Caught between two forces, the Rex battled mightily. Its fire cleared space around the grailstones, and the amphibians, spouting flame, rolled on their trackless treads to the stone. While they kept off the raging defenders and attackers alike, the crane of the Henry swung the cap onto the stone.
The grailstones thundered, and immediately the cap was swung off by the crane, which then telescoped into the interior of the Henry.
After the launches had returned to the boat, John ordered that the anchor be' taken up. "And then full power ahead!" It was easier commanded than carried out. The press of vessels around the Rex was so great that it could move only very slowly. While the paddle wheels dug into the water, and the prow crushed into pieces the large sailing boats and ground the smaller between them, the right-bankers bombarded it. Men and women managed to clamber onto the promenade of the boiler deck, though they didn't stay there long.
Finally, the Rex broke loose and headed for the other shore. There it swung into the weaker current near the bank and forged up-River. Across the stream, the battle was still raging.
At noon, John had to decide whether or not to recharge. After a minute of deliberation, he ordered the boat to anchor by a big dock.
"We'll let them kill each other," he said. "We have plenty of smoked and dried food to keep us going through tomorrow. The day after, we'll recharge. By then the slaughter should be over."
The right bank was a strange sight indeed. They had gotten so used to seeing its throngs, noisy, chattering, laughing, that the unpeopled land was eerie. On this side, except for a very few wise or timid persons who'd elected not to try to fill their bellies at the expense of the left-bankers, not a soul was to be seen. The huts and the longhouses and the big state log buildings were tenantless, and so were the plains and the foothills. Since no animals, birds, insects or reptiles existed on this planet, only the wind rustling the leaves of the few trees on the plains made any sound.
By then, the warring peoples across the stream had exhausted their gunpowder, and only occasionally could the Rex-ites hear a very low murmur, the diluted and compressed sound of people voicing their fury, hunger, and fear, their pain and their deaths.
The casualties on the Rex from both days were thirty dead and sixty wounded, twenty seriously, though it might be said that any wound was taken seriously by the sufferers. The corpses were cast in weighted fishskin bags and into the middle of The River after a brief ceremony. The bags were only to spare the feelings of the survivors since the bags would be ripped open and the flesh devoured by the fish before they reach the bottom.
Along the left bank the waters were thick with corpses, bumping into each other while the eating fish thrashed the bloodied waters. For a month, the logjam of bodies made The River hideous. Everywhere, apparently, the fighting had taken place, and it would be a long time before the drifting corpses disappeared. Meanwhile, the fish ravened, and the colossal riverdragonfish came up from the depths and took the bloating dead whole in their mouths until their stomachs were crammed. And when they had digested and eliminated these, they rose again to feed and to digest and to eliminate.
"It's Armageddon, the.Apocalypse," Burton said to Alice, and he groaned.
Alice wept more than once, and she had nightmares. Burton comforted her so much that she felt that they were close again.
The afternoon of the next day, the Rex ventured across The River to recharge. But instead of going on, it went back to the right bank. It was necessary to make gunpowder and to repair damages. That took a month, during which time Burton completely recovered from his wound.
After the boat resumed its journey, some of its crew were tasked with making a count of the survivors in various areas picked at random. The result: an estimate that nearly half the population must have been killed, if the fighting had occurred on the same scale everywhere. Seventeen and a half billion people had died within twenty-four hours.
It was a long time before gaiety came back to the riverboat, and the people on the bank behaved like ghosts. Even worse than the effect of the slaughter was the dread thought: What if the remaining grailstone line quits?
Now, thought Burton, was the time to question the suspected agents. But if they were cornered, they might kill themselves even if no resurrection awaited them. And there was also the restraint that the post-1983 people might be innocent.
He would wait. He could do nothing else but wait.
Meanwhile, Loghu was subtly questioning her cabinmate, and Alice, though not subtle, was doing her best with Podebrad. And Burton was waiting for Strubewell to make a slip.
Several days after the voyage had started again, John decided that he would do some recruiting. He stopped the Rex during the noontime meal and went ashore to make it known that he had empty berths to fill.
Burton, as Sergeant Gwalchgwynn, had the duty with others of wandering through the crowd looking for possible assassins. When he came across an obvious early paleolithic, a squat massive-boned fellow who looked like a pre-Generalized Mongolian, and started to talk to him, he forgot his job for a while. Ngangchungding didn't mind giving him a quick lesson in the fundamentals of his native speech, one which Burton had never encountered before. Then Burton, speaking Esperanto, tried to get him to sign up on the Rex. Not only would he be a desirable marine, he would give Burton the opportunity to learn his language. Ngangchungding refused his offer. He was, he said a Nichirenite, a member of that Buddhist discipline which stressed pacifism as strongly as its chief rival, the Church of the Second Chance. Though disappointed, Burton gave him a cigarette to show that there were no hard feelings, and he went back to King John's table.
John was interviewing a Caucasian whose back was partially blocked from Burton's view by a tall, skinny-legged, long-armed, broad-shouldered Negro. Burton walked by them to place himself behind John.
He heard the white man say, "I am Peter Jairus Frigate."
Burton whirled, stared, glaring and then he leaped at Frigate. Frigate went down under him, Burton's hands around his throat.
"I'll kill you!" Burton shouted.
Something struck him on the back of the head.
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* * *
When he regained his senses, he saw the Negro and the four men who'd been behind him struggling with John's bodyguards. The monarch had leaped on top of the table, and, red-faced, was shouting orders. There was some confusion for a minute before everybody settled down. Frigate, coughing, had gotten to his feet. Burton pulled himself up, feeling pain in the back of his head. Evidently, he'd been hit with the knobkerrie the black had carried suspended from a thong on his belt. It lay on the grass now.
Though not entirely clear-headed, Burton realized that he had, somehow, erred. This man looked much like the Frigate he knew, and his voice was similar. But neither his voice nor his features were quite the same, and he wasn't as tall. Yet . . . the same name?
"I apologize, Sinjoro Frigate," he said. "I thought . . . you looked so much like a man whom I have good reason to loathe . . . he did me a terrible injury . . . never mind. I am truly sorry, and if I may make amends . . ."
What the devil, he thought. Or perhaps it should be, Which the devil?
Though this was not his Frigate, he couldn't help looking around for Monat.
"You almost scared the piss out of me," the fellow said. "But, well, all right. I accept. Besides, I think you've paid for your error. Umslopogaas can hit hard."
The black said, "I only tapped him to discourage him."
"Which you did," Burton said, and he laughed, though it hurt his head.
"You and your friends were fortunate you weren't slain on the spot!" John bellowed. He got down from the table and sat down. "Now, what is the difficulty?"
Burton explained again, secretly elated since under the circumstances the "almost" Frigate couldn't reveal to John that Burton was using an assumed name. John got assurances from Frigate and his four companions that they held no resentment against Burton and then ordered h
is men to release them. Before continuing the interviews, he insisted that Burton give him an account of why he had attacked Frigate. Burton made up a story which seemed to satisfy the monarch.
He said to Frigate, "How do you explain this startling resemblance?"
"I can't," Frigate said, shrugging. "I've had this happen before. Not the attack, I mean. I mean running across people who think they've seen me before, and I don't have a commonplace face. If my father had been a traveling salesman, I could explain it. But he wasn't. He was an electrical and civil engineer and seldom got out of Peoria."
Frigate didn't seem to have any superior enlistment qualifications. He was almost six feet tall and muscular but not especially so. He claimed to be a good archer, but there were hundreds of thousands of bowmen available to John. He would have dismissed him if Frigate had not mentioned that he'd arrived in an area a hundred miles up-River in a balloon, and he'd seen a huge dirigible. John knew that had to be the Parseval. He was also interested in the balloon story.
Frigate said that he and his companions had been journeying up-River with the intention of getting to the headwaters. They'd gotten tired of the slow rate of travel in their sailboat, and when they came to a place where metal was available, they'd talked its chief of state into building them a blimp.
"Ah!" John said. "What was this ruler's name?"
Frigate looked puzzled. "He was a Czech named Ladislas Podebrad."
John laughed until the tears came. When he'd finished, he said, "That is a good one. It just so happens that this Podebrad is one of my engineers now."
"Yeah?" one of Frigate's companions said. "We have a score to settle with him."
The speaker was about five feet ten inches high. He had a lean muscular body and dark hair and eyes. His face was strong but handsome and distinctive-looking. He wore a cowboy's ten-gallon hat and high-heeled boots, though his only other clothing was a white kiltcloth.
"Tom Mix at your service, Your Majesty," he said in a Texas drawl.
He puffed on his cigarette and added, "I'm a specialist in the rope and the boomerang, Sire, and I was once a well-known movie star, if you know what that is."
John turned to Strubewell. "Have you ever heard of him?"
"I've read about him," Strubewell said. "He was long before my time, but he was very famous in the twenties and thirties. He was a star of what they called horse operas."
Burton wondered if it was likely that an agent would know that.
"We sometimes make movies on the Rex," John said, smiling. "But we don't have horses, as you know."
"Do I ever!"
The monarch asked Frigate more about the adventure. The American said that at the same time they'd sighted the dirigible, they'd sprung a leak in an apparatus used to heat the hydrogen in the envelope. While trying to cover the leak in the pipe with some quick-setting glue, they'd vented gas from the bag so they could drop quickly into thicker and warmer air and thus open the ports of the gondola.
The leak had been fixed, but a wind started blowing them back and the batteries supplying fresh hydrogen had become dead. They decided to land. When they heard that John had sent a launch ahead to this place to announce that he was recruiting, they'd sailed down here as fast as they could.
"What were you on Earth?"
"A lot of things, like most people. In my middle age and old age, a writer of science-fiction and detective stories. I wasn't exactly obscure, but I was never near as well known as him."
He pointed at a medium-sized but muscular man with curly hair and a handsome Irish-looking face.
"He's Jack London, a great early twentieth-century writer."
"I'm not too fond of writers," John said. "I've had some on my boat, and they've generally caused a lot of trouble. However . . . who is the Negro who knocked my sergeant on the head without my permission?"
"Umslopogaas, a Swazi, a native of South Africa of the nineteenth century. He is a great warrior, especially proficient with his axe, which he calls Woodpecker. He also is notable as providing the model for the great fictional Zulu hero of the same name created by another writer, H. Rider Haggard."
"And he?"
John pointed at a brown-skinned black-haired man with a big nose. He stood a little over five feet and wore a large green cloth wrapped in turban fashion.
"That is Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, a much-traveled Iberian Moor, Your Majesty. He lived in your time and is a Sufi. He also happened to have met Your Majesty at your court in London."
John said, "What?" and stood up. He looked closely at the little man, then shut his eyes. When he opened them, he said, "Yes, I remember him well!"
The monarch got up and strode around the table, his arms open, speaking the English of his time rapidly and smiling. The others were astonished to see him embrace the little man and kiss him on both cheeks.
"Jeeze, another Frenchy!" Mix said, but he was grinning.
After the two had gabbed for some time, John said, "All I have to know is that Nur el-Musafir has traveled far with you and still regards you as his friends. Strubewell, you sign them up and give them instructions. Sergeant Gwalchgwynn, you assign them their cabins. Well, my good friend and mentor, we will talk after I have completed the interviews."
On the way down the corridor to their quarters, they ran into Loghu. She stopped, turned pale, then red, and screaming, "Peter, you bastard!" she hurled herself at Frigate. He went down with her hands clutching his throat. Laughing, the black and Mix pulled her off of him.
"You sure got a way with people," Mix said to Frigate.
"Another case of mistaken identity," Burton said. He explained to Loghu what had happened.
After he'd quit coughing and feeling his finger-marked neck, Frigate said, "I don't know who this other Frigate was, but he sure must not be likable."
Reluctantly, Loghu apologized. She was not fully convinced that this Frigate wasn't her former lover.
Mix muttered, "She can grab me any time she wants to, but not around the neck."
Loghu overheard him. She said, "If your whacker is as big as your hat, I might just grab it."
Surprisingly, Mix blushed. When she had hip-swayed away, he said, "Too bold and brassy for me."
Two days later, they were living together.
Burton was not content to admit that the resemblance of the two Frigates was just a coincidence. Whenever he had a chance, he talked to the fellow, delving into his background. What startled him was the discovery that this Frigate, like the other, had been a student of his, Burton's, life.
The American, in his turn, had been watching Burton, though covertly. Every once in a while. Burton caught him staring at him. One night, Frigate cornered him in the grand salon. After looking around to make sure their conversation wasn't overheard, the American said, without preamble and in English, "I'm familiar with the various portraits of Richard Francis Burton. I even had a big blowup of him when he was fifty on the wall in front of my desk. So I think I could recognize him without his mustachios and his forked beard."
"Yaas?"
"I recall well a photograph of him taken when he was about thirty. He had only a mustache then, though it was very thick. If I mentally remove the lip-hair . . ."
"Yaas?"
"Burton looks remarkably like a certain Dark-Ages Welshman I know. The name he claims is Gwalchgwynn, which, translated into English, is white hawk. Gwalchgwynn is an early form of the Welsh name which became better known much later as Gawain. And Gawain was the knight who, in the earlier King Arthur cycles, was first to seek the Holy Grail. The metal cornucopias we call grails look remarkably like the tower that's supposed to be in the middle of the north polar sea – from what I've heard. You might say it's the Big Grail."
"Very interesting," Burton said after he'd sipped on his grog. "Another coincidence."
Frigate looked steadily at him, disconcerting him a trifle. The devil take him. The fellow looked enough like the other to be his brother. Perhaps he was. Perhaps both were agents,
and this one was playing with him as the other had.
"Burton would know all about the Arthurian cycles and the earlier folk tales on which they were based. It would be just like him, if he assumed a disguise – and he was famous on earth for assuming many – to take the name of Gwalchgwynn.
He would know that it signified a seeker after the Holy Grail, but he wouldn't expect anyone else to."
"I'm not so dense that I can't see that you think I'm that Burton fellow. But I never heard of him, and I don't care to have you pursue this matter even if it amuses you so much. I am not amused."
He lifted the glass to his lips and drank.
"Nur told me when he was visited by the Ethical, the Ethical told him that one of the men he'd picked was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer."
Burton was able to control himself enough to keep from spitting the drink out.
Slowly, he put the glass down on the bar.
"Nur?"
"You know him. Mr. Burton, the others are waiting in the stage-prop room. Just to show you how sure I am that you're Burton, I'll reveal something. Mix and London used to go under assumed names. But they recently decided to hell with it. Now, Mr. Burton, would you care to go with me there?" Burton considered. Could Frigate and his companions be agents? Were they waiting to seize and question him, turning the tables on him?
He looked around the crowded and noisy salon. When he saw Kazz, he said, "I'll go with you if you insist on this nonsense. But I'll take my good friend the Neanderthal with me. And we'll be armed."
When Burton entered the prop room ten minutes later, he was accompanied also by Alice and Loghu.
When Mix saw Loghu, his jaw dropped in astonishment. "You in on this, too?"
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R.W. IV - The Magic Labyrinth Page 7