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A house burned. Well, as I have said, sounds of strife and sights of burning houses are often my lot when
I return to Kregen.
Along the path the girls in their fetters struggled, shrieking and wailing, terrified. The difficulty was in
judging who was attempting to abduct the girls and who was trying to rescue them. At first glance there
seemed very little difference between the two sides. Both wore the fawn-colored breechclouts, both used
slings and knives. They were all apims, with a mixture of hair ranging from light to dark brown, so I must
discard that as an identification. A stone almost took my eye out, and I moved away smartly, marking the
man who had flung.
"Him," I said to my captive. "Is he friend or enemy?"
"That is Noki and he was always an onker! He couldn t hit the mark at twenty paces!"
A trifle local friction here, I decided. Noki saw what was going on and tried again, whereat my captive
bellowed, "Hold, you get-onker! This man will help us!"
"I thought you were slain, Mako!" yelped this Noki. "Hurry! They are dragging the girls to their ship."
I perked up at this. So far this appeared to me to be a parody of the times I had fought for the Star
Lords. The time was slipping away, for already most of the girls had vanished around a bend in the trail.
They were all shackled to one another, stumbling on. While it was clear enough to see which of the men
were trying to release them, it was not as easy to see who was slinging at the locals and bringing them
down.
I made up my mind.
"Follow, Mako and you, Noki! You must fight!"
Then I was off, haring along the trail, dodging flung stones until, passing the struggling, shrieking girls, I
reached the head of the column around the bend. The sea blazed before me, rippled with a breeze,
glittering with the twin fires of the Suns of Scorpio. A large open pulling boat was drawn up on the sand.
There was going to be no mistake now.
I went straight in at the three fellows hauling on the shackles at the head of the procession, dragging the
girls along. They all dropped the ropes and slung at me. I dodged. Three blows took care of them.
Against knives a fist is a useful weapon, lacking anything better. The unarmed combat disciplines
hammered into me by the Krozairs of Zy also ensured I could take out a man armed only with a knife. As
for the slung stones, they could break an arm or crack a skull. Two more slavers went down, their faces
abruptly bloody, as they tried to jump me. And all the time I was leaping around like a frenzied
fire-dancer, trying to present so shifting and erratic a target that the slingers would be bound to miss.
It all struck me as remarkably fatuous, not real, as though I was being run through a slow-motion reprise
of what had gone on long ago in much more gory detail. But the truth was there in the blood and the
screams and the agony. This was real enough. The missing factor was twenty-one years away from
scenes of Kregen, I was the one at fault.
What I had left, only moments before, still seemed more real to me. The Parisian hospital, the Prussian
guns, the balloon, the blood there. Already, because one of the slavers twisted his knife as I struck him
down and spitted himself, I had blood on my hands. Blood. Is blood, then, so inseparable from life?
"They climb into the boat!" screeched Mako.
"Don t just stand there shouting about it!" I bellowed at him, running down the beach. "Stop them!" I did
not have the heart to use the great wordJikai, and I think I was right.
An older man ran across as I started. A knife slash had brought blood in a line across his side. He was
panting. "Let them go," he said, his chest heaving. "They may kill more of us."
I ignored him. His was the word of wisdom, of course, for the girls had been saved and the last of the
slavers were evidently only too anxious to push off and row away. But I had other ideas. It was through
no bloodthirsty madness that I acted as I did; I simply needed that boat. I did not know where I was but,
by Vox, it was a long way off the beaten track.
The younger element was anxious to follow my lead. In a last affray in the surf, where, I admit, I stood
back at the end and let them get on with it, the last of the slavers were seen to. Up on the beach the
people on whose side I had fought were going around carefully slitting every living slaver s throat.
The girls, their shackles torn off, played a lustful part in that butchery too.
Presently I was able to go back to the older man who was being seen to, his wound stanched by a pad
of leaves. No one produced a kit of acupuncture needles. Truly, I was out in the boondocks. Something
about the light at last demanded my full attention, and I looked up. Yes. Yes, up there the huge red sun
preceded the smaller green sun across the sky. In the forty-year cycle, which is never really an exact
forty years by virtue of Kregen s Keplerian orbit about Antares, the suns had met and eclipsed and
parted again. I thought of Magdag. What did they get up to on that occasion in that infamous city, when
the green sun passed in front of the red? Could the smaller sun even be seen against that massive somber
red glow?
"We owe you our thanks," said the older man, who said his name was Mogo the Wise.
I still remained on Kregen so I must have done the right thing.
Looking at the people here, the girls hysterical in their relief, the men comforting them, and now a stream
of other people, old men and women, youngsters, coming running along the path from the village, I
wondered which of them the Star Lords had wanted preserved. They did not seem a likely lot of
prospects for a great destiny on Kregen. That was not my concern. Exchanging polite greetings with the
headman was not my concern. I wrapped a fawn breechclout around my nakedness and possessed
myself of a knife, a poor thing with a bone handle and a bronze blade, indifferently made. These people
were poor. I cut through all the chatter.
"Tell me where this place is," I said, then, quelling their inquiries, I added, "for I have been shipwrecked
and am lost out of the sea."
The head-shaking at this, the lip-pursing, made me wonder what they ordinarily did to shipwrecked
mariners.
"Why," said Mogo the Wise, screwing up his eyes. "This is Inama. Everyone knows that."
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