Arslan (39 page)

Not many of the women were really squealing, but it was enough to make quite a racket. Arslan was at the stairwell, roaring them quiet, yelling at his boys to follow orders, then back to the window. The attackers were lugging their casualties back across the parking lot. The main body milled and shrank away from the school. A few loose horses ran or stood aimlessly. Right beside the door, a wounded horse—I hoped it was a horse—was making a terrible noise. Obviously, they were taking too long to begin their next move. Arslan's lips swelled with pleased contempt.

Somebody on the third floor started shooting into them, and Arslan went up the stairs three at a time, clubbing the rifle in his hands as he ran. The thudding of his blows came down through the woodwork. Maybe he was expressing fatherly concern; Sanjar might still be out there. By the time he came back down, they had rallied and started their move. They split into three parts, one group tearing north and east around the block to attack the north side of the school. There, they would have the disadvantage of the steep north bank, but maybe they didn't know that yet. The second group was supposed to hit the south side at the same time, presumably, but they got there first. They couldn't have hoped to do much more than smash in the doors and first-floor windows, and to do that they had to get right up to the walls again. This time they got it from all three floors, hard. They wouldn't have tried it if there'd been enough light to see how those doors and windows were barred. Their rocks and clubs were entirely wasted.

But the third group—the biggest one—were dropping off their horses and ducking into the ruins of the west wing. Arslan had said he was going to demolish that wing, but he hadn't been in much of a hurry to get around to it. There was no immediate danger there—they'd have to knock a hole in the brick wall, and that would take a little while—but they were protected from our fire. There was enough of the roof left to provide considerable cover, and the west wall of the main building was blind—not a window in it. (Arslan's answer to that problem had been to install a trapdoor in the roof, and I wondered if there was anybody up there now. But the top floor was in his jurisdiction.)

Arslan had hot-footed it across to a north window to be in on the juiciest slaughter, so he missed the steady stream of automatic rifle fire that cut into the south-side raiders from across Pearl Street. They must have felt as if they were caught between the upper and the nether millstone, but it was only one gun, and I thought,
There's Sanjar.
It took me a little while to realize it was coming from my house. By that time, the horsemen had broken completely, at least on this side. They weren't even pretending to try to get their wounded out. I had already called off the KCR fire. But Arslan was out for something else. His boys kept pouring it on—not to finish off the wounded and the dehorsed, but to cut down as many as possible of the fleeing.

In the back of my head I heard Arslan yelling something with Hunt's name in it, heard feet racketing down the stairs. Once they were bolted, the doors were awkward to open, but a few of the basement window bars had been planned for quick exit. I saw the flying shadows in the schoolyard—Hunt running clean and long-legged in the lead, and half a dozen more trailing behind him. Somebody on the roof fired a burst into the waiting horses at the far end of the west wing; then Hunt and the first few others got there. I couldn't see what was happening any longer, but at any rate the men in the west wing had just lost their chance to get out. A light flared, too close to the west wall for me to make out what it was. It must have been a mistake; I could hear Arslan's curses over the hubbub. Then a solid lump of flame pitched through the darkness and bounced its way down through the broken west-wing roof. A minute later another followed; this one caught between a jutting beam and the solid part of the roof and hung there blazing. Rifles or no rifles, Hunt's detachment would have their hands full. Most men would sooner risk a bullet than burn.

The west wing had to go, that was inevitable; but I didn't intend to let my whole school burn for Arslan's Plan Two or any other reason that came to mind. If that fire got out of hand, we'd have had all our work for nothing. Luckily it was a still night. I got my men busy rounding up everything that could hold water and organized a bucket brigade from the basement cistern up to the second floor, in case we needed it. There was shooting in the west wing, and the middle part of it was well afire. What raiders were still alive and on horseback had scattered down the neighboring streets, and some of Arslan's boys were catching riderless horses and racing after them. Behind me, the school was in an uproar. The crowd of women had broken across their painted limits, shrieking to know what was going on. The riflemen were yelling in glee. Arslan reappeared beside me, thumping his fist against my shoulder. “How do you feel, sir?” he shouted over the tumult.

“Great!” I yelled back at him, and straightened up from the window. “All over on the north side?”

He answered me with a nod, already on his way out. It was no surprise that he wanted to finish off the wounded himself. My job was with the school, putting the fire out and getting that mob of females organized to go home again.

I ran into Arslan a while later on a stair landing. “Finished?”

He turned his eyes towards me, but I could have sworn he didn't recognize me for a second. Sixteen years had begun to tell on him, after all. “So it wasn't perfect,” I said. He kept on looking at me “Your virus.” He was so expressionless I wondered if he'd heard my words. The noise level was still pretty high. “Some of those guys are going to get away. Quite a few years and a lot of people dead, General, to have it end up just a matter of chance.”

He took a breath like a man about to speak, and those black eyes came alive again, but he still didn't say anything. The women's chatter was seething all around us. Then Ward Munsey came hustling up the stairs, grasping Sanjar's arm. “This here damn crazy kid!” He was almost yelling in his awe and delight. “He come in through that spillway hole on the cistern, and nobody knowed he was coming! Hey, General, I thought you told me nobody couldn't get in there!” He paused to shake Sanjar's arm. “Hey, boy, why don't you come in the door like anybody else? Don't you know the war's over?”

Sanjar grinned wanly, his eyes reaching for his father. He looked as if he were walking on tiptoe, every move he made tense and poised. He was keyed up to a new pitch altogether, and it was hard to tell whether, if you touched him, he would be tough as steel wire or brittle as thin glass. Arslan limped easily down to meet him, halfway up the flight, saying something in his own language, shifting the rifle to hug the boy's shoulders with his good hand and shepherd him up the stairs. Abruptly he turned to me. “It is not chance.” His voice was hot. “There is no chance. There is always risk, but there is never chance.” They started past me up the next flight and stopped again. This time Arslan had to turn his head over his shoulder to look at me. “We accept the risk,” he exclaimed almost indignantly. “We do not abandon ourselves to chance.”

Outside, some kind of order and progress was beginning to emerge. The fire was reduced to a few smoldering beams, checkered with bright gold embers. Bodies were dragged away from the doors; men were detailed to escort the women home by neighborhoods. The male civilian population—to call them that—were turning up in droves to claim their womenfolks or bring in a strayed raider, dead or alive, or just to exchange the news. Hunt came slowly from the direction of my house, a rifle sloped on his arm. He walked with deliberate grace, like a woman in a room full of strangers. Two or three people called to him, and he answered casually, tallying the dead raiders like a game bag. He sat down on the doorstep, barely out of the way of the open door, and looked up at me. “We used your horses,” he said. “I've taken care of them.”

“Thanks. They're all right?”

“Yes. And I apologize for taking them without your permission.”

“I imagine Sanjar did that.”

“Yes.”

Somebody had planted a torch a little way out in the parking lot to search the bodies by, and the night was so still the flame hardly flickered. I sat down beside him on the step. For all the noise and movement, all the people brushing past us, we were as alone there as we would have been in a desert. “Franklin,” Hunt said. I waited. “I know you don't appreciate people walking in and out of your house—”

“You don't have to apologize for Sanjar,” I said. He took it the wrong way; his mouth tightened. And suddenly I was sick of all the games he played. “Does he know you killed his mother?”

His eyes widened, and winced almost shut again. After a few seconds he said patiently, “I didn't kill his mother.”

“What I really can't figure out is whether Arslan knows it.”

“Why...” he hesitated, then went on decisively. “If you thought I killed her, why did you turn the KCR loose on Ollie Schuster?”

“We needed a conviction. Like Arslan—except he wasn't satisfied with just one.” I looked at him. “Tire chains,” I said. “Good God, Hunt.”

He watched me evenly, but there was a tired horror in his eyes. “Don't worry,” I told him. “After tonight, we won't have any trouble working with Arslan. I'm not going to rock the boat.” We'd have trouble, all right—Arslan was born to create trouble—but nothing we couldn't live with. The KCR had found its groove.

Hunt took a little deeper breath. “What I was leading up to,” he said firmly, “was a proposal to move back into your house—if you think I'd be sufficiently useful to compensate for whatever needs compensation.” He paused again. “Incidentally, I am not a murderer, but I don't intend to argue the question. And besides,” he added softly and quickly, “it's true that I've killed people.”

“Always welcome, Hunt. I told you that a long time ago.”

“Yes,” he said. “Among other things.”

PART FOUR
Hunt Morgan

Chapter 28

Sanjar and his red horses—the chestnut roan mare and the bright bay and the sorrels sired by Arslan's starfaced stallion—flashed down the hillside like a meteor shower. This was his sport—to drive the little herd alone, struggling to turn them at full gallop, by voice and whip and example; so that when he rode among his followers, it was the horses, almost more than the boys on their backs, who rallied to him and obeyed him.

He was fourteen, and he had his first girl, installed now in the school among Arslan's. He had picked her himself—Peggy Rose, perfect exemplum of her name—but Arslan, in his own harvesting, had left her to be picked.

Later he may hate me.
Later, perhaps, he might. Now he rode his roan mare amid the herd, rode sometimes alone with me, hunted and raced and wrestled with his companions. They were the young ones, his own age or one year older or two, who chafed now at Arslan and his arrogant muscular gang. They would be forever the babies of their families; old men in the young wilderness, they would wither unmatured, spoiled brats to the end, the darling buds of May enduring fruitlessly into December. They were desperate and innocent as lemmings, happy as bees. They gathered to Sanjar as to their single hope.

The herd flared wide across the field, grudgingly turning to his shrill whoops. He rounded their outskirts, driving the little mare hard, bunching them gradually closer; pulled ahead of the herd and then slowed, calling to them by name as they overran him; and the rush dwindled and dried as they passed me along the fencerow, the riderless horses stepping knee-deep in broom sedge that matched their own colors. Sanjar raised his hand to me, the half salute that was his greeting, and I rode out from under the trees and walked my horse beside the blowing mare.

“Want to come north with me?” His eyes sparkled, but it was a half-hearted invitation. He was saying,
I'm going north. Come if you will, I don't want you
.

“No, thanks. Will he let you go?”

“I'm going!” But it was the joyful defiance of the beloved son.
I could be stopped, but not by him; he could stop anyone else, but not me
. They had quarreled for weeks now. He was too young, Arslan said—Sanjar who had been eleven when he killed three men single-handed, who had been nine when Arslan boasted, “He is my aide-de-camp and my bodyguard.” It was a little late to shelter Sanjar. But Arslan's eyes would redden with anger as he shouted, “Not this year!” It was already October; he would ride, if he went, into winter. Spassky had pitched his wigwam towns among the forested hills of the Great Lakes, where good hunting outweighed bad weather; and to visit Spassky and scout out the territory between was Sanjar's excuse for seeking his fortune. “You'll go next summer.” Next summer would be more reasonable, yes; but it would be permitted and therefore unsatisfactory.

We rode slowly into town. The wind was in our faces, droning and singing in our ears. The sky was the original of blues, scraped and sanded clean by that scouring air. The dazzling maples shed their gold rags around us. A pieced landscape, crazily stitched with its rail fences, opened before us as we turned through the gate into the road: woods multicolored and splotched with bare darkness, the touching spring green of new wheat, fields molten with goldenrod and Spanish needle, fields rusty with the broom sedge that would stand all winter, embroidered with the tarnishing purple of ironweed and loosestrife; the pale even stubble of mown wheat, the harsh stripes of trampled cornfields, the dully shining thatch of haystacks; Kraftsville itself, beautiful from here, a speckled parkland of trees in whose colored shades occasional roofs glinted.

The low sun was deepening into red, and every perishing lawn was a green-rubbed gold. We pulled up beside Franklin's house. Sanjar's eyes danced. “We're going tomorrow,” he cried suddenly. Blithe Sanjar, whose secrets were all innocent. He leaned over the mare's head, naming to me the boys who would go with him. “Hunt, I'm telling
you
this.” He straightened. “I'm telling Arslan tonight.”