Small Gods

“They’re even sitting on the rafters! And…master?”
    “Yes?”
    “There’s even one or two priests! And dozens of soldiers!”
    “Don’t worry,” said Simony, joining them on the makeshift platform made of fig barrels. “They are Turtle believers, just like you. We have friends in unexpected places!”
    “But I don’t —” Didactylos began, helplessly.
    “There isn’t anyone here who doesn’t hate the Church with all their soul,” said Simony.
    “But that’s not—”
    “They’re just waiting for someone to lead them!”
    “But I never—”
    “I know you won’t let us down. You’re a man of reason. Urn, come over here. There’s a blacksmith I want you to meet—”
    Didactylos turned his face to the crowd. He could feel the hot, hushed silence of their stares.

    Each drop took minutes.
    It was hypnotic. Brutha found himself staring at each developing drip. It was almost impossible to see it grow, but they had been growing and dripping for thousands of years.
    “How?” said Om.
    “Water seeps down after the rains,” said Brutha. “It lodges in the rocks. Don’t gods know these things?”
    “We don’t need to.” Om looked around. “Let’s go. I hate this place.”
    “It’s just an old temple. There’s nothing here.”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    Sand and rubble half-filled it. Light lanced in through the broken roof high above, on to the slope that they had climbed down. Brutha wondered how many of the wind-carved rocks in the desert had once been buildings. This one must have been huge, perhaps a mighty tower. And then the desert had come.
    There were no whispering voices here. Even the small gods kept away from abandoned temples, for the same reason that people kept away from graveyards. The only sound was the occasional plink of the water.
    It dripped into a shallow pool in front of what looked like an altar. From the pool it had worn a groove in the slabs of the floor all the way to a round pit, which appeared to be bottomless. There were a few statues, all of them toppled; they were heavy-proportioned, lacking any kind of detail, each one a child’s clay model chiseled in granite. The distant walls had once been covered with some kind of bas-relief, but it had crumbled away except in a few places, which showed strange designs that mainly consisted of tentacles.
    “Who were the people who lived here?” said Brutha.
    “I don’t know.”
    “What god did they worship?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “The statues are made of granite, but there’s no granite near here.”
    “They were very devout, then. They dragged it all the way.”
    “And the altar block is covered in grooves.”
    “Ah. Extremely devout. That would be to let the blood run off.”
    “You really think they did human sacrifice?”
    “I don’t know! I want to get out of here!”
    “Why? There’s water and it’s cool—”
    “Because…a god lived here. A powerful god. Thousands worshiped it. I can feel it. You know? It comes out of the walls. A Great God. Mighty were his dominions and magnificent was his word. Armies went forth in his name and conquered and slew. That kind of thing. And now no one, not you, not me, no one, even knows who the god was or his name or what he looked like. Lions drink in the holy places and those little squidgy things with eight legs, there’s one by your foot, what d’you call ’em, the ones with the antennae, crawl beneath the altar. Now do you understand?”
    “No,” said Brutha.
    “Don’t you fear death? You’re a human!”
    Brutha considered this. A few feet away. Vorbis stared mutely at the patch of sky.
    “He’s awake. He’s just not speaking.”
    “Who cares? I didn’t ask you about him.”
    “Well…sometimes…when I’m on catacomb duty…it’s the kind of place where you can’t help…I mean, all the skulls and things…and and the Book says…”
    “There you are,” said Om, a note of bitter triumph in his voice. “You don’t know . That’s what stops everyone going mad, the uncertainty of it, the feeling that it might work out all right after all. But it’s different for gods. We do know. You know that story about the sparrow flying through a room?”
    “No.”
    “Everyone knows it.”
    “Not me.”
    “About life being like a sparrow flying through a room? Nothing but darkness outside? And it flies through the room and there’s just a moment of warmth and light?”
    “There are windows open?” said Brutha.
    “Can’t you