Brutha removed his hand.
“I said, that's blasphemy!”
“Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I'm a god!”
“I don't believe you!”
“Hah! Want another thunderbolt?”
“You call that a thunderbolt?”
Brutha was red in the face, and shaking. The tortoise hung its head sadly.
“All right. All right. Not much of one, I admit,” it said. “If I was better, you'd have been just a pair of sandals with smoke coming out.” It looked wretched. “I don't understand it. This sort of thing has never happened to me before. I intended to be a great big roaring white bull for a week and ended up a tortoise for three years. Why? I don't know, and I'm supposed to know everything. According to these prophets of yours who say they've met me, anyway. You know, no one even heard me? I tried talking to goatherds and stuff, and they never took any notice! I was beginning to think I was a tortoise dreaming about being a god. That's how bad it was getting.”
“Perhaps you are,” said Brutha.
“Your legs to swell to tree trunks!” snapped the tortoise.
“But-but,” said Brutha, “you're saying the prophets were . . . just men who wrote things down! ”
“That's what they were!”
“Yes, but it wasn't from you!”
“Some of it was, perhaps,” said the tortoise. “I've . . . forgotten so much, the past few years.”
“But if you've been down here as a tortoise, who's been listening to the prayers? Who has been accepting the sacrifices? Who has been judging the dead?”
“I don't know,” said the tortoise. “Who did it before?”
“You did!”
“Did I?”
Brutha stuck his fingers in his ears and opened up with the third verse of Lo, the infidels flee the wrath of Om.
After a couple of minutes the tortoise stuck its head out from under its shell.
“So,” it said, “before unbelievers get burned alive . . . do you sing to them first?”
“No!”
“Ah. A merciful death. Can I say something?”
"If you try to tempt my faith one more time-
The tortoise paused. Om searched his fading memory. Then he scratched in the dust with a claw.
“I . . . remember a day . . . summer day . . . you were . . . thirteen . . .”
The dry little voice droned on. Brutha's mouth formed a slowly widening O.
Finally he said, “How did you know that?”
“You believe the Great God Om watches everything you do, don't you?”
"You're a tortoise, you couldn't have-