Arslan

by M J Engh

  “At least you got Hunt Morgan to tell you what goes on in there.”

  “I don’t rely too much on what Hunt Morgan tells me, Leland. He’s let me down a few times too many.” Which wasn’t entirely accurate. Hunt was useful enough, but even without him, it would have been pretty clear where Arslan was heading.

  He was a politician now. A real politician. It wasn’t hard to make fun of everything the government did, and mockery was one of Arslan’s specialties. People were ready for that—people were always ready for that kind of thing. He didn’t make fun of the KCR, though; in fact, to the extent that he had any public position on the subject, you could say he supported the KCR.

  He kept his boys well enough in line not to cut himself off from the rest of the population. (Plenty of hard drinking and hard riding, but no vandalism of private property. Plenty of flirting, and probably seductions, but no rapes.) The next step would be to start offering the same services as the KCR. Already people with a grudge or a gripe—and there were always those—were starting to think of Arslan as a man who might know how to run things better. “Nizam was behind a lot of that business before.” I don’t know how many times I heard it. “Things are different now. Arslan knows he’s got to behave himself. He’s only alive by the good will of the county.” That was as much as they needed—just an excuse for not shooting him on sight. Arslan’s position in Kraftsville was a little like Hunt’s, now; people didn’t have to accept him to do business with him.

  “He’s on city property, Mr. Bond. Looks like we got a right to evict him.”

  “Maybe we’ve got the right, Leland, but he’s got the arsenal.” As soon as he’d collected enough reliable recruits to garrison his new quarters, he had dispatched Hunt and Sanjar with a couple of boys to some cache farther east, and they had come back loaded with automatic rifles and ammunition.

  What Leland was really asking, and a lot of other people, too, was why I’d stood by and let Arslan set himself up as an independent power. Well, there was no way they could have understood the answer—or appreciated it if they had. Arslan wasn’t going to take over the world a second time, and I was ready to swear he wasn’t going to take over Kraftsville. If it ever came to fighting, I knew how to crack his famous fortifications (Hunt was useful, all right). And besides, there was a lot of solid power in that school, and I didn’t want to see it wasted. Putting Arslan out of action for good would be too much like cutting off my right hand.

  CHAPTER 27

  Leland Kitchener himself brought the alarm, and Leland never wasted much time on introductory remarks.

  “There’s a gang riding down this way from somewhere upstate. We’re in trouble, Mr. Bond. Only good thing, the General could be in trouble, too. Looks like his little plan went pffft.”

  “Lets have it.”

  “A girl up there got pregnant.”

  My throat and chest tightened. My stomach felt frozen. “How do you know? What happened?”

  “Got the word from Colton. Don’t know where they got it from—nor how much you can believe of it. Must not have been a very smart girl. She tried to get rid of it. Killed the baby, and herself, too. Or maybe that’s what she had in mind. Anyway, the thing is, she wasn’t what you’d call a decent girl. And they got a theory up there, somebody got a theory, it was by her having so many different gentlemen friends she got the baby.”

  I turned my head in disgust and spat into the dead grass (something I wouldn’t have done, anywhere, while Luella was alive). “It won’t hold much water, Leland.”

  “No, I guess not. Not when you think about the girls in the houses. But I hear that’s the theory.”

  “What are they doing about it?”

  “What they’re doing about it is, they’ve organized themselves a kind of a army. A bunch of them are just riding around the country, taking a town at a time.”

  “I don’t get it.” But I did get it, by premonition.

  “Seems like they take that theory as gospel. And they’re spreading the gospel.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’d have been here by now, only they veered off north of Colton. You know they got to stop and recuperate now and then.”

  “All right, Leland, pass it on. Not everything you’ve told me—just a KCR alert. I’m going to see Arslan.”

  It was apparently news to him, and interesting news, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He said nothing—politely—but the corner of his mouth tucked in with amusement. The idea of a troop of dedicated rapists, riding out to save the world by force, had to appeal to him. Salvation through violation—it was a concept that suited Arslan, even when it meant salvation from him.

  “So much for Plan Two,” I said as viciously as I knew how.

  “Perhaps. At worst, it was worth a try.” And he gave me the old bland look of half-surpirse. It only needed the caption: What fools these mortals be.

  I stood and leaned my palms on his desk, leaned far over to him. “You stinking bastard,” I shouted into his face, “I’m going to round up all the women and children in this county and I’m going to bring them here, and you’re going to defend them or die trying, and if you don’t I’m going to kill you—I don’t know how, but I’ll kill you by quarter-inches!”

  And he laughed—a big, open, joyful laugh that tossed his head back and pointed his beard at me. “Hurry,” he said. “No men, no boys who can fight. We can’t take more than a thousand. Sanjar will go to scout out these raiders of yours.”

  It was the biggest single operation we’d had to handle in years, and we weren’t really geared for that kind of an operation any more. I’d said “all the women and children,” but in fact we only needed to bring in the women of child-bearing age—stretching it a little on both ends, of course. We released as much ammunition as we could afford to people with families to protect—those that wouldn’t be likely to waste it—but we took nothing to the school. The rest of our little stock would be safe where it was, and Arslan could spare bullets better than we could.

  Well before sundown we had the school crammed full. We had brought in practically all of the girls—the very youngest, after all, were already twelve—and women and girls were all over everywhere. Every room, every hall, every other step of every staircase. It would have been impossible to conduct a defense, or anything else, in such a mob. Arslan’s answer was to set two of his boys to painting boundary lines. (They had turned up some usable paint in the course of their remodeling, and Hunt had done good work with it.) A bright stripe down every staircase reserved a broad passageway “for authorized personnel,” as Arslan put it. Stripes on the floors packed the crowd into the rear of the classrooms and against the corridor walls; the window areas were off limits to them, along with generous aisles that would make it easy for the defenders to get around in a hurry.

  One of the things Arslan’s gang had done was take out most of the basement floor. The concrete slabs had been put together on the remaining part to form a rainwater cistern, fed from the gutters by a pipe that came in through a convenient chink. In the dank subsoil they had excavated a large-scale latrine. The school was ready for a siege.

  If the raiders had guns or explosives, there might be one; otherwise, it looked like no contest. Arslan was as serious about the Battle of Kraftsville School as if the fate of the world depended on it. He hadn’t hesitated to hand out automatic weapons to my men, with a little lecture on how to use them. The KCR was manning the first floor and the basement, with a few monitors scattered through the crowd of females to keep them in line. Arslan’s boys were bubbling like a pot of soup, full of pepper and hotter than sin. This was what they’d been waiting for all their lives—all summer, anyway. Arslan himself looked a good ten years younger and ten pounds heavier.

  “What happens if nothing happens?” I asked him. “These kids can’t keep the steam up very long. Ten to one there won’t be any attack tonight, and tomorrow they’ll be down.”

  He fairly chortled. “There will be an a
ttack tonight. At least, it is very probable.” And it occurred to me that Sanjar had never returned from his scouting.

  “When’s Sanjar getting back?”

  “When he is ready.”

  So Sanjar was dropping some kind of bait to bring the raiders hot on his tracks. There was a lively blaze now in the big fireplace where the furnace used to be, and there must have been plenty of smoke coming out of the chimney. They wouldn’t have any trouble finding us—and just in case they did, Arslan was already having the lamps lit on the top floor.

  They came without much commotion, riding down Pearl Street at an easy pace. There must have been about a hundred. They pretty nearly filled the block, not solidly, but in ragged clumps. At the southwest corner of the schoolground they stopped and bunched up into a dense mass. “Why not fire now?” I didn’t see how we’d ever get a decent shot, otherwise, in the dusk.

  Arslan shook his head. We were watching from a second-floor window. “No. We shall get a better return for our bullets.” And he added, not as casually as he seemed to think, “Sanjar may be with them.”

  For all the orders of silence, the crowd inside kept up a steady buzz of noise. Everything considered, they were being pretty quiet, but you couldn’t expect that many women to be soundless. The horsemen were talking, but there was no hope of hearing anything they said.

  Now they started their move, still not in much of a hurry. Maybe twenty-five or thirty of them peeled off and came across the parking lot at what started as a walk and ended as a fast trot, bringing up at the south door in a flurry of shouts. “Now!” Arslan bellowed. His boys were hanging half out of the second- and third-floor windows; the line of fire was practically straight down. Arslan himself was fairly mortised into the window frame, his hip on the sill, the light rifle making one stiff vertical rod with his left arm and shoulder. One momentary burst of fire was enough; then he was yelling, swearing at his boys furiously, and the shooting sputtered out. The poor fools outside hadn’t exactly expected this kind of treatment, judging from the screams. A belated volley of missiles came from the main body in the road—rocks, or something just as futile. I felt like the U.S. Cavalry in an old western.

  Not many of the women were really squealing, but it was enough to make quite a racket. Arslan was at the stairwell, roaring them quiet, yelling at his boys to follow orders, then back to the window. The attackers were lugging their casualties back across the parking lot. The main body milled and shrank away from the school. A few loose horses ran or stood aimlessly. Right beside the door, a wounded horse—I hoped it was a horse—was making a terrible noise. Obviously, they were taking too long to begin their next move. Arslan’s lips swelled with pleased contempt.

  Somebody on the third floor started shooting into them, and Arslan went up the stairs three at a time, clubbing the rifle in his hands as he ran. The thudding of his blows came down through the woodwork. Maybe he was expressing fatherly concern; Sanjar might still be out there. By the time he came back down, they had rallied and started their move. They split into three parts, one group tearing north and east around the block to attack the north side of the school. There, they would have the disadvantage of the steep north bank, but maybe they didn’t know that yet. The second group was supposed to hit the south side at the same time, presumably, but they got there first. They couldn’t have hoped to do much more than smash in the doors and first-floor windows, and to do that they had to get right up to the walls again. This time they got it from all three floors, hard. They wouldn’t have tried it if there’d been enough light to see how those doors and windows were barred. Their rocks and clubs were entirely wasted.

  But the third group—the biggest one—were dropping off their horses and ducking into the ruins of the west wing. Arslan had said he was going to demolish that wing, but he hadn’t been in much of a hurry to get around to it. There was no immediate danger there—they’d have to knock a hole in the brick wall, and that would take a little while—but they were protected from our fire. There was enough of the roof left to provide considerable cover, and the west wall of the main building was blind—not a window in it. (Arslan’s answer to that problem had been to install a trapdoor in the roof, and I wondered if there was anybody up there now. But the top floor was in his jurisdiction.)

  Arslan had hot-footed it across to a north window to be in on the juiciest slaughter, so he missed the steady stream of automatic rifle fire that cut into the south-side raiders from across Pearl Street. They must have felt as if they were caught between the upper and the nether millstone, but it was only one gun, and I thought, There’s Sanjar. It took me a little while to realize it was coming from my house. By that time, the horsemen had broken completely, at least on this side. They weren’t even pretending to try to get their wounded out. I had already called off the KCR fire. But Arslan was out for something else. His boys kept pouring it on—not to finish off the wounded and the dehorsed, but to cut down as many as possible of the fleeing.

  In the back of my head I heard Arslan yelling something with Hunt’s name in it, heard feet racketing down the stairs. Once they were bolted, the doors were awkward to open, but a few of the basement window bars had been planned for quick exit. I saw the flying shadows in the schoolyard—Hunt running clean and long-legged in the lead, and half a dozen more trailing behind him. Somebody on the roof fired a burst into the waiting horses at the far end of the west wing; then Hunt and the first few others got there. I couldn’t see what was happening any longer, but at any rate the men in the west wing had just lost their chance to get out. A light flared, too close to the west wall for me to make out what it was. It must have been a mistake; I could hear Arslan’s curses over the hubbub. Then a solid lump of flame pitched through the darkness and bounced its way down through the broken west-wing roof. A minute later another followed; this one caught between a jutting beam and the solid part of the roof and hung there blazing. Rifles or no rifles, Hunt’s detachment would have their hands full. Most men would sooner risk a bullet than burn.

  The west wing had to go, that was inevitable; but I didn’t intend to let my whole school burn for Arslan’s Plan Two or any other reason that came to mind. If that fire got out of hand, we’d have had all our work for nothing. Luckily it was a still night. I got my men busy rounding up everything that could hold water and organized a bucket brigade from the basement cistern up to the second floor, in case we needed it. There was shooting in the west wing, and the middle part of it was well afire. What raiders were still alive and on horseback had scattered down the neighboring streets, and some of Arslan’s boys were catching riderless horses and racing after them. Behind me, the school was in an uproar. The crowd of women had broken across their painted limits, shrieking to know what was going on. The riflemen were yelling in glee. Arslan reappeared beside me, thumping his fist against my shoulder. “How do you feel, sir?” he shouted over the tumult.

  “Great!” I yelled back at him, and straightened up from the window. “All over on the north side?”

  He answered me with a nod, already on his way out. It was no surprise that he wanted to finish off the wounded himself. My job was with the school, putting the fire out and getting that mob of females organized to go home again.

  I ran into Arslan a while later on a stair landing. “Finished?”

  He turned his eyes towards me, but I could have sworn he didn’t recognize me for a second. Sixteen years had begun to tell on him, after all. “So it wasn’t perfect,” I said. He kept on looking at me “Your virus.” He was so expressionless I wondered if he’d heard my words. The noise level was still pretty high. “Some of those guys are going to get away. Quite a few years and a lot of people dead, General, to have it end up just a matter of chance.”

  He took a breath like a man about to speak, and those black eyes came alive again, but he still didn’t say anything. The women’s chatter was seething all around us. Then Ward Munsey came hustling up the stairs, grasping Sanjar’s arm. “This here damn cr
azy kid!” He was almost yelling in his awe and delight. “He come in through that spillway hole on the cistern, and nobody knowed he was coming! Hey, General, I thought you told me nobody couldn’t get in there!” He paused to shake Sanjar’s arm. “Hey, boy, why don’t you come in the door like anybody else? Don’t you know the war’s over?”

  Sanjar grinned wanly, his eyes reaching for his father. He looked as if he were walking on tiptoe, every move he made tense and poised. He was keyed up to a new pitch altogether, and it was hard to tell whether, if you touched him, he would be tough as steel wire or brittle as thin glass. Arslan limped easily down to meet him, halfway up the flight, saying something in his own language, shifting the rifle to hug the boy’s shoulders with his good hand and shepherd him up the stairs. Abruptly he turned to me. “It is not chance.” His voice was hot. “There is no chance. There is always risk, but there is never chance.” They started past me up the next flight and stopped again. This time Arslan had to turn his head over his shoulder to look at me. “We accept the risk,” he exclaimed almost indignantly. “We do not abandon ourselves to chance.”

  Outside, some kind of order and progress was beginning to emerge. The fire was reduced to a few smoldering beams, checkered with bright gold embers. Bodies were dragged away from the doors; men were detailed to escort the women home by neighborhoods. The male civilian population—to call them that—were turning up in droves to claim their womenfolks or bring in a strayed raider, dead or alive, or just to exchange the news. Hunt came slowly from the direction of my house, a rifle sloped on his arm. He walked with deliberate grace, like a woman in a room full of strangers. Two or three people called to him, and he answered casually, tallying the dead raiders like a game bag. He sat down on the doorstep, barely out of the way of the open door, and looked up at me. “We used your horses,” he said. “I’ve taken care of them.”