Arslan

“I remember.” They grinned together, a contact very beautiful.

Franklin rose, grim and displeased, to lead the way upstairs. It was an act of—what? compassion? conspicuous gallantry?—that he did not detail me for the job of chambermaid. And I was alone with Arslan and the sleeping girl.

“Come here,” he said, and I came. I was afraid that he would touch me first with his ruined right hand; and, seeing my dread, that was what he did. But after all, it was a hand that could be lived with. The last two fingers were gone, and the next stiffly hooked, but it was still Arslan’s hand. He curled it around my bare forearm, and looked at me. When I began to tremble, he smiled and let me go.

I went back to my chair. He flipped one of the little books at me, and I caught it, and he was pleased. Yes, oh yes, now I remembered; it was exactly for this that I had loved and hated Arslan, those eons ago—that everything pleased him, like a child, or like a child intensified and exaggerated. “Read to me,” he said.

“I can’t read Spanish.” The first words I had spoken to him in five years.

This time he laughed aloud in his pleasure. “Hunt,” he said. And he rocked forward a little, laughing at me. “Read,” he said.

It was the Lorca. There was a little introduction, and I began with that. Of course I knew no more about Spanish than how to say manana. But to be made ludicrous by Arslan was an old, accustomed thing; and, after all, I had undertaken to teach myself Latin once, and Turkmen, without total failure. So I read, as intelligently as I could, and he listened, serious and intent as ever he had listened to Mommsen, or Milton, or Samuel Eliot Morrison. Franklin was back before I had finished. He stood almost between us, looking first at me, then at Arslan, with impersonal, expressionless interest—the principal’s look, only a trifle pallid now in the comparative presence of Arslan. And having weighed and measured me to the pound and foot, Arslan to the milligram and millimeter, he nodded with judicious frown and asked brusquely, “Will you have a glass of beer?” And Arslan—soberly, soberly—with glowing eyes and lifted brows, replied, “This will please me very much, sir.” A decision of state.

Did Arslan ever offer toasts? None that my broken memory showed, yet now he lifted his mug smilingly toward Franklin. “To you, sir.” A singular you.

“We have our little brewery in the basement,” Franklin said explanatorily.

“Is this a change of principles, sir, or only of practice?”

“Only of practice. We’ve always said a little moderate drinking was all right in Biblical times, because of the different conditions. I figure conditions have changed back again.”

Arslan chuckled. “Thus you permit yourself to drink—good. But to drink with me?”

“I’m not going to fight you, General, unless I have to.”

“Ah. And you command here?”

“I’m Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County.”

“And no doubt relatively better armed than when we parted. Why not arrest me now, sir?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Then I must discourage you. Earlier, my death would have had significant consequences for the world. This is no longer true.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have succeeded.”

Now break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea. Franklin sat still, large, and ominous. Arslan had spoken. I have succeeded. The universe adjusted itself.

“I didn’t know we were talking about your death,” Franklin said. The granite cliff hadn’t flinched.

“You don’t kill prisoners yet?” He smiled the old sweet smile. “If you try to manipulate my troops by using me as a hostage, you may have some temporary success. But of course I have left orders to cover this possibility. Does the prospect satisfy you, sir? Have you anything to gain now that is worth the risk of—of what, I do not tell you?” He studied Franklin eagerly, humor bubbling in his look. “But you will do as you wish, sir. Now it is immaterial what you do, or I, or any man.”

“Not to me. Not to Kraftsville.”

He shrugged and drank. “No. Doubtless no. But it is immaterial to the world. You can play out your games as you like, now. The course of the world is fixed. You have no power to destroy it.”

Franklin considered him drily. “It’s not immaterial to you either, General. You told me once that at the end you had to fight. I imagine that still goes.”

Arslan smiled appreciation. “Abstractly it is immaterial to me. Practically, no.” He looked whimsically into his drink. I knew the look; the pleasure that stirred him now was almost too much to contain. “I, too, play my games. And at the end, yes, I fight. Therefore consider carefully, sir. As for Sanjar'—his look tilted ceilingward; he shone with pride—'Sanjar is my aide-de-camp and my bodyguard. Do not expect to manipulate me through Sanjar.” He drank deep. “I’ve had beer much worse than this, sir.”

“Hunt’s the brewmaster.”

I braced myself for Arslan’s look. But his eyes only flicked me weightlessly. “So you still have a food surplus.”

“We don’t still have one, we have one again. This has been the first good crop year since you left.”

“An omen?” He drained his mug, and I rose to pour him more before he could demand it.

“How long are you here for?” The principal’s voice, definitely a tone sterner than the supervisor’s.

“Don’t worry, sir. I am not taking Kraftsville from you. I am on my way to South America.”

“What are you up to there?”

“It is a tour of inspection.” He looked up into my face as I filled his mug. I kept my eyes fixed on the gushing beer. It was warm beer from the kitchen. There was a keg cooling in the wellhouse, but that was outside the sound of his voice. “Nizam has given me a very favorable report of you, sir.”

“Nizam? Don’t tell me he’s been skulking around in the bushes somewhere!”

“Rest assured that he has kept several eyes on you. Now, sir; what is the condition of the camp?”

“Annihilated,” Franklin intoned with relish. “After the Russians pulled out, people had a field day out there. Everything’s been burned or smashed or hauled off. Didn’t Nizam tell you that?”

Arslan only grinned. I put down the pitcher carefully and looked at him with fresh consideration. That he had appeared thus, unheralded and frivolously unprotected (And, save his good broadsword, he weapons had none. He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone) did not in itself surprise me; he had his games to play. But why should he ask about the camp unless he intended a second occupation? And something in me surrendered, resolved into peaceful tears that did not rise or fall, and I abandoned myself hopelessly to hope.

The child stirred, kittenlike, on the couch beside him, and in a fond, absent gesture he ran his maimed right hand along her leg. Till now I had not thought of her, except to note her presence. But I found, with distant amusement, that I had assumed what now his casually obscene caress confirmed. I observed her: my rival, my replacement. Her features were hidden in the snuggling crook of a thin arm and a tumble of hair; but that hair was alienly black as Arslan’s own, and her skin a color not made by sun. Where had he found her? India, perhaps, or North Africa.

“Unnecessary, sir.” (I had not heard, with any part of my brain that counted, what they had just been saying. Adult talk. For the past five years I had functioned as a real person in a real world; it had only required Arslan’s entrance to reduce me again to the irrelevance, to the freedom, of a spectator, of a child.) “Leila sleeps with me.”

“Not tonight,” Franklin stated definitively. “When you’ve got an army to back you up you can turn my house into a pigsty. We’ve seen that. But not tonight.”

Arslan ran his good hand under the sleeping child’s back and scooped her upright. She swayed like a heavy vine, her head tilting and swinging, flutters of darkness showing where her eyes fought to cope with the light. He looked, incredulous but tolerant, from her to Franklin. “As you like, sir. But you should consider two points. One, I desire only sleep tonight. Two, Leila is a professional, indeed an expert.”

“And three,” Franklin said equably, “tomorrow you’ll have your army to back you up again. But tonight she sleeps on the couch.”