"Afflict you with a thousand cuts!"
A hand reached in and took the Great God Om.
"The cannibal fungi of-!"
"Shut up!" hissed Brutha, shoving the tortoise under his robe.
He sidled toward the door, unnoticed in the general culinary chaos.
One of the cooks looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
"Just got to take this back," Brutha burbled, bringing out the tortoise and waving it helpfully. "Deacon's orders."
The cook scowled, and then shrugged. Novices were regarded by one and all as the lowest form of life, but orders from the hierarchy were to be obeyed without question, unless the questioner wanted to find himself faced with more important questions like whether or not it is possible to go to heaven after being roasted alive.
When they were out in the courtyard Brutha leaned against the wall and breathed out.
"Your eyeballs to-!" the tortoise began.
"One more word," said Brutha, "and it's back in the basket."
The tortoise fell silent.
"As it is, I shall probably get into trouble for missing Comparative Religion with Brother Whelk," said Brutha. "But the Great God has seen fit to make the poor man shortsighted and he probably won't notice I'm not there, only if he does I shall have to say what I've done because telling lies to a Brother is a sin and the Great God will send me to hell for a million years."
"In this one case I could be merciful," said the tortoise. "No more than a thousand years at the outside."
"My grandmother told me I shall go to hell when I die anyway," said Brutha, ignoring this. "Being alive is sinful. It stands to reason, because you have to sin every day when you're alive."
He looked down at the tortoise.
"I know you're not the Great God Om"-holy horns-"because if I was to touch the Great God Om"-holy horns-"my hands would burn away. The Great God would never become a tortoise, like Brother Nhumrod said. But it says in the Book of the Prophet Cena that when he was wandering in the desert the spirits of the ground and the air spoke unto him, so I wondered if you were one of those."
The tortoise gave him a one-eyed stare for a while. Then it said: "Tall fellow? Full beard? Eyes wobbling all over the place?"
"What?" said Brutha.
"I think I recall him," said the tortoise. "Eyes wobbled when he talked. And he talked all the time. To himself. Walked into rocks a lot."
"He wandered in the wilderness for three months," said Brutha.
"That explains it, then," said the tortoise. "There's not a lot to eat there that isn't mushrooms."
"Perhaps you are a demon," said Brutha. "The Septateuch forbids us to have discourse with demons. Yet in resisting demons, says the Prophet Fruni, we may grow strong in faith-”
"Your teeth to abscess with red-hot heat!"
"Pardon?"
"I swear to me that I am the Great God Om, greatest of gods!"
Brutha tapped the tortoise on the shell.
"Let me show you something, demon."
He could feel his faith growing, if he listened hard.
This wasn't the greatest statue of Om, but it was the closest. It was down in the pit level reserved for prisoners and heretics. And it was made of iron plates riveted together.
The pits were deserted except for a couple of novices pushing a rough cart in the distance.
"It's a big bull," said the tortoise.
"The very likeness of the Great God Om in one of his worldly incarnations!" said Brutha proudly. "And you say you're him?"
"I haven't been well lately," said the tortoise.
Its scrawny neck stretched out further.
"There's a door on its back," it said. "Why's there a door on its back?"
"So that the sinful can be put in," said Brutha.
"Why's there another one in its belly?"
"So the purified ashes can be let out," said Brutha. "And the smoke issues forth from the nostrils, as a sign to the ungodly."
The tortoise craned its neck round at the rows of barred doors. It looked up at the soot-encrusted walls. It looked down at the now empty fire trench under the iron bull. It reached a conclusion. It blinked its one eye.
"People?" it said eventually. "You roast people in it?"
"There!" said Brutha triumphantly. "And thus you prove you are not the Great God! He would know that of course we do not burn people in there. Burn people in there? That would be unheard of!"
"Ah," said the tortoise. "Then what-?"
"It is for the destruction of heretical materials and other such rubbish," said Brutha.
"Very sensible," said the tortoise.
"Sinners and criminals are purified by fire in the Quisition's pits or sometimes in front of the Great Temple," said Brutha. "The Great God would know that."
"I think I must have forgotten," said the tortoise quietly.
"The Great God Om"-holy horns-"would know that He Himself said unto the Prophet Wallspur-” Brutha coughed and assumed the creased-eyebrow squint that meant serious thought was being undertaken. " `Let the holy fire destroy utterly the unbeliever.' That's verse sixty-five."
"Did I say that?"
"In the Year of the Lenient Vegetable the Bishop Kreeblephor converted a demon by the power of reason alone," said Brutha. "It actually joined the Church and became a subdeacon. Or so it is said."
"Fighting I don't mind," the tortoise began.
"Your lying tongue cannot tempt me, reptile," said Brutha. "For I am strong in my faith!"
The tortoise grunted with effort.
"Smite you with thunderbolts!"
A small, a very small black cloud appeared over Brutha's head and a small, a very small bolt of lightning lightly singed an eyebrow.
It was about the same strength as the spark off a cat's fur in hot dry weather.
"Ouch!"
"Now do you believe me?" said the tortoise.
There was a bit of breeze on the roof of the Citadel. It also offered a good view of the high desert.
Fri'it and Drunah waited for a while to get their breath back.
Then Fri'it said, "Are we safe up here?"
Drunah looked up. An eagle circled over the dry hills. He found himself wondering how good an eagle's hearing was. It certainly was good at something. Was it hearing? It could hear a creature half a mile below in the silence of the desert. What the hells-it couldn't talk as well, could it?
"Probably," he said.
"Can I trust you?" said Fri'it.
"Can I trust you?"
Fri'it drummed his fingers on the parapet.
"Uh," he said.
And that was the problem. It was the problem of all really secret societies. They were secret. How many members did the Turtle Movement have? No one knew, exactly. What was the name of the man beside you? Two other members knew, because they would have introduced him, but who were they behind these masks? Because knowledge was dangerous. If you knew, the inquisitions could wind it slowly out of you. So you made sure you didn't know. This made conversation much easier during cell meetings, and impossible outside of them.
It was the problem of all tentative conspirators throughout history: how to conspire without actually uttering words to an untrusted possible fellow-conspirator which, if reported, would point the accusing red-hot poker of guilt.
The little beads of sweat on Drunah's forehead, despite the warm breeze, suggested that the secretary was agonizing along the same lines. But it didn't prove it. And for Fri'it, not dying had become a habit.
He clicked his knuckles nervously.
"A holy war," he said. That was safe enough. The sentence included no verbal clue to what Fri'it thought about the prospect. He hadn't said, "Ye god, not a damn holy war, is the man insane? Some idiot missionary gets himself killed, some man writes some gibberish about the shape of the world, and we have to go to war?" If pressed, and indeed stretched and broken, he could always claim that his meaning had been "At last! A not-to-be-missed opportunity to die gloriously for Om
, the one true God, who shall Trample the Unrighteous with Hooves of Iron!" It wouldn't make a lot of difference, evidence never did once you were in the deep levels where accusation had the status of proof, but at least it might leave one or two inquisitors feeling that they might just have been wrong.
"Of course, the Church has been far less militant in the last century or so," said Drunah, looking out over the desert. "Much taken up with the mundane problems of the empire."
A statement. Not a crack in it where you could insert a bone-disjointer.
"There was the crusade against the Hodgsonites," said Fri'it distantly. "And the Subjugation of the Melchiorites. And the Resolving of the false prophet Zeb. And the Correction of the Ashelians, and the Shriving of the-”
"But all that was just politics," said Drunah.
"Hmm. Yes. Of course, you are right."
"And, of course, no one could possibly doubt the wisdom of a war to further the worship and glory of the Great God."
"No. None could doubt it," said Fri'it, who had walked across many a battlefield the day after a glorious victory, when you had ample opportunity to see what winning meant. The Omnians forbade the use of all drugs. At times like that the prohibition bit hard, when you dared not go to sleep for fear of your dreams.
"Did not the Great God declare, through the Prophet Abbys, that there is no greater and more honorable sacrifice than one's own life for the God?"
"Indeed he did," said Fri'it. He couldn't help recalling that Abbys had been a bishop in the Citadel for fifty years before the Great God had Chosen him. Screaming enemies had never come at him with a sword. He'd never looked into the eyes of someone who wished him dead-no, of course he had, all the time, because of course the Church had its politics-but at least they hadn't been holding the means to that end in their hands at the time.
"To die gloriously for one's faith is a noble thing," Drunah intoned, as if reading the words off an internal notice-board.
"So the prophets tell us," said Fri'it, miserably.
The Great God moved in mysterious ways, he knew. Undoubtedly He chose His prophets, but it seemed as if He had to be helped. Perhaps He was too busy to choose for Himself. There seemed to be a lot more meetings, a lot more nodding, a lot more exchanging of glances even during the services in the Great Temple.
Certainly there was a glow about young Vorbis-how easy it was to slip from one thought to the other. There was a man touched by destiny. A tiny part of Fri'it, the part that had lived for much of its life in tents, and been shot at quite a lot, and had been in the middle of melees where you could just as easily be killed by an ally as an enemy, added: or at least by something. It was a part of him that was due to spend all the eternities in all the hells, but it had already had a lot of practice.
"You know I traveled a lot when I was much younger?" he said.
"I have often heard you talk most interestingly of your travels in heathen lands," said Drunah politely. "Often bells are mentioned."
"Did I ever tell you about the Brown Islands?"
"Out beyond the end of the world," said Drunah. "I remember. Where bread grows on trees and young women find little white balls in oysters. They dive for them, you said, while wearing not a stitc-”
"Something else I remember," said Fri'it. It was a lonely memory, out here with nothing but scrubland under a purple sky. "The sea is strong there. There are big waves, much bigger than the ones in the Circle Sea, you understand, and the men paddle out beyond them to fish. On strange planks of wood. And when they wish to return to shore, they wait for a wave, and then . . . they stand up, on the wave, and it carries them all the way to the beach."
"I like the story about the young swimming women best," said Drunah.
"Sometimes there are very big waves," said Fri'it,
ignoring him. "Nothing would stop them. But if you ride them, you do not drown. This is something I learned."
Drunah caught the glint in his eye.
"Ah," he said, nodding. "How wonderful of the Great God to put such instructive examples in our path."
"The trick is to judge the strength of the wave," said Fri'it. "And ride it."
"What happens to those who don't?"
"They drown. Often. Some of the waves are very big."
"Such is often the nature of waves, I understand."
The eagle was still circling. If it had understood anything, then it wasn't showing it.
"Useful facts to bear in mind," said Drunah, with sudden brightness. "If ever one should find oneself in heathen parts."
"Indeed."
From prayer towers up and down the contours of the Citadel the deacons chanted the duties of the hour.
Brutha should have been in class. But the tutor priests weren't too strict with him. After all, he had arrived word-perfect in every Book of the Septateuch and knew all the prayers and hymns off by heart, thanks to grandmother. They probably assumed he was being useful. Usefully doing something no one else wanted to do.
He hoed the bean rows for the look of the thing. The Great God Om, although currently the small god Om, ate a lettuce leaf.
All my life, Brutha thought, I've known that the Great God Om-he made the holy horns sign in a fairly half-hearted way-was a . . . a . . . great big beard in the sky, or sometimes, when He comes down into the world, as a huge bull or a lion or . . . something big, anyway. Something you could look up to.
Somehow a tortoise isn't the same. I'm trying hard . . . but it isn't the same. And hearing him talk about the SeptArchs as if they were just . . . just some mad old men . . . it's like a dream . . .
In the rain-forests of Brutha's subconscious the butterfly of doubt emerged and flapped an experimental wing, all unaware of what chaos theory has to say about this sort of thing . . .
"I feel a lot better now," said the tortoise. "Better than I have for months."
"Months?" said Brutha. "How long have you been . . . ill?"
The tortoise put its foot on a leaf.
"What day is it?" it said.
"Tenth of Grune," said Brutha.
"Yes? What year?"
"Er . . . Notional Serpent . . . what do you mean, what year?"
"Then . . . three years," said the tortoise. "This is good lettuce. And it's me saying it. You don't get lettuce up in the hills. A bit of plantain, a thorn bush or two. Let there be another leaf:"
Brutha pulled one off the nearest plant. And lo, he thought, there was another leaf.
"And you were going to be a bull?" he said.
"Opened my eyes . . . my eye . . . and I was a tortoise."
"Why?"
"How should I know? I don't know!" lied the tortoise.
"But you . . . you're omnicognisant," said Brutha.
"That doesn't mean I know everything."
Brutha bit his lip. "Um. Yes. It does."
"You sure?"
"Yes."
"Thought that was omnipotent."
"No. That means you're all-powerful. And you are. That's what it says in the Book of Ossory. He was one of the Great Prophets, you know. I hope," Brutha added.
"Who told him I was omnipotent?"
"You did."
"No I didn't."
"Well, he said you did."
"Don't even remember anyone called Ossory," the tortoise muttered.
"You spoke to him in the desert," said Brutha. "You must remember. He was eight feet tall? With a very long beard? And a huge staff? And the glow of the holy horns shining out of his head?" He hesitated. But he'd seen the statues and the holy icons. They couldn't be wrong.
"Never met anyone like that," said the small god Om.
"Maybe he was a bit shorter," Brutha conceded.
"Ossory. Ossory," said the tortoise. "No . . . no . . . can't say I-”
"He said that you spoke unto him from out of a pillar of flame," said Brutha.
"Oh, that Ossory," said the tortoise. "Pillar of flame. Yes."
"And you dictated to him the Book of Ossory," said Bru
tha. "Which contains the Directions, the Gateways, the Abjurations, and the Precepts. One hundred and ninetythree chapters."
"I don't think I did all that," said Om doubtfully. "I'm sure I would have remembered one hundred and ninety-three chapters."
"What did you say to him, then?"
"As far as I can remember it was 'Hey, see what I can do!' " said the tortoise.
Brutha stared at it. It looked embarrassed, insofar as that's possible for a tortoise.
"Even gods like to relax," it said.
"Hundreds of thousands of people live their lives by the Abjurations and the Precepts!" Brutha snarled.
"Well? I'm not stopping them," said Om.
"If you didn't dictate them, who did?"
"Don't ask me. I'm not omnicognisant!"
Brutha was shaking with anger.
"And the Prophet Abbys? I suppose someone just happened to give him the Codicils, did they?"
"It wasn't me-”
"They're written on slabs of lead ten feet tall!"
"Oh, well, it must have been me, yes? I always have a ton of lead slabs around in case I meet someone in the desert, yes?"
"What! If you didn't give them to him, who did?" "I don't know. Why should I know? I can't be everywhere at once!"
"You're omnipresent!"
"What says so?"
"The Prophet Hashimi!"
"Never met the man!"
"Oh? Oh? So I suppose you didn't give him the Book of Creation, then?"
"What Book of Creation?"
"You mean you don't know?"
"No.
"Then who gave it to him?"
"I don't know! Perhaps he wrote it himself!"
Brutha put his hand over his mouth in horror.
"Thaff blafhngf!"
"What?"
Brutha removed his hand.
"I said, that's blasphemy!"
"Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I'm a god!"
"I don't believe you!"
"Hah! Want another thunderbolt?"
"You call that a thunderbolt?"
Brutha was red in the face, and shaking. The tortoise hung its head sadly.
"All right. All right. Not much of one, I admit," it said. "If I was better, you'd have been just a pair of sandals with smoke coming out." It looked wretched. "I don't understand it. This sort of thing has never happened to me before. I intended to be a great big roaring white bull for a week and ended up a tortoise for three years. Why? I don't know, and I'm supposed to know everything. According to these prophets of yours who say they've met me, anyway. You know, no one even heard me? I tried talking to goatherds and stuff, and they never took any notice! I was beginning to think I was a tortoise dreaming about being a god. That's how bad it was getting."
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