Small Gods (20 page)

Urn was standing on a small ladder, fishing among the shelves of scrolls. Didactylos sat opposite Brutha, his blind gaze still apparently fixed on him.

“You don’t like it, do you?” said the philosopher.

Brutha had said nothing.

“You know,” said Didactylos conversationally, “people’ll tell you that us blind people are the real business where the other senses are concerned. It’s not true, of course. The buggers just say it because it makes them feel better. It gets rid of the obligation to feel sorry for us. But when you can’t see you
do
learn to listen more. The way people breathe, the sounds their clothes make…”

Urn reappeared with another scroll.

“You shouldn’t do this,” said Brutha wretchedly. “All this…” His voice trailed off.

“I know about sureness,” said Didactylos. Now the light, irascible tone had drained out of his voice. “I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. This was before the borders were closed, when you still let people travel. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?”

“It has to be done,” Brutha mumbled. “So the soul can be shriven and—”

“Don’t know about the soul. Never been that kind of a philosopher,” said Didactylos. “All I know is, it was a horrible sight.”

“The state of the body is not—”

“Oh, I’m not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,” said the philosopher. “I’m talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn’t them in the pit. You could see it in their
faces. So glad it wasn’t them that they were throwing just as hard as they could.”

Urn hovered, looking uncertain.

“I’ve got Abraxas’s
On Religion
,” he said.

“Old ‘Charcoal’ Abraxas,” said Didactylos, suddenly cheerful again. “Struck by lightning fifteen times so far, and still not giving up. You can borrow this one overnight if you want. No scribbling comments in the margins, mind you, unless they’re interesting.”

“This is it!” said Om. “Come on, let’s leave this idiot.”

Brutha unrolled the scroll. There weren’t even any pictures. Crabbed writing filled it, line after line.

“He spent years researching it,” said Didactylos. “Went out into the desert, talked to the small gods. Talked to some of our gods, too. Brave man. He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.”

Brutha unrolled a bit more of the scroll. Five minutes ago he would have admitted that he couldn’t read. Now the best efforts of the inquisitors couldn’t have forced it out of him. He held it up in what he hoped was a familiar fashion.

“Where is he now?” he said.

“Well, someone said they saw a pair of sandals with smoke coming out just outside his house a year or two back,” said Didactylos. “He might have, you know, pushed his luck.”

“I think,” said Brutha, “that I’d better be going. I’m sorry to have intruded on your time.”

“Bring it back when you’ve finished with it,” said Didactylos.

“Is that how people read in Omnia?” said Urn.

“What?”

“Upside down.”

Brutha picked up the tortoise, glared at Urn, and strode as haughtily as possible out of the Library.

“Hmm,” said Didactylos. He drummed his fingers on the tables.

“It was him I saw in the tavern last night,” said Urn. “I’m sure, master.”

“But the Omnians are staying here in the palace.”

“That’s right, master.”

“But the tavern is
outside
.”

“Yes.”

“Then he must have flown over the wall, do you think?”

“I’m sure it was him, master.”

“Then…maybe he came later. Maybe he hadn’t gone in when you saw him.”

“It can only be that, master. The keepers of the labyrinth are unbribable.”

Didactylos clipped Urn across the back of the head with his lantern.

“Stupid boy! I’ve told you about that sort of statement.”

“I mean, they are not
easily
bribable, master. Not for all the gold in Omnia, for example.”

“That’s more like it.”

“Do you think that tortoise was a god, master?”

“He’s going to be in big trouble in Omnia if he is. They’ve got a bastard of a god there. Did you ever read old Abraxas?”

“No, master.”

“Very big on gods. Big gods man. Always smelled of burnt hair. Naturally resistant.”

Om crawled slowly along the length of a line.

“Stop walking up and down like that,” he said, “I can’t concentrate.”

“How can people talk like that?” Brutha asked the empty air. “Acting as if they’re
glad
they don’t know things! Finding out more and more things they don’t know! It’s like children proudly coming to show you a full potty!”

Om marked his place with a claw.

“But they find things out,” he said. “This Abraxas was a thinker and no mistake.
I
didn’t know some of this stuff. Sit down!”

Brutha obeyed.

“Right,” said Om. “Now…listen. Do you know how gods get power?”

“By people believing in them,” said Brutha. “Millions of people believe in you.”

Om hesitated.

All right, all right. We are here and it is now. Sooner or later he’ll find out for himself…

“They don’t believe,” said Om.

“But—”

“It’s happened before,” said the tortoise. “Dozens of times. D’you know Abraxas found the lost city of Ee? Very strange carvings, he says. Belief, he says. Belief
shifts
. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.”

“I don’t understand,” said Brutha.

“Let me put it another way,” said the tortoise. “I am your God, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll obey me.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now take a rock and go and kill Vorbis.”

Brutha didn’t move.

“I’m sure you heard me,” said Om.

“But he’ll…he’s…the Quisition would—”

“
Now
you know what I mean,” said the tortoise. “You’re more afraid of him than you are of me, now. Abraxas says here: ‘Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed.’”

“That can’t be true!”

“I think it is. Abraxas says there’s a kind of shellfish that lives in the same way. It makes a bigger and bigger shell until it can’t move around any more, and so it dies.”

“But…but…that means…the whole Church…”

“Yes.”

Brutha tried to keep hold of the idea, but the sheer enormity of it kept wrenching it from his mental grasp.

“But you’re not dead,” he managed.

“Next best thing,” said Om. “And you know what? No other small god is trying to usurp me. Did I ever tell you about old Ur-Gilash? No? He was the god back in what’s now Omnia before me. Not much of one. Basically a weather god. Or a snake god. Something, anyway. It took years to get rid of him, though. Wars and everything. So I’ve been thinking…”

Brutha said nothing.

“Om still exists,” said the tortoise. “I mean the shell. All you’d have to do is get people to understand.”

Brutha still said nothing.

“You can be the next prophet,” said Om.

“I can’t! Everyone knows Vorbis will be the next prophet!”

“Ah, but you’ll be
official
.”

“No!”

“No? I am your God!”

“And I am my me. I’m not a prophet. I can’t even write. I can’t read. No one will listen to me.”

Om looked him up and down.

“I must admit you’re not the chosen one I would have chosen,” he said.

“The great prophets had vision,” said Brutha. “Even if they…even if you didn’t talk to them, they had something to say. What could I say? I haven’t got anything to say to anyone. What could I say?”

“Believe in the Great God Om,” said the tortoise.

“And then what?”

“What do you mean, and then what?”

Brutha looked out glumly at the darkening courtyard.

“Believe in the Great God Om or be stricken with thunderbolts,” he said.

“Sounds good to me.”

“Is that how it always has to be?”

The last rays of the sun glinted off the statue in the center of the courtyard. It was vaguely feminine. There was a penguin perched on one shoulder.

“Patina, Goddess of Wisdom,” said Brutha. “The one with a penguin. Why a penguin?”

“Can’t imagine,” said Om hurriedly.

“Nothing wise about penguins, is there?”

“Shouldn’t think so. Unless you count the fact that you don’t get them in Omnia. Pretty wise of them.”

“Brutha!”

“That’s Vorbis,” said Brutha, standing up. “Shall I leave you here?”

“Yes. There’s still some melon. I mean loaf.”

Brutha wandered out into the dusk.

Vorbis was sitting on a bench under a tree, as still as a statue in the shadows.

Certainty, Brutha thought. I used to be certain. Now I’m not so sure.

“Ah, Brutha. You will accompany me on a little stroll. We will take the evening air.”

“Yes, lord.”

“You have enjoyed your visit to Ephebe.”

Vorbis seldom asked a question if a statement would do.

“It has been…interesting.”

Vorbis put one hand on Brutha’s shoulder and used the other to haul himself up on his staff.

“And what do you think of it?” he asked.

“They have many gods, and they don’t pay them much attention,” said Brutha. “And they search for ignorance.”

“And they find it in abundance, be sure of that,” said Vorbis.

He pointed his staff into the night. “Let us walk,” he said.

There was the sound of laughter, somewhere in the darkness, and the clatter of pans. The scent of evening-opening flowers hung thickly in the air. The stored heat of daytime radiating from the stones, made the night seem like a fragrant soup.

“Ephebe looks to the sea,” said Vorbis after a while. “You see the way it is built? All on the slope of a hill facing the sea. But the sea is mutable. Nothing lasting comes from the sea. Whereas our dear Citadel looks towards the high desert. And what do we see there?”

Instinctively Brutha turned, and looked over the rooftops to the black bulk of the desert against the sky.

“I saw a flash of light,” he said. “And again. On the slope.”

“Ah. The light of truth,” said Vorbis. “So let us go forth to meet it. Take me to the entrance to the labyrinth, Brutha. You know the way.”

“My lord?” said Brutha.

“Yes, Brutha?”

“I would like to ask you a question.”

“Do so.”

“What happened to Brother Murduck?”

There was the merest suggestion of hesitation in the rhythm of Vorbis’s stick on the cobbles. Then the exquisitor said, “Truth, good Brutha, is like the light. Do you know about light?”

“It…comes from the sun. And the moon and stars. And candles. And lamps.”

“And so on,” said Vorbis, nodding. “Of course. But there is another kind of light. A light that fills even the darkest of places. This has to be. For if this meta-light did not exist, how could darkness be seen?”

Brutha said nothing. This sounded too much like philosophy.

“And so it is with truth,” said Vorbis. “There are some things which appear to be the truth, which have all the hallmarks of truth, but which are not the
real
truth. The real truth must sometimes be protected by a labyrinth of lies.”

He turned to Brutha. “Do you understand me?”

“No, Lord Vorbis.”

“I mean, that which appears to our senses is not the
fundamental
truth. Things that are seen and heard and done by the flesh are mere shadows of a deeper reality. This is what you must understand as you progress in the Church.”

“But at the moment, lord, I know only the trivial
truth, the truth available on the outside,” said Brutha. He felt as though he was at the edge of a pit.

“That is how we all begin,” said Vorbis kindly.

“So did the Ephebians kill Brother Murduck?” Brutha persisted. Now he was inching out over the darkness.

“I am telling you that in the deepest sense of the truth they did. By their failure to embrace his words, by their intransigence, they surely killed him.”

“But in the
trivial
sense of the truth,” said Brutha, picking every word with the care an inquisitor might give to his patient in the depths of the Citadel, “in the trivial sense, Brother Murduck died, did he not, in Omnia, because he had
not
died in Ephebe, had been merely mocked, but it was feared that others in the Church might not understand the, the
deeper
truth, and thus it was put about that the Ephebians had killed him in, in the
trivial
sense, thus giving you, and those who saw the truth of the evil of Ephebe, due cause to launch a—a just retaliation.”

They walked past a fountain. The deacon’s steel-shod staff clicked in the night.

“I see a great future for you in the Church,” said Vorbis, eventually. “The time of the eighth Prophet is coming. A time of expansion, and great opportunity for those true in the service of Om.”

Brutha looked into the pit.

If Vorbis was right, and there was a kind of light that made darkness visible, then down there was its opposite, the darkness where no light could ever reach: darkness that blackened light. He thought of blind Didactylos and his empty lantern.

He heard himself say, “And with people like the
Ephebians, there is no truce. No treaty can be held binding, if it is between people like the Ephebians and those who follow a deeper truth?”

Vorbis nodded. “When the Great God is with us,” he said, “who can stand against us? You impress me, Brutha.”

There was more laughter in the darkness, and the twang of stringed instruments.

“A feast,” sneered Vorbis. “The Tyrant invited us to a feast! I sent some of the party, of course. Even their generals are in there! They think themselves safe behind their labyrinth, as a tortoise thinks himself safe in his shell, not realizing it is a prison. Onward.”