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reached the shelter of the trees one problem would have been put behind us, and another and more colorful would face us. I’d not pitch our luck too high, and so did not venture too far into the trees. The jungle remained sparse at the sand’s edge. There would be no point in going back to find the man and woman I’d left tied up. For one thing, their comrades, backtracking my movements, would have discovered them by now; and, two, they would have no idea, I judged, from which village the girl sacrifice came.
    She sniffled and snuffled. I was loathe to keep her quiet with a hand over her mouth; but after I’d cleaned her up and she’d found a piece of sticky sweet goo in a pocket, she quietened. Cleaning her up did not present a difficult task, not in a forest where there were a myriad different leaves. As they say, in a forest of Kregen you can find a leaf to suit every purpose. They are not far wrong.
    The suns at last sank and the sky changed from a sea of rust to an ocean of darkness shot with the stars of Kregen. Soon Kregen’s first moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, would rise and then her fuzzy pink light would provide illumination enough.
    When the second and third moons, the Twins, rose, the light would sparkle most pleasantly — if you were going for a stroll in some pleasure-section of a city, say. If you were trying to escape from enemies, you might not relish such prodigious quantities of light during the night time.
    Making the most of the small time of darkness before the Maiden with the Many Smiles rose, I hurried along the beach, skirting the trees. The coolness had not come with the going of the suns; the air sweltered.
    Now that the priest had escaped me — and I clutched the trident in my fist — I decided to head eastward. If the girl came from a village to the west, then I’d be unlucky. Wherever she came from, someone would know apart from the priest. Taking him along had been showing off to the gallery, really. And, in the end, he’d given me the slip.
    The sand shushed under my feet, and the girl on my arm, lulled by the motion, at last fell asleep. Her tiredness overcame the excitements and fears. And I still did not know her name.
    The old ship burned splendidly.
    Little though there might be of a Viking funeral in those flames, the thought occurred. Orange light stained the sky. The stars glittered and dimmed — for a space. Dry, that old argenter, dry and tinder for consumption. She burned away and fell into ashes, and so the darkness took her.
    I hurried on with my burden into the shadows.
    Pausing every now and then to take a careful look around and particularly backwards, and seeing nothing of pursuit, we made good our escape — for I tended to regard the girl-child sacrifice as one of the party. Adventure has that effect. I did the looking around and she slept; but it was we who made our escape.
    The beginning of this day had seen me encompassed by jungle, and the end saw me striding along the edge of a jungly forest, skirting the greenery, trudging along in the sand. By the light of the Maiden with the Many Smiles and later of the Twins, I kept going. Tiredness did not touch me. I’d be tired later on. Now I had to find the nearest village or town and see about the sleeping charge the Star Lords had placed into my care.
    An eventful day had passed. Perhaps the excitements had come along in fine style, maybe they clustered thickly around each passing hour, but I didn’t regard this as an unusual day for Kregen. Well, not too unusual... The truly unusual day on Kregen, that world of beauty and terror, is when nothing happens.

Chapter four
    Ashti of the Jungle
    The folk who lived in their scattered villages along the brown rivers running through the jungle might not have advanced so far along the so-called road of civilization as many another peoples of Kregen; but they only tried to kill me once and then, when I’d explained, became very friendly.
    Three villages along we