THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

"Can't you ever give me full credit?" she said, and she walked out.

9

LOGHU WAS NO LONGER THE KING'S FAVORITE.

King John had become so smitten with a very pretty redhead with large blue eyes whom he'd seen on the bank that he decided to stay in the area for a while. The boat was anchored by a large dock the locals had built long ago. After two days to make sure that the people here were as friendly as they pretended to be, John permitted shore leave. He didn't say anything to anybody at first about his sudden attack of irresistible lechery, but his behavior made that obvious.

Loghu didn't especially care that she had to leave the grand suite after John had talked the woman into going to bed with him. She wasn't in love with him. Besides, she was more than somewhat interested in one of the locals, a big dark Tokharian. Though he wasn't of her century, he was of her nation, and they had many things to talk about between lovemaking. However, she was humiliated that she had lasted such a short time with the monarch, and she was heard to mutter that she might just push John overboard some dark night. There had been, there were now, there would be many who would like to remove him from the living.

Burton stood guard duty the first night. The next, he moved into a hut with Alice near the dock. The people here, most of whom were Early Minoan Cretans, were hospitable and fun-loving. They danced and sang around the bonfires in the evening until their allotment of lichen alcohol was gone and then reeled to bed to sleep or couple or "pluralize," as Burton called it. He was happy to stay here for a few weeks anyway because he'd have a chance to add the language to his now long list. He mastered its basic grammar and vocabulary quickly since it was closely related to Phoenician and Hebrew. There were, however, many words which were non-Semitic, these having been borrowed from the aboriginals of Crete while the conquerors from the Middle East were assimilating them. They all spoke Esperanto, of course, though it deviated somewhat from the artificial tongue invented by Dr. Zamenhof.

John had no trouble getting his new mistress to agree to go to bed with him. But he had a problem. There was no cabin space for Loghu, and he couldn't throw her off the boat without a good reason. Autocratic though he was, he was able to override her rights. His crew would see to that. Remembering the Magna Carta, he did not buck them, but he was undoubtedly trying to think of a way to get rid of Loghu which would seem justifiable.

On the fourth night of shore leave, while John was in his grand suite with Blue-eyes, and Burton was with Alice in their small but comfortable quarters, a helicopter dropped out of the night sky onto the landing deck of the Rex.

Burton would find out very much later that the raiders came from the airship Parseval and had been ordered to capture King John if they could or to kill him if they couldn't. All he knew then was that the gunfire of the Rex meant bad trouble. He put on a cloth around his waist and fastened it with the magnetic tabs inside the material. Then, grabbing a rapier and a fully loaded pistol from the table by the bed, he ran outside while Alice was still yelling to him. He could hear men screaming and shouting in the midst of shots and then a great explosion apparently in the engine room. He ran as fast as he could toward the boat. There were lights on in the pilothouse; somebody was at the controls. Then the paddle wheels began to turn. The boat started moving backward, but Burton leaped onto the promenade of the boiler deck just before the lines tied to the pilings pulled them down and the dock collapsed. ,

A moment later, a stranger came down the stairs from the lowest story of the pilothouse. Burton emptied his pistol at him but missed. Cursing, he dropped the gun and proceeded toward the fellow. Then the slippery one showed up again with a rapier in his hand.

Never had Burton faced such a demon with his sword! No wonder. The tall thin demon was Cyrano de Bergerac! Playfully he introduced himself during a lull in the swordplay but Burton saw no such reason to waste breath. Both were slightly wounded—a good indication that they were evenly matched. Somebody shouted, Burton's attention was distracted and that was enough. The Frenchman drove his blade deep into Burton's thigh.

He fell to the deck, helpless. The agony came a few seconds later, making him clench his teeth to keep from screaming. De Bergerac was a gallant man. He made no effort to kill Burton, and, when one of his men appeared a moment after, de Bergerac told him not to shoot Burton.

The helicopter lifted off shortly thereafter as men shot at it from the deck. Before it had gotten a hundred feet, however, a naked white body appeared in the beam of a searchlight and then dropped into the darkness. Somebody had either leaped or been thrown from the craft. Burton guessed that it was King John.

Groaning, Burton wrapped the heavily bleeding wound in a cloth, tied its ends, and forced himself to hobble to the steps leading up to the pilothouse base. The Rex was drifting down-River, and there was nothing to do about it. John was hauled aboard moments later, unconscious, an arm and a leg broken.

Five miles downstream, the Rex beached, and, ten minutes later, the first of the men who'd run all the way along the bank, following the boat, came aboard.

Doctor Doyle set John's bones and administered Irish coffee for shock.

When John was fit enough to curse and rave, he did so. But he was glad to be alive, and the engine could be repaired with the precious aluminum wire in the storage room. That would take a month, though, and meanwhile the Clemens boat was slowly gaining on them.

Since twelve guards had been killed, there was a cabin for Loghu to move into. The king had to replace the dead men, but he seemed to be in no hurry to do so. After days of examining candidates and then putting some through mental and physical tests, he chose only two.

"There's no hurry," he said. "I want only the best. These locals are a scroungy lot."

One result of the raid was that John became fond of Burton, whom he gave the most credit for saving his life. He couldn't promote him over the heads of Burton's fellow marines, but he could make him a bodyguard. And he promised Burton to give him a commission whenever it was possible to do so. Burton and Alice moved into the cabin next to John's quarters. Burton was displeased in one way because he liked to dance attendance to no man. However, it did give him an opportunity to be with Strubewell a lot and to study him. He listened carefully to the man's speech for traces of a foreign accent. If Strubewell was an agent, he had mastered American Midwestern.

Alice kept an intent eye and ear on Podebrad while playing bridge and during other social activities. Loghu liked one of the suspected agents, a huge man named Arthur Pal who claimed to have been a Hungarian electrical engineer, so she moved in with him after his mate left him. Burton's suspicions were increased when Loghu noted that Pal spent much time with Podebrad. Her efforts to trip him up on his story were fruitless, but Burton said that if enough time elapsed she was " bound to do so. If the agents had a common story, they would have memorized it. However, they were (presumably) human and so would make mistakes. One contradiction would be enough.

Alice still had not been able to bring herself to force the split with Burton. She kept hoping that he would change his attitude toward her enough to justify staying with him. That their duties kept them apart most of the day helped ease matters. He seemed so glad to see her at the end of the day that she felt better, and she talked herself into believing that they would get back to their original passionate state. They were like an old married couple in many ways. They still had a certain fluctuating affection but were increasingly irritated by character traits they could have once easily overlooked.