by M J Engh
He was ugly. He had gotten a little stringy beard like Genghiz Khan, and his right hand and arm were horribly mutilated, transformed into a scar-striped claw.
And then he looked at me.
Ah, that was what I had forgotten—had thought I remembered, remembering only words; when Arslan looked at you, he looked at you altogether, and anyone else’s most penetrating stare was a casual glance in comparison. I felt his look go through me like an X-ray (that burned, pierced and burned, sweet as Liebestod); and knowing everything he wanted, he smiled at me, his inescapable smile, all joyfulness. “Hunt,” he said. And he said, “Sanjar is with the horses. Help him bring in the saddlebags.”
If I could have refused him, he would not have commanded me. I went out in the blue dusk to the shed and found Sanjar watering a gorgeous pair. In the twilight their coats were slatey-black; bays, perhaps. He must be nine now. I would never have recognized him. “I saw you go by a minute ago,” he said. “We got some things for you in the bags.” He looked very tired, but he grinned merrily at me. He was a beautiful boy; and, seeing that, I saw how like Arslan he was; and Arslan was beautiful to me again. “Don’t you have any horses?” he asked.
“Not this year.”
He frowned with quick concern and gestured around the shed. “Did they die?” I noticed that he had served the horses from our chickens’ supply of oats. Not, however, prodigally.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Nothing contagious.” And he smiled again, a very winning, open smile. He stood hardly higher than my waist. “How was he wounded?” I asked. Soon I must say Arslan aloud again; but not yet.
“Phosphorus,” he answered cheerily. “North of Athens. That was the only real fighting we got, that and in Canada. We got these”—he patted a sleek flank—“from Nizam in Ontario. Your corn looks good. When are you going to harvest?”
“About two weeks.” I wondered if he talked so easily to everyone, or if he thought of me as an old friend.
“They’re tired,” he said fondly. He was so tired himself that when he picked up a pair of saddlebags his arms trembled. “We rode from Marshalltown since daylight. We left the regiment at Colton.” I picked up the other pair of saddlebags. “Look.” He steadied his against the doorframe and flipped one open. “We’re going to learn Spanish.” He pulled out two small books and handed them over to me. They were beautiful—leather-bound, printed in Madrid; one volume of Lope de Vega, and one of Garcia Lorca. I had to smile. Yes, he was real; he was altogether Arslan, unqualified and undeniable.
A little girl lay curled asleep in the corner of the couch. Arslan opened the saddlebags beside her, displaying his largesse triumphantly. “Salt; the baggage train will bring more. Seeds: tea, barley, opium poppy, rice. Vodka: two liters only. Needles. Cloves. Whetstones. Penicillin. And this for you, Hunt.” It was a packet of notebook paper. “Novocaine. Solder.” The salt aside, they were all luxuries, the most useful and satisfying luxuries, the very things whose lack we had cursed a thousand times.
He laid his left hand on Sanjar’s shoulder. “Now sleep,” he said.
Sanjar stood up, with that clear smile, and all the rest of him hazy with weariness. “Upstairs?” The true crown prince.
Arslan nodded. “The old place. Do you remember?”
“I remember.” They grinned together, a contact very beautiful.
Franklin rose, grim and displeased, to lead the way upstairs. It was an act of—what? compassion? conspicuous gallantry?—that he did not detail me for the job of chambermaid. And I was alone with Arslan and the sleeping girl.
“Come here,” he said, and I came. I was afraid that he would touch me first with his ruined right hand; and, seeing my dread, that was what he did. But after all, it was a hand that could be lived with. The last two fingers were gone, and the next stiffly hooked, but it was still Arslan’s hand. He curled it around my bare forearm, and looked at me. When I began to tremble, he smiled and let me go.
I went back to my chair. He flipped one of the little books at me, and I caught it, and he was pleased. Yes, oh yes, now I remembered; it was exactly for this that I had loved and hated Arslan, those eons ago—that everything pleased him, like a child, or like a child intensified and exaggerated. “Read to me,” he said.
“I can’t read Spanish.” The first words I had spoken to him in five years.
This time he laughed aloud in his pleasure. “Hunt,” he said. And he rocked forward a little, laughing at me. “Read,” he said.
It was the Lorca. There was a little introduction, and I began with that. Of course I knew no more about Spanish than how to say mañana. But to be made ludicrous by Arslan was an old, accustomed thing; and, after all, I had undertaken to teach myself Latin once, and Turkmen, without total failure. So I read, as intelligently as I could, and he listened, serious and intent as ever he had listened to Mommsen, or Milton, or Samuel Eliot Morrison. Franklin was back before I had finished. He stood almost between us, looking first at me, then at Arslan, with impersonal, expressionless interest—the principal’s look, only a trifle pallid now in the comparative presence of Arslan. And having weighed and measured me to the pound and foot, Arslan to the milligram and millimeter, he nodded with judicious frown and asked brusquely, “Will you have a glass of beer?” And Arslan—soberly, soberly—with glowing eyes and lifted brows, replied, “This will please me very much, sir.” A decision of state.
Did Arslan ever offer toasts? None that my broken memory showed, yet now he lifted his mug smilingly toward Franklin. “To you, sir.” A singular you.
“We have our little brewery in the basement,” Franklin said explanatorily.
“Is this a change of principles, sir, or only of practice?”
“Only of practice. We’ve always said a little moderate drinking was all right in Biblical times, because of the different conditions. I figure conditions have changed back again.”
Arslan chuckled. “Thus you permit yourself to drink—good. But to drink with me?”
“I’m not going to fight you, General, unless I have to.”
“Ah. And you command here?”
“I’m Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County.”
“And no doubt relatively better armed than when we parted. Why not arrest me now, sir?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Then I must discourage you. Earlier, my death would have had significant consequences for the world. This is no longer true.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have succeeded.”
Now break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea. Franklin sat still, large, and ominous. Arslan had spoken. I have succeeded. The universe adjusted itself.
“I didn’t know we were talking about your death,” Franklin said. The granite cliff hadn’t flinched.
“You don’t kill prisoners yet?” He smiled the old sweet smile. “If you try to manipulate my troops by using me as a hostage, you may have some temporary success. But of course I have left orders to cover this possibility. Does the prospect satisfy you, sir? Have you anything to gain now that is worth the risk of—of what, I do not tell you?” He studied Franklin eagerly, humor bubbling in his look. “But you will do as you wish, sir. Now it is immaterial what you do, or I, or any man.”
“Not to me. Not to Kraftsville.”
He shrugged and drank. “No. Doubtless no. But it is immaterial to the world. You can play out your games as you like, now. The course of the world is fixed. You have no power to destroy it.”
Franklin considered him drily. “It’s not immaterial to you either, General. You told me once that at the end you had to fight. I imagine that still goes.”
Arslan smiled appreciation. “Abstractly it is immaterial to me. Practically, no.” He looked whimsically into his drink. I knew the look; the pleasure that stirred him now was almost too much to contain. “I, too, play my games. And at the end, yes, I fight. Therefore consider carefully, sir. As for Sanjar”—his look tilted ceilingward; he
shone with pride—“Sanjar is my aide-de-camp and my bodyguard. Do not expect to manipulate me through Sanjar.” He drank deep. “I’ve had beer much worse than this, sir.”
“Hunt’s the brewmaster.”
I braced myself for Arslan’s look. But his eyes only flicked me weightlessly. “So you still have a food surplus.”
“We don’t still have one, we have one again. This has been the first good crop year since you left.”
“An omen?” He drained his mug, and I rose to pour him more before he could demand it.
“How long are you here for?” The principal’s voice, definitely a tone sterner than the supervisor’s.
“Don’t worry, sir. I am not taking Kraftsville from you. I am on my way to South America.”
“What are you up to there?”
“It is a tour of inspection.” He looked up into my face as I filled his mug. I kept my eyes fixed on the gushing beer. It was warm beer from the kitchen. There was a keg cooling in the wellhouse, but that was outside the sound of his voice. “Nizam has given me a very favorable report of you, sir.”
“Nizam? Don’t tell me he’s been skulking around in the bushes somewhere!”
“Rest assured that he has kept several eyes on you. Now, sir; what is the condition of the camp?”
“Annihilated,” Franklin intoned with relish. “After the Russians pulled out, people had a field day out there. Everything’s been burned or smashed or hauled off. Didn’t Nizam tell you that?”
Arslan only grinned. I put down the pitcher carefully and looked at him with fresh consideration. That he had appeared thus, unheralded and frivolously unprotected (And, save his good broadsword, he weapons had none. He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone) did not in itself surprise me; he had his games to play. But why should he ask about the camp unless he intended a second occupation? And something in me surrendered, resolved into peaceful tears that did not rise or fall, and I abandoned myself hopelessly to hope.
The child stirred, kittenlike, on the couch beside him, and in a fond, absent gesture he ran his maimed right hand along her leg. Till now I had not thought of her, except to note her presence. But I found, with distant amusement, that I had assumed what now his casually obscene caress confirmed. I observed her: my rival, my replacement. Her features were hidden in the snuggling crook of a thin arm and a tumble of hair; but that hair was alienly black as Arslan’s own, and her skin a color not made by sun. Where had he found her? India, perhaps, or North Africa.
“Unnecessary, sir.” (I had not heard, with any part of my brain that counted, what they had just been saying. Adult talk. For the past five years I had functioned as a real person in a real world; it had only required Arslan’s entrance to reduce me again to the irrelevance, to the freedom, of a spectator, of a child.) “Leila sleeps with me.”
“Not tonight,” Franklin stated definitively. “When you’ve got an army to back you up you can turn my house into a pigsty. We’ve seen that. But not tonight.”
Arslan ran his good hand under the sleeping child’s back and scooped her upright. She swayed like a heavy vine, her head tilting and swinging, flutters of darkness showing where her eyes fought to cope with the light. He looked, incredulous but tolerant, from her to Franklin. “As you like, sir. But you should consider two points. One, I desire only sleep tonight. Two, Leila is a professional, indeed an expert.”
“And three,” Franklin said equably, “tomorrow you’ll have your army to back you up again. But tonight she sleeps on the couch.”
CHAPTER 14
The third night, in the early quiet after the lights were out, while the nervous house settled its boards uneasily, Leila came to my bed. She turned back the quilt and began to slide in beside me. “No,” I said positively. In the dimness her smoky small face showed the pale light of a smile. “Arslan,” she explained.
I turned my face away into the pillow, disabled with regret, finding it pitiful that he had sent this child to me. In his mind, would an obligation be discharged—or at least deferred? Did he recognize obligation? He was Arslan. He might have chosen to punish me for my presumption, to punish me with the smallness of her cool narrow arms; I should not have dreamed of obligation. “Arslan?” I said, talking into the pillow.
She came sometimes early in the night, sometimes when I slept, sometimes in the dawn. She came always silent as a dream, appropriately fairylike in her smallness, miraculous in her power. The laying on of hands. And I understood, and I was reconciled, and the bitter buds of pity and regret opened peonylike into gratitude and joy. It was a gift—a gift that Arslan had put into her hands to give to me. It was exquisite, it was glad; and I wept, and I laughed, and her delicious small body and her lithe wise fingers lit multicolored joys through all my nerves. And “Arslan,” I sang silently into her hair, “Arslan, Arslan,” against her smooth brown body. This came, too, this unexpected universe, under the heading of the small word sex. This was pleasure, a thing I had never known, a thing pole-distant from the black urgencies that Arslan knew how to rouse, the blinding explosions that resolved them in wreck.
He had no business of state in Kraftsville now. He had come to give me this, and to tell Franklin a lie. I have succeeded. But when the dust-colored regiment had settled in the ruined camp, and the bodyguard of hawk-eyed Turkmens hovered devoutly in the house, he announced, “The last pockets of fertility are in South America.”
“In other words, you lied to me.”
“A simple deterrent, sir. I was relatively unarmed, and I wished to avoid unprofitable complications.” Franklin, too, no doubt, wished to avoid complications. Arslan had eaten reclined on the couch—his old place, his old style—served by his bodyguard, attended by Leila, while blithe Sanjar dined with us in the kitchen, bubbling questions and information. Now Sanjar had taken Leila to show her the camp, and I had brought in the cold keg. I looked into my mug and considered beer. I was very grateful for beer. How much ease there was in it, and after all, how much strength. There were still pockets of fertility. Arslan was a pocket of fertility.
“Is South America giving you trouble, General?”
“Yes, sir. It is the jungles—the extent of the jungles. The more accessible areas present no worse problems than other continents.” He dipped more beer from the open keg. He was affable, conversational, informative. “I have dealt with jungles elsewhere, of course. But the methods that worked in Burma and the Congo are not working well in Brazil. And not to work well is not to work at all. Ah, you look hopeful, sir. But it is very probable that I shall succeed. The areas are large, but they are isolated. It may be necessary to use more severe methods.” He broke off, looking at Franklin’s face, and in a swelling rush of exuberance he flung out his arms, half rising, and burst into a chortle of merriment. “Do you remember, sir, the night I left Kraftsville?”
I laughed. He flashed his look of all-knowing glee upon me, a moment’s mutual touch that left me motionless. Franklin leaned back in his chair, his face dark. And Arslan cried (turning upon himself that eager vivisectionist interest which was like mockery), “I have lost my pain.” He subsided smiling into the cushions. “Somewhere between Athens and Stalingrad.”
“That’ll be fine news for Morris Schott’s widow.”
Arslan watched from the bastion of his amusement. “You no longer put flowers on the graves.”
“Only on Decoration Day.” Franklin stretched his legs pontifically in front of him. “That’s our custom, General. We decorate all the graves then.”
“And Rusudan’s?” Arslan asked softly. “And your wife’s?”
Franklin’s voice, when he answered, was heavy. “My wife’s, yes. Rusudan hasn’t had any mourners around here lately.”
The eyes hooded, but the telltale dimples of the invisible smile remained. It was touching—or horrible, or ridiculous—that Arslan should have dimples. They were unobtrusive, they were faint, they were perhaps deniable; but I saw them. “How did your wife die?”
“Are you as
king for information, or just for entertainment?”
“For information, sir.”
“All right, then, General, I’ll tell you. She died for lack of some of those drugs you once assured me would be manufactured locally. She died of pneumonia. A simple dose of penicillin would have saved her.” (Although he had talked bitterly enough of ready-made excuses for doctors’ mistakes.) And he added, a gratuitous bonus of non-entertaining information, “It’ll be two years this November.”
Arslan lifted his drink with a motion like a shrug. “But you have managed well.”
“That’s right,” Franklin said savagely. “Considering the circumstances. Now I’d like some information. What was your idea leaving the Russians here as long as you did and then pulling them out the way you did?”
“The way I did? Why do you ask this, sir?”
“I mean secretly. I think I can understand why you sneaked out with your headquarters, and I think I can appreciate it. But why bother to leave the Russians here all winter, with nothing to do but watch the border and fraternize with us natives? And then why go to all the trouble of sneaking them out by night?”
Arslan gave him a meditative half-smile. Just beneath my diaphragm I felt the interesting beginnings of fear. Nizam’s reports had not satisfied him; I was doomed to describe to him personally those months of fruitless intrigue. “They were needed elsewhere. They had fraternized too much. Also, sir, it is my habit to move without advance notice. Every habit involves a weakness; what is predictable is exposed to attack. But by its nature, a habit of unpredictability is less dangerous than most.”
“And then it turns out not to make two cents’ worth of difference whether the border’s sealed or not. We get goods and we get news from pretty far up the Mississippi and the Ohio, too, General, but I don’t see where we’re any better off than before the Russians left.” Or, in short, Plan One was a posthumous success. He leaned back in his chair and fixed Arslan with a monitory stare. “We could live with the Russians. They earned their keep.”