"I feel sorry for you."
"Later."
The clearing quieted down, and there was silence for a moment. Then out of the forest they came, walking three abreast. Geipgos, the old tribal chieftain, and his son Slagoon, and the warriors with their rippling muscles glinting in the pollen-scented dusk, and their spears held high in a cautious withholding of wrath.
You couldn't call it a greeting. They were still shaken with anger, still ready to kill.
I went forward to meet them, with Kallatah in the crook of my arm. I'd talked and bargained and haggled with them a dozen times, but now I was seeing them for the first time through her eyes.
I have a curious gift of empathy. I could share her awe and admiration, and the stunned incredulity which must have made her doubt the evidence of her eyes.
The natives of Dracona are physically comely and well-proportioned, and they carry themselves with such an air of easy grace that you have to look twice to realize that they are not entirely like ourselves.
They have three eyes, but the extra one is so smoothly lidded that when it remains shut you scarcely notice it. Their three extra, slightly attenuated arms are not obtrusive, for they carry them pressed closely to their sides. And the green sheen of their skins looks more bronze than green in the forest gloom, and is hence far less startling than might be supposed.
They had such keen, discerning eyes, and mobile features that when they smiled in friendly greeting it was hard to think of them as primitives at all.