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We must push on.”
    “Of course.”
    Only when they were once more marching along the blundering monster’s trail did she think to wonder just where his family might be now, what place in all of Kregen they called home. Seg — who was Seg Segutorio — had taken on a new dimension. He remained a wild and reckless wandering warrior; but he had roots.
    As for Seg he was trying to puzzle out the inner meaning of the names of Milsi’s family. They did not sound like Pandahemic names.

Chapter four
Diomb and Bamba
    A clattering commotion broke out ahead along the trail. A trilling noise as of a cage full of parakeets all shrilling away and fluttering their wings against the bars of the cage mingled with sharper shrieks of rage and pain.
    Seg put out a hand to halt Milsi and she walked on for a moment so that her stomach pressed against Seg’s sinewy palm. She was highly conscious of the contact; Seg did not notice.
    He stared evilly along the trail, tensed ready for action and yet perfectly relaxed. When he had sized up the situation out there his brain would tell his muscles what to do. They would respond instantly. That was the secret, albeit a simple one, of readiness for action.
    Presently, as the uproar continued unabated, without gaining or losing volume, he padded cautiously forward. He kept to the side of the trail, and he whispered so that no one more than two or three paces away could overhear.
    “Watch for those dratted killer vines, Milsi.”
    “Oh — yes!”
    The trail bent here as the monster who had made it failed to break through a tree all of five hundred seasons old. With his side against the tree, Seg peered cautiously around, and along the farther extent of the trail.
    What he saw filled him with astonishment. Milsi joined him, and sucked in her breath, and said: “They are dinkus. Savage. They used poisoned darts.”
    “So I see.”
    The dinkus appeared to be caught up in a situation at once horrific and comic. They were pygmies. Each dinko stood about one meter tall, built like an apim, with the exception that from the cunningly fashioned shoulder blades swung four arms instead of two. Each man was stark naked apart from a bark apron.
    They did use poisoned darts, which they shot from blowpipes.
    They were engaged in a fight between two different tribes, as was evident from the colors of the feathers they wore in their clay-matted hair, and their private fight had been interrupted by a toilca. Therein lay the comic aspect of the horror. To a dinko a toilca was a monstrous beast.
    “I really do think this is no concern of ours, Milsi.”
    “You are right. Yet they are so — and they cannot shoot their darts at the toilca’s scales and hope to penetrate.”
    Looking out, Seg saw that the toilca had already ripped up or squashed half a dozen of the dinkus. The two opposing parties had, perforce, joined forces to fight the monster. Seg made up his mind.
    He stepped out into the center of the trail.
    “Hai!”
    So wrapped up in the combat were most of the pygmies that they did not hear him. Some did. They swiveled to stare down the trail, and the long blowpipes switched up most evilly.
    “Hai!”
    And Seg loosed twice, swift accurate shots that punched clean through the eyes of the toilca under the horny protecting scales. The monster lashed about, writhing, and the pygmies leaped for their lives.
    With bow ready, arrow nocked and the shaft half drawn, held by his left hand, Seg walked forward. He lifted his right hand.
    “Llahal! I trust I have helped you, friends.”
    They chattered out, parakeets flinging their wings at a cage. Their voices chittered.
    Then one with the most feathers in his matted hair stepped forward. Instantly another stepped up alongside the first. He wore just about as many feathers, but they were red as the first’s were blue.
    “Hai! Llahal. Are you friend?”
    The blue-feathered pygmy was not to be left in the shade.
    “Hai! Answer me quickly, or you die!”
    “Now