"Mahu, strange man that he is...." the king answered. "He follows me about like a watchdog; I suppose he is afraid of my running away...."
Both were silent: Dio was waiting for him to speak: she knew he had come with her to the desert in order to talk undisturbed.
"I want to ask you something, Dio, and I cannot, I can't find the words," he began quietly, without looking at her.
He broke off and then began lower still:
"Do you know what Iserker said to me when I asked him why he wanted to kill me? 'Because, being a man, you make yourself God'. This was well said, wasn't it?"
"No, it wasn't: you don't make yourself God."
"I know I don't: it would be better for a man who made himself God not to have been born. But that's one thing and then there is something else; and one thing is so like the other that sometimes there is no distinguishing them.... And then it turns round all of a sudden: it was like this and then, all at once, it's the other way about...."
He rambled on incoherently, constantly losing the thread of his thought, wandering off the point and trying to find words; at last he was in a complete tangle and, with a wave of his hand, said hopelessly:
"No, I cannot! I will tell you another time...."
Dio smiled, and, taking his hand began kissing and stroking it gently, comforting him like a child.