George Mills (61 page)

There were the free-for-alls, the battles royal construed as preparation, training. The Soup Man’s cynical dictum: “Janissaries are brothers. A true Janissary will lay down his life for his brother as casually as he would stand him a beer or buy him his breakfast. If an enemy slays his colleague, even in the act of self defense, even protecting his family, deflecting a torch, say, from the thatched lean-to where his babes lie sleeping; or wrenching the firebrand from a corpsman’s hands with which he’d have ignited a wife’s pubic hair simply to take the chill out of the air, then the surviving Janissary is obligated by the laws of God and the traditions of his company not only to avenge his fallen comrade but to read that comrade’s original intent and to atrocify and consummate even to the nth degree his chum’s lewd scheme. He must perfect death and touch the bottom of punishment. He must annihilate all the friends of the family and, years later, should he meet someone in a peaceful street who, in a certain cast of light, merely resembles his cohort’s killer or perhaps, by a word or gesture, so much as
reminds
him of his former teammate, or even only of the incident, then must the veteran Janissary dispatch him at once and with the same concentrate rage and fury at his disposal as had been available to him on the initial occasion of his wrath. If the wrath is not there he must pray for it. If his prayers are unanswered then he must make indifference do, and call on reserves of insouciance and apathy to hone his cruelty and generate out of neutral nonchalance the worst usages of his imagination. We are Janissaries, on the fence, middle of the road in every cause, and patriots only to each other.”

And dropped his handkerchief, the signal on the day of their practical, for the recruits to attack each other. Mills, watching for the handkerchief to fall, touch the actual ground, was distracted for that fraction of a piece of a second it took Khoraghisinian, a friend, a young lad from his own barracks with whom he spoke on fire guard and after lights-out in his newly acquired makeshift Janissary diction of deep things, lost things, of home and absences, loved ones, of plans (mere desires now, simple idle longings, yearnings) and the high mysteries of the starry sky and the pungent, sacred memories of kitchen smells, the breads and sweets and savories of childhood, to drop on his neck from a tree’s low limb and scratch at his eyes with its brittle, leafless, wintry sticks. Before Mills could recover, Khoraghisinian had shoved handfuls of steaming, acidic horse dung into his eyes and nostrils and smeared it across Mills’s astonished mouth and tongue. Blinding George, choking him, leaving him breathless, gagging, gasping. Felling him, turning him over and, still in those split seconds it took Mills to recognize the source of the attack (permitting him to think Khoraghisinian——Khory), driving the twigs up his nose, hammering them home with his fists and frozen turds.

It was his sneezes that saved him. Sudden, furious, reflexive and unwilled. His entire body was behind them, some good immunological angel so repudiate to the foreign matter trapped in his face that the sneezes brought his neck and head up like the solidest of uppercuts, roundhouses and haymakers, brutally butting Khoraghisinian and catching him, who was already leaning over to receive them, smack in the center of his nose, between his eyes, on each temple and, stretching to evade Mills’s repetitive jackhammer blasts, full in the throat. Khoraghisinian’s neck was broken, the bridge of his nose. His eyes had been pounded deep beneath their sockets and smashed like egg yolks, spread like jelly. Khoraghisinian had been killed instantly.

“Excellent. Good recovery, excellent,” the Soup Man called from his horse. “Fine alertness, Muslim.”

Now, still dazed, Mills used his good friend as a kind of fort—Fort Khoraghisinian, Camp Khory—arranging his old friend’s body about him like a rampart and flattening himself behind it. The melee continued about and above him, a strange, pointless and issueless battle which Mills dreamily contemplated from the shieldy security of his pal’s corpse. He had not bothered—or thought: he was still stunned, still bound by the low conscientiousness of shock—to rub the dung from his eyes and his steaming, teary vision was distorted, not blurred or dulled so much as squeezed and biased with a queer, buckled clarity, like someone’s behind strong new prescription lenses. He perceived the incredible sharpness of blunt objects and instruments, so that rocks seemed thorny to him, cudgels torn from trees serrated, ordinary belts and bits of clothing—buttons, shoelace—sawtoothed. All about him he perceived the cusp of detail. The faces of his companions assumed a sort of tooled devastation. Their awled eyes and axey chins and spiky noses. Their scalpeled teeth and the hair on their heads brambly as barbed wire. Their nettled flesh, the fierce briery and cutting edge of their expressions. Even the sky—it was a bright day—seemed capable of stinging. Only the fighting had no point.

The combatants engaged and disengaged tempestuously, almost restlessly. They flung themselves upon and away from each other as if impatiently seeking something specific and valuable in one another. They were. Their opponent’s weakness like buried treasure. If an adversary seemed capable of absorbing a body blow, his challenger quickly withdrew it, administered instead sharp kicks to the shins, the groin. If he withstood these his assailant abandoned him, changed tactics, sought a more vulnerable victim, great fistfuls of whose hair he might pull at almost as if he were riding bareback at full gallop and clinging to the mane to keep from falling. (Mills wondering how he, the assailant, could bear the pain, the sword edge sharpness of the hairy, glassy shards. He looked for stigmata, bloody palms.)

Meanwhile the Soup Man barked out commands, abuse, encouragements.

“Are you blind? Don’t you see Suleiman has fallen? That he’s rolled to the sidelines? Go after him. Put him out of the picture.

“You, Taurus Konia, you foul mistress of a mildewed eunuch, you sleazeball, you slimy slop jar of an excuse for a man,
bite
the scuzzy son of a bitch!

“That’s it, that’s the way, Mills, that’s the way to do it. Khoraghisinian’s dead. Use him,
use
him! Hide in your buddy, use him, live off the land! Did you rob him yet? What? No? What are you waiting for?

“What are the rest of you Muslims waiting for? A comrade has fallen. Have you forgotten the bribegold he carries in case he’s taken prisoner? And what about the rations that must still be on him? It’s not yet lunchtime, the muezzin hasn’t yet called us to midday prayer. His cinch is still good and would make a glorious noose. Are you just going to stand there and let Mills gobble up all the spoils? Rush him.
Rush him, you pussies!
”

Which brought him out of his daze. Which refocused his eyes. Which detranced him and canceled his lassitude, his tourist’s glum stun, his protective shock like a blast of first aid.

The Janissaries were coming for him and, still behind the fallen Khoraghisinian, he brought himself up on his hands and knees and began to lunge and lurch about like an animal——not like a dog or anything even remotely domestic, nor, for that matter, even like an animal in the wild. Rather he seemed to them, must have seemed to them, like someone stricken with a dazzling terror. But terror would not have stopped them, not even if it had been accompanied—as it
was
accompanied—by anything so spectacular as the noises now issuing from George Mills’s mouth, if an instrument ordinary as a human mouth could be said to be capable of producing such sounds. Surely, they thought as they pulled up short of the galvanically compelled man loose and lurching now as live wire, he produces those noises in his vitals, his organs, his liver and lungs, his spleen and kidneys and guts and glands.

“After him,” the Soup Man bellows. “Do you think he’s haunted?” But even the commander’s horse shies.

The Janissaries do not think he’s haunted. They recognize the animal analog they had previously perceived. Mills is not terrified. He is outraged. His brutality now is the brutality of bereavement, his bestiality somehow, well,
maternal.
As though Khoraghisinian were his cub, Khoraghisinian’s corpse something to be defended to the death, all affined biological kindred’s interdictive, no-trespass taboo.

“The bribegold, the bribegold!” the Soup Man calls out. “He carries it too. Fan out, surround him. Smother the bastard.”

And a few of the Janissaries begin to drift away from the main body. Slowly.

They sweep so widely about the flanks of Khoraghisinian’s tautly drawn bow of a form that they seem almost to disperse. Silently, and so very gradually, they sneak-shuffle past him so Mills, glaring round at them, seems to freeze their motion with a glance as if they were subjects in a boy’s game. As soon as he looks elsewhere they are on tiptoe again. Even the Soup Man is silent. Even his horse does not stir. Someone snickers and Mills darts a look behind him, but this time the troopers don’t even bother to suspend their motion. He sees that he is encircled. Taurus Konia holds a dagger in his hand. Suleiman grins from the sidelines where somehow he has managed to survive his tormentors. The Soup Man watches impassively. And sees——

Mills not so much standing, regaining his feet, as actually rearing, rampant as a furious figure in heraldry. He seems suddenly so fierce he might be mortally wounded perhaps, or seized by a peremptory madness. The dung he has not even bothered to remove has dried on his face, assumes some tribal quality of ultimate warpaint. A few bare twigs hang from his nose like an extra row of teeth.

This is the
Christian,
his fellow recruits think, the fastidious Englishman.
How he is transformed!

But he does not apprehend his effect. If Mills is posturing he does not know it. For all the redeemed clarity of his vision, he is unaware of how he must appear to them, is not so much furious or fierce or outraged or maddened or even exalted by his terror as simply alarmed. That they are suddenly so wary—he sees this—he attributes to the complexity of their situation. He has observed their fitful skirmishes, the way they have sought quick advantage, their trial-and-error, upperhand experiments, their sudden disengagements, the violent storms and subsidences of their almost tropical hostility. Their to’s and fro’s like compass work. If they are wary now, he thinks, it is of each other, not of him. He they could dispose of in minutes, seconds. What threat could one Englishman—and that one a Mills, a forty-second or so generated, underwilled survivor on the strength not of strength but of loyalty, good behavior, all the quiet citizen virtues—possibly pose to these elite Paradise Dispatchers?

So their wariness—and this bothers George, seems to proviso and moderate still further this already mitigated man—is only a sort of extemporized battle plan. First they
will
kill him. Easy work. No sooner said than done. What are the odds? Twenty against one? Twenty-five? He is momentarily outraged—more Englishness; perhaps his fellow recruits have his number after all—by the sheer unfairness of his situation. Even the Soup Man, who has complimented him, who has given him high marks for his alertness (though to tell the truth he had not quite taken in at the time what his commander had meant), has sanctioned his slaughter. (And this English too, his complacent pride not so much in distinguishing himself as in pleasing a superior.) So. They will kill him. Steal his bribegold, Khoraghisinian’s. Harvest their corpses for anything of value——matches, a heel of bread, rope, the oranges both carry. What holds them back is what comes next. The free-for-all, that winner-take-all frenzy of their terrible tontine arrangements. Surely, Mills thinks, this is why they stare at him, glance furtively at one another. They are sizing each other up, remembering the power in that one’s fingers, this one’s arms. Dead reckoning will, viciousness. Savages, Mills thinks. They’re savages.

The Soup Man sees Mills squat over Khoraghisinian’s body, the dead man momentarily disappearing beneath the flowing cape George Mills wears. He sees Mills’s quick movements but they’re obscured by his robe and he cannot make them out. Quite suddenly there is blood, but it seems almost of a different color and viscidity than that which flows from the wounds of punctured men. He can’t tell, but it seems cooler.

Mills is standing. He turns in what seems to the troopers a magic circle. Khoraghisinian’s entrails lie gleaming in his left hand. The shit-encrusted bribegold shines in his right. He holds out both.

“We were friends,” he intones. He speaks extra slowly in his new, barely mastered tongue so that he may be understood. He turns so that all might hear him. He means to mollify them with guts and gold and stench. He means to curry favor, to bribe them with atrocity. “We were friends,” he says again of the man whose body he has just mutilated. “At the last minute, at the last minute I remembered something he told me once when we were on fire guard. ‘Bribegold must be well hidden.’ We were friends. He was wily. I frisked his shift and groped his robes. I did his duds like a dowser. ‘
Well
hidden,’ he said. And it came to me he must have swallowed it. See,” Mills says and he raises his arms still higher, bringing his palms together in which Khoraghisinian’s bowels slosh, collision and shift like so much damp, dark, swollen seaweed beneath his offering, the surgical, amputate bribegold steaming like carrots in soup.

It is just then that the muezzin calls from his tower and the Janissaries sink to their bellies as if shot. Only Mills, the pagan, gentile infidel, fails to prostrate himself at once. Then he too lowers himself, but he cannot remember the prayers. All that rings in his head is a nursery rhyme from childhood. He recites, first to himself and then aloud, “Little Jack Horner.”

It was meaningless as the violence in Punch-and-Judy shows. One man had fallen that day. Hardly anyone had escaped injury. There were no doctors. They didn’t take prisoners and they didn’t have doctors.

“
Sir!
” Mills says smartly as he reports to the Meat Cut.

The Soup Man and Latrine Scrub drift over. Seeing that it is Mills who has been singled out, other officers join the group. The Superior and Inferior Scullions, two Water Carriers, a Cook and Pastry Cook, the Salad Man and three Steam Table Men. There are a handful of noncommissioned officers as well——Waiters and Dining Room Orderlies, Dishwashers and Busboys.