by M J Engh
He’d said he wasn’t going to deal with Kraftsville people, but that turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth. In the last two years, starting from scratch and with all the odds apparently against him, he had built himself a very successful little business in horse-trading—a very exclusive business, too, because he dealt only in select breeding stock. It suited his restless temperament and his aloofness. He would ride far out of county to scout good prospects, and arrange deals sight unseen, acting as a go-between for men who’d never heard of each other. Then he’d ride off again with a string of his client’s horses and come back leading a string of new ones. Everybody was amazed that Hunt had turned out to be such a good judge of horseflesh and such a shrewd and honest trader (he got very few real complaints, at least in Kraftsville), but the only thing about his success that surprised me was that he’d gotten so many people to trust him. I figured we could both be proud of that.
The horse-trading was all on his own, but I’d already done what I could to give him a livable position in Kraftsville. I didn’t try to coddle him—that would have been no kindness—but I made it public knowledge that he was part of my family and a confidant in most of my business. After I was elected to my second term as County Supervisor and concurrently my first as Mayor, he served me as an unpaid private secretary, and I had let it be known before the election that he would do just that. Some people didn’t like it.
“I stood by Hunt when his own father turned him out, Leland. He’s not going to let me down.”
Leland tilted his head ruefully—a sort of sidling negative. “Maybe not you he won’t. But he don’t seem to think he owes the rest of the county nothing.”
“He’s working for me, not the rest of the county. And just what harm do you think he could do, anyway?”
“It ain’t me,” Leland protested. “It’s just what I hear around town.”
“Well, what the hell do you hear? I know it’s not you, Leland.”
“Well, you know there’s still Russian troops up north, and God knows where all. It’s not like the war was really over.”
I’d quit arguing about that word years ago. War was what people chose to call the state of abnormality Arslan had created. It was a shorthand way of saying that standard regulations didn’t apply. “All right, get it out, Leland.”
“Well, Arslan’s someplace, and Nizam’s someplace. Some people just figure Hunt’s in a pretty good spot to spy on things.”
“On me, you mean—if he was going to spy on anybody. And I know damned well he’s not going to spy on me. You just tell them to figure again, Leland.”
He pushed his scrap of a hat farther back on his shabby head. “Yeah, I can tell them you vouch for him.” He grinned. “And I don’t reckon the Turks is much interested in Kraft County no more, anyway.”
“And another thing, Leland, you make it clear to everybody I’m not using any public funds to pay Hunt. That’s a saving they’ll see reflected in the next budget.”
But I paid him something, all right: I broke his mother’s heart for him. He didn’t quite have what it took to do the job singlehanded. His father had been in poor health for some time, and Jean had taken to dropping in on the excuse of telling Hunt how Arnold was. Hunt was civil enough, but never much more. And after the elections, when, to give him his due, he had his hands pretty full of work, he began to be a little less.
“Could we just clarify something, Franklin?”
“We could try, at least.”
He was turning back from the door where he had just shown Jean out. His face was a little flushed and his lips a little tight—Hunt’s irritated look. “I’m curious to know just what are the visitation rights in this house.”
“I suppose any decent person is welcome here, if that’s what you mean.”
“I see,” he said pettishly. “In that case, where would you like me to do this work for you?”
Jean’s visit had interrupted something, but it wasn’t all that important. “Now what do you want, Hunt?”
“It’s what I don’t want.” He went back to his chair, demure and gloomy.
“I could put it to your mother that you’re very busy now, if that’s what you really want.”
His head snapped up like a twanged spring. His voice quivered. “I want … I want you to tell me you’ll keep her out of here! Isn’t the line drawable anywhere? Do I have to retreat to my bedroom for refuge? And how long before she’d be in there, too?” He grimaced in self-derision and beat the flat of his hand lightly on the chair arm. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, you don’t have to say any of it to me. Just let me submit that I’ve taken a lot of various things in my time, okay? And there are a few things that rightly or wrongly I can’t take.” He bit his lips, and sat there still and collected, but trembling quietly all over.
I sucked in my breath impatiently. “Exactly what do you have in mind, Hunt?” It was too bad it was his mother he just happened to be unable to bear, and I was well aware that he let himself tremble visibly, to demonstrate his earnestness. But that didn’t make his trembling or his need any less real.
“It’s your house.” Stubborn and meek.
“Hunt,” I said finally (I never knew how it was, but he could outwait me every time), “I give you my word she won’t enter this house while you’re living here—unless you ask her to.”
Naturally, I didn’t intend to put it to Jean in quite those terms, but she got it out of me anyway. She took it calmly, as Jean Morgan was bound to, but her face went deathly pale. “All right, Franklin.” Her voice cracked a little. “Don’t tell me why. Let’s just leave it at that.”
The house felt very empty, though Hunt had been a quiet person to live with. I fed his pets without enthusiasm. For a while—for years, in fact—I’d insisted on having no animals in the house, but when some people’s hostility against Hunt had broken out in the form of attacks on his horses, I’d told him to bring his pets inside if he wanted to. (Not that every animal on the place wasn’t a sort of pet to Hunt. He called the cow Lucinda. The old rooster was Saladin. Even the hens had names.) People who were capable of hamstringing a horse out of malice would do worse things to cats and dogs. That danger seemed to be past, now that Hunt was a practicing businessman; but I’d gotten used to the creatures—after all, it wasn’t the pampered menagerie of Arslan’s regime—and they had stayed. Now it was suddenly up to me to take care of them, and for Hunt’s sake I did it.
I figured that “north of here,” under the circumstances, was three or four days’ ride from Kraftsville. If it were any closer, Arslan couldn’t have resisted some kind of direct communication with his irregulars—always supposing they really existed. He would lose the third day in his next attack of chills and fever, unless he was fool enough to exhaust himself by riding with it. And, being Arslan, he’d make the most efficient use of his time; it was safe to assume he would give himself the maximum amount of rest, and arrive just in time to fight his battle before the next chill took hold. Of course, it might be farther north than that—another chill farther, or two or three; but Sanjar had given such an impression of immediacy, I was convinced otherwise. So I could begin the infuriating business of expecting them in a week and a half.
CHAPTER 23
It was Sanjar again who came as scout in the darkness. This time he woke me. “Sir! Wake up! Sir! A message from Arslan!” His light, sharp voice, hissing with urgency, entered my dream in the form of a knife thrust, and I woke up with the conviction I had been stabbed. He started back from the bed as I jerked upright. “Sanjar, sir! A message from Arslan!”
The mists cleared away. “What is it, Sanjar?”
“Arslan’s sick, Hunt’s wounded. Is it safe to bring them in?”
“Of course it is. How bad wounded?” I was out of bed and feeling for my clothes.
“Not so bad—a smashed leg. Horse fell on him.”
“Where are they?”
“In the shed.”
“Sounds like you pretty
well brought them in already.”
But he was gone. I pulled on my pants, dug my feet into my moccasins, stuck a candle into my pocket, and felt my way downstairs. It was the dead of night. The back door stood open. I crossed the yard to the shed.
It was full of the smell of horses and the sound of their breathing. “Hunt?” I said softly. His little dog was snuffling and fretting around our feet.
“Here,” Sanjar answered. He caught my hand and guided it to something solid.
“Hunt?”
“Hello, Franklin.” His voice was firm and sardonic. I ran my left arm under his right and got a good grip.
“Which is your bad leg?”
“The right. Otherwise known as the wrong. Let’s go.”
I took most of his weight, and we staggered across the yard. I didn’t let him pause till we had struggled through the open door and he could lean against the washstand. He was breathing in ragged gasps of pain and effort, and I could feel him sweating. “Damn it, where’s Sanjar?”
“Let’s go,” Hunt repeated tightly.
Even with Sanjar’s help it would have been hopeless to try to get him up the stairs. I crutched him into the living room and over to the couch and let him painfully down on it. In the darkness I didn’t want to fool with his injured leg; I hurried back to get a light from the cookstove embers and planted my candle on the coffee table. One little flame wouldn’t show through the heavy curtains. Together we got the leg lifted and straightened on the couch. It had been crudely splinted and bandaged, but I could feel the bones grating as we moved it. He lay back panting.
“Okay for a minute, Hunt?”
“Very fine.”
I headed back through the kitchen again, ready to chew out Sanjar and maybe Arslan, too. A minute later I was helping them. It was too much to ask an eleven-year-old boy to carry a grown man, however emaciated. Sanjar had gotten him—part dragging, part supporting—almost as far as the door, and they were both exhausted. Arslan was just conscious enough to try to keep his legs under him. He was shivering in short spasms; you could almost hear his bones rattle.
Between us we manhandled him into the dark house and upstairs to his old bed. He was so light it gave me a peculiar chill feeling in the pit of my stomach. “He’s all yours,” I told Sanjar, and went back down to Hunt. “Well, did you win it?”
“We won it.” He was looking studiously at the ceiling.
I went on through into the kitchen and brought him back a drink of water. He poured it down eagerly and gave me a shy sort of smile in the candlelight.
“I’m going for Dr. Allard.”
“No.” He tried to raise himself.
“Relax, Hunt. You can trust Jack Allard as well as you can me.” I patted him back down on the couch and went out again by the back door. I hadn’t gotten very far before Sanjar caught up with me. He ran like a hunting cat—low, and all but silent. I turned to meet him. “What’s the matter?”
He caught hold of my elbow. “Don’t get the doctor. I can take care of Arslan.”
“You can take care of him all you want to. I’m getting the doctor for Hunt.”
He hung on, and I half dragged him along. “You mustn’t let him know Arslan’s here.”
“Don’t worry, Sanjar. You can trust Doc Allard not to tell tales.”
“No!” he squeaked, his urgency too much for his young voice. He jerked at my arm, and I stopped again and faced him. The moon was down, but I could see that his face was twisted with earnestness. “I can’t even trust you!” he burst out. “You see? You’re going to tell the doctor!”
Under the circumstances I couldn’t laugh at him. “All right, Sanjar. My story is that Hunt came in with a broken leg and I went for help without waiting to find out how it happened. You hurry back to Hunt now and figure out a nice plausible lie. Don’t forget he’s got to explain how he got here alone on horseback.”
“Thanks! Thank you!” He melted back into the darkness.
The story Hunt told was sketchy, but not unbelievable. He had been thrown and dragged in the neighborhood of Reedsboro, where there was no doctor, and the Reedsboro people had given him the doubtful favor of an amateur bonesetting job and tied him to his horse. People would do things like that these days. It was a funny thing that Arslan’s plan of independent communities really had taken effect in some ways. There were business trips like Hunt’s, there was trade, and news filtered around fast enough; but by and large, people stayed in their own districts, and they didn’t take in strangers.
When the doctor was gone, I made sure Hunt was as comfortable as he could well be and went upstairs. There was no answer to my knock. I opened the door and stepped into the dawn-lit room. A curious noise was going on, a continuous soft rustle punctuated with irregular rasping sounds.
“Sanjar?” I couldn’t locate him for a few moments. Then I looked at Arslan in the bed and found Sanjar, too. He had fairly plastered himself onto his father, his arms locked around Arslan’s chest, his face profiled against Arslan’s throat. He was looking sidelong up at me with a look I knew all too well, the look I had seen in the eyes of dozens of wastrel’s sons as they faced their inevitable paddlings—the hopeless, utter defiance of the outlaw’s child. The noise was coming from Arslan. He was shaking, shaking helplessly in the grip of his cold disease, and he was not conscious now. His breath came in noisy heaves. Sanjar had put everything available on him—sheet and spread, the blankets he must have found in the old dresser, his own hot body.
I looked at them for a minute. “You’re pretty proud of your father, aren’t you?” He gazed at me with his steady desperation, the look that accepted hell. “Let me know if you need anything,” I said.
Those were a peculiar three days. It was hard to get used to the idea that Arslan might very well die in my house. I had to plan burial arrangements without mentioning the possibility to anybody. As for his northward expedition, I’d heard nothing but Hunt’s “We won it.” The physical results didn’t look very triumphal. Arslan himself had changed from a South American peasant’s rags to an equally ragged uniform—anonymous khaki, totally without insignia. Maybe that was a step up.
Kraftsville was willing enough to do business with Hunt, but he wasn’t what you could call socially popular. The silver lining of that was that we were spared the normal flood of neighborly visits and inquiries. Jean Morgan came, of course. “He’s doing very well,” I told her. “He’s comfortable.”
“May I come in?” We were standing in the open front door. Hunt was just out of sight at the far end of the living room.
“Jean,” I said, “you know I can’t go back on my word.”
She set her jaw and looked at me hard. “I’d laugh, if I felt cheerful enough. Just tell me, Franklin, did you ever hear of a more ridiculous situation? My son is in there with a broken leg, and I’m here on the doorstep begging admittance.”
But begging was something Jean Morgan couldn’t have done. When she saw I meant what I said, she went away without more ado.
I stretched my charity to the point of offering Arslan, through Sanjar, a pair of my pajamas. They were politely declined. As before I saw nothing of Arslan, but this time I saw more of Sanjar. With Hunt immobilized, he undertook to do all the cooking, after he’d asked my permission very prettily. As a cook he was a little less than inspired, but about as competent as you could want for an eleven-year-old. He took whatever I brought into the kitchen, and inevitably he boiled it. We lived on nondescript gruels and unclassified stews. And while his pots simmered, Sanjar squatted or sat cross-legged beside Hunt’s couch, deep in cheery discussion. I left them alone; it was pretty obvious they preferred to speak Turkistani when I was within earshot. I hadn’t seen Hunt so animated in years. And since Arslan had come through his chill, Sanjar was all smiles. He hadn’t really learned yet that his father was mortal.
But except with Sanjar, Hunt had lapsed back into the inarticulateness of his first days with Arslan. I tried exactly once to ask him what had
happened. He fixed me with that remote look of a visitor from another world, as if we faced each other through barriers not simply of language but of perception. “It was a battle,” he said. “We won it.”
“What happened to Nizam?”
He shrugged, and after a while he said in an answering tone, “What happens to Nizams?”
“I expect they succeed or they die trying.”
He nodded slowly. “Nizam’s dead.”
“What was he trying for?”
“Exactly,” he said.
CHAPTER 24
The third day, Sanjar was as restless as a young cat wanting out. Arslan’s next chill was due tomorrow, and the prospect seemed to infect the boy with jumpiness. For the first time since he was a tot, I saw him get really mad, flaring up at Hunt in the course of their chats, swearing—multilingually—like a trooper over his cooking. But it was with an air almost of contrition that he came to me just after lunch.
“Mr. Bond, I want to catch us some fish for supper. Arslan’s asleep. He won’t need anything for a few hours, and I’ll be back by then.”
“In broad daylight, Sanjar?”
He gave me the humbly calculating look of a wise child facing the barrier of adult prejudice—considering how to convince me he knew his business without displaying a confidence that would look like overconfidence. “I can keep out of sight,” he began cautiously, and I clapped him on the shoulder and told him to go ahead.
He flushed with relief and pleasure. All the same, he managed to delay for half an hour, fussing up and down stairs, he was so anxious to leave Arslan well provided for. When he finally went, he went through the kitchen window, surging out the way he always did, with the unreal grace of a shadow or a dancer. There was a certain crazy beauty about Sanjar. He preferred windows to doors—and he was entitled to windows.