Small Gods (24 page)

Vorbis stirred the ashes with his foot.

“No bones,” he said.

The soldiers stood silently. The fluffy gray flakes collapsed and blew a little way in the dawn breeze.

“And the wrong sort of ash,” said Vorbis.

The sergeant opened his mouth to say something.

“Be assured I know that of which I speak,” said Vorbis.

He wandered over to the charred trapdoor, and prodded it with his toe.

“We followed the tunnel,” said the sergeant, in the tones of one who hopes against experience that sounding helpful will avert the wrath to come. “It comes out near the docks.”

“But if you enter it from the docks it does not come out here,” Vorbis mused. The smoking ashes seemed to hold an endless fascination for him.

The sergeant’s brow wrinkled.

“Understand?” said Vorbis. “The Ephebians wouldn’t build a way out that was a way in. The minds that devised the labyrinth would not work like that. There would be…valves. Sequences of trigger-stones, perhaps. Trips that trip only one way. Whirring blades that come out of unexpected walls.”

“Ah.”

“Most intricate and devious, I have no doubt.”

The sergeant ran a dry tongue over his lips. He could not read Vorbis like a book, because there had never been a book like Vorbis. But Vorbis had certain habits of thought that you learned, after a while.

“You wish me to take the squad and follow it up from the docks,” he said hollowly.

“I was just about to suggest it,” said Vorbis.

“Yes, lord.”

Vorbis patted the sergeant on the shoulder.

“But do not worry!” he said cheerfully. “Om will protect the strong in faith.”

“Yes, lord.”

“And the last man can bring me a full report. But first…they are not in the city?”

“We have searched it fully, lord.”

“And no one left by the gate? Then they left by sea.”

“All the Ephebian war vessels are accounted for, Lord Vorbis.”

“This bay is lousy with small boats.”

“With nowhere to go but the open sea, sir.”

Vorbis looked out at the Circle Sea. It filled the world from horizon to horizon. Beyond lay the smudge of the Sto plains and the ragged line of the Ramtops, all the way to the towering peaks that the heretics called the Hub but which was, he knew, the Pole, visible around
the curve of the world only because of the way light bent in atmosphere, just as it did in water…and he saw a smudge of white, curling over the distant ocean.

Vorbis had very good eyesight, from a height.

He picked up a handful of gray ash, which had once been Dykeri’s
Principles of Navigation
, and let it drift through his fingers.

“Om has sent us a fair wind,” he said. “Let us get down to the docks.”

Hope waved optimistically in the waters of the sergeant’s despair.

“You won’t be wanting us to explore the tunnel, lord?” he said.

“Oh, no. You can do that when we return.”

Urn prodded at the copper globe with a piece of wire while the
Unnamed Boat
wallowed in the waves.

“Can’t you beat it?” said Simony, who was not up to speed on the difference between machines and people.

“It’s a philosophical engine,” said Urn. “Beating won’t help.”

“But you said machines could be our slaves,” said Simony.

“Not the beating sort,” said Urn. “The nozzles are bunged up with salt. When the water rushes out of the globe it leaves the salt behind.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Water likes to travel light.”

“We’re becalmed! Can you do anything about it?”

“Yes, wait for it to cool down and then clean it out and put some more water in it.”

Simony looked around distractedly.

“But we’re still in sight of the coast!”

“
You
might be,” said Didactylos. He was sitting in the middle of the boat with his hands crossed on the top of his walking-stick, looking like an old man who doesn’t often get taken out for an airing and is quite enjoying it.

“Don’t worry. No one could see us out here,” said Urn. He prodded at the mechanism. “Anyway, I’m a bit worried about the screw. It was invented to move water along, not move along on water.”

“You mean it’s confused?” said Simony.

“Screwed up,” said Didactylos happily.

Brutha lay in the pointed end, looking down at the water. A small squid siphoned past, just under the surface. He wondered what it was—

—and
knew
it was the common bottle squid, of the class Cephalopoda, phylum Mollusca, and that it had an internal cartilaginous support instead of a skeleton and a well-developed nervous system and large, image-forming eyes that were quite similar to vertebrate eyes.

The knowledge hung in the forefront of his mind for a moment, and then faded away.

“Om?” Brutha whispered.

“What?”

“What’re you doing?”

“Trying to get some sleep. Tortoises need a lot of sleep, you know.”

Simony and Urn were bent over the philosophical engine. Brutha stared at the globe—

—a sphere of radius r, which therefore had a volume V = (4/3) (pi) rrr, and surface area A = 4(pi) rr—

“Oh, my god…”

“What now?” said the voice of the tortoise.

Didactylos’s face turned towards Brutha, who was clutching at his head.

“What’s a pi?”

Didactylos reached out a hand and steadied Brutha.

“What’s the matter?” said Om.

“I don’t know! It’s just words! I don’t know what’s in the books! I can’t read!”

“Getting plenty of sleep is vital,” said Om. “It builds a healthy shell.”

Brutha sagged to his knees in the rocking boat. He felt like a householder coming back unexpectedly and finding the old place full of strangers. They were in every room, not menacing, but just filling the space with their thereness.

“The books are leaking!”

“I don’t see how that can happen,” said Didactylos. “You said you just looked at them. You didn’t read them. You don’t know what they mean.”

“
They
know what they mean!”

“Listen. They’re just books, of the nature of books,” said Didactylos. “They’re not magical. If you could know what books contained just by looking at them, Urn there would be a genius.”

“What’s the matter with him?” said Simony.

“He thinks he knows too much.”

“No! I don’t know anything! Not really
know
,” said Brutha. “I just remembered that squids have an internal cartilaginous support!”

“I can see that would be a worry,” said Simony. “Huh. Priests? Mad, the lot of them.”

“No! I don’t know what cartilaginous
means!
”

“Skeletal connective tissue,” said Didactylos. “Think of bony and leathery at the same time.”

Simony snorted. “Well, well,” he said, “we live and learn, just like you said.”

“Some of us even do it the other way around,” said Didactylos.

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“It’s philosophy,” said Didactylos. “And sit down, boy. You’re making the boat rock. We’re overloaded as it is.”

“It’s being buoyed upward by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid,” muttered Brutha, sagging.

“Hmm?”

“Except that I don’t know what buoyed means.”

Urn looked up from the sphere. “We’re ready to start again,” he said. “Just bale some water in here with your helmet, mister.”

“And then we shall go again?”

“Well, we can start getting up steam,” said Urn. He wiped his hands on his toga.

“Y’know,” said Didactylos, “there
are
different ways of learning things. I’m reminded of the time when old Prince Lasgere of Tsort asked me how he could become learned, especially since he hadn’t got any time for this reading business. I said to him, ‘There is no royal road to learning, sire,’ and he said to me, ‘Bloody well build one or I shall have your legs chopped off. Use as many slaves as you like.’ A refreshingly direct approach, I always thought. Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words.”

“Why didn’t he chop your legs off?” said Urn.

“I built him his road. More or less.”

“How? I thought that was just a metaphor.”

“You’re learning, Urn. So I found a dozen slaves who could read and they sat in his bedroom at night whispering choice passages to him while he slept.”

“Did that work?”

“Don’t know. The third slave stuck a six-inch dagger in his ear. Then after the revolution the new ruler let me out of prison and said I could leave the country if I promised not to think of anything on the way to the border. But I don’t believe there was anything wrong with the idea in principle.”

Urn blew on the fire.

“Takes a little while to heat up the water,” he explained.

Brutha lay back in the bow again. If he concentrated, he could stop the knowledge flowing. The thing to do was avoid looking at things. Even a cloud—

—devised by natural philosophy as a means of occasioning shade on the surface of the world, thus preventing overheating—

—caused an intrusion. Om was fast asleep.

Knowing without learning, thought Brutha. No. The other way around. Learning without knowing…

Nine-tenths of Om dozed in his shell. The rest of him drifted like a fog in the real world of the gods, which is a lot less interesting than the three-dimensional world inhabited by most of humanity.

He thought: we’re a little boat. She’ll probably not even notice us. There’s the whole of the ocean. She can’t be everywhere.

Of course, she’s got many believers. But we’re only a little boat…

He felt the minds of inquisitive fishes nosing around the end of the screw. Which was odd, because in the normal course of things fishes were not known for their—

“Greetings,” said the Queen of the Sea.

“Ah.”

“I see you’re still managing to exist, little tortoise.”

“Hanging in there,” said Om. “No problems.”

There was a pause which, if it were taking place between two people in the human world, would have been spent in coughing and looking embarrassed. But gods are never embarrassed.

“I expect,” said Om guardedly, “you are looking for your price.”

“This vessel and everyone in it,” said the Queen. “But your believer can be saved, as is the custom.”

“What good are they to you? One of them’s an atheist.”

“Hah! They all believe, right at the end.”

“That doesn’t seem…” Om hesitated. “Fair?”

Now the Sea Queen paused.

“What’s fair?”

“Like…underlying justice?” said Om. He wondered why he said it.

“Sounds a human idea to me.”

“They’re inventive, I’ll grant you. But what I meant was…I mean…they’ve done nothing to deserve it.”

“
Deserve?
They’re
human
. What’s
deserve
got to do with it?”

Om had to concede this. He wasn’t thinking like a god. This bothered him.

“It’s just…”

“You’ve been relying on one human for too long, little god.”

“I know. I know.” Om sighed. Minds leaked into one another. He was seeing too much from a human point of view. “Take the boat, then. If you must. I just wish it was—”

“Fair?” said the Sea Queen. She moved forward. Om felt her all around him.

“There’s no such thing,” she said. “Life’s like a beach. And then you die.”

Then she was gone.

Om let himself retreat into the shell of his shell.

“Brutha?”

“Yes?”

“Can you swim?”

The globe started to spin.

Brutha heard Urn say, “There. Soon be on our way.”

“We’d better be.” This was Simony. “There’s a ship out there.”

“This thing goes faster than anything with sails or oars.”

Brutha looked across the bay. A sleek Omnian ship was passing the lighthouse. It was still a long way off, but Brutha stared at it with a dread and expectation that magnified better than telescopes.

“It’s moving fast,” said Simony. “I don’t understand it—there’s no wind.”

Urn looked around at the flat calm.

“There can’t be wind there and not here,” he said.

“I said, can you swim?” The voice of the tortoise was insistent in Brutha’s head.

“I don’t know,” said Brutha.

“Do you think you could find out quickly?”

Urn looked upwards.

“Oh,” he said.

Clouds had massed over the
Unnamed Boat
. They were visibly spinning.

“You’ve
got
to know!” shouted Om. “I thought you had a perfect memory!”

“We used to splash around in the big cistern in the village,” whispered Brutha. “I don’t know if that counts!”

Mist whipped off the surface of the sea. Brutha’s ears
popped. And still the Omnian ship came on, flying across the waves.

“What do you call it when you’ve got a dead calm surrounded by winds—” Urn began.

“Hurricane?” said Didactylos.

Lightning crackled between sky and sea. Urn yanked at the lever that lowered the screw into the water. His eyes glowed almost as brightly as the lightning.

“Now
there’s
a power,” he said. “Harnessing the lightning! The dream of mankind!”

The
Unnamed Boat
surged forward.

“Is it? It’s not
my
dream,” said Didactylos. “I always dream of a giant carrot chasing me through a field of lobsters.”

“I mean
metaphorical
dream, master,” said Urn.

“What’s a metaphor?” said Simony.

Brutha said, “What’s a dream?”

A pillar of lightning laced the mist. Secondary lightnings sparked off the spinning globe.

“You can get it from cats,” said Urn, lost in a philosophical world, as the
Boat
left a white wake behind it. “You stroke them with a rod of amber, and you get tiny lightnings…if I could magnify that a million times, no man would ever be a slave again and we could catch it in jars and do away with the night…”