Small Gods

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 afterwards. 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.^{31} 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. ‘Worshipped 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 anyone 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.