“No. None could doubt it,” said Fri'it, who had walked across many a battlefield the day after a glorious victory, when you had ample opportunity to see what winning meant. The Omnians forbade the use of all drugs. At times like that the prohibition bit hard, when you dared not go to sleep for fear of your dreams.
“Did not the Great God declare, through the Prophet Abbys, that there is no greater and more honorable sacrifice than one's own life for the God?”
“Indeed he did,” said Fri'it. He couldn't help recalling that Abbys had been a bishop in the Citadel for fifty years before the Great God had Chosen him. Screaming enemies had never come at him with a sword. He'd never looked into the eyes of someone who wished him dead-no, of course he had, all the time, because of course the Church had its politics-but at least they hadn't been holding the means to that end in their hands at the time.
“To die gloriously for one's faith is a noble thing,” Drunah intoned, as if reading the words off an internal notice-board.
“So the prophets tell us,” said Fri'it, miserably.
The Great God moved in mysterious ways, he knew. Undoubtedly He chose His prophets, but it seemed as if He had to be helped. Perhaps He was too busy to choose for Himself. There seemed to be a lot more meetings, a lot more nodding, a lot more exchanging of glances even during the services in the Great Temple.
Certainly there was a glow about young Vorbis-how easy it was to slip from one thought to the other. There was a man touched by destiny. A tiny part of Fri'it, the part that had lived for much of its life in tents, and been shot at quite a lot, and had been in the middle of melees where you could just as easily be killed by an ally as an enemy, added: or at least by something. It was a part of him that was due to spend all the eternities in all the hells, but it had already had a lot of practice.
“You know I traveled a lot when I was much younger?” he said.
“I have often heard you talk most interestingly of your travels in heathen lands,” said Drunah politely. “Often bells are mentioned.”
“Did I ever tell you about the Brown Islands?”
“Out beyond the end of the world,” said Drunah. "I remember. Where bread grows on trees and young women find little white balls in oysters. They dive for them, you said, while wearing not a stitc-
“Something else I remember,” said Fri'it. It was a lonely memory, out here with nothing but scrubland under a purple sky. “The sea is strong there. There are big waves, much bigger than the ones in the Circle Sea, you understand, and the men paddle out beyond them to fish. On strange planks of wood. And when they wish to return to shore, they wait for a wave, and then . . . they stand up, on the wave, and it carries them all the way to the beach.”
“I like the story about the young swimming women best,” said Drunah.
“Sometimes there are very big waves,” said Fri'it,
ignoring him. “Nothing would stop them. But if you ride them, you do not drown. This is something I learned.”
Drunah caught the glint in his eye.
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “How wonderful of the Great God to put such instructive examples in our path.”
“The trick is to judge the strength of the wave,” said Fri'it. “And ride it.”
“What happens to those who don't?”
“They drown. Often. Some of the waves are very big.”
“Such is often the nature of waves, I understand.”
The eagle was still circling. If it had understood anything, then it wasn't showing it.
“Useful facts to bear in mind,” said Drunah, with sudden brightness. “If ever one should find oneself in heathen parts.”
“Indeed.”
From prayer towers up and down the contours of the Citadel the deacons chanted the duties of the hour.
Brutha should have been in class. But the tutor priests weren't too strict with him. After all, he had arrived word?-perfect in every Book of the Septateuch and knew all the prayers and hymns off by heart, thanks to grandmother. They probably assumed he was being useful. Usefully doing something no one else wanted to do.
He hoed the bean rows for the look of the thing. The Great God Om, although currently the small god Om, ate a lettuce leaf.
All my life, Brutha thought, I've known that the Great God Om-he made the holy horns sign in a fairly half-hearted way?-was a . . . a . . . great big beard in the sky, or sometimes, when He comes down into the world, as a huge bull or a lion or . . . something big, anyway. Something you could look up to.
Somehow a tortoise isn't the same. I'm trying hard . . . but it isn't the same. And hearing him talk about the SeptArchs as if they were just . . . just some mad old men . . . it's like a dream . . .
In the rain-forests of Brutha's subconscious the butterfly of doubt emerged and flapped an experimental wing, all unaware of what chaos theory has to say about this sort of thing . . .