Terry Pratchett - Small Gods

Brutha stopped, and lowered his hand.

He said, "No. I won't."

Then, for the first and only time, he saw Vorbis really enraged. There had been times before when the deacon had been angry, but it had been something driven by the brain, switched on and off as the need arose. This was something else, something out of con­trol. And it flashed across his face only for a moment.

As the hands of the guards closed on him, Vorbis stepped forward and patted him on the shoulder. He looked Brutha in the eye for a moment and then said softly:

"Thrash him within an inch of his life and burn him the rest of the way."

An Iam began to speak, but stopped when he saw Vorbis's expression.

"Do it now."

A world of silence. No sound up here, except the rush of wind through the feathers.

Up here the world is round, bordered by a band of sea. The viewpoint is from horizon to horizon, the sun is closer.

And yet, looking down, looking for shapes . . .

. . . down in the farmland on the edge of the wil­derness . . .

. . . on a small hill . . .

. . . a tiny moving dome, ridiculously exposed . . .

No sound but the rush of wind through feathers as the eagle pulls in its wings and drops like an arrow, the world spinning around the little moving shape that is the focus of all the eagle's attention.

Closer and . . .

. . . talons down . . .

. . . grip . . .

. . . and rise . . .

Brutha opened his eyes.

His back was merely agonizing. He'd long ago got used to switching off pain.

But he was spread-eagled on a surface, his arms and legs chained to something he couldn't see. Sky above. The towering frontage of the temple to one side.

By turning his head a little he could see the silent crowd. And the brown metal of the iron turtle. He could smell smoke.

Someone was just tightening the shackles on his hand. Brutha looked over at the inquisitor. Now, what was it he had to say? Oh, yes.

"The Turtle Moves?" he mumbled.

The man sighed.

"Not this one, friend," he said.

The world spun under Om as the eagle sought for shell­cracking height, and his mind was besieged by the tortoise's existential dread of being off the ground. And Brutha's thoughts, bright and clear this close to death . . .

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.