by M J Engh
“Oh, God,” I said wearily. “What’s the use?”
He laughed harshly. “What’s the difference? Aren’t we all dead?” He clenched his trembling fist on the folded paper and burst out, “Nothing about Arslan is private!”
I looked at him. “Try to get things straight in that brain for once, Hunt. Neither the KCR nor the government could possibly lift a finger for Arslan.”
“Well, Sanjar, at least. If your dainty stomach allows, why don’t you get the hell out of here and look for Sanjar?”
“I don’t put much faith in their Bible oaths, and I judge Arslan didn’t either.”
“For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake!” he cried furiously. Tears were spilling into his soft beard.
I did go out to the shed and saddle Sanjar’s horse. Arslan was still Arslan; he would take a lot of killing, and they would be in no hurry about it. Still, he had looked very frail. He had said, with all his pedagogic assurance, “I am dying.” And the ugly thought never left my mind that if he died too soon to suit them, they would be back in a hurry for Hunt.
I was in the living room, looking at the old clock for probably the hundredth time, when the kitchen window rattled. I strode in to meet Sanjar as he pulled a heavy string of fish over the sill after him. His grin faded as he turned; I put the crumpled note into his hand. “J. G. Sims, Cully Johnson, and Harry Flaxman. They came for Hunt, and Arslan persuaded them to take him instead. They went in Flaxman’s wagon; looked like they headed for his place—that’s just north of Blue Creek on the Morrisville road. An hour ago. Flaxman’s got a rifle.” The paper fluttered downwards. “I saddled your horse.” I held out the pistol.
He took it in both hands. For a moment more he held still, barely crouched, his eyes flitting wildly. Then he spun back to the window and was up and out. I watched him sprint to the shed; a few seconds later he was on horseback, tearing across the back garden and disappearing into the trees. When he showed again in the glimpse of road beyond the burned stable, he was going at a smooth gallop.
I gave Hunt the knife Arslan had dropped, locked the doors, and went the quietest way round to Jack Allard’s. “Well, who’s getting murdered now?” he greeted me.
“I’m not sure, but you’d better bring everything you’ve got.”
By the time we got back to the house, Sanjar had been gone half an hour. That was plenty of time for him to get to Flaxman’s. I told the doctor to make himself at home, and started after him.
I heard something coming over the hill and pulled my horse off of the road into the high brush. It was Flaxman’s wagon, but Sanjar was driving. I hailed him. He pulled up and sat wordless while I tied my horse to the tailgate beside his and climbed in. “You drive,” he said shortly, dropping the reins in my lap. He swung over the back of the seat, knelt beside a heap of sacking on the wagon bed, and pulled back the top sack. Arslan’s face was unrecognizable. “Go easy,” Sanjar ordered huskily.
Four times during that slow ride home, Arslan moaned—a thin, inarticulate sound, horrible because it was so helplessly unconscious. I drove into the back yard and stopped as close as I could get to the back door. The doctor came out, and we rigged up a litter from hoe handles and sacks and carried him in. Hunt was sleeping heavily. “I gave him a little something to knock him out,” Jack explained. “I don’t know what you might be bringing home.”
What we had brought home had been pretty well worked over with the classic tire chains, though fists alone must have caved in the face. They had burned his naked feet, but apparently they hadn’t had the time, or the imagination, to get into anything more refined.
“I’d say he’ll live—if he weren’t already about two-thirds dead of malaria. Mind you, you don’t exactly die of malaria, any more than you die of flu; but when it’s knocked out all your resistance, it can get into your liver or your brain, or it can just weaken you to the point where any little infection will finish you off.” He gestured with his pipe towards the ceiling. “That’s why we’re not through up there yet. We’re going to keep scrubbing him till he wishes he was back at Flaxman’s. Every little laceration he’s picked up probably in the last three weeks is infected already, and of course now there isn’t a patch of undamaged skin on him any bigger than the palm of your hand. The burns aren’t much to speak of. The main thing is, I can’t tell yet just what’s ruptured inside.” He puffed thoughtfully. “And then of course he hasn’t lost a hell of a lot of blood, but he probably couldn’t afford to lose any.”
“How about transfusions?”
“Thought you’d say that, but I wasn’t going to suggest it if you didn’t. It’s just a little bit riskier than it used to be since we’ve gone primitive. You know your blood group? That’s all right, I’ll just run a little direct agglutination test.” He got up. “Sanjar gets first chance, but we may need all we can get.” In the kitchen doorway he paused. “And when he comes to himself—if he ever does—I wish you’d point out to him that it’s absolutely his own fault if he dies. Absolutely.”
The first transfusion was Sanjar’s blood. The second was mine. There was no change that I could see in the swollen, multicolored face, but the whistling breath slowed and steadied, and the doctor grunted with satisfaction.
Hunt woke near midnight. As soon as the fuzziness of the drug wore off enough for him to understand what had happened, he lashed out at us desperately. He was furious at the doctor for having put him to sleep, at me for having let Arslan be taken, at Sanjar for no logical reason. What really hurt him was that he couldn’t see Arslan and couldn’t help him. Their blood was incompatible.
CHAPTER 25
Now I found myself living in something like a state of siege. One morning I received a formal delegation of aldermen on the porch (they wouldn’t come inside); they informed me that the board considered I had forfeited my position as Mayor as long as I sheltered Arslan. “Suppose I got rid of Arslan. Would you consider me reinstated?”
They thought so, but the board would have to approve when the time came.
I told them they could go home and forget it. They had no such power, and like it or not, I was Mayor until elections next January. There wasn’t even any provision for impeachment in the city charter. I was pretty mad. Then they wanted to have Sanjar tried for murder. They were on better legal ground there, and I told them that just as soon as they recognized my authority as Mayor, I’d let them charge him and I’d go bail for him. There wasn’t much risk in that. I could delay the trial till the county cooled off enough to be reasonable. Cully’s relatives were the only people who might really care about what Sanjar had done at Flaxman’s place. The rest of the heat against Sanjar was just an overflow of the feeling against Arslan, and against me for shielding Arslan. It was leftover feeling. It might have applied well enough when Arslan was a foreign invader, but that didn’t mean it suited the present circumstances.
I kept the boy strictly in the house and yard, and I stayed home, too. Sanjar complained that the horses needed a run every day, but I convinced him it was too dangerous. If he went out, he might not come back alive, and Arslan needed him. If I went out, there might be a raid on the house.
Dr. Allard came every day. He’d had some unpleasantness on Arslan’s account too, of course, but he didn’t have to worry about any serious retaliation. A good doctor—any doctor—was too valuable.
I went in every day to have a look at Arslan, and it never failed to give me a peculiar feeling. So much of his aura of power had been physical. The thing that lay in the bed, dribbling from swollen lips, restlessly fingering the covers with shrunken hands—could this be any part of Arslan? The eyes in that discolored face, when they did open, were dull and drifting. The only sign of strength left was the violence of the shivering that racked him every third day. The whole bed rattled and inched along the floor. The blankets that Sanjar piled on him quivered like an earthquake. Downstairs, Hunt would lie staring at the ceiling while that racket went on above him. But during the second of those
chills the sunken eyes opened clear and burning and fixed on me. And slowly, improbably, the smashed mouth shaped into a smile—a smile with split lips and chattering broken teeth. Arslan still lived in that wrecked flesh.
For how long was something else again.
Sanjar was a good little nurse. He hung on everything the doctor said. He handled all the dirty sickroom business—feeding, bathing, bedpans, bandages. Under the circumstances I couldn’t expect him to nurse Hunt, too. But Hunt didn’t require much nursing.
He lay quiet and calm on the couch, as he had lain since his first resentful outburst. He was polite and cheerful, but he didn’t want to talk much. He, the perpetual reader, hardly touched a book. He was content to rest, propped up with pillow, stroking a drowsy cat, gazing peacefully towards the windows or at the ceiling. Hunt had beheld his miracle. Now nothing, not Arslan’s death nor Arslan’s life, could destroy it.
One day he was still dying; the next, he was going to live. Like a savage—which was appropriate enough—Arslan seemed to consider death a matter of choice, or at worst an avoidable accident. His mind had turned some corner in the night, and there only remained the detail of dragging his body after it.
He went at it with patience and determination. I had to change my mind again, seeing how the authority of the man shone through the debris of his body. I had the feeling he would have discarded it as readily as any other corpse, if there had been anyplace else for him to go.
Now when I came to his room it was a visit, not an observation. We talked. At first it was only a few minutes at a time, he tired so fast—and he was so careful not to push himself any harder than was profitable. But for those minutes he was so much his old self I literally forgot his appearance, forgot even the rasping weakness of his voice. It was like familiar music on a bad recording.
I learned his version of what had happened “north of here.” It had been really northeast, where the Wabash curves away through a rich plain, eastward from Clairmont into Indiana. Arslan’s six hundred irregulars—the remnants of a decayed Russian regiment—passably well-mounted and well-armed, had surprised Nizam in the process of building what was to be his capital. I shook my head. It wasn’t easy to imagine Nizam being surprised, still less Nizam or anybody else building a capital at this point of time. Arslan smiled—a painful act for his face, from the looks of it. “It is not unreasonable, sir. Nizam might very well expect to live twenty, thirty years more. Why should he not choose to live in the enjoyment of comfort and power? Does life require an heir?”
Hunt told me later, citing it as an example of what he called Arslan’s delicacy, that he, Arslan, had personally killed Nizam in the battle. But Arslan only remarked that Nizam’s body had been found among the dead. “I was able to identify him,” he said thoughtfully. That was the kind of remark Hunt would enjoy brooding over. It didn’t contain much, but a lot of tall structures could be built around it.
Later it was Kraftsville we talked about. If any of the information Hunt had been feeding to Nizam for the last two years had ever gotten through to Arslan, he didn’t want to admit it. The political situation interested him mightily—not to mention the personal situation of every prominent family in town, and some of the obscure ones.
He hadn’t known—or pretended he hadn’t—that Arnold Morgan was dead. Even granting he hadn’t watched us, and even knowing Hunt, that surprised me a little. But no doubt they’d had more urgent things to talk about than a father’s death. “I wasn’t there,” I said dryly. “I suppose he died as well as he lived.”
The last time I saw Arnold Morgan alive had been typical, in a way. I had stopped by the house out of duty, to see Jean, as I did sometimes. It helped give her the feeling Hunt took an interest in her. She wasn’t home, and in common decency I sat down to talk to Arnold. We were all right till Hunt’s name was mentioned.
“He seems to be happy there,” Arnold said, in the kind of tone in which people used to say So-and-so’s boy was really much better off in military school. There, presumably, was my house.
I didn’t ask him how he knew whether Hunt was happy or not. I said he was getting along well enough. Maybe it sounded a little cold.
“As well as he can, probably,” Arnold said stiffly. “I will say this,” he added, warming up. “I’ve never heard a breath of scandal concerning you and Hunt—and I think I would have heard. I hear all the rest of it about him. People are sweet enough to do that for me.”
I’d let him get that far because it had taken me that long to realize what he was talking about. I stood up and looked at him, and he shut his mouth. “What the hell are you trying to say?”
“Say? Nothing. I’m saying that nobody says anything. Or thinks anything, as far as I can tell.”
“You mean you could imagine a thing like that? What’s wrong with you, Arnold?”
“What’s wrong with me? What kind of a question is that?”
“Forget it. It’s stupid for us to be yelling at each other.”
“I didn’t know there was more than one of us …” He let it die out, and we managed to part politely enough. Arnold did look very poorly, and I didn’t doubt he suffered over Hunt. But in my opinion, Jean was better off when he died. As for Hunt, it was harder to say.
Arslan nodded slowly. His face was tight with thoughtful interest—so far as you could interpret its expressions. “You are no longer the resistance,” he said abruptly. “You are the rulers now.”
“Governors, maybe, General. Kraft County’s not a kingdom.”
“Administrators.”
“Yes, I’ll buy that.” We looked at each other. “You’re feeling better today.”
“Better, yes. And when I am well enough to want a woman?” He was grinning now, friendly and mocking as he’d ever been.
“Not in my house. You’re not a prisoner here, you’re a guest, and you’ll behave yourself as a decent guest for as long as you sleep under my roof. When you leave here, you’re on your own.” Even here and now, sick and broken and besieged, beaten within an inch of his life, and flat on his back in a hostile town, he had to show his goat legs. It was monotonous.
But he said no more about women. He still knew how to concentrate on the job in hand, and the job in hand was recuperation.
Maybe I’d built him up to legendary proportions myself, as I’d scolded so many other people for doing. Anyhow it seemed unlike him—unworthy of him—to take so long to get well and have such a hard time of it. Maybe, after all, nature hadn’t given him quite the body to match his will. Because he was trying, trying hard, and it must have been quite a blow to him to find out he couldn’t manipulate or coerce his abused flesh back to health.
There were the setbacks, the dreary plateaus after spurts of improvement, the bruises that wouldn’t heal, the wounds that insisted on festering. The chills lost their regularity but not their strength. Blood appeared in his stool; boils developed on his back. Sanjar was exhausted and frantic with impatience. But Hunt’s leg was knitting nicely. Jack Allard brought him a pair of crutches and told him to get up. He practiced for nearly half an hour downstairs before he undertook the climb to Arslan’s room. It would have been hard to say whether Arslan’s recovery went any faster after that, but at least Sanjar felt better. Now there was somebody else on duty who had the proper regard for his father.
I left them to their own devices. I had other things to tend to. There was quite a little backlog of city and county business building up, aside from the matter of Sanjar. As soon as Hunt was really on his feet, and Arslan was making his first dizzy attempts to stand, I called a meeting of the county board. Just as a precaution, somebody would be keeping an eye on my house. That was a private arrangement. If the KCR involved itself officially at all, it would have to be on the other side. But purely as a friendly gesture to me, a few old members were willing to stand watch over Arslan and his young henchmen.
Effectively, now, there were two governments in Kraft County, and I was at the head of both of them. T
he KCR functioned first as the county’s real police force (Kraftsville had one policeman on the payroll, who supervised what traffic we had and mediated disputes about barking dogs), secondly as a clearinghouse of information and a postal service. The elected government had gotten into the habit of not recognizing the KCR’s existence, which saved a lot of inconvenience for everybody. It worked out, without much special effort, that very few people were directly involved in both. In Arslan’s day, of course, there hadn’t been any elected government, and we had developed our own personnel and our own methods. With the end of Nizam’s repression, a lot more people were suddenly interested in joining the KCR, and over the years we had enlisted a few recruits; but generally we didn’t welcome those who had found reasons not to join as long as death by torture was one of the occupational hazards. And by and large, with a few exceptions, people who enjoyed politicking and drew votes were a different breed from KCR people. So the organizations had stayed separate, and the KCR had stayed quiet, though it wasn’t secret any more. But now there was a very nice harmony. The initiative usually came from the elected government. Questions would be raised before the board, and if it looked like a KCR matter, somebody would say, “I think this kind of thing would be better handled in the private sector,” and the question would be dismissed.
I personally took care of the KCR budget. Even when we had been fighting for our freedom, our country, and our self-respect, there had been expenses, and now that the thrills and the virtue were mostly gone, people wanted wages. It hadn’t seemed right, or smart, either, to make the KCR over into a paid Mafia. Instead, we had made it over into a mutual-assistance cooperative. Members were paid on the basis of their services and their needs—paid, in kind or in labor, by other members. Our income was in contributions levied on people we figured we had helped.