Small Gods - Terry Pratchett [111]
Urn pushed his way through the crowds, with Fergmen trailing behind. That was the best and the worst of civil war, at least at the start—everyone wore the same uniform. It was much easier when you picked enemies who were a different color or at least spoke with a funny accent. You could call them “gooks” or something. It made things easier.
Hey, Urn thought. This is nearly philosophy. Pity I probably won’t live to tell anyone.
The big doors were ajar. The crowd was silent, and very attentive. He craned forward to see, and then looked up at the soldier beside him.
It was Simony.
“I thought—”
“It didn’t work,” said Simony, bitterly.
“Did you—?”
“We did everything! Something broke!”
“It must be the steel they make here,” said Urn. “The link pins on—”
“That doesn’t matter now,” said Simony.
The flat tones of his voice made Urn follow the eyes of the crowd.
There was another iron turtle there—a proper model of a turtle, mounted on a sort of open gridwork of metal bars in which a couple of inquisitors were even now lighting a fire. And chained to the back of the turtle—
“Who’s that?”
“Brutha.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what happened. He hit Vorbis, or didn’t hit him. Or something. Enraged him anyway. Vorbis stopped the ceremony, right there and then.”
Urn glanced at the deacon. Not Cenobiarch yet, so uncrowned. Among the Iams and bishops standing uncertainly in the open doorway, his bald head gleamed in the morning light.
“Come on, then,” said Urn.
“Come on what?”
“We can rush the steps and save him!”
“There’s more of them than there are of us,” said Simony.
“Well, haven’t there always been? There’s not magically more of them than there are of us just because they’ve got Brutha, are there?”
Simony grabbed his arm.
“Think logically, will you?” he said. “You’re a philosopher, aren’t you? Look at the crowd!”
Urn looked at the crowd.
“Well?”
“They don’t like it.” Simon turned. “Look, Brutha’s going to die anyway. But this way it’ll mean something. People don’t understand, really understand, about the shape of the universe and all that stuff, but they’ll remember what Vorbis did to a man. Right? We can make Brutha’s death a symbol for people, don’t you see?”
Urn stared at the distant figure of Brutha. It was naked, except for a loin-cloth.
“A symbol?” he said. His throat was dry.
“It has to be.”
He remembered Didactylos saying the world was a funny place. And, he thought distantly, it really was. Here people were about to roast someone to death, but they’d left his loin-cloth on, out of respectability. You had to laugh. Otherwise you’d go mad.
“You know,” he said, turning to Simony. “Now I know Vorbis is evil. He burned my city. Well, the Tsorteans do it sometimes, and we burn theirs. It’s just war. It’s all part of history. And he lies and cheats and claws power for himself, and lots of people do that, too. But do you know what’s special? Do you know what it is?”
“Of course,” said Simony. “It’s what he’s doing to—”
“It’s what he’s done to you.”
“What?”
“He turns other people into copies of himself.”
Simony’s grip was like a vice. “You’re saying I’m like him?”
“Once you said you’d cut him down,” said Urn. “Now you’re thinking like him…”
“So we rush them, then?” said Simony. “I’m sure of—maybe four hundred on our side. So I give the signal and a few hundred of us attack thousands of them? And he dies anyway and we die too? What difference does that make?”
Urn’s face was gray with horror now.
“You mean you don’t know?” he said.
Some of the crowd looked around curiously at him.
“You don’t know?” he said.
The sky was blue. The sun wasn’t high enough yet to turn it into Omnia’s normal copper bowl.
Brutha turned his head again, towards the sun. It was about a width above the horizon, although if Didactylos’s theories about the speed of light were correct, it was really setting, thousands of years in the future.
It was eclipsed by the head of Vorbis.
“Hot yet, Brutha?” said the deacon.
“Warm.”
“It will get warmer.”
There was a disturbance in the crowd. Someone was shouting.