It wasn't so bad, Sean reflected some weeks later, but it wasn't anything to laugh about—this being doll to a lady of the Kraks. He was fed well, and he slept well, even if it were on the cold black floor.
But he couldn't stand that impassive stare when Shel Lur gazed at him three times a day—once in the morning when she prodded him awake with her foot, once in the afternoon when she brought him down to the dinner table to stare and once in the evening just before she undressed for the night and lay down on her air pallet.
He had stood it for a week, then he tried to teach her the English language only to find out that she knew enough of it as she wanted. He'd talked to her, trying to describe Earth to her—telling her how different women there were. And she had just nodded and said, "Yess?"
Why in the name of Earth's sun had she picked him out—of every other human? There must have been hundreds of red-heads in the human procession. He looked up at Shel Lur's pink face and said very heatedly:
"Oh, hell...."
Shel Lur looked at him impassively.
He had plenty of time to think now and to watch. The picture of the giant Klash ever was with him, that look of pain pricking and tickling at his mind.
Once he asked Shel Lur: "Can't you be killed?"
In her atrociously accented English she said:
"No, I cannot be killed. No Krak ever killed."