Arslan

by M J Engh

  Upstairs we had four rooms and a bathroom. They had all been intended as bedrooms, but we’d never needed that many, and since the little boy died a dozen years ago, we’d needed only one. Luella used one of the smaller, back rooms for her sewing, and I had fixed up the other one as a den and home office, where I could play Verdi records as loud as I pleased, and work out the plans for next semester and next year that there was never enough time for in my office at school. The east front room we kept as a guestroom, and we slept in the other ourselves. I assumed that Arslan had taken over the guestroom.

  I hadn’t been home yet; didn’t know, as things stood now, if I would ever get home. It looked as though the bivouac was settling into an occupation. The Turkistanis were busy after their debauch. A considerable arsenal was being collected in the school music room, as they brought in confiscated shotguns and rifles. The billet rule sounded like a permanent substitute for hostages; Arslan wouldn’t have any excuse for holding the children much longer. And while I didn’t expect that fact to influence him the way it would a human being, I did expect it to bring a turning point of some kind. Whether I was willing to “work with his officers” was doubtful, to say the least, but it might depend a lot on the direction of the turn.

  We had served a breakfast of leftovers, as soon as possible after they had unlocked us. Only Jean Morgan stayed in seclusion in the women’s lounge. I’d known Jean through many years and more than one trouble, and it had taken this to daunt her. We put all the classes to doing calisthenics, and then a singing session, and got started on schoolwork at almost the normal time.

  It was barely ten when Arslan appeared, with his twinkling eyes and his few simple rules and the news that he had quartered himself in my house. And gradually I got my vocal apparatus under control. Entirely free, he had said. “What about your soldiers? Aren’t there any restrictions on them?”

  He smiled swiftly. “There are restrictions. It is not desirable that your people should know exactly what restrictions. This would encourage disputes and misjudgments. I myself will judge my men.”

  I looked at him. “How old are you?” I asked him. My voice was still a little thick.

  He gave my look back steadily, and soberly for the moment. Then he straightened up. “Twenty-five years,” he said softly. “Come.”

  He motioned me ahead of him, into the cross-hall and out through the south door into the parking lot. It was the first time I’d been outside since yesterday morning. We had had a late fall, with off-again on-again weather that had put the forsythias in bloom at Thanksgiving, and now in the first week of December it was like October again, mild and sunny and breezy. The air was delicious.

  There were soldiers all over the lot, buzzing in every direction like bees at the door of a hive. A good deal of their traffic was straight across Pearl Street to my house. That sharp-eyed colonel was expounding something, without gestures, to a little cluster of noncoms, making them look first west, then south, then east. Arslan spoke, and they all saluted him and stared at me, the non-coms grinning, Colonel Nizam with a mortal frown.

  We crossed the street, but when I started up my front walk, Arslan laughed. “This way.” Some kind of armored truck was parked in my driveway—my car had disappeared—and a Land Rover behind it on the lawn. He slid into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover and motioned me toward the seat beside him.

  I got in. He threw it into gear and plowed straight across the lawn and one of Luella’s flower beds before he turned down the Morrisville road. Even so, he drove well. He handled the car like a man who made his living driving. There wasn’t a bump or a pothole on the road that he didn’t foresee and compensate for. He was looking very smug.

  “Would it be easy to kill me?” he asked pleasantly.

  I imagined not. In any case, I wasn’t about to try it, with the school full of children and Luella alone with his soldiers. And it didn’t make any obvious sense for him to drive out into the country with me, alone and unguarded; there had to be a catch. “That’s not why I’m watching you,” I said. “I was thinking you may make some pretty big headlines, but this is the first time I’ve seen you do anything for yourself. It takes a corporal just to tie your shoes.”

  He stopped the Land Rover right there in the middle of the road, turned off the engine, leaned his left elbow on the wheel, and slewed around on the seat to face me full. His eyes fairly danced, exactly like some fourth-grader bound to stir up mischief at any cost. And by God, it made me ache to look at him—ache to get my hands on his neck or my foot in his face. We were already out of sight of town, just before the road turned west, with Sam Tuller’s fields on our right and the woods of the old Karcher place on the left. There wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.

  “I have brought you here for two reasons, sir. One, that you should tell me about these farms. Two, that you should see that I do things for myself.”

  The little breeze stirred the heavy, dead-black hair above his foreign face. He was breathing fast and easily. His eager eyes were no more than two feet from mine. And I felt my blood surge up like a river rising. “Are you daring me to attack you?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said softly.

  I took a deep breath. “You’re a good seventeen years younger. You’re armed, and you’re a professional soldier. I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw away whatever chance I’ve got just to satisfy your sadistic whims. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to do it on your own initiative.”

  He didn’t move a muscle; only the whole expression of his face changed. The smile was still there, but the eyes were serious. “Good.” He stared at me as if he was reading the fine print on the inside of my skull. “Your language has a beautiful saying, ‘Strike while the iron is hot.’ Now, sir, you are hot. You would like to kill me, yes. But you are afraid that if you tried, you would fail; and this is true. Also you are afraid that if you succeeded, my soldiers would take a great vengeance; and this is also true. But there will be times when it will be easy to kill me, for you or for others. I tell you now what will happen if I ever die within the borders of this district—even of what you call … natural causes.” His smile tightened. “Every effort will be made to exterminate the entire population of the district, beginning with Kraftsville, which will be surrounded and burned to the ground.”

  I swallowed a swell of rage. “What you mean is, those are the orders you’ve given.”

  “This has been sworn to me by Colonel Nizam,” he said portentously—there should have been a dark bass chord of accompaniment—but all at once he grinned. “Yes; yes, sir—orders and oaths are no more immortal than men. So I tell you this, sir: my soldiers are like a pack of hungry wolves; they need no whip to drive them to the kill.” He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it without taking his eyes off mine. “It is important for your people that you should understand this. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. I understood it.

  “Do you believe it?”

  I nodded again. I believed it very well. Whatever was going on in the rest of the world didn’t matter much—this was what was happening in Kraftsville. “Do we have anything to gain by not killing you?”

  He smiled sweetly—sweetly is the word. “That, of course, you cannot know with certainty. But it is a chance, and you cannot afford to lose any chance.”

  I cleared my throat. “Second question. What if somebody decides to kill you anyway? How are you going to stop them?”

  He shrugged. “That is your problem, sir.”

  “I’d say it’s yours.”

  He pursed his lips—considering, probably, how to make it sound plausible. “I desire to live, yes. But the desire ceases with the life. And the process of dying does not deter me. I am a soldier. Sir, I am Arslan. You should not expect me to think like a citizen of Kraftsville.”

  No, not a citizen of Kraftsville. Looking into his eyes was like looking into the bottomless pit. “If you don’t mind dying,” I said, “why go to all this trouble?”

/>   He smiled again. “I have said that I desire to live. It gives me pleasure; also there are plans to be fulfilled before I die. Therefore I take certain precautions. But when I am dead, I shall not remember these things. Only the living can suffer.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “I urge you to believe that it is my opinion.” He cocked his head. “I have a question for you also, sir. Why are you not afraid of me?”

  “Because I can’t afford to be.” I’d no sooner said it than I felt my insides jerked by a cold convulsion. He must have seen it in my face, because he exploded suddenly into a laugh, gay and contemptuous. That made me hot again. “I’ve got a bad stomach,” I said steadily. “If I got upset, it would interfere with my work.”

  “And exactly what is your work, sir?”

  “I’m responsible for my school. If you don’t know what that means, I can’t tell you.”

  He studied me. “I can make you afraid.”

  “Maybe so, General. But why bother to try? I can’t do you any good if I’m disabled.”

  He nodded agreeably. He finished his cigarette in silence, crushed out the butt between his thumb and fingers—he could be very careful, I noticed, when it suited him—and flipped it onto the road. “Now, sir, we shall show each other something. I shall show that I mean what I say; and you will show whether you have understood.” For the first time since he stopped the car his eyes left my face, as he unholstered his pistol. He took it loosely by the barrel and held it out to me.

  I had to lick my lips before I could speak, and I could barely hear my own voice through the blood singing in my ears. What made him think he could play games with me? “You wouldn’t offer it to me, except you’re sure I won’t take it.”

  “Ah, no,” he said quickly. “There is always risk. In every battle there is risk of death—even when victory is sure.” He smiled. “It is loaded, sir; with live ammunition.”

  I thought that when I reached for the gun, or at least when I touched it, he would simply jerk it back. But he didn’t. For just an instant we both had hold of it, and I felt the solidity of that casual-looking grasp. And then it was all mine. It was years since I’d held a handgun, a lot of years. It felt very effective.

  He wasn’t smiling any more, but his whole air was too comfortable. I could well imagine the gun wasn’t loaded, or was loaded with blanks. It was the sort of joke that might tickle his fancy. And if I fired a trial shot at something else, the report—if there was one—would bring his men down on me as fast as if I’d really killed him. No doubt the woods and fields were full of them already. But he was right about one thing—I couldn’t afford to pass up any chance.

  “Start the car.”

  “No,” he said. “You are not my master; I am yours.”

  I had hit him—as hard as I could, lefthanded and backhanded in that cramped space—literally before I knew what I was doing. He took it full in the face without flinching, and it knocked him back against the frame. But as I struck, his hand came up and touched my left wrist—not a grab or a blow, just a touch like a cat’s playful pat.

  He straightened up and leaned on the wheel again. Still, that had gotten to him. It took a minute for his eyes to clear—ten seconds, anyway—and when they did, he looked really hard for the first time, like a man fighting. “It is not your fault,” he went on smoothly. “You have the strength, and the courage, and the brain, and now the gun. You lack only the army.” I could see he was swallowing blood. “If my troops were not occupying your town, I should act differently. Perhaps I should even start the car. But now, sir, if you kill me”—he smiled thinly, swallowed again, and shrugged—“it is the end for me, but it is the beginning of very bad things for you and for Kraftsville, and for many other places.”

  “Your little Turkistani wolf pack looks pretty small in the middle of the United States of America, General.”

  His mouth pursed with amusement or a good imitation of it. “Do not forget, sir, that I command the armed forces of the United States of America.”

  “You can’t tell me they’d fight for you.”

  Another shrug. “Was it necessary for the armed forces of Vichy France to fight for Hitler? Do not deceive yourself with false hopes, sir. There is no United States government to help you. There is no Soviet government. There is no government in Canada, in England, in France, in Germany, in Egypt, in Israel, in Turkey, in India, in China, in Japan, in Australia. I am the government. I am the leash that holds my wolf packs. If you kill me now, sir”—he smiled a real smile—“hell breaks loose.”

  “As far as I can see, it already has.”

  He shook his head gently at me. “Then you have not seen war.”

  “What happens if I don’t kill you now?”

  He turned and spat over his shoulder, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “You will not be punished. You have asked how I can prevent others from killing me. There is no certain method. But you, sir, can help. Do you understand?”

  “You mean spread the word that you’re worse dead than alive?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Before I did that, I’d have to believe it. And I’m not about to believe anything till I know a whole lot more about the situation. Just what the hell have you done, General? What the hell are you planning to do?”

  He said nothing. He looked at me, cool and level. The gun felt warm and heavy in my hand. “Do you think I am some politician,” he said at last, “to feed upon power and praise?”

  “I think you’re a devil. I think you’re a barbarian Hitler. Your idea of fun is raping children in front of their mothers.”

  “Fun, yes,” he agreed comfortably. “If you cannot endure this, sir, shoot—and let my soldiers have their turn. But I have not conquered the world for … fun.”

  Up the back of my neck I felt my scalp prickling. “There’s a lot of world not covered in that list you reeled off.”

  An empty smile flitted across his face. He looked very thoughtfully at the pistol in my hand. “Well, I am a soldier. I do not pretend that I would have let the chance go by, once I saw it. But also I saw another chance.” He met my eyes suddenly. “More difficult, sir. But if I work quickly, it is conceivable that I can do it.”

  I had to wet my lips again. “Do what?”

  “Make the world a good place in which to live.”

  I heard myself make a snorting noise. Somehow I had expected better from him.

  He smiled innocently. “Or I could say, ‘destroy civilization,’ if you prefer that I should be … diabolical. But what is that civilization, sir? Is it so worthy of preservation? Tell me, what was wrong with the world, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what is wrong with it. Too little Christianity.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Christianity has had its chance. Now I have mine. No, sir; the two great curses of mankind are very simple: hunger and crowding. Crowd human beings together, and all miseries multiply. And there is no greater misery—believe me, sir—than hunger. Therefore there are two great needs: more food, more land. And this has always been true, even when food and land were absolutely plentiful. It is a problem of distribution.”

  I stared at him, amazed as much as disgusted. It was incredible that a two-bit warlord from nowhere, infected with some outmoded Middle Eastern strain of agrarian socialism, could be kinging it over my town—let alone my whole country. I had it in my hand, if the gun was loaded, to end it right now. And if he was as crazy as he must be, it might really be loaded, and we might really be alone. I didn’t think it would take two weeks for this country to shake off Arslan’s wolf packs. If the gun was loaded.

  And I would have the gun and the Land Rover, and maybe a little time. My hand was slippery with sweat. Good God, I had thought of the noise—why hadn’t I thought of silencing it? But with what?

  “So you’re going to redistribute the wealth,” I said. “It’s been tried.” I scooted back as far away from him on the seat as I could get.

 
“No, sir. I am going to redistribute the people.” I flipped the chamber open, flipped it shut. It was loaded. Arslan watched, but he didn’t move. “And I am cutting lines of communication,” he said. “I intend that every community should be self-sufficient. It should produce everything it consumes, and contain no more people than it can support in comfort.” He was speaking dully, absently. His eyes were on the gun.

  I had started to take off my suit coat. And just now, when I needed every speck of coolness I could manage, sweat ran into my eyes and I kept seeing faces in the corner of my mind’s eye: the children’s faces, Hunt and his mother, Betty white with fear, and Colonel Nizam’s face, and faces of soldiers; and over and behind what Arslan was saying now, I heard him saying to Perry, “No games,” and the noise Perry made.

  “I thought there were too many people to go around.” I had my left arm out of the sleeve. I reached across my chest and pulled the coat loose from behind me, pulled it down from my right shoulder, leaving my right arm in its sleeve, and began to wrap the loose folds around the gun.

  “Of course. It is too late to solve the problem by distribution alone. But it is better to die quickly than by starvation or malnutrition. And those who remain alive will have enough. Also, there is more land than you may think, sir. Very much is now wasted.” He watched the gun. It was the first time I had seen that face dead serious, without a trace of mockery or humor. No games, I heard his voice saying, and I saw the soldier’s rueful look, and Paula’s face.

  “Destruction of civilization sounds like a good name for it, all right. What about industry?”

  “Only local industry. No trade. Total self-sufficiency based on the land.” He glanced from the gun to my face and smiled faintly. “Yes, these are clichés. You yourself live by clichés, sir. But mine are enforceable.”