Arslan (16 page)

He wasn't anything you could call a husband, but he was a real father. He took the child with him almost everywhere, and showed him almost everything. Nobody else was allowed to cross Sanjar in either the smallest or the most vital things; as a matter of fact, we were all under orders to obey (that was the word,
obey
) the child in everything. Naturally I paid no attention to that. Here was a bright, healthy, normal three-year-old boy, and of course he had no more idea of what was good for him than a hound pup. Luella was willing enough to spoil him, because she was starved for children, but she was always grabbing him away from the stove or out of her china cabinet or off the porch railing where he loved to climb; and every time Arslan caught her at it or heard about it, she was in trouble. I had to tell her finally, “Just look the other way when he gets into something.” Nobody had laid a finger on Luella so far, and I intended to keep it that way.

“I can't look the other way,” she said. “I don't care
whose
child he is. He's always trying to take the stove lids off.”

“He's got a father and a mother and a cavalry regiment to take care of him. If he wants to crawl in the oven, just hold the door open for him.”

Taking care
wasn't exactly it. Rusudan would play with him and fight with him by the hour, acting like a six-year-old herself, but if he needed to be fed or washed or bandaged, she called her women—or Luella. Hunt Morgan led him around by the hand (or rather he led Hunt), took him fishing when summer came, and corrected his budding English. The troops doted on him, and spoiled him every way they could think of.

It was different with Arslan. Sanjar might be climbing all over his father on the couch, getting his muddy little boots into the charts on the coffee table. “Sit still,” Arslan would say quietly, and the boy would slip to the floor without a murmur and sit there looking up with solemn eyes. And when, being a boy, he forgot again and started climbing onto the table, one sharp word from Arslan would set him back with a very chastened look on his face. He always spoke English to the boy now—at least, whenever I was within earshot—and Sanjar was developing a remarkable vocabulary. Most of it came from listening to Hunt read. Because, after all this time, Hunt was still reading to Arslan. I thought I understood that now. It was Arslan's own continuing education, the liberal arts that the parvenu dictator's son had never dreamed of; and now it was to be Sanjar's, too.

It was Arslan, appropriately, who taught him about guns. He showed him why he shouldn't pull a trigger by the simple, messy method of shooting a tame rabbit at close range with his pistol. After that Sanjar treated firearms pretty respectfully.

Still, by and large, Arslan with Sanjar was Arslan at his best. He fairly glowed with pride in all the child's little accomplishments. It was really pretty to see how carefully he pointed things out to the boy. “Do you see it, Sanjar? Do you hear, Sanjar?” Dozens of times a day he would break off whatever he was doing to show Sanjar something. “Can you tell what color that bird is, Sanjar? Then go that way—you see? You need the light a little behind you ... Do you see how the mare turns her ears, Sanjar? She is wondering if we will be her friends ... Look, Sanjar; these are two different maps of the same place. Do you see, here is an island, and here is the same island on the other.” And the boy knew that nothing pleased his father more than for
him
to notice something and point it out. “Look, Arslan! Look, Arslan! You see the squirrel?” And Arslan would gravely follow the little waving finger and refuse to see the squirrel till it had been pointed out with bullseye accuracy.

Nobody ever disciplined Sanjar, but he had his hard lessons, and his punishments. The rabbit was only one of them. Arslan's rule against gainsaying the boy meant that he had more than his share of accidents. In fact, it was a wonder he survived the year he lived in my house without serious injury. That spring and summer, especially, it was a quiet day indeed that passed without Sanjar's shrieks of pain or fear, as he learned the hard way that mother sows will bite, that bulls will charge, that flatirons are hot and heavy, and a hundred other uncomfortable facts of life. None of these things disturbed Arslan; his only concern seemed to be that the boy should learn not to cry. “You sound like a woman,” he would say scornfully. “You sound like a baby.”

“It hurts me! It hurts me!”

And Arslan, hard-faced, hard-eyed, would shake his head. “Sanjar, listen; remember. If you are strong enough, and smart enough, and brave enough, nothing will hurt you. Nothing.”

It was this kind of thing that made Luella the most indignant. “He's ruining that child,” she said to me. “He's trying to make him into a soldier before he's had time to be a baby.”

And she needed a baby to love. She should have been a grandmother by now.

You couldn't see much of Sanjar—I couldn't, anyway—without feeling a sort of fascination. I'd always hated to see a child completely alone in a world of adults. From what Hunt told me, Sanjar had never had a companion, or a rival, his own age. Naturally all good Kraftsville parents were careful to keep their children away from him. And it didn't seem to occur to Arslan or Rusudan that their child might enjoy (still less need) the company of any little plebeians. But Sanjar would stop whatever he was doing to stare at every bunch of kids who happened along—stare awestruck and intent, his black eyes as full of concentration as his father's and a lot more human.

Aside from acting as Sanjar's tutor and escort, Hunt apparently had nothing to do. He drifted from my house to Nizam's headquarters to school and back again. Information flowed through him like a wide-mesh seine.

“You can't tell me he hasn't run into a lot of active resistance movements, Hunt.” I knew for a fact he'd run into some. Roley Munsey's receiver had picked them up and listened to them die. It was why I knew I'd been right never to let Roley transmit anything.

Hunt's reaction to that kind of statement was likely to be literal: he wouldn't tell me. But a little later on, he would give his own kind of answer. “It's essentially a judo technique—use your opponent's force and weight against himself. He's a very eclectic wrestler. Have you ever seen him wrestle?”

“No.”

“No, of course.” He mused on his secrets. “He likes to use his own strength, too. That's like a religion with him. It would be terribly interesting to see Arslan disabled.”

“Terribly.”

“But brute force is only the
ideal
. In practice, he follows the principles of judo. It's not always easy, but it's very economical. He invites the resistance to organize, you see, so he can crush it conveniently. He doesn't object to resistance—only to organization.”

“What do you mean, ‘invites'?”

“Teases. Baits. It's a kind of sport—resistance-baiting.”

I nodded. “So that's what he's been doing for four years—that and founding a dynasty.” Thank God, we had had the luck and the discipline to resist
Evergreen.
Still, it didn't necessarily follow that the KCR was undetected. And Hunt wasn't in a position to be trusted very far.

“It's not a dynasty. A dynasty is an organization.”

“I never noticed him objecting to his own organization.”

“His organization is designed to be temporary. He's going to phase it out as fast as possible.”

“I'll believe that when I see it. And I'll still call it a dynasty, Hunt. He's not above setting up a monument to himself.”

“Why should he?” Hunt's eyes went hot. “Do you think he
wants
to be remembered by posterity? Do you think he'd go down in history as Arslan the Good? Arslan the Well-Beloved? He'd be Red Arslan—Bloody Arslan—Arslan the Terrible.”

“Isn't that the way he likes it?” From the sound of it, Hunt had savored that list of titles before.

He shrugged, mild again. “Perhaps the question's a little academic.”

What the troop movements added up to was that about half the Russians and a smaller proportion of Turkistanis had been replaced by the new troops Arslan had brought in, which left us, numerically speaking, about where we were before. But in fact, things were a lot different.

It was probably a toss-up which of us was gladder to see Arslan—Nizam or me. I sympathized with Nizam, in a way; my hands had been as tied as his. The only thing that made District 3281 the possible site of an uprising was Arslan's presence in it. If we'd ever tried to fight Nizam, it wouldn't have made one bit of difference whether we failed or succeeded; the whole district could have been crushed from outside, like a flea between Arslan's fingernails. Now we had the heart and brain of the whole juggernaut within our grasp, and we'd had four years to develop our organization.

The problem the KCR had to face now—or I had to face for the KCR—was simple enough, but the answer still wasn't. As long as Plan One was in operation, we couldn't afford to make any mistakes. I know enough now to be sure Nizam wasn't the only commander who would take it personally if anything happened to Arslan. And the new Turkistani battalion had the unmistakable look of an elite unit—hard and polished and too damned proud of themselves. There was no way the KCR could move, even now, without unleashing more hell than I wanted to be responsible for—no way but one. The only defense Arslan had been able to come up with against the threat of kidnapping was to tell me he wouldn't let me do it. That had been valid enough in the front seat of a Land Rover, with one gun between us, but it didn't apply any longer. Only we had to be very careful.

There was no lack of information and misinformation in the air, and Hunt wasn't the only source of it. Things had solidified under Nizam—petrified into a humdrum daily desperation. Now we were free enough to breathe and think. Things seemed fluid again, and stale old bits of information from the Russian camp suddenly began to branch and bloom.

“Of course he got the Russian government first, Hunt. But what the devil could he threaten them with—or bribe them with, either?”

There was a faint, abstracted frown he used for hypothetical problems. “If the lever is long enough, it doesn't take much force to move the world.”

“It's got to have been some kind of a trick. They must have thought they were using
him.
But from there on, it's all downhill work. Somebody just picked up the hot-line phone and told Washington they could either fight a nuclear war or turn over the armed forces to Arslan. And all I can say is, everything we ever heard about Washington must have been true, the way they caved in. I suppose it doesn't matter much now whether they were traitors or just chicken. After that, he just started shifting troops around.”

Hunt nodded absently. “That's approximately right.”

“What do you mean?”

“At least, that's approximately what he told me.”

It was no use getting mad at Hunt. “Told you how long ago?” I asked him as mildly as I could.

He considered. “About six years.”

“In other words, right after he got here.” And the whole town—the whole world—dying to know, buzzing with bewilderment and pain, while Hunt Morgan sat mum with his nice-little-boy face of ravished innocence. For six years. “All right, how did he get the Russians to cooperate?”

“Magic?” he suggested. He met my eyes for a second, and hunched forwards in a movement of contrition. “He didn't really tell me much,” he said seriously. “I'm sorry. Would it have helped?”

“I suppose not. Forget it, Hunt.” His shadowy smile flickered, and it annoyed me. He was so damned determined to be an exile, cultivating every little irony like an orchid.

But it was in midsummer that the real revelation came, and everything crystallized into a new solidity. Luella tapped on the bedroom door and peeped in. “It's Dr. Allard,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.” Her manner added,
privately
.

Jack Allard was already making his ponderous way upstairs, like a tired bear. Luella ushered him in and left us alone. “What can I do for you, Doctor?” I motioned him to the armchair and turned my desk chair to face him.

He settled himself thoroughly down into the cushions. He didn't look cheerful. “Torey McArthur and two of his kids are sick.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it looks to me like typhus. Not that we have typhus in Kraft County, but these new troops could have brought it in.” There had been troop movements—little, piddling ones, like fine-tuning adjustments—in and out of the district for the past two months.

“Didn't the McArthurs get their shots?”

“Oh, they got them, all right. Typhus—that's the one thing Nizam's boys were the keenest about. They let me do the flu and the cholera, but they insisted on giving the typhus inoculations themselves. You know they've been through this district door to door.”

I nodded. “So what are you saying, Doctor?”

He took out his pipe and looked at it. “Well, nothing gives one hundred percent immunity. I'm not saying anything.”

“If the vaccine doesn't work, how do we keep it from spreading? Quarantine?”

“Quarantine, sanitation. It's louse-borne, you know. Shouldn't be much of a problem if I can have the authority to stop people from living like pigs.”

“You just take all the measures you need to, Jack, and if anybody objects, send them to me.” I looked at him. “All right, what else is on your mind?”

“I tried to get some more vaccine or some serum from Nizam's boys, so I could at least revaccinate the rest of the family. Nothing doing. They not only claim they don't have any—they obviously don't give a damn that there's typhus in the district. Which strikes me as odd from the same bunch who were so steamed up a couple of years ago about everybody getting protected against typhus—especially women and children.”

“Jack,” I said, “tell me one thing. How long since there's been a baby born in the county?”

“That's the right question. It's very close to a year. The last was Pearl Miller's baby girl.” He leaned forward, playing with his pipe. “Oh, I could tell you some interesting things.”

“Such as that the birth rate started dropping fast about nine months after Arslan first got here?”