Small Gods

Brutha paused. “Because it’s talking to me…isn’t it?”
    Brother Nhumrod looked down at the small, one-eyed head poking out of the shell.
    He was, by and large, a kindly man. Sometimes demons and devils did put disquieting thoughts in his head, but he saw to it that they stayed there and he did not in any literal sense deserve to be called what the tortoise called him which, in fact, if he had heard it, he would have thought was something to do with feet. And he was well aware that it was possible to hear voices attributed to demons and, sometimes, gods. Tortoises was a new one. Tortoises made him feel worried about Brutha, whom he’d always thought of as an amiable lump who did, without any sort of complaint, anything asked of him. Of course, many novices volunteered for cleaning out the cesspits and bull cages, out of a strange belief that holiness and piety had something to do with being up to your knees in dirt. Brutha never volunteered, but if he was told to do something he did it, not out of any desire to impress, but simply because he’d been told. And now he was talking to tortoises.
    “I think I have to tell you, Brutha,” he said, “that it is not talking.”
    “You can’t hear it?”
    “I cannot hear it, Brutha.”
    “It told me it was…” Brutha hesitated. “It told me it was the Great God.”
    He flinched. Grandmother would have hit him with something heavy now.
    “Ah. Well, you see, Brutha,” said Brother Nhumrod, twitching gently, “this sort of thing is not unknown among young men recently Called to the Church. I daresay you heard the voice of the Great God when you were Called, didn’t you? Mmm?”
    Metaphor was lost on Brutha. He remembered hearing the voice of his grandmother. He hadn’t been Called so much as Sent. But he nodded anyway.
    “And in your…enthusiasm, it’s only natural that you should think you hear the Great God talking to you,” Nhumrod went on.
    The tortoise bounced up and down.
    “Smite you with thunderbolts!” it screamed.
    “I find healthy exercise is the thing,” said Nhumrod. “And plenty of cold water.”
    “Writhe on the spikes of damnation!”
    Nhumrod reached down and picked up the tortoise, turning it over. Its legs waggled angrily.
    “How did it get here, mmm?”
    “I don’t know, Brother Nhumrod,” said Brutha dutifully.
    “Your hand to wither and drop off!” screamed the voice in his head.
    “There’s very good eating on one of these, you know,” said the master of novices. He saw the expression on Brutha’s face.
    “Look at it like this,” he said. “Would the Great God Om”—holy horns—“ ever manifest Himself in such a lowly creature as this? A bull, yes, of course, an eagle, certainly, and I think on one occasion a swan…but a tortoise ?”
    “Your sexual organs to sprout wings and fly away!”
    “After all,” Nhumrod went on, oblivious to the secret chorus in Brutha’s head, “what kind of miracles could a tortoise do? Mmm?”
    “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 ex cellent 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