Arslan. Part 15

Hunt hesitated. "You'll bring him here, then."

"I'll tell him what both of you say."

Hunt whipped around to me, looking for someplace to take out his frustration. "He's disbanded the armies! I a.s.sume you know what that means. Can't you perform one generous act in your life?"

"Sure I know. He said himself there'd be revolts."

Sanjar stepped between us, lifting his face towards mine. "Listen, Mr. Bond, I'll tell you something." He spoke fast and low, every word stinging clear. "He disbanded the armies because he was through with them. He's done exactly everything he planned to, one hundred percent. There's some trouble, yes. I can't tell you what, I'm under orders; but he's going to stop it. We got word some of his old troops are gathering, up north of here. He wants to get there before it comes to a battle. Sir, he needs rest. Sir"-he seemed to grow an inch or two with sheer intensity-"do you think Arslan would be asking you just for-for fun?"

"I wouldn't expect it, but I can imagine it. What I can't understand is Arslan rus.h.i.+ng north to stop a battle."

"Stop it?" he cried, surprised. "No, sir-win it!"

I had to laugh. "All right, and after he wins his battle, Sanjar-then what?"

He didn't answer. Maybe he was considering what to say, or more likely it hadn't really occurred to him, up to now, that time would go on beyond the next battle. I put my hands on his shoulders and felt the skin-and-bones of him through his s.h.i.+rt. "Is it Nizam?" He didn't say anything, but his shoulders stiffened. So Nizam was making his bid to take over-Nizam with his wolfs face, Nizam who had carried Sanjar in his arms and sworn to avenge Arslan's death by annihilating Kraft County. Another proverb turned out to be right-thieves' honor. I let go of the boy and stepped back. "All right. Tell Arslan to come. I'll hide him."

He swayed toward me a little-from grat.i.tude, maybe, or else faintness-and then he sprang to the open window and poured over the sill like a shadow. We both looked cautiously after him. I saw him once, already near the shed, before he disappeared. "That's quite a boy," I said.

"Which room are you putting them in?" Hunt asked briskly.

We talked about that, and decided inevitably on Arslan's old room. The window was a reasonably good escape hatch, and they could hear something of what went on in the living room and keep an eye on the street and the Morrisville road. I went upstairs to get things ready, and Hunt went out to the wellhouse to fetch milk and b.u.t.ter and eggs and a bucket of fresh water.

I got back to the kitchen just in time to see them come through the window-a beautiful performance. Hunt stood by the cabinet, with his hands full of dishes. Arslan came straight on into the middle of the room and stood there like the king of the mountain. "Good morning, General," I said.

"Good morning, sir." He turned to Hunt. "Bring me food upstairs. Sanjar will help you." This was his greeting after two full years of absence. I was a little sorry I hadn't decided to keep him in the shed. He pa.s.sed me, heading straight for the stairs, with Sanjar hurrying in front. I followed, and Hunt trailed mutely after.

Pale daylight poured down the stairwell, and for the first time I got a good look at him. In the dark he was definitely Arslan, but I didn't know whether I'd have recognized him in the light, except by the crippled hand. He was sunburned nearly black, and he wasn't just thin, he was shrunken, like a fugitive from a prison camp. "You've been sick."

He laughed huskily. "I am sick. This is why I have begged your bed, sir. You need not worry. It is not contagious, and I will not die on your hands. Not this time, at least. I want two things only, rest and nourishment." He grabbed the bannister with his crippled hand, swinging from it like a boy swinging around a lightpole. Sanjar was halfway up the stairs, leaning anxiously on that same bannister. Arslan grinned at me like a death's head, swung himself back to the stairs, and mounted them slowly, with steady steps. Sanjar waited, all but quivering, till he reached him, and hovered at his elbow the rest of the way up. Hunt slipped past me and followed. They didn't need me. I went back to the kitchen to wait for breakfast.

Sanjar was right; it was ten days, almost to the hour. They had come through the kitchen window in the dawn of a Monday morning; and a week and a half later, a little before the dawn of the Thursday, they went quietly through the back door. Arslan brushed against me in the darkness, and I felt the heat of his lean body, still fired from the fourth bout of fever since he came. It had been a nervous ten days, but quiet. There were no alarms. He slept; slept night and day, apparently. Sanjar stood guard over him like a tame tiger. He ate. Maybe ten times a day and three or four in the night, Sanjar would materialize in the kitchen to carry away a bowl or plate full of the nouris.h.i.+ng messes that Hunt continually stirred up. And in those ten days I never once saw Arslan. It was like having a ghost for a tenant. All the news of his progress came through Hunt from Sanjar. Hunt had washed and ironed Arslan's clothes, such as they were-the threadbare blouse and pantaloons of a peon. Sanjar had washed his own, in stages, borrowing a pair of Hunt's pants while his dried in the bas.e.m.e.nt, belting them in to fit and rolling up the legs so that he looked like a boy playing pirate.

And now Arslan, hot with his fading fever but steady on his legs, brushed past me in the dark, and Sanjar slid through the door like a breath of night wind. Hunt stood shoulder to shoulder with me, occupying the s.p.a.ce Arslan had vanished through. "I'm going," he said conversationally. "Maybe I'll be back. Thanks."

I stopped him with an arm across the door. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm going with Arslan." He paused. "I didn't ask him. I'm not asking you. I own the horse." Then, Huntlike, "You can make a note of anything I owe you. If I live long enough, I'll be back to work it off."

"You don't owe me anything, Hunt." I dropped my arm. "Good luck. Come back."

"Thanks." He pa.s.sed me into the night. I watched till the three horses moved out of the shed, shadows in darkness, and then I closed the door and turned back into the lightless house.

The truth was that I missed Hunt. For one thing, I cared about him. And for another, he had been there, a human presence in the house. Now, for literally the first time in my life, I was living alone.

When Luella died, it was a terrific blow to me. And yet there was something in my feeling that surprised me. It was a while before I could even admit to myself what it was, and it was this, that I felt only a very little personal grief. As far as Luella herself was concerned, my overriding feeling was thankfulness that she had gotten out of it as easily as anybody could in these times. In the past years I'd watched her getting tireder and tireder, more and more discouraged and resigned, and I had grieved for that. Now the grief was relieved.

No, the real blow was entirely practical and selfish. Luella had kept everything running smoothly. No wonder she'd been tired. She had cooked and canned, washed and ironed, sewed and mended, swept and dusted and scrubbed, built fires and carried water; and hardest of all, she had coordinated all of those things, so that we never lacked for anything it was in her power to provide. And on top of everything else, she had helped with the garden and the chickens and the cow. She was even more a part of my life than I'd ever known.

The day after we buried her in the old Cedar Hill cemetery, I walked into the kitchen for the first time since she'd died. It was a real shock. The sink was piled full of dirty dishes. There were dirty pans on the stove and dirty napkins wadded up on the table. The whole place smelled of garbage and burned grease. "Hunt!" I yelled. He came in hastily from the dining room. "Look at this filthy mess! How did it happen?"

He shrugged. "There's been n.o.body to clean up," he said mildly.

I stared at him. "But good Lord," I said at last. "It's only been four days. Three days."

He shrugged again. "This is what happens in three days."

I couldn't stand to look at it. I went back to the living room, and Hunt followed slowly, closing the door behind us. I sat down and scrubbed my hands over my face. "What about the women?" It seemed to me they'd been all over the place. When anybody died, now more than ever, the women friends and relatives would come over to do the cooking and cleaning and all of that.

He didn't answer at first, and when I looked at him he had an odd expression on his face, partly sly, partly defiant. "Didn't they bring food?" I asked him.

He nodded. "That's what you've been eating."

"Didn't they offer to help out?"

"They offered." He smiled a little puckered smile. "I accepted some of the food, because I couldn't ask you to eat my cooking. But I didn't accept anything else."

"Why not?"

"Because I've known for ten years where I stand with Kraftsville, but this is the first chance I've had to show Kraftsville where it stands with me." He came a little farther into the room to face me better. "I hate to bother you with this when you're in the midst of your own trouble. But since it's come up I'll just say that I'm ready to leave whenever you give the word." He waited a moment and went on. "But the only dealings I'm going to have with Kraftsville people from now on is to tell them to go to h.e.l.l."

"I'm Kraftsville people, too, Hunt."

"Except you, of course. You've been very good to me." But he said it oddly.

He had stayed, of course. He had turned out eventually to be a pretty good cook, and we had shared out the other household jobs between us. There was a certain toughness in Hunt, and along with his intelligence and his enormous coolness it made him a good manager, and sometimes a good worker. Nothing was too trivial, or too dirty, or too complicated for him to undertake. He didn't have to ask questions, and he had the initiative to start things on his own. The trouble was, he couldn't be relied on. He would drop a project in the middle, not from boredom exactly (it was never the really dull and monotonous jobs he gave up on), but because for some reason he suddenly lost the interest necessary for him to carry anything through. If he cared about a thing, he could be determined to the point of stubbornness.

There was no shortage of work to do. I'd kept my house and grounds up, and I meant to go on doing it. "Your place looks like old times, Mr. Bond," Leland had said to me once. "Got yourself a real old-time well-house now." What Leland actually understood better than most people, though he might not have known how to put it, was that the way my place looked was modern now. Where too many people were letting things wear out and run down and just sit there, I got rid of the obsolete items and installed whatever would be useful from here on out. After the water system broke down, I had dug a good well and a complete septic tank system. A lot of people told me that if I wanted that kind of facilities I should have bought a country house that already had them; but I was d.a.m.ned if I was going to move out of my own house for no better reason than that. We had plenty of room, with the Carpenter lot. I'd had the KCR's help, of course, but Hunt had done all the calculations and his share of the manual labor-more than his share, because he worked faster than most. Hunt was no weakling. He might be slender-built, but there was nothing flimsy about him, and I noticed he took care to keep himself in shape.

He'd said he wasn't going to deal with Kraftsville people, but that turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth. In the last two years, starting from scratch and with all the odds apparently against him, he had built himself a very successful little business in horse-trading-a very exclusive business, too, because he dealt only in select breeding stock. It suited his restless temperament and his aloofness. He would ride far out of county to scout good prospects, and arrange deals sight unseen, acting as a go-between for men who'd never heard of each other. Then he'd ride off again with a string of his client's horses and come back leading a string of new ones. Everybody was amazed that Hunt had turned out to be such a good judge of horseflesh and such a shrewd and honest trader (he got very few real complaints, at least in Kraftsville), but the only thing about his success that surprised me was that he'd gotten so many people to trust him. I figured we could both be proud of that.

The horse-trading was all on his own, but I'd already done what I could to give him a livable position in Kraftsville. I didn't try to coddle him-that would have been no kindness-but I made it public knowledge that he was part of my family and a confidant in most of my business. After I was elected to my second term as County Supervisor and concurrently my first as Mayor, he served me as an unpaid private secretary, and I had let it be known before the election that he would do just that. Some people didn't like it.

"I stood by Hunt when his own father turned him out, Leland. He's not going to let me down."

Leland tilted his head ruefully-a sort of sidling negative. "Maybe not you he won't. But he don't seem to think he owes the rest of the county nothing."

"He's working for me, not the rest of the county. And just what harm do you think he could do, anyway?"

"It ain't me," Leland protested. "It's just what I hear around town."

"Well, what the h.e.l.l do you hear? I know it's not you, Leland."

"Well, you know there's still Russian troops up north, and G.o.d knows where all. It's not like the war was really over."

I'd quit arguing about that word years ago. War was what people chose to call the state of abnormality Arslan had created. It was a shorthand way of saying that standard regulations didn't apply. "All right, get it out, Leland."

"Well, Arslan's someplace, and Nizam's someplace. Some people just figure Hunt's in a pretty good spot to spy on things."

"On me, you mean-if he was going to spy on anybody. And I know d.a.m.ned well he's not going to spy on me. You just tell them to figure again, Leland."

He pushed his sc.r.a.p of a hat farther back on his shabby head. "Yeah, I can tell them you vouch for him." He grinned. "And I don't reckon the Turks is much interested in Kraft County no more, anyway."

"And another thing, Leland, you make it clear to everybody I'm not using any public funds to pay Hunt. That's a saving they'll see reflected in the next budget."

But I paid him something, all right: I broke his mother's heart for him. He didn't quite have what it took to do the job singlehanded. His father had been in poor health for some time, and Jean had taken to dropping in on the excuse of telling Hunt how Arnold was. Hunt was civil enough, but never much more. And after the elections, when, to give him his due, he had his hands pretty full of work, he began to be a little less.

"Could we just clarify something, Franklin?"

"We could try, at least."

He was turning back from the door where he had just shown Jean out. His face was a little flushed and his lips a little tight-Hunt's irritated look. "I'm curious to know just what are the visitation rights in this house."

"I suppose any decent person is welcome here, if that's what you mean."

"I see," he said pettishly. "In that case, where would you like me to do this work for you?"

Jean's visit had interrupted something, but it wasn't all that important. "Now what do you want, Hunt?"

"It's what I don't want." He went back to his chair, demure and gloomy.

"I could put it to your mother that you're very busy now, if that's what you really want."

His head snapped up like a tw.a.n.ged spring. His voice quivered. "I want... I want you to tell me you'll keep her out of here! Isn't the line drawable anywhere? Do I have to retreat to my bedroom for refuge? And how long before she'd be in there, too?" He grimaced in self-derision and beat the flat of his hand lightly on the chair arm. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, you don't have to say any of it to me. Just let me submit that I've taken a lot of various things in my time, okay? And there are a few things that rightly or wrongly I can't take." He bit his lips, and sat there still and collected, but trembling quietly all over.

I sucked in my breath impatiently. "Exactly what do you have in mind, Hunt?" It was too bad it was his mother he just happened to be unable to bear, and I was well aware that he let himself tremble visibly, to demonstrate his earnestness. But that didn't make his trembling or his need any less real.

"It's your house." Stubborn and meek.

"Hunt," I said finally (I never knew how it was, but he could outwait me every time), "I give you my word she won't enter this house while you're living here-unless you ask her to."

Naturally, I didn't intend to put it to Jean in quite those terms, but she got it out of me anyway. She took it calmly, as Jean Morgan was bound to, but her face went deathly pale. "All right, Franklin." Her voice cracked a little. "Don't tell me why. Let's just leave it at that."

The house felt very empty, though Hunt had been a quiet person to live with. I fed his pets without enthusiasm. For a while-for years, in fact-I'd insisted on having no animals in the house, but when some people's hostility against Hunt had broken out in the form of attacks on his horses, I'd told him to bring his pets inside if he wanted to. (Not that every animal on the place wasn't a sort of pet to Hunt. He called the cow Lucinda. The old rooster was Saladin. Even the hens had names.) People who were capable of hamstringing a horse out of malice would do worse things to cats and dogs. That danger seemed to be past, now that Hunt was a practicing businessman; but I'd gotten used to the creatures-after all, it wasn't the pampered menagerie of Arslan's regime-and they had stayed. Now it was suddenly up to me to take care of them, and for Hunt's sake I did it.

I figured that "north of here," under the circ.u.mstances, was three or four days' ride from Kraftsville. If it were any closer, Arslan couldn't have resisted some kind of direct communication with his irregulars-always supposing they really existed. He would lose the third day in his next attack of chills and fever, unless he was fool enough to exhaust himself by riding with it. And, being Arslan, he'd make the most efficient use of his time; it was safe to a.s.sume he would give himself the maximum amount of rest, and arrive just in time to fight his battle before the next chill took hold. Of course, it might be farther north than that-another chill farther, or two or three; but Sanjar had given such an impression of immediacy, I was convinced otherwise. So I could begin the infuriating business of expecting them in a week and a half.

Chapter 23.

It was Sanjar again who came as scout in the darkness. This time he woke me. "Sir! Wake up! Sir! A message from Arslan!" His light, sharp voice, hissing with urgency, entered my dream in the form of a knife thrust, and I woke up with the conviction I had been stabbed. He started back from the bed as I jerked upright. "Sanjar, sir! A message from Arslan!"

The mists cleared away. "What is it, Sanjar?"

"Arslan's sick, Hunt's wounded. Is it safe to bring them in?"

"Of course it is. How bad wounded?" I was out of bed and feeling for my clothes.

"Not so bad-a smashed leg. Horse fell on him."

"Where are they?"

"In the shed."

"Sounds like you pretty well brought them in already."

But he was gone. I pulled on my pants, dug my feet into my moccasins, stuck a candle into my pocket, and felt my way downstairs. It was the dead of night. The back door stood open. I crossed the yard to the shed.

It was full of the smell of horses and the sound of their breathing. "Hunt?" I said softly. His little dog was snuffling and fretting around our feet.

"Here," Sanjar answered. He caught my hand and guided it to something solid.

"Hunt?"

"h.e.l.lo, Franklin." His voice was firm and sardonic. I ran my left arm under his right and got a good grip.

"Which is your bad leg?"

"The right. Otherwise known as the wrong. Let's go."

I took most of his weight, and we staggered across the yard. I didn't let him pause till we had struggled through the open door and he could lean against the washstand. He was breathing in ragged gasps of pain and effort, and I could feel him sweating. "d.a.m.n it, where's Sanjar?"

"Let's go," Hunt repeated tightly.

Even with Sanjar's help it would have been hopeless to try to get him up the stairs. I crutched him into the living room and over to the couch and let him painfully down on it. In the darkness I didn't want to fool with his injured leg; I hurried back to get a light from the cookstove embers and planted my candle on the coffee table. One little flame wouldn't show through the heavy curtains. Together we got the leg lifted and straightened on the couch. It had been crudely splinted and bandaged, but I could feel the bones grating as we moved it. He lay back panting.

"Okay for a minute, Hunt?"

"Very fine."

I headed back through the kitchen again, ready to chew out Sanjar and maybe Arslan, too. A minute later I was helping them. It was too much to ask an eleven-year-old boy to carry a grown man, however emaciated. Sanjar had gotten him-part dragging, part supporting-almost as far as the door, and they were both exhausted. Arslan was just conscious enough to try to keep his legs under him. He was s.h.i.+vering in short spasms; you could almost hear his bones rattle.

Between us we manhandled him into the dark house and upstairs to his old bed. He was so light it gave me a peculiar chill feeling in the pit of my stomach. "He's all yours," I told Sanjar, and went back down to Hunt. "Well, did you win it?"

"We won it." He was looking studiously at the ceiling.

I went on through into the kitchen and brought him back a drink of water. He poured it down eagerly and gave me a shy sort of smile in the candlelight.

"I'm going for Dr. Allard."

"No." He tried to raise himself.

"Relax, Hunt. You can trust Jack Allard as well as you can me." I patted him back down on the couch and went out again by the back door. I hadn't gotten very far before Sanjar caught up with me. He ran like a hunting cat-low, and all but silent. I turned to meet him. "What's the matter?"