Small Gods

‘Sorry, sorry. See what you mean. All right. Tortoise statues. Ye-ess. I thought about them. Nice shape. Incidentally, you couldn’t make a statue wobble every now and again, could you? Very good for business, wobbling statues. The statue of Ossory wobbles every Fast of Ossory, reg’lar. By means of a small piston device operated in the basement, it is said. But very good for the prophets, all the same.’

XII. You Make Me Laugh, Little Prophet. Sell Your Tortoises, By All Means.

‘Tell you the truth,’ said Dhblah, ‘I’ve already drawn a few designs just now …’

Om vanished. There was a brief thunderclap. Dhblah looked reflectively at his sketches.

‘… but I suppose I’ll have to take the little figure off them,’ he said, more or less to himself.

The shade of Vorbis looked around.

‘Ah. The desert,’ he said. The black sand was absolutely still under the starlit sky. It looked cold.

He hadn’t planned on dying yet. In fact … he couldn’t quite remember how he’d died …

‘The desert,’ he repeated, and this time there was a hint of uncertainty. He’d never been uncertain about anything in his … life. The feeling was unfamiliar and terrifying. Did ordinary people feel like this?

He got a grip on himself.

Death was impressed. Very few people managed this, managed to hold on to the shape of their old thinking after death.

Death took no pleasure in his job. It was an emotion he found hard to grasp. But there was such a thing as satisfaction.

‘So,’ said Vorbis. ‘The desert. And at the end of the desert—?’

JUDGEMENT.

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

Vorbis tried to concentrate. He couldn’t. He could feel certainty draining away. And he’d always been certain.

He hesitated, like a man opening a door to a familiar room and finding nothing there but a bottomless pit. The memories were still there. He could feel them. They had the right shape. It was just that he couldn’t remember what they were. There had been a voice … Surely, there had been a voice? But all he could remember was the sound of his own thoughts, bouncing off the inside of his own head.

Now he had to cross the desert. What could there be to fear—

The desert was what you believed.

Vorbis looked inside himself.

And went on looking.

He sagged to his knees.

I CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE BUSY, said Death.

‘Don’t leave me! It’s so empty!’

Death looked around at the endless desert. He snapped his fingers and a large white horse trotted up.

I SEE A HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, he said, swinging himself into the saddle.

‘Where? Where?’

HERE. WITH YOU.

‘I can’t see them!’

Death gathered up the reins.

NEVERTHELESS, he said. His horse trotted forward a few steps.

‘I don’t understand!’ screamed Vorbis.

Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?^{79}

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

The first boats grounded in the shallows, and the troops leapt into shoulder-high surf.

No one was quite sure who was leading the fleet. Most of the countries along the coast hated one another, not in any personal sense, but simply on a kind of historical basis. On the other hand, how much leadership was necessary? Everyone knew where Omnia was. None of the countries in the fleet hated the others worse than they did Omnia. Now it was necessary for it … not to exist.

General Argavisti of Ephebe considered that he was in charge, because although he didn’t have the most ships he was avenging the attack on Ephebe. But Imperiator Borvorius of Tsort knew that he was in charge, because there were more Tsortean ships than any others. And Admiral Rham-ap-Efan of Djelibeybi knew that he was in charge, because he was the kind of person who always thought he was in charge of anything. The only captain who did not, in fact, think that he was commanding the fleet was Fasta Benj,^{80} a fisherman from a very small nation of marsh-dwelling nomads of whose existence all the other countries were in complete ignorance, and whose small reed boat had been in the path of the fleet and had got swept along. Since his tribe believed that there were only fifty-one people in the world, worshipped a giant newt, spoke a very personal language which no one else understood, and had never seen metal or fire before, he was spending a lot of time wearing a puzzled grin.

Clearly they had reached a shore, not of proper mud and reeds, but of very small gritty bits. He lugged his little reed boat up the sand, and sat down with interest to see what the men in the feathery hats and shiny fish-scale vests were going to do next.

General Argavisti scanned the beach.

‘They must have seen us coming,’ he said. ‘So why would they let us establish a beach-head?’

Heat haze wavered over the dunes. A dot appeared, growing and contracting in the shimmering air.

More troops poured ashore.

General Argavisti shaded his eyes against the sun.

‘Fella’s just standing there,’ he said.

‘Could be a spy,’ said Borvorius.