Arslan (10 page)

his end by despotic blows.

Or he would be leaning back in my armchair beside the kitchen sink, in the blissful trance of a hot shave, the little orderly operating with all the grim delicacy of a brain surgeon. And Arslan would look like a petted cat.

Locks so grey did never grow but from out some

ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old,

Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped,

as though I was Adam, staggering beneath the piled

centuries since Paradise.

It was strange fare for a Turkistani general. He never commented, never asked questions; and, almost always, he was doing something else while he listened. But he listened. Sometimes a passage would make him smile. More often, he would turn his snake's eyes abruptly on Hunt, with an expressionless spotlight intensity that it almost hurt to watch. Hunt seemed to feel it, always; a flush would start upward from his neck, and his voice would burn all the more earnestly. But those were never the times when he stole his glances at Arslan.

His mother had been after me all along to arrange some way for her to talk to Hunt. She had lost weight, and she'd never had a lot to spare. Her freckled face was pinched and grim, but she went about business as briskly as ever. On my way to Nizam's—or more often on my way back, because I'd be in better humor—she would waylay me. “Any chance, Franklin?”

“Nothing new, Jean, but you know there's always a chance.”

What was less common was for me to hear anything from her husband. Arnold Morgan was generally considered the best attorney in town, or anyway the sharpest, and in my opinion he'd raised a fine son; but I didn't think any the better of him for the way he was acting now.

I caught up with him one day just coming out of his office. Business was still being conducted, Arslan or no Arslan. A lot of legal requirements were in abeyance, for lack of a government, and we weren't allowed to hold court, but there was still plenty to keep the lawyers busy. “Hello, Arnold.” I slowed down to fall into step beside him, and he looked a little annoyed.

“Good afternoon, Franklin. How's it going?”

“Not too bad.” I waited; sooner or later he would have to ask about his son.

“Of course, Jean keeps us pretty well posted about Hunt,” he said reluctantly, “and I know he's in good hands at your house. The best thing we can do for him now is not make waves.”

“He's in General Arslan's hands,” I said.

He threw a furious look at me and checked himself. “Fortunately, Hunt has been brought up to think for himself. He's a very mature boy.” He settled his hat more firmly on his head, and added, “All this must be pretty hard on your ulcer.”

“It's not an ulcer. It's a spastic pylorus.”

“I beg your pardon.”

What that came to was that Arnold Morgan was in no hurry to get his son back. A bright, polite, good-looking child was an asset, no matter how much it took to support him, but now Hunt was tainted. It wasn't a question of morals. It would have been the same if he had lost his looks, or his grade average. But Jean was dying for him.

It wasn't often Hunt was alone with Luella and me, or either of us. But sometimes Arslan would trot upstairs for a few minutes, or swing out of the house for half an hour, leaving Hunt unoccupied. He would sit in his little pool of self-consciousness, waiting for whatever somebody might choose to do to him next. I always took the opportunity to speak to him and try to get some reaction, if it was nothing but a faint nod in response to some remark on the weather.

“Isn't there a poem with something about Bukhara in it? Something about ‘lonely Bukhara'?” Arslan had just gone out with one of his officers, and the word
Bukhara
hung in the air.

Hunt nodded. He got up silently, took an old high school literature book from the shelf, and leafed straight to the page he wanted. He held the book out toward me without a word.

“Will you read it to me, please, Hunt?” I didn't want him to feel that reading was just part of the regimen Arslan inflicted on him.

He sat down, docile as always. “Matthew Arnold,” he said quietly, smoothing the page. “'Sohrab and Rustem.'” He began to read. I didn't pay much attention to the words at first—

My terrible father's terrible horse—

But Hunt was reading it as if he'd been born to read it.

O Ruksh, thou art more fortunate than I;

For thou hast gone where I shall never go,

And snuff'd the breezes of my father's home.

And thou hast trod the sand of Seistan—

It didn't sound exactly like what I remembered.

—But I

Have never known my grandsire's furrow'd face—

His voice shook with feeling. It was a question whether he would make it through.

But lodged among my father's foes, and seen

Afrasiab's cities only, Samarcand,

Bokhara, and lone Khiva in the waste,

And the black Toorkmun tents; and only drunk

The desert rivers, Moorgab and Tejend,

Kohik, and where the Kalmuks feed their sheep,

The northern Sir; and this great Oxus stream,

The yellow Oxus, by whose brink I die.

He stopped. “That's all,” he said, without lifting his eyes. “It's not much.” But he was struggling to bring out something else, so I waited. “He,” he began, and swallowed hard, and then got it out steadily enough, “he told me they really do ferment the milk of mares. I was surprised.”

It didn't matter much what he had said; he had said something. His hands jammed the book shut convulsively, and he shot me a naked, stricken look—confessing everything, that he was a child, that he was alive, that Arslan was his grown-up. His eyes fell again; his shoulders shook, but before I could cross the room to him he stiffened again, and the look he flung at me this time stopped me dead—it was so plainly a look of fear.

I held out my hand for the book, and I saw his shoulders relax. “Thank you, Hunt,” I said.

Chapter 6

“That Morgan boy's a pitiful case, isn't he?” Fred Gonderling made it sound sympathetic, which was better than most people managed to do.

“He's in a tough spot, if that's what you mean. But he keeps his wits about him. I think he'll come out of it all right.” It made me a little mad to hear Hunt Morgan dismissed as pitiful, like a failing patient in a nursing home. There was no telling what kind of a future lay ahead of that boy, except that it wouldn't be an easy one; but I thought he had more of a future than most of the people who were shaking their heads over him. There was something in Hunt that could hold out for a long time against everything Arslan was doing to him—given a little luck, long enough to come through on the other side.

By midsummer, he had been granted some of the trappings of freedom. He was never locked up now. He was allowed to come and go pretty much at will, except when Arslan had a use for him. He was even allowed to take a horse out of the Russians’ stable and ride anywhere in the district, apparently. But the district was sown with soldiers, and I thought one of the permanent duties of every one of them was keeping an eye out for Hunt Morgan. Every time Jean had tried lying in wait along his usual routes—and she had tried it often enough, if not more—some Russian or Turkistani had sent her about her business. After a while I persuaded her to quit trying and wait till I could arrange something. Partly I wanted to keep her out of official trouble, and partly I wanted to keep her from finding out in the bluntest way that Hunt didn't want to see her.

“She's on your side, Hunt,” I told him. “Forget about everybody else.”

Usually his answer was silence; but once he brought himself to say, “I
know
her opinions.”

“Forget about opinions. And when you do see her, never mind what she says to you. When it comes to family, those things don't really matter—not if you can remember they're just words.”

“Sticks and stones,” he said.

In a way, Arnold Morgan had been right when he called Hunt mature, but not in a very important way. Compared to most of his classmates, with their raw country boyishness, he'd always seemed both younger and older. But that had been superficial, just the self-confident sophistication of any well-bred child. Now he was definitely, irreversibly older. It had been close, but Hunt had proved me right. He had had just barely the necessary toughness to get him through. He didn't blush any more.

Hunt would survive, no doubt of that. What I worried about now was what kind of a person he would survive as. He listened when he was talked to—listened seriously but distantly. There was a kind of impediment in his communication. He volunteered practically nothing, and when he answered a question it was most often with a shrug, a sidelong look, or a cool stare.

Toward Arslan, he had the manner of a well-trained servant—sometimes he was disconcertingly like the little orderly. Arslan was the sun around which Hunt had to revolve, and it was only on the side illuminated by Arslan that he showed much sign of life. On that unique subject he was able and willing to talk, or at least answer questions articulately. And then again he would clam up, and I couldn't get any more out of him except a shrug and “He doesn't tell me everything.”

Either he told him an almighty lot, or Hunt had a very fertile imagination and didn't mind farming it. “He says he has American troops in Russia and China, and Chinese troops in Europe, and European troops in the Middle East, and Arab and Israeli troops in Africa. All commanded by his officers.”

“Hunt, I don't see how he could
have
that many officers.”

“That's what he told me.”

“Why does he stay in Kraftsville? Has he told you that?”

One of the things I'd noticed about Hunt lately was that he held his head upright even when he bowed it. His shoulders might hunch and droop, his eyes and chin might sink, but his spine stayed straight and tall. Now he lowered those big eyes and shrugged his little shrug, and his mouth stirred briefly.

“Of course,” I said, “we don't have to believe everything he says.”

“Free will,” he observed constrainedly.

“And common sense. If he'd really conquered the world, would he set up his capital in Kraftsville, Illinois?”

He took on a struggling look—trying to enunciate an answer that would suit me—but after a minute he gave it up and relaxed in silence.

“And what's he doing with those troops, if he commands them all?”

“Dividing the world into small, self-sufficient communities,” he parroted patiently.

“How ready does he have to be, General?”

Arslan looked up blankly from his coffee-tableful of papers. He had sent Hunt upstairs a few minutes before, and he had called for a bottle, but it still stood unopened. Lately he had started to break his unstated rule of no hard liquor while there was still work to do. “How ready?”

“How strong. Strength was the idea, wasn't it?”

He fingered the top of his bottle. “He is ready now,” he said finally. “Let him go to his people.”

I wasted no time setting up a meeting between Hunt and Jean—and when it came right down to it, Hunt raised no objection. They talked in what had been the music room at school and was now an office supply storeroom. (The Turkistanis used a considerable amount of memo paper.) Hunt was back in twenty minutes, and I felt better as soon as I saw his face. There was a freshness and childhood there that had been missing for too long. And a vulnerability. He didn't say anything; he just started to pack a little toilet kit. Hunt didn't have very many belongings. Still, he managed to put off his departure till after supper, dawdling through his preparations and taking individual leave of every animal on the place. Arslan wasn't there.

And when Arslan came in at last, not half an hour after he finally left, he didn't mention Hunt.

A little after dark (it would have been about eight—there was no Daylight Saving Time this year) we heard a single rifle shot, not far away. On the couch Arslan swung himself upright, his face gone hard, and spoke an order. Two soldiers jumped to put out the lights, and another one rushed past me and out of the door. I heard low voices, running feet, one cautious shout; then in scarcely a minute the man was back with a word to Arslan, the door was shut, the lamps being lit again.

“What's the matter?” I demanded. But Arslan was giving more orders, brisk and easy. One man disappeared through the kitchen door, another up the stairs. Luella came in from the kitchen, white-faced. There was a pause. We were all on our feet, except Arslan.

He knew too damned well what was coming, and I knew it, too. Anger was building up in me like compressed air, so tight I could hardly hear the slow steps on the porch. A guard held the door open for Hunt and closed it after him.

He looked straight towards me. “Would you mind if I came back, Mr. Bond?” His voice was clear, level, and bitter.

“As far as I'm concerned you
are
back, Hunt, and always welcome.”

Luella came to him anxiously. “What happened, Hunt?”

“Forget it.” He was leaning against the door, his little bag in his hands. His eyes flared at me as he burst out, “He's willing to take me back—
on conditions!
How about that? If you've got any conditions, I'd appreciate hearing them now.”

“No conditions, Hunt,” I said. “Never.”

Luella gasped wordlessly, and I followed her look. Hunt's left pant leg was streaked with wet from thigh to ankle; the blood dribbled silently off his shoe onto the rug. “Yeah,” he said. She was trying to help him away from the door, but he leaned against it stubbornly. “I can walk very well, thanks.” His eyes were alight with fury. I touched Luella's arm, and she stepped back.

It was Arslan's turn now. He stood up at last, and Hunt limped across the room and allowed himself to be let down onto the couch. Arslan was on his knees beside him in an instant, ripping open the pant leg with his knife.

Luella surprised me. “You get your hands off him!” she snapped. “You're the one that had him shot!”

“My own fault,” Hunt said calmly. “I know the curfew rule. I'm surprised, though,” he added to Arslan. “I thought you had better marksmen. Or don't they shoot to kill?”