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shake them up a bit. This part, Khan had already completed.
    Stage two was to scare them some more.This, Khan was about to do.
    Stage three involved the visitors running fast back to the jetty and getting the ferry home. With a bit of luck Khan hoped he’d be home for the semifinal of American Idol .
    Khan pulled out a sword from his belt and prodded Nigel’s limp body with the toe of his boot. Time for Stage two.
    Nigel’s eyes opened. A split second later, with Khan’s blade waving in front of his face, so did his mouth.
    Trish Molyneux was only four metres below but, had she been four hundred metres away, stone deaf, with cotton wool stuffed in her ears and her head in a bucket of water, there would have been no chance of her not hearing Nigel’s scream.
    This close, it almost made her ears bleed.
    Khan nodded happily. With Nigel making a noise like that, Khan knew any sane woman would be halfway to the ferry in no time.
    â€˜Nigel?’ Trish said, peering up through thebranches towards where Khan was sitting. ‘Are you all right?’
    Khan blinked. Instead of turning tail and running back to the ferry, Trish kicked off her shoes and began to climb the tree. It was rough going, but the woman moved quicker than Khan would have believed possible, and in no time at all was high enough to see Khan clearly, one hand clamped firmly around Nigel’s mouth, the other clasping a fearsome-looking sword.
    â€˜Oh,’ said Trish. Whatever she’d expected to find up in the tree, it wasn’t a Mongolian warlord from the thirteenth century.
    Trish and Khan looked at one another.
    Then Khan opened his mouth and roared, a gale-force howl of complete animal anger, which had reduced battle-hardened generals to tears before now.
    Apart from wrinkling her nose, Trish didn’t seem to have noticed.
    Khan roared again and waved his sword inTrish’s face as she rummaged around in her handbag.
    As he opened his mouth to shout at the woman again, Khan realised something was wrong. His chin felt warm and he could smell smoke.
    He looked down and saw that (a) the woman was holding a lit match and (b) his beard was on fire.

    â€˜Goodbye,’ said Trish and, bracing herself against the trunk of the tree, kicked Khan hard between his legs.
    Once, many years ago, the original Genghis Khan had woken to find a blood-soaked Persian warrior holding an axe to his throat only seconds away from separating his head from his body. Until this moment in the tree, he had thought that would be the most surprising moment of his life.
    He was wrong.
    Khan’s eyes opened wide and, with a high-pitched squeaking sound like a tyre losing air, he toppled slowly backwards out of the tree, his beard trailing smoke behind him. Trish smoothly lifted his sword from his limp fingers as he fell.
    The Mongolian hit the ground with a thunderous crash and bounced into a pool of thick grey–green mud, steam rising from his flaming beard as he sank below the surface.
    â€˜What a rude man,’ said Trish. Nigeljust nodded. His mouth didn’t appear to be working.
    Trish took Khan’s sword and sliced through the rope holding Nigel. Landing with a bump and scrambling free, he sprinted towards a thick tangle of greenery.
    â€˜Nigel!’ yelled Trish. ‘Wait!’
    By the time she’d climbed down from the tree, Nigel had disappeared for the second time that morning.
    Trish checked her watch.
    Four hours until the ferry came back.
    She checked her compass and headed briskly in the direction taken by the panicking Nigel.
    Behind Trish’s retreating back, Khan’s face rose slowly from the stinking mud. Smoke coiling around his scorched beard, he removed an eel from his ear and stared hatefully after Trish.

    No matter what that pipsqueak Mortimer DeVere told him to do, Khan swore by theblood-drenched bones of all the mighty ancestor warriors of the Mongolian Empire and by the Ten Terrible Tribes of