Arslan

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 It was never officially suspended, but every week a few more of the billeted soldiers were withdrawn.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 constituted 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. Nobody 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.” Nobody 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.

Nobody 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 passed 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.

“You can’t tell me he hasn’t run into a lot of active resistance movements, Hunt.” I knew for a fact he’d run into some. Roley Munsey’s receiver had picked them up and listened to them die. It was why I knew I’d been right never to let Roley transmit anything.

Hunt’s reaction to that kind of statement was likely to be literal: he wouldn’t tell me. But a little later on, he would give his own kind of answer. “It’s essentially a judo technique—use your opponent’s force and weight against himself. He’s a very eclectic wrestler. Have you ever seen him wrestle?”

“No.”

“No, of course.” He mused on his secrets. “He likes to use his own strength, too. That’s like a religion with him. It would be terribly interesting to see Arslan disabled.”

“Terribly.”

“But brute force is only the ideal. In practice, he follows the principles of judo. It’s not always easy, but it’s very economical. He invites the resistance to organize, you see, so he can crush it conveniently. He doesn’t object to resistance—only to organization.”

“What do you mean, ‘invites’?”

“Teases. Baits. It’s a kind of sport—resistance-baiting.”

I nodded. “So that’s what he’s been doing for four years—that and founding a dynasty.” Thank God, we had had the luck and the discipline to resist Evergreen. Still, it didn’t necessarily follow that