I came downstairs one morning before sunrise and heard movements in the kitchen. The dog had barked earlier, but not as though something was wrong. Still, it wasn’t often Hunt was up before me, and these days anything was possible, so I came along as quietly as I could and just looked around the corner of the door.
“Good morning, sir.”
It was Sanjar. He stood beside the window, looking very straight and small. It was too dark to see his face, and he had grown, but I knew him by his voice and the way he held himself. “Where’s Arslan?”
“Not very far from here. He wants to know if you can hide us for about two weeks.”
I came in and reached for the candle we kept on the table. The cracks of the stove showed red; Sanjar must have built up the fire.
“No light yet,” he said, and as neat as you please he whisked the candle up before my fingers touched it, and stepped back out of reach behind the table. “Nobody must know except you and Hunt.” He hesitated. “Arslan wants me to tell you he’s asking you. He wants me to tell you he says, ‘Please.’” He held the candle clasped against his chest.
“What’s the trouble?”
“It’s not trouble. We’re on our way north, Arslan and me. We just need a place to rest awhile.” He set the candle down again, but he didn’t let go of it.
“Who’s he hiding from?”
Again he hesitated a little, before he said coldly, in his sweet, boy voice, “That’s the message. I’ve got to give him your answer.”
“Sanjar,” I said, “take it easy. You know I can’t give you an answer that means anything till you tell me a whole lot more. Now sit down and let me get you a drink of milk.”
“No, thanks.” But I heard him swallow.
“Well, sit down, anyway. Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to give away any secrets. But I’ve got to know what happens if I say yes, and what happens if I say no.” He sat down. “Now I’m going to slice us some bread.” In the darkness I didn’t want to make any sudden moves he might interpret as hostile. He was only a child; but he was Arslan’s child, and he was keyed up.
“If you say no,” he said softly, “we’ll go someplace else, that’s all. If you say yes, I’ll go get Arslan and we’ll stay upstairs—or anywhere you want to put us. We can keep quiet. It’d be probably ten days.” He paused. “We think nobody knows where we are.”
It was two years since they’d been in Kraftsville—seven, if you didn’t count the month-long stopover on their way to South America, or wherever they really went. I wondered who the somebody was that had reduced Arslan to a fugitive in that time.
“And what if somebody finds out?”
He took a piece of bread from my hand. “Then you might get hurt. But it’s not likely.” He munched hungrily, but even so he was quiet about it.
“I’ll tell you, Sanjar. If anybody came looking for you, this is about the first place they’d look. That’s one thing. Another thing is, this is Hunt’s home, too, and I can’t speak for him. But the main thing is, I’m not even going to consider it unless I know what’s going on—why he wants to come here and what he’s planning to do. And maybe you can’t tell me that.”
He put the bread down on the table and stood up. “No, sir,” he said, but he didn’t move to leave.
I stood up, too, and came around the table to him in three steps. “Who’s after him, Sanjar? Where are his troops?” I took him by the left arm. “What’s going to happen in ten days?”
He was Arslan’s child, all right. Absolutely before I knew he was moving, I felt a hair-light touch on my wrist, and looking down in the dimness I saw the dull gleam of the knife in his right hand. “Nobody’s after him,” he said steadily. “His troops are north of here. In ten days he’ll be rested enough to go on.”
I didn’t let go of my hold. “What’s happened? Why all the sneaking and hiding and begging favors? That’s not like Arslan.”
I felt the knife-edge quiver against my wrist, but his voice was still steady. “He’s disbanded the armies.”
“What armies?”
“All of his armies. All of them.”
“You just said his troops are north of here.”
“Those are irregulars.”
I shook his arm just a little. “What’s happening up north of here, Sanjar?”
“There’s a battle to be fought,” he said evenly. “Maybe more than one. Now, that’s all I’m going to tell you. If you don’t let go of my arm in thirty seconds, I’ll cut you.”
“Will you listen to me a minute if I let go?”
“Yes.”
I dropped my hand. “You can tell Arslan this: I’m willing to hide you, Sanjar, for this ten days or so, but before I decide to hide him, I’d have to talk to him face to face.”
“I’ll tell him.” He started melting away towards the window, but halfway there he stopped, silently poised. I listened, and heard Hunt’s footsteps on the stairs.
It only took a few words; Hunt was always quick to understand a situation when he wanted to. “Where is he?” His voice was rough with eagerness.
“Not far from here,” Sanjar said quickly.
“Is he wounded?”
“No.”
“Are you on foot?”
“No. Got a horse down the road.”
“Wait a minute while I saddle up.”
“No, Hunt.” The difference in their ages didn’t matter, no more than it would have between brothers. They talked straight at each other, on the same level. “He told me to come back alone.”
Hunt hesitated. “You’ll bring him here, then.”
“I’ll tell him what both of you say.”
Hunt whipped around to me, looking for someplace to take out his frustration. “He’s disbanded the armies! I assume you know what that means. Can’t you perform one generous act in your life?”
“Sure I know. He said himself there’d be revolts.”
Sanjar stepped between us, lifting his face towards mine. “Listen, Mr. Bond, I’ll tell you something.” He spoke fast and low, every word stinging clear. “He disbanded the armies because he was through with them. He’s done exactly everything he planned to, one hundred percent. There’s some trouble, yes. I can’t tell you what, I’m under orders; but he’s going to stop it. We got word some of his old troops are gathering, up north of here. He wants to get there before it comes to a battle. Sir, he needs rest. Sir"—he seemed to grow an inch or two with sheer intensity—"do you think Arslan would be asking you just for—for fun?”
“I wouldn’t expect it, but I can imagine it. What I can’t understand is Arslan rushing north to stop a battle.”
“Stop it?” he cried, surprised. “No, sir—win it!”
I had to laugh. “All right, and after he wins his battle, Sanjar—then what?”
He didn’t answer. Maybe he was considering what to say, or more likely it hadn’t really occurred to him, up to now, that time would go on beyond the next battle. I put my hands on his shoulders and felt the skin-and-bones of him through his shirt. “Is it Nizam?” He didn’t say anything, but his shoulders stiffened. So Nizam was making his bid to take over—Nizam with his wolfs face, Nizam who had carried Sanjar in his arms and sworn to avenge Arslan’s death by annihilating Kraft County. Another proverb turned out to be right—thieves’ honor. I let go of the boy and stepped back. “All right. Tell Arslan to come. I’ll hide him.”
He swayed toward me a little—from gratitude, maybe, or else faintness—and then he sprang to the open window and poured over the sill like a shadow. We both looked cautiously after him. I saw him once, already near the shed, before he disappeared. “That’s quite a boy,” I said.
“Which room are you putting them in?” Hunt asked briskly.
We talked about that, and decided inevitably on Arslan’s old room. The window was a reasonably good escape hatch, and they could hear something of what went on in the living room and keep an eye on the street and the Morrisville road. I went upstairs to get things ready, and Hunt went out to the wellhouse to fetch milk and butter and eggs and a bucket of fresh water.
I got back to the kitchen just in time to see them come through the window—a beautiful performance. Hunt stood by the cabinet, with his hands full of dishes. Arslan came straight on into the middle of the room and stood there like the king of the mountain. “Good morning, General,” I said.
“Good morning, sir.” He turned to Hunt. “Bring me food upstairs. Sanjar will help you.” This was his greeting after two full years of absence. I was a little sorry I hadn’t decided to keep him in the shed. He passed me, heading straight for the stairs, with Sanjar hurrying in front. I followed, and Hunt trailed mutely after.
Pale daylight poured down the stairwell, and for the first time I got a good look at him. In the dark he was definitely Arslan, but I didn’t know whether I’d have recognized him in the light, except by the crippled hand. He was sunburned nearly black, and he wasn’t just thin, he was shrunken, like a fugitive from a prison camp. “You’ve been sick.”
He laughed huskily. “I am sick. This is why I have begged your bed, sir. You need not worry. It is not contagious, and I will not die on your hands. Not this time, at least. I want two things only, rest and nourishment.” He grabbed the bannister with his crippled hand, swinging from it like a boy swinging around a lightpole. Sanjar was halfway up the stairs, leaning anxiously on that same bannister. Arslan grinned at me like a death’s head, swung himself back to the stairs, and mounted them slowly, with steady steps. Sanjar waited, all but quivering, till he reached him, and hovered at his elbow the rest of the way up. Hunt slipped past me and followed. They didn’t need me. I went back to the kitchen to wait for breakfast.
Sanjar was right; it was ten days, almost to the hour. They had come through the kitchen window in the dawn of a Monday morning; and a week and a half later, a little before the dawn of the Thursday, they went quietly through the back door. Arslan brushed against me in the darkness, and I felt the heat of his lean body, still fired from the fourth bout of fever since he came. It had been a nervous ten days, but quiet. There were no alarms. He slept; slept night and day, apparently. Sanjar stood guard over him like a tame tiger. He ate. Maybe ten times a day and three or four in the night, Sanjar would materialize in the kitchen to carry away a bowl or plate full of the nourishing messes that Hunt continually stirred up. And in those ten days I never once saw Arslan. It was like having a ghost for a tenant. All the news of his progress came through Hunt from Sanjar. Hunt had washed and ironed Arslan’s clothes, such as they were—the threadbare blouse and pantaloons of a peon. Sanjar had washed his own, in stages, borrowing a pair of Hunt’s pants while his dried in the basement, belting them in to fit and rolling up the legs so that he looked like a boy playing pirate.
And now Arslan, hot with his fading fever but steady on his legs, brushed past me in the dark, and Sanjar slid through the door like a breath of night wind. Hunt stood shoulder to shoulder with me, occupying the space Arslan had vanished through. “I’m going,” he said conversationally. “Maybe I’ll be back. Thanks.”
I stopped him with an arm across the door. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m going with Arslan.” He paused. “I didn’t ask him. I’m not asking you. I own the horse.” Then, Huntlike, “You can make a note of anything I owe you. If I live long enough, I’ll be back to work it off.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Hunt.” I dropped my arm. “Good luck. Come back.”
“Thanks.” He passed me into the night. I watched till the three horses moved out of the shed, shadows in darkness, and then I closed the door and turned back into the lightless house.
The truth was that I missed Hunt. For one thing, I cared about him. And for another, he had been there, a human presence in the house. Now, for literally the first time in my life, I was living alone.
When Luella died, it was a terrific blow to me. And yet there was something in my feeling that surprised me. It was a while before I could even admit to myself what it was, and it was this, that I felt only a very little personal grief. As far as Luella herself was concerned, my overriding feeling was thankfulness that she had gotten out of it as easily as anybody could in these times. In the past years I’d watched her getting tireder and tireder, more and more discouraged and resigned, and I had grieved for that. Now the grief was relieved.
No, the real blow was entirely practical and selfish. Luella had kept everything running smoothly. No wonder she’d been tired. She had cooked and canned, washed and ironed, sewed and mended, swept and dusted and scrubbed, built fires and carried water; and hardest of all, she had coordinated all of those things, so that we never lacked for anything it was in her power to provide. And on top of everything else, she had helped with the garden and the chickens and the cow. She was even more a part of my life than I’d ever known.
The day after we buried her in the old Cedar Hill cemetery, I walked into the kitchen for the first time since she’d died. It was a real shock. The sink was piled full of dirty dishes. There were dirty pans on the stove and dirty napkins wadded up on the table. The whole place smelled of garbage and burned grease. “Hunt!” I yelled. He came in hastily from the dining room. “Look at this filthy mess! How did it happen?”
He shrugged. “There’s been nobody to clean up,” he said mildly.
I stared at him. “But good Lord,” I said at last. “It’s only been four days. Three days.”
He shrugged again. “This is what happens in three days.”
I couldn’t stand to look at it. I went back to the living room, and Hunt followed slowly, closing the door behind us. I sat down and scrubbed my hands over my face. “What about the women?” It seemed to me they’d been all over the place. When anybody died, now more than ever, the women friends and relatives would come over to do the cooking and cleaning and all of that.
He didn’t answer at first, and when I looked at him he had an odd expression on his face, partly sly, partly defiant. “Didn’t they bring food?” I asked him.
He nodded. “That’s what you’ve been eating.”
“Didn’t they offer to help out?”
“They offered.” He smiled a little puckered smile. “I accepted some of the food, because I couldn’t ask you to eat my cooking. But I didn’t accept anything else.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve known for ten years where I stand with Kraftsville, but this is the first chance I’ve had to show Kraftsville where it stands with me.” He came a little farther into the room to face me better. “I hate to bother you with this when you’re in the midst of your own trouble. But since it’s come up I’ll just say that I’m ready to leave whenever you give the word.” He waited a moment and went on. “But the only dealings I’m going to have with Kraftsville people from now on is to tell them to go to hell.”
“I’m Kraftsville people, too, Hunt.”
“Except you, of course. You’ve been very good to me.” But he said it oddly.
He had stayed, of course. He had turned out eventually to be a pretty good cook, and we had shared out the other household jobs between us. There was a certain toughness in Hunt, and along with his intelligence and his enormous coolness it made him a good manager, and sometimes a good worker. Nothing was too trivial, or too dirty, or too complicated for him to undertake. He didn’t have to ask questions, and he had the initiative to start things on his own. The trouble was, he couldn’t be relied on. He would drop a project in the middle, not from boredom exactly (it was never the really dull and monotonous jobs he gave up on), but because for some reason he suddenly lost the interest necessary for him to carry anything through. If he cared about a thing, he could be determined to the point of stubbornness.
There was no shortage of work to do. I’d kept my house and grounds up, and I meant to go on doing it. “Your place looks like old times, Mr. Bond,” Leland had said to me once. “Got yourself a real old-time well-house now.” What Leland actually understood better than most people, though he might not have known how to put it, was that the way my place looked was modern now. Where too many people were letting things wear out and run down and just sit there, I got rid of the obsolete items and installed whatever would be useful from here on out. After the water system broke down, I had dug a good well and a complete septic tank system. A lot of people told me that if I wanted that kind of facilities I should have bought a country house that already had them; but I was damned if I was going to move out of my own house for no better reason than that. We had plenty of room, with the Carpenter lot. I’d had the KCR’s help, of course, but Hunt had done all the calculations and his share of the manual labor—more than his share, because he worked faster than most. Hunt was no weakling. He might be slender-built, but there was nothing flimsy about him, and I noticed he took care to keep himself in shape.
He’d said he wasn’t going to deal with Kraftsville people, but that turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth. In the last two years, starting from scratch and with all the odds apparently against him, he had built himself a very successful little business in horse-trading—a very exclusive business, too, because he dealt only in select breeding stock. It suited his restless temperament and his aloofness. He would ride far out of county to scout good prospects, and arrange deals sight unseen, acting as a go-between for men who’d never heard of each other. Then he’d ride off again with a string of his client’s horses and come back leading a string of new ones. Everybody was amazed that Hunt had turned out to be such a good judge of horseflesh and such a shrewd and honest trader (he got very few real complaints, at least in Kraftsville), but the only thing about his success that surprised me was that he’d gotten so many people to trust him. I figured we could both be proud of that.
The horse-trading was all on his own, but I’d already done what I could to give him a livable position in Kraftsville. I didn’t try to coddle him—that would have been no kindness—but I made it public knowledge that he was part of my family and a confidant in most of my business. After I was elected to my second term as County Supervisor and concurrently my first as Mayor, he served me as an unpaid private secretary, and I had let it be known before the election that he would do just that. Some people didn’t like it.
“I stood by Hunt when his own father turned him out, Leland. He’s not going to let me down.”
Leland tilted his head ruefully—a sort of sidling negative. “Maybe not you he won’t. But he don’t seem to think he owes the rest of the county nothing.”
“He’s working for me, not the rest of the county. And just what harm do you think he could do, anyway?”
“It ain’t me,” Leland protested. “It’s just what I hear around town.”
“Well, what the hell do you hear? I know it’s not you, Leland.”
“Well, you know there’s still Russian troops up north, and God knows where all. It’s not like the war was really over.”
I’d quit arguing about that word years ago. War was what people chose to call the state of abnormality Arslan had created. It was a shorthand way of saying that standard regulations didn’t apply. “All right, get it out, Leland.”
“Well, Arslan’s someplace, and Nizam’s someplace. Some people just figure Hunt’s in a pretty good spot to spy on things.”
“On me, you mean—if he was going to spy on anybody. And I know damned well he’s not going to spy on me. You just tell them to figure again, Leland.”
He pushed his scrap of a hat farther back on his shabby head. “Yeah, I can tell them you vouch for him.” He grinned. “And I don’t reckon the Turks is much interested in Kraft County no more, anyway.”
“And another thing, Leland, you make it clear to everybody I’m not using any public funds to pay Hunt. That’s a saving they’ll see reflected in the next budget.”
But I paid him something, all right: I broke his mother’s heart for him. He didn’t quite have what it took to do the job singlehanded. His father had been in poor health for some time, and Jean had taken to dropping in on the excuse of telling Hunt how Arnold was. Hunt was civil enough, but never much more. And after the elections, when, to give him his due, he had his hands pretty full of work, he began to be a little less.
“Could we just clarify something, Franklin?”
“We could try, at least.”
He was turning back from the door where he had just shown Jean out. His face was a little flushed and his lips a little tight—Hunt’s irritated look. “I’m curious to know just what are the visitation rights in this house.”
“I suppose any decent person is welcome here, if that’s what you mean.”
“I see,” he said pettishly. “In that case, where would you like me to do this work for you?”
Jean’s visit had interrupted something, but it wasn’t all that important. “Now what do you want, Hunt?”
“It’s what I don’t want.” He went back to his chair, demure and gloomy.
“I could put it to your mother that you’re very busy now, if that’s what you really want.”
His head snapped up like a twanged spring. His voice quivered. “I want… I want you to tell me you’ll keep her out of here! Isn’t the line drawable anywhere? Do I have to retreat to my bedroom for refuge? And how long before she’d be in there, too?” He grimaced in self-derision and beat the flat of his hand lightly on the chair arm. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, you don’t have to say any of it to me. Just let me submit that I’ve taken a lot of various things in my time, okay? And there are a few things that rightly or wrongly I can’t take.” He bit his lips, and sat there still and collected, but trembling quietly all over.
I sucked in my breath impatiently. “Exactly what do you have in mind, Hunt?” It was too bad it was his mother he just happened to be unable to bear, and I was well aware that he let himself tremble visibly, to demonstrate his earnestness. But that didn’t make his trembling or his need any less real.
“It’s your house.” Stubborn and meek.
“Hunt,” I said finally (I never knew how it was, but he could outwait me every time), “I give you my word she won’t enter this house while you’re living here—unless you ask her to.”
Naturally, I didn’t intend to put it to Jean in quite those terms, but she got it out of me anyway. She took it calmly, as Jean Morgan was bound to, but her face went deathly pale. “All right, Franklin.” Her voice cracked a little. “Don’t tell me why. Let’s just leave it at that.”
The house felt very empty, though Hunt had been a quiet person to live with. I fed his pets without enthusiasm. For a while—for years, in fact—I’d insisted on having no animals in the house, but when some people’s hostility against Hunt had broken out in the form of attacks on his horses, I’d told him to bring his pets inside if he wanted to. (Not that every animal on the place wasn’t a sort of pet to Hunt. He called the cow Lucinda. The old rooster was Saladin. Even the hens had names.) People who were capable of hamstringing a horse out of malice would do worse things to cats and dogs. That danger seemed to be past, now that Hunt was a practicing businessman; but I’d gotten used to the creatures—after all, it wasn’t the pampered menagerie of Arslan’s regime—and they had stayed. Now it was suddenly up to me to take care of them, and for Hunt’s sake I did it.
I figured that “north of here,” under the circumstances, was three or four days’ ride from Kraftsville. If it were any closer, Arslan couldn’t have resisted some kind of direct communication with his irregulars—always supposing they really existed. He would lose the third day in his next attack of chills and fever, unless he was fool enough to exhaust himself by riding with it. And, being Arslan, he’d make the most efficient use of his time; it was safe to assume he would give himself the maximum amount of rest, and arrive just in time to fight his battle before the next chill took hold. Of course, it might be farther north than that—another chill farther, or two or three; but Sanjar had given such an impression of immediacy, I was convinced otherwise. So I could begin the infuriating business of expecting them in a week and a half.
It was Sanjar again who came as scout in the darkness. This time he woke me. “Sir! Wake up! Sir! A message from Arslan!” His light, sharp voice, hissing with urgency, entered my dream in the form of a knife thrust, and I woke up with the conviction I had been stabbed. He started back from the bed as I jerked upright. “Sanjar, sir! A message from Arslan!”
The mists cleared away. “What is it, Sanjar?”
“Arslan’s sick, Hunt’s wounded. Is it safe to bring them in?”
“Of course it is. How bad wounded?” I was out of bed and feeling for my clothes.
“Not so bad—a smashed leg. Horse fell on him.”
“Where are they?”
“In the shed.”
“Sounds like you pretty well brought them in already.”
But he was gone. I pulled on my pants, dug my feet into my moccasins, stuck a candle into my pocket, and felt my way downstairs. It was the dead of night. The back door stood open. I crossed the yard to the shed.
It was full of the smell of horses and the sound of their breathing. “Hunt?” I said softly. His little dog was snuffling and fretting around our feet.
“Here,” Sanjar answered. He caught my hand and guided it to something solid.
“Hunt?”
“Hello, Franklin.” His voice was firm and sardonic. I ran my left arm under his right and got a good grip.
“Which is your bad leg?”
“The right. Otherwise known as the wrong. Let’s go.”
I took most of his weight, and we staggered across the yard. I didn’t let him pause till we had struggled through the open door and he could lean against the washstand. He was breathing in ragged gasps of pain and effort, and I could feel him sweating. “Damn it, where’s Sanjar?”
“Let’s go,” Hunt repeated tightly.
Even with Sanjar’s help it would have been hopeless to try to get him up the stairs. I crutched him into the living room and over to the couch and let him painfully down on it. In the darkness I didn’t want to fool with his injured leg; I hurried back to get a light from the cookstove embers and planted my candle on the coffee table. One little flame wouldn’t show through the heavy curtains. Together we got the leg lifted and straightened on the couch. It had been crudely splinted and bandaged, but I could feel the bones grating as we moved it. He lay back panting.
“Okay for a minute, Hunt?”
“Very fine.”
I headed back through the kitchen again, ready to chew out Sanjar and maybe Arslan, too. A minute later I was helping them. It was too much to ask an eleven-year-old boy to carry a grown man, however emaciated. Sanjar had gotten him—part dragging, part supporting—almost as far as the door, and they were both exhausted. Arslan was just conscious enough to try to keep his legs under him. He was shivering in short spasms; you could almost hear his bones rattle.
Between us we manhandled him into the dark house and upstairs to his old bed. He was so light it gave me a peculiar chill feeling in the pit of my stomach. “He’s all yours,” I told Sanjar, and went back down to Hunt. “Well, did you win it?”
“We won it.” He was looking studiously at the ceiling.
I went on through into the kitchen and brought him back a drink of water. He poured it down eagerly and gave me a shy sort of smile in the candlelight.
“I’m going for Dr. Allard.”
“No.” He tried to raise himself.
“Relax, Hunt. You can trust Jack Allard as well as you can me.” I patted him back down on the couch and went out again by the back door. I hadn’t gotten very far before Sanjar caught up with me. He ran like a hunting cat—low, and all but silent. I turned to meet him. “What’s the matter?”
He caught hold of my elbow. “Don’t get the doctor. I can take care of Arslan.”
“You can take care of him all you want to. I’m getting the doctor for Hunt.”
He hung on, and I half dragged him along. “You mustn’t let him know Arslan’s here.”
“Don’t worry, Sanjar. You can trust Doc Allard not to tell tales.”
“No!” he squeaked, his urgency too much for his young voice. He jerked at my arm, and I stopped again and faced him. The moon was down, but I could see that his face was twisted with earnestness. “I can’t even trust you!” he burst out. “You see? You’re going to tell the doctor!”
Under the circumstances I couldn’t laugh at him. “All right, Sanjar. My story is that Hunt came in with a broken leg and I went for help without waiting to find out how it happened. You hurry back to Hunt now and figure out a nice plausible lie. Don’t forget he’s got to explain how he got here alone on horseback.”
“Thanks! Thank you!” He melted back into the darkness.
The story Hunt told was sketchy, but not unbelievable. He had been thrown and dragged in the neighborhood of Reedsboro, where there was no doctor, and the Reedsboro people had given him the doubtful favor of an amateur bonesetting job and tied him to his horse. People would do things like that these days. It was a funny thing that Arslan’s plan of independent communities really had taken effect in some ways. There were business trips like Hunt’s, there was trade, and news filtered around fast enough; but by and large, people stayed in their own districts, and they didn’t take in strangers.
When the doctor was gone, I made sure Hunt was as comfortable as he could well be and went upstairs. There was no answer to my knock. I opened the door and stepped into the dawn-lit room. A curious noise was going on, a continuous soft rustle punctuated with irregular rasping sounds.
“Sanjar?” I couldn’t locate him for a few moments. Then I looked at Arslan in the bed and found Sanjar, too. He had fairly plastered himself onto his father, his arms locked around Arslan’s chest, his face profiled against Arslan’s throat. He was looking sidelong up at me with a look I knew all too well, the look I had seen in the eyes of dozens of wastrel’s sons as they faced their inevitable paddlings—the hopeless, utter defiance of the outlaw’s child. The noise was coming from Arslan. He was shaking, shaking helplessly in the grip of his cold disease, and he was not conscious now. His breath came in noisy heaves. Sanjar had put everything available on him—sheet and spread, the blankets he must have found in the old dresser, his own hot body.
I looked at them for a minute. “You’re pretty proud of your father, aren’t you?” He gazed at me with his steady desperation, the look that accepted hell. “Let me know if you need anything,” I said.
Those were a peculiar three days. It was hard to get used to the idea that Arslan might very well die in my house. I had to plan burial arrangements without mentioning the possibility to anybody. As for his northward expedition, I’d heard nothing but Hunt’s “We won it.” The physical results didn’t look very triumphal. Arslan himself had changed from a South American peasant’s rags to an equally ragged uniform—anonymous khaki, totally without insignia. Maybe that was a step up.
Kraftsville was willing enough to do business with Hunt, but he wasn’t what you could call socially popular. The silver lining of that was that we were spared the normal flood of neighborly visits and inquiries. Jean Morgan came, of course. “He’s doing very well,” I told her. “He’s comfortable.”
“May I come in?” We were standing in the open front door. Hunt was just out of sight at the far end of the living room.
“Jean,” I said, “you know I can’t go back on my word.”
She set her jaw and looked at me hard. “I’d laugh, if I felt cheerful enough. Just tell me, Franklin, did you ever hear of a more ridiculous situation? My son is in there with a broken leg, and I’m here on the doorstep begging admittance.”
But begging was something Jean Morgan couldn’t have done. When she saw I meant what I said, she went away without more ado.
I stretched my charity to the point of offering Arslan, through Sanjar, a pair of my pajamas. They were politely declined. As before I saw nothing of Arslan, but this time I saw more of Sanjar. With Hunt immobilized, he undertook to do all the cooking, after he’d asked my permission very prettily. As a cook he was a little less than inspired, but about as competent as you could want for an eleven-year-old. He took whatever I brought into the kitchen, and inevitably he boiled it. We lived on nondescript gruels and unclassified stews. And while his pots simmered, Sanjar squatted or sat cross-legged beside Hunt’s couch, deep in cheery discussion. I left them alone; it was pretty obvious they preferred to speak Turkistani when I was within earshot. I hadn’t seen Hunt so animated in years. And since Arslan had come through his chill, Sanjar was all smiles. He hadn’t really learned yet that his father was mortal.
But except with Sanjar, Hunt had lapsed back into the inarticulateness of his first days with Arslan. I tried exactly once to ask him what had happened. He fixed me with that remote look of a visitor from another world, as if we faced each other through barriers not simply of language but of perception. “It was a battle,” he said. “We won it.”
“What happened to Nizam?”
He shrugged, and after a while he said in an answering tone, “What happens to Nizams?”
“I expect they succeed or they die trying.”
He nodded slowly. “Nizam’s dead.”
“What was he trying for?”
“Exactly,” he said.
The third day, Sanjar was as restless as a young cat wanting out. Arslan’s next chill was due tomorrow, and the prospect seemed to infect the boy with jumpiness. For the first time since he was a tot, I saw him get really mad, flaring up at Hunt in the course of their chats, swearing—multilingually—like a trooper over his cooking. But it was with an air almost of contrition that he came to me just after lunch.
“Mr. Bond, I want to catch us some fish for supper. Arslan’s asleep. He won’t need anything for a few hours, and I’ll be back by then.”
“In broad daylight, Sanjar?”
He gave me the humbly calculating look of a wise child facing the barrier of adult prejudice—considering how to convince me he knew his business without displaying a confidence that would look like overconfidence. “I can keep out of sight,” he began cautiously, and I clapped him on the shoulder and told him to go ahead.
He flushed with relief and pleasure. All the same, he managed to delay for half an hour, fussing up and down stairs, he was so anxious to leave Arslan well provided for. When he finally went, he went through the kitchen window, surging out the way he always did, with the unreal grace of a shadow or a dancer. There was a certain crazy beauty about Sanjar. He preferred windows to doors—and he was entitled to windows.
It must have been about two in the afternoon when a wagon pulled up in front of the house. I was working in the side garden—somebody had to do Hunt’s chores—and I straightened up to watch.
Three men were getting out. One of them I recognized immediately—Harry Flaxman, a trapper from over by Blue Creek. The other two I placed as belonging to the middle-aged generation of town loafers, but couldn’t call their names to mind. Flaxman was hitching the horses to the gatepost. I headed up front in a hurry. This was a visit I didn’t like the looks of. Flaxman was a loner, a childless widower who was said to have worked his wife to death. After Arslan’s coming he had let his little farm grow up in brush and taken to trapping for a living. He was a drinker, a poacher, and a chiseler, efficient and mean.
By the time I got to the front walk I had placed the other two: J. G. Sims, a shiftless drunken no-account, like a milder Ollie Schuster; and Cully Johnson, a lanky, gentle-mannered loafer who lived on the charity of his relatives and whose only serious vice, as far as I knew, was absolute laziness. Hunt’s dog was yapping and snarling around them, but that little dog wasn’t worth two cents, and they could tell it at a glance. I stepped up on the porch, to get solidly between them and the door. There was a gun upstairs in my bedroom, but it might as well have been on the moon. Flaxman was leading the way up my front walk, and he swung a rifle loosely in his hand.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, now, Mr. Bond,” Flaxman began. He was grinning widely at me. He mounted the porch steps and stood facing me, while the other two formed up behind him. “Mind if we come in and talk about it?”
“I’ll have to ask you to put the gun down,” I said. “It’s a little rule I have—no firearms in the house or on the porch.”
He nodded a little exaggeratedly and rested the rifle butt on the top step. “We really come to see Hunt Morgan.”
I looked quickly at J. G.’s face, and Cully’s. If it was only Flaxman’s viciousness that inspired them, we had a better chance. But all three pairs of eyes were lit with the same vindictive fire. There had never been a lynching in Kraftsville, to my knowledge, but the conclusion was obvious: they had come to lynch Hunt.
“Hunt’s resting, and he’s not in shape to talk to anybody. I’m sorry I can’t ask you in.”
“Well, Mr. Bond, you just don’t have to ask us.”
So there was no use being polite. “Sorry,” I said, in a different tone. “I’m busy. If you have anything to say to me, you can say it tomorrow in my office. If you have anything to say to Hunt, I’ll take the message.”
“Seems like it’s hard to find you in your office,” Flaxman said. He was still grinning. The dog had given up and sat down, still growling uneasily. “Least that’s what I hear. I don’t have much occasion to come looking for you, myself.”
“Somebody says to me,” J. G. chimed in conversationally, “’If there’s ever another war in Kraft County, they’ll never make the Supervisor surrender.’ I says, ‘Why not?’ And he says, ‘They can’t never find him.’”
They all thought that was pretty funny. “I’d advise all three of you to tend to your own business and let me tend to mine. You’ll find out I’m in my office, all right.”
“Right now our business is Hunt Morgan,” Flaxman said.
“No.” I saw Flaxman’s muscles shift as he tilted just a shade forward, ready to take the offensive, but Cully and J. G. were already losing their nerve. “We’ve got laws in this town, mister, and you ought to know by now that I enforce them. You can’t go around disturbing people in their homes.”
“We ain’t going to disturb you one bit, Mr. Bond. We ain’t even got to come in if you bring him out.”
“Get back,” I said. Flaxman’s face twisted as he tried to stare me down, and I felt a swell of comfortable warmth. They weren’t so tough. “Mister, you’ve still got time to leave quietly and there won’t be any charges. But don’t you forget, the KCR has an interest in preserving law and order, too.”
Now they were all three whipped. Flaxman half turned away, riding his hand loosely up and down the gun barrel, figuring out his parting sneer. The gun might not be loaded; on the other hand, if anybody still had cartridges, it would be people like Flaxman, too selfish to turn them in and too smart to waste them. “We’ll get him, Mr. Bond,” he said with a travesty of pleasantness. “Don’t you worry, we’ll get him. There’s other ways.” He took the first slow step down.
“We got the proof, Mr. Bond,” Cully blurted. “That’s the God’s truth.”
A brown flush surged over Flaxman’s neck, and he spat on the steps to clarify his stand on Cully’s insubordination. “Get off my property,” I said. Flaxman turned his vicious face, surprised. “I mean you. Take that gun and get out, and don’t come back here or I’ll have you jailed.”
Flaxman teetered murderously, not sure whether to show his teeth before he slunk off, but J. G. and Cully, looking chastened, were already started toward the gate. “You come back here, Cully,” I said. “I want to talk to you.” He turned back hastily. Flaxman shrugged, and dawdled down the steps, passing him. “What proof have you got of what?”
He came up close to me and said, in a husky, confidential voice, like somebody discussing a dirty disease, “We just happened to find out, Mr. Bond. All three of us, we seen him with our own eyes.” He nodded. “Hunt Morgan’s a spy for Arslan.”
Flaxman had stopped halfway down the walk, looking back. “Out!” I called to him, and motioned with the back of my hand towards the gate, and he shrugged again and went on out to the wagon where J. G. was already waiting.
“What did you see, Cully?”
He shuffled a little, or managed to look like it without actually moving his feet. “We was out on a fishing trip. First time in a long time, I mean a real trip like that. You know how it is, nobody goes out of county no more. Don’t know why—do you?”
“How far did you go?” You had to be patient with Cully. Flaxman and J. G. were leaning against the side of the wagon, watching.
“Clear up to the Wabash. Nearly far as Clairmont, I reckon. Spent most a month, if you can believe it, Mr. Bond. I mean if you count coming and going.” If he had had a hat, he would have taken it off now and turned it round and round in his hands. “And it was up there we seen Hunt Morgan. Riding that there red horse of his. I’d of knowed him and the horse both, five miles off. Seen him ride up to a little old house there was, one of them little summer houses some people used to build up there, and he waited there most near half a day till somebody come and met him. And you know who it was, Mr. Bond? A soldier. Yes, sir. One of Arslan’s soldiers, I’ll swear. He had the uniform and all. And they was talking there all evening from noon till clear up dark. We was watching the whole thing from the river bank, all day long, first to last. Then we seen them ride off again back the way they come, Hunt south and the soldier north. He wasn’t just no private, neither; he was some kind of a officer.”
“When was this, Cully?”
“Near two months ago.” He screwed up his eyes and rocked on his feet. “It was six weeks, Mr. Bond. When we got home, we heard as Hunt was out of town again, so we figured we’d get him when he come back. Then when he come back hurt, it seemed like a God’s judgment. We don’t none of us figure you had a thing to do with it, Mr. Bond. I know I don’t.”
I stepped back across the porch to the front door and opened it, and held it open while I motioned to Flaxman and J. G. They straightened themselves and came up the walk grim as death, not a hint of a grin between them. “I’ll take the gun,” I said to Flaxman.
“No, sir,” he said, snapping his mouth shut. That meant, most likely, that it was loaded. Guns were a lot easier to come by than ammunition.
“Then you wait out here.” He nodded curtly. “You two come in. You can say what you think about Hunt to his face. If it’s more than hot air, the whole business belongs in court.” There were no treason laws in Kraft County—we hadn’t been able to agree on how to word them—but the KCR had its own rules. It was one thing when Hunt was a virtual prisoner, with Arslan’s hand on his throat; it was another to ride a hundred miles out of county to tell his little tales behind my back.
Hunt on the couch looked at us with eyes no more wary than usual. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t help knowing that something was up, but he was prepared to be polite if the situation allowed. J. G., not sure what had been told, wasn’t about to say anything, either. As for me, I didn’t feel much like doing favors for any of them. “Tell Hunt what you just told me,” I said to Cully.
“Well, like I was telling you, Mr. Bond—”
“Tell it to Hunt.”
He mustered some of the patriotic indignation, or whatever it was, that had slipped away from him. “Hunt, we seen you up on the Wabash.”
He raised his eyebrows very coolly, but I’d lived with Hunt long enough to recognize the quick shrinking look in his eyes—hurrying to acknowledge defeat before the fighting started.
Cully was back on the track now; his voice shrilled and trembled. “You been spying for Arslan all along, ain’t you? There ain’t nothing never went on in this town but what you told him, ain’t that right? Living right here in this here house and everything. There’s a lot of folks always said so, and now we know it. We got the proof!”
But it wasn’t for Arslan, it was for Nizam. Hunt shrugged. He had been looking steadily at me, and I at him. “Am I being charged with something?”
“I’ll have to check out the legal aspects,” I said. “One way or another, we’ll see that justice is done.”
Fear and humor washed like rotating colored lights across Hunt’s face and left him looking tired and injured. He nodded vaguely. Six weeks ago. He had believed then—at least he could have believed—that Nizam was still Arslan’s selfless right arm. And four weeks later, he had ridden north again to battle against Nizam.
“I don’t hear him deny it,” J. G. observed contemptuously.
“He can deny it all he wants to,” Cully shrilled. “But we seen it with our own eyes!”
The door scraped open. Flaxman was well into the room before I took my eyes off of Hunt. “Cully,” I said, “you know Ward Munsey’s house. You go tell him or his brother we’ve got a charge of collaboration to investigate. If you can’t find them home, get me Leland Kitchener or—”
“You just stay put, Cully,” Flaxman said. Five minutes earlier he wouldn’t have dared cross the porch with that gun. Five minutes earlier I wouldn’t have let him. There was a kind of justice that replaced legality sometimes—the kind of justice that dragged a careless hand into the gears of a machine.
“Hey!”
I didn’t understand for a moment what had happened. Flaxman, with his startled shout, had dodged back, jerking up his gun. Cully wavered, then leaned his long reach forward and scooped up something from the floor. It was Arslan’s knife.
He was leaning on the bannister. His face shone with sweat. His mouth was drawn into a grimace or a grin. J. G. was swearing softly.
“By God, it’s him. Is it him?” Cully said, in a voice of awe, looking from the knife to Arslan and back. Flaxman leveled the rifle.
“Wait,” I said, and “Wait,” said Arslan at the same instant. His hoarse voice rasped. As he spoke, he forced himself upright from the bannister, his arms trembling with the strain. “I make you an offer,” he said steadily. “You see that I am weak—even too weak to throw a knife properly. You see that I am alone. You want Hunt. Will you trade him for me?” His voice was gathering strength and color. “I will surrender myself to you, in return for a promise.” I wouldn’t have surrendered a tenpenny nail to those three for all the promises they could make. “You will promise—you will swear—before Mr. Bond and before your God, that you will never come to this house again, that you will never attack this house or anyone in it. Do you understand?” It was ridiculous, of course, but inside I was cursing whatever had made me keep the whereabouts of my gun strictly to myself. If I’d told Hunt about it, Arslan would have known by now.
They looked uneasily at each other, with dawning greed. Flaxman had lowered the rifle. J. G.’s mouth twisted. “Looks to me like we got you both,” he said fiercely. “We don’t need to make no promises. What’s to stop us just walking up there and getting you?”
“This.” Now the grimace was unmistakably a grin. He raised the second knife—Hunt’s knife, it must be—turning it in front of his chest to make it glint.
Cully cleared his throat. “Well, hell.” He sounded embarrassed. “We can just shoot you, and take Hunt anyways.”
“I am dying,” Arslan reproved gently. “Which do you want more: Hunt Morgan, or Arslan—alive, in your hands?”
They looked sidelong at each other, and suddenly they all three moved, drawing together and mumbling agreement. “Okay, drop the knife,” J. G. ordered.
“When you have sworn. You first.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who says you can take anybody out of my house?”
“Mr. Bond,” Flaxman said patiently, “if you don’t shut up, I’m going to shoot you dead. I ain’t promised nothing yet.”
“Then wait just a minute. I’m going to get a Bible for you to swear on.” I started for the stairs.
“If that ain’t a Bible on that there table"—the gun muzzle dipped towards the coffee table for half a second—"my mama sure didn’t teach me right.”
“You first,” Arslan repeated. I held the Bible, and J. G. laid his hand on it unwillingly, looking past me to Arslan.
“Repeat what I say. ‘I swear upon this Bible that I will never set foot in this house—’”
“I swear on this Bible I’ll never"—he faltered over the words—"set foot in this house.”
“’Or on its grounds—’”
“Or on its grounds.”
“’And I swear I will never try to hurt anyone—’”
“I swear I’ll never try to hurt anyone.”
“’While they are in this house or on its grounds—’”
“While they’re in this house or its grounds.”
“’And I swear I will never damage this house—’”
“And I swear I will never damage this house.”
“’And if I ever break any part of this oath—’”
“If I ever break any part of this oath.”
“’I pray that God will strike me—’”
“I pray that God will strike me.”
“’And all my family—’”
“And all my family.” J. G. had no family worth mentioning, but by this time he was speaking in deadly earnest.
“’Dead in agony.’”
“Dead"—he balked a little, and finished in a strangled voice—"in agony.”
I pulled the Bible away. “Do you understand what you have sworn?” Arslan insisted.
“Yeah—to leave this place alone, and anybody that’s in it—as long as they’re in it.”
“Or on the grounds.”
“Yeah, or on the grounds. But that’s only if you drop the knife and come with us.”
“Right,” Arslan approved, like a teacher who’s finally dragged the right answer out of a dull class. “Now you.”
And Cully, with his embarrassed air, mumbled through the same oath, impatiently coached by J. G. when he stumbled. “I ain’t putting my hand on no Bible,” Flaxman protested. But he did, while J. G. held the rifle for him.
“Now,” Cully said with relief. “Drop that knife and get down here.”
“Back up,” Arslan commanded quietly. “Open the door, and wait there.”
Shufflingly they did as they were told. I saw Hunt brace himself, bunching the muscles of his good leg, and knew he meant to plunge at Flaxman. But Flaxman knew it, too, and gave him a wide berth.
Slowly Arslan made his way down the stairs, stood swaying a moment, and crossed the room more briskly. He was barefoot. He smelled of sickness and sweat. The threadbare khaki clung to him in wet stripes. He didn’t look at Hunt. Beside me he stopped and opened his hand, and the knife clattered dully on the floor. At the same time he steadied himself against me with his two-fingered right hand. I felt the hooked fingers tap my wrist, with something between them; I closed my hand over them quickly and they pulled away, leaving the folded paper in my palm.
He stepped forward. I squeezed my hand against the pit of my stomach, where waves of pain ballooned outwards in pulse after pulse. The three faces at the door beamed with triumph, with the lust of cruelty. And who could blame them? Who could blame them?
Flaxman kept the rifle leveled, not at Arslan, but at me. Cully reached for the crippled arm, but J. G. struck out with one foot in a sudden sideways kick, and Arslan sprawled, half through the open door onto the porch. Hunt made a sound, a piteous small moan of protest. J. G. reached down; cloth ripped as he pulled Arslan upright. Cully seized his arm, twisting it up behind his back, and they crowded through the door. Flaxman waited till they got to the wagon. Then he gave a cheerful wave of the gun, slammed the door, and hurried after them.
A thick ink line crossed the paper. Above it was written in Arslan’s open hand, “Wait With Hunt,” and below, “Sanjar—Follow—If I am dead, try Spassky at once” and the last two words were underlined, the ink petering out into a pen scratch.
I brought down the pistol from my bedroom, and I got myself a drink of pure cream and sat hunched by the window. Hunt’s voice was frantic and coarse. “What are you waiting for? You own this town. Why the hell don’t you stop them?”
“That’s government. This is a private matter.” For all I could do, I kept wondering how Jesus had looked when He fell with the cross. If I am dead…."Who’s Spassky?”
“Spahsky,” he said, correcting my pronunciation, “is the ranking Russian officer on this continent—or was when there were ranks. He’s the one who raised the irregulars against Nizam and got word to Arslan.” His slim hands were folding, unfolding, smoothing, refolding the paper. “One of the few loyal people left. He sent four separate crews south, far enough so that Nizam’s receivers wouldn’t pick them up, to broadcast calls to Arslan. And he was sharp enough to see what was happening and do that in time.” He folded, folded again, opened, read, refolded. “So Kraftsville’s going to burn after all.”
“Oh, God,” I said wearily. “What’s the use?”
He laughed harshly. “What’s the difference? Aren’t we all dead?” He clenched his trembling fist on the folded paper and burst out, “Nothing about Arslan is private!”
I looked at him. “Try to get things straight in that brain for once, Hunt. Neither the KCR nor the government could possibly lift a finger for Arslan.”
“Well, Sanjar, at least. If your dainty stomach allows, why don’t you get the hell out of here and look for Sanjar?”
“I don’t put much faith in their Bible oaths, and I judge Arslan didn’t either.”
“For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake!” he cried furiously. Tears were spilling into his soft beard.
I did go out to the shed and saddle Sanjar’s horse. Arslan was still Arslan; he would take a lot of killing, and they would be in no hurry about it. Still, he had looked very frail. He had said, with all his pedagogic assurance, “I am dying.” And the ugly thought never left my mind that if he died too soon to suit them, they would be back in a hurry for Hunt.
I was in the living room, looking at the old clock for probably the hundredth time, when the kitchen window rattled. I strode in to meet Sanjar as he pulled a heavy string of fish over the sill after him. His grin faded as he turned; I put the crumpled note into his hand. “J. G. Sims, Cully Johnson, and Harry Flaxman. They came for Hunt, and Arslan persuaded them to take him instead. They went in Flaxman’s wagon; looked like they headed for his place—that’s just north of Blue Creek on the Morrisville road. An hour ago. Flaxman’s got a rifle.” The paper fluttered downwards. “I saddled your horse.” I held out the pistol.
He took it in both hands. For a moment more he held still, barely crouched, his eyes flitting wildly. Then he spun back to the window and was up and out. I watched him sprint to the shed; a few seconds later he was on horseback, tearing across the back garden and disappearing into the trees. When he showed again in the glimpse of road beyond the burned stable, he was going at a smooth gallop.
I gave Hunt the knife Arslan had dropped, locked the doors, and went the quietest way round to Jack Allard’s. “Well, who’s getting murdered now?” he greeted me.
“I’m not sure, but you’d better bring everything you’ve got.”
By the time we got back to the house, Sanjar had been gone half an hour. That was plenty of time for him to get to Flaxman’s. I told the doctor to make himself at home, and started after him.
I heard something coming over the hill and pulled my horse off of the road into the high brush. It was Flaxman’s wagon, but Sanjar was driving. I hailed him. He pulled up and sat wordless while I tied my horse to the tailgate beside his and climbed in. “You drive,” he said shortly, dropping the reins in my lap. He swung over the back of the seat, knelt beside a heap of sacking on the wagon bed, and pulled back the top sack. Arslan’s face was unrecognizable. “Go easy,” Sanjar ordered huskily.
Four times during that slow ride home, Arslan moaned—a thin, inarticulate sound, horrible because it was so helplessly unconscious. I drove into the back yard and stopped as close as I could get to the back door. The doctor came out, and we rigged up a litter from hoe handles and sacks and carried him in. Hunt was sleeping heavily. “I gave him a little something to knock him out,” Jack explained. “I don’t know what you might be bringing home.”
What we had brought home had been pretty well worked over with the classic tire chains, though fists alone must have caved in the face. They had burned his naked feet, but apparently they hadn’t had the time, or the imagination, to get into anything more refined.
“I’d say he’ll live—if he weren’t already about two-thirds dead of malaria. Mind you, you don’t exactly die of malaria, any more than you die of flu; but when it’s knocked out all your resistance, it can get into your liver or your brain, or it can just weaken you to the point where any little infection will finish you off.” He gestured with his pipe towards the ceiling. “That’s why we’re not through up there yet. We’re going to keep scrubbing him till he wishes he was back at Flaxman’s. Every little laceration he’s picked up probably in the last three weeks is infected already, and of course now there isn’t a patch of undamaged skin on him any bigger than the palm of your hand. The burns aren’t much to speak of. The main thing is, I can’t tell yet just what’s ruptured inside.” He puffed thoughtfully. “And then of course he hasn’t lost a hell of a lot of blood, but he probably couldn’t afford to lose any.”
“How about transfusions?”
“Thought you’d say that, but I wasn’t going to suggest it if you didn’t. It’s just a little bit riskier than it used to be since we’ve gone primitive. You know your blood group? That’s all right, I’ll just run a little direct agglutination test.” He got up. “Sanjar gets first chance, but we may need all we can get.” In the kitchen doorway he paused. “And when he comes to himself—if he ever does—I wish you’d point out to him that it’s absolutely his own fault if he dies. Absolutely.”
The first transfusion was Sanjar’s blood. The second was mine. There was no change that I could see in the swollen, multicolored face, but the whistling breath slowed and steadied, and the doctor grunted with satisfaction.
Hunt woke near midnight. As soon as the fuzziness of the drug wore off enough for him to understand what had happened, he lashed out at us desperately. He was furious at the doctor for having put him to sleep, at me for having let Arslan be taken, at Sanjar for no logical reason. What really hurt him was that he couldn’t see Arslan and couldn’t help him. Their blood was incompatible.
Now I found myself living in something like a state of siege. One morning I received a formal delegation of aldermen on the porch (they wouldn’t come inside); they informed me that the board considered I had forfeited my position as Mayor as long as I sheltered Arslan. “Suppose I got rid of Arslan. Would you consider me reinstated?”
They thought so, but the board would have to approve when the time came.
I told them they could go home and forget it. They had no such power, and like it or not, I was Mayor until elections next January. There wasn’t even any provision for impeachment in the city charter. I was pretty mad. Then they wanted to have Sanjar tried for murder. They were on better legal ground there, and I told them that just as soon as they recognized my authority as Mayor, I’d let them charge him and I’d go bail for him. There wasn’t much risk in that. I could delay the trial till the county cooled off enough to be reasonable. Cully’s relatives were the only people who might really care about what Sanjar had done at Flaxman’s place. The rest of the heat against Sanjar was just an overflow of the feeling against Arslan, and against me for shielding Arslan. It was leftover feeling. It might have applied well enough when Arslan was a foreign invader, but that didn’t mean it suited the present circumstances.
I kept the boy strictly in the house and yard, and I stayed home, too. Sanjar complained that the horses needed a run every day, but I convinced him it was too dangerous. If he went out, he might not come back alive, and Arslan needed him. If I went out, there might be a raid on the house.
Dr. Allard came every day. He’d had some unpleasantness on Arslan’s account too, of course, but he didn’t have to worry about any serious retaliation. A good doctor—any doctor—was too valuable.
I went in every day to have a look at Arslan, and it never failed to give me a peculiar feeling. So much of his aura of power had been physical. The thing that lay in the bed, dribbling from swollen lips, restlessly fingering the covers with shrunken hands—could this be any part of Arslan? The eyes in that discolored face, when they did open, were dull and drifting. The only sign of strength left was the violence of the shivering that racked him every third day. The whole bed rattled and inched along the floor. The blankets that Sanjar piled on him quivered like an earthquake. Downstairs, Hunt would lie staring at the ceiling while that racket went on above him. But during the second of those chills the sunken eyes opened clear and burning and fixed on me. And slowly, improbably, the smashed mouth shaped into a smile—a smile with split lips and chattering broken teeth. Arslan still lived in that wrecked flesh.
For how long was something else again.
Sanjar was a good little nurse. He hung on everything the doctor said. He handled all the dirty sickroom business—feeding, bathing, bedpans, bandages. Under the circumstances I couldn’t expect him to nurse Hunt, too. But Hunt didn’t require much nursing.
He lay quiet and calm on the couch, as he had lain since his first resentful outburst. He was polite and cheerful, but he didn’t want to talk much. He, the perpetual reader, hardly touched a book. He was content to rest, propped up with pillows, stroking a drowsy cat, gazing peacefully towards the windows or at the ceiling. Hunt had beheld his miracle. Now nothing, not Arslan’s death nor Arslan’s life, could destroy it.
One day he was still dying; the next, he was going to live. Like a savage—which was appropriate enough—Arslan seemed to consider death a matter of choice, or at worst an avoidable accident. His mind had turned some corner in the night, and there only remained the detail of dragging his body after it.
He went at it with patience and determination. I had to change my mind again, seeing how the authority of the man shone through the debris of his body. I had the feeling he would have discarded it as readily as any other corpse, if there had been anyplace else for him to go.
Now when I came to his room it was a visit, not an observation. We talked. At first it was only a few minutes at a time, he tired so fast—and he was so careful not to push himself any harder than was profitable. But for those minutes he was so much his old self I literally forgot his appearance, forgot even the rasping weakness of his voice. It was like familiar music on a bad recording.
I learned his version of what had happened “north of here.” It had been really northeast, where the Wabash curves away through a rich plain, eastward from Clairmont into Indiana. Arslan’s six hundred irregulars—the remnants of a decayed Russian regiment—passably well-mounted and well-armed, had surprised Nizam in the process of building what was to be his capital. I shook my head. It wasn’t easy to imagine Nizam being surprised, still less Nizam or anybody else building a capital at this point of time. Arslan smiled—a painful act for his face, from the looks of it. “It is not unreasonable, sir. Nizam might very well expect to live twenty, thirty years more. Why should he not choose to live in the enjoyment of comfort and power? Does life require an heir?”
Hunt told me later, citing it as an example of what he called Arslan’s delicacy, that he, Arslan, had personally killed Nizam in the battle. But Arslan only remarked that Nizam’s body had been found among the dead. “I was able to identify him,” he said thoughtfully. That was the kind of remark Hunt would enjoy brooding over. It didn’t contain much, but a lot of tall structures could be built around it.
Later it was Kraftsville we talked about. If any of the information Hunt had been feeding to Nizam for the last two years had ever gotten through to Arslan, he didn’t want to admit it. The political situation interested him mightily—not to mention the personal situation of every prominent family in town, and some of the obscure ones.
He hadn’t known—or pretended he hadn’t—that Arnold Morgan was dead. Even granting he hadn’t watched us, and even knowing Hunt, that surprised me a little. But no doubt they’d had more urgent things to talk about than a father’s death. “I wasn’t there,” I said dryly. “I suppose he died as well as he lived.”
The last time I saw Arnold Morgan alive had been typical, in a way. I had stopped by the house out of duty, to see Jean, as I did sometimes. It helped give her the feeling Hunt took an interest in her. She wasn’t home, and in common decency I sat down to talk to Arnold. We were all right till Hunt’s name was mentioned.
“He seems to be happy there,” Arnold said, in the kind of tone in which people used to say So-and-so’s boy was really much better off in military school. There, presumably, was my house.
I didn’t ask him how he knew whether Hunt was happy or not. I said he was getting along well enough. Maybe it sounded a little cold.
“As well as he can, probably,” Arnold said stiffly. “I will say this,” he added, warming up. “I’ve never heard a breath of scandal concerning you and Hunt—and I think I would have heard. I hear all the rest of it about him. People are sweet enough to do that for me.”
I’d let him get that far because it had taken me that long to realize what he was talking about. I stood up and looked at him, and he shut his mouth. “What the hell are you trying to say?”
“Say? Nothing. I’m saying that nobody says anything. Or thinks anything, as far as I can tell.”
“You mean you could imagine a thing like that? What’s wrong with you, Arnold?”
“What’s wrong with me? What kind of a question is that?”
“Forget it. It’s stupid for us to be yelling at each other.”
“I didn’t know there was more than one of us…” He let it die out, and we managed to part politely enough. Arnold did look very poorly, and I didn’t doubt he suffered over Hunt. But in my opinion, Jean was better off when he died. As for Hunt, it was harder to say.
Arslan nodded slowly. His face was tight with thoughtful interest—so far as you could interpret its expressions. “You are no longer the resistance,” he said abruptly. “You are the rulers now.”
“Governors, maybe, General. Kraft County’s not a kingdom.”
“Administrators.”
“Yes, I’ll buy that.” We looked at each other. “You’re feeling better today.”
“Better, yes. And when I am well enough to want a woman?” He was grinning now, friendly and mocking as he’d ever been.
“Not in my house. You’re not a prisoner here, you’re a guest, and you’ll behave yourself as a decent guest for as long as you sleep under my roof. When you leave here, you’re on your own.” Even here and now, sick and broken and besieged, beaten within an inch of his life, and flat on his back in a hostile town, he had to show his goat legs. It was monotonous.
But he said no more about women. He still knew how to concentrate on the job in hand, and the job in hand was recuperation.
Maybe I’d built him up to legendary proportions myself, as I’d scolded so many other people for doing. Anyhow it seemed unlike him—unworthy of him—to take so long to get well and have such a hard time of it. Maybe, after all, nature hadn’t given him quite the body to match his will. Because he was trying, trying hard, and it must have been quite a blow to him to find out he couldn’t manipulate or coerce his abused flesh back to health.
There were the setbacks, the dreary plateaus after spurts of improvement, the bruises that wouldn’t heal, the wounds that insisted on festering. The chills lost their regularity but not their strength. Blood appeared in his stool; boils developed on his back. Sanjar was exhausted and frantic with impatience. But Hunt’s leg was knitting nicely. Jack Allard brought him a pair of crutches and told him to get up. He practiced for nearly half an hour downstairs before he undertook the climb to Arslan’s room. It would have been hard to say whether Arslan’s recovery went any faster after that, but at least Sanjar felt better. Now there was somebody else on duty who had the proper regard for his father.
I left them to their own devices. I had other things to tend to. There was quite a little backlog of city and county business building up, aside from the matter of Sanjar. As soon as Hunt was really on his feet, and Arslan was making his first dizzy attempts to stand, I called a meeting of the county board. Just as a precaution, somebody would be keeping an eye on my house. That was a private arrangement. If the KCR involved itself officially at all, it would have to be on the other side. But purely as a friendly gesture to me, a few old members were willing to stand watch over Arslan and his young henchmen.
Effectively, now, there were two governments in Kraft County, and I was at the head of both of them. The KCR functioned first as the county’s real police force (Kraftsville had one policeman on the payroll, who supervised what traffic we had and mediated disputes about barking dogs), secondly as a clearinghouse of information and a postal service. The elected government had gotten into the habit of not recognizing the KCR’s existence, which saved a lot of inconvenience for everybody. It worked out, without much special effort, that very few people were directly involed in both. In Arslan’s day, of course, there hadn’t been any elected government, and we had developed our own personnel and our own methods. With the end of Nizam’s repression, a lot more people were suddenly interested in joining the KCR, and over the years we had enlisted a few recruits; but generally we didn’t welcome those who had found reasons not to join as long as death by torture was one of the occupational hazards. And by and large, with a few exceptions, people who enjoyed politicking and drew votes were a different breed from KCR people. So the organizations had stayed separate, and the KCR had stayed quiet, though it wasn’t secret any more. But now there was a very nice harmony. The initiative usually came from the elected government. Questions would be raised before the board, and if it looked like a KCR matter, somebody would say, “I think this kind of thing would be better handled in the private sector,” and the question would be dismissed.
I personally took care of the KCR budget. Even when we had been fighting for our freedom, our country, and our self-respect, there had been expenses, and now that the thrills and the virtue were mostly gone, people wanted wages. It hadn’t seemed right, or smart, either, to make the KCR over into a paid Mafia. Instead, we had made it over into a mutual-assistance cooperative. Members were paid on the basis of their services and their needs—paid, in kind or in labor, by other members. Our income was in contributions levied on people we figured we had helped.
The budget was a piece of work I would have been glad to get rid of. It was complicated and laborious, and I could have used the time for the duties I’d been elected to. Hunt would have done a good job of it—better than anybody else in the county—and I had been tempted more than once to trust him with it. But I’d made up my mind long since that nobody but myself would ever see that budget. Now I thanked God for that.
The board met on a muggy July afternoon. I left Arslan and Hunt deep in private discussion upstairs, while Sanjar stirred up their dinner, as carefree as a meadowlark. When I got back, the three of them were over in the schoolyard. Arslan, with his head thrown back and his good arm clamped on Sanjar’s young shoulders, was limping laboriously around the ruined west wing.
“Surveying?”
Hunt, a few feet behind the others, smiled humorlessly at me. “When I leave your house, sir,” Arslan said, “I propose to come here.”
“It’s city property.”
“Yes. Who will stop me?”
“Probably a lynch mob.”
He laughed happily. “Haven’t I been lynched?”
“Well, not entirely.” I was looking at Sanjar’s grave little face.
“Let them try. It will be good. But I am more interested in what you will do, sir.”
“I’ll do exactly nothing, unless you give me a specific reason to. I told you you’re not a prisoner. But as long as you stay in Kraft County, you’re subject to Kraft County laws. And outside of my house and yard I can’t offer you any personal protection. I suggest you stay put till you’re ready to leave.”
The black eyebrows, broken now with scars, went up. “To leave?”
“You aren’t staying in Kraftsville indefinitely, are you?”
“Sir,” he said, “I have come back to Kraftsville.” Maybe it was really that straightforward to him, or maybe he was explaining it in simple terms for simple minds.
“You’re crazy. Don’t forget that a crippled general without an army is just a man with a limp.”
He gave me a luminous smile, turning a little to share it with Hunt. “I am not a general, sir. There are no longer generals. Do you understand?”
“I understand that. I don’t think you do.”
“Ah,” he said, and he turned back to the school. “It is still the most defensible site in Kraftsville, and it is unused.” He gave me a sidelong look of amusement. “I am aware that Arslan would not survive long in Kraftsville without—fortification. I propose to fortify your school and to live there. That is all.”
“And what do you propose to live on?”
He shrugged. “We will hunt.”
“Well, you know where I stand. What you do from here on is your business—as long as it isn’t public business.”
“And if I appropriate city property?”
“A lot of other people have been doing it. I won’t interfere on that ground alone. But I’ll use it if I want to interfere for other reasons.”
He nodded soberly. He took a breath and squeezed Sanjar’s shoulder, and they moved on. Hunt gave me a studying look as he trailed past. “I brought the ham in,” he said.
That night Arslan shivered again in his bed. But the next morning he was out behind the house, watching sharply while Sanjar saddled Hunt’s colt. Hunt eyed me—ready to say, if I looked like objecting, “It’s my horse.”
“Where to?” I asked.
Sanjar shot a look at his father before he answered, “It’s for Arslan.”
“Going somewhere, General?” He didn’t look in any shape to ride, but I’d learned not to make bets on what Arslan couldn’t do.
“I need exercise,” he said cheerfully. “Also I wish to see the district.”
“The district’s going to see you, too.”
“It is good for the district to see me.”
“Well, it’s your neck, and Hunt’s horse. But I’m going to wish you luck.”
He laughed. “Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’d like to see you back in good health before they kill you.”
“Good,” he said warmly, but he was talking to Sanjar, who had just finished his job. Arslan took the bridle and began to walk the horse away from the house. It was the first time I’d seen him take more than two steps without help. He went slowly, talking to the horse, his face lined with concentration. Presently they stopped, and Arslan bunched the reins in his hand, and, after several false starts, got his foot into the stirrup. Even from where we stood by the shed, I could see how he gathered himself for a major effort. He swung himself up, but didn’t quite make it into the saddle: hung awkwardly for a moment, half lying on the horse’s neck, and then slipped back down.
The horse stepped nervously. He quieted it, hopping a little and twisting his foot on the grass for better purchase. For a moment horse and man stood waiting. Then in one sweeping chain of motion he swung himself astride, the horse moved, they were turning towards us, and Arslan swayed and toppled and caught himself on the startled horse’s neck, straightened and dug in his heels, rounded us in a tight circle, and drew up, laughing in harsh gasps.
Hunt seized the bridle. They gazed at each other, immobile. Then Arslan struck with his open left hand and shouted. The horse leaped away. Hunt staggered against me and recovered. He was cursing quietly, nursing his right wrist. Arslan was headed down the Morrisville road at a ragged trot, getting the horse and himself under control by fits and starts.
Hunt was looking at Sanjar so intently that I looked, too. The boy’s face was stricken. “Why don’t you saddle up and go with him?” I said.
“I’m under orders!” he flashed at me.
Arslan was already out of sight. Sanjar scuffed the dirt and shuffled sullenly into the shed. The horse would be his consolation. Hunt turned towards me—past me—a face so blank and tired that I was shaken. Arslan’s family.
It didn’t matter much now what Hunt had done. Nizam was dead, and Arslan was back under my roof, and nothing any of us could do would make the past any better. Forgiving people their trespasses wasn’t just Christian charity, it was common sense. There might be imitation Nizams still to come, and double-dealing was part of Hunt Morgan’s nature, or at least of his education; but I couldn’t see him as a threat to Kraftsville. Hunt had found his orbit again, his old orbit around Arslan. It was from Arslan the next move was bound to come.
He was back within an hour, and he was exhausted. Hunt caught him as he slipped clumsily down from the saddle—the closest thing to an embrace I’d ever seen between them. Arslan’s drawn face was radiant. Sanjar capered beside him, aglow too and all little boy again. Arslan caught my look and advanced between them towards the back door, the horse neglected for once. “So, sir; today it was only a small part of the district. Tomorrow, perhaps, more.”
As a matter of fact, it was two days before he went out again. Arslan, in his own way, was a cautious man. It had always struck me that most people’s approach to a risk was to open their eyes to the eighty percent chance, or whatever it happened to be, of safety, and close their eyes to the other twenty percent. But Arslan never staked anything he wasn’t fully prepared to lose. And if he pushed himself, it was never quite to the limit—except maybe that day when his knife had clattered on my floor.
He did ride out again, and come back again, and twice more after that, before he settled down to the business he’d laid out for himself. By that time it was well enough publicized.
From the first day of their remodeling operations they attracted observers. All of the immediate neighbors who were home had a good look from their windows or gardens, and the Munseys stood out in the street for a better view. The next day, and every day from then on, a few people drifted over from other parts of town. They would stand in idle groups of two or three or four, smoking, passing a few words, mostly just watching. After half an hour or so, a man would knock out his pipe, hitch up his pants, and move on about his business; but in a little while somebody else was likely to come along, so that while the groups shrank and grew, broke and re-formed, there was seldom a time when Arslan was without his spectators.
He gave them a pretty good show. What with his scars and scrawniness and lameness, and the too-loose hang of the ragged uniform, he made a nicely heroic laborer himself; and Sanjar as the picture of innocent devotion and Hunt as the fallen aristocrat didn’t hurt any, either.
At first, people stayed in the street or the neighboring yards. But after a few days, some of them started drifting up the east slope or into the parking lot for a closer look. They didn’t speak to the workers, and vice versa. Not for a while.
He ignored them just the right amount. Whenever he turned, whenever he spoke, he was ready to include them; you could almost see the blanks he left for their responses. Every time he hammered a nail or lifted a plank or laid a brick, every time he sang out an order or paused for a drink of water, he played it for all it was worth, reaching hard for his audience. And getting them. First their interest, then their admiration for a job well done under difficulties, then—with some of them—a little more than that.
Pretty soon people started making comments on the work, near enough and loud enough for Arslan to hear. He made no pretense of not hearing. If a remark pleased him, he smiled, if it didn’t, he made a little comic grimace that did a lot more for him than the smile could. Still there was a gap, a little something lacking to make the connection complete. He looked at them, they looked at him—but never quite at the same moment. They spoke, he spoke—but never directly to each other.
It wasn’t what you could call a relaxed situation, but in a way it was peaceful. As long as that connection remained uncompleted, nothing was going to happen, and that meant nobody had to make any inconvenient decisions. Kraftsville was uncommitted. Arslan and his ménage and his project had been granted, by popular will or by default, a kind of diplomatic immunity.
It was Ward Munsey who finally completed the connection. He had left the group of four that had settled that particular morning on the ruins of one of the parking-lot dividers and strolled up close to the workers, getting himself between Hunt on the one hand and Arslan and Sanjar on the other. He watched a little while longer, with his fingers flat in his hip pockets and his elbows stuck out behind. Then he asked conversationally, “You trying to make a fort out of it?”
Arslan turned to him with a sociable smile, as if it was an everyday exchange between old friends, up-ended the board he was carrying, and wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “Just a place to live.” He leaned on his board and gazed at the school, giving his handiwork a fond appraisal.
Ward gestured. “How come all the fortifications?”
Arslan shot him a confidential grin. “To prevent insomnia.”
It took Ward a minute to get that, but when he did, he answered it by spitting appreciatively into the grass and turning away with a one-sided smile. Nobody was about to forget that Arslan’s bullets had cut down Ward’s brother, or that Ward had risked his neck every night for weeks to give Arslan another little floral stab in the only place where it hurt. Whatever relationship was going to emerge now, it had to be built on that.
It was a new variation on Arslan’s old theme: first the rape, then the seduction. He was wooing Kraftsville now. The difference was that this time the strength was on the side of the victim.
But for good or ill the connection had been made, and Kraftsville was committed to the extent of accepting Arslan into fairly polite conversation. After that, people talked to him. It wasn’t that they were friendly; they were curious. And Arslan was always happy to explain his project.
“Yes, permanently. Later we can demolish what is left of the west wing. For the present, it is enough to seal the fire door.”
“You figure you got to seal it like that?”
“I would prefer a solid wall; I settle for a door that no one can open.”
In fact, the great fire door was probably the solidest part of the west wall. With the state of its tracks and bearings, welded with rust, there wasn’t much likelihood of anybody being able to open it, but Arslan wasn’t satisfied with that. What he was doing was literally bolting it in place. For lumber and hardware they were pillaging the railroad line. Hunt and Sanjar used the horses to drag the soundest rails and ties, travois-fashion, across town and into the school parking lot. They did it piecemeal, fetching another section whenever Arslan was ready for it. “We have no time to guard a supply depot,” he told me. “Sleep is more important.”
When they got through with that door, it would have taken a platoon of men with blowtorches to get it open. By that time, people were getting right up close, talking to all three of them, offering advice and argument—everything short of actually lending a hand.
“Come in and take a look.” Arslan’s English, like his manners, was mellowing. That invitation was made more and more often, and usually it was to the youngsters—the teenage boys who were taking more and more to hanging around the schoolground. Those kids were growing up pretty wild, in some ways. All that saved Kraftsville from a mass outbreak of juvenile delinquency was the amount of necessary work there was for everybody to do and the shortage of opportunities for getting into real mischief. We didn’t have to worry about drugs and peace politics any more, but the young people didn’t have much to hold them down or give them direction—except the ones who had joined the Last Days movement.
What had happened in religion was funny. The regular churches had just faded away without much fuss during Arslan’s first occupation—oh, some of them had shown signs of life longer than others—as if the ban on meetings had been the excuse they were waiting for. Most people had either lost their religion or preferred to exercise it privately. Even when meetings were possible again, the churches hadn’t come back to life, in spite of all the attempted revivals. But the Last Days was different. It started out as just another revival, but people were swept up by it. It had one main doctrine: that Jesus Christ would come to judge the quick and the dead pretty darn soon, while there were still some quick left. Which made as much sense, when you came to think about it, as a lot of other doctrines I’d heard in my life.
“What’s he telling those boys?” I asked Hunt, and he answered dryly, “Whatever they want to hear.” Hunt didn’t like the way the boys had started to flock to Arslan like flies to honey. For a little while Arslan had been all his—profoundly and poignantly his. “Isn’t it obvious?” he added. “He’s collecting a gang.”
No, after all, maybe the strength was on Arslan’s side again. At least he had certain advantages. He offered those restless kids a freedom that amounted to riot and the discipline of the wolf pack. I couldn’t match that.
Sanjar was finding Arslan’s new role a little hard to take, too. He was doggedly adoring—whenever he had a chance to be—but the betrayed look in his eyes told it better. Arslan’s new playmates were a far cry from the troopers who had made Sanjar their mascot. These boys were boys; that was the long and the short of it. They didn’t have enough years on Sanjar (and, God knows, not enough security) to see him as anything but a competitor. The fact that he could do practically anything as well as any of them—anything that didn’t demand weight or sexual development—just made it worse. And Arslan was no help. I’d used to think, when Sanjar was a three-year-old with a talent for finding trouble, that Arslan was trying to toughen him up. Now I was beginning to wonder if he just didn’t give a damn.
By the end of September they were moving in. Arslan had finished his fortifications and fixed up enough of the interior to make a little livable spot. It was like moving into a half-built house, but he knew what he was doing. The boys he was wooing had to have work to do—otherwise the whole setup would have fallen apart in a hurry—and this was the only work he had to offer them. So far, at least.
I wasn’t surprised when Hunt silently packed up his belongings and plodded across the street. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d stayed put, either; but since he’d made up his mind to go, it behooved him to go early and get himself established on Arslan’s right hand.
Once Arslan, Hunt, and Sanjar were well bedded down in what had been the A-V room on the second floor, the boys started moving in, two or three at a time. A few of the parents came to me, either threatening or appealing, to try to get their sons home again, but Arslan was ready for that, too. If the boys were eighteen, they had a legal right to live anyplace they chose; and if they were younger, he didn’t let them actually move in unless they got their parents’ consent in writing. He wasn’t prepared to fight Kraftsville.
“People ask me why the dickens we didn’t shoot him when we had the chance.” Leland Kitchener was too tactful to put his question more directly. “Looks like we could have had a trial to make it legal.”
“We could have.”
“Had to hang him then, I guess,” Leland added thoughtfully. “But I reckon he’d find his way home either way—sniff his way along by the smell of the brimstone.”
“Leland, when I accept a man into my house, he’s entitled to all the protection I can give him.”
He rubbed his jawbone pensively. “We might of had somebody waiting for him when he come out.”
“Well, the thing is this, Leland. Arslan hasn’t committed any crimes as a private citizen, and we don’t have the authority to try him for war crimes. And even if we did, what good would it do? From here on in, he is a private citizen, and nothing more than a private citizen. He’s entitled to the same rights as anybody else.”
He thought that over and then grinned his sly, sweet grin. “You mean when he’s got a army we can’t get him, and when he don’t, we ain’t supposed to?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Of course Arslan would never be exactly a private citizen. But he’d come a long way down since the day he drove me out on the Morrisville road.
“At least you got Hunt Morgan to tell you what goes on in there.”
“I don’t rely too much on what Hunt Morgan tells me, Leland. He’s let me down a few times too many.” Which wasn’t entirely accurate. Hunt was useful enough, but even without him, it would have been pretty clear where Arslan was heading.
He was a politician now. A real politician. It wasn’t hard to make fun of everything the government did, and mockery was one of Arslan’s specialties. People were ready for that—people were always ready for that kind of thing. He didn’t make fun of the KCR, though; in fact, to the extent that he had any public position on the subject, you could say he supported the KCR.
He kept his boys well enough in line not to cut himself off from the rest of the population. (Plenty of hard drinking and hard riding, but no vandalism of private property. Plenty of flirting, and probably seductions, but no rapes.) The next step would be to start offering the same services as the KCR. Already people with a grudge or a gripe—and there were always those—were starting to think of Arslan as a man who might know how to run things better. “Nizam was behind a lot of that business before.” I don’t know how many times I heard it. “Things are different now. Arslan knows he’s got to behave himself. He’s only alive by the good will of the county.” That was as much as they needed—just an excuse for not shooting him on sight. Arslan’s position in Kraftsville was a little like Hunt’s, now; people didn’t have to accept him to do business with him.
“He’s on city property, Mr. Bond. Looks like we got a right to evict him.”
“Maybe we’ve got the right, Leland, but he’s got the arsenal.” As soon as he’d collected enough reliable recruits to garrison his new quarters, he had dispatched Hunt and Sanjar with a couple of boys to some cache farther east, and they had come back loaded with automatic rifles and ammunition.
What Leland was really asking, and a lot of other people, too, was why I’d stood by and let Arslan set himself up as an independent power. Well, there was no way they could have understood the answer—or appreciated it if they had. Arslan wasn’t going to take over the world a second time, and I was ready to swear he wasn’t going to take over Kraftsville. If it ever came to fighting, I knew how to crack his famous fortifications (Hunt was useful, all right). And besides, there was a lot of solid power in that school, and I didn’t want to see it wasted. Putting Arslan out of action for good would be too much like cutting off my right hand.
Leland Kitchener himself brought the alarm, and Leland never wasted much time on introductory remarks.
“There’s a gang riding down this way from somewhere upstate. We’re in trouble, Mr. Bond. Only good thing, the General could be in trouble, too. Looks like his little plan went pffft.”
“Let’s have it.”
“A girl up there got pregnant.”
My throat and chest tightened. My stomach felt frozen. “How do you know? What happened?”
“Got the word from Colton. Don’t know where they got it from—nor how much you can believe of it. Must not have been a very smart girl. She tried to get rid of it. Killed the baby, and herself, too. Or maybe that’s what she had in mind. Anyway, the thing is, she wasn’t what you’d call a decent girl. And they got a theory up there, somebody got a theory, it was by her having so many different gentlemen friends she got the baby.”
I turned my head in disgust and spat into the dead grass (something I wouldn’t have done, anywhere, while Luella was alive). “It won’t hold much water, Leland.”
“No, I guess not. Not when you think about the girls in the houses. But I hear that’s the theory.”
“What are they doing about it?”
“What they’re doing about it is, they’ve organized themselves a kind of a army. A bunch of them are just riding around the country, taking a town at a time.”
“I don’t get it.” But I did get it, by premonition.
“Seems like they take that theory as gospel. And they’re spreading the gospel.”
“Where are they?”
“They’d have been here by now, only they veered off north of Colton. You know they got to stop and recuperate now and then.”
“All right, Leland, pass it on. Not everything you’ve told me—just a KCR alert. I’m going to see Arslan.”
It was apparently news to him, and interesting news, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He said nothing—politely—but the corner of his mouth tucked in with amusement. The idea of a troop of dedicated rapists, riding out to save the world by force, had to appeal to him. Salvation through violation—it was a concept that suited Arslan, even when it meant salvation from him.
“So much for Plan Two,” I said as viciously as I knew how.
“Perhaps. At worst, it was worth a try.” And he gave me the old bland look of half-surprise. It only needed the caption: What fools these mortals be.
I stood and leaned my palms on his desk, leaned far over to him. “You stinking bastard,” I shouted into his face, “I’m going to round up all the women and children in this county and I’m going to bring them here, and you’re going to defend them or die trying, and if you don’t I’m going to kill you—I don’t know how, but I’ll kill you by quarter-inches!”
And he laughed—a big, open, joyful laugh that tossed his head back and pointed his beard at me. “Hurry,” he said. “No men, no boys who can fight. We can’t take more than a thousand. Sanjar will go to scout out these raiders of yours.”
It was the biggest single operation we’d had to handle in years, and we weren’t really geared for that kind of an operation any more. I’d said “all the women and children,” but in fact we only needed to bring in the women of child-bearing age—stretching it a little on both ends, of course. We released as much ammunition as we could afford to people with families to protect—those that wouldn’t be likely to waste it—but we took nothing to the school. The rest of our little stock would be safe where it was, and Arslan could spare bullets better than we could.
Well before sundown we had the school crammed full. We had brought in practically all of the girls—the very youngest, after all, were already twelve—and women and girls were all over everywhere. Every room, every hall, every other step of every staircase. It would have been impossible to conduct a defense, or anything else, in such a mob. Arslan’s answer was to set two of his boys to painting boundary lines. (They had turned up some usable paint in the course of their remodeling, and Hunt had done good work with it.) A bright stripe down every staircase reserved a broad passageway “for authorized personnel,” as Arslan put it. Stripes on the floors packed the crowd into the rear of the classrooms and against the corridor walls; the window areas were off limits to them, along with generous aisles that would make it easy for the defenders to get around in a hurry.
One of the things Arslan’s gang had done was take out most of the basement floor. The concrete slabs had been put together on the remaining part to form a rainwater cistern, fed from the gutters by a pipe that came in through a convenient chink. In the dank subsoil they had excavated a large-scale latrine. The school was ready for a siege.
If the raiders had guns or explosives, there might be one; otherwise, it looked like no contest. Arslan was as serious about the Battle of Kraftsville School as if the fate of the world depended on it. He hadn’t hesitated to hand out automatic weapons to my men, with a little lecture on how to use them. The KCR was manning the first floor and the basement, with a few monitors scattered through the crowd of females to keep them in line. Arslan’s boys were bubbling like a pot of soup, full of pepper and hotter than sin. This was what they’d been waiting for all their lives—all summer, anyway. Arslan himself looked a good ten years younger and ten pounds heavier.
“What happens if nothing happens?” I asked him. “These kids can’t keep the steam up very long. Ten to one there won’t be any attack tonight, and tomorrow they’ll be down.”
He fairly chortled. “There will be an attack tonight. At least, it is very probable.” And it occurred to me that Sanjar had never returned from his scouting.
“When’s Sanjar getting back?”
“When he is ready.”
So Sanjar was dropping some kind of bait to bring the raiders hot on his tracks. There was a lively blaze now in the big fireplace where the furnace used to be, and there must have been plenty of smoke coming out of the chimney. They wouldn’t have any trouble finding us—and just in case they did, Arslan was already having the lamps lit on the top floor.
They came without much commotion, riding down Pearl Street at an easy pace. There must have been about a hundred. They pretty nearly filled the block, not solidly, but in ragged clumps. At the southwest corner of the schoolground they stopped and bunched up into a dense mass. “Why not fire now?” I didn’t see how we’d ever get a decent shot, otherwise, in the dusk.
Arslan shook his head. We were watching from a second-floor window. “No. We shall get a better return for our bullets.” And he added, not as casually as he seemed to think, “Sanjar may be with them.”
For all the orders of silence, the crowd inside kept up a steady buzz of noise. Everything considered, they were being pretty quiet, but you couldn’t expect that many women to be soundless. The horsemen were talking, but there was no hope of hearing anything they said.
Now they started their move, still not in much of a hurry. Maybe twenty-five or thirty of them peeled off and came across the parking lot at what started as a walk and ended as a fast trot, bringing up at the south door in a flurry of shouts. “Now!” Arslan bellowed. His boys were hanging half out of the second and third-floor windows; the line of fire was practically straight down. Arslan himself was fairly mortised into the window frame, his hip on the sill, the light rifle making one stiff vertical rod with his left arm and shoulder. One momentary burst of fire was enough; then he was yelling, swearing at his boys furiously, and the shooting sputtered out. The poor fools outside hadn’t exactly expected this kind of treatment, judging from the screams. A belated volley of missiles came from the main body in the road—rocks, or something just as futile. I felt like the U.S. Cavalry in an old western.
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.”