Small Gods (16 page)

There was a bowl of fruit in Brutha’s cell, and a plate of cold meat. But first things first. He fished the God out of the box.

“There’s fruit,” he said. “What’re these berries?”

“Grapes,” said Om. “Raw material for wine.”

“You mentioned that word before. What does it mean?”

There was a cry from outside.

“Brutha!”

“That’s Vorbis. I’ll have to go.”

Vorbis was standing in the middle of his cell.

“Have you eaten anything?” he demanded.

“No, lord.”

“Fruit and meat, Brutha. And this is a fast day. They seek to insult us!”

“Um. Perhaps they don’t know that it is a fast day?” Brutha hazarded.

“Ignorance is itself a sin,” said Vorbis.

“Ossory VII, verse 4,” said Brutha automatically.

Vorbis smiled and patted Brutha’s shoulder.

“You are a walking book, Brutha. The
Septateuch perambulatus
.”

Brutha looked down at his sandals.

He’s right, he thought. And I had forgotten. Or at least, not wanted to remember.

And then he heard his own thoughts echoed back to him: it’s fruit and meat and bread, that’s all. That’s all it is. Fast days and feast days and Prophets’ Days and bread days…who cares? A God whose only concern about food now is that it’s low enough to reach?

I wish he wouldn’t keep patting my shoulder.

Vorbis turned away.

“Shall I remind the others?” Brutha said.

“No. Our ordained brothers will not, of course, require reminding. As for soldiers…a little license, perhaps, is allowable this far from home…”

Brutha wandered back to his cell.

Om was still on the table, staring fixedly at the melon.

“I nearly committed a terrible sin,” said Brutha. “I nearly ate fruit on a fruitless day.”

“That’s a terrible thing, a terrible thing,” said Om. “Now cut the melon.”

“But it is forbidden!” said Brutha.

“No it’s not,” said Om. “Cut the melon.”

“But it was the eating of fruit that caused passion to invade the world,” said Brutha.

“All it caused was flatulence,” said Om. “Cut the melon!”

“You’re tempting me!”

“No I’m not. I’m giving you permission. Special dispensation! Cut the damn melon!”

“Only a bishop or higher is allowed to giv—” Brutha began. And then he stopped.

Om glared at him.

“Yes. Exactly,” he said. “And now cut the melon.” His tone softened a bit. “If it makes you feel any better, I shall declare that it is bread. I happen to be the God in this immediate vicinity. I can call it what I damn well like. It’s bread. Right? Now cut the damn melon.”

“Loaf,” corrected Brutha.

“Right. And give me a slice without any seeds in it.”

Brutha did so, a bit carefully.

“And eat up quick,” said Om.

“In case Vorbis finds us?”

“Because you’ve got to go and find a philosopher,” said Om. The fact that his mouth was full didn’t make
any difference to his voice in Brutha’s mind. “You know, melons grow wild in the wilderness. Not big ones like this. Little green jobs. Skin like leather. Can’t bite through ’em. The years I’ve spent eating dead leaves a goat’d spit out, right next to a crop of melons. Melons should have thinner skins. Remember that.”

“Find a philosopher?”

“Right. Someone who knows how to think. Someone who can help me stop being a tortoise.”

“But…Vorbis might want me.”

“You’re just going for a stroll. No problem. And hurry up. There’s other gods in Ephebe. I don’t want to meet them right now. Not looking like this.”

Brutha looked panicky.

“How do I find a philosopher?” he said.

“Around here? Throw a brick, I should think.”

The labyrinth of Ephebe is ancient and full of one hundred and one amazing things you can do with hidden springs, razor-sharp knives, and falling rocks. There isn’t just one guide through it. There are six, and each one knows his way through one-sixth of the labyrinth. Every year they have a special competition, when they do a little redesigning. They vie with one another to see who can make his section even more deadly than the others to the casual wanderer. There’s a panel of judges, and a small prize.

The furthest anyone ever got through the labyrinth without a guide was nineteen paces. Well, more or less. His head rolled a further seven paces, but that probably doesn’t count.

At each changeover point there is a small chamber without any traps at all. What it does contain is a small bronze bell. These are the little waiting-rooms where vis
itors are handed on to the next guide. And here and there, set high in the tunnel roof over the more ingenious traps, are observation windows, because guards like a good laugh as much as anyone else.

All of this was totally lost on Brutha, who padded amiably along the tunnels and corridors without really thinking much about it, and at last pushed open the gate into the late evening air.

It was fragrant with the scent of flowers. Moths whirred through the gloom.

“What do philosophers look like?” said Brutha, “When they’re not having a bath, I mean.”

“They do a lot of thinking,” said Om. “Look for someone with a strained expression.”

“That might just mean constipation.”

“Well, so long as they’re philosophical about it…”

The city of Ephebe surrounded them. Dogs barked. Somewhere a cat yowled. There was that general susurration of small comfortable sounds that shows that, out there, a lot of people are living their lives.

And then a door burst open down the street and there was the cracking noise of a quite large wine amphora being broken over someone’s head.

A skinny old man in a toga picked himself up from the cobbles where he had landed, and glared at the doorway.

“I’m telling you, listen, a finite intellect, right, cannot by means of comparison reach the absolute truth of things, because being by nature indivisible, truth excludes the concepts of “more” or “less” so that nothing but truth itself can be the exact measure of truth. You bastards,” he said.

Someone from inside the building said, “Oh yeah? Sez you.”

The old man ignored Brutha but, with great difficulty, pulled a cobblestone loose and hefted it in his hand.

Then he dived back through the doorway. There was a distant scream of rage.

“Ah. Philosophy,” said Om.

Brutha peered cautiously around the door.

Inside the room two groups of very nearly identical men in togas were trying to hold back two of their colleagues. It is a scene repeated a million times a day in bars around the multiverse—both would-be fighters growled and grimaced at one another and fought to escape the restraint of their friends, only of course they did not fight
too
hard, because there is nothing worse than actually
succeeding
in breaking free and suddenly finding yourself all alone in the middle of the ring with a madman who is about to hit you between the eyes with a rock.

“Yep,” said Om, “that’s philosophy, right enough.”

“But they’re fighting!”

“A full and free exchange of opinions, yes.”

Now that Brutha could get a clearer view, he could see that there were one or two differences between the men. One had a shorter beard, and was very red in the face, and was waggling a finger accusingly.

“He bloody well accused me of slander!” he was shouting.

“I didn’t!” shouted the other man.

“You did! You did! Tell ’em what you said!”

“Look, I merely suggested, to indicate the nature of paradox, right, that if Xeno the Ephebian said, ‘All Ephebians are liars—’”

“See? See? He did it again!”

“—no, no, listen, listen…then, since Xeno is himself
an Ephebian, this would mean that he himself is a liar and therefore—”

Xeno made a determined effort to break free, dragging four desperate fellow philosophers across the floor.

“I’m going to lay one right
on
you, pal!”

Brutha said, “Excuse me, please?”

The philosophers froze. Then they turned to look at Brutha. They relaxed by degrees. There was a chorus of embarrassed coughs.

“Are you all philosophers?” said Brutha.

The one called Xeno stepped forward, adjusting the hang of his toga.

“That’s right,” he said. “We’re philosophers. We think, therefore we am.”

“Are,” said the luckless paradox manufacturer automatically.

Xeno spun around. “I’ve just about had it up to
here
with you, Ibid!” he roared. He turned back to Brutha. “We
are
, therefore we am,” he said confidently. “That’s it.”

Several of the philosophers looked at one another with interest.

“That’s actually quite interesting,” one said. “The evidence of our existence is the
fact
of our existence, is that what you’re saying?”

“Shut up,” said Xeno, without looking around.

“Have you been fighting?” said Brutha.

The assembled philosophers assumed various expressions of shock and horror.

“Fighting? Us? We’re
philosophers
,” said Ibid, shocked.

“My word, yes,” said Xeno.

“But you were—” Brutha began.

Xeno waved a hand.

“The cut and thrust of debate,” he said.

“Thesis plus antithesis equals hysteresis,” said Ibid. “The stringent testing of the universe. The hammer of the intellect upon the anvil of fundamental truth—”

“Shut up,” said Xeno. “And what can we do for you, young man?”

“Ask them about gods,” Om prompted.

“Uh, I want to find out about gods,” said Brutha.

The philosophers looked at one another.

“Gods?” said Xeno. “We don’t bother with gods. Huh. Relics of an outmoded belief system, gods.”

There was a rumble of thunder from the clear evening sky.

“Except for Blind Io the Thunder God,” Xeno went on, his tone hardly changing.

Lightning flashed across the sky.

“And Cubal the Fire God,” said Xeno.

A gust of wind rattled the windows.

“Flatulus the God of the Winds, he’s all right too,” said Xeno.

An arrow materialized out of the air and hit the table by Xeno’s hand.

“Fedecks the Messenger of the Gods, one of the all-time greats,” said Xeno.

A bird appeared in the doorway. At least, it looked vaguely like a bird. It was about a foot high, black and white, with a bent beak and an expression that suggested that whatever it was it really dreaded ever happening to it had already happened.

“What’s that?” said Brutha.

“A penguin,” said the voice of Om inside his head.

“Patina the Goddess of Wisdom? One of the best,” said Xeno.

The penguin croaked at him and waddled off into the darkness.

The philosophers looked very embarrassed. Then Ibid said, “Foorgol the God of Avalanches? Where’s the snowline?”

“Two hundred miles away,” said someone.

They waited. Nothing happened.

“Relic of an outmoded belief system,” said Xeno.

A wall of freezing white death did not appear anywhere in Ephebe.

“Mere unthinking personification of a natural force,” said one of the philosophers, in a louder voice. They all seemed to feel a lot better about this.

“Primitive nature worship.”

“Wouldn’t give you tuppence for him.”

“Simple rationalization of the unknown.”

“Hah! A clever fiction, a bogey to frighten the weak and stupid!”

The words rose up in Brutha. He couldn’t stop himself.

“Is it always this cold?” he said. “It seemed very chilly on my way here.”

The philosophers all moved away from Xeno.

“Although if there’s one thing you can say about Foorgal,” said Xeno, “it’s that he’s a very understanding god. Likes a joke as much as the next…man.”

He looked both ways, quickly. After a while the philosophers relaxed, and seemed to completely forget about Brutha.

And only now did he really have time to take in the room. He had never seen a tavern before in his life, but that was what it was. The bar ran along one side of the room. Behind it were the typical trappings of an Ephebian bar—the stacks of wine jars, racks of am
phorae, and the cheery pictures of vestal virgins on cards of salted peanuts and goat jerky, pinned up in the hope that there really
were
people in the world who would slatheringly buy more and more packets of nuts they didn’t want in order to look at a cardboard nipple.

“What’s all this stuff?” Brutha whispered.

“How should I know?” said Om. “Let me out so’s I can see.”

Brutha unfastened the box and lifted the tortoise out. One rheumy eye looked around.

“Oh. Typical tavern,” said Om. “Good. Mine’s a saucer of whatever they were drinking.”

“A tavern? A place were alcohol is drunk?”

“I very much intend this to be the case, yes.”

“But…but…the Septateuch, no less than seventeen times, adjures us most emphatically to refrain from—”

“Beats the hell out of me why,” said Om. “See that man cleaning the mugs? You say unto him, Give me a—”

“But it mocks the mind of Man, says the Prophet Ossory. And—”

“I’ll say this one more time! I never said it! Now talk to the man!”

In fact the man talked to Brutha. He appeared magically on the other side of the bar, still wiping a mug.

“Evening, sir,” he said. “What’ll it be?”

“I’d like a drink of water, please,” said Brutha, very deliberately.

“And something for the tortoise?”

“Wine!” said the voice of Om.

“I don’t know,” said Brutha. “What do tortoises usually drink?”

“The ones we have in here normally have a drop of milk with some bread in it,” said the barman.

“You get a lot of tortoises?” said Brutha loudly, trying to drown out Om’s outraged screams.

“Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races…very handy.”

“Uh…I haven’t got any money,” said Brutha.

The barman leaned towards him. “Tell you what,” he said. “Declivities has just bought a round. He won’t mind.”