“Primitive nature worship.”
“Wouldn’t give you tuppence for him.”
“Simple rationalization of the unknown.”
“Hah! A clever fiction, a bogey to frighten the weak and stupid!”
The words rose up in Brutha. He couldn’t stop himself.
“Is it always this cold?” he said. “It seemed very chilly on my way here.”
The philosophers all moved away from Xeno.
“Although if there’s one thing you can say about Foorgol,” said Xeno, “it’s that he’s a very understanding god. Likes a joke as much as the next . . . man.”
He looked both ways, quickly. After a while the philosophers relaxed, and seemed to completely forget about Brutha.
And only now did he really have time to take in the room. He had never seen a tavern before in his life, but that was what it was. The bar ran along one side of the room. Behind it were the typical trappings of an Ephebian bar-the stacks of wine jars, racks of amphorae, and the cheery pictures of vestal virgins on cards of salted peanuts and goat jerky, pinned up in the hope that there really were people in the world who would slatheringly buy more and more packets of nuts they didn’t want in order to look at a cardboard nipple.
“What’s all this stuff?” Brutha whispered.
“How should I know?” said Om. “Let me out so’s I can see.”
Brutha unfastened the box and lifted the tortoise out. One rheumy eye looked around.
“Oh. Typical tavern,” said Om. “Good. Mine’s a saucer of whatever they were drinking.”
“A tavern? A place were alcohol is drunk?”
“I very much intend this to be the case, yes.”
“But . . . but . . . the Septateuch, no less than seventeen times, adjures us most emphatically to refrain from-”
“Beats the hell out of me why,” said Om. “See that man cleaning the mugs? You say unto him, Give me a-”
“But it mocks the mind of Man, says the Prophet Ossory. And-”
“I’ll say this one more time! I never said it! Now talk to the man!”
In fact the man talked to Brutha. He appeared magically on the other side of the bar, still wiping a mug.
“Evening, sir,” he said. “What’ll it be?”
“I’d like a drink of water, please,” said Brutha, very deliberately.
“And something for the tortoise?”
“Wine!” said the voice of Om.
“I don’t know,” said Brutha. “What do tortoises usually drink?”
“The ones we have in here normally have a drop of milk with some bread in it,” said the barman.
“You get a lot of tortoises?” said Brutha loudly, trying to drown out Om’s outraged screams.
“Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races . . . very handy.”
“Uh . . . I haven’t got any money,” said Brutha.
The barman leaned towards him. “Tell you what,” he said. “Declivities has just bought a round. He won’t mind.”
“Bread and milk?”
“Oh. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“Oh, we get all sorts in here,” said the barman, leaning back. “Stoics. Cynics. Big drinkers, the Cynics. Epicureans. Stochastics. Anamaxandrites. Epistemologists. Peripatetics. Synoptics. All sorts. That’s what I always say. What I always say is”-he picked up another mug and started to dry it “it takes all sorts to make a world.”
“Bread and milk!” shouted Om. “You’ll feel my wrath for this, right? Now ask him about gods!”
“Tell me,” said Brutha, sipping his mug of water, “do any of them know much about gods?”
“You’d want a priest for that sort of thing,” said the barman.
“No, I mean about . . . what gods are . . . how gods came to exist . . . that sort of thing,” said Brutha, trying to get to grips with the barman’s peculiar mode of conversation.
“Gods don’t like that sort of thing,” said the barman. “We get that in here some nights, when someone’s had a few. Cosmic speculation about whether gods really exist. Next thing, there’s a bolt of lightning through the roof with a note wrapped round it saying `Yes, we do’ and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out. That sort of thing, it takes all the interest out of metaphysical speculation.”
“Not even fresh bread,” muttered Om, nose deep in his saucer.
“No, I know gods exist all right,” said Brutha, hurriedly. “I just want to find out more about . . . them.”
The barman shrugged.
“Then I’d be obliged if you don’t stand next to anything valuable,” he said, “Still, it’ll all be the same in a hundred years.” He picked up another mug and started to polish it.
“Are you a philosopher?” said Brutha.
“It kind of rubs off on you after a while,” said the barman.
“This milk’s off,” said Om. “They say Ephebe is a democracy. This milk ought to be allowed to vote.”
“I don’t think,” said Brutha carefully, “that I’m going to find what I want here. Um. Mr. Drink Seller?”
“Yes?”
“What was that bird that walked in when the Goddess”-he tasted the unfamiliar word-“of Wisdom was mentioned?”
“Bit of a problem there,” said the barman. “Bit of an embarrassment.”
“Sorry? ”
“It was,” said the barman, “a penguin.”
“Is it a wise sort of bird, then?”
“No. Not a lot,” said the barman. “Not known for its wisdom. Second most confused bird in the world. Can only fly underwater, they say.”
“Then why-”
“We don’t like to talk about it,” said the barman. “It upsets people. Bloody sculptor,” he added, under his breath.
Down the other end of the bar the philosophers had started fighting again.
The barman leaned forward. “If you haven’t got any money,” he said, “I don’t think you’re going to get much help. Talk isn’t cheap around here.”
“But they just-” Brutha began.
“There’s the expenditure on soap and water, for a start. Towels. Flannels. Loofahs. Pumice stones. Bath salts. It all adds up.”
There was a gurgling noise from the saucer. Om’s milky head turned to Brutha.
“You’ve got no money at all?” he said.
“No,” said Brutha.
“Well, we’ve got to have a philosopher,” said the tortoise flatly. “I can’t think and you don’t know how to. We’ve got to find someone who does it all the time.”
“Of course, you could try old Didactylos,” said the barman. “He’s about as cheap as they come.”
“Doesn’t use expensive soap?” said Brutha.
“I think it could be said without fear of contradiction,” said the barman solemnly, “that he doesn’t use any soap at all whatsoever in any way.”
“Oh. Well. Thank you,” said Brutha.
“Ask him where this man lives,” Om commanded.
“Where can I find Mr. Didactylos?” said Brutha.
“In the palace courtyard. Next door to the Library. You can’t miss him. Just follow your nose.”
“We just came-” Brutha said, but his inner voice prompted him not to complete the sentence. “We’ll just be going then.”
“Don’t forget your tortoise,” said the barman. “There’s good eating on one of them.”
“May all your wine turn to water!” Om shrieked.
“Will it?” said Brutha, as they stepped out into the night.
No.
“Tell me again. Why exactly are we looking for a philosopher?” said Brutha.
“I want to get my power back,” said Om.
“But everyone believes in you!”
“If they believed in me they could talk to me. I could talk to them. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. No one is worshiping any other gods in Omnia, are they?”
“They wouldn’t be allowed to,” said Brutha. “The Quisition would see to that.”
“Yeah. It’s hard to kneel if you have no knees.”
Brutha stopped in the empty street.
“I don’t understand you!”
“You’re not supposed to. The ways of gods aren’t supposed to be understandable to men.”
“The Quisition keeps us on the path of truth! The Quisition works for the greater glory of the Church!”
“And you believe that, do you?” said the tortoise.
Brutha looked, and found that certainty had gone missing. He opened and shut his mouth, but there were no words to be said.
“Come on,” said Om, as kindly as he could manage. “Let’s get back.”
In the middle of the night Om awoke. There were noises from Brutha’s bed.
Brutha was praying again.
Om listened curiously. He could remember prayers. There had been a lot of them, once. So many that he couldn’t make out an individual prayer even if he had felt inclined to, but that didn’t matter, because what mattered was the huge cosmic susurration of thousands of praying, believing minds. The words weren’t worth listening to, anyway.
Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time . . .