I’m on my back and getting hotter and I’m going to die . . .
Careful, careful. Concentrate, concentrate. It’ll let go any second . . .
Om stuck out his long scrawny neck, stared at the body just above him, picked what he hoped was about the right spot, plunged his beak through the brown feathers between the talons, and gripped.
The eagle blinked. No tortoise had ever done that to an eagle, anywhere else in history.
Om’s thoughts arrived in the little silvery world of its mind:
“We don’t want to hurt one another, now do we?”
The eagle blinked again.
Eagles have never evolved much imagination or forethought, beyond that necessary to know that a turtle smashes when you drop it on the rocks. But it was forming a mental picture of what happened when you let go of a heavy tortoise that was still intimately gripping an essential bit of you.
Its eyes watered.
Another thought crept into its mind.
“Now. You play, uh, ball with me, I’ll play . . . ball with you. Understand? This is important. This is what I want you to do . . .”
The eagle soared on a thermal off the hot rocks, and sped towards the distant gleam of the Citadel.
No tortoise had ever done this before. No tortoise in the whole universe. But no tortoise had ever been a god, and knew the unwritten motto of the Quisition: Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.
When you have their full attention in your grip, their hearts and minds will follow.
Urn pushed his way through the crowds, with Fergmen trailing behind. That was the best and the worst of civil war, at least at the start-everyone wore the same uniform. It was much easier when you picked enemies who were a different color or at least spoke with a funny accent. You could call them “gooks” or something. It made things easier.
Hey, Urn thought. This is nearly philosophy. Pity I probably won’t live to tell anyone.
The big doors were ajar. The crowd was silent, and very attentive. He craned forward to see, and then looked up at the soldier beside him.
It was Simony.
“I thought-”
“It didn’t work,” said Simony, bitterly.
“Did you-?”
“We did everything! Something broke!”
“It must be the steel they make here,” said Urn. “The link pins on-”
“That doesn’t matter now,” said Simony.
The flat tones of his voice made Urn follow the eyes of the crowd.
There was another iron turtle there-a proper model of a turtle, mounted on a sort of open gridwork of metal bars in which a couple of inquisitors were even now lighting a fire. And chained to the back of the turtle-
“Who’s that?”
“Brutha.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what happened. He hit Vorbis, or didn’t hit him. Or something. Enraged him anyway. Vorbis stopped the ceremony, right there and then.”
Urn glanced at the deacon. Not Cenobiarch yet, so uncrowned. Among the Iams and bishops standing uncertainly in the open doorway, his bald head gleamed in the morning light.
“Come on, then,” said Urn.
“Come on what?”
“We can rush the steps and save him!”
“There’s more of them than there are of us,” said Simony.
“Well, haven’t there always been? There’s not magically more of them than there are of us just because they’ve got Brutha, are there?”
Simony grabbed his arm.
“Think logically, will you?” he said. “You’re a philosopher, aren’t you? Look at the crowd!”
Urn looked at the crowd.
“Well?”
“They don’t like it,.” Simon turned. “Look, Brutha’s going to die anyway. But this way it’ll mean something. People don’t understand, really understand, about the shape of the universe and all that stuff, but they’ll remember what Vorbis did to a man. Right? We can make Brutha’s death a symbol for people, don’t you see?”
Urn stared at the distant figure of Brutha. It was naked, except for a loin-cloth.
“A symbol?” he said. His throat was dry.
“It has to be.”
He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they’d left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you’d go mad.
“You know,” he said, turning to Simony. “Now I know Vorbis is evil. He burned my city. Well, the Tsorteans do it sometimes, and we burn theirs. It’s just war. It’s all part of history. And he lies and cheats and claws power for himself, and lots of people do that, too. But do you know what’s special? Do you know what it is?”
“Of course,” said Simony. “It’s what he’s doing to-”
“It’s what he’s done to you.”
“What?”
“He turns other people into copies of himself.”
Simony’s grip was like a vice. “You’re saying I’m like him?”
“Once you said you’d cut him down,” said Urn. “Now you’re thinking like him . . .
“So we rush them, then?” said Simony. “I’m sure of-maybe four hundred on our side. So I give the signal and a few hundred of us attack thousands of them? And he dies anyway and we die too? What difference does that make?”
Urn’s face was gray with horror now.
“You mean you don’t know?” he said.
Some of the crowd looked round curiously at him.
“You don’t know?” he said.
The sky was blue. The sun wasn’t high enough yet to turn it into Omnia’s normal copper bowl.
Brutha turned his head again, towards the sun. It was about a width above the horizon, although if Didactylos’s theories about the speed of light were correct, it was really setting, thousands of years in the future.
It was eclipsed by the head of Vorbis.
“Hot yet, Brutha?” said the deacon.
“Warm.”
“It will get warmer.”
There was a disturbance in the crowd. Someone was shouting. Vorbis ignored it.
“Nothing you want to say?” he said. “Can’t you manage even a curse? Not even a curse?”
“You never heard Om,” said Brutha. “You never believed. You never, ever heard his voice. All you heard were the echoes inside your own mind.”
“Really? But I am the Cenobiarch and you are going to burn for treachery and heresy,” said Vorbis. “So much for Om, perhaps?”
“There will be justice,” said Brutha. “If there is no justice, there is nothing.”
He was aware of a small voice in his head, too faint yet to distinguish words.
“Justice?” said Vorbis. The idea seemed to enrage him. He spun around to the crowd of bishops. “Did you hear him? There will be justice? Om has judged! Through me! This is justice!”
There was a speck in the sun now, speeding toward the Citadel. And the little voice was saying left left left up up left right a bit up left-The mass of metal under him was getting uncomfortably hot.
“He comes now,” said Brutha.
Vorbis waved his hand to the great facade of the temple. “Men built this. We built this,” he said. “And what did Om do? Om comes? Let him come! Let him judge between us!”
“He comes now,” Brutha repeated. “The God.”
People looked apprehensively upward. There was that moment, just one moment, when the world holds its breath and against all experience waits for a miracle.
-up left now, when I say three, one, two, THREE-
“Vorbis?” croaked Brutha.
“What?” snapped the deacon.
“You’re going to die.”
It was hardly a whisper, but it bounced off the bronze doors and carried across the Place . . .
It made people uneasy, although they couldn’t quite say why.
The eagle sped across the square, so low that people ducked. Then it cleared the roof of the temple and curved away towards the mountains. The watchers relaxed. It was only an eagle. For a moment there, just for a moment . . .
No one saw the tiny speck, tumbling down from the sky.
Don’t put your faith in gods. But you can believe in turtles.
A feeling of rushing wind in Brutha’s mind, and a voice . . .
-obuggerbuggerbuggerhelpaarghnoNoNoAarghBuggerNONOAARGH-
Even Vorbis got a grip of himself. There had been just a moment, when he’d seen the eagle-but, no . . .
He extended his arms and smiled beatifically at the sky.
“I’m sorry,” said Brutha.
One or two people, who had been watching Vorbis closely, said later that there was just time for his expression to change before two pounds of tortoise, traveling at three meters a second, hit him between the eyes.
It was a revelation.
And that does something to people watching. For a start, they believe with all their heart.
Brutha was aware of feet running up the steps, and hands pulling at the chains.
And then a voice:
I. He is Mine.
The Great God rose over the Temple, billowing and changing as the belief of thousands of people flowed into him. There were shapes there, of eagle-headed men, and bulls, and golden horns, but they tangled and flamed and fused into one another.