“Hah! I could tell you stories,” said Om darkly.
“What?”
“Think they're so bloody elite!”
“You didn't live up there, then?”
“No. Got to be a thunder god or something. Got to have a whole parcel of worshipers to live on Nob Hill. Got to be an anthropomorphic personification, one of them things.”
“Not just a Great God, then?”
Well, this was the desert. And Brutha was going to die.
“May as well tell you,” muttered Om. “It's not as though we're going to survive . . . See, every god's a Great God to someone. I never wanted to be that great. A handful of tribes, a city or two. It's not much to ask, is it?”
“There's two million people in the empire,” said Brutha.
“Yeah. Pretty good, eh? Started off with nothing but a shepherd hearing voices in his head, ended up with two million people.”
“But you never did anything with them,” said Brutha.
“Like what?”
“Well . . . tell them not to kill one another, that sort of thing . . .”
“Never really given it much thought. Why should I tell them that?”
Brutha sought for something that would appeal to god psychology.
“Well, if people didn't kill one another, there'd be more people to believe in you?” he suggested.
“It's a point,” Om conceded. “Interesting point. Sneaky.”
Brutha walked along in silence. There was a glimmer of frost on the dunes.
“Have you ever heard”, he said, “of Ethics?”
“Somewhere in Howondaland, isn't it?”
“The Ephebians were very interested in it.”
“Probably thinking about invading.”
“They seemed to think about it a lot.”
“Long-term strategy, maybe.”
“I don't think it's a place, though. It's more to do with how people live.”
"What, lolling around all day while slaves do the real work? Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place while those fellows are living like-
“-gods?” said Brutha.
There was a terrible silence.
“I was going to say kings,” said Om, reproachfully.
“They sound a bit like gods.”