Arslan (21 page)

He had spread his hand a little too soon. But I had to be on my feet and out of reach, and I'd better be between Hunt and the door, and my first shot should be by the window, to put the KCR into action.

Hunt brushed past me and confronted Arslan. “This time are you
asking
me?” he cried huskily.

Arslan's face went cold. “No. You stay, Hunt.”

Hunt swayed on his feet. “I'm going with you.” His voice was hard and shrill with desperation. Three strides got me to the window; as I turned I had the gun in my hand.

That instant the world stopped turning for me. The whole room seemed illuminated with a terrific clarity. I felt every muscle in my body. I was contented. There would be no more lying now.

Hunt had turned his desolate face towards me. On the far edge of the bed, Arslan had to look almost over his shoulder. He made no move, but his face was afire with excitement. “Ah, there it is,” he said quietly.

I turned the gun a little away from them, to fire the signal shot. But as I turned it, the long moment ended, exploded in a splintering burst, and flying specks of my blood and bone sprinkled my face. Flickeringly I saw Arslan fling himself across the bed, rolling over and up onto his feet in front of me, and stoop and rise and dance back. He stood before me with a pistol in each hand.

I knew two things in the smeared dimness that throbbed through the room:
he
had fired the signal shot; and with all the guns on his side, I had nothing more to lose. I plunged towards the door. Keep him cut off from his men till the KCR got here—that was the last-ditch idea that moved my legs.

Hunt met me in a rush, and we grappled together. I heard myself remarking, up in some attic of my brain,
He's stronger than I thought.
Now the shock of the bullet was wearing off, and one wave after another of hot pain washed up my right arm. I threw Hunt down and slammed against the dresser, driving it in front of the door. Through the drumming in my head I heard feet on the stairs. I gave the dresser a last thrust and caught Hunt as he came up again.

He hadn't tried to use his knife—the famous knife that had been Arslan's own. My vision cleared as if a curtain had risen. I hugged him to me with my left arm, catching his right hand between our chests. Arslan's men were at the door.

Hunt had stopped struggling. He stood trying to control his breath. Arslan was standing a little back from the window. He holstered one of the pistols casually and called out something; the sounds at the door stopped.

“You can let me go now,” Hunt said composedly. “Consider me
hors de combat
.”

I wasn't about to let him go. Other things being equal, Arslan would maybe rather not kill me, but he would almost certainly go at least a little out of his way to keep from killing Hunt. And the only thing Hunt had showed me so far was that neither of us could afford to trust him.

Then the first shots sounded from the schoolground. Arslan smiled at me expectantly. A machinegun answered under the window.

“Sir,” he said, “I am leaving Kraftsville to you.” He lifted the lamp from the table. The machinegun spoke again. I heard running footsteps outside; the Land Rover started up; something else—one of the trucks—was coming down the street. My whole right arm to the shoulder felt swollen and half-solid, like a balloon full of blood. I was getting dizzy. He shouted one more order, and then he hurled the lamp in a looping overhead pitch that lifted the shadows and shook them over us. He swept the curtain aside, and struck the screen a sidearm blow. Fire swarmed up the cotton spread, from the shattered lamp at the bed's foot. The screen clattered on the porch roof. I let go of Hunt and lunged forward, carrying him along with my rush till he pulled away from me. Arslan was already out of the window.

The fire was to keep us busy, maybe, but neither of us was having any. Hunt dived through the window. How I got through I didn't know.

Arslan was running lightly along the edge of the porch roof, fuzzy in the darkness. At the corner he half turned to us, and his hand came up in a quick gesture of salute or warning. The light of the flames from the bedroom glinted on his face. Hunt had almost reached him when he dropped over the edge. Instantly, it seemed to me, the truck motor roared. There was one more burst of machinegun fire, somebody yelled something, and beyond the roofs edge I saw the truck and the Land Rover scream into Pearl Street, their lights coming on like explosions.

We teetered on the gentle slope of the shingles. I waved my good arm. “Joel!” I bellowed. “Pete Larner! All of you get up here! We've got to put out a fire!”

Hunt came back to me with a step, facing me close. He shook with racking laughter. “That's right, Mr. Bond,” he said. “Your house is burning. You'd better take care of your Goddamn house.”

“A few weeks, a few eons—in other words, presumptively never.
That's
when Arslan will come back.”

That was what Hunt said. He had made his movement of self-preservation very promptly. He had attached himself to me the instant Arslan deserted him, but he had also asserted his independence, or at least his aloofness, by doing it with a very scornful air.

And for half an hour on the porch roof, it was Hunt who had taken care of me. He had caught me when I swayed and eased me down away from the roofs edge. He had held me back when I half sat up and raved at the KCR men to leave me alone and get to work on the fire. He had put the tourniquet on my arm, and he had jumped off the roof and gone for Dr. Allard.

Later I found myself lying on a strange bed in a strange room. But it was Arslan's bed, Arslan's room. “Is it out?” I demanded.

“Yes, yes, it's out,” Luella answered.

“Where's Joel Munsey?”

“He's dead,” Hunt said from somewhere in the shadows.

“He's the only one,” Luella added quickly.

“Then get me Leland Kitchener—or anybody that knows what's going on.”

Hunt put himself forward. “Okay, I can tell you. The town's all yours. The troops are apparently all in camp—those that are still here. Nobody's fighting anybody. The school is cleaned out. Nizam got his unit out with practically no action. Joel Munsey's dead, Leland Kitchener has a few bullets in him, and you're the rest of the casualty list.” His voice was brassy. “You had a nice little revolution going, Mr. Bond, but it never had a chance to get off the ground. Oh, yes, and your bed's ruined—that's all. But you have a couple of extra rooms now, anyway.”

I looked at my arm lying beside me and was a little surprised to see fingers at the end of the bandages. Luella was holding my left hand. “I'm sorry I couldn't let you know beforehand,” I told her.

“Thank goodness you didn't.”

“Where's Leland?”

“Downstairs. The doctor's down there with him.”

I took a good breath and started to get up. There were a lot of things to find out.

We couldn't tell how many Russians were still in the camp. The only men we saw were manning the machineguns along the fence. We had no way of attacking that kind of fortress, and I had no intention of trying it. There was no sign of our friendly officer. Either Nizam had got him, or he'd chickened out, or he'd been Arslan's man all along.

Except for the impacted Russians, the district was empty of troops; but, as the KCR soon found out, the border was as solidly guarded as ever, only now it was guarded from the other side. We had gained nothing but the half-mile-wide border strip. It wasn't that our coup had failed; it had just ceased to be applicable.

The bemusing thing was that Arslan had
escaped
from Kraftsville. He had known the plot, or at least known of it. He could hardly have doubted he could smash it. Instead, he had secretly packed up his valuables and fled. He had come into Kraftsville like a young lion, rampant and triumphant, but in the end he had climbed out a window and run down a roof, and his getaway car had been waiting.

There was a weird feeling everywhere, like the shock when an unpleasant noise you've gotten used to suddenly stops. No more soldiers! The Russians stayed inside their fence. On Tuesday Kraftsville boiled over. Boys romped through the school and Nizam's headquarters, breaking windows and tumbling desks down the stairs. By midafternoon an orgy of visiting was in progress. The wagons were coming to town again. Impromptu picnics and covered-dish suppers were being put together. Reunions were being planned. The churches were announcing prayer services. Quite a few people were looking for Arslan's liquor supply, and several of them came to me about it. As far as I was concerned, he'd either used it up or taken it with him—and in case anybody looked through my furnace-room window, I sent Hunt down to cover the cases with some boxes of Luella's fruit jars.

He had left the district to me and the KCR. But it was still a sealed box, with an explosive charge in the middle of it. We might have twenty-four hours of respite or forever; there was no way to know except by living it.

As it turned out, we had five years.

PART TWO
Hunt Morgan

Chapter 13

I had dreamed, asleep and awake, so many variations of his return. I had even considered the possibility of not recognizing him. And when he came at last, the only shock I felt, standing unnoticed in the twilit doorway, was at seeing a stranger in our living room. Then the question arose in my mind, as it were abstractly,
Is this Arslan? Yes
, I answered, and felt nothing. I saw that he was not a large man—something I had known before, but not realized. His face was plain—a face without attraction or notable characteristic, a face with nothing special in it. Then he turned his head a little, and I thought definitely, No. Not
Arslan.
Not only his anonymous countenance but his whole build seemed different. The Arslan who inhabited my nightmares was a more massive person. Then he spoke to Franklin, and his voice was strange to me, and then, in the same moment, all familiar, and I knew him. And still I felt nothing. Or, rather, I felt an empty excitement, an emotion without content; aroused, but to nothing; awaiting the contact that should fill me with fear or with desire.

He was ugly. He had gotten a little stringy beard like Genghiz Khan, and his right hand and arm were horribly mutilated, transformed into a scar-striped claw.

And then he looked at me.

Ah, that was what I had forgotten—had thought I remembered, remembering only words; when Arslan looked at you, he looked at you altogether, and anyone else's most penetrating stare was a casual glance in comparison. I felt his look go through me like an X-ray (that burned, pierced and burned, sweet as
Liebestod
); and knowing everything he wanted, he smiled at me, his inescapable smile, all joyfulness. “Hunt,” he said. And he said, “Sanjar is with the horses. Help him bring in the saddlebags.”

If I could have refused him, he would not have commanded me. I went out in the blue dusk to the shed and found Sanjar watering a gorgeous pair. In the twilight their coats were slatey-black; bays, perhaps. He must be nine now. I would never have recognized him. “I saw you go by a minute ago,” he said. “We got some things for you in the bags.” He looked very tired, but he grinned merrily at me. He was a beautiful boy; and, seeing that, I saw how like Arslan he was; and Arslan was beautiful to me again. “Don't you have any horses?” he asked.

“Not this year.”

He frowned with quick concern and gestured around the shed."Did they die?” I noticed that he had served the horses from our chickens’ supply of oats. Not, however, prodigally.

“Don't worry,” I said. “Nothing contagious.” And he smiled again, a very winning, open smile. He stood hardly higher than my waist. “How was he wounded?” I asked. Soon I must say
Arslan
aloud again; but not yet.

“Phosphorus,” he answered cheerily. “North of Athens. That was the only real fighting we got, that and in Canada. We got these"—he patted a sleek flank—"from Nizam in Ontario. Your corn looks good. When are you going to harvest?”

“About two weeks.” I wondered if he talked so easily to everyone, or if he thought of me as an old friend.

“They're tired,” he said fondly. He was so tired himself that when he picked up a pair of saddlebags his arms trembled. “We rode from Marshalltown since daylight. We left the regiment at Colton.” I picked up the other pair of saddlebags. “Look.” He steadied his against the doorframe and flipped one open. “We're going to learn Spanish.” He pulled out two small books and handed them over to me. They were beautiful—leatherbound, printed in Madrid; one volume of Lope de Vega, and one of Garcia Lorca. I had to smile. Yes, he was real; he was altogether Arslan, unqualified and undeniable.

A little girl lay curled asleep in the corner of the couch. Arslan opened the saddlebags beside her, displaying his largesse triumphantly. “Salt; the baggage train will bring more. Seeds: tea, barley, opium poppy, rice. Vodka: two liters only. Needles. Cloves. Whetstones. Penicillin. And this for you, Hunt.” It was a packet of notebook paper. “Novocaine. Solder.” The salt aside, they were all luxuries, the most useful and satisfying luxuries, the very things whose lack we had cursed a thousand times.

He laid his left hand on Sanjar's shoulder. “Now sleep,” he said.

Sanjar stood up, with that clear smile, and all the rest of him hazy with weariness. “Upstairs?” The true crown prince.

Arslan nodded. “The old place. Do you remember?”

“I remember.” They grinned together, a contact very beautiful.

Franklin rose, grim and displeased, to lead the way upstairs. It was an act of—what? compassion? conspicuous gallantry?—that he did not detail me for the job of chambermaid. And I was alone with Arslan and the sleeping girl.

“Come here,” he said, and I came. I was afraid that he would touch me first with his ruined right hand; and, seeing my dread, that was what he did. But after all, it was a hand that could be lived with. The last two fingers were gone, and the next stiffly hooked, but it was still Arslan's hand. He curled it around my bare forearm, and looked at me. When I began to tremble, he smiled and let me go.