Arslan

So he moved, tense with his mortal pleasure, hunting, hunted, between two levels of death; William Rufus in the Saxon forest. And after the shot that brought our first deer staggering down upon its neck, he reached across the gun and laid his stilling fingers again on my arm. And I, hunched with the crushing pain in my neck and shoulders, turned to look at him, and found again the offer in his eyes. “Look,” he whispered.

What was it I was to see? Was there some animal crouched among the leaves? Some spoor I should have noticed? I shook my head at last—explicit answer to the explicitness of his word. So, at least, the time might come when we could talk.

There were other days. There were other moments. But it was not in the woods, it was in my bed, alone, in the room that had been Mr. Bond’s son’s, holding in my hands the soft pelt of a rabbit, that I understood.

When I was a child, we had had a sort of formal garden behind the house, and I had always rather liked it— liked it, in fact, a great deal more than I had ever admitted. It was exactly the formality of it that I liked; and the flaw, the secret reason for the real contempt for which I feigned other reasons, was that it failed in its formality—it was incomplete, inconsistent, too small or too open. But in midsummer and in fall, coming into it from the south side, I had momentarily loved it. It was calm. Calm. Beautiful in its calmness. The healing, smooth, content, contained, closed endlessness of the circle. And with the downy softness of the fur against my face, I knew, and quivered with hopeless regret for my dullness, that it was this he had offered me—the very calm of the circle.

Too late. Too late. The waves had ceased to flow. I sat up in the empty bed, clenched all over like a fist. Our strange and self abuse is the initiate fear that wants hard use. We are yet but young in deed. And I, indeed young, abused, initiate, got up and pounded on my door, pounded and did not answer the sentry’s objection, pounded until my fists felt numbed and pulpy and Arslan’s own hands turned the key in the lock and pushed me back. Afterwards we would talk.

Chapter 16

It wasn’t to understand Turkistani that I began to study it, but to understand Arslan. In time I would grow fond of that hot, smooth tongue, and proficient enough to silence his gossiping officers with my presence. But their cabals bored me. It was more interesting, and more significant, that what was officially called Turkistani was in fact Uzbek; that Arslan spoke by preference the Turkmen of his hand-picked bodyguard, and spoke it like a common soldier; that it was Colonel Nizam who spoke the elegant Uzbek of the schools.

I had learned by that time, too, the tactics he used to make his command of English seem greater than it was. No, not his command—for he commanded it truly and superbly—but the range and accuracy of his understanding. I had been reading to him for weeks when he first began to ask me the meanings of words— sometimes words he himself had used earlier. He never, as far as I could tell, admitted ignorance of an English word to anyone else. Confronted unignorably with a phrase he was unsure of, he would turn it back, with a straight face, in question, threat, or provocation, to elicit more data. I thought, too, that one reason for his inscrutable looks, his reluctance to show surprise or annoyance or enthusiasm, was a simple fear of betraying misunderstanding by an inappropriate reaction. In his own tongue he behaved as in his own bedroom—responsive as quicksilver, eager, impatient, and irritable, throwing off little explosions of scorn and admiration.

In that crowded, bustling house I lived alone and silent. The raucous poultry of the yard, the thick-tongued soldiery, alike confident of their validity, filled day and night with urgent communication. Betty—Miss Hanson to me before my promotion to auxiliary adulthood—emitted signals of agony and ecstasy from Arslan’s room. Mr. and Mrs. Bond communed conjugally, upon a band narrow but apparently clear. Cats wove their intricate society through the useful obstacles of humankind and its hounds. The monkey, sui generis, scratched his piglike skin and pattered forth rattling streams of helpless exhortation. Individuals addressed communications to me: Darya sang, in a language whose very sounds I never grasped; Mrs. Bond presented to me kindnesses, fruit pies, clean linen; Arslan’s soldiers delivered retailed orders and original mockery; Mr. Bond kindly preached; Arslan laid upon me his light hands, his heavy body, his intolerable informations. I did not respond. Only in certain roseate darknesses—the laughably, pitiably frail virginness of dawn, the dying violent power of sunset, the glory that attended midnight in Arslan’s sweated bed—did I speak, give answers, question, and then to Arslan alone. A certain mechanical heaviness invested otherwise my speech centers.

“Light, Hunt,” he said. I lit the lamp: the match blared its small headstrong explosion; the patient wick took the fire quietly and lifted a tall pale flame, ravelling into a tangle of dark smoke. I set the chimney, fixed in its perfect curve, over the equally perfect and ever altering curves of combustion. The flame settled; the smoke vanished; the room was lit. “Is not light beautiful?” Arslan said.

I considered. All the all-but-infinite hues of the spectrum were beautiful; and every intensity, from the coalmine dark to the retina-searing brilliance of a star unmasked, had its peculiar beauty. He took my wrist as I returned, and I sat beside his neatly sprawled body on the bed, and nodded. How, then, could any visible thing be unbeautiful?

“Yes, beautiful,” he said—the voice that swam in dark sweetness, that purred, that without music sang. “And strong, Hunt; light is strong. Do you know the laser?”

Personally, no. I nodded anonymously.

“A beam of light of such—” his hand groped air until he found the perfect word —'integrity that it pierces steel.” He loosed my wrist and turned to me on his elbow, his face eager and exhorting, Arslan’s native posture. “As a weapon it is only a weapon—you understand? It has its own limits—of range, of speed, of accuracy, of maneuverability. Another weapon, Hunt, nothing more. But every new weapon has its hour, the period when its power is multiplied by its newness. Therefore to use a weapon most efficiently, it is necessary to strike during its hour.”

And if there was nothing at which to strike? But Arslan could create his own victims. Now he tamped his pillow into a solid backrest. His shoulders curved against it as he lit a cigarette (swiftly, impatient of his self- interruption). “Consider, Hunt. If the United States had struck, intelligently and with decision, at the hour when she alone possessed nuclear weapons and her delivery capability exceeded the defensive power of every other nation, she could have conquered the world.”

I looked at him, interested at last in the content of what he was saying. He touched me, and thus unspellbound I asked, “Did you do it with lasers?”

He let his head fall backward, draped from the rolled pillow, not in indolence but in enjoyment. He talked around his cigarette; gentle rivulets of white smoke accompanied his words. “The laser had been developed as a defensive weapon. Unfortunately its offensive potentialities will never be realized. But consider, Hunt! When two men face each other with drawn knives, who will live longer? He who wears armor. The shield was as decisive an invention as the sword. And what is the shield against the sword of full-scale nuclear attack? Either a counterstrike force too massive and dispersed to be neutralized, or a defensive network that is virtually one hundred percent effective. Nothing less is adequate. The advantage of the laser, the beauty of the laser, Hunt, is its speed. The antimissile missile has one chance to destroy its target: the laser has four, five, six! No, nothing is perfect—but we can approach perfection as a limit. Given a complete defensive network of lasers, the damage that can be inflicted by a nuclear strike approaches zero. Most certainly, for a large country, it falls within the limits of acceptable damage. Therefore—” he half straightened, jabbing his cigarette toward me—'your country and the Soviet Union competed for years to perfect an antimissile laser—competed quietly.” He smiled at me, the playful smile. “Conveniently for me, the Soviets succeeded first. Do you understand now?”

He touched me nowhere; but my whole right side was warmed because of him, the principal heat exchange occurring in the region of my right hip. He reached past me to tamp out his cigarette; returning, his arm brushed across me, his hand caught gently below my armpit. “A little,” I said.

He chuckled lowly. “A little,” he mocked. “A little, little. Hunt,” he said, urgently if cavalierly. His fingers sank into me (five bruises tomorrow) and I said, mightily aloud, “I want to understand.”

He paused, his fingers still tight in my side, eyeing me with humorous surprise. “You want,” he said interestedly. “Good. I shall tell you.” His gripping hand eased slowly. “I knew—and your government knew, Hunt, in much more detail than I could know—that the Russians had perfected an antimissile laser. It followed that they were installing a laser defense network as rapidly as possible. Do you understand, Hunt? It is very simple. The shield—the first shield—is a weapon of offense.” I understood. It was very simple. “I went to Moscow to talk to the