The scalbie watched him reproachfully from the top of a dune. It ruffled its handful of greasy feathers with the air of one who was prepared to wait all night, if necessary. As long as it took.
Om crawled back to Brutha. Well, there was still breathing going on.
Water . . .
The god gave it some thought. Smiting the living rock. That was one way. Getting water to flow . . . no problem. It was just a matter of molecules and vectors. Water had a natural tendency to flow. You just have to see to it that it flowed here instead of there. No problem at all to a god in the peak of condition.
How did you tackle it from a tortoise perspective?
The tortoise dragged himself to the bottom of the dune and then walked up and down for a few minutes. Finally he selected a spot and began digging.
This wasn’t right. It had been fiery hot. Now he was freezing.
Brutha opened his eyes. Desert stars, brilliant white, looked back at him. His tongue seemed to fill his mouth. Now, what was it . . .
Water.
He rolled over. There had been voices in his head, and now there were voices outside his head. They were faint, but they were definitely there, echoing quietly over the moonlit sands.
Brutha crawled painfully toward the foot of the dune. There was a mound there. In fact, there were several mounds. The muffled voice was coming from one of them. He pulled himself closer.
There was a hole in the mound. Somewhere far underground, someone was swearing. The words were unclear as they echoed backward and forward up the tunnel, but the general effect was unmistakable.
Brutha flopped down, and watched.
After a few minutes there was movement at the mouth of the hole and Om emerged, covered with what, if this wasn’t a desert, Brutha would have called mud.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the tortoise. “Tear off a bit of your robe and pass it over.”
Dreamlike, Brutha obeyed.
“Turnin’ round down there”, said Om, “is no picnic, let me tell you.”
He took the rag in his jaws, backed around carefully, and disappeared down the hole. After a couple of minutes he was back, still dragging the rag.
It was soaked. Brutha let the liquid dribble into his mouth. It tasted of mud, and sand, and cheap brown dye, and slightly of tortoise, but he would have drunk a gallon of it. He could have swum in a pool of it.
He tore off another strip for Om to take down.
When Om re-emerged, Brutha was kneeling beside Vorbis.
“Sixteen feet down! Sixteen bloody feet!” shouted Om. “Don’t waste it on him! Isn’t he dead yet?”
“He’s got a fever.”
“Put him out of our misery.”
“We’re still taking him back to Omnia.”
“You think we’ll get there? No food? No water?”
“But you found water. Water in the desert.”
“Nothing miraculous about that,” said Om. “There’s a rainy season near the coast. Flash floods. Wadis. Dried-up river beds. You get aquifers,” he added.
“Sounds like a miracle to me,” croaked Brutha.
“Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.”
“Well, there’s no food down there, take it from me,” said Om. “Nothing to eat. Nothing in the sea, if we can find the sea again. I know the desert. Rocky ridges you have to go round. Everything turning you out of your path. Dunes that move in the night . . . lions . . . other things . . .”
. . . gods.
“What do you want to do, then?” said Brutha. “You said better alive than dead. You want to go back to Ephebe? We’ll be popular there, you think?”
Om was silent.
Brutha nodded.
“Fetch more water, then.”
It was better traveling at night, with Vorbis over one shoulder and Om under one arm.
At this time of year-
-the glow in the sky over there is the Aurora Corealis, the hublights, where the magical field of the Discworld constantly discharges itself among the peaks of Cori Celesti, the central mountain. And at this time of year the sun rises over the desert in Ephebe and over the sea in Omnia, so keep the hublights on the left and the sunset glow behind you-
“Did you ever go to Cori Celesti?” said Brutha.
Om, who had been nodding off in the cold, woke up with a start.
“Huh?”
“It’s where the gods live.”
“Hah! I could tell you stories,” said Om darkly.
“What?”
“Think they’re so bloody elite!”
“You didn’t live up there, then?”
“No. Got to be a thunder god or something. Got to have a whole parcel of worshipers to live on Nob Hill. Got to be an anthropomorphic personification, one of them things.”
“Not just a Great God, then?”
Well, this was the desert. And Brutha was going to die.
“May as well tell you,” muttered Om. “It’s not as though we’re going to survive . . . See, every god’s a Great God to someone. I never wanted to be that great. A handful of tribes, a city or two. It’s not much to ask, is it?”
“There’s two million people in the empire,” said Brutha.
“Yeah. Pretty good, eh? Started off with nothing but a shepherd hearing voices in his head, ended up with two million people.”
“But you never did anything with them,” said Brutha.
“Like what?”
“Well . . . tell them not to kill one another, that sort of thing . . .”
“Never really given it much thought. Why should I tell them that?”
Brutha sought for something that would appeal to god psychology.
“Well, if people didn’t kill one another, there’d be more people to believe in you?” he suggested.
“It’s a point,” Om conceded. “Interesting point. Sneaky.”
Brutha walked along in silence. There was a glimmer of frost on the dunes.
“Have you ever heard”, he said, “of Ethics?”
“Somewhere in Howondaland, isn’t it?”
“The Ephebians were very interested in it.”
“Probably thinking about invading.”
“They seemed to think about it a lot.”
“Long-term strategy, maybe.”
“I don’t think it’s a place, though. It’s more to do with how people live.”
“What, lolling around all day while slaves do the real work? Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place while those fellows are living like-”
“-gods?” said Brutha.
There was a terrible silence.
“I was going to say kings,” said Om, reproachfully.
“They sound a bit like gods.”
“Kings,” said Om emphatically.
“Why do people need gods?” Brutha persisted.
“Oh, you’ve got to have gods,” said Om, in a hearty, no-nonsense voice.
“But it’s gods that need people,” said Brutha. “To do the believing. You said.”
Om hesitated. “Well, okay,” he said. “But people have got to believe in something. Yes? I mean, why else does it thunder?”
“Thunder,” said Brutha, his eyes glazing slightly, “I don’t-”
“-is caused by clouds banging together; after the lightning stroke, there is a hole in the air, and thus the sound is engendered by the clouds rushing to fill the hole and colliding, in accordance with strict cumulodynamic principles.”
“Your voice goes funny when you’re quoting,” said Om. “What does engendered mean?”
“I don’t know. No one showed me a dictionary.”
“Anyway, that’s just an explanation,” said Om. “It’s not a reason.”
“My grandmother said thunder was caused by the Great God Om taking his sandals off,” said Brutha. “She was in a funny mood that day. Nearly smiled.”
“Metaphorically accurate,” said Om. “But I never did thundering. Demarcation, see. Bloody I’ve-got-a-big-hammer Blind Io up on Nob Hill does all the thundering.”
“I thought you said there were hundreds of thunder gods,” said Brutha.
“Yeah. And he’s all of ’em. Rationalization. A couple of tribes join up, they’ve both got thunder gods, right? And the gods kind of run together-you know how amoebas split?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s like that, only the other way.”
“I still don’t see how one god can be a hundred thunder gods. They all look different . . .”
“False noses.”
“What?”
“And different voices. I happen to know Io’s got seventy different hammers. Not common knowledge, that. And it’s just the same with mother goddesses. There’s only one of ’em. She just got a lot of wigs and of course it’s amazing what you can do with a padded bra.”
There was absolute silence in the desert. The stars, smeared slightly by high-altitude moisture, were tiny, motionless rosettes.
Away toward what the Church called the Top Pole, and which Brutha was coming to think of as the Hub, the sky flickered.
Brutha put Om down, and laid Vorbis on the sand.
Absolute silence.