“Will he come?” I asked.
Arslan shrugged. “Will tomorrow come? Who knows?” He was still looking at Franklin.
One of the groups on the south bank began to sing again, meltingly out of the darkness. “He’s a good boy,” Franklin said abruptly, and he turned again toward the old house.
“Sir!” Arslan called softly. And Franklin turned once more, a little ponderous and square, making a full half- cycle where Arslan would have pivoted dancer-like far enough and no farther. Now Arslan swung forward a step, and I knew by the movement of his shoulders that he held out his left hand. “On that?”
“On that.” The clasp of their hands was in darkness. Then the granite head nodded, the portentous budge of the cliff. At three paces, in the trivial moonlight, his eyes were too shadowed. I would have given something—say a hand—to know if he was looking into my eyes or Arslan’s. “Good night.”
And Arslan, who had not watched his only son ride out of sight into the wilderness of earth, stood silently gazing while the Supervisor of Kraft County finished crossing the narrow street and mounted the broken walk and blackened into the darker darkness of his porch.
I hadn’t moved. Arslan threw his right arm around me in passing—the clawed clasp, the soldier’s caress— and released me, and moved on. Up out of the moon-defined moat, up the black bank, up into the harvest light of bonfires, where his citizens crunched their feast bones and licked their fingers, where his boys and girls sported in the moonlight and fornicated in the shadows in the purity of their young lust, he walked with his dancer’s limp, red Arslan, Arslan; and quietly I followed him.
About the Author
M. J. Engh (b.1933) is a science fiction author and independent Roman scholar. In 2009, Engh was named Author emerita by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
She is best known for her 1976 novel Arslan, about an invasion of the United States.
