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How can I be the ransom for all Glome unless I die? And if I am to go to the god, of course it must be through death. That way, even what is strangest in the holy sayings might be true. To be eaten and to be married to the god might not be so different. We don’t understand. There must be so much that neither the Priest nor the Fox knows.’
‘But, sister, you will follow me soon. You don’t think any mortal life seems a long thing to me tonight? And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I should have been given to some king in the end—perhaps such another as our father. And there you can see again how little difference there is between dying and being married. To leave your home—to lose you, Maia, and the Fox—to lose one’s maidenhead—to bear a child—they are all deaths.
No herd of other beasts, gathered together, has so ugly a voice as Man.
Now mark yet again the cruelty of the gods. There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy. The nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one.
