“But they can listen!”
“Even so . . . they need to be shown . . . they need a symbol . . .”
“We have one!”
Instinctively, every masked figure turned to look at the drawing on the wall, indistinct in the firelight but graven on their minds. They were looking at the truth, which can often impress.
“The Turtle Moves!”
“The Turtle Moves!”
“The Turtle Moves!”
The leader nodded.
“And now,” he said, “we will draw lots . . .”
The Great God Om waxed wroth, or at least made a spirited attempt. There is a limit to the amount of wroth that can be waxed one inch from the ground, but he was right up against it.
He silently cursed a beetle, which is like pouring water onto a pond. It didn't seem to make any difference, anyway. The beetle plodded away.
He cursed a melon unto the eighth generation, but nothing happened. He tried a plague of boils. The melon just sat there, ripening slightly.
Just because he was temporarily embarrassed, the whole world thought it could take advantage. Well, when Om got back to his rightful shape and power, he told himself, Steps would be Taken. The tribes of Beetles and Melons would wish they'd never been created. And something really horrible would happen to all eagles. And . . . and there would be a holy commandment involving the planting of more lettuces . . .
By the time the big boy arrived back with the waxy-skinned man, the Great God Om was in no mood for pleasantries. Besides, from a tortoise-eye viewpoint even the most handsome human is only a pair of feet, a distant pointy head, and, somewhere up there, the wrong end of a pair of nostrils.
“What's this?” he snarled.
“This is Brother Nhumrod,” said Brutha. “Master of the novices. He is very important.”
“Didn't I tell you not to bring me some fat old pederast!” shouted the voice in his head. “Your eyeballs will be spitted on shafts of fire for this!”
Brutha knelt down.
“I can't go to the High Priest,” he said, as patiently as possible. “Novices aren't even allowed in the Great Temple except on special occasions. I'd be Taught the Error of My Ways by the Quisition if I was caught. It's the Law.”
“Stupid fool!” the tortoise shouted.
Nhumrod decided that it was time to speak.
“Novice Brutha,” he said, “for what reason are you talking to a small tortoise?”
“Because- 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.”