The sergeant stood at the prow, staring fixedly as the city drew nearer. It was unusual to see him very far away from Vorbis. Wherever Vorbis stood there was the sergeant, hand on sword, eyes scanning the surroundings for . . . what?
And always silent, except when spoken to. Brutha tried to be friends.
“Looks very . . . white, doesn't it?” he said. “The city. Very white. Sergeant Simony?”
The sergeant turned slowly, and stared at Brutha.
Vorbis's gaze was dreadful. Vorbis looked through your head to the sins inside, hardly interested in you except as a vehicle for your sins. But Simony's glance was pure, simple hatred.
Brutha stepped back.
“Oh. I'm sorry,” he muttered. He walked back sombrely to the blunt end, and tried to keep out of the soldier's way.
Anyway, there were more soldiers, soon enough . . .
The Ephebians were expecting them. Soldiers lined the quay, weapons held in a way that stopped just short of being a direct insult. And there were a lot of them.
Brutha trailed along, the voice of the tortoise insinuating itself in his head.
“So the Ephebians want peace, do they?” said Om. “Doesn't look like that. Doesn't look like we're going to lay down the law to a defeated enemy. Looks like we took a pasting and don't want to take any more. Looks like we're suing for peace. That's what it looks like to me.”
“In the Citadel everyone said it was a glorious victory,” said Brutha. He found he could talk now with his lips hardly moving at all; Om seemed able to pick up his words as they reached his vocal chords.
Ahead of him, Simony shadowed the deacon, staring suspiciously at each Ephebian guard.
“That's a funny thing,” said Om. “Winners never talk about glorious victories. That's because they're the ones who see what the battlefield looks like afterward. It's only the losers who have glorious victories.”
Brutha didn't know what to reply. “That doesn't sound like god talk,” he hazarded.
“It's this tortoise brain.”
“What?”
“Don't you know anything? Bodies aren't just handy things for storing your mind in. Your shape affects how you think. It's all this morphology that's all over the place.”
“What?”
Om sighed. “If I don't concentrate, I think like a tortoise!”
“What? You mean slowly?”
“No! Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst.”
,Why?"
“I don't know. Because it often happens to them, I suppose.”
Brutha stared around at Ephebe. Guards with helmets crested with plumes that looked like horses' tails gone rogue marched on either side of the column. A few Ephebian citizens watched idly from the roadside. They looked surprisingly like the people at home, and not like two-legged demons at all.
“They're people,” he said.
“Full marks for comparative anthropology.”
“Brother Nhumrod said Ephebians eat human flesh,” said Brutha. “He wouldn't tell lies.”
A small boy regarded Brutha thoughtfully while excavating a nostril. If it was a demon in human form, it was an extremely good actor.
At intervals along the road from the docks were white stone statues. Brutha had never seen statues before. Apart from the statues of the SeptArchs, of course, but that wasn't the same thing.