“Currants, madam.”
“Why'd they just fly away, then?” the woman demanded.
The man looked down. Then he looked back up into her face.
“A miracle!” he said, waving his hands dramatically. “The time of miracles is at hand!”
The eagle shifted uneasily.
It recognized humans only as pieces of mobile landscape which, in the lambing season in the high hills, might be associated with thrown stones when it stooped upon the newborn lamb, but which otherwise were as unimportant in the scheme of things as bushes and rocks. But it had never been so close to so many of them. Its mad eyes swiveled backward and forward uncertainly.
At that moment trumpets rang out across the Place.
The eagle looked around wildly, its tiny predatory mind trying to deal with this sudden overload.
It leapt into the air. The worshipers fought to get out of its way as it dipped across the flagstones and then rose majestically toward the turrets of the Great Temple and the hot sky.
Below it, the doors of the Great Temple, each one made of forty tons of gilded bronze, opened by the breath (it was said) of the Great God Himself, swung open ponderously and-and this was the holy part-silently.
Brutha's enormous sandals flapped and flapped on the flagstones. Brutha always put a lot of effort into running; he ran from the knees, lower legs thrashing like paddlewheels.
This was too much. There was a tortoise who said he was the God, and this couldn't be true except that it must be true, because of what it knew. And he'd been tried by the Quisition. Or something like that. Anyway, it hadn't been as painful as he'd been led to expect.
“Brutha!”
The square, normally alive with the susurration of a thousand prayers, had gone quiet. The pilgrims had all turned to face the Temple.
His mind boiling with the events of the day, Brutha shouldered his way through the suddenly silent crowd . . . .
“Brutha!”
People have reality-dampers.
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They'd say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work.
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
Part of the brain exists to stop this happening. It is very efficient. It can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels. And Brutha's was working feverishly.
So he didn't immediately notice that he'd pushed through the last row of people and had trotted out into the middle of a wide pathway, until he turned and saw the procession approaching.
The Cenobiarch was returning to his apartments, after conducting-or at least nodding vaguely while his chaplain conducted on his behalf-the evening service.
Brutha spun around, looking for a way to escape. Then there was a cough beside him, and he stared up into the furious faces of a couple of Lesser Iams and, between them, the bemused and geriatrically good-natured expression of the Cenobiarch himself.
The old man raised his hand automatically to bless Brutha with the holy horns, and then two members of the Divine Legion picked up the novice by the elbows, on the second attempt, and marched him swiftly out of the procession's path and hurled him into the crowd.
“Brutha!”
Brutha bounded across the plaza to the statue and leaned against it, panting.
“I'm going to go to hell!” he muttered. “For all eternity! ”
“Who cares? Now . . . get me away from here. ”
No one was paying him any attention now. They were all watching the procession. Even watching the procession was a holy act. Brutha knelt down and peered into the scrollwork around the base of the statue.
One beady eye glared back at him.
“How did you get under there?”
“It was touch and go,” said the tortoise. “I tell you, when I'm back on form, there's going to be a considerable redesigning of eagles.”
“What's the eagle trying to do to you?” said Brutha.
“It wants to carry me off to its nest and give me dinner,” snarled the tortoise. “What do you think it wanted to do?” There was a short pause in which it contemplated the futility of sarcasm in the presence of Brutha; it was like throwing meringues at a castle.
“It wants to eat me,” it said patiently.
“But you're a tortoise!”
“I am your God!”
“But currently in the shape of a tortoise. With a shell on, is what I mean.”
“That doesn't worry eagles,” said the tortoise darkly. “They pick you up, carry you up a few hundred feet, and then . . . drop you.”
“Urrgh.”
“No. More like . . . crack . . . splat. How did you think I got in here?”
"You were dropped? But-
“Landed on a pile of dirt in your garden. That's eagles for you. Whole place built of rock and paved with rock on a big rock and they miss.”