Small Gods (29 page)

“Who were the people who lived here?” said Brutha.

“I don’t know.”

“What god did they worship?”

“I don’t know.”

“The statues are made of granite, but there’s no granite near here.”

“They were very devout, then. They dragged it all the way.”

“And the altar block is covered in grooves.”

“Ah.
Extremely
devout. That would be to let the blood run off.”

“You really think they did human sacrifice?”

“I don’t know! I want to get out of here!”

“Why? There’s water and it’s cool—”

“Because…a god lived here. A powerful god. Thousands worshiped it. I can feel it. You know? It comes out of the walls. A Great God. Mighty were his dominions and magnificent was his word. Armies went forth in his name and conquered and slew. That kind of thing. And now no one, not you, not me, no one, even knows who the god was or his name or what he looked like. Lions drink in the holy places and those little squidgy things with eight legs, there’s one by your foot, what d’you call ’em, the ones with the antennae, crawl beneath the altar. Now do you understand?”

“No,” said Brutha.

“Don’t you fear death? You’re a human!”

Brutha considered this. A few feet away. Vorbis stared mutely at the patch of sky.

“He’s awake. He’s just not speaking.”

“Who cares? I didn’t ask you about him.”

“Well…sometimes…when I’m on catacomb duty…it’s the kind of place where you can’t help…I mean, all the skulls and things…and and the Book says…”

“There you are,” said Om, a note of bitter triumph in his voice. “You don’t
know
. That’s what stops everyone going mad, the uncertainty of it, the feeling that it might work out all right after all. But it’s different for gods. We
do
know. You know that story about the sparrow flying through a room?”

“No.”

“Everyone knows it.”

“Not me.”

“About life being like a sparrow flying through a room? Nothing but darkness outside? And it flies through the room and there’s just a moment of warmth and light?”

“There are windows open?” said Brutha.

“Can’t you imagine what it’s like to
be
that sparrow, and know about the darkness? To know that afterward there’ll be nothing to remember, ever, except that one moment of the light?”

“No.”

“No. Of course you can’t. But that’s what it’s like, being a god. And this place…it’s a morgue.”

Brutha looked around at the ancient, shadowy temple.

“Well…do you know what it’s like, being human?”

Om’s head darted into his shell for a moment, the nearest he was capable of to a shrug.

“Compared to a god? Easy. Get born. Obey a few rules. Do what you’re told. Die. Forget.”

Brutha stared at him.

“Is something wrong?”

Brutha shook his head. Then he stood up and walked over to Vorbis.

The deacon had drunk water from Brutha’s cupped hands. But there was a switched-off quality about him. He walked, he drank, he breathed. Or something did. His body did. The dark eyes opened, but appeared to be looking at nothing that Brutha could see. There was no sense that anyone was looking out through them. Brutha was certain that if he walked away, Vorbis would sit on the cracked flagstones until he very gently fell over. Vorbis’ body was present, but the whereabouts of his mind was probably not locatable on any normal atlas.

It was just that, here and now and suddenly, Brutha felt so alone that even Vorbis was good company.

“Why do you bother with him? He’s had thousands of people killed!”

“Yes, but perhaps he thought you wanted it.”

“I never said I wanted that.”

“You didn’t care,” said Brutha.

“But I—”

“Shut up!”

Om’s mouth opened in astonishment.

“You could have helped people,” said Brutha. “But all you did was stamp around and roar and try to make people afraid. Like…like a man hitting a donkey with a stick. But people like Vorbis made the stick so good, that’s all the donkey ends up believing in.”

“That could use some work, as a parable,” said Om sourly.

“This is real life I’m talking about!”

“It’s not my fault if people misuse the—”

“It is! It has to be! If you muck up people’s minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do is all your fault!”

Brutha glared at the tortoise, and then stamped off toward the pile of rubble that dominated one end of the ruined temple. He rummaged around in it.

“What are you looking for?”

“We’ll need to carry water,” said Brutha.

“There won’t be anything,” said Om. “People just left. The land ran out and so did the people. They took everything with them. Why bother to look?”

Brutha ignored him. There was something under the rocks and sand.

“Why worry about Vorbis?” Om whined. “In a hun
dred years’ time, he’ll be dead anyway. We’ll all be dead.”

Brutha tugged at the piece of curved pottery. It came away, and turned out to be about two-thirds of a wide bowl, broken right across. It had been almost as wide as Brutha’s outstretched arms, but had been too broken for anyone to loot.

It was useful for nothing. But it had once been useful for something. There were embossed figures around its rim. Brutha peered at them, for want of something to distract himself, while Om’s voice droned on in his head.

The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god). In the center of the bowl was a larger figure, obviously important, some kind of god they were doing it for…

“What?” he said.

“I
said
, in a hundred years’ time we’ll all be dead.”

Brutha stared at the figures around the bowl. No one knew who their god was, and they were gone. Lions slept in the holy places and—

—
Chilopoda aridius
, the common desert centipede, his memory resident library supplied—

—scuttled beneath the altar.

“Yes,” said Brutha. “We will.” He raised the bowl over his head, and turned.

Om ducked into his shell.

“But here—” Brutha gritted his teeth as he staggered under the weight. “And now—”

He threw the bowl. It landed against the altar. Fragments of ancient pottery fountained up, and clattered down again. The echoes boomed around the temple.

“—we are alive!”

He picked up Om, who had withdrawn completely into his shell.

“And we’ll make it home. All of us,” he said. “I know it.”

“It’s written, is it?” said Om, his voice muffled.

“It is
said
. And if you argue—a tortoise shell is a pretty good water container, I expect.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Who knows? I might. In a hundred years’ time we’ll all be dead, you said.”

“Yes! Yes!” said Om desperately. “But here and now—”

“Right.”

Didactylos smiled. It wasn’t something that came easily to him. It wasn’t that he was a somber man, but he could not see the smiles of others. It took several dozen muscle movements to smile, and there was no return on his investment.

He’d spoken many times to crowds in Ephebe, but they were invariably made up of other philosophers, whose shouts of “Bloody daft!,” “You’re making it up as you go along!” and other contributions to the debate always put him at his ease. That was because no one really paid any attention. They were just working out what
they
were going to say next.

But this crowd put him in mind of Brutha. Their listening was like a huge pit waiting for his words to fill it. The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish.

“You
can’t
believe in Great A’Tuin,” he said. “Great A’Tuin
exists
. There’s no point in believing in things that exist.”

“Someone’s put up their hand,” said Urn.

“Yes?”

“Sir, surely only things that exist are worth believing in?” said the enquirer, who was wearing a uniform of a sergeant of the Holy Guard.

“If they exist, you don’t have to believe in them,” said Didactylos. “They just are.” He sighed. “What can I tell you? What do you want to hear? I just wrote down what people know. Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle
Moves
.”

From the darkness came a voice, “And that is really true?”

Didactylos shrugged. “The Turtle
exists
. The world is a flat disc. The sun turns around it once every day, dragging its light behind it. And this will go on happening, whether you believe it is true or not. It is real. I don’t know about truth. Truth is a lot more complicated than that. I don’t think the Turtle gives a bugger whether it’s true or not, to tell you the truth.”

Simony pulled Urn to one side as the philosopher went on talking.

“This isn’t what they came to hear! Can’t you do anything?”

“Sorry?” said Urn.

“They don’t want philosophy. They want a reason to move against the Church! Now! Vorbis is dead, the Cenobiarch is gaga, the hierarchy are busy stabbing one another in the back. The Citadel is like a big rotten plum.”

“Still a few wasps in it, though,” said Urn. “You said you’ve only got a tenth of the army.”

“But they’re free men,” said Simony. “Free in their heads. They’ll be fighting for more than fifty cents a day.”

Urn looked down at his hands. He often did that when he was uncertain about anything, as if they were the only things he was sure of in all the world.

“They’ll get the odds down to three to one before the rest know what’s happening,” said Simony grimly. “Did you talk to the blacksmith?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it?”

“I…think so. It wasn’t what I…”

“They tortured his father. Just for having a horseshoe hanging up in his forge, when everyone knows that smiths have to have their little rituals. And they took his son off into the army. But he’s got a lot of helpers. They’ll work through the night. All you have to do is tell them what you want.”

“I’ve made some sketches…”

“Good,” said Simony. “
Listen
, Urn. The Church is run by people like Vorbis. That’s how it all works. Millions of people have died for—for nothing but lies. We can stop all that—”

Didactylos had stopped talking.

“He’s muffed it,” said Simony. “He could have done
anything
with them. And he just told them a lot of facts. You can’t inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.”

They left the temple just before sundown. The lion had crawled into the shade of some rocks, but stood up unsteadily to watch them go.

“It’ll track us,” moaned Om. “They do that. For miles and miles.”

“We’ll survive.”

“I wish I had your confidence.”

“Ah, but I have a God to have faith in.”

“There’ll be no more ruined temples.”

“There’ll be something else.”

“And not even snake to eat.”

“But I walk with my God.”

“Not as a snack, though.
And
you’re walking the wrong way, too.”

“No. I’m still heading away from the coast.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“How far can a lion go with a spear wound like that in him?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Everything.”

And, half an hour later, a black shadowy line on the silver moonlit desert, there were the tracks.

“The soldiers came this way. We just have to follow the tracks back. If we head where they’ve come from, we’ll get where we’re going.”

“We’ll never do it!”

“We’re traveling light.”

“Oh, yeah. They were burdened by all the food and water they had to carry,” said Om bitterly. “How lucky for us we haven’t got any.”

Brutha glanced at Vorbis. He was walking unaided now, provided that you gently turned him around whenever you needed to change direction.

But even Om had to admit that the tracks were some comfort. In a way they were alive, in the same way that an echo is alive. People had been this way, not long ago. There were other people in the world. Someone, somewhere, was surviving.

Or not. After an hour or so they came across a mound
beside the track. There was a helmet atop it, and a sword stuck in the sand.

“A lot of soldiers died to get here quickly,” said Brutha.

Whoever had taken enough time to bury their dead had also drawn a symbol in the sand of the mound. Brutha half-expected it to be a turtle, but the desert wind had not quite eroded the crude shape of a pair of horns.

“I don’t understand that,” said Om. “They don’t
really
believe I exist, but they go and put something like that on a grave.”

“It’s hard to explain. I think it’s because they believe
they
exist,” said Brutha. “It’s because they’re people, and so was he.”

He pulled the sword out of the sand.

“What do you want that for?”

“Might be useful.”

“Against who?”

“Might be useful.”

An hour later the lion, who was limping after Brutha, also arrived at the grave. It had lived in the desert for sixteen years, and the reason it had lived so long was that it had not died, and it had not died because it never wasted handy protein. It dug.

Humans have always wasted handy protein ever since they started wondering who had lived in it.

But, on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion.

There were snakes and lizards on the rock islands. They were probably very nourishing and every one was, in its own way, a taste explosion.

There was no more water.

But there were plants…more or less. They looked
like groups of stones, except where a few had put up a central flower spike that was a brilliant pink and purple in the dawn light.