Arslan

“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 God 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 grass, 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 God, 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 asset 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 hell 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 coons 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 prickled. There he stood beside me—Arslan Khan, and Genghiz’s pyramid of skulls was