Arslan. Part 19

"All right, Leland, pa.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d," 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 pa.s.sageway "for authorized personnel," as Arslan put it. Stripes on the floors packed the crowd into the rear of the cla.s.srooms 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 c.h.i.n.k. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 ma.s.s. "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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 d.a.m.n crazy kid!" He was almost yelling in his awe and delight. "He come in through that spillway hole on the cistern, and n.o.body knowed he was coming! Hey, General, I thought you told me n.o.body 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 gla.s.s. 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 G.o.d, Hunt."

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

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

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

"Yes," he said. "Among other things."

PART FOUR.

Hunt Morgan.

Chapter 28.

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

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

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

The herd flared wide across the field, grudgingly turning to his shrill whoops. He rounded their outskirts, driving the little mare hard, bunching them gradually closer; pulled ahead of the herd and then slowed, calling to them by name as they overran him; and the rush dwindled and dried as they pa.s.sed 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. Spa.s.sky had pitched his wigwam towns among the forested hills of the Great Lakes, where good hunting outweighed bad weather; and to visit Spa.s.sky 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, sc.r.a.ped and sanded clean by that scouring air. The dazzling maples shed their gold rags around us. A pieced landscape, crazily st.i.tched 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 coa.r.s.e 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 Spa.s.sky 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 a.r.s.enal (I could not even remember, now, what cla.s.sroom 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, sa.s.safras, 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 s.e.x, 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 cl.u.s.ters of a young grapevine. The small black grapes, most of them already a little shriveled, were like lackl.u.s.ter 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 a.s.sume 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 l.u.s.t. 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 c.o.c.ked, 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 gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.s 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 st.u.r.dy little upright violets that we called rooster-fights, purpling sunny hillcrests unregarded, mowed and trampled like the gra.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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, b.u.t.terflyweed-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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sions that lived within them, the hoa.r.s.e 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 p.u.b.erty), 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 gra.s.s 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. "f.u.c.k Nizam," I said-the pain was so inescapable. Arslan's face, cracked and sunken, warped like an old sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.sed, 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. n.o.body'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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.s 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 weatherc.o.c.k. "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 antic.i.p.ation 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 embarra.s.sed-"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, gra.s.s-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.