Arslan (31 page)

He was two rows away from me, a dark shape without outline. I wiped my hand carefully and drew Arslan's knife. One row. It was the dark Russian uniform. I stood with the knife held behind me. He stepped into my aisle, four yards away, perhaps. I had seen him before, I thought—a middle-aged lieutenant, big-eared and stupid-faced. I discarded my experimentally friendly greeting. All doubts were removed by the light in his pale eyes, the clubbed pistol in his red hand.

The corn slashed at me as I ran—head down, to save my eyes from the blades and my feet from the roots. I heard, over the pounding of my steps, the slower pounding of his. It seemed not unnatural to be hunted in the corn, and it seemed to follow (seemed, with the distorted clarity of heat waves) that if I could escape from the corn, the hunt would be over.

A stunning shock thudded my back, between my right shoulder and the base of my neck, a blow outrageously hard and heavy. I was scrabbling angrily in the hot-smelling dust. He must have thrown the gun at me; ergo, the gun was somewhere near. But my right arm refused to act, my neck and shoulders were heavy as stone. I heaved myself over, seeing the prop roots of the near stalks standing out like flying buttresses. The Russian plunged upon me like a falling cloud, and I realized that I had lost the knife.

I was initiated long since in the actuality of physical contact; it was old familiar business, serious, deliberate, and there could be nothing more real. He had the advantages of weight and position. But I had been thrown by Arslan. I knew all the art of the underdog.

He had my left wrist. Before he could gain the right, I got a grip on his left thumb, and bent, and as his right hand twisted and crushed, we strove in mutual torture. With furious joy I felt my wrist spring free. I writhed, gouged, suffered his clubbing fist. I was tipped—folded, rather—upon my side, my still-free hand (the immediate jewel of my soul) crushed under our double weight. He pulled busily at my clothes. My left eye was in the dust; my right contemplated a blond cornstalk. A terrific decision enacted itself:
no
! And I exploded in the self-forgetful fury that had burst me in the beginning so long ago. And though it had failed me then (even in total war somebody loses), now the Russian hunched backward off me, grunting. I spraggled up to knees and elbows. Arslan's miraculous knife winked in the dust. My hand sprang to meet it, and I crouched and panted.

He backed away, shaking his head, grinning, stumbled on his gun (to each his own), paternally dusted and holstered it, and disappeared gradually through the successive curtains of the corn, still backing, still grinning, still shaking his head.

I tidied myself triumphantly. My nose was bleeding. (
Had he his hurts before? Ay, on the front
.) I sat among the shattered stalks and nursed it patiently, while the long shafts of sunlight broke among the corn.

Franklin looked at me with care. He didn't ask, “What happened?” He didn't ask, “Who was it?” He didn't ask even, “Are you all right?” He set his chin and turned away into the kitchen, his back broad to my gratitude. “Why don't you wash up,” he said, “while I fix the fire?”

Winter came, passed, with the beautiful ashes of wood fires under the grate, to be carried out and shed like hushed snowflakes or blessings on the frigid earth; with dried corn, hard and dimpled, the seeds that could not sow themselves (corn, that hapless species, reproducing only by the service of man). The deer pushed thicker into the easy browsing of the fields and fencerows, and were shot with our clumsy arrows. And the Russians departed, sudden and noisy as a migration of purple martins, with great pretense of secrecy. Spring came, speciously wholesome, feeding eyes and tongues while winter-lean bellies grew leaner still. Merely, winter rains changed to spring rains. Yet it was true that the skewed earth thrust us ever deeper, for a time, into the sunshine; and it was presumable that these green shoots would bear again the golden fruits of their fathers.

After the long, vague days of mist, I loved the sleek sky; loved especially the clear and brilliant clouds, truest white on their heights and ridges, shadowing their own slopes with the blue of ashes. They stood pure and definite like piled snow, unneatly firm as some engraving by William Blake. What had Blake said about line? Outline is reality. He had said it Blakishly, of course. Standing in far air, the real clouds shone and shadowed. But at close range they would be edgeless, lineless—a vague mist, obscure and obscuring. Yet that very obscurity was the sum of myriad surfaces, the entangled glitter of a billion crystal spheres, each comprised in a bounding line of mathematical trueness and demonstrable reality; so that (unless, as was probable, my grasp of Newtonian physics was infirm) the slovenly gray of Kraftsville's mists and heaven's exploded clouds was only, in generalized form, the radiant precision of the misty rainbow.

I watched the nobility of the ranked clouds, passing, with that stateliest motion perceivable by human eyes, across the high hemisphere of Heaven.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud
. Well, it was not the thorns of life that had drawn my blood, and I was, to all perception, tame, slow, and humble; but certainly I could feel my leaves falling. (Oops, there goes another—hectic red, that one.)
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth
. Alas, poor Shelley. It took more than withered leaves. And no doubt Pluto, as much as Earth, had its forever-sequent spring.

Patterns of leaves upon the wind, billowing flights that went nowhere, sails of green lace that moved nothing, moved me. Through March and April I drifted, my horse unguided, along fencerows and woods’ margins.
As burnist silver the leaf onglidez That thick con trill on everich bough
. The little leaves, furred with their delicate birthcoats, colors of silver, colors of wine, and the hearttouching innocence of young green, misted the great elastic branches that surged and sprang in ponderous sweeps above my head. Every species had its shape—the lifting fountains of the dying elms, the broad layered pyramids of oaks, the rustic bouquets of the little blossoming redbuds. Already the eager maples spread broad leaves, like flocks of green stars, upon the wind.

They were not my friends, the trees. My friend was the chestnut horse that moved under me, warm in the sterile air. But I admired the trees, those static galleons, rooted like me in the graves of their ancestors. They drank the traveling air, the dead radiance of a star. They shadowed their shapes upon the passing wind and light. Every leaf held its place, a stitch of the tapestry, disordered by every breeze, primly returning with every calm. And when at last it fell, its one flight, spinning and beautiful, bore it to the grave of its birth. Year by year the epicycles wheeled. The trees remained. They bent; they broke at last; but they did not budge.

Under the trees, my chestnut's hooves among the thick gold stars of dandelions, I took relief in the slow, traveling spiral of the world, the great pacific resultant of how many billion impassioned problems, the moving equilibrium of all forces. Humanity was a plague. Locustlike, we ripped holes in the world's fabric. The locusts met their controlling limits—birds and starvation, fungi and disease—and the fabric healed itself; and mankind had met Arslan. But as the plague was more ravaging, so the control was more drastic.

Passive and exquisite as the fretwork of Taj Mahal, the viruses laid their irrefutable pattern upon the world. Whatever we saw was through that screen. Yet by what perversion of language was
passive
the opposite of
active
? The viruses did not suffer, did not allow, were not done to. It was they that, without action, performed: performed their existence and their replication upon the struggling active world. Passive, impassive, unpassional, they cancelled the activity of passion. And passionate men who suffered and inflicted would, marked with that multiplying pattern, vanish in incorrigible uniqueness.

Royal in nothing else, I forgot nothing, I learned nothing. All my meditations moved around him, returning to their premises unimproved. Other things faded, leaves in seasonal decline; the trunk remained, imperceptibly enlarged, armored in fissuring scabs.

“I have made you ashamed,” he had said.
Shame
was a trivial word for it. He had looted me of boyhood, manhood, freedom. The key to my door was in his pocket. “But someday, Hunt, you will be able to say, ‘Arslan is my friend.’ And you will be proud.”

He would be drunk when he said these things to me—the real drunkenness that closed down upon him after the second bottle was opened, when for a moment anger flickered in his eyes and he weighed once more the hazards of uncontrol in the scales of his enormous
Realpolitik
, and relaxed with a small but total shrug. Or it would be passion, the real desire that was to his everyday lust as moon to morning star. “There is a woman that I have loved.” His look was luminous, his hands as steady as a singing string. “Do you understand?” No, I did not understand. “That was a year ago—eight thousand miles away. But I shall see her again. And if I love her again, that will be good. That will be good, Hunt.” I did not understand, I could not conceive, what such a verb as
love
might mean to Arslan. Had he held her, that fabulous woman, against his square, blunt body, and said into her ear the actual words, “I love you"? No; it would have been another language, eight thousand miles away. What language—and what intonation? Had he looked into her eyes? But he would not have spoken. Lying with his bare feet cocked on the bedpost, his drink neatly clasped on his belt buckle, “I have been afraid to father a child,” he said. His seed was sown like the cottonwoods'; battalions of his children must have sprung already from the raped planet. “Because I loved her.”
Father
, then, was a word he understood better than I. But
afraid
? “Rusudan,” he said. “Her name is Rusudan.”

Love. The word became transparent to me, and I saw it empty of all signification. A sound so used and misused should have had a multitude of meanings—contradictory, by nature, imprecise, but real. Yet it stood in my mind as uncontaining as a nonsense syllable, and I puzzled seriously and honestly at it. Verb transitive:
I love—
but what, or whom? No feeling I could find or imagine in myself seemed to couple me as subject appropriately with any object.

Rusudan. They were syllables in a void, and yet the name was dark with meaning and power. He would not have spoken to Rusudan of friendship. Did I want ever to say, “Arslan is my friend"? No; I wanted him in some relationship utter and forthright—lover or master or enemy—nothing so complex and temperate as a friend.

Yet it was Arslan and Rusudan who put content into that dry vessel for me at last; so that, returned from Bukhara, I could tell Franklin Bond, “I love him.” They were complete, those two, each alone; but when they touched, they struck fire. That was what I saw; and what my greedy heart asserted (I can
so
ride no hands, and my bike is just as fast as yours) was,
I can feel that, too
.

My place in the pattern of things was, apparently, to serve beside the throne, one of the perquisites of royalty in Kraft County. Franklin had inherited, by force of some cosmic law of survivorship, the position for which he had been born, meshing the rusty gears of civilian government to the subterranean motor of his KCR. But his ambition was closed in its own nutshell. His kingdom was an enclave in the unbounded universe of Arslan's curved world.

It was after Mrs. Bond's death that my floating position in Kraftsville solidified (obscure insect in posture of flight, suspended for inspection in clear plastic). It was more than a year later, after the troops’ withdrawal, that the last veils fell away from it. I was (since the Russians, faithful in their fashion, had taken the brothel with them) the only visible vestige of Arslan's regime. I had notably failed to repudiate him and all his works. I had declined the helping hand of Kraftsville custom. I was queer. Neither my parents’ virtue nor my patron's power could shield me from the fallout of outraged propriety. There was a certain civility in my reception by the adult population, ranging coldly from the Cut Courteous through the Snub Outright. My horses were less fortunate.

The first was shot from ambush, and I assumed that the arrow was meant for me. Indeed, perhaps it was—the local standard of accuracy was not high—and the campaign may thus have launched itself accidentally. The second was lamed by a simple pit-trap. Then I understood, and became cautious. It was months before the third was killed, and that by a somewhat desperate night attack whose perpetrator I almost caught. (But the mare was crying, her belly slashed, and in Arslan's absence I had forgotten the trick of turning from one pain to inflict another.) Winter favored me; but with the spring my last mare and her foal were hamstrung, and a little later the four-year-old chestnut I had bought from the Munseys was poisoned. I was resigned. I would keep no horses that year. Next year I would be ready; I studied my defenses and began, very slowly, to prepare my counter-offensive. But with rich September came Arslan, and touched me with his marred right hand.

He stayed for four weeks and three days, an exact month of the calendar. And closely and distantly, in and out of focus, I considered him. Sometimes he presented himself to me as a mathematical diagram, the Platonic idea of Arslan, sometimes as a reality of close and radiant flesh. He was, take him for all in all, a man—
menschlichallzumen-schlich
—and I was also, oddly enough, a man.

When he went, there was no talk of my going with him. What was perhaps the first genuine and independent action of my life was wholly negative, passive, and imperceptible—all the more genuine for that. Out of turmoil and dread, joy of Leila, jealousy of Sanjar, I collected a quietness, I enacted a decision: I did not choose to go with him.

Sanjar and Leila were all his household now. I had canceled Rusudan, as she me, and that in itself was a victory more honorable than triumph. For the first time I began to see the past as past, the future as possible. The probability that he wanted me with him approached the infinitesimal, but that was irrelevant. I did not choose to go;
therefore
he would not ask, still less command me. Hourly, momently, my world refocused, my eyes blinked off dry tears and fading illusions. I acknowledged truth after truth—the shabby usefulness of his depleted regiment (pockets of fertility, unarmored and feebly arrowed, lurked in the dilapidating jungles of a broken world), the convenience of Kraftsville (a road, a memory; rest and recreation, the playing out of games), the aptness of his shrunken meiny and shriveled hand (the perfect end of Arslan's success must be inglorious).