Arslan. Part 11

"Come here," he said, and I came. I was afraid that he would touch me first with his ruined right hand; and, seeing my dread, that was what he did. But after all, it was a hand that could be lived with. The last two fingers were gone, and the next stiffly hooked, but it was still Arslan's hand. He curled it around my bare forearm, and looked at me. When I began to tremble, he smiled and let me go.

I went back to my chair. He flipped one of the little books at me, and I caught it, and he was pleased. Yes, oh yes, now I remembered; it was exactly for this that I had loved and hated Arslan, those eons ago-that everything pleased him, like a child, or like a child intensified and exaggerated. "Read to me," he said.

"I can't read Spanish." The first words I had spoken to him in five years.

This time he laughed aloud in his pleasure. "Hunt," he said. And he rocked forward a little, laughing at me. "Read," he said.

It was the Lorca. There was a little introduction, and I began with that. Of course I knew no more about Spanish than how to say manana. But to be made ludicrous by Arslan was an old, accustomed thing; and, after all, I had undertaken to teach myself Latin once, and Turkmen, without total failure. So I read, as intelligently as I could, and he listened, serious and intent as ever he had listened to Mommsen, or Milton, or Samuel Eliot Morrison. Franklin was back before I had finished. He stood almost between us, looking first at me, then at Arslan, with impersonal, expressionless interest-the princ.i.p.al's look, only a trifle pallid now in the comparative presence of Arslan. And having weighed and measured me to the pound and foot, Arslan to the milligram and millimeter, he nodded with judicious frown and asked brusquely, "Will you have a gla.s.s of beer?" And Arslan-soberly, soberly-with glowing eyes and lifted brows, replied, "This will please me very much, sir." A decision of state.

Did Arslan ever offer toasts? None that my broken memory showed, yet now he lifted his mug smilingly toward Franklin. "To you, sir." A singular you.

"We have our little brewery in the bas.e.m.e.nt," Franklin said explanatorily.

"Is this a change of principles, sir, or only of practice?"

"Only of practice. We've always said a little moderate drinking was all right in Biblical times, because of the different conditions. I figure conditions have changed back again."

Arslan chuckled. "Thus you permit yourself to drink-good. But to drink with me?"

"I'm not going to fight you, General, unless I have to."

"Ah. And you command here?"

"I'm Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County."

"And no doubt relatively better armed than when we parted. Why not arrest me now, sir?"

"It's a possibility."

"Then I must discourage you. Earlier, my death would have had significant consequences for the world. This is no longer true."

"Why not?"

"Because I have succeeded."

Now break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea. Franklin sat still, large, and ominous. Arslan had spoken. I have succeeded. The universe adjusted itself.

"I didn't know we were talking about your death," Franklin said. The granite cliff hadn't flinched.

"You don't kill prisoners yet?" He smiled the old sweet smile. "If you try to manipulate my troops by using me as a hostage, you may have some temporary success. But of course I have left orders to cover this possibility. Does the prospect satisfy you, sir? Have you anything to gain now that is worth the risk of-of what, I do not tell you?" He studied Franklin eagerly, humor bubbling in his look. "But you will do as you wish, sir. Now it is immaterial what you do, or I, or any man."

"Not to me. Not to Kraftsville."

He shrugged and drank. "No. Doubtless no. But it is immaterial to the world. You can play out your games as you like, now. The course of the world is fixed. You have no power to destroy it."

Franklin considered him drily. "It's not immaterial to you either, General. You told me once that at the end you had to fight. I imagine that still goes."

Arslan smiled appreciation. "Abstractly it is immaterial to me. Practically, no." He looked whimsically into his drink. I knew the look; the pleasure that stirred him now was almost too much to contain. "I, too, play my games. And at the end, yes, I fight. Therefore consider carefully, sir. As for Sanjar"-his look tilted ceilingward; he shone with pride-"Sanjar is my aide-de-camp and my bodyguard. Do not expect to manipulate me through Sanjar." He drank deep. "I've had beer much worse than this, sir."

"Hunt's the brewmaster."

I braced myself for Arslan's look. But his eyes only flicked me weightlessly. "So you still have a food surplus."

"We don't still have one, we have one again. This has been the first good crop year since you left."

"An omen?" He drained his mug, and I rose to pour him more before he could demand it.

"How long are you here for?" The princ.i.p.al's voice, definitely a tone sterner than the supervisor's.

"Don't worry, sir. I am not taking Kraftsville from you. I am on my way to South America."

"What are you up to there?"

"It is a tour of inspection." He looked up into my face as I filled his mug. I kept my eyes fixed on the gus.h.i.+ng beer. It was warm beer from the kitchen. There was a keg cooling in the wellhouse, but that was outside the sound of his voice. "Nizam has given me a very favorable report of you, sir."

"Nizam? Don't tell me he's been skulking around in the bushes somewhere!"

"Rest a.s.sured that he has kept several eyes on you. Now, sir; what is the condition of the camp?"

"Annihilated," Franklin intoned with relish. "After the Russians pulled out, people had a field day out there. Everything's been burned or smashed or hauled off. Didn't Nizam tell you that?"

Arslan only grinned. I put down the pitcher carefully and looked at him with fresh consideration. That he had appeared thus, unheralded and frivolously unprotected (And, save his good broadsword, he weapons had none. He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone) did not in itself surprise me; he had his games to play. But why should he ask about the camp unless he intended a second occupation? And something in me surrendered, resolved into peaceful tears that did not rise or fall, and I abandoned myself hopelessly to hope.

The child stirred, kittenlike, on the couch beside him, and in a fond, absent gesture he ran his maimed right hand along her leg. Till now I had not thought of her, except to note her presence. But I found, with distant amus.e.m.e.nt, that I had a.s.sumed what now his casually obscene caress confirmed. I observed her: my rival, my replacement. Her features were hidden in the snuggling crook of a thin arm and a tumble of hair; but that hair was alienly black as Arslan's own, and her skin a color not made by sun. Where had he found her? India, perhaps, or North Africa.

"Unnecessary, sir." (I had not heard, with any part of my brain that counted, what they had just been saying. Adult talk. For the past five years I had functioned as a real person in a real world; it had only required Arslan's entrance to reduce me again to the irrelevance, to the freedom, of a spectator, of a child.) "Leila sleeps with me."

"Not tonight," Franklin stated definitively. "When you've got an army to back you up you can turn my house into a pigsty. We've seen that. But not tonight."

Arslan ran his good hand under the sleeping child's back and scooped her upright. She swayed like a heavy vine, her head tilting and swinging, flutters of darkness showing where her eyes fought to cope with the light. He looked, incredulous but tolerant, from her to Franklin. "As you like, sir. But you should consider two points. One, I desire only sleep tonight. Two, Leila is a professional, indeed an expert."

"And three," Franklin said equably, "tomorrow you'll have your army to back you up again. But tonight she sleeps on the couch."

Chapter 14.

The third night, in the early quiet after the lights were out, while the nervous house settled its boards uneasily, Leila came to my bed. She turned back the quilt and began to slide in beside me. "No," I said positively. In the dimness her smoky small face showed the pale light of a smile. "Arslan," she explained.

I turned my face away into the pillow, disabled with regret, finding it pitiful that he had sent this child to me. In his mind, would an obligation be discharged-or at least deferred? Did he recognize obligation? He was Arslan. He might have chosen to punish me for my presumption, to punish me with the smallness of her cool narrow arms; I should not have dreamed of obligation. "Arslan?" I said, talking into the pillow.

She came sometimes early in the night, sometimes when I slept, sometimes in the dawn. She came always silent as a dream, appropriately fairylike in her smallness, miraculous in her power. The laying on of hands. And I understood, and I was reconciled, and the bitter buds of pity and regret opened peonylike into grat.i.tude and joy. It was a gift-a gift that Arslan had put into her hands to give to me. It was exquisite, it was glad; and I wept, and I laughed, and her delicious small body and her lithe wise fingers lit multicolored joys through all my nerves. And "Arslan," I sang silently into her hair, "Arslan, Arslan," against her smooth brown body. This came, too, this unexpected universe, under the heading of the small word s.e.x. This was pleasure, a thing I had never known, a thing pole-distant from the black urgencies that Arslan knew how to rouse, the blinding explosions that resolved them in wreck.

He had no business of state in Kraftsville now. He had come to give me this, and to tell Franklin a lie. I have succeeded. But when the dust-colored regiment had settled in the ruined camp, and the bodyguard of hawk-eyed Turkmens hovered devoutly in the house, he announced, "The last pockets of fertility are in South America."

"In other words, you lied to me."

"A simple deterrent, sir. I was relatively unarmed, and I wished to avoid unprofitable complications." Franklin, too, no doubt, wished to avoid complications. Arslan had eaten reclined on the couch-his old place, his old style-served by his bodyguard, attended by Leila, while blithe Sanjar dined with us in the kitchen, bubbling questions and information. Now Sanjar had taken Leila to show her the camp, and I had brought in the cold keg. I looked into my mug and considered beer. I was very grateful for beer. How much ease there was in it, and after all, how much strength. There were still pockets of fertility. Arslan was a pocket of fertility.

"Is South America giving you trouble, General?"

"Yes, sir. It is the jungles-the extent of the jungles. The more accessible areas present no worse problems than other continents." He dipped more beer from the open keg. He was affable, conversational, informative. "I have dealt with jungles elsewhere, of course. But the methods that worked in Burma and the Congo are not working well in Brazil. And not to work well is not to work at all. Ah, you look hopeful, sir. But it is very probable that I shall succeed. The areas are large, but they are isolated. It may be necessary to use more severe methods." He broke off, looking at Franklin's face, and in a swelling rush of exuberance he flung out his arms, half rising, and burst into a chortle of merriment. "Do you remember, sir, the night I left Kraftsville?"

I laughed. He flashed his look of all-knowing glee upon me, a moment's mutual touch that left me motionless. Franklin leaned back in his chair, his face dark. And Arslan cried (turning upon himself that eager vivisectionist interest which was like mockery), "I have lost my pain." He subsided smiling into the cus.h.i.+ons. "Somewhere between Athens and Stalingrad."

"That'll be fine news for Morris Schott's widow."

Arslan watched from the bastion of his amus.e.m.e.nt. "You no longer put flowers on the graves."

"Only on Decoration Day." Franklin stretched his legs pontifically in front of him. "That's our custom, General. We decorate all the graves then."

"And Rusudan's?" Arslan asked softly. "And your wife's?"

Franklin's voice, when he answered, was heavy. "My wife's, yes. Rusudan hasn't had any mourners around here lately."

The eyes hooded, but the telltale dimples of the invisible smile remained. It was touching-or horrible, or ridiculous-that Arslan should have dimples. They were un.o.btrusive, they were faint, they were perhaps deniable; but I saw them. "How did your wife die?"

"Are you asking for information, or just for entertainment?"

"For information, sir."

"All right, then, General, I'll tell you. She died for lack of some of those drugs you once a.s.sured me would be manufactured locally. She died of pneumonia. A simple dose of penicillin would have saved her." (Although he had talked bitterly enough of ready-made excuses for doctors' mistakes.) And he added, a gratuitous bonus of non-entertaining information, "It'll be two years this November."

Arslan lifted his drink with a motion like a shrug. "But you have managed well."

"That's right," Franklin said savagely. "Considering the circ.u.mstances. Now I'd like some information. What was your idea leaving the Russians here as long as you did and then pulling them out the way you did?"

"The way I did? Why do you ask this, sir?"

"I mean secretly. I think I can understand why you sneaked out with your headquarters, and I think I can appreciate it. But why bother to leave the Russians here all winter, with nothing to do but watch the border and fraternize with us natives? And then why go to all the trouble of sneaking them out by night?"

Arslan gave him a meditative half-smile. Just beneath my diaphragm I felt the interesting beginnings of fear. Nizam's reports had not satisfied him; I was doomed to describe to him personally those months of fruitless intrigue. "They were needed elsewhere. They had fraternized too much. Also, sir, it is my habit to move without advance notice. Every habit involves a weakness; what is predictable is exposed to attack. But by its nature, a habit of unpredictability is less dangerous than most."

"And then it turns out not to make two cents' worth of difference whether the border's sealed or not. We get goods and we get news from pretty far up the Mississippi and the Ohio, too, General, but I don't see where we're any better off than before the Russians left." Or, in short, Plan One was a posthumous success. He leaned back in his chair and fixed Arslan with a monitory stare. "We could live with the Russians. They earned their keep."

It had always been entertaining to observe their conversations: Franklin truculent and unbending, unabashedly asking his impertinent questions; Arslan with his accidental air of courtesy and his deliberate candor, forever expatiating his profoundest secrets as if there were nothing outrageous in the counseling of conqueror with conquered. It was like old times-the bitter truce, the threadbare couch, the presence (quiet, full of signification and portent) of the soldiers. Like old times, except that we all drank together, though independently; except that I was almost a quarter-century old; except that there were thread-like lines of gray in Arslan's coa.r.s.e hair, and webs of lines about his eyes, and the straggle of beard, and the white freckles on his right cheek where phosphorus had splattered; except that Franklin Bond was Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County.

Chapter 15.

Now what had been our real life was suspended. Arslan was here; we existed in relation to Arslan. Franklin and I pa.s.sed in our orbits, speaking like hostelers, all discussions adjourned, all quarrels in abeyance. Kraftsville receded, a cycloramic setting for Arslan's movements. The little war that had so occupied me for seven seasons lost all personal interest. Kraftsville would kill no more of my horses; I rode Arlan's horses again.

Yet, expectably, chance set me alone with Franklin after a late supper, Sanjar and Leila abed, Arslan and his bodyguard on some midnight errand, and nothing petty to talk about. "He's changed," Franklin said.

Not even to my physical sight, since that first night of his return. Arslan's mouth and Arslan's eyes were unscarred and unaged. But there was a difference around him. "He's over the hump," I said.

"That may be partly it." He snorted thoughtfully. "It's all over but the dirty work." Franklin L. Bond, ever fair. But his convictions were otherwise. "And of course," he added, "he was very young then."

Very young? I closed my eyes against it. Very young, when he crushed me beneath him on the green couch in the school gymnasium, and I heard him laugh in my ear, and smelled the ugly smell of him, and blazed and all but burst and splintered with hate? No, Arslan had never been very young. But I, I had been very young.

I was so young, indeed, that a little after, when I began to pull together my lacerated soul, I thought, So that's how it's done; and only later I learned, with surprise, that that was not necessarily how it was done at all among genteel modern h.o.m.os.e.xuals. But Arslan was not a genteel modern h.o.m.os.e.xual. He was outlandish, archaic, indifferently male.

That was the easy time. I lived quietly in h.e.l.l, and things were done to me. But already within a few weeks something was required-my single, ludicrous, several-times-daily act: to catch the book that sprang from the flas.h.i.+ng bow of his arm. Reading was not an action. It was rest, it was restoration-sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, the compensation that was granted for my laborious sleep. Night after night I climbed the same desperate mountains, th.o.r.n.y crags that crumbled and stabbed, staggering, crawling, naked and hideously torn. I woke disordered, with jerking nerves and quivering heart, to traverse the equally unsure footing of reality. I was learning his looks, his movements, as a downed flyer on a raft might urgently learn the looks and movements of the cryptic sea. There were the keen smiles, joyous when I had shown pain against my fruitlessly stoic will, eager when he was about to inflict it. (Later he was to tell Franklin Bond very soberly that he had never been cruel, that the pain he gave was incidental, a waste product of the process that gave him his victory or his pleasure. But if he abstained from the cra.s.ser crudities of sadism, it was because I suffered enough in the course of simple violent perversion. A byproduct, perhaps, but never waste.) There was the concentrated look with which he turned to a map or a soldier or a thought, releasing me for some moments or hours; the swinging, dancing stride that meant he would tease me a little before he laid me; the deliberate, gentle motion with which he reached for my shoulder when his desire was serious. Among them all, the one that lightened my heart like a fair breeze, a shower of pure rain-the whiplash flick of his forearm that sent a book spinning toward my hands.

I considered, with serious and equal care, the cultural requirements of tomatoes, the stagnation of seventeenth-century Russia, the artillery of h.e.l.l. My soul was restored. I mounted up with wings as of, say, a pigeon. But soon, risking glances from under the flimsy protection of my eyelids, I learned that there was something I could do. I had the power to produce, by my own action, an actual result in Arslan; the reading pleased him. And, by a retroactive casuality, reading became act.

So it was with a kind of triumph that I would see his taut face lighten, his deep eyes grow live with intent concern. I, I had done this. It was insignificant that his concern was for the battle of Poitiers or of Jericho, the poisonous principles of the Umbelliferae, black little Pip a-bob in the white-toothed sea; it was my act, my voice, my reading that had roused the concern. I could do something. I could do something to Arslan.

In early summer he began to take me hunting. The first time, it was to the abandoned woods just east of town. The old Karcher place. The name of it came to me as a recollection of another era. Childhood revisited. We walked into the woods-Arslan and I, and his bodyguard fanning out behind us. Arslan himself put the rifle into my uncomprehending hands, that almost let it fall before they grasped it. "Do not shoot me, Hunt." It was not a joke, but a command. Lightning-struck, I took it. Such an invitation smashed down walls on every side. Wild light and stormy winds poured upon me. We went into the woods.

It came to me slowly, as I stalked beside him, that I would not be permitted to shoot him. There would be half a dozen bullets in me before I could pull the trigger. Arslan watched me with interest. He was considering the way I held the gun and my face, gauging how much I wanted to kill him, calculating the probability of my trying to do it. The soldiers were to keep me harmless while he made his observations.

And presently he was so well satisfied that he sent them away.

I did not shoot that day-not at Arslan, not at the game we started. There were no closed seasons for him, no licenses or limits. His smooth face s.h.i.+ning with a happy l.u.s.t, he took squirrels, rabbits, doves, a bemused daylight possum, two brown thrashers, a curving mink-filling his bag and loading me with the excess, cursing sweetly in Turkmen when he missed a shot. But he missed few. (Once, later, Mr. Bond asked him why he never used a shotgun, even for birds, and he laughed: "Sir, if I could, I would carry the bullet in my hand.") He was a good marksman-of course, of course; but through that summer and fall I watched his marksmans.h.i.+p improve.

Sometimes he brought one or two of the hunting dogs, but evidently more for their education than for his pleasure, and I understood that he preferred not to share his attention between the dogs and me.

It was not the first day, it was a near one, when the first question was thrust to me, and necessarily I had no answer. We were alone in Karcher's woods (after the first hunt we were always alone, though two of his bodyguards waited, bored and smoking, in the jeep), and we were looking for deer. We made no kill that day; but in the dew and innocence of sunrise, on the heartbreaking plush of moss below the oaks and in the shelving shales and sandstones of the creekbanks, we tracked the spoor of a harem of whitetails. And while the dew exhaled and the gold sun undid the pink and grayness, and the mosquitoes gave way to gnats, and the birds bustled from matins into business, we tracked them slowly yet.

Arslan a little ahead and left of me went with grave eager eyes and ready gun. Suddenly he paused and touched my arm, a touch to stop and still me. I turned to him; and he gave me a gentle, smiling look, a look of such intimacy that my heart and my whole being turned and stirred, and I understood at last and saw as beautiful that verse in the Song of Solomon whose meaning had been cramped into the vulgar dialect of my childhood. It was a look of shared secrets, a look that drew me toward him more powerfully than ever his savage embrace had repulsed. I felt that he was offering me something dear to him-he who gave nothing, to whom nothing was dear. Then he turned his eyes, showing me which way to look, the motionless gesture of a soldier, of a hunter. And I looked, motionless too, looked into the dense, always quivering congeries of leaves, heard the sizzling hum and rustle of young summer, saw the oak branch that swept downward on our left, the tangled arches of bayberries, the scraggy cedar seedlings like discarded Christmas trees, the limp, blistered, delicately apple-colored leaflets of poison ivy. His fingers still lay upon my sleeve, without warmth, almost without pressure. I looked at him again, and now he was waiting for my response, for the look that would tell him I had understood, had received and accepted his treasure. And I was molten with longing to accept; but I had not received.

I was thirteen. All else ignored-as you might ignore the earth beneath your feet-he stood beside me a man, a grown man and a soldier, offering me with that smiling look a comrades.h.i.+p to dazzle any boy.

And seeing that I had not seen, he smiled a new smile, kindly withdrawing the offer; kindly, but so certainly that I caught my breath and leaned, stumbling at the verge of speech. But I had nothing to say to him.

That was one day. And that night he had a girl-I forget which girl. But there were other days. And I began to learn that the eddying stream of time brings round and round again not the same opportunity, but, over and over, opportunities for the same answer-like a thousand billion waves, each new, each different, each formed by its own causes, and yet all recognizably one.

There was always death, sometimes sickening, sometimes so neat and sweet that he gathered the body in his hands like a sleeping pet, running his fingers caressingly through the fur of c.o.o.n or cottontail, squirrel or possum. I had hunted before, though never much-with my grandfather, with my country cousins. I had shot rabbits myself, and doves, and missed squirrels. I had fished every summer since I could remember, and gigged frogs since I was old enough to stay up after dark. And I had been soft-hearted and a little squeamish by the savage standards of boyhood-but not really squeamish, not really soft-hearted. Now everything was different. Now every pain I witnessed, I felt; and with every dying I cringed nearer to my death. As the hook went through the minnow's back, I felt the rending stab in my own. Before the thres.h.i.+ng of the wordless deer, my own limbs ached with thwarted jerks, and the red heat of the bullet lay burning within my chest. It was a curious malady, which I tried to conceal; and though he knew that these things bothered me, I thought-it pleased me to think-that he never knew exactly how.

There was death in his hands, the gentle hands with which he hurt me, and death in the still eyes that watched the deer. But there was another death that filled the summer air, that made each breath an exercise in tension. At first I wondered what he found in the hunting that made it worth the risk, or if (he was a man, a soldier, a general, he knew so much more than I) there was really no risk worth considering. Then I saw the electric pleasure that kindled in him with his first shot, saw how he stalked more cautiously after each kill than before it, and I understood that the joy of the hunt was precisely in the risk. These woods, which had been tame as gardens to me all my life, were suddenly perilous as jungles. He was alone, except for me; armed, yes, but unprotected, vulnerable in the green mazes of the unconquerable woods; and with every shot advertising himself to all the vengefulness of the countryside.

So he moved, tense with his mortal pleasure, hunting, hunted, between two levels of death; William Rufus in the Saxon forest. And after the shot that brought our first deer staggering down upon its neck, he reached across the gun and laid his stilling fingers again on my arm. And I, hunched with the crus.h.i.+ng pain in my neck and shoulders, turned to look at him, and found again the offer in his eyes. "Look," he whispered.

What was it I was to see? Was there some animal crouched among the leaves? Some spoor I should have noticed? I shook my head at last-explicit answer to the explicitness of his word. So, at least, the time might come when we could talk.

There were other days. There were other moments. But it was not in the woods, it was in my bed, alone, in the room that had been Mr. Bond's son's, holding in my hands the soft pelt of a rabbit, that I understood.