Arslan

by M J Engh

  I saw now, as we sank roaring through the air, one of the beautiful horrors of which he had told me—an invested city. Through the outskirts of Tokyo ran an irregular band of devastation, a knotted black sash binding the city against the sea. In places it merged into broader spots of wasteland—the love-knots of Arslan’s ribbon. Well-set fires and well-planted bombs had drawn that siege line. Tokyo, caught in a tightening belt of flame, and inspired by memories of old conflagrations, had saved herself (other cities had been less skillful or other-starred), to strangle more slowly in the cordon of blackness. Here, it had been Chinese troops who patrolled the perimeter, shooting down fugitives from the city. At certain checkpoints, a citizen could buy his way out with any deadly weapon. (In Tokyo, guns were scarce, but swords were equally acceptable.) Such people were packed off to the farm districts being laid out in Mongolia and Siberia. There were escapes, of course. There were sorties, organized and otherwise. In the depths of the city, there were riots, new fires, cannibalism. When the Chinese marched in at last, there was very little resistance.

  It was from such cities, docile with agony, that Arslan had drained off all the surviving males. All evidently pregnant women and mothers with male infants were ghettoed in convenient prisons and hospitals. Their men and boys were marched or shipped away, to farm the unappealingly virgin lands of northern Asia or Australia, or sometimes—if they passed the scrutiny of Nizam’s agents—to serve Arslan more directly, as drivers, mechanics, technicians, clerks, interpreters, administrators, seamen, soldiers. In such a city, only the inmates of the inevitable brothels required sterilization. It was, on the whole, an efficient way to dispose of several million people.

  There in Japan, to my relief, I fell ill. I was to learn on that zigzag journey that the health of mankind had already deteriorated. A surprising variety of plagues afflicted the concentrations of population, plagues that Arslan accepted gladly and manipulated with growing skill. Under the circumstances, diagnosis and prognosis of my ailment were alike uncertain, and not worth bothering with. I was content with the indefinite consolation of a schooldays phrase, “just a bug that’s going around.” The practical result was that I was spared setting foot on the barren ground of Tokyo. But after a few days of helpless peace I was well again.

  And by that time he had finished his dispositions in Japan (“It is very simple here, Hunt. But there are problems elsewhere”), and we were ready to put still more distance between our backs and Bukhara. But ere the circle homeward hies, Far, far must it remove. The route was circuitous, not circular, and in the end we were to come back to Bukhara from east, not west. But I took care not to anticipate any return.

  I was seeing the world. What surprised me was that it was indeed a world—globular, and covered all over with seas and continents. The sun went around and around it (Copernicus was irrelevant), and a mouse or a human being might go around and around it, too—by rocket, by plane, by ship and train, by swimming and walking if he chose. Maps could be drawn of it. Beams of electromagnetic energy could be bumped along its surface. It was real; it was finite.

  Finite, and not only divisible but already divided. Water was Arslan’s ally: the great rejecting oceans; rivers that cut nation from nation; the final ice of the mountains and the poles, blank, white, and perfect. And I was pleased. What Arslan was doing was fitting. I began to see the tangled web of twisting, heaping life in which this globular world was awkwardly netted. And I saw how Arslan with his square-nailed fingers worked at it, stretching and cutting and piecing and smoothing, so that someday, the scraps discarded, the web should fit neatly over every painted continent.

  Lying in alien beds, awaiting the dull tides of shallow sleep that would flow and ebb across the mudflats of my mind, I was oppressed by the futility of all my hours. Remembrance, anticipation, experience, all were shadows in the night. Nothing was real to me but weight, the resistance of the dark medium in which I moved. And in Delhi, Marseilles, Kinshasa, it appeared to me still in images of Kraftsville summer: days filled with linty wisps shed from the cottonwoods, like the lung-muffling waste from some industrial process, nights with the horrid blunderings of gross beetles, junebugs monstrous in pathetic stupidity. And a passing jet, mysterious and purposeful in the night, that in other times would have relieved awhile the pressure on my heart, now only grindingly moved and mumbled, crossing the sky with a long tearing sound, and left for a little a rasped furrow upon the flesh of mind.

  Worm-belly skin of the creeping oceans beneath us, clouds repurified of life beyond our wingtips. “You will see, Hunt. All wounds heal. The world will heal very quickly.”

  “All?”

  “Death heals the last.”

  King’s fool or kempery-man, I served in other functions. Aimless, jerked idly along his hectic track, I carried his books and listened. Dimly I glimpsed, perhaps, what it would be to call Arslan my friend.

  He took care, after all, to be on hand for the birth of the child he had never so much as mentioned, except in his battles with Rusudan. Sanjar; the name came from out of the air, or from some secret sanctum, immediately and unmodifiably. There was never any talk of “the baby.” Once, before we left Bukhara, Rusudan had followed him into my room to scream at him, and he had turned to her a face coarsened with rage, while I stood widening myself in futile imitation of an angry cat. It was a violation that roused in me resentments and disgusts I thought I had lost—and in fact they melted in the warm pleasure of their recognition. It was good to feel outraged; but since it was pointless to object to the outrage, I relaxed and observed it. The woman’s face streamed and dribbled (when Rusudan wept, she wept wholeheartedly), her wild hair, beautiful sometimes in its munificence, was fuzzed and snarled now; and yet her body, like Arslan’s, and for all the topological distortions of cramming one human being inside another, moved and held and moved with the authority of beauty. What she alternately begged and demanded was that she be allowed to name the child. He did not argue; he called her whore, bastard, beggar, sow, and a good deal else that got past me. And all the while, untainted by their strained ugly faces and guttersnipe voices and stupid peasant spite, their bodies played out a ballet of majesty and grace. It was one of the times when I thought I understood.

  Arslan’s son. Rusudan’s baby. I made an effort, once the birth was accomplished, to consider the child as a human being. Surely the offspring of these parents must be torn apart, wrenched by two such forces. And yet, apparently, he was not torn. Arslan accepted, as he accepted the hyperbolic weather of Bukhara, all the pampering jujuism with which Rusudan’s overheated court of handmaidens featherbedded their infant master. He insisted only on his right to claim Sanjar at any time of day or night and to handle him without interference. I found to my fleeting horror that it was I, not Arslan, who felt and showed the traditional discomposure of the male confronting the infant. It was so small, so frangible, and so irreparable. It seemed made of rice paper and jelly, a miniscule misrepresentation of humanity, at once exquisite and obscene. But, “Come, Sanjar,” said Arslan, and tucked the silken monsterlet into his bent arm with all the quick casual care he extended to his guns and his animals. Rusudan shrilled at him from her bed (deprived, for the time, of her body, she was all ugly now), and her women fluttered quietly like a border of voiceless birds. They were abandoned disconsolate.

  Day by day, month by month, in the crook of his father’s arm, perched on his father’s shoulders, dragging with pudgy-footed stumbles from his father’s hand, Sanjar was introduced to his profession. He was accustomed, in order, to every branch of Arslan’s transport system, from the ponderous cargo jets to the stony-footed mules of the mountaineers. Weaponry and communications were the meadow of his infant play. I always, and I only, spoke English to him—Arslan’s educational scheme, designed to promote native and uncontaminated bilingualism. “Paperwork,” Sanjar explained to me solemnly, burying his slight arms in the day’s unclassified residue from Arslan’s wastebasket—a phrase I did not remember having g
iven him, and which he might well have constructed for himself. He was quick-witted, sometimes thoughtful, delighted to please—traits that boded well, to my ignorance of little children, for his future development. I was not very patient, but I was not spiteful with him. He was so very small.

  CHAPTER 19

  Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

  Nescio; sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

  I claimed the right to be young; to be moved by Catullus. I was trying to translate that poem—my first exercise in authentic Latin. The story of my life in two lines. “I hate and I love.” Those words were the data, incapable of alteration. Odious, amorous; yet the verbs of English had their taproots in deeper soil. “Why I do that, perhaps you ask. I don’t know; but I feel it to be done.” Et excrucior: another datum. If I could translate that, the rest of the poem would be merely bricklaying. But if there was any direct English equivalent, I had so far failed to find it.

  “I hate and I love. Why, you may ask. I don’t know; but I feel it being done.” The passive infinitive (the inactive indefinite; or, say, the suffering unlimited). Fieri sentio: “to-be-being-done I feel.” I sense the happening. Et excrucior. “And I am crucified.”

  But that was wrong, both in its literal inaccuracy and in its lack of a certain refinement. Or was it falsely that “excruciate” tinted excrucior for me? Was it indeed a fact (one of those observable concepts of which the world and science were constructed) that the greatest pains were the fruit not of bludgeons but of needles—not the crushed bone, but the delicately raveling nerve—so that, in the tortuous course of two or three millennia, what had meant simply the extremity of pain had come thereby to connote exquisiteness? What had Catullus felt? That (I had read) was the true translator’s question. Well, the cross was an instrument combining the principles of bludgeon and needle.

  The ex troubled me. My knowledge and my books were inadequate to explain it. Excrucior: “I am taken down from the cross”? Or had ex, like per (thoroughly, thoroughly), its aspect of completeness? Outerly, utterly; “I am crucified out-and-out”?

  But it was futile. (Another Latin word; futilis, futile, it would be. But what exactly did it signify? What was futility after all—one of the basic states of human existence, undefinable except by pointing, part of the impenetrable bedrock of etymology?) For crucifixion, since the Crucifixion, was irreversibly changed, dyed with the purple of sacrifice and glory. What Catullus had felt, rereading his stylused words, I could not feel. The shadows of his world were different, the punctuation different, and crucifixion as commonplace and as repugnant as hanging. And to translate from his mind, rather than his words, would be to write a new poem, or the poem anew—impossible, unless I were Catullus.

  Futile, all futile, when in truth I could barely scratch out the literal meaning. Futile to be concerned with shades of skin color before I knew the structure of the skeleton. Grammar (knobby, articulated, concealing in stone-walled cells the leaveny life within), grammar refuted my pink and slovenly misshapes.

  “I hate and love.” I had never seen him comfort or soothe or tend a woman—not even Rusudan; least of all Rusudan. That sort of tenderness he reserved for his soldiers, for men wounded in body and spirit. I had had a few flashes of it, in Kraftsville and in Bukhara; but then I was certainly his man, and certainly I was wounded.

  And in time of crisis, what woman would cling to Arslan for comfort or protection? No; if they turned to him, it was as a tracking antenna to the missile that will smash it. And a wave of regret and pity went through me, to think that of all the women who had felt the pressure of that hard chest against their breasts, not one had clung there for security; and I was sorry for Arslan, my poor and terrible Arslan.

  “I hate, I love. You may ask why I do it.

  I don’t know; but I feel it done, and it tortures me.”

  He had spoken so often and so matter-of-factly of our returning to Kraftsville that I had long since ceased to believe him. “When we go back …” he would say, as if Kraftsville were his point of origin as much as mine. “When we go back, we will show Sanjar the cave in the hill.” My mind set sullenly. That had been my cave, one of my secret places, only big enough for one boy. “When we go back, Hunt, you will be useful to Nizam.” Not, You can help Nizam; willy-nilly, active or passive, I would be useful. Used. In the beginning, my heart had twisted at each of his magical go back’s; but it no longer occurred to me to consider them as real possibilities. Thus, though no doubt my potential usefulness had increased (I had lost scruples, gained cunning, advanced linguistically and diplomatically), I did not bother to imagine how I might be used. The only point worth examination was Arslan’s motive in rasping the skin of my soul with this particular tool on this particular day.

  So that when Rusudan’s bustle of packing began, I speculated with the ludicrous sobriety of a three-in-the-morning drunk. He was preparing to send her somewhere out of the way (and certainly at the last minute he would keep Sanjar with him); or we were all embarking on a royal progress of his dominions; or he was preparing to lead an actual campaign or defend against a threatened coup, and Rusudan and the child were to be sent elsewhere for safekeeping or, contrarily, as bait; or no one was in fact going anywhere, and all the preparations were one of Arslan’s smokescreens for some gigantic or minute maneuver. I failed to consider that the announced schedule might be simply true. And even when we reached Kraftsville, realization had not overtaken skepticism, so that I labored with feelings of belatedness and surprise, and perceived what I looked at only after a moment’s delay.

  Everything was altered. I had left as a victim, contemptible but pitiable. I returned as a henchman. To fulfill the role Kraftsville had assigned me, I should have died, or escaped, or found refuge in suicide, murder, or madness. It was ungrateful of me to have reappeared, intact and even cheerful, at Arslan’s side.

  Everything was altered, from my viewpoint as from Kraftsville’s. There was the trite and tediously inevitable change of perspective known, no doubt, to every returned native; but I myself had changed, so that the difference lay not only in point of view but in organs of perception. I too had thought myself a victim and seen myself fail in that role. But my conclusions were not Kraftsville’s.

  Mr. Bond, the image of a wise disappointed father, was glad to see me and offered no recriminations. It was he who introduced me to the practical realities of Kraftsville life. “We’ve had a lot of trouble with the deer.”

  I could resolve the sounds into words, but not into meaning. I smiled inquiringly.

  “Of course, we don’t have anything to shoot them with. We’ve turned into pretty good Indians—but you know something, Hunt? I don’t believe the Indians ever kept the deer down very well, either.”

  It was true, if ludicrous: a good deal of Kraft County effort was devoted to the serious business of “keeping the deer down.” Or, considered more constructively, of keeping the district in good meat. Kraft County had moved a long way toward a hunting economy, though it still had far to go. Venison had practically replaced beef; and yet deer were, in popular opinion, vermin. “The deer seem to have adapted better than Homo sapiens,” I said. Although better was a matter of definition.

  “They’re thriving, that’s the truth.” But “thriving” was not necessarily the same as adaptation; and in fact, hadn’t the deer been always better adapted, even in Homo sapiens’ heyday? They had done more than survive; they had kept the balance. It would have been valuable, once, to know their secret.

  Already on the first day, Mr. Bond began the offer of his pastime intrigues. He was to play Good Angel to my Faustus; but it was, of course, too late to burn my books. I had made that attempt, in Kraftsville and in Bukhara, without celestial prompting; and the first time he had dissuaded me (there were politics in heaven), and the second—when I needed whatever I could get, dissuasion or assistance—he had not been there to save me from proving myself incompetent. So that now I could be titillated, but not seduced. (Raped
virgins, in St. Augustine’s opinion, were as pure as any.) Still, his tone opened old and new possibilities.

  My usefulness to Nizam was wholly passive. When I was full, he squeezed me, and the pores of my mind, dutiful not to the greater glory of his Turkistan but to the principles of elasticity, gave up their drops of stored observation. But to serve Franklin L. Bond would have required activity. I had no doubt that he led the most powerful, at least, of whatever submerged forces moved beneath the dull ripples of Kraftsville’s mud-dark surface. It was tempting to think of offering my services—tempting but impossible. No man could serve two masters. That was not a moral prohibition, but a statement of fact. I could not choose to betray Arslan.

  No, nor conceive betrayal, however I struggled toward it. Meshed in his heavy nets, all maneuverings were futile. For all roads led to death, all species evolved toward extinction.

  Bukhara the Pure, Bukhara the Mine of Wisdom. So is every wise man a Bukharan. I had not realized, in the deep fever of Bukhara, what it was that he displayed to me so proudly, with such love. His city, yes. It was in Bukhara that I heard him called Al Hadj and learned that he had made the Great Pilgrimage with his mother when he was very small. But it was complacently, almost with pride, that he assured me he knew no Arabic. Bukhara the Dome of Islam, the Crown of the True Faith, the City of Many Mosques. His city, his country. “For four years I worked hard …” He had left the mosques still standing, as the churches of Holy Russia had still stood in the Soviet Union. But the light had gone out of the dome. And in Kraftsville I recognized at last that the Bukhara through which he had led me, his left hand locked on my wrist and his eyes luminous with joy, was already a ruin. He had cut, methodically, remorselessly, his own roots. And the nourishment he planned for his heir was drawn from other soil.

  It was part of his scheme of education that Sanjar should learn, willy-nilly, all the prowess of Huckleberry Finn. For that, too, I was useful. Arslan did not hunt this year, nor the next. (Had it been only a summer’s sport, a bachelor’s game?) It fell to me, Chiron to his infant Achilles, to initiate Sanjar into the art of killing. We were not very successful at hunting together—he was impatient and noisy, too small to help, too young to care—but I supposed he had fun in the woods. “I seen a bluebird, Hunt! I seen roses!” He mimicked my turns of phrase and Arslan’s (diversely stilted), but his grammar was pure Kraft County.