"Mnathl," he said, "I'm so grateful to you. You've done so much for me, helped me so much. You ... mean a lot to me, Mnathl." That, at least, was true.
Mnathl pulled her fingers away and regarded him. "What you mean?" she asked blankly. "What you mean?"
"That you ... that I ..." he stopped, too embarrassed to go on.
Mnathl threw back her head and laughed. It was the first time he had ever heard the sound from her, and there was something strange in it. She motioned to the axmen with her hand.
"Not like, not hate," she said blandly. "Let you see, let you hear, so you tell Them all that Deidrithes do. You our messenger. Then we eat."
Then we eat.... For a moment the words echoed meaninglessly in Ericson's mind. The axmen were forcing him to his knees near a depression in the center of the pyramid. "But why ..." he said.
"We hear about you the first time you try trip," Mnathl said. "Everybody know. No other men your color in Fyhon."
His color. Ericson began to understand. Mnathl's devotion, her self-sacrificing tenacity, her long kindness to him, everything—had all been nothing but the prelude to a ritual meal in which his rare blonde body was to be the chief support. No doubt a man of his color would be an especially choice offering to the gods. The gleam he had seen in Mnathl's eyes had been not love, but a kind of religious gluttony.
He began to laugh. Irony had always appealed to him; and besides he was remembering a sentence in the Ethnographic Commission's preliminary survey: "There is no doubt that ritual cannibalism is unknown among the natives of Fyhon."
"O.K., Mnathl," he said, recalling what he had been saved from, what he had seen and learned. "I'm ahead, no matter how you look at it. It's O.K."