Arslan

by M J Engh

  That spring and others, I had found, too, the standard school-book wildflowers—Dutchman’s breeches, snowdrop, hepatica—academic beauties that were somehow touching, rooted in Kraft County dirt; touching but unreal. More to the point were the flocks of sturdy little upright violets that we called rooster-fights, purpling sunny hillcrests unregarded, mowed and trampled like the grass. And my orchids. Anomalous, unpredicted, and secret, they illuminated the woods.

  I had wondered, sometimes, if Sanjar had known those orchids. Perhaps he had seen them and passed on, unrealizing, he to whose homeless eyes all flowers were exotic. Solomon’s seal, cinquefoil, heal-all—he had delighted to name and touch the rugged blooms of Illinois. Smartweed, ironweed, butterfly-weed—season after season, he named, he touched, but he did not pick. Yet I had seen him race and roll with a puppy’s craziness in the red clover, and one day he had cut armloads of wild honeysuckle and ridden home triumphantly bedecked, in clouds of sweetness, with trailing stems twined in his vexed horse’s mane. But honeysuckle or columbine, mullein or pigweed, they were no more native to him than the flamboyant flora of monsoon Asia, he who was born to the twisted scrub of Arslan’s plains. To Sanjar, the unyellowing ivory of miraculous orchids in Karcher’s woods must be no more, no less, significant than the casual dayflowers whose blue blossoms and supine stalks we trampled every summer long. No, the orchids were mine forever.

  And Sanjar, Sanjar was gone—Sanjar whose shining eyes opened sometimes into a look of blindness. Confiding, quick Sanjar, afire with indignation as he struck with his riding whip, and struck again, and struck again (“You don’t kick any of those dogs, you hear?”) while the disgraced courtier whimpered and backed, head hunched behind his flapping arms. Singing Sanjar, Sanjar who had tumbled the books off the table, laughing—“Oh, what’s the use, Hunt?” (I thinking, but not saying, Someday you may want to read.) When Sanjar argued, he was candid, receptive, eager to learn; but his commands were arbitrary, his angers as flashing and frequent as summer lightning.

  My fingers curled in the stiff curled grass, and my mind rode back to the blaze of Bukharan summer, where Arslan lay, drenched with his sweat and mine, one bright arm flung like a wave-cast across his face. It was not likely that I would see him so again. In Bukhara, everything had been intensified, concentrated by a process of dehydration. Essences of day and night, of summer and winter; spring itself, too faint and swift to grasp, wringing the heart with one outrageous spasm; these things had suited the passions that lived within them, the hoarse and howling rages that swept down the shining stairs, the abandon (loose and laughing as drunkenness, but unblurred) of joy. That—if, of course, I could only have known it—had been our honeymoon.

  And he had been young then, very young. He had begun his work early, as a man should (as men were born to do before the artifices of civilization had prolonged childhood past puberty), and in his hour of triumph he had still been very young. He was not old now. He was total, arrived, all his powers at peak; and it was right that his work was finished. When Nizam lay dead in the grass at Clairmont, Arslan had looked at him, not long, but so intensely that I clenched my hand upon my belly as Franklin Bond was wont to do in his moments of horrible crisis. His worn face was without expression, as if all feeling and purpose had withdrawn from it, and only his eyes burned upon dead Nizam. Later he squatted beside me, steadying himself against the still-warm body of my horse, and touched my leg thoughtfully. “Fuck Nizam,” I said—the pain was so inescapable. Arslan’s face, cracked and sunken, warped like an old scrap of bad leather, softened once more into his dimpling smile. “Nizam,” he said gently. “Nizam was right.” Tears persisted in seeping out of my eyes. Yet six days later he was to barter his ravaged body for mine.

  Yes, Nizam had been right. Arslan’s ephemeral empire had passed, like a running prairie fire. Nizam’s devotion, like Arslan’s plans, had served its purpose and could be discarded. Work was over. It remained only to live.

  And Nizam’s style of living had crossed Arslan’s; therefore he had died. But Franklin Bond had built himself a solid hold on undisputed ground. Nobody’s servant, he had not run Nizam’s danger (the shadow’s death, the fatal disease of fidelity), and he had seen his own danger in good time and trimmed his ambitions to fit the space allotted. Like me—I thought—he had taken the step backward that enabled him to stand upright. There was a certain family relationship between our positions. It was therefore that I had chosen to live in his house; chosen in the teeth of those fierce abstractions—treason, murder—that were realities to him; chosen to live, or, if that were still denied me, to wait. And when I lay raging in the tranquil nights, it was for that, almost alone: that all obstacles had been passed, all walls broken, and yet he declined to recognize so simple a relationship.

  I had been resigned long since to the look in Arslan’s eyes, the look that lay far back like the silent shapes under deep water. A look of concern I could have forgiven, of anxiety, or of love; but it was more and worse than these, a look of vulnerability; I could not forgive him the fact that Sanjar could hurt him. Yet I had been resigned, for—surely as the inevitable, uncertain spring—Sanjar would go, Sanjar my almost friend, my something less than brother. Sanjar would go, and the alien burden of fatherhood would be lifted from Arslan, the far shapes die out from his eyes.

  For Karcher’s woods stood witness that his vulnerability could pass, that if his brain remembered, his heart could forget. Here, somewhere between the bramble-clogged roadside ditch and the scattered flat seeds of my persimmons, Rusudan had died among the leaves, opening the wound that would close at last, unnoticed, somewhere between Athens and Stalingrad. There were no memories of Rusudan in Arslan’s eyes now; and it was Sanjar who had planted roses on her grave.

  Idling on the road, leaning against the chain links of the Russians’ fence, they had watched me pass. I did not even know their names (Schuster was one?), though I knew their eyes. I rode slowly, not to avoid them. And when one hailed me, “Say, Hunt!” something made me draw rein—something not suicidal, but aggressive. Their question surprised me. So I was not, after all, their quarry. Yes; I knew (as what did I not know?) where Rusudan had gone to tease Fred Gonderling in the dusk. “Well, Hunt, if you meet Mr. Gonderling on the way, why don’t you pass the time of day with him a few minutes? Just so he don’t get there too soon, you know?” “Wouldn’t want him to have to wait out there in the woods by hisself,” said the other. Shadow men, they were not real. What was real was what turned inside me, pointing like a weathercock. “Right by the road,” I said. “Not really in the woods.” Later, beneath the lash of Arslan’s tormented voice, it was Fred Gonderling’s name I stammered out first, before my haphazard descriptions of the shadow men.

  I did not know, until he turned away from the four corpses, that I would not be the fifth. Until that moment I had waited, with anxious anticipation and a hollow sickness in the gut, to learn whether I would fight him—and how, if I did not, he would destroy me. But as he turned, slack and satiated, sheer joy bubbled within me, and I trembled like a fountain. Rusudan was dead, and I would live. Nights afterward, when in my agony I dared to tongue Rususdan’s name, he leaned the heel of his hand upon my mouth, saying for all time, “That case is closed,” and I read in the jet transparence of his eyes that I was absolved of my own sin, called only to suffer for others’.

  “Dreams are funny,” Sanjar had said once, touching me with his humanness. (For all the billions of babies, the first cry, the first step, the first word. Yet why should it be touching that life was cyclic?) “Sometimes I dream about”—he broke off, gently embarrassed—“you know—kids. Children. I mean, I just see them; walking around and everything.”

  “Playing,” I said. “That’s what children do.”

  He nodded gravely, his eyes searching inward.

  Like secret orchids, the children bloomed; native strangers, humble and precious. I too had dreamed of them, the children that would have been, the children that might be
. Certainly it was in quest of children that Sanjar was leading his little troop northward. Surely in all the fertile sweep of the rich land, at least one child must lurk. And I felt the intangible pulse of the earth against me, the immortal dirt of Karcher’s fecund woods, squirrel-eyed, bird-voiced, grass-pelted, cloven and rutted with the gushing generations of the deer.

  I rolled over and sat up, remembering something Sanjar had said once, coming contritely back to me after some trivial quarrel. “I wish you could have been with us all the time.” All the time. The memory struck like a revelation, so that I heard the tones of his voice, reviewed the expressions of his face, hands, shoulders, all his guileless muscles. I had taken it then as an offer of conciliation to a subordinate, no more. But it was more. I wish. Awkward with boyishness, unaccustomed to confession. You could have been. Helpless before the huge impossibilities of past and future. With us.

  I checked my gun—Arslan’s gun—and stood up.

  I knew my road now, and followed faithfully along it; up the hill, down the slope, across the creek, and upstream beside it. Below the head of the gorge I stood awhile, staring at the grape-eyed vine under the oak. He had his paths as well as I, and this was our only proven crossroads. But I did not meet him there, nor, working my way downhill, in the next valley. The lower reaches of the third were broad and ruggedly flat, a section that had been cut over more than once when this land belonged to somebody. Clumps of crimson sumac and little cedars made a low forest among the stumps and tall saplings. I stood for a long time surveying the gaps among the foliage. I could not afford another mistake. Slow waves of certainty succeeded one another: he would be here; he would not; he would be. Without surprise I grew aware of a certain brownness among the browns and reds and muted greens. I eased my head sideward a little, and made out the sleeping deer, folded snugly as a cat. A deer, but not my buck. One of his harem, perhaps; and in that hope, and expert with desire, I trod Indian-soft among the leaves, too busy to be moved by the intimacy of the scene that revealed itself to me.

  He lay among his loves, his splendorous head resting at ease along his foreleg. Moving with the faint pulses of the breeze that washed in slow ripples down the valley, I found my way to a vantage point against an ash tree and raised Arslan’s gun. Heat throbbed in my face, nested my heart. He had been hunted before, this stag. But who, even in his incautious youth, had seen him thus helplessly abandoned to peace? I would have wagered my life, at that moment, that no one, since the Shawnee had tracked his ancestors through the virgin scrub of aboriginal forests, had witnessed this secret domesticity in the woods. His ancestors, not mine; immigrant in my very homeland, I could only imitate the ancient lords of the land. But the unbroken stream of his breed ran back, birth by birth, through wooded centuries before the first footfall of those first immigrants of whom the Shawnee had been the illegitimate heirs. I lowered the gun.

  I could not take him so. In the end, I could not take him unawares. It was not, certainly, the classic perversion of sportsmen, obsolete from the moment of its conception, that morality demanded for the victim some chance of escape. No, my morality was older, more classic yet, the morality that distinguished between sacrifice and slaughter and had not yet dreamed of sport. In the end, it seemed to me, no death could be so cruelly unfair as the unfelt death in sleep. I leaned against the ash and waited. Time was my ally. Time: not the fourth dimension, but the first, the essential, without which the mere dimensions of space could not be born. Time: the matrix wherein we traced the shapes of beauty and of power. For it was shape that gave significance. Form was beauty—the classicists were right—and power was form. Starlight swept along the curved lanes of the closed universe; planets wheeled in the grooves that Newton had not seen. Swinging down the paths of time, my deer and I would meet—rightly, as our predecessors had met, here beneath other trees, round centuries ago.

  And after all, I was not simply an imitator—or not, at least, an imitation. If I wore moccasins, they were of my own design and making; and though for years past I had delighted to play with bows (making of civilization’s wreck an excuse to return to my childhood’s toys), for this hunt I chose a graver weapon. It added both power and risk. Arslan’s gun had not been fired for many months, though he cleaned and nursed it beyond all practical need; and the cartridges, however lovingly they had been guarded against assaults of weather, were older than Sanjar—twice, three times, perhaps, the age of the buck they were to kill. But in return for such precision and potency, it was only fair to accept the risk of a misfire.

  Fair: a sweeter, truer word than just. All justice aside, was it not keenly unfair that I had scrambled for crumbs beneath his table with his other minions?—that the place I had earned by such fierce apprenticeship was reserved to that mindless salamandrine queen of fire and earth? What had she to offer him, beside the match of passion? Where could they meet, but in the furious and volcanic dark? What, in simple fact, could they talk about?

  It was absurd, of course, to be still wrestling with the gorgeous shade of Rusudan—Rusudan whom Arslan had forgotten. But I wrestled now not for his affection (had that ever been the prize?) but for understanding. By what right had he suffered for Rusudan? It was I, not Rusudan, whom he had led through Karcher’s woods, to whom he had whispered, “Look.”

  And now, leaning in the very heart of the still circle, looking with wordless patience upon the nested deer, I turned the curve of recollection for the thousandth time, and saw, for the first time, everything in its place. Yes. It was I whom he had led through Karcher’s woods, to whom he had whispered, “Look.”

  I took a deep breath that swelled my chest like pride, and my eyes focused to a new intensity on the great stag. A thrill, slow but electric, passed through me. He was awake. I must have moved (perhaps I had breathed too vehemently), for he was aware of me. By infinite split seconds, time was draining past us.

  Then he rose. One fused sequence of movements, heavy and lunging and yet effectively graceful, brought him to his feet and on his way. I had swung the gun up with all my speed, guessed an aim. It jerked against my hands; the cartridge had been good. He sprang.

  Aborted and perfect, like the eternal gasp of violent art, his final spring hung before the leather-colored brushwood of his bed—hung, altered, and fell. I pushed forward, afire with the one hope that he would need no second shot, while my provident hands prepared the gun for it. The woods around me burst with exploding deer, the does scattering in panic out of the depths of sleep. He lay crashed upon the broken underbush. The dark vast eye loomed above his cheek. The sinewy prongs of his antlers (woodlike neither dead nor living) skewed his head into an awkwardness that seemed to guarantee the honesty of his proposition: I am dead. I squatted beside him and drew my knife, holding it ready to the warm, golden throat. Death, in theory so final and so certain, had mocked me before. His legs were stretched, a little more than half tense. I lifted one of the beautiful cloven forefeet and teased my knife into its depths, grazing the point against the black quick, but I did not plunge, not pry. I would not force him to betray his life, if he lived. Only, I gazed into the round brown eyes. There, if he lived, he would betray himself. There life would gleam, or flicker, or deeply glow, or fire up at me some uncontrollable bolt of intelligence or enmity. So I gazed into that dark globe, dived it, navigated it, sank and surfaced and swept along its curve. He was dead.

  And I remembered only then to notice the wound. My bullet had pierced the skull at its vulnerable point and thrust into the secret soft core of his brain. My right hand had brushed, unknowing, the little unsealed opening in the warm pelt, and small dark clots of his blood clung to me. He had been dead already when he sank upon the leaves.

  I rode into town against the light of the setting sun. Market Street was afire. A narrow blaze stretched down the long block of the schoolyard. From the slopes, with hilarious whoops, Arslan’s boys were hurtling blunt missiles into the flames. Behind them, and on the other sides of the school, lesser demons tende
d lesser fires. On the walk near the eastern one, a thin swarm of old men hovered about the naked carcasses of three hogs, ritually waving their flywhisk hands.

  I rode up the low east face of the yard, where Arslan waited, fists on hips. He laid his hand on the dun’s nose and walked past me to the packhorse. Turning in the saddle, I watched him inspect the buck, saw his eyes seek and find and judge the wound. When he began to untie the ropes, I dismounted. Together we heaved the shining body up and off and let its sudden bulk pour between us to the ground.

  “Good enough?”

  He grinned at me in silence and turned away, calling for volunteers to butcher the deer. I headed for the school, to return his rifle to its place.

  Inside and out, the feast was under way. The chickens were already cooked and the pork was roasting. My deer would be the final surfeiting course, toothsome and succulent. Kegs of beer stood open, for anyone with a cup or a cupped hand to help himself, and more were being hauled out. The town was gathering to the school, as it had gathered before.

  Beside me on the east walk, Franklin swung his spread hand in a slow horizontal arc, taking in the fires, the feasters, and the rolling kegs. “Do you know what this is, Hunt?”

  A wake? A jubilee? “The winter stores,” I said.

  “Exactly. Our food and fuel supply for the winter, going up in one big blaze.”

  “Plus the liquor supply. All the renewable resources.”

  “I don’t take it as a joke. We’ll have a hard time renewing them by December.”

  Hard times come again. But the fact was that they were renewable, as we were not, and my deer had planted his seed already in Karcher’s woods. “The sabbath was made for man,” I said.

  The indigo twilight deepened, deeper already than the hearts of jewels. Arslan strode to the eastern fire, his last limp dipping into a swoop, and lifted a long brand. In stately loops, trailing a fiery friz, it traced his path to the steps. And standing where he had stood to pass sentence on Kraftsville’s martyrs, he whirled the torch around his head once, twice, and pealed the undisobeyable order, “Listen!” At that enormous shout, the trivial shouts below subsided in a rush. There was no sound louder than the crackling of the fires, until he cried his ringing cry, “Is it good?”