Arslan

by M J Engh

  We had—maybe—our traitor, if that was the right word, among the Russian officers, ready to declare himself commander of the troops and broadcast our message. But all our contacts had been very circumspect, and I wasn’t counting on him too much. We would tell him what was going on when it was under way. I counted more on Hunt Morgan. Hunt could make himself understood by the Turkistanis, and one way or another—either to save the world or to save Arslan’s life—I was sure he would act as interpreter for us.

  If we got that far, we were just coming to the hard part. What we were betting was that nobody, not even the Turkistanis, really gave a damn about Arslan’s Plans. Either they were serving Arslan personally, or they were serving under duress. In the first case, they’d be our men as long as we held Arslan hostage (and if he had to be killed, they wouldn’t have to know it); in the second, we could tell them about Plan Two and offer them the freedom to go home. But we had to face the possibility of hostile units. That meant raising the local population against them, or turning other units against them, or both. Whether Kraftsville turned out to be the Concord of the new American Revolution or just the first skirmish of Armageddon would depend very much on what kind of contact we made with Arslan’s armies and with the American people during the first few days.

  And if we failed at any point, I would have let loose the hell on earth that I had sold my soul to prevent, seven years ago on the Morrisville road. But it was Arslan who had broken the contract.

  Friday night, as it happened, we all ate together. Arslan swung into the house early, shouting for Hunt and his supper. Hunt was in the living room, pouring himself a drink. Luella was just sitting down with me to eat before the rush. She had been deep in making applesauce and apple butter all day. The stove was covered with steaming pots, and the whole house was full of the rich, spicy smell. “I’m using up the last of the cinnamon,” she said. “It loses its flavor, anyway; you can’t keep it forever.” Supper was about as simple as it could be—baked ham, baked beans, and fresh hot applesauce. “That’s one nice thing about a wood stove,” Luella said; “if you’re cooking anything on top, you might as well put something in the oven, too.” She smiled at me tiredly.

  “It’s delicious.” I smiled back at her. This was probably the last supper I’d be eating with her here for a while. It might very well be the last of all. And the smell of the apple butter was very good.

  But Arslan and Hunt came in, Hunt carrying glass and bottle. “Coffee,” Arslan ordered. He was on the make tonight; the fury was avid, and everything in sight was fair game. He took Hunt’s bottle and poured vodka into his coffee till it brimmed the cup; his teeth showed as he lifted it and drank. “You are very trusting, sir,” he said to me. His eyes flashed. He dug into the beans with a vengeance.

  “That depends on who you ask me to trust.”

  “I ask you to trust no one, least of all my soldiers. But you have approved that your people’s children should go out alone in the night. Would it not have been wiser to consult with me before you approved this?”

  “We’ll be watching them.”

  He smiled cruelly. “As you watched, the day I came to Kraftsville?”

  I shoved back my plate. “If anything happens to any of those kids, General, you’ve got a revolution on your hands.” It was the literal truth. My pistol shot—or any other—would be the signal to start things rolling.

  Light leaped in his eyes. He turned his square hands above his plate, half-smiling. “No, sir,” he said softly. “But perhaps a revolt. There will be more important revolts.”

  I got up. “You’d better see that they’re left alone. Be careful if you don’t want to lose me, General.”

  He gazed up at me, balancing, daring. “Do you imagine that this is important to me?”

  “If it isn’t, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

  He smiled slowly. “Ah,” he whispered, and went back to his beans.

  Luella bent her head over her plate, but not before I saw her drawn mouth and look of misery. I hadn’t eaten very much. I was sorry. Hunt sat stiffly upright, eyes down, swirling the liquor in his glass. Arslan smiled around the table; he was pleased with his work.

  It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes before Arslan was at my bedroom door, bottle in hand. He stood eyeing me a moment before he came all the way in, kicking the door shut behind him, and stretched himself on my bed, propped on his left elbow. “Have you considered the significance of flowers, sir?” he asked softly.

  “I’ve never given it much thought.” Thirty-six hours from now, one of us would be a corpse or a captive. It was easy enough to picture Arslan bound hand and foot, blood and sweat on his face (there’d be no other way), with his black hair lank on his forehead and his black eyes watchful and undefeated; but I couldn’t picture him dead, any more than I could myself.

  He was a young man—a very young man to have destroyed so much. But his skin was weathered, and his eyes haggard. “What is a flower in itself, sir? It is an organ of reproduction, and like other organs of reproduction, it gives pleasure. No doubt the pleasure of the bee is greater than the pleasure of the gardener. Pleasure, sir”—his face grew fierce, intent and serious—“pleasure is the supreme immediate end; but in the economy of the world it is only instrumental. The flower of the pea is as exquisite as the flower of the rose. The scent of the lilac is a tool with which the lilac constructs its seeds.” He looked down into his bottle with an expression of intense wonderment, and slowly, feelingly, drank.

  “And yet there are sterile flowers, sir. The flower of the potato, the Japanese cherry blossom; to what end do they bloom? This is the monstrosity that man has bred: the sterile flower. And yet there were already sterile flowers when man ran on his knuckles with the apes. Who bred the wild yam? Who bred the saxifrage?” He glared at me as if he could compel an answer. Then he drank again, and his face smoothed. “Is this not beautiful, sir?” he asked purringly. “The flower that gives pleasure fruitlessly? Is it not beautiful that nature is so—unnatural?” He showed his teeth in a slow grimace. “Why do your people put flowers upon graves, sir? What is the meaning of this custom?”

  “I suppose, like most customs, it means about whatever people put into it.”

  He hunched his shoulders forward a little, searching my face. “I tell you a curious thing, sir,” he said confidentially. “I am in pain. You understand that I am accustomed to facts; facts do not trouble me. But there is a pain that does not cease.” He grinned savagely. “Ah, this gives you satisfaction, sir. Good. Good.” A hot look glowed in his taut face. He lifted three cigarettes from the pack in his shirt pocket and plugged the mouth of the bottle with them, and in one powerful, deliberate movement he swung his legs down and his arm in a sideward arc. The bottle smashed against the opposite wall, spewing liquor, and he was sitting upright on the edge of the bed. “Hunt!” he roared.

  Vodka dripped down the wall. A piece of flying glass had landed on my knee. I flipped it off with my finger, and it hit his leg and dropped onto his shoe. He picked it up and looked at it searchingly.

  Hunt opened the door. “Bring me another bottle,” Arslan said suavely. Hunt nodded, taking it all in with a little scornful smile, and lifted his hand into sight. It held an unopened bottle of vodka. Arslan’s laugh exploded. He dropped the glass fragment onto the bed beside him and accepted the new bottle. “Shut the door.” He opened the bottle swiftly, took a long swig, and nestled it between his knees. “Therefore, or in part therefore, I am going.”

  Hunt took a step forward from the door. “Where?”

  “To Russia. Probably then to India.”

  I didn’t care where. “When?” I asked harshly.

  He gave me a smile of luminous sweetness. “Tonight,” he said. He lifted the bottle by the neck and swung it gently back and forth. “The main transmitter and receiver have been dismantled. The rest of the communications equipment”—he glanced at his watch—“has just left headquarters. Sanjar,” he
added smoothly, “is already out of the district.” He set the bottle on the floor and leaned forward confidingly. “You see, sir, that I wish to save Kraftsville.”

  He had spread his hand a little too soon. But I had to be on my feet and out of reach, and I’d better be between Hunt and the door, and my first shot should be by the window, to put the KCR into action.

  Hunt brushed past me and confronted Arslan. “This time are you asking me?” he cried huskily.

  Arslan’s face went cold. “No. You stay, Hunt.”

  Hunt swayed on his feet. “I’m going with you.” His voice was hard and shrill with desperation. Three strides got me to the window; as I turned I had the gun in my hand.

  That instant the world stopped turning for me. The whole room seemed illuminated with a terrific clarity. I felt every muscle in my body. I was contented. There would be no more lying now.

  Hunt had turned his desolate face towards me. On the far edge of the bed, Arslan had to look almost over his shoulder. He made no move, but his face was afire with excitement. “Ah, there it is,” he said quietly.

  I turned the gun a little away from them, to fire the signal shot. But as I turned it, the long moment ended, exploded in a splintering burst, and flying specks of my blood and bone sprinkled my face. Flickeringly I saw Arslan fling himself across the bed, rolling over and up onto his feet in front of me, and stoop and rise and dance back. He stood before me with a pistol in each hand.

  I knew two things in the smeared dimness that throbbed through the room: he had fired the signal shot; and with all the guns on his side, I had nothing more to lose. I plunged towards the door. Keep him cut off from his men till the KCR got here—that was the last-ditch idea that moved my legs.

  Hunt met me in a rush, and we grappled together. I heard myself remarking, up in some attic of my brain, He’s stronger than I thought. Now the shock of the bullet was wearing off, and one wave after another of hot pain washed up my right arm. I threw Hunt down and slammed against the dresser, driving it in front of the door. Through the drumming in my head I heard feet on the stairs. I gave the dresser a last thrust and caught Hunt as he came up again.

  He hadn’t tried to use his knife—the famous knife that had been Arslan’s own. My vision cleared as if a curtain had risen. I hugged him to me with my left arm, catching his right hand between our chests. Arslan’s men were at the door.

  Hunt had stopped struggling. He stood trying to control his breath. Arslan was standing a little back from the window. He holstered one of the pistols casually and called out something; the sounds at the door stopped.

  “You can let me go now,” Hunt said composedly. “Consider me hors de combat.”

  I wasn’t about to let him go. Other things being equal, Arslan would maybe rather not kill me, but he would almost certainly go at least a little out of his way to keep from killing Hunt. And the only thing Hunt had showed me so far was that neither of us could afford to trust him.

  Then the first shots sounded from the schoolground. Arslan smiled at me expectantly. A machinegun answered under the window.

  “Sir,” he said, “I am leaving Kraftsville to you.” He lifted the lamp from the table. The machinegun spoke again. I heard running footsteps outside; the Land Rover started up; something else—one of the trucks—was coming down the street. My whole right arm to the shoulder felt swollen and half-solid, like a balloon full of blood. I was getting dizzy. He shouted one more order, and then he hurled the lamp in a looping overhead pitch that lifted the shadows and shook them over us. He swept the curtain aside, and struck the screen a sidearm blow. Fire swarmed up the cotton spread, from the shattered lamp at the bed’s foot. The screen clattered on the porch roof. I let go of Hunt and lunged forward, carrying him along with my rush till he pulled away from me. Arslan was already out of the window.

  The fire was to keep us busy, maybe, but neither of us was having any. Hunt dived through the window. How I got through I didn’t know.

  Arslan was running lightly along the edge of the porch roof, fuzzy in the darkness. At the corner he half turned to us, and his hand came up in a quick gesture of salute or warning. The light of the flames from the bedroom glinted on his face. Hunt had almost reached him when he dropped over the edge. Instantly, it seemed to me, the truck motor roared. There was one more burst of machinegun fire, somebody yelled something, and beyond the roof’s edge I saw the truck and the Land Rover scream into Pearl Street, their lights coming on like explosions.

  We teetered on the gentle slope of the shingles. I waved my good arm. “Joel!” I bellowed. “Pete Larner! All of you get up here! We’ve got to put out a fire!”

  Hunt came back to me with a step, facing me close. He shook with racking laughter. “That’s right, Mr. Bond,” he said. “Your house is burning. You’d better take care of your Goddamn house.”

  “A few weeks, a few eons—in other words, presumptively never. That’s when Arslan will come back.”

  That was what Hunt said. He had made his movement of self-preservation very promptly. He had attached himself to me the instant Arslan deserted him, but he had also asserted his independence, or at least his aloofness, by doing it with a very scornful air.

  And for half an hour on the porch roof, it was Hunt who had taken care of me. He had caught me when I swayed and eased me down away from the roof’s edge. He had held me back when I half sat up and raved at the KCR men to leave me alone and get to work on the fire. He had put the tourniquet on my arm, and he had jumped off the roof and gone for Dr. Allard.

  Later I found myself lying on a strange bed in a strange room. But it was Arslan’s bed, Arslan’s room. “Is it out?” I demanded.

  “Yes, yes, it’s out,” Luella answered.

  “Where’s Joel Munsey?”

  “He’s dead,” Hunt said from somewhere in the shadows.

  “He’s the only one,” Luella added quickly.

  “Then get me Leland Kitchener—or anybody that knows what’s going on.”

  Hunt put himself forward. “Okay, I can tell you. The town’s all yours. The troops are apparently all in camp—those that are still here. Nobody’s fighting anybody. The school is cleaned out. Nizam got his unit out with practically no action. Joel Munsey’s dead, Leland Kitchener has a few bullets in him, and you’re the rest of the casualty list.” His voice was brassy. “You had a nice little revolution going, Mr. Bond, but it never had a chance to get off the ground. Oh, yes, and your bed’s ruined—that’s all. But you have a couple of extra rooms now, anyway.”

  I looked at my arm lying beside me and was a little surprised to see fingers at the end of the bandages. Luella was holding my left hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t let you know beforehand,” I told her.

  “Thank goodness you didn’t.”

  “Where’s Leland?”

  “Downstairs. The doctor’s down there with him.”

  I took a good breath and started to get up. There were a lot of things to find out.

  We couldn’t tell how many Russians were still in the camp. The only men we saw were manning the machineguns along the fence. We had no way of attacking that kind of fortress, and I had no intention of trying it. There was no sign of our friendly officer. Either Nizam had got him, or he’d chickened out, or he’d been Arslan’s man all along.

  Except for the impacted Russians, the district was empty of troops; but, as the KCR soon found out, the border was as solidly guarded as ever, only now it was guarded from the other side. We had gained nothing but the half-mile-wide border strip. It wasn’t that our coup had failed; it had just ceased to be applicable.

  The bemusing thing was that Arslan had escaped from Kraftsville. He had known the plot, or at least known of it. He could hardly have doubted he could smash it. Instead, he had secretly packed up his valuables and fled. He had come into, Kraftsville like a young lion, rampant and triumphant, but in the end he had climbed out a window and run down a roof, and his getaway car had been waiting.

  There was a weir
d feeling everywhere, like the shock when an unpleasant noise you’ve gotten used to suddenly stops. No more soldiers! The Russians stayed inside their fence. On Tuesday Kraftsville boiled over. Boys romped through the school and Nizam’s headquarters, breaking windows and tumbling desks down the stairs. By midafternoon an orgy of visiting was in progress. The wagons were coming to town again. Impromptu picnics and covered-dish suppers were being put together. Reunions were being planned. The churches were announcing prayer services. Quite a few people were looking for Arslan’s liquor supply, and several of them came to me about it. As far as I was concerned, he’d either used it up or taken it with him—and in case anybody looked through my furnace-room window, I sent Hunt down to cover the cases with some boxes of Luella’s fruit jars.

  He had left the district to me and the KCR. But it was still a sealed box, with an explosive charge in the middle of it. We might have twenty-four hours of respite or forever; there was no way to know except by living it.

  As it turned out, we had five years.

  Part 2

  HUNT MORGAN

  CHAPTER 13

  I had dreamed, asleep and awake, so many variations of his return. I had even considered the possibility of not recognizing him. And when he came at last, the only shock I felt, standing unnoticed in the twilit doorway, was at seeing a stranger in our living room. Then the question arose in my mind, as it were abstractly, Is this Arslan? Yes, I answered, and felt nothing. I saw that he was not a large man—something I had known before, but not realized. His face was plain—a face without attraction or notable characteristic, a face with nothing special in it. Then he turned his head a little, and I thought definitely, No. Not Arslan. Not only his anonymous countenance but his whole build seemed different. The Arslan who inhabited my nightmares was a more massive person. Then he spoke to Franklin, and his voice was strange to me, and then, in the same moment, all familiar, and I knew him. And still I felt nothing. Or, rather, I felt an empty excitement, an emotion without content; aroused, but to nothing; awaiting the contact that should fill me with fear or with desire.