So Brutha had to retire to the garden, with his God screaming at him from the pocket of his robe, where it was being jostled by a ball of garden twine, a pair of shears, and some loose seeds.
Finally he was fished out.
“Look, I didn't have a chance to tell you,” said Brutha. “I've been chosen to go on a very important mission. I'm going to Ephebe, on a mission to the infidels. Deacon Vorbis picked me. He's my friend.”
“Who's he?”
“He's the chief exquisitor. He . . . makes sure you're worshiped properly.”
Om picked up the hesitation in Brutha's voice, and remembered the grating. And the sheer busyness below . . .
“He tortures people,” he said coldly.
“Oh, no! The inquisitors do that. They work very long hours for not much money, too, Brother Nhumrod says. No, the exquisitors just . . . arrange matters. Every inquisitor wants to become an exquisitor one day, Brother Nhumrod says. That's why they put up with being on duty at all hours. They go for days without sleep, sometimes.”
“Torturing people,” mused the God. No, a mind like that one in the garden wouldn't pick up a knife. Other people would do that. Vorbis would enjoy other methods.
“Letting out the badness and the heresy in people,” said Brutha.
“But people . . . perhaps . . . don't survive the process?”
“But that doesn't matter,” said Brutha earnestly.
"What happens to us in this life is not really real.
There may be a little pain, but that doesn't matter. Not if it ensures less time in the hells after death."
“But what if the exquisitors are wrong?” said the tortoise.
“They can't be wrong,” said Brutha. “They are guided by the hand of . . . by your hand . . . your front leg . . . I mean, your claw,” he mumbled.
The tortoise blinked its one eye. It remembered the heat of the sun, the helplessness, and a face watching it not with any cruelty but, worse, with interest. Someone watching something die just to see how long it took. He'd remember that face anywhere. And the mind behind it-that steel ball of a mind.
o;Currants, madam.”
“Why'd they just fly away, then?” the woman demanded.
The man looked down. Then he looked back up into her face.
“A miracle!” he said, waving his hands dramatically. “The time of miracles is at hand!”
The eagle shifted uneasily.
It recognized humans only as pieces of mobile landscape which, in the lambing season in the high hills, might be associated with thrown stones when it stooped upon the newborn lamb, but which otherwise were as unimportant in the scheme of things as bushes and rocks. But it had never been so close to so many of them. Its mad eyes swiveled backward and forward uncertainly.
At that moment trumpets rang out across the Place.
The eagle looked around wildly, its tiny predatory mind trying to deal with this sudden overload.
It leapt into the air. The worshipers fought to get out of its way as it dipped across the flagstones and then rose majestically toward the turrets of the Great Temple and the hot sky.
Below it, the doors of the Great Temple, each one made of forty tons of gilded bronze, opened by the breath (it was said) of the Great God Himself, swung open ponderously and-and this was the holy part-silently.
Brutha's enormous sandals flapped and flapped on the flagstones. Brutha always put a lot of effort into running; he ran from the knees, lower legs thrashing like paddlewheels.
This was too much. There was a tortoise who said he was the God, and this couldn't be true except that it must be true, because of what it knew. And he'd been tried by the Quisition. Or something like that. Anyway, it hadn't been as painful as he'd been led to expect.
“Brutha!”