Free Maker of Universes by Philip José Farmer

soupcon of shrimp.
    “They fall off when they’re ripe, and the fish get most of them,” Ipsewas said. “But some float in to the beach. They’re best when you get them right off the stalk.”
    Wolff crouched down by Ipsewas. Between mouthfuls, he said, “The histoikhthys is handy. They seem almost too much of a good thing.”
    “The Lord designed and made them for our pleasure and his,” Ipsewas replied.
    “The Lord made this universe?” Wolff said, no longer sure that the story was a myth.
    “You better believe it,” Ipsewas replied, and took another drink. “Because if you don’t, the Lord will end you. As it is, I doubt that he’ll let you continue, anyway. He doesn’t like uninvited guests.”
    Ipsewas lifted the nut and said, “Here’s to your escaping his notice. And a sudden end and damnation to the Lord.”
    He dropped the nut and leaped at Wolff. Wolff was so taken by surprise he had no chance to defend himself. He went sprawling into the hollow of shell in which he had slept, with Ipsewas’ bulk on him.
    “Quiet!” Ipsewas said. “Stay curled up inside here until I tell you it’s all right. It’s an Eye of the Lord.”
    Wolff shrank back against the hard shell and tried to make himself one with the shadow of the interior. However, he did look out with one eye and thus he saw the ragged shadow of the raven scud across, followed by the creature itself. The dour bird flashed over once, wheeled, and began to glide in for a landing on the stern of the sailfish.
    “Damn him! He can’t help seeing me,” Wolff muttered to himself.
    “Don’t panic,” Ipsewas called. “Ahhh!”
    There was a thud, a splash, and a scream that made Wolff start up and bump his head hard against the shell above him. Through the flashes of light and darkness, he saw the raven hanging limply within two giant claws. If the raven was eagle-sized, the killer that had dropped like a bolt from the green sky seemed, in that first second of shock, to be as huge as a roc. Wolff’s vision straightened and cleared, and he saw an eagle with a light-green body, a pale red head, and a pale yellow beak. It was six times the bulk of the raven, and its wings, each at least thirty feet long, were flapping heavily as it strove to lift higher from the sea into which its missile thrust had carried both it and its prey. With each powerful downpush, it rose a few inches higher. Presently it began climbing higher, but before it got too far away, it turned its head and allowed Wolff to see its eyes. They were black shields mirroring the flames of death. Wolff shuddered; he had never seen such naked lust for killing.
    “Well may you shudder,” Ipsewas said. His grinning head was thrust into the cave of the shell. “That was one of Podarge’s pets. Podarge hates the Lord and would attack him herself if she got the chance, even if she knew it would be her end. Which it would. She knows she can’t get near the Lord, but she can tell her pets to eat up the Eyes of the Lord. Which they do, as you have seen.”
    Wolff left the cavern of the shell and stood for awhile, watching the shrinking figure of the eagle and its kill.
    “Who is Podarge?”
    “She is, like me, one of the Lord’s monsters. She, too, once lived on the shores of the Aegean; she was a beautiful young girl. That was when the great king Priamos and the godlike Akhilleus and crafty Odysseus lived. I knew them all; they would spit on the Kretan Ipsewas, the once-brave sailor and spear-fighter, if they could see me now. But I was talking of Podarge. The Lord took her to this world and fashioned a monstrous body and placed her brain within it.
    “She lives up there someplace, in a cave on the very face of the mountain. She hates the Lord; she also hates every normal human being and will eat them, if her pets don’t get them first. But most of all she hates the Lord.”
    That seemed to be all that Ipsewas knew about her, except that Podarge had not been her name before the Lord