Arslan. Part 13

At his orders, I gave English lessons to his officers. I, whose cla.s.sification in life, for as long as I could remember, had been "pupil," found myself elevated to full professor, an authority and source of knowledge looked up to and earnestly consulted by the commanders of regiments. All my inept.i.tude and confusion to the contrary, it was very steadying. Rusudan came a few times, curious and impatient-jealous, perhaps, of the alien language into which he withdrew from her-eager, most of all, to show herself off to me. Rusudan, at least, did not reject my hate.

Grotesque among the pilasters, in rooms designed for cus.h.i.+ons and hangings but bare now as new-built prisons, stood the last emir's gestures toward technological civilization (or was it Arslan's father who had installed them, or even Arslan himself?): a nonfunctioning air-conditioner, a stereo console with ready-made collection of unplayed records. For the first time there came home to me, exiled in Bukhara, the ba.n.a.l horror of Arslan's great work. One could not honestly grieve for the loss of future Mozarts-there would have been no more Mozarts in any case; but Arslan had destroyed forever what I, backwatered in Kraftsville, had never known: the whole ebullient and evanescent world of performance. There would be no more concerts.

In Kraftsville, Mr. Bond had left beside my bed his little record player and a stack of records in shabby jackets. Now and again, Arslan had pulled a random disc from the pile and thrust it at me-background music for the sports of the evening. Otherwise they had sat unconsidered, silent, acc.u.mulating the dust of that uncleaned room. Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, Fidelio. In Kraftsville I had not noticed. But in Bukhara I remembered and was moved. "Do you think the electricity will ever come on again, Hunt?" Mrs. Bond had inquired anxiously, at a slightly later epoch. "I know he misses those records. It's the closest thing he's ever had to a hobby." Mr. Bond, the self-contained, self-satisfied, the Gibraltar on whose stolid crags my new-born soul had steadied its bruised first footsteps-had he offered me, like Arslan in the woods, drink from the very springs of his own strength? Had he once bowed, as I did now, intently over the music, searching out the rich phrase that should nourish him through another day? And pell-mell, simultaneous perhaps, regret and resentment welled up, and I burned against him, remembering with momentary hatred his lofty shoulders and rock-rough face, remembering Kraftsville with hatred, because he had not been my father.

In Bukhara, the music seemed miraculous to me, the machine no less so. Nightlong I would sit hunched beside it, touching my budding beard with small proxy caresses, while the floating tone-arm softly bobbed and gradually pivoted, spinning great ripples of sound from a flat black circle. The tremendous swag and sway of Verdi, the joyous patternings of Mozart, gave back to my memory now the odor of Arslan's l.u.s.t, now the concerned and disapproving eyes of Franklin L. Bond. In the morning there would be coffee, raucously strong; and at midday I would lie flat, spread-eagled on a blank bed, my teeth locked tight and fragments of arias furiously rotating through my brain.

I was lonely. In Kraftsville three people had been kind to me: Mr. Bond with his mute gifts and unseasonable advice, Mrs. Bond with her promiscuous motherliness, Darya with her harmless corruptions. In Kraftsville I had had Arslan, inexorable and close, a surrounding presence in which I struggled warmly. But it was in Bukhara the pale city that I felt the first doomed stirring of desire.

He had not touched me in Bukhara. And at first, thankful, I had s.h.i.+ed away from every chance of touch. But I looked now with an abstract cupidity upon those blunt, soiled hands, seeing in them my only hope of human attachment.

As in Kraftsville, so in Bukhara, he purveyed me a girl. I didn't want her. I was incapable of the simple prophylactic contact with which Arslan's bachelor officers solaced themselves; and affection for one of Arslan's poppets was futile, futile. Where now was Darya?

But she was billeted in my room ("Hunt, I have given you a girl"); she was serious, gentle, and persistent. Her name was Chalyu. Dutifully I studied, not the art, but the mechanics, of lovemaking. Two drinks, taken in a period of forty to forty-five minutes, and with her help I could manage it, like a diligent paraplegic lover. It had been better with Darya. I tried to teach her English, which she tried to learn. We talked in a halting pidgin Turki. She was sixteen. She didn't know where America was. She admired Arslan.

One night she was gone. I sat on the bed and practiced rolling cigarettes while I waited. I had finished seven when he came. He walked straight to the bed, his hands coming out to take my shoulders. "Now, Hunt," he said.

Rusudan was five months pregnant. It would have been consistent, I thought, for Arslan to retire her from his bed, to put her in storage until the heir was safely born. Instead, he had retired Chalyu from mine. I never saw her again, and I asked no questions. I was busy. For what opened around me now was a new world: Arslan's Bukhara, the inner sanctum of a universe, the pale city I had seen hitherto through the veils of solitude.

We talked. In the exercise yard, now, he called me, too, to wrestle with him. To me they were desperate battles, fought in fury and shame under the hooting laughter of his troops. He expounded maps to me. He appointed one of his best pilots to teach me to fly. For hours in the denseaired night he interrogated me on the intrigues of his court. I had become his spy. Under the caravan stars he schooled me in his language, rich and simple as a poem. And when, dizzy and defeated, accepting that I myself must be the traitor, I plunged the knife with all my force, and fell back stricken as Arslan's veritable blood welled upon his naked side, it was in his own language that he cried furiously, "You dirty little fool, you don't know how!" Indeed I had done very badly. I had had to get up to get the knife, and by the time I struck he was awake, twisting out of the way. There was plenty of blood to set the palace buzzing again in the morning, but the wound was, as he said, "very inadequate." I learned that night that I had never before been thoroughly afraid. In the end, when he kicked the broken knife away, he came back to English, leaning over me in one last blaze where I cowered like a quivering hound, jerking his own knife from the tumbled clothes beside the bed. "Next time" (lilting the words) "use a better one." And I took it from his bleeding hands.

There were gifts. There were recompenses. I had not expected (I had not considered it) that piloting a light plane would be the opening of a new world. A New World. And I understood at last (the realization flas.h.i.+ng in and out of existence at first, then steadying, focusing, becoming examinable) something of what that phrase must have meant to Europeans of 1500, to Columbus himself. A New World. As one might say, a new universe. No. A new continuum. No. There was no word, since the beginning of the era (just ended) of multiplication and renewal, so final and whole as world had been.

To fly: the consummation of the most exquisite longings, the reality of the most delicious dreams. The whole globe of the world showed itself to me two-dimensional but enveloped in the perfect third. I bent myself to learn, to be quickly rid of my instructor. To fly-it was by definition to be alone.

It was flying in the dazzling void of the desert air that I came to terms with death. All the mortal hardware that surrounded Arslan had given me a brief mechanical thrill, like that of a carnival ride; the bullet wound in my thigh had been interesting but trivial, disappointing as much as pride-engendering; the bodies in the dump had seemed fraudulent. For the rest, I had poeticized suicidally, misusing Keats to ease my own midnights, and pondering the merits of knife and noose. It was suicide, not murder, I had meant when I dreamed in Kraftsville of shooting Arslan (the most certain suttee), though I had earned my new knife another way. But under all the romantic frenzy my unperturbed and patient self had known that I had other engagements. And the silent slogan with which I greeted the days and the nights-I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead-was as hollow, and as comfortable, as the Now I lay me of my childhood.

Yet always when I look death in the face, When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine...

I had smiled at what seemed to me Yeats' boastful simplicity, the casual implication of daily encounters with extinction. But now, above the Black Sands, in the enormity of the humming air, I had my daily encounters. For the first time I teetered on the knife edge, not merely of possibility, but of temptation. Nothing held me up. Nothing above, nothing below. Sometimes a miniature cloud crawled forlornly along the outskirts of the tremendous sky. Otherwise I was alone. It was only a straining, groaning, quivering, squealing effort, a frantic laborious whirling, that kept me precariously aloft from moment to moment. It was easy, it was inevitable, for me to lift the plane's nose into the unbounded blue, until she stumbled and hung, a momentary floating star, and the uselessly flailing propeller growled a new tune, and suddenly hollowed I was falling, backward into the nothing below.

It was enough. "n.o.body dies of a stall," my instructor had taught me; "only of fear." I tilted the plane's nose downward ... downward ... still downward ... Whimpers rose in my throat, and my neck and arms p.r.i.c.kled helplessly. Against the stiff resistance of my wrists I pushed the plane's nose still farther in the direction of death. Still downward ... And now she caught the air, and I was flying again.

My hands on the wheel trembled. I was running sweat, and in the cold blue sky I was chilly within a moment. I turned the plane and climbed slowly, in wide circles, wheeling my way, with an eye on the fuel gauge, gradually back to Bukhara.

It was to become an exercise. I learned half a dozen ways to stall and recover. I learned to dive toward the scorching sands and pull out when it was almost too late. It was very calming. I looked with new eyes upon death, knowing now what Arslan's very existence should have taught me; shrugging off, unregarded, the destruction of mult.i.tudes, myself among them. Myself among them. There was no more to learn. The door of my death stood ajar, and a touch would open it. Beyond, Arslan's hands and soldiers' laughter did not enter.

On foot, once past the towers and foliage of Bukhara, the cloudless sky of Turkistan oppressed me. I would stare at the unqualified blank (the inside of the small end sliced from the cosmic eggsh.e.l.l), trying to remember that what I saw was itself a cloud-not clear s.p.a.ce, but a tangle of bewildered light, the blue rays lost and hurtling among thickets of jiggling dust. But it was useless-the polished sh.e.l.l remained; and I was hungry for the b.u.t.termilk skies of Kraft County, dawns as rosy-fingered as any Homer could have dreamed, sharp-edged and layered sunset clouds like the stone-made sediments of past ages.

Bukhara was a fever. In the dense shade of the trees, the oven air baked, the furnace breeze seared. It was surreal to pluck a peach from the tortuous branches and bite into that exquisite juiciness, while my eyes ached with drought. Arslan's deep laugh burst like fireworks bombs. The reports flowed in, the maps were netted with ever finer meshes, Rusudan was approaching her time. He was parched and hard, with gleaming eyes. He would never leave. Here was his home, the root of his nourishment, the hard nest of all his loves.

Who had noticed or cared, in eighth-grade Current History or the labyrinths of the CIA, that the Republic of Turkistan was developing one of the world's most efficient armies? "It is a question of men, not of money; of morale, not of equipment. This is not wishful thinking, Hunt; I have proved it. Also," he added pensively, "we were not badly equipped." It was the Russians who had re-equipped them-not badly, but not well-as their British arms fell obsolete. It was Arslan who had ordained that men outweighed equipment. "It is not important-not for long-that a man should be trained to use this tool or that one. It is important that he should know that he can learn quickly to use any tool." Supple and proud, they were a far cry from the tindery battalions of most of the third world. And to their suppleness and their pride he had added the crucial third ingredient. "A soldier is alone, Hunt, more alone than other men. Do you understand? Because he lives with death." The trite phrase was new in his mouth, making him smile with pleasure and knowledge. Yes, as I died with life. "But also, if he is truly a soldier, he is never alone. His army is always with him." Even unto the end of the world. It was unjust that Arslan's eyes, brilliant and treacherous, overshadowed his mouth. It was a mouth worth watching, supple and proud. "They are good, Hunt. Good," he said, and his lips curled fondly about the word, telling me that they were his children, his brothers, his lovers, his creatures. The cadres of the army he had inherited as dictator's son had been unremarkable-half trained, half experienced, half rebellious, and thoroughly venal. It was not the least of his feats that he had, in that subterranean era before the revolt that made him Premier of Turkistan, infected every one of them (every one, at least, who had survived) with what in the interests of accuracy, might have been called love. I tried to imagine a world in which Arslan's ruthless enthusiasm was contained in so small a scope: to train-to create, rather, an army that would make him unqualified master of a certain arid acreage in Central Asia. "I had seen the Russians and the Chinese, Hunt. I knew what I must measure myself against." He was talking about armed forces, and he was serious. First, it had been necessary to neutralize his father's air force; but his immediate next move had been to take firm possession of his country's ill-defined borders. He had fought a little, unnoticed war with Afghanistan-a war that could have tempted him into conquest, but had not. Through the vacancy of the Black Sands, where the Soviet Union had been content to leave an uncertainty for future exploitation, he had drawn his emphatic line of fortifications and patrols-and Moscow, startled but sanguine, had given him vodka and confirmed the line by treaty. On the east, he had sat down with relish to some four years of skirmish and argument. That-the Chinese border-had been his recreation. Within the boundaries, bidding East against West for oil rigs and teachers and irrigation projects, stockpiling his silky cotton while the mills went up, he had not neglected his first loves; the army was never idle. Like emirs and sultans before him, he had pacified the tribal Turkmens with bribes. ("My father's people, Hunt. A difficult people." Arrogant, irascible, joyous, and cruel, a people dear to his heart.) All other tribes had been pacified Roman fas.h.i.+on. Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellent. The Kurds and Kalmucks, still following their ancient feuds and herds, contemptuous of boundaries, had been corralled, decimated, part.i.tioned, and resettled with staggering speed and thoroughness. The nomads of old Turkistan became part of the growing proletariat of Bukhara and Merv and Khiva, and Arslan's troops added rural and urban riot control to their list of practiced skills.

So that when his great hour came, unexpected but destined, he was prepared. It was not in vain that he had sworn the oath of blood-brotherhood with Nizam-Argus-eyed Nizam, whose foresight provided the corps of interpreters through whom Arslan's officers were to command the world's troops. And the army had shared. The songs that rose from the Kraftsville grade-school gym had been true paeans.

It had been his feast of Persepolis, the single hour of triumph. And if, more moderate for once than Alexander, he had ignited no city (his conflagrations were later, measured and purposeful), he had had no less his accidental sacrifice; it was I who had been consumed in the peripheral blaze of his glory.

And only now I began to understand what lightning stroke had changed Kraftsville from a crossroads bivouac to the capital of the world (for Bukhara could never be more than the capital of Turkistan). He had driven west-the instinct of Timur, the inverse of Alexander-into the physical vastness of his untried conquest, leading his personal army into the heart of mid-America as he had drawn his personal gun in the Moscow conference room. It was not yet a matter of baiting the incipient resistance-there could be no resistance until the conquest was real. It was a challenge, a risk, an exploration; he did not yet know what he had done, nor what he would find. The world (there, there was the rub, the nub-I beat my palm against my brow and cursed like Hamlet over Hecuba) the world had still been free to choose its answer to him.

But driving west on Illinois 460, he had received the answer. Nizam had caught up with him, bringing the confirmation that he could accept from no one else: Moscow was docile, Was.h.i.+ngton was well in hand; those generals who had shown themselves uncooperative had been rendered harmless. For the first time (perhaps the last), Muzaffer Arslan Khan knew himself the master of the world. The place where he found himself became the universe's center.

So that the Arslan I first saw-swaggering down the aisle of Mrs. Runciman's eighth-grade cla.s.s, face aglow and body afire and the hand that touched my shoulder vibrating steel-was not, as I had a.s.sumed, the normal Arslan of his everyday past or his everyday future; just as the Kraftsville he saw that day, and all that it contained, were illuminated by an incandescence not their own.

Again, again, again; my muscles would bunch, my blood leap, and for the instant it would seem determined that I was about to plunge, simply and physically, for whatever freedom my legs could find. a.s.saults of escapism, they took me more often and more keenly in Bukhara than they had in Kraftsville. They were pangs of returning life, not spasms of dying (so, at least, I concluded); perceptions of reality, not rejections of it. Between convulsions, I was growing unsteadily more aware that flight was not so much impossible as pointless. h.e.l.l hath no limits, nor is circ.u.mscribed In one self place; for where we are is h.e.l.l; And where h.e.l.l is, there must we ever be. Milton's Satan was a general; Marlowe's Mephistophilis knew what it was to march in the ranks.

He moved always with the urgent skill of a professional. His plans were as secret as the wrestler's in the ring; the movement announced the decision to move. The child was to be born. Rusudan's plans were elaborate. Yet, "Hunt," he said, "you will come with me." I thought it would be to India, where the great camps were-the labor camps where, contrary to all his announced doctrine, the surplus rice crops were grown, the medical supplies ma.s.s-produced. There were always problems with those camps, and with the sterilization program that accompanied them-this the overt, even publicized sterilization program, using only surgical methods, that busied his henchmen for a time in India as in China. And indeed we were to visit some of those camps before our journeying was done. But first, out of a pink dawn, our jet tilted downward to the convoluted islands that had been j.a.pan.

I saw now, as we sank roaring through the air, one of the beautiful horrors of which he had told me-an invested city. Through the outskirts of Tokyo ran an irregular band of devastation, a knotted black sash binding the city against the sea. In places it merged into broader spots of wasteland-the love-knots of Arslan's ribbon. Well-set fires and well-planted bombs had drawn that siege line. Tokyo, caught in a tightening belt of flame, and inspired by memories of old conflagrations, had saved herself (other cities had been less skillful or other-starred), to strangle more slowly in the cordon of blackness. Here, it had been Chinese troops who patrolled the perimeter, shooting down fugitives from the city. At certain checkpoints, a citizen could buy his way out with any deadly weapon. (In Tokyo, guns were scarce, but swords were equally acceptable.) Such people were packed off to the farm districts being laid out in Mongolia and Siberia. There were escapes, of course. There were sorties, organized and otherwise. In the depths of the city, there were riots, new fires, cannibalism. When the Chinese marched in at last, there was very little resistance.

It was from such cities, docile with agony, that Arslan had drained off all the surviving males. All evidently pregnant women and mothers with male infants were ghettoed in convenient prisons and hospitals. Their men and boys were marched or s.h.i.+pped away, to farm the unappealingly virgin lands of northern Asia or Australia, or sometimes-if they pa.s.sed the scrutiny of Nizam's agents-to serve Arslan more directly, as drivers, mechanics, technicians, clerks, interpreters, administrators, seamen, soldiers. In such a city, only the inmates of the inevitable brothels required sterilization. It was, on the whole, an efficient way to dispose of several million people.

There in j.a.pan, to my relief, I fell ill. I was to learn on that zigzag journey that the health of mankind had already deteriorated. A surprising variety of plagues afflicted the concentrations of population, plagues that Arslan accepted gladly and manipulated with growing skill. Under the circ.u.mstances, diagnosis and prognosis of my ailment were alike uncertain, and not worth bothering with. I was content with the indefinite consolation of a schooldays phrase, "just a bug that's going around." The practical result was that I was spared setting foot on the barren ground of Tokyo. But after a few days of helpless peace I was well again.

And by that time he had finished his dispositions in j.a.pan ("It is very simple here, Hunt. But there are problems elsewhere"), and we were ready to put still more distance between our backs and Bukhara. But ere the circle homeward hies, Far, far must it remove. The route was circuitous, not circular, and in the end we were to come back to Bukhara from east, not west. But I took care not to antic.i.p.ate any return.

I was seeing the world. What surprised me was that it was indeed a world-globular, and covered all over with seas and continents. The sun went around and around it (Copernicus was irrelevant), and a mouse or a human being might go around and around it, too-by rocket, by plane, by s.h.i.+p and train, by swimming and walking if he chose. Maps could be drawn of it. Beams of electromagnetic energy could be b.u.mped along its surface. It was real; it was finite.

Finite, and not only divisible but already divided. Water was Arslan's ally: the great rejecting oceans; rivers that cut nation from nation; the final ice of the mountains and the poles, blank, white, and perfect. And I was pleased. What Arslan was doing was fitting. I began to see the tangled web of twisting, heaping life in which this globular world was awkwardly netted. And I saw how Arslan with his square-nailed fingers worked at it, stretching and cutting and piecing and smoothing, so that someday, the sc.r.a.ps discarded, the web should fit neatly over every painted continent.

Lying in alien beds, awaiting the dull tides of shallow sleep that would flow and ebb across the mudflats of my mind, I was oppressed by the futility of all my hours. Remembrance, antic.i.p.ation, experience, all were shadows in the night. Nothing was real to me but weight, the resistance of the dark medium in which I moved. And in Delhi, Ma.r.s.eilles, Kinshasa, it appeared to me still in images of Kraftsville summer: days filled with linty wisps shed from the cottonwoods, like the lung-m.u.f.fling waste from some industrial process, nights with the horrid blunderings of gross beetles, junebugs monstrous in pathetic stupidity. And a pa.s.sing jet, mysterious and purposeful in the night, that in other times would have relieved awhile the pressure on my heart, now only grindingly moved and mumbled, crossing the sky with a long tearing sound, and left for a little a rasped furrow upon the flesh of mind.

Worm-belly skin of the creeping oceans beneath us, clouds repurified of life beyond our wingtips. "You will see, Hunt. All wounds heal. The world will heal very quickly."

"All?"

"Death heals the last."

King's fool or kempery-man, I served in other functions. Aimless, jerked idly along his hectic track, I carried his books and listened. Dimly I glimpsed, perhaps, what it would be to call Arslan my friend.

He took care, after all, to be on hand for the birth of the child he had never so much as mentioned, except in his battles with Rusudan. Sanjar; the name came from out of the air, or from some secret sanctum, immediately and unmodifiably. There was never any talk of "the baby." Once, before we left Bukhara, Rusudan had followed him into my room to scream at him, and he had turned to her a face coa.r.s.ened with rage, while I stood widening myself in futile imitation of an angry cat. It was a violation that roused in me resentments and disgusts I thought I had lost-and in fact they melted in the warm pleasure of their recognition. It was good to feel outraged; but since it was pointless to object to the outrage, I relaxed and observed it. The woman's face streamed and dribbled (when Rusudan wept, she wept wholeheartedly), her wild hair, beautiful sometimes in its munificence, was fuzzed and snarled now; and yet her body, like Arslan's, and for all the topological distortions of cramming one human being inside another, moved and held and moved with the authority of beauty. What she alternately begged and demanded was that she be allowed to name the child. He did not argue; he called her wh.o.r.e, b.a.s.t.a.r.d, beggar, sow, and a good deal else that got past me. And all the while, untainted by their strained ugly faces and guttersnipe voices and stupid peasant spite, their bodies played out a ballet of majesty and grace. It was one of the times when I thought I understood.

Arslan's son. Rusudan's baby. I made an effort, once the birth was accomplished, to consider the child as a human being. Surely the offspring of these parents must be torn apart, wrenched by two such forces. And yet, apparently, he was not torn. Arslan accepted, as he accepted the hyperbolic weather of Bukhara, all the pampering jujuism with which Rusudan's overheated court of handmaidens featherbedded their infant master. He insisted only on his right to claim Sanjar at any time of day or night and to handle him without interference. I found to my fleeting horror that it was I, not Arslan, who felt and showed the traditional discomposure of the male confronting the infant. It was so small, so frangible, and so irreparable. It seemed made of rice paper and jelly, a miniscule misrepresentation of humanity, at once exquisite and obscene. But, "Come, Sanjar," said Arslan, and tucked the silken monsterlet into his bent arm with all the quick casual care he extended to his guns and his animals. Rusudan shrilled at him from her bed (deprived, for the time, of her body, she was all ugly now), and her women fluttered quietly like a border of voiceless birds. They were abandoned disconsolate.

Day by day, month by month, in the crook of his father's arm, perched on his father's shoulders, dragging with pudgy-footed stumbles from his father's hand, Sanjar was introduced to his profession. He was accustomed, in order, to every branch of Arslan's transport system, from the ponderous cargo jets to the stony-footed mules of the mountaineers. Weaponry and communications were the meadow of his infant play. I always, and I only, spoke English to him-Arslan's educational scheme, designed to promote native and uncontaminated bilingualism. "Paperwork," Sanjar explained to me solemnly, burying his slight arms in the day's uncla.s.sified residue from Arslan's wastebasket-a phrase I did not remember having given him, and which he might well have constructed for himself. He was quick-witted, sometimes thoughtful, delighted to please-traits that boded well, to my ignorance of little children, for his future development. I was not very patient, but I was not spiteful with him. He was so very small.

Chapter 19.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, forta.s.se requiris.

Nescio; sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

I claimed the right to be young; to be moved by Catullus. I was trying to translate that poem-my first exercise in authentic Latin. The story of my life in two lines. "I hate and I love." Those words were the data, incapable of alteration. Odious, amorous; yet the verbs of English had their taproots in deeper soil. "Why I do that, perhaps you ask. I don't know; but I feel it to be done." Et excrucior: another datum. If I could translate that, the rest of the poem would be merely bricklaying. But if there was any direct English equivalent, I had so far failed to find it.

"I hate and I love. Why, you may ask. I don't know; but I feel it being done." The pa.s.sive infinitive (the inactive indefinite; or, say, the suffering unlimited). Fieri sentio: "to-be-being-done I feel." I sense the happening. Et excrucior. "And I am crucified."

But that was wrong, both in its literal inaccuracy and in its lack of a certain refinement. Or was it falsely that "excruciate" tinted excrucior for me? Was it indeed a fact (one of those observable concepts of which the world and science were constructed) that the greatest pains were the fruit not of bludgeons but of needles-not the crushed bone, but the delicately raveling nerve-so that, in the tortuous course of two or three millennia, what had meant simply the extremity of pain had come thereby to connote exquisiteness? What had Catullus felt? That (I had read) was the true translator's question. Well, the cross was an instrument combining the principles of bludgeon and needle.

The ex troubled me. My knowledge and my books were inadequate to explain it. Excrucior: "I am taken down from the cross"? Or had ex, like per (thoroughly, thoroughly), its aspect of completeness? Outerly, utterly; "I am crucified out-and-out"?

But it was futile. (Another Latin word; futilis, futile, it would be. But what exactly did it signify? What was futility after all-one of the basic states of human existence, undefinable except by pointing, part of the impenetrable bedrock of etymology?) For crucifixion, since the Crucifixion, was irreversibly changed, dyed with the purple of sacrifice and glory. What Catullus had felt, rereading his stylused words, I could not feel. The shadows of his world were different, the punctuation different, and crucifixion as commonplace and as repugnant as hanging. And to translate from his mind, rather than his words, would be to write a new poem, or the poem anew-impossible, unless I were Catullus.

Futile, all futile, when in truth I could barely scratch out the literal meaning. Futile to be concerned with shades of skin color before I knew the structure of the skeleton. Grammar (k.n.o.bby, articulated, concealing in stone-walled cells the leaveny life within), grammar refuted my pink and slovenly misshapes.

"I hate and love." I had never seen him comfort or soothe or tend a woman-not even Rusudan; least of all Rusudan. That sort of tenderness he reserved for his soldiers, for men wounded in body and spirit. I had had a few flashes of it, in Kraftsville and in Bukhara; but then I was certainly his man, and certainly I was wounded.

And in time of crisis, what woman would cling to Arslan for comfort or protection? No; if they turned to him, it was as a tracking antenna to the missile that will smash it. And a wave of regret and pity went through me, to think that of all the women who had felt the pressure of that hard chest against their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, not one had clung there for security; and I was sorry for Arslan, my poor and terrible Arslan.

"I hate, I love. You may ask why I do it.

I don't know; but I feel it done, and it tortures me."

He had spoken so often and so matter-of-factly of our returning to Kraftsville that I had long since ceased to believe him. "When we go back..." he would say, as if Kraftsville were his point of origin as much as mine. "When we go back, we will show Sanjar the cave in the hill." My mind set sullenly. That had been my cave, one of my secret places, only big enough for one boy. "When we go back, Hunt, you will be useful to Nizam." Not, You can help Nizam; w.i.l.l.y-nilly, active or pa.s.sive, I would be useful. Used. In the beginning, my heart had twisted at each of his magical go back's; but it no longer occurred to me to consider them as real possibilities. Thus, though no doubt my potential usefulness had increased (I had lost scruples, gained cunning, advanced linguistically and diplomatically), I did not bother to imagine how I might be used. The only point worth examination was Arslan's motive in rasping the skin of my soul with this particular tool on this particular day.

So that when Rusudan's bustle of packing began, I speculated with the ludicrous sobriety of a three-in-the-morning drunk. He was preparing to send her somewhere out of the way (and certainly at the last minute he would keep Sanjar with him); or we were all embarking on a royal progress of his dominions; or he was preparing to lead an actual campaign or defend against a threatened coup, and Rusudan and the child were to be sent elsewhere for safekeeping or, contrarily, as bait; or no one was in fact going anywhere, and all the preparations were one of Arslan's smokescreens for some gigantic or minute maneuver. I failed to consider that the announced schedule might be simply true. And even when we reached Kraftsville, realization had not overtaken skepticism, so that I labored with feelings of belatedness and surprise, and perceived what I looked at only after a moment's delay.

Everything was altered. I had left as a victim, contemptible but pitiable. I returned as a henchman. To fulfill the role Kraftsville had a.s.signed me, I should have died, or escaped, or found refuge in suicide, murder, or madness. It was ungrateful of me to have reappeared, intact and even cheerful, at Arslan's side.

Everything was altered, from my viewpoint as from Kraftsville's. There was the trite and tediously inevitable change of perspective known, no doubt, to every returned native; but I myself had changed, so that the difference lay not only in point of view but in organs of perception. I too had thought myself a victim and seen myself fail in that role. But my conclusions were not Kraftsville's.

Mr. Bond, the image of a wise disappointed father, was glad to see me and offered no recriminations. It was he who introduced me to the practical realities of Kraftsville life. "We've had a lot of trouble with the deer."

I could resolve the sounds into words, but not into meaning. I smiled inquiringly.

"Of course, we don't have anything to shoot them with. We've turned into pretty good Indians-but you know something, Hunt? I don't believe the Indians ever kept the deer down very well, either."

It was true, if ludicrous: a good deal of Kraft County effort was devoted to the serious business of "keeping the deer down." Or, considered more constructively, of keeping the district in good meat. Kraft County had moved a long way toward a hunting economy, though it still had far to go. Venison had practically replaced beef; and yet deer were, in popular opinion, vermin. "The deer seem to have adapted better than h.o.m.o sapiens," I said. Although better was a matter of definition.

"They're thriving, that's the truth." But "thriving" was not necessarily the same as adaptation; and in fact, hadn't the deer been always better adapted, even in h.o.m.o sapiens' heyday? They had done more than survive; they had kept the balance. It would have been valuable, once, to know their secret.

Already on the first day, Mr. Bond began the offer of his pastime intrigues. He was to play Good Angel to my Faustus; but it was, of course, too late to burn my books. I had made that attempt, in Kraftsville and in Bukhara, without celestial prompting; and the first time he had dissuaded me (there were politics in heaven), and the second-when I needed whatever I could get, dissuasion or a.s.sistance-he had not been there to save me from proving myself incompetent. So that now I could be t.i.tillated, but not seduced. (Raped virgins, in St. Augustine's opinion, were as pure as any.) Still, his tone opened old and new possibilities.

My usefulness to Nizam was wholly pa.s.sive. When I was full, he squeezed me, and the pores of my mind, dutiful not to the greater glory of his Turkistan but to the principles of elasticity, gave up their drops of stored observation. But to serve Franklin L. Bond would have required activity. I had no doubt that he led the most powerful, at least, of whatever submerged forces moved beneath the dull ripples of Kraftsville's mud-dark surface. It was tempting to think of offering my services-tempting but impossible. No man could serve two masters. That was not a moral prohibition, but a statement of fact. I could not choose to betray Arslan.

No, nor conceive betrayal, however I struggled toward it. Meshed in his heavy nets, all maneuverings were futile. For all roads led to death, all species evolved toward extinction.

Bukhara the Pure, Bukhara the Mine of Wisdom. So is every wise man a Bukharan. I had not realized, in the deep fever of Bukhara, what it was that he displayed to me so proudly, with such love. His city, yes. It was in Bukhara that I heard him called Al Hadj and learned that he had made the Great Pilgrimage with his mother when he was very small. But it was complacently, almost with pride, that he a.s.sured me he knew no Arabic. Bukhara the Dome of Islam, the Crown of the True Faith, the City of Many Mosques. His city, his country. "For four years I worked hard..." He had left the mosques still standing, as the churches of Holy Russia had still stood in the Soviet Union. But the light had gone out of the dome. And in Kraftsville I recognized at last that the Bukhara through which he had led me, his left hand locked on my wrist and his eyes luminous with joy, was already a ruin. He had cut, methodically, remorselessly, his own roots. And the nourishment he planned for his heir was drawn from other soil.

It was part of his scheme of education that Sanjar should learn, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, all the prowess of Huckleberry Finn. For that, too, I was useful. Arslan did not hunt this year, nor the next. (Had it been only a summer's sport, a bachelor's game?) It fell to me, Chiron to his infant Achilles, to initiate Sanjar into the art of killing. We were not very successful at hunting together-he was impatient and noisy, too small to help, too young to care-but I supposed he had fun in the woods. "I seen a bluebird, Hunt! I seen roses!" He mimicked my turns of phrase and Arslan's (diversely stilted), but his grammar was pure Kraft County.

Fis.h.i.+ng was better. "Later he may hate me," Arslan had said to me. "There will be hard times for him." But Sanjar would croon his little wordless songs and jiggle contentedly the line I had set for him, or sink absorbed into some private game at the water's edge, while I gazed bemused on the running ripples, a little eased to think that the brown cowponds of Kraft County were moved with the urges of the Pacific. The wavelets of these flowing breezes, baffled on every side, were the very image of those immeasurable surges swept by the Trades around the endless curve of ocean. And I would gaze until, broken from my roots, I felt myself, and the bank I sat on, running like a s.h.i.+p athwart the motionless ripples.

But if motion was relative, could it be real? And anch.o.r.ed by doubt, my bank would brake abruptly, and the ripples run again. Drop fused with drop, the inseparable crumbs of water swung in their trivial orbits, here as in the open sea, a fall for every rise, a retreat for every advance, no particle escaping its tiny province; so that what flung itself at last, heaping and rending, against the helpless sh.o.r.e, was not a thing so much as a force. It was like the headlong incessant lunge of mankind, transmitted by the feeble and frustrate circlings of an infinity of atoms, unendurable in its strength.

That was what made Arslan unique, human but not merely human. How could he be a bobbing droplet in the waves, he who was himself the waves embodied? He would sweep on, carrying all before him, pounding the wreckage of his enemies against the stubborn cliffs of earth until they crumbled at last and the restless waves swept past. He and his own.

Queen of the universe; mistress of its sole master, mother of its sole heir. Tenderness aside, Rusudan stood now, in Kraftsville as never in Bukhara, within the full circle of Arslan's embrace. They were comrades, bound by a kins.h.i.+p deeper than love, bounded by Kraft County's alien fields. And I, disconnected and withering on my home soil, felt here as never there the stifled anguish of the concubine. Laden with Arslan's disregard, goaded by Rusudan's contempt, I plodded my treadmill way, deeper into desperation. Dutifully I uttered my drops of useless treason (what could I tell Nizam that Arslan did not already know?) and dutifully begrudged them. For the sponge remains wet, the last drops are always unexpressed.

It was possible to look into the chill air for a long time without realizing that rain was falling. Only the whitish blurring of a thin mist intervened, like a dingy windowpane, between eye and landscape. Then, refocused, the ever-falling drops showed faint and cold, like delicate beaded chains sliding and slanting across the blue.

Again, it was spring. Weary and irreversible, again the world heaved round. Autumns were falsely sad, patting the fat tears of success. But spring rose always again like a beaten fighter stumbling from his corner for still another round. There was nothing to say to the universe; it was; one could only turn away.

But could not. I breathed, and the air was spring. In Karcher's woods, the trees stood definite and angled as black crystals; yet a scattered few were hazed with mists of color that showed, through the white rain, uncertain as illusions-faint green, fainter pink, like the pastels of an impressionist. I stood under the stable eaves, leaning and waiting. Arslan might come with Sanjar, to ride in the young rain. Or might not. And my mouth made the small, standard smile of acknowledgment, for I felt the weed of hope rising again, for one more spring.

Chapter 20.

Rusudan lay dead on Franklin Bond's couch. Awkward with fear, an apprehensive covey of women jostled behind Arslan. He had sent the guards beyond the doors. He bent deliberatively over Rusudan and began to strip her of her clothes.

First one, then two, then all, the women shrilled. They wavered; the boldest stepped forward to offer help. Arslan turned on her with a voiceless animal sound, lips shrunk back from his teeth, and she dissolved into wailing cries. He bent again to his work. The women swayed and shrieked, willows with tambourines and sirens. What did it express, this racket of anguish? Perhaps nothing more or less profound than their ache to perform the last offices of their mistress. Perhaps grief, certainly shock. I was shocked myself.

He examined her very thoroughly, and he took care not to obstruct our view of her. Or was "it" the proper term for one so emphatically dead? No; Rusudan was unalterably female. For the first and last time I saw her naked, and the sight stirred something within me, though not (as I had mildly dreaded) necrophilia. I was surprised by the broad aureoles of her nipples; I was impressed by the solid curves of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s; and I was strangely touched by the dark turf of hair, scanter than I had expected, at the vulnerable meeting point of thighs and belly-the tender crotch where Arslan's hands had lain, into whose recesses he had rubbed himself with the authority of love. Now he soberly examined the dead flesh for bruises. It was with a kind of medical-student coa.r.s.eness that he flopped her broken limbs. And with each manipulation of the silent corpse the women screamed, as though Rusudan's nerves functioned now in them.

When he had finished, he went to one of the women-the nearest, and also the oldest, who keened a desperate and ritualistic cry-and struck her. She tumbled backwards, all dignity abased. He said to me, moving his mouth laboriously, like one to whom speech returns as a lesson forgotten, "Bring in two men." I stepped onto the porch. "The general wants two men," I told the Turkmens in English. It would have been presumptuous now to present myself as anything more than conquered alien. They were accustomed to me as Arslan's messenger, but they gave me this time the hard looks that uniforms were invented to authorize, the looks that warned, Everything you have ever said is already held against you.

Arslan had covered what he could of Rusudan with the filthy dress he had peeled from her. "For Colonel Nizam," he said, consigning the women with a gesture. One guard escorted them. Arslan turned to me. "Tell me everything. Everything. Everything."

Far less prepared for this inevitable moment than for that of death, I felt my eyes go wide, my tongue stiff. All my innocence and ignorance, so valid a minute before, crumbled and evaporated, and I was cowering again in Bukhara, incompetent even in guilt. Stumblingly I told him everything I could remember or imagine that might serve, not to solve his mystery or a.s.suage his pain (helpless with fear, I had instantly forgotten that such purposes might exist), but to protect me from his violence. His eyes blazed out of some distant enmity. He listened, he questioned, and at the end, "Upstairs," he said to the remaining guard, nudging his head at me. It was the command I had known a hundred times before I understood it literally and grammatically. I was surprised that my heart did not grow cold at the sound of it. But I was chill enough already.

So again I sat the long hours on the bed's edge, listening, drifting. But I was older now, and knew how to hope for a better thing-that when reality came through the door again, it would be with what I had earned, the possibility of contact, of mutuality. So that when in fact it came, nights later, after Arslan's hands and heels had wrought the execution that was, for a time, to lose him Kraftsville, there was another hope to be crushed down.

He came to me, those nights, with the unplanned, unplanning, conscious intensity of an elemental. I remembered that demode phrase, "crime of pa.s.sion," and understood it in a new light, glaring and garish. For they were crimes that he wrought upon me in the narrow room that had been Mr. Bond's son's, crimes in intent and therefore in effect. It was not sadism, in the pure sense, that struck me from my waiting sleep and wrenched my joints into a new and still a new distortion; it was revenge, that Satanistic atonement. He pressed from me not only the immemorial noises of the wounded, but speech, but argument. For I was wounded by his cruelty, but I was outraged by his unreasonableness. It was not appropriate to Arslan to snarl accusations, to sneer insults. Threats were something else again; but it was wrong for him to whisper them. "Your mother, too-she is one of them. I will deal with her personally-personally. Do you wish me to tell you how?" I lay quietly outside my listening body and waited for him to finish, to sleep, to go away, to kill me. "Do you think that you are one of them, Hunt? Wait, wait until they have drained you dry. I protect you now, while you plot with them, while you crawl on your belly to do their errands, and pour for them your little drops of information. But wait, wait until I throw you to them, these jackals. When they have finished with you, then I will destroy them. And perhaps I will take what is left of you again. Perhaps."

Those nights, he broke upon me like a tempest, waves of l.u.s.t and fury that overran each other and died not in satisfaction but in collapse. I was roused and tumbled, buffeted with the excitement of the gale that is past pain and near to glee. And in the spent surf of such a dying storm he turned on me a look of so much gentleness that I sank, desolate, forlorn past hope at last. He cared for me; somehow, in some sense, I was of importance to him, a subject for tenderness, a source of joy. Therefore I was lost.

Chapter 21.

Somebody's child came idling down Pearl Street, in grave pursuit of this season's resident tomcat; an older child than Sanjar, without Sanjar's aggressive grace. He looked apprehensively at the raw palings of the new fence-fences were not common in Kraftsville-drubbed his fingers experimentally along them for a moment, and stooped for a throwing stone. The cat sprang without visible effort, like a sailplane rising on a sudden thermal, posed a brief second on the gatepost, and descended, ponderous and lithe, upon Franklin's front walk. The boy flung his stone side-armed toward the other side of the street and trotted past. The cat paced halfway down the walk, turned, seated himself, and began to wash. He was impressive in rear view-thick-necked and chunky-shouldered, like Arslan.

"What do you call that one?" Franklin's memory for the names of cats was short.

"Bruce," I said huskily. "Robert the Bruce."