Brutha stared at the tortoise. Then he picked him up.
“I think it's this way,” he said.
Om's legs waggled frantically.
“What do you want to go to Omnia for?” he said.
“I don't want to,” said Brutha. “But I'm going any?way.”
The sun hung high above the beach.
Or possibly it didn't.
Brutha knew things about the sun now. They were leaking into his head. The Ephebians had been very interested in astronomy. Expletius had proved that the Disc was ten thousand miles across. Febrius, who'd stationed slaves with quick reactions and carrying voices all across the country at dawn, had proved that light travelled at about the same speed as sound. And Didactylos had reasoned that, in that case, in order to pass between the elephants, the sun had to travel at least thirty-five thousand miles in its orbit every day or, to put it another way, twice as fast as its own light.
Which meant that mostly you could only ever see where the sun had been, except twice every day when it caught up with itself, and this meant that the whole sun was a faster-than-light particle, a tachyon or, as Didactylos put it, a bugger.
It was still hot. The lifeless sea seemed to steam.
Brutha trudged along, directly above the only piece of shadow for hundreds of miles. Even Om had stopped complaining. It was too hot.
Here and there fragments of wood rolled in the scum at the edge of the sea.
Ahead of Brutha the air shimmered over the sand. In the middle of it was a dark blob.
He regarded it dispassionately as he approached, incapable of any real thought. It was nothing more than a reference point in a world of orange heat, ex?panding and contracting in the vibrating haze.
Closer to, it turned out to be Vorbis.
The thought took a long time to seep through Brutha's mind.
Vorbis.
Not with a robe. All torn off. Just his singlet with. The nails sewn in. Blood -all. Over one leg. Torn by. Rocks. Vorbis.
Vorbis.
Brutha slumped to his knees. On the high-tide line, a scalbie gave a croak.
“He's still . . . alive,” Brutha managed.
“Pity,” said Om.
“We should do something . . . for him.”
“Yes? Maybe you can find a rock and stove his head in,” said Om.
“We can't just leave him here.”
“Watch us.” No."
Brutha got his hand under the deacon and tried to lift him. To his dull surprise, Vorbis weighed almost nothing. The deacon's robe had concealed a body that was just skin stretched over bone. Brutha could have broken him with bare hands.
“What about me?” whined Om.
Brutha slung Vorbis over his shoulder.
“You've got four legs,” he said.