Small Gods

Page 18

“What?”
Om sighed. “If I don't concentrate, I think like a tortoise!”
“What? You mean slowly?”
“No! Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst.”
,Why?"
“I don't know. Because it often happens to them, I suppose.”
Brutha stared around at Ephebe. Guards with helmets crested with plumes that looked like horses' tails gone rogue marched on either side of the column. A few Ephebian citizens watched idly from the roadside. They looked surprisingly like the people at home, and not like two-legged demons at all.
“They're people,” he said.
“Full marks for comparative anthropology.”
“Brother Nhumrod said Ephebians eat human flesh,” said Brutha. “He wouldn't tell lies.”
A small boy regarded Brutha thoughtfully while excavating a nostril. If it was a demon in human form, it was an extremely good actor.
At intervals along the road from the docks were white stone statues. Brutha had never seen statues before. Apart from the statues of the SeptArchs, of course, but that wasn't the same thing.
“What are they?”
"Well, the tubby one with the toga is Tuvelpit, the God of Wine. They call him Smimto in Tsort. And the broad with the hairdo is Astoria, Goddess of Love. A complete bubblehead. The ugly one is Offler the Crocodile God. Not a local boy. He's Klatchian originally, but the Ephebians heard about him and thought he was a good idea. Note the teeth. Good teeth. Good teeth. Then the one with the snakepit hairdo is-
“You talk about them as if they were real,” said Brutha.
“They are.”
“There is no other god but you. You told Ossory that.”
“Well. You know. I exaggerated a bit. But they're not that good. There's one of 'em that sits around playing a flute most of the time and chasing milkmaids. I don't call that very divine. Call that very divine? I don't.”
The road wound up steeply around the rocky hill. Most of the city seemed to be built on outcrops or was cut into the actual rock itself, so that one man's patio was another man's roof. The roads were really a series of shallow steps, accessible to a man or a donkey but sudden death to a cart. Ephebe was a pedestrian place.
More people watched them in silence. So did the statues of the gods. The Ephebians had gods in the same way that other cities had rats.
Brutha got a look at Vorbis's face. The exquisitor was staring straight ahead of himself. Brutha wondered what the man was seeing.
It was all so new!
And devilish, of course. Although the gods in the statues didn't look much like demons-but he could hear the voice of Nhumrod pointing out that this very fact made them even more demonic. Sin crept up on you like a wolf in a sheep's skin.
One of the goddesses had been having some very serious trouble with her dress, Brutha noticed; if Brother Nhumrod had been present, he would have had to hurry off for some very serious lying down.
“Petulia, Goddess of Negotiable Affection,” said Om. “Worshiped by the ladies of the night and every other time as well, if you catch my meaning.”
Brutha's mouth dropped open.
“They've got a goddess for painted jezebels?”
“Why not? Very religious people I understand. They're used to being on their-they spend so much time looking at the-look, belief is where you find it. Specialization. That's safe, see. Low risk, guaranteed returns. There's even a God of Lettuce somewhere. I mean, it's not as though any one else is likely to try to become a God of Lettuce. You just find a lettuce-growing community and hang on. Thunder gods come and go, but it's you they turn to every time when there's a bad attack of Lettuce Fly. You've got to . . . uh . . . hand it to Petulia. She spotted a gap in the market and filled it.”
“There's a God of Lettuce?”
“Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything . . .”
Om stopped himself and waited to see if Brutha had noticed. But Brutha seemed to have something else on his mind.
“That's not right. Not treating people like that. Ow.”
He'd walked into the back of a subdeacon. The party had halted, partly because the Ephebian escort had stopped too, but mainly because a man was running down the street.
He was quite old, and in many respects resembled a frog that had been dried out for quite some time. Something about him generally made people think of the word “spry,” but, at the moment, they would be much more likely to think of the words “mother naked” and possibly also “dripping wet” and would be one hundred percent accurate, too. Although there was the beard. It was a beard you could camp out in.
The man thudded down the street without any apparent self?consciousness and stopped outside a potter's shop. The potter didn't seem concerned at being addressed by a little wet naked man; in fact, none of the people in the street had given him a second glance.
“I'd like a Number Nine pot and some string, please,” said the old man.
“Yes sir, Mr. Legibus.” The potter reached under his counter and pulled out a towel. The naked man took it in an absent-minded way. Brutha got the feeling that this had happened to both of them before.
“And a lever of infinite length and, um, an immovable place to stand,” said Legibus, drying himself off.
“What you see is what I got, sir. Pots and general household items, but a bit short on axiomatic mechanisms.”
“Well, have you got a piece of chalk?”
“Got some right here from last time,” said the potter.
The little naked man took the chalk and started to draw triangles on the nearest bit of wall. Then he looked down.
“Why haven't I got any clothes on?” he said.
“We've been having our bath again, haven't we?” said the potter.
“I left my clothes in the bath?”
“I think you probably had an idea while you were in the bath?” prompted the potter.
“That's right! That's right! Got this splendid idea for moving the world around!” said Legibus. “Simple lever principle. Should work perfectly. It's just a matter of getting the technical details sorted out.”
“That's nice. We can move somewhere warm for the winter,” said the potter.
“Can I borrow the towel?”
“It's yours anyway, Mr. Legibus.”
“Is it?”
“I said, you left it here last time. Remember? When you had that idea for the lighthouse?”
“Fine. Fine,” said Legibus, wrapping the towel around himself. He drew a few more lines on the wall. “Fine. Okay. I'll send someone down later to collect the wall.”
He turned and appeared to see the Omnians for the first time. He peered forward and then shrugged.
“Hmm,” he said, and wandered away.
Brutha tugged at the cloak of one of the Ephebian soldiers.
“Excuse me, but why did we stop?” he said.
“Philosophers have right of way,” said the soldier.
“What's a philosopher?” said Brutha.
“Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,” said a voice in his head.
“An infidel seeking the just fate he shall surely receive,' said Vorbis. ”An inventor of fallacies. This cursed city attracts them like a dung heap attracts flies."
“Actually, it's the climate,” said the voice of the tortoise. “Think about it. If you're inclined to leap out of your bath and run down the street every time you think you've got a bright idea, you don't want to do it somewhere cold. If you do do it somewhere cold, you die out. That's natural selection, that is. Ephebe's known for its philosophers. It's better than street theater.”
“What, a lot of old men running around the streets with no clothes on?” said Brutha, under his breath, as they were marched onward.
“More or less. If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants. And ninety-nine out of a hundred ideas they come up with are totally useless.”
“Why doesn't anyone lock them away safely, then? They don't sound much use to me,” said Brutha.
“Because the hundredth idea,” said Om, “is generally a humdinger.”
“What?”
“Look up at the highest tower on the rock.”
Brutha looked up. At the top of the tower, secured by metal bands, was a big disc that glittered in the morning light.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“The reason why Omnia hasn't got much of a fleet any more,” said Om. “That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does a Falling Tree in the Forest Make a Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles,” he added. “Always coming up with amazing new ideas, the philosophers. The one before that was some intricate device that demonstrated the principles of leverage by incidentally hurling balls of burning sulphur two miles. Then before that, I think, there was some kind of an underwater thing that shot sharpened logs into the bottom of ships.”
Brutha stared at the disc again. He hadn't understood more than one-third of the words in the last statement.
“Well,” he said, “does it?”
“Does what?”
“Make a sound. If it falls down when no one's there to hear it.”
“Who cares?”
The party had reached a gateway in the wall that ran around the top of the rock in much the same way that a headband encircles a head. The Ephebian captain stopped, and turned.
“The . . . visitors . . . must be blindfolded,” he said.
“That is outrageous!” said Vorbis. “We are here on a mission of diplomacy!”
“That is not my business,” said the captain. “My business is to say: If you go through this gate you go blindfolded. You don't have to be blindfolded. You can stay outside. But if you want to go through, you got to wear a blindfold. This is one of them life choices.”
One of the subdeacons whispered in Vorbis's ear. He held a brief sotto voce conversation with the leader of the Omnian guard.
“Very well,” he said, “under protest.”
The blindfold was quite soft, and totally opaque. But as Brutha was led . . .
. . . ten paces along a passage, and then left five paces, then diagonally forward and left threeand-a-half paces, and right one hundred and three paces, down three steps, and turned around seventeen-and-one-quarter times, and forward nine paces, and left one pace, and forward nineteen paces, and pause three seconds, and right two paces, and back two paces, and left two paces, and turned threeand-a-half times, and wait one second, and up three steps, and right twenty paces, and turned around five-and-a-quarter times, and left fifteen paces, and forward seven paces, and right eighteen paces, and up seven steps, and diagonally forward, and pause two seconds, right four paces, and down a slope that went down a meter every ten paces for thirty paces, and then turned around seven-and-a-half times, and forward six paces . . .