“Your ankles to be crushed in the jaws of giants!”
“Turn lettuce into gold, perhaps?” said Brother Nhumrod , in the jovial tones of those blessed with no sense of humor. “Crush ants underfoot? Ahaha.”
“Haha,” said Brutha dutifully.
“I shall take it along to the kitchen, out of your way,” said the master of novices. “They make excellent soup. And then you’ll hear no more voices, depend upon it. Fire cures all Follies, yes?”
“Soup?”
“Er . . .” said Brutha.
“Your intestines to be wound around a tree until you are sorry!”
Nhumrod looked around the garden. It seemed to be full of melons and pumpkins and cucumbers. He shuddered.
“Lots of cold water, that’s the thing,” he said. “Lots and lots.” He focused on Brutha again. “Mmm?”
He wandered off toward the kitchens.
The Great God Om was upside down in a basket in one of the kitchens, half-buried under a bunch of herbs and some carrots.
An upturned tortoise will try to right itself firstly by sticking out its neck to its fullest extent and trying to use its head as a lever. If this doesn’t work it will wave its legs frantically, in case this will rock it upright.
An upturned tortoise is the ninth most pathetic thing in the entire multiverse.
An upturned tortoise who knows what’s going to happen to it next is, well, at least up there at number four.
The quickest way to kill a tortoise for the pot is to plunge it into boiling water.
Kitchens and storerooms and craftsmen’s workshops belonging to the Church’s civilian population honeycombed the Citadel.[4] This was only one of them, a smoky-ceilinged cellar whose focal point was an arched fireplace. Flames roared up the flue. Turnspit dogs trotted in their treadmills. Cleavers rose and fell on the chopping blocks.
Off to one side of the huge hearth, among various other blackened cauldrons, a small pot of water was already beginning to seethe.
“The worms of revenge to eat your blackened nostrils!” screamed Om, twitching his legs violently. The basket rocked.
A hairy hand reached in and removed the herbs.
“Hawks to peck your liver!”
A hand reached in again and took the carrots.
“Afflict you with a thousand cuts!”
A hand reached in and took the Great God Om.
“The cannibal fungi of-!”
“Shut up!” hissed Brutha, shoving the tortoise under his robe.
He sidled toward the door, unnoticed in the general culinary chaos.
One of the cooks looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Just got to take this back,” Brutha burbled, bringing out the tortoise and waving it helpfully. “Deacon’s orders.”
The cook scowled, and then shrugged. Novices were regarded by one and all as the lowest form of life, but orders from the hierarchy were to be obeyed without question, unless the questioner wanted to find himself faced with more important questions like whether or not it is possible to go to heaven after being roasted alive.
When they were out in the courtyard Brutha leaned against the wall and breathed out.
“Your eyeballs to-!” the tortoise began.
“One more word,” said Brutha, “and it’s back in the basket.”
The tortoise fell silent.
“As it is, I shall probably get into trouble for missing Comparative Religion with Brother Whelk,” said Brutha. “But the Great God has seen fit to make the poor man shortsighted and he probably won’t notice I’m not there, only if he does I shall have to say what I’ve done because telling lies to a Brother is a sin and the Great God will send me to hell for a million years.”
“In this one case I could be merciful,” said the tortoise. “No more than a thousand years at the outside.”
“My grandmother told me I shall go to hell when I die anyway,” said Brutha, ignoring this. “Being alive is sinful. It stands to reason, because you have to sin every day when you’re alive.”
He looked down at the tortoise.
“I know you’re not the Great God Om”-holy horns-“because if I was to touch the Great God Om”-holy horns-“my hands would burn away. The Great God would never become a tortoise, like Brother Nhumrod said. But it says in the Book of the Prophet Cena that when he was wandering in the desert the spirits of the ground and the air spoke unto him, so I wondered if you were one of those.”
The tortoise gave him a one-eyed stare for a while. Then it said: “Tall fellow? Full beard? Eyes wobbling all over the place?”
“What?” said Brutha.
“I think I recall him,” said the tortoise. “Eyes wobbled when he talked. And he talked all the time. To himself. Walked into rocks a lot.”
“He wandered in the wilderness for three months,” said Brutha.
“That explains it, then,” said the tortoise. “There’s not a lot to eat there that isn’t mushrooms.”
“Perhaps you are a demon,” said Brutha. “The Septateuch forbids us to have discourse with demons. Yet in resisting demons, says the Prophet Fruni, we may grow strong in faith-”
“Your teeth to abscess with red-hot heat!”
“Pardon?”
“I swear to me that I am the Great God Om, greatest of gods!”
Brutha tapped the tortoise on the shell.
“Let me show you something, demon.”
He could feel his faith growing, if he listened hard.
This wasn’t the greatest statue of Om, but it was the closest. It was down in the pit level reserved for prisoners and heretics. And it was made of iron plates riveted together.
The pits were deserted except for a couple of novices pushing a rough cart in the distance.
“It’s a big bull,” said the tortoise.
“The very likeness of the Great God Om in one of his worldly incarnations!” said Brutha proudly. “And you say you’re him?”
“I haven’t been well lately,” said the tortoise.
Its scrawny neck stretched out further.
“There’s a door on its back,” it said. “Why’s there a door on its back?”
“So that the sinful can be put in,” said Brutha.
“Why’s there another one in its belly?”
“So the purified ashes can be let out,” said Brutha. “And the smoke issues forth from the nostrils, as a sign to the ungodly.”
The tortoise craned its neck round at the rows of barred doors. It looked up at the soot-encrusted walls. It looked down at the now empty fire trench under the iron bull. It reached a conclusion. It blinked its one eye.
“People?” it said eventually. “You roast people in it?”
“There!” said Brutha triumphantly. “And thus you prove you are not the Great God! He would know that of course we do not burn people in there. Burn people in there? That would be unheard of!”
“Ah,” said the tortoise. “Then what-?”
“It is for the destruction of heretical materials and other such rubbish,” said Brutha.
“Very sensible,” said the tortoise.
“Sinners and criminals are purified by fire in the Quisition’s pits or sometimes in front of the Great Temple,” said Brutha. “The Great God would know that.”
“I think I must have forgotten,” said the tortoise quietly.
“The Great God Om”-holy horns-“would know that He Himself said unto the Prophet Wallspur-” Brutha coughed and assumed the creased-eyebrow squint that meant serious thought was being undertaken. ” `Let the holy fire destroy utterly the unbeliever.’ That’s verse sixty-five.”
“Did I say that?”
“In the Year of the Lenient Vegetable the Bishop Kreeblephor converted a demon by the power of reason alone,” said Brutha. “It actually joined the Church and became a subdeacon. Or so it is said.”
“Fighting I don’t mind,” the tortoise began.
“Your lying tongue cannot tempt me, reptile,” said Brutha. “For I am strong in my faith!”
The tortoise grunted with effort.
“Smite you with thunderbolts!”
A small, a very small black cloud appeared over Brutha’s head and a small, a very small bolt of lightning lightly singed an eyebrow.
It was about the same strength as the spark off a cat’s fur in hot dry weather.
“Ouch!”
“Now do you believe me?” said the tortoise.
There was a bit of breeze on the roof of the Citadel. It also offered a good view of the high desert.
Fri’it and Drunah waited for a while to get their breath back.
Then Fri’it said, “Are we safe up here?”
Drunah looked up. An eagle circled over the dry hills. He found himself wondering how good an eagle’s hearing was. It certainly was good at something. Was it hearing? It could hear a creature half a mile below in the silence of the desert. What the hells-it couldn’t talk as well, could it?
“Probably,” he said.
“Can I trust you?” said Fri’it.
“Can I trust you?”
Fri’it drummed his fingers on the parapet.
“Uh,” he said.
And that was the problem. It was the problem of all really secret societies. They were secret. How many members did the Turtle Movement have? No one knew, exactly. What was the name of the man beside you? Two other members knew, because they would have introduced him, but who were they behind these masks? Because knowledge was dangerous. If you knew, the inquisitions could wind it slowly out of you. So you made sure you didn’t know. This made conversation much easier during cell meetings, and impossible outside of them.