“Psst!”
Brutha paused in mid-hoe and stared around the Temple garden.
“Pardon?” he said.
It was a fine day early in the lesser Spring. The prayer mills spun merrily in the breeze off the mountains. Bees loafed around in the bean blossoms, but buzzed fast in order to give the impression of hard work. High above, a lone eagle circled.
Brutha shrugged, and got back to the melons.
Yea, the Great God Om spake again unto Brutha, the Chosen One:
“Psst!”
Brutha hesitated. Someone had definitely spoken to him from out of the air. Perhaps it was a demon. Novice master Brother Nhumrod was hot on the subject of demons. Impure thoughts and demons. One led to the other. Brutha was uncomfortably aware that he was probably overdue a demon.
The thing to do was to be resolute and repeat the Nine Fundamental Aphorisms.
Once more the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One:
“Are you deaf, boy?”
The hoe thudded on to the baking soil. Brutha spun around. There were the bees, the eagle and, at the far end of the garden, old Brother Lu-Tze dreamily forking over the dung heap. The prayer mills whirled reassuringly along the walls.
He made the sign with which the Prophet Ishkible had cast out spirits.
“Get thee behind me, demon,” he muttered.
“I am behind you.”
Brutha turned again, slowly. The garden was still empty.
He fled.
Many stories start long before they begin, and Brutha's story had its origins thousands of years before his birth.
There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshiped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don't demand much in the way of miracles.
They are the small gods-the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way.
Because what they lack is belief.
A handful, though, go on to greater things. Anything may trigger it. A shepherd, seeking a lost lamb, finds it among the briars and takes a minute or two to build a small cairn of stones in general thanks to whatever spirits might be around the place. Or a peculiarly shaped tree becomes associated with a cure for disease. Or someone carves a spiral on an isolated stone. Because what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods.
Often it stops there. But sometimes it goes further. More rocks are added, more stones are raised, a temple is built on the site where the tree once stood. The god grows in strength, the belief of its worshipers raising it upwards like a thousand tons of rocket fuel. For a very few, the sky's the limit.
And, sometimes, not even that.
Brother Nhumrod was wrestling with impure thoughts in the privacy of his severe cell when he heard the fervent voice from the novitiates' dormitory.
The Brutha boy was flat on his face in front of a statue of Om in His manifestation as a thunderbolt, shaking and gabbling fragments of prayer.
There was something creepy about that boy, Nhumrod thought. It was the way he looked at you when you were talking, as if he was listening.
He wandered out and prodded the prone youth with the end of his cane.
“Get up, boy! What do you think you're doing in the dormitory in the middle of the day? Mmm?”
Brutha managed to spin around while still flat on the floor and grasped the priest's ankles.