Small Gods

‘I am the Great God Om,’ said the tortoise, in a menacing and unavoidably low voice, ‘and before very long you are going to be a very unfortunate priest. Go and get him.’

‘Novice,’ said Brutha.

‘What?’

‘Novice, not priest. They won’t let me—’

‘Get him!’

‘But I don’t think the Cenobiarch ever comes into our vegetable garden,’ said Brutha. ‘I don’t think he even knows what a melon is.’

‘I’m not bothered about that,’ said the tortoise. ‘Fetch him now, or there will be a shaking of the earth, the moon will be as blood, agues and boils will afflict mankind and divers ills will befall. I really mean it,’ it added.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Brutha, backing away.

‘And I’m being very reasonable, in the circumstances!’ the tortoise shouted after him.

‘You don’t sing badly, mind you!’ it added, as an afterthought.

‘I’ve heard worse!’ as Brutha’s grubby robe disappeared through the gateway.

‘Puts me in mind of that time there was the affliction of plague in Pseudopolis,’ it said quietly, as the footsteps faded. ‘What a wailing and a gnashing of teeth was there, all right.’ It sighed. ‘Great days. Great days!’

Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, ‘It’s indoor work with no heavy lifting, do you want to be a ploughman like your father?’

Whereas Brutha didn’t just believe. He really Believed. That sort of thing is usually embarrassing when it happens in a God-fearing family, but all Brutha had was his grandmother, and she Believed too. She believed like iron believes in metal. She was the kind of woman every priest dreads in a congregation, the one who knows all the chants, all the sermons. In the Omnian Church women were allowed in the temple only on sufferance, and had to keep absolutely silent and well covered-up in their own section behind the pulpit in case the sight of one half of the human race caused the male members of the congregation to hear voices not unakin to those that plagued Brother Nhumrod through every sleeping and waking hour. The problem was that Brutha’s grandmother had the kind of personality that can project itself through a lead sheet and a bitter piety with the strength of a diamond-bit auger.

If she had been born a man, Omnianism would have found its 8th Prophet rather earlier than expected. As it was, she organized the temple-cleaning, statue-polishing and stoning-of-suspected-adulteresses rotas with a terrible efficiency.

So Brutha grew up in the sure and certain knowledge of the Great God Om. Brutha grew up knowing that Om’s eyes were on him all the time, especially in places like the privy, and that demons assailed him on all sides and were only kept at bay by the strength of his belief and the weight of grandmother’s cane, which was kept behind the door on those rare occasions when it was not being used. He could recite every verse in all seven Books of the Prophets, and every single Precept. He knew all the Laws and the Songs. Especially the Laws.

The Omnians were a God-fearing people.

They had a great deal to fear.

Vorbis’s room was in the upper Citadel, which was unusual for a mere deacon. He hadn’t asked for it. He seldom had to ask for anything. Destiny has a way of marking her own.

He also got visited by some of the most powerful men in the Church’s hierarchy.

Not, of course, the six Archpriests or the Cenobiarch himself. They weren’t that important. They were merely at the top. The people who really run organisations are usually found several levels down, where it’s still possible to get things done.

People liked to be friends with Vorbis, mainly because of the aforesaid mental field which suggested to them, in the subtlest of ways, that they didn’t want to be his enemy.

Two of them were sitting down with him now. They were General Iam Fri’it, who whatever the official records might suggest was the man who ran most of the Divine Legion, and Bishop Drunah, secretary to the Congress of Iams. People might not think that was much of a position of power, but then they’d never been minutes secretary to a meeting of slightly deaf old men.

Neither man was in fact there. They were not talking to Vorbis. It was one of those kinds of meeting. Lots of people didn’t talk to Vorbis, and went out of their way not to have meetings with him. Some of the abbots from the distant monasteries had recently been summoned to the Citadel, travelling secretly for up to a week across tortuous terrain, just so they definitely wouldn’t join the shadowy figures visiting Vorbis’s room. In the last few months, Vorbis had apparently had about as many visitors as the Man in the Iron Mask.

Nor were they talking. But if they had been there, and if they had been having a conversation, it would have gone like this:

‘And now,’ said Vorbis, ‘the matter of Ephebe.’

Bishop Drunah shrugged.[3]

‘Of no consequence, they say. No threat.’