Small Gods

The scalbie leapt backwards and then made a kind of running jump, which was the nearest any scalbie ever bothered to come to actual flight, on to a pile of sun-bleached driftwood. Things were looking up. If this rock was alive, then eventually it would be dead.

The Great God Om staggered over to Brutha and butted him in the head with its shell until he groaned.

‘Wake up, lad. Rise and shine. Huphuphup. All ashore who’s going ashore.’

Brutha opened an eye.

‘Wha’ happened?’ he said.

‘You’re alive is what happened,’ said Om. Life’s a beach, he remembered. And then you die.

Brutha pulled himself into a kneeling position.

There are beaches that cry out for brightly coloured umbrellas.

There are beaches that speak of the majesty of the sea.

But this beach wasn’t like that. It was merely a barren hem where the land met the ocean. Driftwood piled up on the high-tide line, scoured by the wind. The air buzzed with unpleasant small insects. There was a smell that suggested that something had rotted away, a long time ago, somewhere where the scalbies couldn’t find it. It was not a good beach.

‘Oh. God.’

‘Better than drowning,’ said Om encouragingly.

‘I wouldn’t know.’ Brutha looked along the beach. ‘Is there any water to drink?’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Om.

‘Ossory V, verse 3, says that you made living water flow from the dry desert,’ said Brutha.

‘That was by way of being artistic licence,’ said Om.

‘You can’t even do that?’

‘No.’

Brutha looked at the desert again. Behind the drift-wood lines, and a few patches of grass that appeared to be dying even while it grew, the dunes marched away.

‘Which way to Omnia?’ he said.

‘We don’t want to go to Omnia,’ said Om.

Brutha stared at the tortoise. Then he picked him up.

‘I think it’s this way,’ he said.

Om’s legs waggled frantically.

‘What do you want to go to Omnia for?’ he said.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Brutha. ‘But I’m going anyway.’

The sun hung high above the beach.

Or possibly it didn’t.

Brutha knew things about the sun now. They were leaking into his head. The Ephebians had been very interested in astronomy. Expletius had proved that the Disc was ten thousand miles across. Febrius, who’d stationed slaves with quick reactions and carrying voices all across the country at dawn, had proved that light travelled at about the same speed as sound. And Didactylos had reasoned that, in that case, in order to pass between the elephants, the sun had to travel at least thirty-five thousand miles in its orbit every day or, to put it another way, twice as fast as its own light. Which meant that mostly you could only ever see where the sun had been, except twice every day when it caught up with itself, and this meant that the whole sun was a faster-than-light particle, a tachyon or, as Didactylos put it, a bugger.

It was still hot. The lifeless sea seemed to steam.

Brutha trudged along, directly above the only piece of shadow for hundreds of miles. Even Om had stopped complaining. It was too hot.

Here and there fragments of wood rolled in the scum at the edge of the sea.

Ahead of Brutha the air shimmered over the sand. In the middle of it was a dark blob.

He regarded it dispassionately as he approached, incapable of any real thought. It was nothing more than a reference point in a world of orange heat, expanding and contracting in the vibrating haze.

Closer to, it turned out to be Vorbis.

The thought took a long time to seep through Brutha’s mind.

Vorbis.

Not with a robe. All torn off. Just his singlet with. The nails sewn in. Blood all. Over one leg. Torn by. Rocks. Vorbis.

Vorbis.

Brutha slumped to his knees. On the high-tide line, a scalbie gave a croak.

‘He’s still … alive,’ Brutha managed.

‘Pity,’ said Om.

‘We should do something … for him.’

‘Yes? Maybe you can find a rock and stove his head in,’ said Om.

‘We can’t just leave him here.’

‘Watch us.’

‘No.’

Brutha got his hand under the deacon and tried to lift him. To his dull surprise, Vorbis weighed almost nothing. The deacon’s robe had concealed a body that was just skin stretched over bone. Brutha could have broken him with bare hands.

‘What about me?’ whined Om.

Brutha slung Vorbis over his shoulder.

‘You’ve got four legs,’ he said.

‘I am your God!’

‘Yes. I know.’ Brutha trudged on along the beach.

‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘Take him to Omnia,’ said Brutha thickly. ‘People must know. What he did.’

‘You’re mad! You’re mad! You think you’re going to carry him to Omnia?’

‘Don’t know. Going to try.’

‘You! You!’ Om pounded a claw on the sand. ‘Millions of people in the world and it had to be you! Stupid! Stupid!’

Brutha was becoming a wavering shape in the haze.

‘That’s it!’ shouted Om. ‘I don’t need you! You think I need you? I don’t need you! I can soon find another believer! No problem about that!’

Brutha disappeared.

‘And I’m not chasing after you!’ Om screamed.

Brutha watched his feet dragging one in front of the other.

He was past the point of thinking now. What drifted through his frying brain were disjointed images and fragments of memory.