Small Gods

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 somberly 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 cords.
    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.
    “What are they?”
    “Well, the tubby one with the toga is Tuvelpit, the God of Wine. They call him Smimto in Tsort. And the broad with the hairdo is Astoria, Goddess of Love. A complete bubblehead. The ugly one is Offler the Crocodile God. Not a local boy. He’s Klatchian originally, but the Ephebians heard about him and thought he was a good idea. Note the teeth. Good teeth. Good teeth. Then the one with the snakepit hairdo is—”
    “You talk about them as if they were real,” said Brutha.
    “They are.”
    “There is no other god but you. You told Ossory that.”
    “Well. You know. I exaggerated a bit. But they’re not that good. There’s one of ’em that sits around playing a flute most of the time and chasing milkmaids. I don’t call that very divine. Call that very divine? I don’t.”
    The road wound up steeply around the rocky hill. Most of the city seemed to be built on outcrops or was cut into the actual rock itself, so that one man’s patio was another man’s roof. The roads were really a series of shallow steps, accessible to a man or a donkey but sudden death to a cart. Ephebe was a pedestrian place.
    More people watched them in silence. So did the statues of the gods. The Ephebians had gods in the same way that other cities had rats.
    Brutha got a look at Vorbis’s face. The exquisitor was staring straight ahead of himself. Brutha wondered what the man was seeing.
    It was all so new!
    And devilish, of course. Although the gods in the statues didn’t look much like