But of course we are not prey to such superstitions,’ he said lazily.

‘Well, of course,’ said the captain, clutching at this straw. ‘Idle sailor talk. If ever I hear it again I shall have the man flog—’

Vorbis was looking past his ear.

‘I say! Yes, you there!’ he said.

One of the sailors nodded.

‘Fetch me a harpoon,’ said Vorbis.

The man looked from him to the captain and then scuttled off obediently.

‘But, ah, uh, but your lordship should not, uh, ha, attempt such sport,’ said the captain. ‘Ah. Uh. A harpoon is a dangerous weapon in untrained hands, I am afraid you might do yourself an injury—’

‘But I will not be using it,’ said Vorbis.

The captain hung his head and held out his hand for the harpoon.

Vorbis patted him on the shoulder.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘you shall entertain us to lunch. Won’t he, sergeant?’

Simony saluted. ‘Just as you say, sir.’

‘Yes.’

Brutha lay on his back among sails and ropes somewhere under the decking. It was hot, and the air smelled of all air anywhere that has ever come into contact with bilges.

Brutha hadn’t eaten all day. Initially he’d been too ill to. Then he just hadn’t.

‘But being cruel to animals doesn’t mean he’s a … bad person,’ he ventured, the harmonics of his tone suggesting that even he didn’t believe this. It had been quite a small porpoise.

‘He turned me on to my back,’ said Om.

‘Yes, but humans are more important than animals,’ said Brutha.

‘This is a point of view often expressed by humans,’ said Om.

‘Chapter IX, verse 16 of the book of—’ Brutha began.

‘Who cares what any book says?’ screamed the tortoise.

Brutha was shaken.

‘But you never told any of the prophets that people should be kind to animals,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about that. Not when you were … bigger. You don’t want people to be kind to animals because they’re animals, you just want people to be kind to animals because one of them might be you.’

‘That’s not a bad idea!’

‘Besides, he’s been kind to me. He didn’t have to be.’

‘You think that? Is that what you think? Have you looked at the man’s mind?’

‘Of course I haven’t! I don’t know how to!’

‘You don’t?’

‘No! Humans can’t do—’

Brutha paused. Vorbis seemed to do it. He only had to look at someone to know what wicked thoughts they harboured. And grandmother had been the same.

‘Humans can’t do it, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘We can’t read minds.’

‘I don’t mean reading them, I mean looking at them,’ said Om. ‘Just seeing the shape of them. You can’t read a mind. You might as well try and read a river. But seeing the shape’s easy. Witches can do it, no trouble.’

‘“The way of the witch shall be as a path strewn with thorns”,’ said Brutha.

‘Ossory?’ said Om.

‘Yes. But of course you’d know,’ said Brutha.

‘Never heard it before in my life,’ said the tortoise bitterly. ‘It was what you might call an educated guess.’

‘Whatever you say,’ said Brutha, ‘I still know that you can’t truly be Om. The God would not talk like that about His chosen ones.’

‘I never chose anyone,’ said Om. ‘They chose themselves.’

‘If you’re really Om, stop being a tortoise.’

‘I told you, I can’t. You think I haven’t tried? Three years! Most of that time I thought I was a tortoise.’

‘Then perhaps you were. Maybe you’re just a tortoise who thinks he’s a god.’

‘Nah. Don’t try philosophy again. Start thinking like that and you end up thinking maybe you’re just a butterfly dreaming it’s a whelk or something. No. One day all I had on my mind was the amount of walking necessary to get to the nearest plant with decent low-growing leaves, the next … I had all this memory filling up my head. Three years before the shell.^{24} No, don’t you tell me I’m a tortoise with big ideas.’