Not long ago, archaeologists discovered a huge stone horse buried deep underground - and it spoke to them. The head of the dig, a dusty but harmless little man called Peter, was the first to witness this phenomenon, something which revitalised his otherwise waning interest in the profession of archaeology.

In the months preceding the discovery, surrounded by nothing but a parched, dirt filled valley and constantly watched over by a merciless sun, Peter had - as usual - overseen the unearthing of countless bits of stone, or to the trained eye ancient flint axe blades and arrowheads, as well as any number of fragments of prehistoric bowls, plates and other assorted eating utensils. These were - as usual - cleaned, glued, labelled, catalogued and taken away to find their place in a stale museum alongside hundreds of similar knickknacks, dug up on dozens of similar digs and stared at through microscopes by tens of similar scientists. Peter’s dig colleagues still had a spark in their eyes, an electric charge of enthusiasm as they knelt in the hot dirt, busily but vigilantly scraping, occasionally retrieving a non-descript piece of flint. But Peter’s spark had gone, scraped away over the years like all the thousands of layers of soil due to the nagging growing suspicion that he was destined never to find a dinosaur or a Tutankhamen’s tomb and that he had been cursed to dig up primitive weapons and smashed crockery for the rest of his career. Archaeologists nowadays were into ‘building up pictures of ancient societies’, but Peter had always wanted to be one of the grave-robbing adventurers of days gone by, with fame, fortune and a big house full of ancient gold treasures and socialite groupies.

Consequently, excavating a large, immaculately preserved, never before seen or heard of stone horse, was like being shocked back to life with electric heart paddles. It was big and magnificent - about four metres high, seated on a square platform in a proud manner with its back straight and its head held high. Its front legs covered the underside of its body, guarding the identity of its gender. It created a sense of inferiority in whoever approached it, partly due to its size, but mainly because of the unmistakeable air of dignity that surrounded it. They removed it from the earth intact and placed it on a big mound of soil, looking down across the endless dry valley; as obvious as a concrete apartment block yet as mysterious as an ancient parchment.

They soon realised it had nothing in common with the flint and pots that had been lying near it. Nobody could match its design to any particular civilisation, nobody could identify the impenetrable stone it was made of and nobody could even say how old it was. It didn’t answer questions, it asked them. The more baffling it became the more Peter sizzled with energy like a dizzy student, and then one morning as he was bent over in the pounding heat trying to brush some brown muck from the cleft of the front left hoof he heard a wonderfully clear, resonating, genderless voice from above asking him what he was up to. He stopped, looked up and saw nothing but the horse’s blank stone face.

“If you want to know something, it’s better to ask.”

Peter was struck by an interesting concoction of fear and joy, bewilderment and realisation. A flash of a future stuffed with cash and nubile blonde millionaires’ daughters fizzed through his brain. Then he composed himself, got to his feet and went to tell the world.

..............

All manner of human beings filled the baked red landscape in front of the stone horse – archaeology experts, history experts, religion experts, journalists, photographers, translators, laymen and women of assorted colours, languages, faiths and cultures. They took turns in coming close, touching, staring and photographing the intriguing monument. It stayed quiet, portraying a mere statue, as each group approached, had their moment with it and returned to the main assembly, which simply stood, waited, watched and occasionally sneezed on gusts of stifling red dust or the sweat of their fellow watchers. Eventually when maybe thousands had gathered, Peter the archaeologist, looking slightly less dusty than usual, positioned himself in front of the horse, microphone in hand and addressed his audience. He told them through screeching feedback that this was his horse, that it would speak to them, that it was no trick, that it would answer their questions. Translators translated to the important people who didn’t speak Peter’s language and a crackle of conflicting accents momentarily clashed among the congregation. Peter put the microphone in its stand, pointing at the horse’s face, and stepped aside. A sudden flurry of wind blew right across the gathering, sending up the burning sandy powder into their eyes. They barely even noticed, such was their focus on the mystery before them.

“If you want to know something, it’s better to ask,” said the horse again without even a hint of a squeal from the microphone.

The only sound in the next moment was the castanet clapping of a hundred flashing cameras; the translators however, said nothing – they didn’t need to. The horse had spoken to them, their employers and every other member of the crowd, important or not, in their native tongues. Everybody could understand the horse’s words the moment they emitted. With each further syllable that emanated, more people realised it was speaking to them all simultaneously with a singular voice and that this really was no trick – it was something special.

“What are you?” said an impatient voice near the front.

The translators instantly chattered back to life.

“I’m a big stone horse and I know almost everything,” said the horse in a very headmasterly manner.

“Which period are you from?” said an expert.

“Which period?” said the horse.

“Yes, which people made you?”

“You didn’t make me,” said the horse, “I made you.”

A loud gasp that belonged in a circus tent rippled across the valley. For some, who had already made up their mind that the horse’s linguistic prowess was a miracle, this was too much. They fell to their knees and bowed down in reverence to the stone idol, somehow not even noticing the stench of the sweat stewed feet that stood about them. The owners of the feet needed more convincing. “What do you mean you made us?” they said.

“I designed you, created you and brought you to life, along with every other living thing on this planet,” said the horse calmly.

More people fell to their knees.

“But you’re just a big stone horse,” said one of the remaining standers.

“Yes?” said the horse.

“How did you build us then?”

“Yes, and why didn’t you make us in your image?” said another.

“Because I’m not that vain,” said the horse, ignoring the first question.

There was a silence as the excitement dipped for a second, a moment of contemplation and thought gathering, which then exploded into a barrage of questions from all sides.

“Do you know everything?”

“Yes, pretty much.”

“Why did you create us?”

“Call it an experiment.”

“Are you a horse or a donkey?”

“I’m a horse.”

“Why is there suffering?”

“Because if you didn’t know suffering you wouldn’t know happiness, and because you allow there to be.”

“Are you actually God or just a manifestation of God?”

“Neither.”

They stopped again.

“I am not a god; I am a mortal being just as you are. So please stand up - the last thing I want is your worship and prayers.” Some of the grovelling figures glanced across at each other uncertainly, but none of them moved. “Really,” continued the horse with a hint of urgency, “the whole idea of you bowing before me is insulting. I mean, even if I were a god what would I want with worship? Would I not be beyond petty human needs like having my ego massaged? Would I not know what was in your hearts and see through these acts as purely selfish; only done because you want something in return – paradise, mercy or lottery money? Would I actually want you to waste the life that I had granted you on begging and gratitude? Your life is for living, so get up and live it.”

The worshippers got to their feet rather sheepish and disgruntled and brushed patches of crimson from their knees. The congregation muttered to itself irritably, resentful at its harsh treatment.

“Now,” said the horse, “I’ve been watching you lot over the years and I think there are one or two things that need sorting out.”

The people shuffled about, for the first time noticing the unbearable heat of the sun. A minute ago it had all been going so well and now they were vulnerable, not knowing what it was that faced them. They were suddenly scared to ask the questions that were previously so forthcoming. Instead they murmured for a while, a few of them coughed a bit and then finally everything went quiet.

“So tell me, this God of yours,” began the horse sounding even more authoritarian than ever, “What’s He all about? Is He good?”

“Of course,” said some, wary of what they were getting themselves into.

“He is righteous, merciful, compassionate, yes?”

“Absolutely,” they all agreed, with a growing degree of confidence.

“And God is all knowing, all seeing, all powerful too.”

“That is the only possible truth,” everybody affirmed clearly.

“But isn’t this a contradiction?” said the horse.

“Umm no, I don’t see how it is,” they said, lurching back awkwardly to a low mumble.

“Well,” said the horse, “on one hand God is totally beyond you, all seeing, all powerful. But on the other hand you claim to know He possesses human qualities like mercy, compassion or even jealousy and vengeance. How can you claim to comprehend that which is beyond you, what God is, what God wants, what God thinks?”

“We know God because He has blessed us with His word,” came the reply, followed by a chorus of ‘bravos’ and ‘hear hears’ from those that understood and a slow nod from the important people once they’d heard the same words in their own language.

“Which one?” said the horse, glibly.

The people shouted the names of their Holy Scriptures with pride and vigour.

“Were you there when these books were written? Do you know who wrote them, who translated them, who interpreted and changed their words and what their motives were? Are these the words of God or someone’s personal understanding of the word of God, someone who couldn’t see further than his own period in history or even his own race? Are they even simply the words of man, putting his ideas into the mouth of God to give them power? How can you ever know for sure which parts of these books are universal truths and which are merely of their time, of their place? How can you know which are the exact word of God, which the interpretation of the word of God and which the word of man?” asked the horse.

“God’s message always shines through,” said a powerful voice from the back of the group. “He may have spoken to a particular people in the language of their times, but we can adapt His word to our own people, our own time. We can interpret it.”

“When you interpret something you change its meaning,” said the horse, “and at the end of the day that’s exactly what you’ve been doing for thousands of years. If you check your history God has constantly changed and it’s always been exactly in line with human thought. He even changed between one Holy book and the next in accordance with the needs and ideas of the times. I mean, in the beginning He couldn’t manage to keep tabs on two people stuck in a garden, now He’s all seeing. Doesn’t that strike you as inconsistent? The gods you have now are no more than a mess of old and new cultural desires and influences. You think your deliberations bring you closer to true understanding, but all you ever do is pull God one way and another to suit your latest requirements.”

“How do you know that this is not God’s purpose?” asked a big bearded man. “Maybe God gave us His word in such a way that we have to gradually find our true understanding, to reach a point through experience where we really understand, and every interpretation is another step on the path to enlightenment.”

“Firstly,” said the horse, “if that’s true you’re not doing very well are you? As time passes you are not coming closer to God, you are fragmenting, fighting, creating a thousand different arguments all against one another. Every interpretation causes wars, death and misery. Is that God’s purpose for you? What being of such perfect goodness would put you through all this? Secondly, what would be the point in God setting you some mission like this when He is all knowing? Why does He need to see you develop like this when He knows every moment of time, even your future? What is He trying to prove, and who is He trying to prove it to?”

Parts of the multitude were losing trust in their equine creator and were becoming gripped by a growing restlessness, exacerbated by the burning oxygen in their lungs.

“His purpose may be beyond us, but His actions are clear to all,” barked one man through a dry throat.

“Which actions?” said the horse.

“He sent us His prophets,” said the man. “And don’t even think about casting doubt on them, or I’ll come and knock your big stone head off!”

A mixture of cheers and laughter erupted from the group around the man, which was brought abruptly to a halt by the unrelentingly calm voice of the horse.

“The problem with His prophets is the same as with His word,” it said, without any apparent regard for the man’s threat. “All you know about them is wrapped up in those same unreliable, indecipherable books. Full of the beliefs and superstitions of their age, bathed in a writer’s interpretation, clouded by time. And another thing, why don’t any prophets turn up to guide you now, when you’re as confused and divided as ever? How come ancient people got confirmation of God first hand and nowadays you have to rely on blind faith? That’s not very fair, is it? Anyway, when all’s said and done, all of your interpretations of words, saviours and chosen ones bring you back to that crucial contradiction - if God is the being of infinite wisdom how can you ever understand Him? How can you ever even hope to comprehend the purpose of His prophets, who these people were and what they really wanted from you?”

“I’m not listening to this anymore,” said the man and ran towards the horse brandishing a fist. A few others started to follow half-heartedly until Peter came rushing out in front of the horse, shouting “Stop! Stop! This horse is private property, don’t damage it.” The man came to a halt in front of Peter and they stared at each other for a good few moments, poised for action like some high noon stand off.

“This thing’s got no right to say what it’s been saying,” said the man finally, “it should be pulled down.” He turned back to the audience, all looking right at him. “Don’t you agree?”

A few isolated howls of support rang out, but generally there was no reaction. Most of the people either didn’t realise they’d been asked a question or still maintained too much curiosity in the mystical horse to give up on it yet.

The man started to walk away. “Well I’m not staying any longer,” he said to anybody who could understand him. “And if you’re willing to listen to this shit then you can all go to hell.” He stormed off, quietly followed by three others. Peter glared at the horse to tell it to behave itself.

“I know!” exclaimed one man, to the surprise of everybody else, “I know that my prophet was the messenger of God, because God has acted upon us, in our own minds, allowing us to see the truth. I see God all around us; I see His actions in everything. Everything in my God given conscious tells me God exists and that He sent His true word through His prophet. That is why I can be sure.”

The others suddenly remembered what they had been talking about before the angry man’s outburst and turned their attention back to the horse for its predictably disagreeable answer.

“No,” it said. “First you believe in God and then you see Him everywhere around you. If you didn’t believe in God, you wouldn’t see His actions. Or, if you believed in a different idea of God, you would see actions that conformed to that belief. Your mind interprets everything you see based on your personal experience of the world. Nothing that you perceive is free from this interpretation, and clearly for you everything is interpreted in terms of your view of God.”

“What about miracles?” said another man, “I saw a miracle with my own eyes, something totally otherworldly, you can’t refute that.”

“What did you see?” said the horse.

“I saw a vision of the virgin Mary, as clear as you are right now.”

“And you are a Christian, are you not?”

“Of course.”

“Why is it that only Christians see visions of Mary, do you think?”

“Because Jesus is our saviour, the son of God, and you must open your heart to Him in order to be saved.”

“There is another way of looking at it,” said the horse. “Christians see visions of Mary, while others see visions of their own religious figures. Some people even see their own dead relatives when they miss them enough. I know a lot more about your minds than you do and believe me there are things within your own heads that you have yet to understand. Besides, what about me? I am a miracle, am I not? And I am not some apparition, I am stone. You know I am real because you all see me, you all touched me and you are all hearing my message first hand. So surely my word is the most believable of all.”

“That’s what you’d like us to think, isn’t it?” shouted a woman dramatically, “but I can see through you even if these other people can’t. You are the work of the devil! You have been sent to lead us astray.”

“The devil?” said the horse, “in that case why doesn’t your all powerful God put a stop to me?”

“It is a test of our faith, one which we shall pass.”

“So, God sits back and allows the devil to test your faith. God could stop evil whenever He felt like it, but instead he actually encourages the devil’s little games. In a way God actually needs the devil around to do His dirty work, that’s what you’re saying is it?”

“Well...not exactly,” she said.

“And why does God need your will to be tested anyway?” continued the horse with an increasingly irritating know-it-all tone, “He already knows everything, remember?”

“Say whatever you like,” shouted the woman regaining her fervour. “My faith is stronger than any words. Nothing you do can fool me into doubting my belief.”

The people near her roared heartily, then, after the translators translated, there was an overly delayed and less effective round of applause from the important people.

“All that means is that you are beyond reason,” said the horse. “You know, faith is all very well,” it continued, “but the problem, of course, is knowing what to have faith in. And, as I hope you are beginning to realise, your versions of God are so unlikely that faith in them is an unreasonably large leap to take.”

There was another silence, this time laced with frustrated rage at the realisation that talking to this stone horse was like talking to a brick wall, or a stone horse. By now journalist’s notebooks had been placed back in journalist’s pockets, and the cameras had stopped their popping rhythm to be held idly by their owners, pointing only at the featureless ground. Different emotions permeated the air, infused with the odour of perspiration and the persistent intensity of the heat. Some people were on the verge of offended explosion, some on the brink of disappointed tears, others still retained a crumb of hope and decided to give the horse one more chance to tell the truth, and to prove its knowledge and power. “So then tell us,” they shouted, “if you know everything tell us about our prophets. Were they sent by God?”

“The point is,” said the horse, “it really doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t know,” they said, “you’re a fake.” Now the majority of the crowd jeered and booed, shouting insults at the stone monument. Waves of movement swept across the congregation as they became more excited and agitated.

“Let’s say for example,” continued the horse, its echoing voice managing to drown out the screams and curses and bring most of the mob to its attention again, “that I was sent by God, that I was here now telling you how to live, to treat others and so on. Even if you saw this with your own eyes, heard it with your own ears and knew it to be the word of God, you still couldn’t possibly hope to understand it. If God is all powerful, His reasoning is so totally beyond your understanding that you wouldn’t know whether it was right to follow His word to the letter, to interpret it in your own way or even to do the exact opposite. You have no hope of ever knowing what God wants from you. You cannot possibly know the purpose of His prophets. Are they of their time, or eternal? Do you follow them or are they maybe testing you in some other way? You see it all boils down to this: if God is the almighty then He is completely beyond all human morals, emotions, characteristics and comprehension, totally out of reach and therefore not even worth considering. If this is not the case then God is merely one being among others, He is no more than I am, someone who created you for an experiment, to prove something to someone else and hardly worthy of your worship. What I want you to know is not whether God exists or not, even I don’t know that. I want you to know that you don’t know anything about God and you never will. Anyone who claims to know God has nothing but supreme arrogance. Believe in whatever you want by all means, but don’t waste time and lives fighting about it, there really is no point. Nothing you can do can determine what happens to you after you die, but you can determine most things that happen to you before you die. Remember that.”

The crowd paused as if it was actually considering the horse’s words quite carefully, until one of its members, who had been trying to think things through logically from the start, eventually spoke out. “Back up a bit there, you said that even if you were a god we wouldn’t understand you. So, doesn’t that mean we shouldn’t pay any attention to you then?”

“Yes, but I’m not a god.”

“How do we know that?” said the man, “how do we know you’re not something to do with God that we have no hope of understanding and therefore we shouldn’t pay the slightest attention to anything you say?”

“Because even if that were the case, what I said still holds true. If you have no way of knowing what I am and what my message means, you can choose to follow it or not, but there’s no reason to fight about it.” The horse paused as if it was giving a tired sigh. “You know what really gets to me,” it said, “it’s not as if this is the first time you’ve heard all this. People have been coming up with ideas like these for centuries and yet somehow you never pay attention, you manage to ignore them and continue like they never existed.”

“Maybe that’s because we’re right and we don’t need these ideas,” someone said.

“You can’t all be right, can you? You could at least meet me half way here and accept that you’re as likely to be wrong as the next person.”

“So, why won't you just tell us if our prophets are real and if there is a god or not? Then we’d know exactly where we stood.”

“Because it wouldn’t make any difference; it seems you’d only choose to believe me if I told you that you were right. And, if you’d listened to a word I’d said you’d realise it’s simply not important,” said the horse, its voice finally trembling with impatience.

“It doesn’t know,” said the man decisively, “it said it knew everything but it doesn’t.”

“I said almost everything,” said the horse.

“Why did you come?” said another man, “why did you have to come and spoil everything, confuse us?”

“Because it’s the truth and it should make things simpler, not confuse you.”

“We were fine as we were,” said the man.

“Fine?” said the horse in an unexpectedly high pitched voice. “Come off it. You’ve been killing each other for most of history about these things and you call that fine?”

“We’re better off working things out for ourselves; we don’t need your negativity and denial. You’ve only made things worse.”

“Unbelievable,” said the horse.

“It’s full of shit,” said another man, gesturing towards the horse. “I mean, look at this thing, a statue of a horse. Are we really going to believe that this is our maker? We should stop insulting God by entertaining this block of stone and go home.”

“Yeah come on,” said some others, “this is a waste of time.”

With shattered hopes, shaken faith and insulted beliefs they all started to file away, kicking up a cloud of scarlet behind them, apparently having instantly disregarded the whole unexplainable oddness of a simultaneously multi-lingual talking stone horse that claimed to be their creator. Peter tried to run after them, begging them to return, but ended up walking back alone, coughing violently and looking as dusty as ever. By the time the dirt had settled the valley was empty, with very little other than a scattering of empty water bottles to show that anyone had been there, and nothing to be heard but the sombre chirping of a lone and probably lost cricket. Peter looked up at the horse, having seen his chance of a lifetime vanish in a puff of powdery smoke.

“What the hell was all that about?” he said.

“I was trying to help them along a bit, they’ve been stuck in this same rut for so long and I wanted to give them a little nudge in the right direction,” said the horse, “but I think it was too soon, maybe it’ll always be too soon.”

“Well you should’ve known that,” said Peter, “you were supposed to know everything.”

“Almost everything,” said the horse, “obviously I haven’t quite understood my own creations, who’d have thought they’d turn out like this?”

“You said at the start, ‘if you want to know something it’s better to ask,’ well they asked and you didn’t answer. That’s why they left.”

“I answered,” said the horse, “but sometimes when you ask you don’t get the answer you’re looking for, and it seems that even when that answer is the truth, even when it makes perfect sense and even when it’s as undeniable as a four metre high stone horse standing right in front of them, people can simply decide not to hear it.”

“Whatever,” said Peter, tired of the horse’s self-indulgent analysis. “Why should I care about any of that? You’ve ruined me. What about my fame, my money? You were supposed to be my meal ticket and you screwed up everything.”

“I only told them the truth,” said the horse.

“Well what did you do that for?” shouted Peter. “Why not just give them what they wanted, instead of causing trouble? If you’d played along, pretended to be God, they would’ve listened. You really don’t know anything, do you?" He started walking back to the nearby dig site. “Well, it was a nice dream for me while it lasted, but I suppose I’ll have to forget about posh nymphomaniacs and get back to my arrowheads,” he muttered bitterly.

The horse was left alone, without anybody around to show it any interest, to listen to its words, to even believe in its existence. Sometime over the next few days, but nobody noticed exactly when, it disappeared and was never seen again.