Arslan

making him smile with pleasure and knowledge. Yes, as I died with life. “But also, if he is truly a soldier, he is never alone. His army is always with him.” Even unto the end of the world. It was unjust that Arslan’s eyes, brilliant and treacherous, overshadowed his mouth. It was a mouth worth watching, supple and proud. “They are good, Hunt. Good,” he said, and his lips curled fondly about the word, telling me that they were his children, his brothers, his lovers, his creatures. The cadres of the army he had inherited as dictator’s son had been unremarkable—half trained, half experienced, half rebellious, and thoroughly venal. It was not the least of his feats that he had, in that subterranean era before the revolt that made him Premier of Turkistan, infected every one of them (every one, at least, who had survived) with what in the interests of accuracy, might have been called love. I tried to imagine a world in which Arslan’s ruthless enthusiasm was contained in so small a scope: to train—to create, rather, an army that would make him unqualified master of a certain arid acreage in Central Asia. “I had seen the Russians and the Chinese, Hunt. I knew what I must measure myself against.” He was talking about armed forces, and he was serious. First, it had been necessary to neutralize his father’s air force; but his immediate next move had been to take firm possession of his country’s ill-defined borders. He had fought a little, unnoticed war with Afghanistan—a war that could have tempted him into conquest, but had not. Through the vacancy of the Black Sands, where the Soviet Union had been content to leave an uncertainty for future exploitation, he had drawn his emphatic line of fortifications and patrols—and Moscow, startled but sanguine, had given him vodka and confirmed the line by treaty. On the east, he had sat down with relish to some four years of skirmish and argument. That—the Chinese border— had been his recreation. Within the boundaries, bidding East against West for oil rigs and teachers and irrigation projects, stockpiling his silky cotton while the mills went up, he had not neglected his first loves; the army was never idle. Like emirs and sultans before him, he had pacified the tribal Turkmens with bribes. ('My father’s people, Hunt. A difficult people.” Arrogant, irascible, joyous, and cruel, a people dear to his heart.) All other tribes had been pacified Roman fashion. Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellent. The Kurds and Kalmucks, still following their ancient feuds and herds, contemptuous of boundaries, had been corralled, decimated, partitioned, and resettled with staggering speed and thoroughness. The nomads of old Turkistan became part of the growing proletariat of Bukhara and Merv and Khiva, and Arslan’s troops added rural and urban riot control to their list of practiced skills.

So that when his great hour came, unexpected but destined, he was prepared. It was not in vain that he had sworn the oath of blood-brotherhood with Nizam—Argus-eyed Nizam, whose foresight provided the corps of interpreters through whom Arslan’s officers were to command the world’s troops. And the army had shared. The songs that rose from the Kraftsville grade-school gym had been true paeans.

It had been his feast of Persepolis, the single hour of triumph. And if, more moderate for once than Alexander, he had ignited no city (his conflagrations were later, measured and purposeful), he had had no less his accidental sacrifice; it was I who had been consumed in the peripheral blaze of his glory.

And only now I began to understand what lightning stroke had changed Kraftsville from a crossroads bivouac to the capital of the world (for Bukhara could never be more than the capital of Turkistan). He had driven west—the instinct of Timur, the inverse of Alexander—into the physical vastness of his untried conquest, leading his personal army into the heart of mid-America as he had drawn his personal gun in the Moscow conference room. It was not yet a matter of baiting the incipient resistance—there could be no resistance until the conquest was real. It was a challenge, a risk, an exploration; he did not yet know what he had done, nor what he would find. The world (there, there was the rub, the nub—I beat my palm against my brow and cursed like Hamlet over Hecuba) the world had still been free to choose its answer to him.

But driving west on Illinois 460, he had received the answer. Nizam had caught up with him, bringing the confirmation that he could accept from no one else: Moscow was docile, Washington was well in hand; those generals who had shown themselves uncooperative had been rendered harmless. For the first time (perhaps the last), Muzaffer Arslan Khan knew himself the master of the world. The place where he found himself became the universe’s center.

So that the Arslan I first saw—swaggering down the aisle of Mrs. Runciman’s eighth-grade class, face aglow and body afire and the hand that touched my shoulder vibrating steel—was not, as I had assumed, the normal Arslan of his everyday past or his everyday future; just as the Kraftsville he saw that day, and all that it contained, were illuminated by an incandescence not their own.

Again, again, again; my muscles would bunch, my blood leap, and for the instant it would seem determined that I was about to plunge, simply and physically, for whatever freedom my legs could find. Assaults of escapism, they took me more often and more keenly in Bukhara than they had in Kraftsville. They were pangs of returning life, not spasms of dying (so, at least, I concluded); perceptions of reality, not rejections of it. Between convulsions, I was growing unsteadily more aware that flight was not so much impossible as pointless. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is Hell; And where Hell is, there must we ever be. Milton’s Satan was a general; Marlowe’s Mephistophilis knew what it was to march in the ranks.

He moved always with the urgent skill of a professional. His plans were as secret as the wrestler’s in the ring; the movement announced the decision to move. The child was to be born. Rusudan’s plans were elaborate. Yet, “Hunt,” he said, “you will come with me.” I thought it would be to India, where the great camps were—the labor camps where, contrary to all his announced doctrine, the surplus rice crops were grown, the medical supplies mass-produced. There were always problems with those camps, and with the sterilization program that accompanied them—this the overt, even publicized sterilization program, using only surgical methods, that busied his henchmen for a time in India as in China. And indeed we were to visit some of those camps before our journeying was done. But first, out of a pink dawn, our jet tilted downward to the convoluted islands that had been Japan.

I saw now, as we sank roaring through the air, one of the beautiful horrors of which he had told me—an invested city. Through the outskirts of Tokyo ran an irregular band of devastation, a knotted black sash binding the city against the sea. In places it merged into broader spots of wasteland—the love-knots of Arslan’s ribbon. Well- set fires and well-planted bombs had drawn that siege line. Tokyo, caught in a tightening belt of flame, and inspired by memories of old conflagrations, had saved herself (other cities had been less skillful or other-starred), to strangle more slowly in the cordon of blackness. Here, it had been Chinese troops who patrolled the perimeter, shooting down fugitives from the city. At certain checkpoints, a citizen could buy his way out with any deadly weapon. (In Tokyo, guns were scarce, but swords were equally acceptable.) Such people were packed off to the farm districts being laid out in Mongolia and Siberia. There were escapes, of course. There were sorties, organized and otherwise. In the depths of the city, there were riots, new fires, cannibalism. When the Chinese marched in at last, there was very little resistance.

It was from such cities, docile with agony, that Arslan had drained off all the surviving males. All evidently pregnant women and mothers with male infants were ghettoed in convenient prisons and hospitals. Their men and boys were marched or shipped away, to farm the unappealingly virgin lands of northern Asia or Australia, or sometimes—if they passed the scrutiny of Nizam’s agents—to serve Arslan more directly, as drivers, mechanics, technicians, clerks, interpreters, administrators, seamen, soldiers. In such a city, only the inmates of the inevitable brothels required sterilization. It was, on the whole, an efficient way to dispose of several million people.

There in Japan, to my relief, I fell ill. I was to learn on that zigzag journey that the health of mankind had already deteriorated. A surprising variety of plagues afflicted the concentrations of population, plagues that Arslan accepted gladly and manipulated with growing skill. Under the circumstances, diagnosis and prognosis of my ailment were alike uncertain, and not worth bothering with. I was content with the indefinite consolation of a schooldays phrase, “just a bug that’s going around.” The practical result was that I was spared setting foot on the barren ground of Tokyo. But after a few days of helpless peace I was well again.

And by that time he had finished his dispositions in Japan ('It is very simple here, Hunt. But there are problems elsewhere'), and we were ready to put still more distance between our backs and Bukhara. But ere the circle homeward hies, Far, far must it remove. The route was circuitous, not circular, and in the end we were to come back to Bukhara from east, not west. But I took care not to anticipate any return.

I was seeing the world. What surprised me was that it was indeed a world—globular, and covered all over with seas and continents. The sun went around and around it (Copernicus was irrelevant), and a mouse or a human being might go around and around it, too—by rocket, by plane, by ship and train, by swimming and walking if he chose. Maps could be drawn of it. Beams of electromagnetic energy could be bumped along its surface. It was real;