"Oh, Amra!"
"Yes, you have! Else why should I follow you when you deserted me to run away on the Bird? And why should I still want to follow you, to be with you, even if those towers had turned out to be your what-do-you-call-'em? and you had sailed away into the skies on them? Why would any decent human woman want to do that? Tell me!"
She, too, rose on an elbow, her face now turned to him. He scarcely recognized her, her features were so twisted and her skin was so livid.
"A hundred times during this voyage I've wished you would die. Why? Because then I wouldn't have to think about the time to come when you would leave this world forever, leave me forever! But when you were in danger, then I almost died, too, and I knew I didn't really wish your death. It was just wounded pride on my part. And I couldn't face the moment of your departure! Or the fact that you must come from a superior race, a people more like gods than demons!
"Oh, I didn't know what to think! Whether you were a devil, or a god, or just a man who was somehow more of a man than any I knew. I could ignore such things as your wounds healing up faster than they should and scar tissues disappearing. But I couldn't ignore your knowledge that Aga would be killed if she touched that wall in the room on the cannibals' island. Nor the fact that your teeth grew back in after they were knocked out during the escape from the island. Nor your too obvious interest in those two demons held prisoner in Estorya. Or...."
"Not so loud, Amra," he interrupted. "You'll wake everybody up."
"All right, all right. Better to keep quiet and pretend to be stupid. But I can't, I'm not built that way. So ... what are you going to do, Alan?"
"Do? Do?" he repeated miserably. "Why, somehow or other I'm going to free those two poor devils and escape in their spaceship."
"Devils? Then they are demons!"
"Oh, no, that was just a manner of speaking. I said poor devils because of what they must have gone through in that barbarous prison. They might as well have been in the hands of the cannibals as at the mercy of the priests of this wretched planet."