Gods liked games, provided they were winning.
Koomi’s theory was largely based on the good old Gnostic heresy, which tends to turn up all over the multiverse whenever men get up off their knees and start thinking for two minutes together, although the shock of the sudden altitude tends to mean the thinking is a little whacked. But it upsets priests, who tend to vent their displeasure in traditional ways.
When the Omnian Church found out about Koomi, they displayed him in every town within the Church’s empire to demonstrate the essential flaws in his argument.
There were a lot of towns, so they had to cut him up quite small.
Ragged clouds ripped across the skies. The sails creaked in the rising wind, and Om could hear the shouts of the sailors as they tried to outrun the storm.
It was going to be a big storm, even by the mariners’ standards. White water crowned the waves.
Brutha snored in his nest.
Om listened to the sailors. They were not men who dealt in sophistries. Someone had killed a porpoise, and everyone knew what that meant. It meant that there was going to be a storm. It meant that the ship was going to be sunk. It was simple cause and effect. It was worse than women aboard. It was worse than albatrosses.
Om wondered if tortoises could swim. Turtles could, he was pretty sure. But those buggers had the shell for it.
It would be too much to ask (even if a god had anyone to ask) that a body designed for trundling around a dry wilderness had any hydrodynamic properties other than those necessary to sink to the bottom.
Oh, well. Nothing else for it. He was still a god. He had rights.
He slid down a coil of rope and crawled carefully to the edge of the swaying deck, wedging his shell against a stanchion so that he could see down into the roiling water.
Then he spoke in a voice audible to nothing that was mortal.
Nothing happened for a while. Then one wave rose higher than the rest, and changed shape as it rose. Water poured upward, filling an invisible mold; it was humanoid, but obviously only because it wanted to be. It could as easily have been a waterspout, or an undertow. The sea is always powerful. So many people believe in it. But it seldom answers prayers.
The water shape rose level with the deck and kept pace with Om.
It developed a face, and opened a mouth.
“Well?” it said.
“Greetings, oh Queen of-” Om began.
The watery eyes focused.
“But you are just a small god. And you dare to summon me?”
The wind howled in the rigging.
“I have believers,” said Om. “So I have the right.”
There was the briefest of pauses. Then the Sea Queen said, “One believer?”
“One or many does not matter here,” said Om. “I have rights.”
“And what rights do you demand, little tortoise?” said the Queen of the Sea.
“Save the ship,” said Om.
The Queen was silent.
“You have to grant the request,” said Om. “It’s the rules.”
“But I can name my price,” said the Sea Queen.
“That’s the rules, too.”
“And it will be high.”
“It will be paid.”
The column of water began to collapse back into the waves.
“I will consider this.”
Om stared down into the white sea. The ship rolled, sliding him back down the deck, and then rolled back. A flailing foreclaw hooked itself around the stanchion as Om’s shell spun around, and for a moment both hind legs paddled helplessly over the waters.
And then Om was shaken free.
Something white swept down toward him as he seesawed over the edge, and he bit it.
Brutha yelled and pulled his hand up, with Om trailing on the end of it.
“You didn’t have to bite!”
The ship pitched into a wave and flung him to the deck. Om let go and rolled away.
When Brutha got to his feet, or at least to his hands and knees, he saw the crewmen standing around him. Two of them grabbed him by the elbows as a wave crashed over the ship.
“What are you doing?”
They were trying to avoid looking at his face. They dragged him toward the rail.
Somewhere in the scuppers Om screamed at the Sea Queen.
“It’s the rules! The rules!”
Four sailors had got hold of Brutha now. Om could hear, above the roaring of the storm, the silence of the desert.
“Wait,” said Brutha.
“It’s nothing personal,” said one of the sailors. “We don’t want to do this.”
“I don’t want you to do it either,” said Brutha.”Is that any help?”
“The sea wants a life,” said the oldest sailor. “Yours is nearest. Okay, get his-”
“Can I make my peace with my God?”
“What?”
“If you’re going to kill me, can I pray to my God first?”
“It’s not us that’s killing you,” said the sailor. “It’s the sea.”
” `The hand that does the deed is guilty of the crime,’ ” said Brutha. “Ossory, chapter LVI, verse 93.”
The sailors looked at one another. At a time like this, it was probably not wise to antagonize any god. The ship skidded down the side of a wave.
“You’ve got ten seconds,” said the oldest sailor. “That’s ten seconds more than many men get.”
Brutha lay down on the deck, helped considerably by another wave that slammed into the timbers.
Om was dimly aware of the prayer, to his surprise. He couldn’t make out the words, but the prayer itself was an itch at the back of his mind.
“Don’t ask me,” he said, trying to get upright, “I’m out of options-”
The ship smacked down . . .
. . . on to a calm sea.
The storm still raged, but only around a widening circle with the ship in the middle. The lightning, stabbing at the sea, surrounded them like the bars of a cage.
The circle lengthened ahead of them. Now the ship sped down a narrow channel of calm between gray walls of storm a mile high. Electric fire raged overhead.
And then was gone.
Behind them, a mountain of grayness squatted on the sea. They could hear the thunder dying away.
Brutha got uncertainly to his feet, swaying wildly to compensate for a motion that was no longer there.
“Now I-” he began.
He was alone. The sailors had fled.
“Om?” said Brutha.
“Over here.”
Brutha fished his God out of the seaweed.
“You said you couldn’t do anything!” he said accusingly.
“That wasn’t m-” Om paused. There will be a price, he thought. It won’t be cheap. It can’t be cheap. The Sea Queen is a god. I’ve crushed a few towns in my time. Holy fire, that kind of thing. If the price isn’t high, how can people respect you?
“I made arrangements,” he said.
Tidal waves. A ship sunk. A couple of towns disappearing under the sea. It’ll be something like that. If people don’t respect then they won’t fear, and if they don’t fear, how can you get them to believe?
Seems unfair, really. One man killed a porpoise. Of course, it doesn’t matter to the Queen who gets thrown overboard, just as it didn’t matter to him which porpoise he killed. And that’s unfair, because it was Vorbis who did it. He makes people do things they shouldn’t do . . .
What am I thinking about? Before I was a tortoise, I didn’t even know what unfair meant . . .
The hatches opened. People came on deck and hung on the rail. Being on deck in stormy weather always has the possibility of being washed overboard, but that takes on a rosy glow after hours below decks with frightened horses and seasick passengers.
There were no more storms. The ship ploughed on in favorable winds, under a clear sky, in a sea as empty of life as the hot desert.
The days passed uneventfully. Vorbis stayed below decks for most of the time.
The crew treated Brutha with cautious respect. News like Brutha spreads quickly.
The coast here was dunes, with the occasional barren salt marsh. A heat haze hung over the land. It was the kind of coast where shipwrecked landfall is more to be dreaded than drowning. There were no seabirds. Even the birds that had been trailing the ship for scraps had vanished.
“No eagles,” said Om. There was that to be said about it.
Toward the evening of the fourth day the unedifying panorama was punctuated by a glitter of light, high on the dune sea. It flashed with a sort of rhythm.
The captain, whose face now looked as if sleep had not been a regular nighttime companion, called Brutha over.
“His . . . your . . . the deacon told me to watch out for this,” he said. “You go and fetch him now.”