Vorbis had a cabin somewhere near the bilges, where the air was as thick as thin soup. Brutha knocked.
“Enter.”[1][5]
There were no portholes down here. Vorbis was sitting in the dark.
“Yes, Brutha?”
“The captain sent me to fetch you, lord. Something’s shining in the desert.”
“Good. Now, Brutha. Attend. The captain has a mirror. You will ask to borrow it.”
“Er . . . what is a mirror, lord?”
“An unholy and forbidden device,” said Vorbis. “Which regretfully can be pressed into godly service. He will deny it, of course. But a man with such a neat beard and tiny mustache is vain, and a vain man must have his mirror. So take it. And stand in the sun and move the mirror so that it shines the sun towards the desert. Do you understand?”
“No, lord,” said Brutha.
“Your ignorance is your protection, my son. And then come back and tell me what you see.”
Om dozed in the sun. Brutha had found him a little space near the pointy end where he could get sun with little danger of being seen by the crew-and the crew were jittery enough at the moment not to go looking for trouble in any case.
A tortoise dreams . . .
. . . for millions of years.
It was the dreamtime. The unformed time.
The small gods chittered and whirred in the wilderness places, and the cold places, and the deep places. They swarmed in the darkness, without memory but driven by hope and lust for the one thing, the one thing a god craves-belief.
There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there’s light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space . . . then there’s a race-between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up.
Sometimes, you can make your own space.
Forests were a long way from the wilderness. The nameless voice that was going to be Om drifted on the wind on the edge of the desert, trying to be heard among countless others, trying to avoid being pushed into the center. It may have whirled for millions of years-it had nothing with which to measure time. All it had was hope, and a certain sense of the presence of things. And a voice.
Then there was a day. In a sense, it was the first day.
Om had been aware of the shepherd for some ti-for a while. The flock had been wandering closer and closer. The rains had been sparse. Forage was scarce. Hungry mouths propelled hungry legs further into the rocks, searching out the hitherto scorned clumps of sun-seared grass.
They were sheep, possibly the most stupid animal in the universe with the possible exception of the duck. But even their uncomplicated minds couldn’t hear the voice, because sheep don’t listen.
There was a lamb, though. It had strayed a little way. Om saw to it that it strayed a little further. Around a rock. Down the slope. Into the crevice.
Its bleating drew the mother.
The crevice was well hidden and the ewe was, after all, content now that she had her lamb. She saw no reason to bleat, even when the shepherd wandered about the rocks calling, cursing, and, eventually, pleading. The shepherd had a hundred sheep, and it might have been surprising that he was prepared to spend days searching for one sheep; in fact, it was because he was the kind of man prepared to spend days looking for a lost sheep that he had a hundred sheep.
The voice that was going to be Om waited.
It was on the evening of the second day that he scared up a partridge that had been nesting near the crevice, just as the shepherd was wandering by.
It wasn’t much of a miracle, but it was good enough for the shepherd. He made a cairn of stones at the spot and, next day, brought his whole flock into the area. And in the heat of the afternoon he lay down to sleep-and Om spoke to him, inside his head.
Three weeks later the shepherd was stoned to death by the priests of Ur-Gilash, who was at that time the chief god in the area. But they were too late. Om already had a hundred believers, and the number was growing . . .
Only a mile away from the shepherd and his flock was a goatherd and his herd. The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.
For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.
Ur-Gilash, thought Om. Ah, those were the days . . . when Ossory and his followers had broken into the temple and smashed the altar and had thrown the priestesses out of the window to be torn apart by wild dogs, which was the correct way of doing things, and there had been a mighty wailing and gnashing of feet and the followers of Om had lit their campfires in the crumbled halls of Gilash just as the Prophet had said, and that counted even though he’d said it only five minutes earlier, when they were only looking for the firewood, because everyone agreed a prophecy is a prophecy and no one said you had to wait a long time for it to come true.
Great days. Great days. Every day fresh converts. The rise of Om had been unstoppable . . .
He jerked awake.
Old Ur-Gilash. Weather god, wasn’t he? Yes. No. Maybe one of your basic giant spider gods? Something like that. Whatever happened to him?
What happened to me? How does it happen? You hang around the astral planes, going with the flow, enjoy the rhythms of the universe, you think that all the, you know, humans are getting on with the believing back down there, you decide to go and stir them up a bit and then . . . a tortoise. It’s like going to the bank and finding the money’s been leaking out through a hole. The first you know is when you stroll down looking for a handy mind, and suddenly you’re a tortoise and there’s no power left to get out.
Three years of looking up at practically everything . . .
Old Ur-Gilash? Perhaps he was hanging on as a lizard somewhere, with some old hermit as his only believer. More likely he had been blown out into the desert. A small god was lucky to get one chance.
There was something wrong. Om couldn’t quite put his finger on it, and not only because he didn’t have a finger. Gods rose and fell like bits of onion in a boiling soup, but this time was different. There was something wrong this time . . .
He’d forced out Ur-Gilash. Fair enough. Law of the jungle. But no one was challenging him . . .
Where was Brutha?
“Brutha! ”
Brutha was counting the flashes of light off the desert. “It’s a good thing I had a mirror, yes?” said the captain hopefully. “I expect his lordship won’t mind about the mirror because it turned out to be useful?”
“I don’t think he thinks like that,” said Brutha, still counting.
“No. I don’t think he does either,” said the captain gloomily.
“Seven, and then four.”
“It’ll be the Quisition for me,” said the captain.
Brutha was about to say, “Then rejoice that your soul shall be purified.” But he didn’t. And he didn’t know why he didn’t.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said.
A veneer of surprise overlaid the captain’s grief.
“You people usually say something about how the Quisition is good for the soul,” he said.
“I’m sure it is,” said Brutha.
The captain was watching his face intently.
“It’s flat, you know,” he said quietly. “I’ve sailed out into the Rim Ocean. It’s flat, and I’ve seen the Edge, and it moves. Not the Edge. I mean . . . what’s down there. They can cut my head off but it will still move.”
“But it will stop moving for you,” said Brutha. “So I should be careful to whom you speak, captain.”
The captain leaned closer.
“The Turtle Moves!” he hissed, and darted away.
“Brutha! ”
Guilt jerked Brutha upright like a hooked fish. He turned around, and sagged with relief. It wasn’t Vorbis, it was only God.
He padded over to the place in front of the mast. Om glared up at him.
“Yes?” said Brutha.
“You never come and see me,” said the tortoise. “I know you’re busy,” it added sarcastically, “but a quick prayer would be nice, even.”