Small Gods

‘Don’t tell him! Don’t tell him! The local gods’ll hear!’

‘I don’t know,’ said Brutha.

Didactylos turned Om over.

‘The Turtle Moves,’ said Urn thoughtfully.

‘What?’ said Brutha.

‘Master did a book,’ said Urn.

‘Not really a book,’ said Didactylos modestly. ‘More a scroll. Just a little thing I knocked off.’

‘Saying that the world is flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle?’ said Brutha.

‘Have you read it?’ Didactylos’s gaze was unmoving. ‘Are you a slave?’

‘No,’ said Brutha. ‘I am a—’

‘Don’t mention my name! Call yourself a scribe or something!’

‘—scribe,’ said Brutha weakly.

‘Yeah,’ said Urn. ‘I can see that. The telltale callus on the thumb where you hold the pen. The inkstains all over your sleeves.’

Brutha glanced at his left thumb. ‘I haven’t—’

‘Yeah,’ said Urn, grinning. ‘Use your left hand, do you?’

‘Er, I use both,’ said Brutha. ‘But not very well, everyone says.’

‘Ah,’ said Didactylos. ‘Ambi-sinister?’

‘What?’

‘He means incompetent with both hands,’ said Om.^{47}

‘Oh. Yes. That’s me.’ Brutha coughed politely. ‘Look … I’m looking for a philosopher. Um. One that knows about gods.’

He waited.

Then he said, ‘You aren’t going to say they’re a relic of an outmoded belief system?’

Didactylos, still running his fingers over Om’s shell, shook his head.

‘Nope. I like my thunderstorms a long way off.’

‘Oh. Could you stop turning him over and over? He’s just told me he doesn’t like it.’

‘You can tell how old they are by cutting them in half and counting the rings,’ said Didactylos.

‘Um. He hasn’t got much of a sense of humour, either.’

‘You’re Omnian, by the sound of it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Here to talk about the treaty?’

‘I do the listening.’

‘And what do you want to know about gods?’

Brutha appeared to be listening.

Eventually he said: ‘How they start. How they grow. And what happens to them afterwards.’

Didactylos put the tortoise into Brutha’s hands.

‘Costs money, that kind of thinking,’ he said.

‘Let me know when we’ve used more than fifty-two obols’ worth,’ said Brutha. Didactylos grinned.

‘Looks like you can think for yourself,’ he said. ‘Got a good memory?’

‘No. Not exactly a good one.’

‘Right? Right. Come on into the Library. It’s got an earthed copper roof, you know. Gods really hate that sort of thing.’

Didactylos reached down beside him and picked up a rusty iron lantern.

Brutha looked up at the big white building.

‘That’s the Library?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Didactylos. ‘That’s why it’s got LIBRVM carved over the door in such big letters. But a scribe like you’d know that, of course.’

The Library of Ephebe was — before it burned down — the second biggest on the Disc.^{48}

Not as big as the library in Unseen University, of course, but that library had one or two advantages on account of its magical nature. No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books^{49} — books that would have been written if the author hadn’t been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotters’ guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen …

And so unlike the Library at Ephebe, with its four or five hundred volumes. Many of them were scrolls, to save their readers the fatigue of having to call a slave every time they wanted a page turned. Each one lay in its own pigeonhole, though. Books shouldn’t be kept too close together, otherwise they interact in strange and unforeseeable ways.

Sunbeams lanced through the shadows, as palpable as pillars in the dusty air.

Although it was the least of the wonders in the Library, Brutha couldn’t help noticing a strange construction in the aisles. Wooden laths had been fixed between the rows of stone shelves about two metres from the floor, so that they supported a wider plank of no apparent use whatsoever. Its underside had been decorated with rough wooden shapes.

‘The Library,’ announced Didactylos.

He reached up. His fingers gently brushed the plank over his head.

It dawned on Brutha.

‘You’re blind aren’t you?’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘But you carry a lantern?’

‘It’s all right,’ said Didactylos. ‘I don’t put any oil in it.’

‘A lantern that doesn’t shine for a man that doesn’t see?’

‘Yeah. Works perfectly. And of course it’s very philosophical.’

‘And you live in a barrel.’^{50}

‘Very fashionable, living in a barrel,’ said Didactylos, walking forward briskly, his fingers only occasionally touching the raised patterns on the plank. ‘Most of the philosophers do it. It shows contempt and disdain for worldly things. Mind you, Legibus has got a sauna in his. It’s amazing the kind of things you can think of in it, he says.’

Brutha looked around. Scrolls protruded from their racks like cuckoos piping the hour.

‘It’s all so … I never met a philosopher before I came here,’ he said. ‘Last night, they were all …’