“It’ll track us,” moaned Om. “They do that. For miles and miles.”
“We’ll survive.”
“I wish I had your confidence.”
“Ah, but I have a God to have faith in.”
“There’ll be no more ruined temples.”
“There’ll be something else.”
“And not even snake to eat.”
“But I walk with my God.”
“Not as a snack, though. And you’re walking the wrong way, too.”
“No. I’m still heading away from the coast.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“How far can a lion go with a spear wound like that in him?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Everything.”
And, half an hour later, a black shadowy line on the silver moonlit desert, there were the tracks.
“The soldiers came this way. We just have to follow the tracks back. If we head where they’ve come from, we’ll get where we’re going.”
“We’ll never do it!”
“We’re traveling light.”
“Oh, yeah. They were burdened by all the food and water they had to carry,” said Om bitterly. “How lucky for us we haven’t got any.”
Brutha glanced at Vorbis. He was walking unaided now, provided that you gently turned him around whenever you needed to change direction.
But even Om had to admit that the tracks were some comfort. In a way they were alive, in the same way that an echo is alive. People had been this way, not long ago. There were other people in the world. Someone, somewhere, was surviving.
Or not. After an hour or so they came across a mound beside the track. There was a helmet atop it, and a sword stuck in the sand.
“A lot of soldiers died to get here quickly,” said Brutha.
Whoever had taken enough time to bury their dead had also drawn a symbol in the sand of the mound. Brutha halfexpected it to be a turtle, but the desert wind had not quite eroded the crude shape of a pair of horns.
“I don’t understand that,” said Om. “They don’t really believe I exist, but they go and put something like that on a grave.”
“It’s hard to explain. I think it’s because they believe they exist,” said Brutha. “It’s because they’re people, and so was he.”
He pulled the sword out of the sand.
“What do you want that for?”
“Might be useful.”
“Against who?”
“Might be useful.”
An hour later the lion, who was limping after Brutha, also arrived at the grave. It had lived in the desert for sixteen years, and the reason it had lived so long was that it had not died, and it had not died because it never wasted handy protein. It dug.
Humans have always wasted handy protein ever since they started wondering who had lived in it.
But, on the whole, there are worse places to be buried than inside a lion.
There were snakes and lizards on the rock islands. They were probably very nourishing and every one was, in its own way, a taste explosion.
There was no more water.
But there were plants . . . more or less. They looked like groups of stones, except where a few had put up a central flower spike that was a brilliant pink and purple in the dawn light.
“Where do they get the water from?”
“Fossil seas.”
“Water that’s turned to stone?”
“No. Water that sank down thousands of years ago.
Right down in the bedrock.”
“Can you dig down to it?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Brutha glanced from the flower to the nearest rock island.
“Honey,” he said.
“What?”
The bees had a nest high on the side of a spire of rock. The buzzing could be heard from ground level. There was no possible way up.
“Nice try,” said Om.
The sun was up. Already the rocks were warm to the touch. “Get some rest,” said Om, kindly. “I’ll keep watch.”
“Watch for what?”
“I’ll watch and find out.”
Brutha led Vorbis into the shade of a large boulder, and gently pushed him down. Then he lay down too.
The thirst wasn’t too bad yet. He’d drunk from the temple pool until he squelched as he walked. Later on, they might find a snake . . . When you considered what some people in the world had, life wasn’t too bad.
Vorbis lay on his side, his black-on-black eyes staring at nothing.
Brutha tried to sleep.
He had never dreamed. Didactylos had been quite excited about that. Someone who remembered everything and didn’t dream would have to think slowly, he said. Imagine a heart,[9] he said, that was nearly all memory, and had hardly any beats to spare for the everyday purposes of thinking. That would explain why Brutha moved his lips while he thought.
So this couldn’t have been a dream. It must have been the sun.
He heard Om’s voice in his head. The tortoise sounded as though he was holding a conversation with people Brutha could not hear.
Mine!
Go away!
No.
Mine!
Both of them!
Mine!
Brutha turned his head.
The tortoise was in a gap between two rocks, neck extended and weaving from side to side. There was another sound, a sort of gnat-like whining, that came and went . . . and promises in his head.
They flashed past . . . faces talking to him, shapes, visions of greatness, moments of opportunity, picking him up, taking him high above the world, all this was his, he could do anything, all he had to do was believe, in me, in me, in me-
An image formed in front of him. There, on a stone beside him, was a roast pig surrounded by fruit, and a mug of beer so cold the air was frosting on the sides.
Mine!
Brutha blinked. The voices faded. So did the food.
He blinked again.
There were strange after-images, not seen but felt. Perfect though his memory was, he could not remember what the voices had said or what the other pictures had been. All that lingered was a memory of roast pork and cold beer.
“That’s because they don’t know what to offer you,” said Om’s voice, quietly. “So they try to offer you anything. Generally they start with visions of food and carnal gratification.”
“They got as far as the food,” said Brutha.
“Good job I overcame them, then,” said Om. “No telling what they might have achieved with a young man like yourself.”
Brutha raised himself on his elbows.
Vorbis had not moved.
“Were they trying to get through to him, too?”
“I suppose so. Wouldn’t work. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Never seen a mind so turned in on itself.”
“Will they be back?”
“Oh, yes. It’s not as if they’ve got anything else to do.”
“When they do,” said Brutha, feeling lightheaded, “could you wait until they’ve shown me visions of carnal gratification?”
“Very bad for you.”
“Brother Nhumrod was very down on them. But I think perhaps we should know our enemies, yes?”
Brutha’s voice faded to a croak.
“I could have done with the vision of the drink,” he said, wearily.
The shadows were long. He looked around in amazement.
“How long were they trying?”
“All day. Persistent devils, too. Thick as flies.”
Brutha learned why at sunset.
He met St. Ungulant the anchorite, friend of all small gods. Everywhere.
“Well, well, well,” said St. Ungulant. “We don’t get very many visitors up here. Isn’t that so, Angus?”
He addressed the air beside him.
Brutha was trying to keep his balance, because the cartwheel rocked dangerously every time he moved. They’d left Vorbis seated on the desert twenty feet below, hugging his knees and staring at nothing.
The wheel had been nailed flat on top of a slim pole. It was just wide enough for one person to lie uncomfortably. But St. Ungulant looked designed to lie uncomfortably. He was so thin that even skeletons would say, “Isn’t he thin?” He was wearing some sort of minimalist loin-cloth, insofar as it was possible to tell under the beard and hair.
It had been quite hard to ignore St. Ungulant, who had been capering up and down at the top of his pole shouting “Coo-ee!” and “Over here!” There was a slightly smaller pole a few feet away, with an old-fashioned half-moon-cutout-on-the-door privy on it. Just because you were an anchorite, St. Ungulant said, didn’t mean you had to give up everything.
Brutha had heard of anchorites, who were a kind of oneway prophet. They went out into the desert but did not come back, preferring a hermit’s life of dirt and hardship and dirt and holy contemplation and dirt. Many of them liked to make life even more uncomfortable for themselves by being walled up in cells or living, quite appropriately, at the top of a pole. The Omnian Church encouraged them, on the basis that it was best to get madmen as far away as possible where they couldn’t cause any trouble and could be cared for by the community, insofar as the community consisted of lions and buzzards and dirt.