Arslan. Part 14

"I'm glad we put the fence in." He ran his hand approvingly along the porch rail and turned back toward the front door. "You call me when you get that paint mixed, and I'll help you paint it."

What was it Hesse had said in Der Steppenwolf? Something in scorn, or perhaps in envy, of the Faust who complained merely because he had two souls struggling within his breast. (Every book I read had seemed to me momentarily the fated answer to my question, before I learned that literature was an insignificant sham, shallow to its very depths-that there was no vicarious experience, none; that I knew nothing I had not felt in my own flesh.) One of the spa.r.s.e benefits of having an indefinite number of souls was that one or more of them could find some glint of silver in almost any catastrophic cloud. So that there was a small pleasure in being abandoned by Arslan, an enemy alien in my home town. It was challenging. It had its aspects of unaccustomed freedom, somewhat like being parachuted alone into a jungle. I did not realize at once that he had exactly fulfilled his threat; he had thrown me to the jackals.

One thing I had already learned: it was useless to ask for help unless you didn't really need it. There were no free gifts possible in a functioning universe. Those who gave, took payment; and as the truly helpless had nothing to tender but their helplessness, they could pay only with their suffering, or (if they had the luck to pet.i.tion a lover of responsibility) their dependentness. Long ago I had asked for help, in every way possible to me, from Mr. Bond-this at a time when I was in physical pain and spiritual anguish and simple desperate daily fear of death, while he, my host and my princ.i.p.al (ex officio protector and automatic father image), was the only man in Kraftsville with will and power to stand against Arslan. I had begged for mercy (surprising how readily one was reduced to begging for mercy, that contemptible self-confession of schoolbook dastards) from Arslan himself. And I had received, in response or in inattention, kindly exhortations to have courage (I would have been glad to have it) and sweetly mocking laughter. (But Mrs. Bond, from whom I had asked nothing, had given me eggnogs and offered me hot compresses; and though I had gagged on the first and declined the second, I appreciated their practicality. It was, however, vain.) I had asked for bread from my father, and he had given me a stone. Only much later, when my soul had healed and grown strong, like the terrible cripples of folklore, did I receive what I no longer required.

Therefore now I pressed my tenders with the firmness of desperation. I must run with the jackals or be torn. Arslan had taken all and given all; but Franklin Bond did not batten upon suffering. To him and his KCR I offered myself as a non-aligned Mephistopheles, one of h.e.l.l's rejects, a useful servant at a minimum wage. To my parents I presented myself politely as the independent son, in business for himself but well disposed toward his origins.

I saw them, now, merely as two more citizens of Kraftsville. They had made their own adjustments. My father was a pillar of the respectable branch of the non-KCR anti-Arslanists (so far had sectarianism advanced). As such he had weathered the variable gales of the past years, unscathed, secure in his harmless intransigeance. He was Kraftsville's independent lawyer. Arthur Kitchener (tenuously, if at all, related to the equally notable Leland) was the KCR lawyer, and Greeley Simms had once been Nizam's entry, until the KCR had quietly bankrupted him.

In turn ravished, perverted, abandoned, and brutalized, the school stood dirty and forlorn. Undismayed, my mother went on teaching. She had gathered two cla.s.ses of vocal students, separated by age, and gave private lessons in piano and a few other instruments. Things wore out, things atrophied; and yet so much of Kraftsville remained, essentially intact.

"Come see my primary chorus, Hunt. You know, the little ones really have better voices than the older kids; it's always that way. Your dad will be home for lunch, and then you can stay and listen till you get bored." And so I lunched with them, and stayed and listened. The children arrived promptly, in cl.u.s.ters, obviously experienced pupils-feral out of doors, noisy but tractable as soon as they crossed the threshold. It was true that their voices had not yet lost the sweet clarity that their souls, being human, had never had; and she had schooled them into a l.u.s.ty approximation of accuracy and order. They sang "John Peel" and "Auld Lang Syne" and "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad." They sang, pristinely as an inspiration: Oats, pease, beans, and barley grow, Oats, pease, beans, and barley grow.

Do you, or I, or anyone know How oats, pease, beans, and barley grow?

I stayed longer than I had expected. They sang "America the Beautiful."

How long since I had heard that song, or any such song? At least ten years, it must have been. I tried to recall some real or plausible last occasion from my disintegrated memories of the Time Before, and could not. And since that lost last time, my ears had been filled with the sad, wild anthems of the sterile plateaus.

Oh, beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved, And mercy more than life.

And suddenly a real beauty trembled vainly up from the foolish words, and I was homesick, soulsick, for those alabaster cities that had never been and would never be. There people lived whose right name was patriots, and fed upon the golden wine of pride, the snowy bread of love. But there had never been a past from which that future might have come.

Had there been? I had been a child, too young to do anything real, too young really to understand; and when I began to understand, and to be old enough, it was too late for doing. That was easy to say. They should have done it: the grown-ups, the genuine citizens, the ones with the newspapers from which to understand and the votes and money with which to act. But that was too easy. Every citizen had had his own helplessness. Where had the power been? Could there be responsibility without power? Free will without free action? The responsibility and the power were easy to locate now; Arslan had taken them upon himself. (Unto himself? What was the word? The king, the king's to blame.) But taken them from where-from whom? Children and ignorant, we had been responsible then, I as much as any. We should have understood. We should have found a way to act. If we had not, that was our fault, not Arslan's-our fault not collectively, but individually. I was to blame for Arslan.

We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. We were free now; the drunken freedom of the slave, of the cog, of the world rolling in its...o...b..t. Our sins were as white as wool. But I shook with belated anger at myself, at all other lethargic cowards and all zealous imbeciles. Mock mockers after that, Who would not lift a hand maybe... Was one responsible for the past? Could there be any responsibility for what did not exist? I had been responsible then, when no one had called me to answer. Now I was ready to present my true account (One talent: Lodged with me useless); and the books were already closed.

Oh, beautiful. This woman who had been my mother, honorable and brisk, freckled but tidy-was it still beautiful for her? Possibly so. Mrs. Jean Morgan, last surviving singer of "America the Beautiful." I looked at her, with her mouth vigorously open, and I was touched. She was a kind and honest lady. The cruelties and falsehoods she had inflicted on me were no more than the duties of motherhood. I did love you once. Kind lady, she would do better to forget that beauty. These were the last children, loud and docile, with their uncertain throats and visionary eyes, that she would have to teach; and already these were not Americans. Where but in bitterness could she lodge all that good will and courage, when the children were gone and the beautiful stillborn nation was forgotten? Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

It was with the Bonds that I lived on familial terms, in various senses. I was not yet the household menial-that was to come later-but I was Franklin's instrument in his gestures of worried kindness toward his wife. "Hunt, would you carry out that laundry for Mrs. Bond?" On the other hand, she fulfilled for me (as, I increasingly thought I saw, for Franklin) the role of devoted and honored servant, privileged to criticize, to manage, and to share, but neither to initiate nor to command. It was the sort of personal relations.h.i.+p that one might have with a beloved animal, and in that way, I concluded, very like most maternal relations.h.i.+ps.

Between her husband and me, the intimacy was of a different order. (It did not occur to me to be surprised that it had not, apparently, occurred to Kraftsville to impute any variety of improper relations.h.i.+p to us. Such unsuspicion was a tribute, from Kraftsville and from me, to the force of Franklin Bond's character, or at least reputation.) For a long time now, I had argued with him from the privileged position of the favored graduate student. But our daily contacts were on a rawer and more urgent level. Who was to water the horses? How were the corn borers to be stopped? Why was the septic tank in danger of overflowing-and what, and by whom, was to be done about it? And after Mrs. Bond had failed us for the first time, by inconsiderately allowing herself to die, all our dealings were aggravated and exasperated. The last courtesies crumpled from our theoretical discussions as the last distances were squeezed out, and though "I never argue about religion" was one of his mottoes, we were more and more embroiled in savagely impatient disputes on immortality, the nature of dogma, the roles of reason and revelation. I could recall only darkly a time when I had believed in some divinity; and yet I found myself beginning so many heated sentences with "Granted the existence of G.o.d..." s.h.i.+fting my ground again and again and yet fighting for every inch of that batable and marshy terrain. In mundane matters, he was as shrewd an organizer as Arslan (if a more open and unsubtle one) and scarcely less hard a master. Irregularity offended him, neither abstractly nor practically, but in his personal feelings. An esthetic reaction, perhaps. Or a memorial of affection. Mrs. Bond had been regular. I was not. "I thought we'd agreed that if we're going to keep this house together, we've both got to do our jobs!" I bowed before his dams as before Arslan's floods.

Yet sometimes, unexpectedly, Franklin touched me with a perceptive kindness. "Where have you been, Hunt?"

My clothes were saturated with dust, my eye swollen all but shut, my s.h.i.+rt torn and a little messed with blood. "Walking," I said, "in the corn."

I liked to walk in the corn. From August on, when the great stalks stood higher than my head, the corn fields were a world apart, a world aloof and alien as pale Bukhara. I walked in the corn alone, or sometimes with a dog as a convenient switch by which to connect myself now and then with reality. After a late-summer rain, the field steamed. I walked in a dense green heat, my feet in the mud, my body and soul washed with sweat. Midges and mosquitoes twinkled. My ears hummed. And all around me the enormous gra.s.s-leaves hung and crowded, rubbing their moist rough blades against my clothes, shouldering and slapping as I pushed through the rows, spilling their drops upon my hair.

But it was in waiting autumn that I liked best to walk in the corn. It was dry then, colored like the yellow dust, a gold without l.u.s.ter. The blades still curved and drooped in the easy postures of life; but with every stir of air they clashed faintly, a sound of thin bra.s.s. Their edges cut, cruel grating cuts like those of stiff paper. I paced slowly through the dusty stillness, surrounded, surrounded-ahead, behind, to left, to right, above-by the great tawny leaves, alone in the harsh ripe corn.

I was teaching myself to see and hear in the dim world of the corn, as Arslan had taught me in the woods, and in the dazzling nights and colorless days of Bukhara. In the lion-colored noonday dusk of the corn, the eye lost itself. The brazen rustling had the very quality of silence. It was easy to drift in a hot, buzzing dream, down aisles cross-laced with ragged swords. But I was learning. So I heard, in the unresonant clangors that ran like m.u.f.fled alarms through the corn with the changing breeze, a more purposeful rustle. I stood at gaze. Ahead, behind, the tall files closed in. The blades clashed. The bronze shadows crossed and waved. I walked on, stirring the blades carefully out of my way.

Again. But this time it was the wind. Again. A mist of gnats hung quivering in the heat. Dogs ranged sometimes in the corn. I waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a wholesome feeling. I had made the elementary discovery that marked, perhaps, the beginning of maturity as of childhood: This is myself. I am separate.

Through that month, knowing that he would go but not knowing how soon, I schooled myself for his departure. It was educational. I understood now how deeply I had counted on his return, and what little grounds I had had to expect it. Like a jilted lady of romance, I had staked my life on the farthest of outside chances, resigned myself with enthusiasm to a oneway journey into the ultimate pale realms of fantasy. He had come and halted me. He had put a body of solid flesh into my bed-and if it was not his body, it was all the more certainly real. He had come, and refocused the world for me, and he would go again. So far was certain. But not even the most heterodox predicted a third coming.

PART THREE.

Franklin L. Bond.

Chapter 22.

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. "n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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. "n.o.body'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."