Arslan. Part 12

When I was a child, we had had a sort of formal garden behind the house, and I had always rather liked it-liked it, in fact, a great deal more than I had ever admitted. It was exactly the formality of it that I liked; and the flaw, the secret reason for the real contempt for which I feigned other reasons, was that it failed in its formality-it was incomplete, inconsistent, too small or too open. But in midsummer and in fall, coming into it from the south side, I had momentarily loved it. It was calm. Calm. Beautiful in its calmness. The healing, smooth, content, contained, closed endlessness of the circle. And with the downy softness of the fur against my face, I knew, and quivered with hopeless regret for my dullness, that it was this he had offered me-the very calm of the circle.

Too late. Too late. The waves had ceased to flow. I sat up in the empty bed, clenched all over like a fist. Our strange and self abuse is the initiate fear that wants hard use. We are yet but young in deed. And I, indeed young, abused, initiate, got up and pounded on my door, pounded and did not answer the sentry's objection, pounded until my fists felt numbed and pulpy and Arslan's own hands turned the key in the lock and pushed me back. Afterwards we would talk.

Chapter 16.

It wasn't to understand Turkistani that I began to study it, but to understand Arslan. In time I would grow fond of that hot, smooth tongue, and proficient enough to silence his gossiping officers with my presence. But their cabals bored me. It was more interesting, and more significant, that what was officially called Turkistani was in fact Uzbek; that Arslan spoke by preference the Turkmen of his hand-picked bodyguard, and spoke it like a common soldier; that it was Colonel Nizam who spoke the elegant Uzbek of the schools.

I had learned by that time, too, the tactics he used to make his command of English seem greater than it was. No, not his command-for he commanded it truly and superbly-but the range and accuracy of his understanding. I had been reading to him for weeks when he first began to ask me the meanings of words-sometimes words he himself had used earlier. He never, as far as I could tell, admitted ignorance of an English word to anyone else. Confronted unignorably with a phrase he was unsure of, he would turn it back, with a straight face, in question, threat, or provocation, to elicit more data. I thought, too, that one reason for his inscrutable looks, his reluctance to show surprise or annoyance or enthusiasm, was a simple fear of betraying misunderstanding by an inappropriate reaction. In his own tongue he behaved as in his own bedroom-responsive as quicksilver, eager, impatient, and irritable, throwing off little explosions of scorn and admiration.

In that crowded, bustling house I lived alone and silent. The raucous poultry of the yard, the thick-tongued soldiery, alike confident of their validity, filled day and night with urgent communication. Betty-Miss Hanson to me before my promotion to auxiliary adulthood-emitted signals of agony and ecstasy from Arslan's room. Mr. and Mrs. Bond communed conjugally, upon a band narrow but apparently clear. Cats wove their intricate society through the useful obstacles of humankind and its hounds. The monkey, sui generis, scratched his piglike skin and pattered forth rattling streams of helpless exhortation. Individuals addressed communications to me: Darya sang, in a language whose very sounds I never grasped; Mrs. Bond presented to me kindnesses, fruit pies, clean linen; Arslan's soldiers delivered retailed orders and original mockery; Mr. Bond kindly preached; Arslan laid upon me his light hands, his heavy body, his intolerable informations. I did not respond. Only in certain roseate darknesses-the laughably, pitiably frail virginness of dawn, the dying violent power of sunset, the glory that attended midnight in Arslan's sweated bed-did I speak, give answers, question, and then to Arslan alone. A certain mechanical heaviness invested otherwise my speech centers.

"Light, Hunt," he said. I lit the lamp: the match blared its small headstrong explosion; the patient wick took the fire quietly and lifted a tall pale flame, ravelling into a tangle of dark smoke. I set the chimney, fixed in its perfect curve, over the equally perfect and ever altering curves of combustion. The flame settled; the smoke vanished; the room was lit. "Is not light beautiful?" Arslan said.

I considered. All the all-but-infinite hues of the spectrum were beautiful; and every intensity, from the coalmine dark to the retina-searing brilliance of a star unmasked, had its peculiar beauty. He took my wrist as I returned, and I sat beside his neatly sprawled body on the bed, and nodded. How, then, could any visible thing be unbeautiful?

"Yes, beautiful," he said-the voice that swam in dark sweetness, that purred, that without music sang. "And strong, Hunt; light is strong. Do you know the laser?"

Personally, no. I nodded anonymously.

"A beam of light of such-" his hand groped air until he found the perfect word-"integrity that it pierces steel." He loosed my wrist and turned to me on his elbow, his face eager and exhorting, Arslan's native posture. "As a weapon it is only a weapon-you understand? It has its own limits-of range, of speed, of accuracy, of maneuverability. Another weapon, Hunt, nothing more. But every new weapon has its hour, the period when its power is multiplied by its newness. Therefore to use a weapon most efficiently, it is necessary to strike during its hour."

And if there was nothing at which to strike? But Arslan could create his own victims. Now he tamped his pillow into a solid backrest. His shoulders curved against it as he lit a cigarette (swiftly, impatient of his self-interruption). "Consider, Hunt. If the United States had struck, intelligently and with decision, at the hour when she alone possessed nuclear weapons and her delivery capability exceeded the defensive power of every other nation, she could have conquered the world."

I looked at him, interested at last in the content of what he was saying. He touched me, and thus unspellbound I asked, "Did you do it with lasers?"

He let his head fall backward, draped from the rolled pillow, not in indolence but in enjoyment. He talked around his cigarette; gentle rivulets of white smoke accompanied his words. "The laser had been developed as a defensive weapon. Unfortunately its offensive potentialities will never be realized. But consider, Hunt! When two men face each other with drawn knives, who will live longer? He who wears armor. The s.h.i.+eld was as decisive an invention as the sword. And what is the s.h.i.+eld against the sword of full-scale nuclear attack? Either a counterstrike force too ma.s.sive and dispersed to be neutralized, or a defensive network that is virtually one hundred percent effective. Nothing less is adequate. The advantage of the laser, the beauty of the laser, Hunt, is its speed. The antimissile missile has one chance to destroy its target: the laser has four, five, six! No, nothing is perfect-but we can approach perfection as a limit. Given a complete defensive network of lasers, the damage that can be inflicted by a nuclear strike approaches zero. Most certainly, for a large country, it falls within the limits of acceptable damage. Therefore-" he half straightened, jabbing his cigarette toward me-"your country and the Soviet Union competed for years to perfect an antimissile laser-competed quietly." He smiled at me, the playful smile. "Conveniently for me, the Soviets succeeded first. Do you understand now?"

He touched me nowhere; but my whole right side was warmed because of him, the princ.i.p.al heat exchange occurring in the region of my right hip. He reached past me to tamp out his cigarette; returning, his arm brushed across me, his hand caught gently below my armpit. "A little," I said.

He chuckled lowly. "A little," he mocked. "A little, little. Hunt," he said, urgently if cavalierly. His fingers sank into me (five bruises tomorrow) and I said, mightily aloud, "I want to understand."

He paused, his fingers still tight in my side, eyeing me with humorous surprise. "You want," he said interestedly. "Good. I shall tell you." His gripping hand eased slowly. "I knew-and your government knew, Hunt, in much more detail than I could know-that the Russians had perfected an antimissile laser. It followed that they were installing a laser defense network as rapidly as possible. Do you understand, Hunt? It is very simple. The s.h.i.+eld-the first s.h.i.+eld-is a weapon of offense." I understood. It was very simple. "I went to Moscow to talk to the Chinese, yes, as the papers said, but much more as an escort to Nizam." His eyes, unmoving, withdrew from me a moment. It was dull and cold to realize that he thought more of Nizam than of me. Recollection united them, occupation welded them. They were made one by years (five? ten? fifteen?) of shared effort, intense not with love but with life and death. Conspiracy and combat-two fields as far beyond me (considered as a point infinitesimally distant from the neutral center) as, say, experimental biochemistry and steamfitting-were the elements of their weathered intimacy. "Nizam was a student of the Soviets," he said reminiscently. "Therefore he was able to apply appropriate modifications of their own methods to themselves. We were half certain before we set out for Moscow, almost certain before we reached Moscow, entirely certain before we finished a week in Moscow, that the Russian laser defense network was complete. No, Hunt, you could not have known. Certain parts of your government knew that the Russians had perfected the laser, and were installing it, but how far the installation had proceeded they did not know." He sank his head back into the pillow. His face rounded and sweetened; his smile played like summer upon earth. "There were two men," he said.

There had been two men. I remembered them very well from eighth-grade Current History. Their names were Glukhovsky and Kerbabayev, and it was hard to keep in mind which was the technical head of state and which the leader of the Party. I remembered the stout businessman face of one, soulless and broad, and that the other was a little man. But as Arslan spoke, low and luxuriatingly, the blurred pictures sharpened and came alive to me. Two men. And I shuddered, stroked with the razor-edge of actuality. It was more strange and thrilling that the man beside me had seen, conversed with, dealt with those miraculous beings-men and yet powers-who had swayed nations, destroyed lives, inspired headlines, than that he, Arslan, was himself such a being raised to a higher power. For I touched him, I knew the taste of his breath and its sound in sleep, his flesh had wounded mine, I saw him yawn, scratch, spit, his stomach rumbled, he repeated himself and misp.r.o.nounced words; he was Arslan to me, absolute Arslan, but he was familiar to me as the potent air.

It was Glukhovsky, the man with the business face, who had been Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and thus effectively Tsar of all the Russias. "Ah, he was good, Hunt. Good!" Good: praise from the c.o.c.klesh.e.l.led lancer for the featureless wall-face of the turning whale, backed with kilotons of oiled muscle and buoyed with the endless ocean. "It was the hour of the laser, and of Russia. The world was hers to take, if she had the courage. It could be a long hour for her, perhaps. But for me, Hunt, the hour was very short. It was necessary to do two things. First, to encourage the Russians to take this world that they had earned. Second, to persuade them to give it to me. Not so difficult, Hunt-not so very difficult. There was a disagreement within the Russian government."

And in blazoned clarity I saw the scene: the two Russians with distrustful eyes, the smooth wood of the table, the smooth faces of the Chinese, the red telephone ominous and ludicrous, and Arslan, Arslan in his hour. I saw the tiger glint of his prowling eyes, the crouched short-muscled power within (born for the stalk and spring, not the long lope of pursuit), the glow of joy that made his squat solidity beautiful as Praxiteles' G.o.ds. "Nizam," he said, "had made these things possible." Nizam making the ways straight. I looked for Nizam in that picture, and distinguished a shadow on the outskirts. "He had-isolated-insulated-the room. Thus I could make my proposal without interruption. And could enforce an answer."

He spoke Russian, presumably well. "Enforce an answer how?" I asked him: Gem-eyed Arslan, two thousand miles behind enemy lines, armed with a silent whip named Nizam, enjoying himself. Arslan at climax, all but imperceptibly quivering, alight, afire, ablaze. Shabby princeling of a beggar state, stretching his hand to manipulate the crowned chessmen of world politics: "With a gun," he said.

I would have laughed, if laughter had been among my current capabilities. At least I registered the words as amusing. I could enforce an answer: Enforce an answer how? With a gun. Premier Arslan Khan of Turkistan in the capital of the world's vastest nation-and, for the hour that might have been long, the world's most powerful. "Naturally our belongings had been searched; but I had carried it always on my person." Arslan's bedmate, Arslan's bathmate. "Naturally we had been examined electromagnetically; but there are convenient devices, which were known to Nizam, that defeat such examination. Thus I had the gun with me in the conference room. It was necessary only to point it."

But already the scene was fading. It had been merely a projection of colored light, not one of the etchings of the mind. The red telephone would not have been in that room, probably not the Chinese. I frowned, trying to follow the legend he unrolled for my education, trying to regain the interest I had felt or claimed to feel. He had pointed the gun. He had made his proposal: that the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet deliver to the President of the United States an immediate ultimatum demanding immediate response-capitulation (though not in that unacceptable term) or nuclear war. "And in either event, Hunt, I asked for myself only the command of the armed forces. More than that I could not hope to be given." That was all he asked. Later he would not need to ask.

"It was not unreasonable, Hunt." No; insane but not unreasonable. Silent-eyed Glukhovsky had heard all the reasons long before he faced Arslan's pistol. And brisk little Kerbabayev, who watched them both with equal attention, burned with belief in those reasons: There had been a disagreement within the government. Irony: somehow the word had always brought me the picture of some unidentifiable curio, carved in ivory. It was a beautiful irony that Kerbabayev should hear urged upon Glukhovsky at pistol point, by the premier of Turkistan, the very act that he had been urging for weeks past: It was reasonable, reasonable. It was the terminus of all the logic of defense and counterdefense, of strike and counterstrike. For what else (excepting only the great ends of Communist teleology) had they worked, contrived, expended, sacrificed, risked? How could they lack the final courage now to take the final risk, a risk so much less than many they had triumphantly run? Thus he had surely argued. And now they would take that risk perforce: Arslan was the gadfly to drive them into the promised land, and then be brushed away.

Or, alternatively, to be crushed at once, before the heavy thews began to move. And Arslan's audacity, if it failed of success, would have ended the arguments forever: He, Kerbabayev, would be silenced with the same blow that destroyed Arslan.

And the man who faced the pistol-had he been charmed, somewhere within, by this swift brash grace and youthfulness, the outrageous speed and ease with which this trivial opportunist had pierced the guarded heart of their strength? Or had he only raged, Philistine confronting the minuscule host of inspiration, at all the petty, irrevocable stupidities, of his underlings, predecessors, colleagues, that had left him suddenly at catastrophe's brink? Or, executive to the last, had he been weighing truths and consequences all this while, premeditating the muscular actions that should inflect his face, produce words from his breath, explode or petrify the world?

"He did not accept." So there had been a man, a member of my very species, who had refused Arslan-a character as unreal, in that aspect, as Arslan's mythical parents, as the teachers in whose cla.s.srooms he had presumably sat, as the woman for whose love he had considered committing follies. Why had he not accepted, that man? I did not well understand, then or later, his teleology; perhaps to him it implied the necessity of the current phase of international relations. Or, ideology aside, did the status quo appear, in the curled computer of his brain, more advantageous than the newborn risks and harvests of a new world conquered? Or, simply and humanly, was he unwilling to exchange the ritual of his daily problems for the cataclysm of a revealed truth?

"Therefore I shot him." And, patient and cold (it was the previous sentence that had chilled me), I looked at him. It was the first time such words had been addressed to me, and to my ignorance they sounded abnormal. But the logic was real. Arslan had enforced his answer.

It was, of course, desperate. He had begun the plunge, the crimson sky-dive of Macbeth. If Kerbabayev, too, "did not accept," where could he turn to find his next sacrifice? Isolated in that still room as in the hurricane's eye, he had no weapon but murder, no exit but triumph. A second Glukhovsky would have defeated him. But if there had been two Glukhovskys, he would not have attacked.

And Kerbabayev, of course, had accepted. Doubtless it had seemed to him a dazzling gambit. The goaded muscles would move, more suddenly than decision alone could make them, and the whole momentous bulk of his nation be set upon the path of righteousness. As for Arslan, without question he could be eliminated or neutralized; or (questioned) at worst he, Kerbabayev, would be able to keep a hand on the reins; and if all somehow failed, if the path were missed, or led awry, then Arslan should be sponge enough to sop up all the guilt.

He had made the call. He had delivered the ultimatum. The mountain had been climbed because it was there. No doubt the world's end would have been different if there had been no red telephone-or, say, no Arslan, or no human race. The evolution, at least, would have been longer.

But these things came to me later, far later. Beside Arslan, in the lamplight, nothing stirred in me-nothing until the sullen slow warmth of an unexpected resentment (disappointment? shame?-some degradation product of a residual patriotism I had thought I never had) roused at his casual disposal of my country's honor. "The United States, of course, capitulated." Why of course? Why was all the uncertainty, all the risk, in Moscow? I looked down at my hands in my lap, and Arslan, hunching toward me, laughed. A momentary pulse of desire to argue rose in my throat, beat once, and died. Later, in the still hours before sleep, I was to cherish that little urgency as one more hopeful twitch of my paralyzed soul. Confusion of the deathbed over... There was still a future tense.

Chapter 17.

Measuredly, by a gentle gradation of brutal degrees, I was being weaned away from slavery. He took me hunting, and I breathed. He struck me, and I spoke. He left my door unlocked, and I was afraid. It was not night I feared (Come, seeling night), but the great ghost-filled day. Daylight and Kraftsville swelled and swirled around the house, infiltrated the staircase, eddied outside my door. Tendrils snaked and vined through cracks and keyholes, every exit and entry let in a puff, and I sat bleak as Arctic stone in the knowledge that I would have to go out into it, out into all of it.

At first I went only with him, at special order. "Come, Hunt." It would be no farther than the yard. The horses were ghosts to me. I looked through them, or looked away. I had learned to ride, seriously, two summers before. He caressed their solidity with a touch luxurious and sure, feeling for faults. From the outside Mr. Bond's house looked alien or unreal. Warm breezes rustled the dusty flowers. Yellow sunlight poured in heavy swathes from the exhaustible sun. It was simply hot.

"Come, Hunt." It was not an invitation; he merely commanded my attendance. Thousands at his bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest. I also served, apparently; though for what, in the sunlight, was obscure.

"Come, Hunt." In the newly finished stable, in the good smells of horses and raw lumber, he talked his plausible Russian, criticized equerriel architecture by eye and hand, and turned on me with a sudden order to mount. The horse stood just-saddled; the Russian groom was laughing. I m.u.f.fed it, naturally. But once in the saddle, hot with shame and dread, looking down at Arslan (a fantastic viewpoint), I felt my body take over. I remembered how it was to ride. He looked at me-looked up-and laughed. And looking down I smiled my first smile.

And still later, Mr. Bond's gentlemanly and unp.r.o.nounceable lieutenant was deputized to chaperone me. I liked his worried expressions and his diluted devotion to Arslan. He regarded me with the eyes of a conscientious nursemaid who didn't much like children. He was a mild challenge, a natural object for hara.s.sment; but I wasn't up to it. I was debilitated, the good invalid child glad of its leading-strings.

He led me, on Arslan's precise instructions, farther and farther into the ghost-filled day. Two blocks south (the stables, to fetch the horse of Arslan's whimsical choice); four blocks east (Nizam's headquarters, to deliver some trivial, perhaps nonexistent, message; to look, or not to look, one block onward to my father's house); three blocks north (shorter but farther, a different neighborhood, to Gullick's the harness-maker, for a rather interesting modification of a halter). And outside Gullick's house he courteously instructed me to wait a few minutes for him, and turned the nearest corner.

It was the first time I had been alone in the open, and I was at a loss. I dangled Arslan's halter and admired the air. Did a colt feel the same dull resentment at being trained? Or, for that matter, the same dull satisfaction? I would perform my lessons, accept the bit, follow the reins. The line of least resistance, spidery clue through the funhouse labyrinth of actuality.

And alone in the open air, perceiving the world leafy and flowery, full of s.p.a.ce in which the displaced personality could spread arms and turn about, sun-shone, solitary, I felt myself grow cheerful. Future tense aside, there was most definitely a present-a present in which it was possible to move, smile, respire, ride horses, understand harness, study Latin.

The tranquil street was unpeopled but alive. Hadn't there always been people on the streets, before Arslan? No, I remembered now, and the scene around me sharpened into a keener focus, unmodifiable, indescribable in its realness and rightness; lovely and real. It had been exactly like this before Arslan, on such a sidestreet, on such a summer day-the life and quiet bustle all in the houses and the trees, only an occasional flitter-between or resident-on-threshold (pa.s.ser-by, porch-chatter, rug-shaker, harness-customer, tomato-picker), n.o.body in very much of a hurry. Nothing had changed. And I felt for the first time a wholehearted homesickness for my own people (cracked, contused, lacerated, but whole) and in it, temporary but stabbing, an instant ache for fellows.h.i.+p, for the kids of Eighth Grade, Room One.

And on cue, real and right, with the coincidental inevitability of fate-in-the-dice, two figures emerged from the green shadows of the next cross-street north, coming my way on the other side of the street. They were Gene Michaels (not, indeed, of Room One, but he had played first trumpet beside me) and Simon Teffertiller, universally known as Bud, kind-eyed and potato-faced. They were in eager conversation. I stood and waited until they were nearly opposite me. Then, "Hi," I said, and lifted my hand.

They were very, very busy with their conversation. Not until they were definitely past did a half-glance come my way, and Bud exclaimed, in a voice that filled the attentive universe, "Hey, Gene, do you believe in fairies?"

I waited, hot but frozen, very busy in my turn with the harness, until they turned the corner, and then while I counted ten, twenty, forty-seven; and considering this a sufficiently angular and realistic number to justify me before any lingering atoms not yet convulsed in snickers, I turned and walked slowly-to very h.e.l.l with instructions-back the long three blocks to Mr. Bond's house. Some part of my brain (was it the cerebellum?) had cravenly deserted under fire, leaving the management of all my muscles to my unpracticed consciousness, so that I traveled in jerks and wavers where all should have been smooth but firm, and stubbed my toes.

It wasn't the impersonal fact-I had antic.i.p.ated, imagined, and armed myself against such taunts, indeed much worse, even to violence-but the source of it, which so unstrung me. Gene and Bud were not among the jackals from whom I had expected such, nor quite among the friends whom I was prepared (having lately learned the ruthlessness of self-defense) to forgive it. They represented the rational and indifferently sympathetic Better Cla.s.s my bitterest apprehensions had a.s.sumed; and that they had turned upon me demonstrated, with mathematical finality, that all the world at large was hostile.

It was one of the turning points. Not my turn, since I had not altered in self or in direction, but the world's turn. I was only the pivot pin upon which the visible universe wheeled. And feeling cramped and restless for a pin, I resorted to merely physical motion. That was the first time I walked boldly, so to speak, into Arslan's stable and saddled and harnessed one of Arslan's horses, and mounted and rode off, wordless before the mock salutes of my watchers. Not one moved to stop or question me. And on the road I leaned the horse slowly into a flying, floating gallop that eased my chest. I quartered the town, tattooing down Bud's street and down Gene's, making long corner loops along the country roads. Then I rode back, the horse and I heaving together, to gather the fruit of my first disobedience.

Yet I was so obtuse, the universe so little visible to me, that eight weeks later I walked like a lamb to my father's house. And lamblike I was bewildered and surprised when the club fell. "You are a G.o.dd.a.m.ned hypocrite," I said-the valor of the lamb-and walking back through the forbidden dark, I heard the rifle crack and felt an outrageous thrust drive through my thigh.

I had been taught that there were good people and bad people. The good subscribed to certain theoretical tenets and abstained from certain actions. The bad faulted in one way or both. There were also rumors of peculiarly loathsome creatures, the worst of the bad, who pretended to subscribe to the required tenets, the better to perform the forbidden actions with impunity. Scorn and righteous indignation were fired at these absent monsters from the batteries of pulpit and schoolbook fiction, but none were ever pointed out to me in the flesh. For Kraftsville's ancestral piety had not been shaken by the seisms remaking the face of America. The Sunday School literature spoke fas.h.i.+onably of society's sins, and the Social Studies books confessed that westward expansion had been a little hard on the Indians; but what citizen of Kraftsville could have questioned that Kraftsville citizens were nice people, and that nice people were good?

So it took a convulsive effort to realize that it was exactly the good people, it was especially the better people, who were the loathsome hypocrites. My father and my mother, and all the other reasonably intelligent, reasonably nice, reasonably successful people I had ever known-they were the ones who spoke out so dogmatically for truth, beauty, and goodness, while with every action of their lives they cast votes for falsity, ugliness, and corruption. And Mr. Bond, of course-Mr. Bond was a particularly prime specimen, because he made his living teaching hypocrisy to children.

It was Arslan who showed me the possibility of living honestly. Even his deceits were straightforward-tools as simple in purpose and exquisite in design as the guns he equally loved. He lied; but he did not pretend.

"You give me much pleasure, Hunt." Yes-except that I gave nothing; he took, took with both hands. The stuttering metaphors of my mind were silent before the concentrated consciousness he brought to bear upon his pleasure-taking. It was this-not his deeds, but the pa.s.sionate and concerned intelligence that powered them-which struck me dumb and helpless, naked before his ruthless interest. Brutal but unanimal, wholly aware, wholly deliberate, he probed again and again for one more pocket of resistance, one more unwillingness from whose bursting another spurt of pleasure would flow. That was what I saw of him. It did not occur to me that he had other concerns as well.

It was against my will-it was against my very flesh-that I read Tamburlaine to him. I did not know the story. I had never heard of Timur the Lame, I did not dream that Arslan had paced the polished floor of Timur's own tomb with pudgy legs, his hand in his father's. But before I had read far, the words thickened in my mouth, and I saw Arslan doubled, before me on the couch, before me on the page. Surely to read this to him was to pour oil upon the fire that was devouring me. Over my zenith hang a blazing star That may endure till heaven be dissolv'd, Fed with the fresh supply of earthly dregs... Yet he listened with an earnestness that might have been anxiety if it had not been calm. Later, out of silence, he would speak the word that had touched him. "Triumph. Triumph is public, is it not?" I nodded doubtfully. "Yes. And it is temporary, Hunt." His eyes were very quiet, very open. "I do not deceive myself. I have finished my triumph." It was spring, his lush first Kraftsville spring. I was very young, I did not guess that he was more and less than Tamburlaine (the conquering shepherd, invincible by sheer intent, n.o.ble by sheer brutality, marching forever forward to new wars). "Now there is only work."

Those were words I forgot, for months, for years, while I remembered all the standard, stirring taglines of Marlowe's limpid bombast. Come, let us war against the powers of heaven And set black streamers in the firmament... No, Arslan would need no second triumph. His triumph was with him forever.

No doubt it was grievous to be unable to respond, practically, to inquiry or a.s.sertion, friendly or hostile. Yet, on the whole, response seemed to me frivolous. There was nothing to say; or the things sayable there was no point in saying. "Arslan says you're free to go," Mr. Bond informed me. That was communication, and valuable, or at least effective. But Go where? would have been the only feasible response, and it could have evoked no effective answer. Therefore I gazed, and was silent.

And in the dusty music room-though I felt such a sweet stab into my vitals that everything inside me was, in a moment, dissolved and flowing-I only listened. The room was so small. Exactly here (or there, or there; my memory ran liquid and swirling as the eddies of spring creeks) the instrumental scores had been kept, here the vocal, in those two cabinets the school's instruments (the dingy, dented bra.s.s, the dilapidated woodwinds, the new drums we had been so proud of); there, in that corner, I had kissed Patty c.u.mmings after the year's first basketball game, because I liked the wild grace of her and because she teased me-my first kiss, my only kiss, except the hundred that Darya had demonstrated to me, except the condimental tendernesses with which Arslan spiced his a.s.saults.

I had been a good trumpeter, by Kraftsville standards. And it was that thought, ramifying, that brought tears to my eyes while I listened to my mother. My mother, Hunt Morgan's mother, Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Arnold Morgan, Jean Morgan-in any aspect, not a woman to sentimentalize. She was all business; but the sentiment was notably present-very neatly boxed, very properly veiled, very ostentatiously unmentioned-a thing set as on a table between us.

She looked so thin and so old-not truly old, of course, but I had never before recognized the marks of time upon her, or imagined she could be subject to them. It surprised me (I was still that young) that she had actually and physically suffered. Parents were immutable.

"What became of my trumpet?" I asked her.

She radiated stifled pleasure. "It's in your room. As far as I know, it's as good as it ever was."

And it had been a good trumpet. "What ever happened to Patty c.u.mmings?"

Now she was surprised-staggered, in fact. Was it good or bad for me to ask about Patty c.u.mmings? Good, for me to express interest in anything; good, for me to be interested in a girl as opposed to Arslan; good, for me to speak at all. But bad, for me to be more interested in a girl than in my long-awaited homecoming; bad, for me to have any interest that implied s.e.x, however innocuously; bad, for me to be interested specifically in Patty c.u.mmings, an empty-headed innocent without family prestige or intellectual pretension.

"Patty c.u.mmings? Nothing, that I know of. All the c.u.mmings girls are still living at home."

Living at home. What a world of homeliness that phrase implied, a world enormous, solid, and sweet, in which "home" had a meaning beyond "the place where I live." I had forgotten. I gazed at her, staringly, touched and awed, and the word Mother came to me, and I thought that I understood it. And I wished, knowing it an adolescent wish, that she would ask me some important question to which I could answer, "Yes. I am coming."

But she talked of mealtimes and underwear, of my father's health and my old dog's death, presented me with a pseudo-leather toilet bag and advised me how to pack it, tucked her handkerchief into her well-kept purse and adjourned the meeting. She was a grown-up.

And Arslan, also, was a grown-up. Grown-ups might give, at unpredictable intervals, anything else; but not drama, not dignity, and not freedom. He did not come to see me go. With neither congratulation nor recrimination, with nothing but a pseudo-leather toilet bag, I stepped into the cool sweet air of the first breeze of evening. Yet, in the end, all the drama and all the dignity were on Arslan's side; and there was no question of freedom. Hot and sour I walked back through the bitter night, ballasted with incredulity and contempt (which would be worse, that they had forgotten the curfew or that they had remembered?), waiting for the bullet. And when it came I staggered, less with physical shock than with the strong wash of relief, of satisfaction, of preconceived anger now justified and released-and, later, with the dragging undertow (annoyingly real) of fear.

And Arslan was there to see me come back, there to heal me with his hands. It had been a false departure, a real return. When the time came for true departures, he would be there.

He threw himself stomach-down on the bed where I lay, and my own stomach contracted in the accustomed cold cramp. Propped on his forearms, a very boyish posture, he dragged a fingertip across my chest. "You understand, Hunt, that I make a whirlpool around myself. There is no one who can come to me"-he considered for a word-"naturally. I must always deal with people who are in a condition of strain with regard to me."

I felt a small smile detachedly form itself on my face. He looked at me with confident expectation. "A condition of strain." My voice sounded to me husky and childish.

"Greater or lesser," he said, grinning, and laid his palm on my diaphragm by way of demonstration.

"Rusudan," I said, and the blackness her name roused in me was, in comparison, soothing.

His other hand flicked; the knuckles caught me under the chin, snapped my mouth shut very effectively. Not, with regard to Arslan, what you could call a blow. Just a mild warning, a touch of the lion's paw. Just a gesture to inform me that I must not contradict his dogma with the fact of Rusudan. She was not a part of the world which I was permitted to consider.

"Therefore I discount the strain," he said, "in one who would be a friend without it. Do you understand?"

I investigated with my tongue for blood before I spoke. I had a notion that the sight of blood excited him. "I don't know."

"You say to me, 'I hate you.' But without the strain you would have said something different. I consider that you have said the something different. Hunt, I tell you this tonight for a reason."

I closed my eyes. I didn't want to hear his reason. But I was too vulnerable in that blindness; I had to look at him again.

"I return to Bukhara," he said. "Tomorrow."

Instantly the world flashed and rang, as if I had been colorblind, tone deaf, for a season, and those few words had cured me. My heart sprang; my lungs drew one delicious breath of pure freedom, like pure oxygen, before everything s.h.i.+fted, like one of those optical illusions in which high is suddenly low and low high, and I felt myself abandoned in a world to which I had been made a traitor. Christ had volunteered; but the scapegoat was a conscript.

"I want you with me," he said.

So it was back into the frying pan, and nothing had been given me but the prospect of old tortures with new instruments. And falling back into the crumpled husk of myself, I felt tears under my eyelids. I closed them. "And if I say no, I suppose you'll consider that I said yes?"

He was silent, until I had to open my eyes and look at him. At once he smiled and spoke. "I am not asking you to choose, Hunt. You come with me. When I ask, I do not dictate the answer."

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Okay." I closed my eyes again, going down for the third time. And this time (elementary tactics, invite a relaxation of vigilance and then strike) his hands shut like steel on my upper arms and I felt his breath on my ear as he said softly, "Remember."

Chapter 18.

And I remembered. Through the four terrific years, the fast years, the years of my true initiation (for what happened in Kraftsville had been only the test, the preliminary ordeal, which I had pa.s.sed, because I had survived), I remembered that he did not accept my hate; he returned it to me, so to speak, unopened. I remembered that he chose not to endow me with free will. I remembered, seeing her for the first time the day he brought her to the palace, that my mouth was incompetent to speak her name. Seeing him look at her, I remembered the taste of his tongue. Seeing him rock with laughter, hearing her pa.s.sionate shouts of anger and of joy, I felt again the little tap that had clapped my jaws together; and I thought-small, sour, spiteful, old-man's thought-Well, I was right. Rusudan did not exist in a condition of strain.

She was not beautiful, no. She was garish, she was cheap, she was third-rate Technicolor-not even nouveau riche, as Arslan so patently was, but overpriced toy of nouveau riche. Yet she was whole; she was integral. And I, a disarticulate collection of fragments, awash in the bile of envy, watched. She was the only person with whom I had ever seen him quarrel. With the rest of the world his arguments were rational, his angers dictatorial. But with her he struggled and raged. With her he was unjust, brutal, indignant.

I thought I understood. She was, in some way, his unique equal-the one living being with whom it was unnecessary for him to condescend, to explain or domineer. Not even Nizam the Ineluctable Shadow merited abuse or importunity-how much less I. I watched at first with bewilderment and shame, but later with admiration. No, it would not occur to him to m.u.f.fle his noisy struggles; there was no danger of rousing revolt or contempt, for it was inconceivable that any other could dare stand against the flas.h.i.+ng force of his confidence. All the openness of his furies, his frustrations, his delights, said to the world, My weakness is stronger than your strength.

Bukhara was a trap. In those bleak halls, under that blank sky, Arslan's retinue drew into itself, re-formed, transmogrified, and spread netlike around him, a fullfledged court. In the exercise yard he wrestled with soldiers from the garrison, challenging one after another, embracing every man who gave him a fall. Cigarettes drooping, eyes askance, the jealous majors stirred and s.h.i.+fted. They were aligned in only two things, distrust of Rusudan and devotion to Arslan. The world was divided and distributed every day in the casino, while Arslan, sweating and tousled, dictated endless orders in the radio room, scribbled his maps with ever-spreading lines like crackling glaze, shoved away his lukewarm coffee and called violently for hot.

He was happy. This was his home. He had his woman, the chosen vessel. Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity! She was eternal, at least, in her pestiferousness. She mocked, interrupted, scolded, demanded. It was unnecessary to understand the language of her complaints. So-and-so had insulted her. She wanted new clothes, more jewels. The cook must be replaced. Arslan shouldn't drink so much.

He drank more. He began with coffee and raki at lunch. The steel schedule of Kraftsville-a long day's driving work, an evening's intense debauch, a short night's childlike sleep-crumbled and vapored away. More coffee, to be gulped or forgotten. More raki, until light-foot Arslan slipped and scrambled on the treacherous marble floors.

It was the traitor's hour. In this palace, the b.l.o.o.d.y powers of Bukhara-emirs and viziers, and all the Turkish generals who had antic.i.p.ated Arslan by half a millennium-had succeeded each other upon waves of treason. Generations of his forefathers' betters had caroused here to their own undoing. But there were no traitors among Arslan's men. The schemers were faithful. They came and went, dispatched to this sector or that, still plotting. The cook stayed. Rusudan was arrogantly pregnant. Arslan knocked a lieutenant down the stairs for bringing him the wrong report. But after the three-day carouse that left him immobilized for the fourth day and night, while the palace buzzed with varying tones of dismay and frenzy, he reformed by the unexpected expedient of cutting himself to three cups of coffee per day.

In the winter of Bukhara, the great wind flowed like a tide across the plain. Wild flights of snow boomed like storm birds around the minarets; sprays of coa.r.s.e, dry flakes spewed through unsuspected crevices and scattered down the barren halls. (There were no comforts among the marble luxuries of Bukhara; small wonder that Arslan had settled so complacently into the meager ease of Kraftsville.) In the streets, the s.h.i.+vering dogs chewed the snow hopefully. Symbolic more than real, it stated winter and disappeared. But the wind rolled on, the cold sank ponderously through the blankets, the dull pink bricks of Bukhara were hazed with an arid and delicate frost.