Small Gods

of grayness squatted on the sea. They could hear the thunder dying away.
    Brutha got uncertainly to his feet, swaying wildly to compensate for a motion that was no longer there.
    “Now I—” he began.
    He was alone. The sailors had fled.
    “Om?” said Brutha.
    “Over here.”
    Brutha fished his God out of the seaweed.
    “You said you couldn’t do anything!” he said accusingly.
    “That wasn’t m—” Om paused. There will be a price, he thought. It won’t be cheap. It can’t be cheap. The Sea Queen is a god. I’ve crushed a few towns in my time. Holy fire, that kind of thing. If the price isn’t high, how can people respect you?
    “I made arrangements,” he said.
    Tidal waves. A ship sunk. A couple of towns disappearing under the sea. It’ll be something like that. If people don’t respect then they won’t fear, and if they don’t fear, how can you get them to believe?
    Seems unfair, really. One man killed a porpoise. Of course, it doesn’t matter to the Queen who gets thrown overboard, just as it didn’t matter to him which porpoise he killed. And that’s unfair, because it was Vorbis who did it. He makes people do things they shouldn’t do…
    What am I thinking about? Before I was a tortoise, I didn’t even know what unfair meant…

    The hatches opened. People came on deck and hung on the rail. Being on deck in stormy weather always has the possibility of being washed overboard, but that takes on a rosy glow after hours below decks with frightened horses and seasick passengers.
    There were no more storms. The ship plowed on in favorable winds, under a clear sky, in a sea as empty of life as the hot desert.
    The days passed uneventfully. Vorbis stayed below decks for most of the time.
    The crew treated Brutha with cautious respect. News like Brutha spreads quickly.
    The coast here was dunes, with the occasional barren salt marsh. A heat haze hung over the land. It was the kind of coast where shipwrecked landfall is more to be dreaded than drowning. There were no seabirds. Even the birds that had been trailing the ship for scraps had vanished.
    “No eagles,” said Om. There was that to be said about it.
    Toward the evening of the fourth day the unedifying panorama was punctuated by a glitter of light, high on the dune sea. It flashed with a sort of rhythm. The captain, whose face now looked as if sleep had not been a regular nighttime companion, called Brutha over.
    “His…your…the deacon told me to watch out for this,” he said. “You go and fetch him now.”
    Vorbis had a cabin somewhere near the bilges, where the air was as thick as thin soup. Brutha knocked.
    “Enter.” *
    There were no portholes down here. Vorbis was sitting in the dark.
    “Yes, Brutha?”
    “The captain sent me to fetch you, lord. Something’s shining in the desert.”
    “Good. Now, Brutha. Attend. The captain has a mirror. You will ask to borrow it.”
    “Er…what is a mirror, lord?”
    “An unholy and forbidden device,” said Vorbis. “Which regretfully can be pressed into godly service. He will deny it, of course. But a man with such a neat beard and tiny mustache is vain, and a vain man must have his mirror. So take it. And stand in the sun and move the mirror so that it shines the sun towards the desert. Do you understand?”
    “No, lord,” said Brutha.
    “Your ignorance is your protection, my son. And then come back and tell me what you see.”

    Om dozed in the sun. Brutha had found him a little space near the pointy end where he could get sun with little danger of being seen by the crew—and the crew were jittery enough at the moment not to go looking for trouble in any case.
    A tortoise dreams…
    …for millions of years.
    It was the dreamtime. The unformed time.
    The small gods chittered and whirred in the wilderness places, and the cold places, and the deep places. They swarmed in the darkness, without memory but driven by hope and lust for the one thing, the one thing a god craves— belief .
    There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there’s light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space… then there’s a race—between the trees on either side, who want to spread out , and the seedlings below, who race to grow up .
    Sometimes, you can make your own space.
    Forests were a long way from the wilderness. The nameless voice that was going