Sanjar and his red horses—the chestnut roan mare and the bright bay and the sorrels sired by Arslan’s starfaced stallion—flashed down the hillside like a meteor shower. This was his sport—to drive the little herd alone, struggling to turn them at full gallop, by voice and whip and example; so that when he rode among his followers, it was the horses, almost more than the boys on their backs, who rallied to him and obeyed him.
He was fourteen, and he had his first girl, installed now in the school among Arslan’s. He had picked her himself—Peggy Rose, perfect exemplum of her name—but Arslan, in his own harvesting, had left her to be picked.
Later he may hate me. Later, perhaps, he might. Now he rode his roan mare amid the herd, rode sometimes alone with me, hunted and raced and wrestled with his companions. They were the young ones, his own age or one year older or two, who chafed now at Arslan and his arrogant muscular gang. They would be forever the babies of their families; old men in the young wilderness, they would wither unmatured, spoiled brats to the end, the darling buds of May enduring fruitlessly into December. They were desperate and innocent as lemmings, happy as bees. They gathered to Sanjar as to their single hope.
The herd flared wide across the field, grudgingly turning to his shrill whoops. He rounded their outskirts, driving the little mare hard, bunching them gradually closer; pulled ahead of the herd and then slowed, calling to them by name as they overran him; and the rush dwindled and dried as they passed me along the fencerow, the riderless horses stepping knee-deep in broom sedge that matched their own colors. Sanjar raised his hand to me, the half salute that was his greeting, and I rode out from under the trees and walked my horse beside the blowing mare.
“Want to come north with me?” His eyes sparkled, but it was a half-hearted invitation. He was saying, I’m going north. Come if you will, I don’t want you.
“No, thanks. Will he let you go?”
“I’m going!” But it was the joyful defiance of the beloved son. I could be stopped, but not by him; he could stop anyone else, but not me. They had quarreled for weeks now. He was too young, Arslan said—Sanjar who had been eleven when he killed three men single-handed, who had been nine when Arslan boasted, “He is my aide-de-camp and my bodyguard.” It was a little late to shelter Sanjar. But Arslan’s eyes would redden with anger as he shouted, “Not this year!” It was already October; he would ride, if he went, into winter. Spassky had pitched his wigwam towns among the forested hills of the Great Lakes, where good hunting outweighed bad weather; and to visit Spassky and scout out the territory between was Sanjar’s excuse for seeking his fortune. “You’ll go next summer.” Next summer would be more reasonable, yes; but it would be permitted and therefore unsatisfactory.
We rode slowly into town. The wind was in our faces, droning and singing in our ears. The sky was the original of blues, scraped and sanded clean by that scouring air. The dazzling maples shed their gold rags around us. A pieced landscape, crazily stitched with its rail fences, opened before us as we turned through the gate into the road: woods multicolored and splotched with bare darkness, the touching spring green of new wheat, fields molten with goldenrod and Spanish needle, fields rusty with the broom sedge that would stand all winter, embroidered with the tarnishing purple of ironweed and loosestrife; the pale even stubble of mown wheat, the harsh stripes of trampled cornfields, the dully shining thatch of haystacks; Kraftsville itself, beautiful from here, a speckled parkland of trees in whose colored shades occasional roofs glinted.
The low sun was deepening into red, and every perishing lawn was a green-rubbed gold. We pulled up beside Franklin’s house. Sanjar’s eyes danced. “We’re going tomorrow,” he cried suddenly. Blithe Sanjar, whose secrets were all innocent. He leaned over the mare’s head, naming to me the boys who would go with him. “Hunt, I’m telling you this.” He straightened. “I’m telling Arslan tonight.”
“Take care, you hear?” We grinned at each other.
“You mean tonight, or tomorrow?” he said, and laughed. Later he may hate me. Not yet; no, not yet. He had planted wild roses on Rusudan’s grave, blithe Sanjar, without a word to anyone. Dog roses, their arcing stems furred with spines. I looked at the flowerless tangle below what I had been accustomed to think of, so many years ago, as Arslan’s window. Come May again, and rosy June, those ungraspable briars would flower with the simplest and loveliest of blooms, and wild bees sing around the pink and gold. “See you, Hunt,” said Sanjar, and he clucked the mare into a sudden trot.
By morning the town glowed with expectation. It was Sanjar’s followers, the chosen troop and the disgruntled rejectees, who had spread the news. The prospect of a showdown quarrel was as good as a holiday; at daybreak the loafers were gathering around the school. Franklin closed himself in his room with a stack of paperwork, while I loafed as eagerly as any, leaning with elbows on Arslan’s windowsill. But the quarrel began late, and when it moved out onto the schoolground it was already past climax. Only then I came down the stairs, and out, through Franklin’s porch, down the well-patched walk, across Pearl Street (unrutted still, for all the rains of spring, the summer wheels), unhurrying.
Sanjar swung into the saddle, his courtiers demurely following suit, and wheeled the little roan to face us all. In the gold of the high morning sun he seemed luminous himself. He thrust one hand into the mare’s mane, a gesture unconscious and beautiful as the cataract of coarse red hairs that poured upon the arching neck. Arslan limped forward a wounded pace. Girl Peggy stood forlorn, rumpled by the wind.
“Any messages?” Sanjar sang out. Certainly with the muscles of his back he felt the watchful attention of his retinue; his legs were warmed as much by the attendant crowd as by the mare’s round sides; even the hand in the red mane must be aware of Peggy. But the flushed young face was all concentrated on Arslan.
And Arslan, stern and grave, with basalt eyes, answered presently, “Ask Spassky if he can send me a good pipe.”
“I will!” It was a cry of exultation. He lifted the reins, raising the red mane like spray, and spun toward the road, heeling his body around and bringing the mare to follow, as a young centaur might turn and bound away. With scrambling hooves the courtiers followed.
Arslan’s hand had risen in the mild ghost of a salute. His lifted bronze face glowed with the grim furnace-light of pride. Now he would watch until the little troop was out of sight and hearing. But he did not. They had barely rounded the turn, a compact knot of motion, when he swung upon sobbing Peggy. “Go kill the broilers and roasters! And start dressing them!”
Stupid and shaken, she stared. “Now!” he barked, bell-mouthed Arslan, the voice that had wheeled the irregular cavalry at Clairmont like a flight of swifts. She turned mechanically under the force of it, and—in mid-step at last realizing what she was commanded to do—gasped tearfully, “How many?”
“All of them!” He swept her away with a gesture that eddied the other girls with its backwash. “Fay! Judy! Get on there and help her!” And, swinging back, “Jerry! Buck! Take as many men as you need and butcher the slaughter hogs. Hunt! Go bring me a deer.”
Go bring me a deer. And without a break he completed his wheeling maneuver and moved schoolward, swinging left and right to fire orders, driving the watchers like schools of shiners in a creek. He had imposed on me not a set of instructions, but a responsibility. All right. I would bring him his deer.
In the room that was his bedroom, study, and arsenal (I could not even remember, now, what classroom it had been) I sought and found his hunting rifle and the treasured cartridges with which to load it. The everyday bow and quiver that stood beside my bed in Franklin’s house were too prosaic now for this day’s hunt. I put my own saddle on the big dun and led one of the quarter horses. The cool October sun was high. Every deer in the district would be bedded down for the long rest. I tied the horses under the first trees of Karcher’s woods, beside a leaf-padded pool. For a little way the woods were open. Hickory, oak, ash, persimmon, sassafras, stood like good neighbors, a little withdrawn but with interlocking branches. It was the best of hiking weather, the worst for hunting. Dry leaves crackled at every step. Bare twigs curved in endless facsimiles of antlers. I went up the round swell of the hill that rose like a wooded cenotaph from the place where Arslan’s true love had died, and paused below its crest to ready the gun and let the noise of my tramping soak away into the quiet and be forgotten.
Beyond, the woods thickened. The down-slope was cut into deep, irregular gullies—midget ravines that merged and intersected, their channels choked with many autumns’ leaf falls. Buried at the slope’s foot, a nameless creek felt its forgotten way. I crossed its dank-smelling sandstone below one of the windfall dams that broke it into pools, and moved by slow gradations upstream along the wilder slope of the far side. Layered outcrops of stone and the miniature boulders cracked from them, and here and there a still-sound fallen log, gave me silent footing through the rustling welter of autumn. At each step I paused, scanning the barely altered scene until every element of it declared itself clearly, and choosing the next few feet of my route. It was a stooping, twisting way, picked to avoid the tangled brush and branches rather than to bend them aside; movement visible was even more hazardous than movement audible. An automatic pleasure, like that of the monotonous routines of sex, possessed me. The sweet dark woods, the dear dim woods, the wonderful woods and glades. But it was a labyrinth that led to death. A necessary end, I came (eluctable and rambling) toward some victim no less stoic and unforeseeing than Caesar.
In the light air, the faded leaves hung stiffly, gray-green and brown, palest beige and sallow. Here and there a single leaf spun and quivered, tinkling like a dry-mouthed bell. The creek below glinted at me occasionally through the brush, where meandering sunlight struck up from some clear minnow-pool; occasionally, even, a whisper of running water sounded. Between, stretches of sandstone and of silt (more exquisite than coral sand, scrolled with the tracks of the stream) had been swept clear of leaves by the wind. Where a bend had undercut a tree root, a late frog sang from his grotto. Elsewhere the creek lay silent and hidden, thatched with leaves.
Squirrels eyed me from the upper trunks. Persimmons, plum-sized, pumpkin-shaped and pumpkin-colored, hung like the lights of a garden party along the threadbare umbrella-ribs of their branches. I was beyond all sight and sound of humankind. The birds of the fencerows and open woodlots had given place to the shyer, drabber birds of the deep woods. Sweet-voiced, nameless to me, they flitted with little suspicious cries about the fringes of my vision—the only creatures in the woods whom my presence troubled. They would give warning (or so in my conceit I believed) if any warning was given. Only the mourning doves, imbecile and mild, ignored me.
I had neared the top of the creek’s gentle gorge, the dangerous point where I must cross the ridge into the next tiny valley. Again I took my cautious step, and paused, and scanned. An old oak tree stood at the head of the gorge, and from my latest viewpoint I could see a single ascending column of dull crimson rosettes up the visible edge of the thick trunk—the palmate, five-fingered leaves of the Virginia creeper, neatly graduated from large to small. Beneath and behind the oak, the undergrowth was hung with the open clusters of a young grapevine. The small black grapes, most of them already a little shriveled, were like lackluster eyes among the leaves. I stared at them, and they, pregnant with mighty vines upon which no boys would ever swing, stared steadily back. Then without alteration of the scene another eye was staring. Larger and brighter, it poised motionless among the grapes. Slowly, as in those puzzle pictures in which the outlines of hidden beasts gradually reveal themselves to the concentrated sight, certain branches resolved into the beautiful forward curve of a raked antler.
From the height of the eye, he stood a good four feet. For minutes more, I could make out nothing of his actual fleshly presence—only the symbolic eye and antler, like the grin of the Cheshire cat. I counted four points; adding a conservative two for concealed branches, and doubling for the other antler, I could assume a twelve-point buck—old and wise and in all probability the master of a considerable harem. That antler raised a very practical question: Should I try for the glorious-headed stag, or for one of his more succulent dependents? Bring me a deer. It was a requisition for provisions (Hunt Morgan’s commissariat, Buffalo Bill to Kraftsville, Illinois), but was it not also a test of my prowess?
Then the line of his back came into focus, and I stiffened with silent lust. In those still woods, he and I were the stillest things. The creek whispered; every leafed thing burred and rustled; the birds exclaimed in quiet voices; the indifferent insects sang and whirred. What wind there was (a stirring in the damp earth’s cover, a life in the hanging leaves) favored me. It was possible, for all the directness in that dark gaze, that he did not see me. I began to raise the gun.
There was no change in the solitary eye or the stretched outlines. Creepingly from inch to inch, with pauses, I lifted the rifle, until my cheek nested peacefully against the stock. Now I could see, or imagine that I saw, the even tan of his pelt showing in background patches between the patterning leaves and twigs. I chose a spot that offered as clear a trajectory as any (Arslan had taught me how slight a thing could hopelessly deflect a bullet) to the broad target of his chest, and began that most delicate pleasure of the hunter—the gradual squeeze that is to trip the trigger exactly at one of those unprolongable instants when the swaying sights are mated perfectly upon the target.
But my stag, too, was cocked, and his triggering instant came an instant sooner. As the stock struck my cradling cheek and shoulder, and my ears rang with the shot, the buck was already in motion. He crashed across the slope into the next gorge.
I plunged wildly after, paused upon his track to look for blood, and followed far enough to be sure he was not wounded. There was no need to follow farther now. Later, much later, when the calm hours of afternoon had lulled him, when responsibility had netted him round and routine emergencies disarmed him, my chance would come again. There were other deer in the woods, but he was mine.
I circled back to the edge of the woods where I had entered. I checked the horses, drank, relieved myself, gathered a double handful of persimmons, and stretched out with them and a slab of my own bread to rest and wait. By now he would have fled far enough. He would gather his harem, while I lay munching tranquilly in the thick dry grass. Herder, warder, leader—lover last and first—he would return to his familiar bonds. He would not wander far; like me, he had his bounds. And bound—oh, bound… oh, bound. The swelled and shuddering word engorged my mind. The spring and fall of haunches in the leap, ridges and gullies of unleaving autumn, the maps of love, the ropes of life, trees rooted in the towing tides of air … oh bound, bound, the leap of the heart, the limit of the deer. Until, released at last, the word found words and drained itself in the relieving trivialness of poetry. And, bound for the same bourn as I, On every road I wandered by, Trod beside me, close and dear, The beautiful and death-struck year. “Bound to stir up a fuss,” my grandfather had grumbled (or was it my great-uncle? Some old man, grumbling once, a time and scene forgotten), though I had been the quietest of children. My eyes were open, the same persimmon trees hung their fruits before me; I stretched myself in the dry grass of Karcher’s woods and finished my bread.
In Karcher’s woods, here at the foot of the first hill, I had found one spring a shin-high stalk spiraled with cloud-white flowers. I had gazed, disturbed because I could not put a name to my pleasure, a long time into the tiny depths of the twisted blossoms. They were minute, fly-sized—and yet, in intricacy and grandeur, monumental, like expert miniatures of the Great Buddha. Slowly and sweetly I recognized that they were orchids.
That spring and others, I had found, too, the standard schoolbook wildflowers—Dutchman’s breeches, snowdrop, hepatica—academic beauties that were somehow touching, rooted in Kraft County dirt; touching but unreal. More to the point were the flocks of sturdy little upright violets that we called rooster-fights, purpling sunny hillcrests unregarded, mowed and trampled like the grass. And my orchids. Anomalous, unpredicted, and secret, they illuminated the woods.
I had wondered, sometimes, if Sanjar had known those orchids. Perhaps he had seen them and passed on, unrealizing, he to whose homeless eyes all flowers were exotic. Solomon’s seal, cinquefoil, heal-all—he had delighted to name and touch the rugged blooms of Illinois. Smartweed, ironweed, butterflyweed—season after season, he named, he touched, but he did not pick. Yet I had seen him race and roll with a puppy’s craziness in the red clover, and one day he had cut armloads of wild honeysuckle and ridden home triumphantly bedecked, in clouds of sweetness, with trailing stems twined in his vexed horse’s mane. But honeysuckle or columbine, mullein or pigweed, they were no more native to him than the flamboyant flora of monsoon Asia, he who was born to the twisted scrub of Arslan’s plains. To Sanjar, the unyellowing ivory of miraculous orchids in Karcher’s woods must be no more, no less, significant than the casual dayflowers whose blue blossoms and supine stalks we trampled every summer long. No, the orchids were mine forever.
And Sanjar, Sanjar was gone—Sanjar whose shining eyes opened sometimes into a look of blindness. Confiding, quick Sanjar, afire with indignation as he struck with his riding whip, and struck again, and struck again ("You don’t kick any of those dogs, you hear?") while the disgraced courtier whimpered and backed, head hunched behind his flapping arms. Singing Sanjar, Sanjar who had tumbled the books off the table, laughing—"Oh, what’s the use, Hunt?” (I thinking, but not saying, Someday you may want to read.) When Sanjar argued, he was candid, receptive, eager to learn; but his commands were arbitrary, his angers as flashing and frequent as summer lightning.
My fingers curled in the stiff curled grass, and my mind rode back to the blaze of Bukharan summer, where Arslan lay, drenched with his sweat and mine, one bright arm flung like a wave-cast across his face. It was not likely that I would see him so again. In Bukhara, everything had been intensified, concentrated by a process of dehydration. Essences of day and night, of summer and winter; spring itself, too faint and swift to grasp, wringing the heart with one outrageous spasm; these things had suited the passions that lived within them, the hoarse and howling rages that swept down the shining stairs, the abandon (loose and laughing as drunkenness, but unblurred) of joy. That—if, of course, I could only have known it—had been our honeymoon.
And he had been young then, very young. He had begun his work early, as a man should (as men were born to do before the artifices of civilization had prolonged childhood past puberty), and in his hour of triumph he had still been very young. He was not old now. He was total, arrived, all his powers at peak; and it was right that his work was finished. When Nizam lay dead in the grass at Clairmont, Arslan had looked at him, not long, but so intensely that I clenched my hand upon my belly as Franklin Bond was wont to do in his moments of horrible crisis. His worn face was without expression, as if all feeling and purpose had withdrawn from it, and only his eyes burned upon dead Nizam. Later he squatted beside me, steadying himself against the still-warm body of my horse, and touched my leg thoughtfully. “Fuck Nizam,” I said—the pain was so inescapable. Arslan’s face, cracked and sunken, warped like an old scrap of bad leather, softened once more into his dimpling smile. “Nizam,” he said gently. “Nizam was right.” Tears persisted in seeping out of my eyes. Yet six days later he was to barter his ravaged body for mine.
Yes, Nizam had been right. Arslan’s ephemeral empire had passed, like a running prairie fire. Nizam’s devotion, like Arslan’s plans, had served its purpose and could be discarded. Work was over. It remained only to live.
And Nizam’s style of living had crossed Arslan’s; therefore he had died. But Franklin Bond had built himself a solid hold on undisputed ground. Nobody’s servant, he had not run Nizam’s danger (the shadow’s death, the fatal disease of fidelity), and he had seen his own danger in good time and trimmed his ambitions to fit the space allotted. Like me—I thought—he had taken the step backward that enabled him to stand upright. There was a certain family relationship between our positions. It was therefore that I had chosen to live in his house; chosen in the teeth of those fierce abstractions—treason, murder—that were realities to him; chosen to live, or, if that were still denied me, to wait. And when I lay raging in the tranquil nights, it was for that, almost alone: that all obstacles had been passed, all walls broken, and yet he declined to recognize so simple a relationship.
I had been resigned long since to the look in Arslan’s eyes, the look that lay far back like the silent shapes under deep water. A look of concern I could have forgiven, of anxiety, or of love; but it was more and worse than these, a look of vulnerability; I could not forgive him the fact that Sanjar could hurt him. Yet I had been resigned, for—surely as the inevitable, uncertain spring—Sanjar would go, Sanjar my almost friend, my something less than brother. Sanjar would go, and the alien burden of fatherhood would be lifted from Arslan, the far shapes die out from his eyes.
For Karcher’s woods stood witness that his vulnerability could pass, that if his brain remembered, his heart could forget. Here, somewhere between the bramble-clogged roadside ditch and the scattered flat seeds of my persimmons, Rusudan had died among the leaves, opening the wound that would close at last, unnoticed, somewhere between Athens and Stalingrad. There were no memories of Rusudan in Arslan’s eyes now; and it was Sanjar who had planted roses on her grave.
Idling on the road, leaning against the chain links of the Russians’ fence, they had watched me pass. I did not even know their names (Schuster was one?), though I knew their eyes. I rode slowly, not to avoid them. And when one hailed me, “Say, Hunt!” something made me draw rein—something not suicidal, but aggressive. Their question surprised me. So I was not, after all, their quarry. Yes; I knew (as what did I not know?) where Rusudan had gone to tease Fred Gonderling in the dusk. “Well, Hunt, if you meet Mr. Gonderling on the way, why don’t you pass the time of day with him a few minutes? Just so he don’t get there too soon, you know?” “Wouldn’t want him to have to wait out there in the woods by hisself,” said the other. Shadow men, they were not real. What was real was what turned inside me, pointing like a weathercock. “Right by the road,” I said. “Not really in the woods.” Later, beneath the lash of Arslan’s tormented voice, it was Fred Gonderling’s name I stammered out first, before my haphazard descriptions of the shadow men.
I did not know, until he turned away from the four corpses, that I would not be the fifth. Until that moment I had waited, with anxious anticipation and a hollow sickness in the gut, to learn whether I would fight him—and how, if I did not, he would destroy me. But as he turned, slack and satiated, sheer joy bubbled within me, and I trembled like a fountain. Rusudan was dead, and I would live. Nights afterward, when in my agony I dared to tongue Rusudan’s name, he leaned the heel of his hand upon my mouth, saying for all time, “That case is closed,” and I read in the jet transparence of his eyes that I was absolved of my own sin, called only to suffer for others’.
“Dreams are funny,” Sanjar had said once, touching me with his humanness. (For all the billions of babies, the first cry, the first step, the first word. Yet why should it be touching that life was cyclic?) “Sometimes I dream about"—he broke off, gently embarrassed—"you know—kids. Children. I mean, I just see them; walking around and everything.”
“Playing,” I said. “That’s what children do.”
He nodded gravely, his eyes searching inward.
Like secret orchids, the children bloomed; native strangers, humble and precious. I too had dreamed of them, the children that would have been, the children that might be. Certainly it was in quest of children that Sanjar was leading his little troop northward. Surely in all the fertile sweep of the rich land, at least one child must lurk. And I felt the intangible pulse of the earth against me, the immortal dirt of Karcher’s fecund woods, squirrel-eyed, bird-voiced, grass-pelted, cloven and rutted with the gushing generations of the deer.
I rolled over and sat up, remembering something Sanjar had said once, coming contritely back to me after some trivial quarrel. “I wish you could have been with us all the time.” All the time. The memory struck like a revelation, so that I heard the tones of his voice, reviewed the expressions of his face, hands, shoulders, all his guileless muscles. I had taken it then as an offer of conciliation to a subordinate, no more. But it was more. I wish. Awkward with boyishness, unaccustomed to confession. You could have been. Helpless before the huge impossibilities of past and future. With us.
I checked my gun—Arslan’s gun—and stood up.
I knew my road now, and followed faithfully along it; up the hill, down the slope, across the creek, and upstream beside it. Below the head of the gorge I stood awhile, staring at the grape-eyed vine under the oak. He had his paths as well as I, and this was our only proven crossroads. But I did not meet him there, nor, working my way downhill, in the next valley. The lower reaches of the third were broad and ruggedly flat, a section that had been cut over more than once when this land belonged to somebody. Clumps of crimson sumac and little cedars made a low forest among the stumps and tall saplings. I stood for a long time surveying the gaps among the foliage. I could not afford another mistake. Slow waves of certainty succeeded one another: he would be here; he would not; he would be. Without surprise I grew aware of a certain brownness among the browns and reds and muted greens. I eased my head sideward a little, and made out the sleeping deer, folded snugly as a cat. A deer, but not my buck. One of his harem, perhaps; and in that hope, and expert with desire, I trod Indian-soft among the leaves, too busy to be moved by the intimacy of the scene that revealed itself to me.
He lay among his loves, his splendorous head resting at ease along his foreleg. Moving with the faint pulses of the breeze that washed in slow ripples down the valley, I found my way to a vantage point against an ash tree and raised Arslan’s gun. Heat throbbed in my face, nested my heart. He had been hunted before, this stag. But who, even in his incautious youth, had seen him thus helplessly abandoned to peace? I would have wagered my life, at that moment, that no one, since the Shawnee had tracked his ancestors through the virgin scrub of aboriginal forests, had witnessed this secret domesticity in the woods. His ancestors, not mine; immigrant in my very homeland, I could only imitate the ancient lords of the land. But the unbroken stream of his breed ran back, birth by birth, through wooded centuries before the first footfall of those first immigrants of whom the Shawnee had been the illegitimate heirs. I lowered the gun.
I could not take him so. In the end, I could not take him unawares. It was not, certainly, the classic perversion of sportsmen, obsolete from the moment of its conception, that morality demanded for the victim some chance of escape. No, my morality was older, more classic yet, the morality that distinguished between sacrifice and slaughter and had not yet dreamed of sport. In the end, it seemed to me, no death could be so cruelly unfair as the unfelt death in sleep. I leaned against the ash and waited. Time was my ally. Time: not the fourth dimension, but the first, the essential, without which the mere dimensions of space could not be born. Time: the matrix wherein we traced the shapes of beauty and of power. For it was shape that gave significance. Form was beauty—the classicists were right—and power was form. Starlight swept along the curve lanes of the closed universe; planets wheeled in the grooves that Newton had not seen. Swinging down the paths of time, my deer and I would meet—rightly, as our predecessors had met, here beneath other trees, round centuries ago.
And after all, I was not simply an imitator—or not, at least, an imitation. If I wore moccasins, they were of my own design and making; and though for years past I had delighted to play with bows (making of civilization’s wreck an excuse to return to my childhood’s toys), for this hunt I chose a graver weapon. It added both power and risk. Arslan’s gun had not been fired for many months, though he cleaned and nursed it beyond all practical need; and the cartridges, however lovingly they had been guarded against assaults of weather, were older than Sanjar—twice, three times, perhaps, the age of the buck they were to kill. But in return for such precision and potency, it was only fair to accept the risk of a misfire.
Fair: a sweeter, truer word than just. All justice aside, was it not keenly unfair that I had scrambled for crumbs beneath his table with his other minions?—that the place I had earned by such fierce apprenticeship was reserved to that mindless salamandrine queen of fire and earth? What had she to offer him, beside the match of passion? Where could they meet, but in the furious and volcanic dark? What, in simple fact, could they talk about?
It was absurd, of course, to be still wrestling with the gorgeous shade of Rusudan—Rusudan whom Arslan had forgotten. But I wrestled now not for his affection (had that ever been the prize?) but for understanding. By what right had he suffered for Rusudan? It was I, not Rusudan, whom he had led through Karcher’s woods, to whom he had whispered, “Look.”
And now, leaning in the very heart of the still circle, looking with wordless patience upon the nested deer, I turned the curve of recollection for the thousandth time, and saw, for the first time, everything in its place. Yes. It was I whom he had led through Karcher’s woods, to whom he had whispered, “Look.”
I took a deep breath that swelled my chest like pride, and my eyes focused to a new intensity on the great stag. A thrill, slow but electric, passed through me. He was awake. I must have moved (perhaps I had breathed too vehemently), for he was aware of me. By infinite split seconds, time was draining past us.
Then he rose. One fused sequence of movements, heavy and lunging and yet effectively graceful, brought him to his feet and on his way. I had swung the gun up with all my speed, guessed an aim. It jerked against my hands; the cartridge had been good. He sprang.
Aborted and perfect, like the eternal gasp of violent art, his final spring hung before the leather-colored brushwood of his bed—hung, altered, and fell. I pushed forward, afire with the one hope that he would need no second shot, while my provident hands prepared the gun for it. The woods around me burst with exploding deer, the does scattering in panic out of the depths of sleep. He lay crashed upon the broken underbush. The dark vast eye loomed above his cheek. The sinewy prongs of his antlers (woodlike neither dead nor living) skewed his head into an awkwardness that seemed to guarantee the honesty of his proposition: I am dead. I squatted beside him and drew my knife, holding it ready to the warm, golden throat. Death, in theory so final and so certain, had mocked me before. His legs were stretched, a little more than half tense. I lifted one of the beautiful cloven forefeet and teased my knife into its depths, grazing the point against the black quick, but I did not plunge, not pry. I would not force him to betray his life, if he lived. Only, I gazed into the round brown eyes. There, if he lived, he would betray himself. There life would gleam, or flicker, or deeply glow, or fire up at me some uncontrollable bolt of intelligence or enmity. So I gazed into that dark globe, dived it, navigated it, sank and surfaced and swept along its curve. He was dead.
And I remembered only then to notice the wound. My bullet had pierced the skull at its vulnerable point and thrust into the secret soft core of his brain. My right hand had brushed, unknowing, the little unsealed opening in the warm pelt, and small dark clots of his blood clung to me. He had been dead already when he sank upon the leaves.
I rode into town against the light of the setting sun. Market Street was afire. A narrow blaze stretched down the long block of the schoolyard. From the slopes, with hilarious whoops, Arslan’s boys were hurtling blunt missiles into the flames. Behind them, and on the other sides of the school, lesser demons tended lesser fires. On the walk near the eastern one, a thin swarm of old men hovered about the naked carcasses of three hogs, ritually waving their flywhisk hands.
I rode up the low east face of the yard, where Arslan waited, fists on hips. He laid his hand on the dun’s nose and walked past me to the packhorse. Turning in the saddle, I watched him inspect the buck, saw his eyes seek and find and judge the wound. When he began to untie the ropes, I dismounted. Together we heaved the shining body up and off and let its sudden bulk pour between us to the ground.
“Good enough?”
He grinned at me in silence and turned away, calling for volunteers to butcher the deer. I headed for the school, to return his rifle to its place.
Inside and out, the feast was under way. The chickens were already cooked and the pork was roasting. My deer would be the final surfeiting course, toothsome and succulent. Kegs of beer stood open, for anyone with a cup or a cupped hand to help himself, and more were being hauled out. The town was gathering to the school, as it had gathered before.
Beside me on the east walk, Franklin swung his spread hand in a slow horizontal arc, taking in the fires, the feasters, and the rolling kegs. “Do you know what this is, Hunt?”
A wake? A jubilee? “The winter stores,” I said.
“Exactly. Our food and fuel supply for the winter, going up in one big blaze.”
“Plus the liquor supply. All the renewable resources.”
“I don’t take it as a joke. We’ll have a hard time renewing them by December.”
Hard times come again. But the fact was that they were renewable, as we were not, and my deer had planted his seed already in Karcher’s woods. “The sabbath was made for man,” I said.
The indigo twilight deepened, deeper already than the hearts of jewels. Arslan strode to the eastern fire, his last limp dipping into a swoop, and lifted a long brand. In stately loops, trailing a fiery friz, it traced his path to the steps. And standing where he had stood to pass sentence on Kraftsville’s martyrs, he whirled the torch around his head once, twice, and pealed the undisobeyable order, “Listen!” At that enormous shout, the trivial shouts below subsided in a rush. There was no sound louder than the crackling of the fires, until he cried his ringing cry, “Is it good?”
There were no words distinguishable, or needed, in the cheer that answered him. It was good. He stretched his torch out over them, a fiery shepherd’s blessing, and they hushed—docile, expectant, and eager. “Enjoy it!” he sang at them. “Enjoy it! This is for Sanjar!” It was a voice that called and celebrated, that might conjure Sanjar himself out of the twilight. “Whatever you drink tonight, you drink to Sanjar. Whatever you eat tonight is the gift of Sanjar. All your games tonight are in honor of Sanjar. All your songs are in praise of Sanjar. Tonight you laugh for Sanjar. You make love for Sanjar. Remember! Remember! This is the Feast of Sanjar!” Again the firebrand circled, this time a wide slow curve, and flew meteorlike across the yard to plunge with a golden burst of sparks upon the street.
Reluctantly, in the new darkness, the sounds surged up again. A mutter of talk, peaked with soft yells; the songs beginning anew, a little self-conscious now and defiantly obscene; the light thuds of running feet; and—crown and seal of all, Sanjar’s investiture, Arslan’s mandate—the many-keyed concord of laughter.
I waited as he came down the east steps. He threw his arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the south side. He said nothing, only waved and grinned to the groups we threaded through. The grip of his good hand on my moving shoulder was comfortable, fond, the limping swing of his body beside me easy. I walked carefully, not to lose my balance upon the precious knife-edge of tranquillity. I saw that Franklin had started home and that we were unhastily following him. In the street he turned and waited.
Here the moonlight fell upon our faces, but we stood in a moat of darkness. The glow of the nearer fire cast moving hues of yellow-red over the bright black of Arslan’s hair and the hard planes of Franklin’s temples. “Now what?” Franklin asked. Unexpectedly his voice was rough and bitter.
Now what? It was a question to be answered with panoramas, not with sentences. “I stay here,” Arslan said, as if his staying had been the point in question. He tightened his arm about my shoulders for a moment, and let me go, and took out his pipe, and began to fill it—gently, casually, fondly, gently.
“Why? To wait for Sanjar?”
“To wait for Sanjar.” He was tamping his tobacco with his thumb. “Also, I am a citizen of Kraftsville.” He put the pipe in his mouth, took an experimental pull, and tamped again.
“Also, sir, I am your friend.”
“I wish I could be yours.” He said it very soberly. The authentic voice of Franklin L. Bond. I wish I could be your friend. I wish I could be your father. But this inconstancy is such As you too must adore.
“Will he come?” I asked.
Arslan shrugged. “Will tomorrow come? Who knows?” He was still looking at Franklin.
One of the groups on the south bank began to sing again, meltingly out of the darkness. “He’s a good boy,” Franklin said abruptly, and he turned again toward the old house.
“Sir!” Arslan called softly. And Franklin turned once more, a little ponderous and square, making a full half-cycle where Arslan would have pivoted dancer-like far enough and no farther. Now Arslan swung forward a step, and I knew by the movement of his shoulders that he held out his left hand. “On that?” When I ask, I do not dictate the answer.
“On that.” The clasp of their hands was in darkness. Then the granite head nodded, the portentous budge of the cliff. At three paces, in the trivial moonlight, his eyes were too shadowed. I would have given something—say a hand—to know if he was looking into my eyes or Arslan’s. “Good night.”
And Arslan, who had not watched his only son ride out of sight into the wilderness of earth, stood silently gazing while the Supervisor of Kraft County finished crossing the narrow street and mounted the broken walk and blackened into the darker darkness of his porch.
I hadn’t moved. Arslan threw his right arm around me in passing—the clawed clasp, the soldier’s caress—and released me, and moved on. Up out of the moon-defined moat, up the black bank, up into the harvest light of bonfires, where his citizens crunched their feast bones and licked their fingers, where his boys and girls sported in the moonlight and fornicated in the shadows in the purity of their young lust, he walked with his dancer’s limp, red Arslan, Arslan; and quietly I followed him.