11
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 knob-kerrie 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 his 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.”