“Currants, madam.”
“Why'd they just fly away, then?” the woman demanded.
The man looked down. Then he looked back up into her face.
“A miracle!” he said, waving his hands dramatically. “The time of miracles is at hand!”
The eagle shifted uneasily.
It recognized humans only as pieces of mobile landscape which, in the lambing season in the high hills, might be associated with thrown stones when it stooped upon the newborn lamb, but which otherwise were as unimportant in the scheme of things as bushes and rocks. But it had never been so close to so many of them. Its mad eyes swiveled backward and forward uncertainly.
At that moment trumpets rang out across the Place.
The eagle looked around wildly, its tiny predatory mind trying to deal with this sudden overload.
It leapt into the air. The worshipers fought to get out of its way as it dipped across the flagstones and then rose majestically toward the turrets of the Great Temple and the hot sky.
Below it, the doors of the Great Temple, each one made of forty tons of gilded bronze, opened by the breath (it was said) of the Great God Himself, swung open ponderously and-and this was the holy part-silently.
Brutha's enormous sandals flapped and flapped on the flagstones. Brutha always put a lot of effort into running; he ran from the knees, lower legs thrashing like paddlewheels.
This was too much. There was a tortoise who said he was the God, and this couldn't be true except that it must be true, because of what it knew. And he'd been tried by the Quisition. Or something like that. Anyway, it hadn't been as painful as he'd been led to expect.
“Brutha!”
The square, normally alive with the susurration of a thousand prayers, had gone quiet. The pilgrims had all turned to face the Temple.
His mind boiling with the events of the day, Brutha shouldered his way through the suddenly silent crowd . . . .
“Brutha!”
People have reality-dampers.
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They'd say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work.
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
Part of the brain exists to stop this happening. It is very efficient. It can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels. And Brutha's was working feverishly.
So he didn't immediately notice that he'd pushed through the last row of people and had trotted out into the middle of a wide pathway, until he turned and saw the procession approaching.
The Cenobiarch was returning to his apartments, after conducting-or at least nodding vaguely while his chaplain conducted on his behalf-the evening service.
Brutha spun around, looking for a way to escape. Then there was a cough beside him, and he stared up into the furious faces of a couple of Lesser Iams and, between them, the bemused and geriatrically good-natured expression of the Cenobiarch himself.
The old man raised his hand automatically to bless Brutha with the holy horns, and then two members of the Divine Legion picked up the novice by the elbows, on the second attempt, and marched him swiftly out of the procession's path and hurled him into the crowd.
“Brutha!”
Brutha bounded across the plaza to the statue and leaned against it, panting.
“I'm going to go to hell!” he muttered. “For all eternity! ”
“Who cares? Now . . . get me away from here. ”
No one was paying him any attention now. They were all watching the procession. Even watching the procession was a holy act. Brutha knelt down and peered into the scrollwork around the base of the statue.
One beady eye glared back at him.
“How did you get under there?”
“It was touch and go,” said the tortoise. “I tell you, when I'm back on form, there's going to be a considerable redesigning of eagles.”
“What's the eagle trying to do to you?” said Brutha.
“It wants to carry me off to its nest and give me dinner,” snarled the tortoise. “What do you think it wanted to do?” There was a short pause in which it contemplated the futility of sarcasm in the presence of Brutha; it was like throwing meringues at a castle.
“It wants to eat me,” it said patiently.
“But you're a tortoise!”
“I am your God!”
“But currently in the shape of a tortoise. With a shell on, is what I mean.”
“That doesn't worry eagles,” said the tortoise darkly. “They pick you up, carry you up a few hundred feet, and then . . . drop you.”
“Urrgh.”
“No. More like . . . crack . . . splat. How did you think I got in here?”
"You were dropped? But-
“Landed on a pile of dirt in your garden. That's eagles for you. Whole place built of rock and paved with rock on a big rock and they miss.”
“That was lucky. Million-to-one chance,” said Brutha.
“I never had this trouble when I was a bull. The number of eagles who can pick up a bull, you can count them on the fingers of one head. Anyway,” said the tortoise, "there's worse here than eagles. There's a-
“There's good eating on one of them, you know,” said a voice behind Brutha.
He stood up guiltily, the tortoise in his hand.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Dhblah,” he said.
Everyone in the city knew Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah, purveyor of suspiciously new holy relics, suspiciously old rancid sweetmeats on a stick, gritty figs, and long-past-the?sell-by dates. He was a sort of natural force, like the wind. No one knew where he came from or where he went at night. But he was there every dawn, selling sticky things to the pilgrims. And in this the priests reckoned he was on to a good thing, because most of the pilgrims were coming for the first time and therefore lacked the essential thing you needed in dealing with Dhblah, which was the experience of having dealt with him before. The sight of someone in the Place trying to unstick their jaws with dignity was a familiar one. Many a devout pilgrim, after a thousand miles of perilous journey, was forced to make his petition in sign language.
“Fancy some sherbet for afters?” said Dhblah hopefully. “Only one cent a glass, and that's cutting me own hand off.”
“Who is this fool?” said Om.
“I'm not going to eat it,” said Brutha hurriedly.
“Going to teach it to do tricks, then?” said Dhblah cheerfully. “Look through hoops, that kind of thing?”
“Get rid of him,” said Om. “Smite him on the head, why don't you, and push the body behind the statue.”
“Shut up,” said Brutha, beginning to experience once again the problems that occur when you're talking to someone no one else can hear.
“No need to be like that about it,” said Dhblah.
“I wasn't talking to you,” said Brutha.
“Talking to the tortoise, were you?” said Dhblah. Brutha looked guilty.
“My old mum used to talk to a gerbil,” Dhblah went on. “Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.”
“This man is not honest,” said Om. “I can read his mind.”
“Can you?”
“Can I what?” said Dhblah. He gave Brutha a lopsided look. “Anyway, it'll be company on your journey.”
“What journey?”
“To Ephebe. The secret mission to talk to the infidel.”
Brutha knew he shouldn't be surprised. News went around the enclosed world of the Citadel like bushfire after a drought.
“Oh,” he said. “That journey.”
“They say Fri'it's going,” said Dhblah. “And-that other one. The éminence grease.”
“Deacon Vorbis is a very nice person,” said Brutha. “He has been very kind to me. He gave me a drink.”
“What of? Never mind,” said Dhblah. “Of course, I wouldn't say a word against him, myself,” he added quickly.
“Why are you talking to this stupid person?” Om demanded.
“He's a . . . friend of mine,” said Brutha.
“I wish he was a friend of mine,” said Dhblah. “Friends like that, you never have enemies. Can I press you to a candied sultana? Onna stick?”
There were twenty-three other novices in Brutha's dormitory, on the principle that sleeping alone promoted sin. This always puzzled the novices themselves, since a moment's reflection would suggest that there were whole ranges of sins only available in company. But that was because a moment's reflection was the biggest sin of all. People allowed to be by themselves overmuch might indulge in solitary cogitation. It was well known that this stunted your growth. For one thing, it could lead to your feet being chopped off.
So Brutha had to retire to the garden, with his God screaming at him from the pocket of his robe, where it was being jostled by a ball of garden twine, a pair of shears, and some loose seeds.
Finally he was fished out.
“Look, I didn't have a chance to tell you,” said Brutha. “I've been chosen to go on a very important mission. I'm going to Ephebe, on a mission to the infidels. Deacon Vorbis picked me. He's my friend.”
“Who's he?”
“He's the chief exquisitor. He . . . makes sure you're worshiped properly.”
Om picked up the hesitation in Brutha's voice, and remembered the grating. And the sheer busyness below . . .
“He tortures people,” he said coldly.
“Oh, no! The inquisitors do that. They work very long hours for not much money, too, Brother Nhumrod says. No, the exquisitors just . . . arrange matters. Every inquisitor wants to become an exquisitor one day, Brother Nhumrod says. That's why they put up with being on duty at all hours. They go for days without sleep, sometimes.”
“Torturing people,” mused the God. No, a mind like that one in the garden wouldn't pick up a knife. Other people would do that. Vorbis would enjoy other methods.
“Letting out the badness and the heresy in people,” said Brutha.
“But people . . . perhaps . . . don't survive the process?”
“But that doesn't matter,” said Brutha earnestly.
"What happens to us in this life is not really real.
There may be a little pain, but that doesn't matter. Not if it ensures less time in the hells after death."
“But what if the exquisitors are wrong?” said the tortoise.
“They can't be wrong,” said Brutha. “They are guided by the hand of . . . by your hand . . . your front leg . . . I mean, your claw,” he mumbled.
The tortoise blinked its one eye. It remembered the heat of the sun, the helplessness, and a face watching it not with any cruelty but, worse, with interest. Someone watching something die just to see how long it took. He'd remember that face anywhere. And the mind behind it-that steel ball of a mind.