Arslan. Part 7

Naturally Nizam had confiscated all the pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer he could find in the district for the troops' use. And their fields looked to be in relatively good shape. I thought it was only relative. Because that summer was like nothing I'd ever seen before, unless it was Arslan's advent. It was heartbreaking to see the potato bugs demolish a field in a day. People began to panic. We had worked hard the year before, but we had worked with confidence. Men had been masters of Kraft County for a long time, and just taking away their tractors didn't change that. But this year we were fighting for our lives. It wasn't possible there could be a famine in Kraft County, we kept telling ourselves. But we weren't exactly Kraft County any more. And then another blow hit us.

The corn was blighted. The stalks had tended to be leggy and a little pale from the start, like a slight case of mineral deficiency-nothing to worry anybody much. But the ears just didn't fill. What kernels did form were small and misshapen. Sweet corn wasn't very much affected. But all the field corn was hard hit; and our precious hybrids, that the County Farm Advisor had literally made by hand on his seed plots the year before, were a total loss.

And it was right then, while I was figuring how many livestock we could winter on practically no corn, that Roley Munsey brought me the news of Evergreen.

Roley was the youngest Munsey boy. He would have been in high school if he hadn't dropped out in his freshman year. As a matter of fact, he had just barely managed to graduate from eighth grade, a year behind his age. But he was a good boy-a good-natured kid, clever with his hands, and one who tried his best. And, very importantly for us, he had been a radio ham. Not Citizens' Band stuff, but a real, licensed amateur. There had been some others in the district, before Arslan, but it was remarkable how many of them had been high school students.

What radio equipment we had saved from Nizam's confiscations didn't look too impressive, but it was plenty for Roley to work with. He had a shortwave receiver that picked up signals, sporadically, from all around the world. Unfortunately, not one of them in the past year had ever sounded like anything but the internal communications of Arslan's organization. It was that fact, more than any other, that made me believe in the reality of Arslan's Plan One.

"Mr. Bond, I hate to bother you when you're busy, but I never heard nothing like this before."

"Just sorry I couldn't get here faster. Tell me about it."

"Well, it was an American voice, no d.a.m.n Turk. The only words I could make out was, 'Both sunk. Sorry about that, Arslan. Evergreen signing off.' But he laughed, see? He said 'Sorry about that, Arslan,' and he laughed. So I figure he got to be American."

"Where did it come from?"

"East. I don't know where from, only east of here. It come in clear enough."

"Nothing else?"

"No, sir, nothing, not a thing. He just said 'sunk.' 'Both sunk.'"

"Roley, you mean to tell me there are still American ships at sea? After nearly two years?"

"I don't know, Mr. Bond, I sure don't know. But I know he said 'sunk.'"

"Well, if we heard it, Nizam must have heard it, Roley. You can bet Arslan's organization knows a lot more about it than we do."

Roley nodded, which he always did, but he rubbed the back of his head doubtfully. "Well, yeah, sure, Mr. Bond, but maybe not. Maybe not. Like if they wasn't expecting it, they likely wouldn't be listening on that band. If they wasn't right there on the right frequency at the right second, they wouldn't of heard it. That signal never lasted but half a minute."

"Roley, you figure out exactly what you'd need to hook into Nizam's power. We just might want to transmit a long-distance signal. I'll talk to you later. You boys be sure there's one of you listening every second. Now get on it and stay on it."

Evergreen. It sounded more like a code word than the name of a ship. I felt ten years younger. My mind was happily jumping to conclusions. Evergreen. It would be appropriate for, say, a nuclear-powered ship, or a group of them. What else could be still functioning? Hunt had told me, and it sounded plausible, that Arslan was destroying fuel production facilities. He would have taken over the navies as he had the armies, of course; but it would be a lot easier for a recalcitrant ship to hold out against him than a recalcitrant regiment. He could have starved out any conventional-powered ship by this time, for lack of fuel. But even if you commanded the combined fleets of the world, it wouldn't necessarily be easy to track down one or two or a dozen nuclear-powered vessels, especially if some of them were submarines. And he couldn't actually have the combined fleets of the world in operation; he must have felt the fuel squeeze himself, long since, plus all the maintenance problems that would intensify as he phased out industries or smashed them cold.

Evergreen. It would be appropriate, of course, for any unit of resistance that had survived the cold wave of Arslan's first great sweep. Suppose a mosquito fleet of private boats had maintained itself in the creeks and coves of some ragged coast or island chain-motorboats that could operate for years on a few well-rationed barrels of oil, reconverted steamers burning wood, sailboats. It wouldn't be much of a combat navy; but suppose there were a hundred such little fleets. It was the old, old story; no force, no force could destroy a popular movement, if it was popular enough. Not without destroying the population.

Evergreen... The fields looked naked, stripped, like burned-over ground. A potato plant or a beanstalk with all the leaves eaten off was awkward and obscene, not like the honest stubble of any harvested field. I knew it had gotten to me the day I found myself clenched up with fear, not for the county but for my personal stomach. The medicines that Doc Allard had kept me in shape with were all used up, and I had to depend on diet and willpower. If I couldn't guarantee myself a supply of milk and cream-The thought sent me to bed, doubled up.

Well, that wasn't only cowardly, it was un-Christian. And besides, it got in the way of doing anything.

It took plenty of effort and plenty of prayer, but I got my stomach quieted down-and not for just that day, either. The thing was, I had to live calmly. I had to rely on G.o.d in an ultimate way, not for little things like enough milk or a miracle to save the crops. I had to believe that everything I did, as long as I did my best, was for the best.

Livestock, after all, were a luxury. It was August, which meant we still had time, but not time for experiments and failures. We burned off the blighted and bug-eaten fields, plowed up some pastures, and planted what would do us more good: carrots, turnips, beets. Our oats were doing well, comparatively-compared to our wheat, for example-but it was too late to plant more oats this year. We slaughtered stock as fast as we could use the meat or put it up. We salted and pickled as much as we could spare the salt for, canned as much as we had cans to hold, dried as much as we had room to spread in the sun, and smoked the rest. Plenty of people protested killing the stock and plowing up the gra.s.s, and the Farm Advisor protested that smoking didn't actually preserve meat; but we didn't have time to let everybody follow their own whims. Later we would plant winter wheat and keep our fingers crossed. We'd have enough grain and hay to winter what few livestock we were keeping.

Evergreen... After all, it didn't have to mean anything. Roley had picked up what sounded like American voices before, that had obviously been working for Arslan. Not a doubt in the world, whether I liked it or not, that Arslan's Americans were in Russia just as much as Arslan's Russians were in America. And it would be a miracle if some of those Americans didn't make remarks like "Sorry about that, Arslan" now and then. Whatever were "both sunk," they might have been anti-Arslan as well as pro. "Sorry about that"-there might have been an order to capture instead of destroy.

Yes, we would last the winter, and every spring was a new start. Kraft County wasn't crowded-the population had been declining for years-and by the grace of G.o.d, or maybe the exercise of common sense, people just weren't having babies these days. There were the troops, of course; but, if anything, they were an economic a.s.set now. On the average, they not only took care of themselves, but produced a little surplus that found its way by various means into the hands of Kraft County citizens.

Even if we couldn't do much farming, we could live. A few chickens for eggs, a few cattle for milk, a few hogs to keep up the breed; fish and game would be our staple meat sources. Every field abandoned meant that much more game-cover. And the game, like the bugs, thrived. The soldiers were permitted only very limited hunting privileges, but that didn't apply to us.

"Franklin, how the h.e.l.l are you going to shoot anything without guns?"

"Who said shoot?" We weren't even allowed to have bows and arrows, but we did have traps and nets. It was a new style of hunting for us, but we learned it. The Indians had done all right in this territory, and maybe there was even more game now than there had been back then, when it was all deep woods. We held drives for the small game, rotating them around the district and learning as we worked. With good dogs, it wasn't hard to walk quail and rabbits and even doves into a fine-mesh seine. Getting it closed on them was a little harder. We used the seines for what they were made for, too, and got all the fish we could use, not to mention cleaning out a lot of mud turtles while we were at it. We hunted c.o.o.ns and possums with the dogs, trapped muskrats, snared rabbits-snared deer, too, when we'd learned the trick. We had long enough to learn it.

Chapter 9.

It must have been very near the fourth anniversary of Arslan's departure when a boy I didn't know came galloping into town with the news that a mechanized force was coming east on 460. His horse was still blowing when we heard their motors-a chilling sound these days, now that Nizam only used his vehicles for emergencies.

Starting home from the square, I saw a procession of jeeps and one truck draw up in front of my house. By the time I got there, the street and yard were swarming. Soldiers were prodding their way through the garden as if it were a minefield. The Russians were cheering from the school windows and popping out of the doors. My front door stood open, and a flock of women were trotting in and out helter-skelter, some of them carrying bundles and all of them chattering. One in a scarlet headscarf and a swinging blue skirt was directing operations, running from jeep to jeep, then halfway up the walk, then back to the street. Only one stood by silently, with a child in her arms. Arslan was leaning against the side of the truck, smoking.

I stopped beside him, and we eyed each other. He looked thriving. He might have put on a little flesh; otherwise he was the identical brash welterweight who had stridden out of my kitchen four years ago.

"Good morning, sir."

"How's Plan One going, General?"

He grinned. "Very well."

"Then things could be worse."

Luella stepped out on the porch. "Franklin, come here!" She sounded excited and glad.

"But first, sir," Arslan put in smoothly, "you will meet my son."

He dropped his cigarette and beckoned the quiet woman. I took a quick look at her face (she was on the far edge of middle age, and homely-definitely not the mother of Arslan's son), and he took the baby from her.

The nape of my neck p.r.i.c.kled. There he stood beside me-Arslan Khan, and Genghiz's pyramid of skulls was no more than a steppingstone to him-there he stood, smiling, with a baby in his arms. "This is Sanjar," he said.

I focused on the child. "Sander?"

"San-jar!" He rolled the name joyously, all but singing it.

Arslan's son. He was either small for his age or advanced for it. From a distance I had taken him for no more than a babe in arms, but he had the bright boy-face of a three-year-old. Now he put his hand commandingly on Arslan's mouth and said something that sounded very clear, though it certainly wasn't English. Arslan chuckled, shaking his head away from the little brown fingers. He might have been any proud young soldier-father.

Then Hunt Morgan walked out onto the porch beside Luella. He'd been gone four years at the fastest-changing time of a boy's life, but I knew him at once. I hurried up the walk to shake his hand, and Arslan followed.

He was taller than Arslan; almost as tall as I. He had grown a soft little fringe of beard, as dark as his hair, and with his big dark eyes and soft mouth he looked like a Persian prince out of the Arabian Nights.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Bond." His handshake was solid. He wore Turkistani fatigues, with a sheath knife at his belt.

"Franklin," I corrected.

Arslan set down the child, who promptly trotted over to the porch rail and started trying to climb it. With a clatter of heels, the red-scarfed woman flashed up the steps, swooped him up in her arms, and whirled on Arslan. I stood back comfortably against the house wall and watched. Arslan as a family man was a spectacle I'd never thought to see.

Whatever you could say for her temper, there was nothing wrong with her looks. Halfway through her tirade, she jerked off the red scarf, underlining her argument with a long loop of auburn hair. Her crackling eyes were blue, though her skin was the color of buckwheat honey. Arslan stood rocking on his feet, laughing at her. The child struggled down from her arms and went back to his rail-climbing unnoticed. With a final burst, the woman spun away and stalked into the house. Arslan lit a fresh cigarette and turned to Hunt and me. He was obviously charmed with the whole affair.

"I am taking the same room for myself, sir," he announced. "And the same room for Hunt. Sanjar and Rusudan will use the southwest room."

"Nice of you to leave me my bedroom."

I didn't realize at the moment how nice it was. The southwest room wasn't big to start with, and Arslan's orders crowded into it not only the mother and child, but four of the attendant women. The others-there were three or four more of them-disappeared in the course of the afternoon, touching off a general flutter of protest from the rest and a storm from Rusudan (if she had any more name or t.i.tle than that, I never heard it). This time Arslan was roused to shout back at her, and she retreated up the stairs, spitting defiance with every step. Rusudan-her harsh name matched the metallic timbre of her voice and her harridan temper, but her features were clear and sweet. Arslan stood with hands on hips and grinned after her.

Not one of the women seemed to speak anything that could pa.s.s as English, though Rusudan made one or two stabs at it. Luella had her hands full, getting them settled in. I walked out of the confusion early, and into what would be Hunt's room again.

Hunt stood in the middle of the floor, gazing mildly around. "Welcome home," I said.

He gave me a sharp look-not sure if that was meant kindly. "How have things been?"

"Not too good, Hunt, but we're surviving. Your folks are well."

His mouth quirked with humor. "Which of us invites the other to sit down?"

"It's your room."

"It's your house. Let's sit down, shall we?"

We did, he on the bed and I on the one chair. "Well, there's a lot to fill in," I said. "Where have you been, and what's happened?"

He spread his hand, palm down, a foreign kind of gesture. "Bukhara." That seemed to be the end of the sentence. He hunched forward confidentially, but he was looking at his hands, not at me. "I tried to kill him once." He shot me a glance, smiled faintly, and lowered his eyes again. "Like old times, isn't it? Except that this time I can say I really tried to do it." Now he drew the knife from his sheath and laid it across his knees, stroking his fingertips along the steel. It was a very practical-looking blade. "Not with this one," he said. "This one was his own; he gave it to me, afterwards."

No doubt there was a very interesting story there, as well as a very romantic one, but I didn't want to hear it-not right now. Hunt wasn't talking to me, he was playing a role, and, from the sound of it, one he'd acted out in his head till he knew it by heart. "What did you see of Turkistan?" I asked him.

He raised his eyes to me. "The Black Sands are gray. The Red Sands are pink." He made the motion of a smile.

"Were you disappointed?"

He shrugged, eyes drifting downward again. "It's a question of viewpoint. You can walk up and down hill all day and think you've gotten somewhere; but if you fly over the same area at ten thousand feet, you see that it's really only-"

"No, I don't!" He looked up, startled. "If it is a question of viewpoint," I said, "then you can forget about that 'really.' I don't think much of the objectivity of anybody who spends his life on the ground, and then the first time he goes up in a plane he hollers, 'Oh, that's what the world really looks like!' If he'd spent his life in the plane, then the first time he got down on the ground he'd say, 'Oh, this is how the world really is!' That's all hogwash. Reality is whatever you've got to deal with."

His eyes lightened a moment. Then he closed his hand on the knife hilt and stood up abruptly, sheathing the knife with a practiced motion. "I ought to warn you. In case you're involved in any plots against Arslan, or happen to get involved, or happen to hear of any, don't tell me. Don't even give me a hint. I'm afraid there's nothing I wouldn't do to protect him."

"If that were true, Hunt, you wouldn't have warned me." We smiled at each other cordially, without contact.

"Ah," he said. "Do robots have souls? That's the question, isn't it?"

"You're not a robot," I told him. "Don't flatter yourself with that idea. You're a human being endowed with free will, and you can't get rid of it."

"Ah." He was-what?-eighteen now. "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of h.e.l.l, a h.e.l.l of Heaven."

"That's not what I mean," I said. "I'm talking about responsibility. You're still responsible for your actions. And your decisions."

He tilted his head in polite incredulity. It was one of Arslan's mannerisms. "Aren't free will and responsibility distinct?"

"Not to me."

He shrugged. "I don't act. I don't decide."

"You can't help it," I said. "You're doing both of them all the time. How do you know? You may have changed the course of history right here and now by warning me not to trust you with any plots. There are things you can't control, sure, outside of you and inside of you; but you decide what to do about those things, and you act on that decision-whether you know it or not." He was listening closely. Hunt had always been a courteous boy. "And not many people are decisive and active enough to try sticking a knife into Arslan."

He couldn't hold back a pleased little private smile at that. "Think about it, Hunt. And remember I'm always on your side. Your side, not Arslan's." I patted his shoulder once, and I left him.

I wanted information, not bungled a.s.sa.s.sination attempts. I wanted to know what Arslan had been doing to the world for four years, and what brought him back here now. And what, if anything, Evergreen had been.

He had been back three weeks, spending most of his time with Nizam, when the changes started. One morning there was an un.o.btrusive placard on the notice boards. Announcement, it said modestly. The curfew is abolished, effective immediately. By order of General Arslan.

There wasn't any rush to take advantage of that order. For one thing, n.o.body wanted to be the first to test its validity. For another, people were used to the curfew; they stayed in after dark as much from habit now as from necessity. But gradually they began to try it-neighbors visiting in their yards a little later and a little later, people daring to go for the doctor when they got sick, and (because, after all, we were getting squared away for winter, and could make good use of the extra time) farmers and hunters working after dark.

By that time the billet rule was well on the way out. It was never officially suspended, but every week a few more of the billeted soldiers were withdrawn. They went first to the camp. After a few weeks, a company of them marched north out of the district, and later another detachment, a little larger if anything, went south. There was no doubt but what the whole atmosphere of the district was relaxing. Compared to Nizam, Arslan was making himself look pretty good.

At first I hoped we might eat a little better that winter, but Arslan's troops brought no supplies with them. They did bring something that promised to be more useful in the long run-seed corn that Arslan claimed was resistant to the blight. He kept his fleet of trucks and jeeps and armored cars serviced and ready to go, but he didn't use them much. The whole district was geared to horses now. The remaining Turkistanis const.i.tuted a cavalry troop, and there was another all-Russian one. Horse-breeding and horse-trading had become important parts of the economy again, and there was constant friction between troops and civilians over horses. The floodlights on the schoolground had been dark for four years, like all the other electric lights outside of Nizam's headquarters. Now Arslan formalized the situation by taking out the floodlights, and installed a windmill to supplement Nizam's oil-burning generators. On the other hand, he imported generous supplies of liquor, coffee, and tobacco for his own use, in fact for the whole household. I didn't mind having the coffee.

Arslan had set up shop in my office at school again, and he worked like any young-middle-aged executive bucking for a heart attack. His home life, to call it that, was something I couldn't fathom. Rusudan's appearance was generally the signal for a fight, which ended inevitably with slamming doors, but I would hear them laughing together in Arslan's room, boisterous and innocent.

He wasn't anything you could call a husband, but he was a real father. He took the child with him almost everywhere, and showed him almost everything. n.o.body else was allowed to cross Sanjar in either the smallest or the most vital things; as a matter of fact, we were all under orders to obey (that was the word, obey) the child in everything. Naturally I paid no attention to that. Here was a bright, healthy, normal three-year-old boy, and of course he had no more idea of what was good for him than a hound pup. Luella was willing enough to spoil him, because she was starved for children, but she was always grabbing him away from the stove or out of her china cabinet or off the porch railing where he loved to climb; and every time Arslan caught her at it or heard about it, she was in trouble. I had to tell her finally, "Just look the other way when he gets into something." n.o.body had laid a finger on Luella so far, and I intended to keep it that way.

"I can't look the other way," she said. "I don't care whose child he is. He's always trying to take the stove lids off."

"He's got a father and a mother and a cavalry regiment to take care of him. If he wants to crawl in the oven, just hold the door open for him."

Taking care wasn't exactly it. Rusudan would play with him and fight with him by the hour, acting like a six-year-old herself, but if he needed to be fed or washed or bandaged, she called her women-or Luella. Hunt Morgan led him around by the hand (or rather he led Hunt), took him fishing when summer came, and corrected his budding English. The troops doted on him, and spoiled him every way they could think of.

It was different with Arslan. Sanjar might be climbing all over his father on the couch, getting his muddy little boots into the charts on the coffee table. "Sit still," Arslan would say quietly, and the boy would slip to the floor without a murmur and sit there looking up with solemn eyes. And when, being a boy, he forgot again and started climbing onto the table, one sharp word from Arslan would set him back with a very chastened look on his face. He always spoke English to the boy now-at least, whenever I was within earshot-and Sanjar was developing a remarkable vocabulary. Most of it came from listening to Hunt read. Because, after all this time, Hunt was still reading to Arslan. I thought I understood that now. It was Arslan's own continuing education, the liberal arts that the parvenu dictator's son had never dreamed of; and now it was to be Sanjar's, too.

It was Arslan, appropriately, who taught him about guns. He showed him why he shouldn't pull a trigger by the simple, messy method of shooting a tame rabbit at close range with his pistol. After that Sanjar treated firearms pretty respectfully.

Still, by and large, Arslan with Sanjar was Arslan at his best. He fairly glowed with pride in all the child's little accomplishments. It was really pretty to see how carefully he pointed things out to the boy. "Do you see it, Sanjar? Do you hear, Sanjar?" Dozens of times a day he would break off whatever he was doing to show Sanjar something. "Can you tell what color that bird is, Sanjar? Then go that way-you see? You need the light a little behind you ... Do you see how the mare turns her ears, Sanjar? She is wondering if we will be her friends ... Look, Sanjar; these are two different maps of the same place. Do you see, here is an island, and here is the same island on the other." And the boy knew that nothing pleased his father more than for him to notice something and point it out. "Look, Arslan! Look, Arslan! You see the squirrel?" And Arslan would gravely follow the little waving finger and refuse to see the squirrel till it had been pointed out with bullseye accuracy.

n.o.body ever disciplined Sanjar, but he had his hard lessons, and his punishments. The rabbit was only one of them. Arslan's rule against gainsaying the boy meant that he had more than his share of accidents. In fact, it was a wonder he survived the year he lived in my house without serious injury. That spring and summer, especially, it was a quiet day indeed that pa.s.sed without Sanjar's shrieks of pain or fear, as he learned the hard way that mother sows will bite, that bulls will charge, that flatirons are hot and heavy, and a hundred other uncomfortable facts of life. None of these things disturbed Arslan; his only concern seemed to be that the boy should learn not to cry. "You sound like a woman," he would say scornfully. "You sound like a baby."

"It hurts me! It hurts me!"

And Arslan, hard-faced, hard-eyed, would shake his head. "Sanjar, listen; remember. If you are strong enough, and smart enough, and brave enough, nothing will hurt you. Nothing."

It was this kind of thing that made Luella the most indignant. "He's ruining that child," she said to me. "He's trying to make him into a soldier before he's had time to be a baby."

And she needed a baby to love. She should have been a grandmother by now.

You couldn't see much of Sanjar-I couldn't, anyway-without feeling a sort of fascination. I'd always hated to see a child completely alone in a world of adults. From what Hunt told me, Sanjar had never had a companion, or a rival, his own age. Naturally all good Kraftsville parents were careful to keep their children away from him. And it didn't seem to occur to Arslan or Rusudan that their child might enjoy (still less need) the company of any little plebeians. But Sanjar would stop whatever he was doing to stare at every bunch of kids who happened along-stare awestruck and intent, his black eyes as full of concentration as his father's and a lot more human.

Aside from acting as Sanjar's tutor and escort, Hunt apparently had nothing to do. He drifted from my house to Nizam's headquarters to school and back again. Information flowed through him like a wide-mesh seine.