Arslan

there for security; and I was sorry for Arslan, my poor and terrible Arslan.

“I hate, I love. You may ask why I do it.

I don’t know; but I feel it done, and it tortures me.”

He had spoken so often and so matter-of-factly of our returning to Kraftsville that I had long since ceased to believe him. “When we go back…” he would say, as if Kraftsville were his point of origin as much as mine. “When we go back, we will show Sanjar the cave in the hill.” My mind set sullenly. That had been my cave, one of my secret places, only big enough for one boy. “When we go back, Hunt, you will be useful to Nizam.” Not, You can help Nizam; willy-nilly, active or passive, I would be useful. Used. In the beginning, my heart had twisted at each of his magical go back’s; but it no longer occurred to me to consider them as real possibilities. Thus, though no doubt my potential usefulness had increased (I had lost scruples, gained cunning, advanced linguistically and diplomatically), I did not bother to imagine how I might be used. The only point worth examination was Arslan’s motive in rasping the skin of my soul with this particular tool on this particular day.

So that when Rusudan’s bustle of packing began, I speculated with the ludicrous sobriety of a three-in-the- morning drunk. He was preparing to send her somewhere out of the way (and certainly at the last minute he would keep Sanjar with him); or we were all embarking on a royal progress of his dominions; or he was preparing to lead an actual campaign or defend against a threatened coup, and Rusudan and the child were to be sent elsewhere for safekeeping or, contrarily, as bait; or no one was in fact going anywhere, and all the preparations were one of Arslan’s smokescreens for some gigantic or minute maneuver. I failed to consider that the announced schedule might be simply true. And even when we reached Kraftsville, realization had not overtaken skepticism, so that I labored with feelings of belatedness and surprise, and perceived what I looked at only after a moment’s delay.

Everything was altered. I had left as a victim, contemptible but pitiable. I returned as a henchman. To fulfill the role Kraftsville had assigned me, I should have died, or escaped, or found refuge in suicide, murder, or madness. It was ungrateful of me to have reappeared, intact and even cheerful, at Arslan’s side.

Everything was altered, from my viewpoint as from Kraftsville’s. There was the trite and tediously inevitable change of perspective known, no doubt, to every returned native; but I myself had changed, so that the difference lay not only in point of view but in organs of perception. I too had thought myself a victim and seen myself fail in that role. But my conclusions were not Kraftsville’s.

Mr. Bond, the image of a wise disappointed father, was glad to see me and offered no recriminations. It was he who introduced me to the practical realities of Kraftsville life. “We’ve had a lot of trouble with the deer.”

I could resolve the sounds into words, but not into meaning. I smiled inquiringly.

“Of course, we don’t have anything to shoot them with. We’ve turned into pretty good Indians—but you know something, Hunt? I don’t believe the Indians ever kept the deer down very well, either.”

It was true, if ludicrous: a good deal of Kraft County effort was devoted to the serious business of “keeping the deer down.” Or, considered more constructively, of keeping the district in good meat. Kraft County had moved a long way toward a hunting economy, though it still had far to go. Venison had practically replaced beef; and yet deer were, in popular opinion, vermin. “The deer seem to have adapted better than Homo sapiens,” I said. Although better was a matter of definition.

“They’re thriving, that’s the truth.” But “thriving” was not necessarily the same as adaptation; and in fact, hadn’t the deer been always better adapted, even in Homo sapiens’ heyday? They had done more than survive; they had kept the balance. It would have been valuable, once, to know their secret.

Already on the first day, Mr. Bond began the offer of his pastime intrigues. He was to play Good Angel to my Faustus; but it was, of course, too late to burn my books. I had made that attempt, in Kraftsville and in Bukhara, without celestial prompting; and the first time he had dissuaded me (there were politics in heaven), and the second—when I needed whatever I could get, dissuasion or assistance—he had not been there to save me from proving myself incompetent. So that now I could be titillated, but not seduced. (Raped virgins, in St. Augustine’s opinion, were as pure as any.) Still, his tone opened old and new possibilities.

My usefulness to Nizam was wholly passive. When I was full, he squeezed me, and the pores of my mind, dutiful not to the greater glory of his Turkistan but to the principles of elasticity, gave up their drops of stored observation. But to serve Franklin L. Bond would have required activity. I had no doubt that he led the most powerful, at least, of whatever submerged forces moved beneath the dull ripples of Kraftsville’s mud-dark surface. It was tempting to think of offering my services—tempting but impossible. No man could serve two masters. That was not a moral prohibition, but a statement of fact. I could not choose to betray Arslan.

No, nor conceive betrayal, however I struggled toward it. Meshed in his heavy nets, all maneuverings were futile. For all roads led to death, all species evolved toward extinction.

Bukhara the Pure, Bukhara the Mine of Wisdom. So is every wise man a Bukharan. I had not realized, in the deep fever of Bukhara, what it was that he displayed to me so proudly, with such love. His city, yes. It was in Bukhara that I heard him called Al Hadj and learned that he had made the Great Pilgrimage with his mother when he was very small. But it was complacently, almost with pride, that he assured me he knew no Arabic. Bukhara the Dome of Islam, the Crown of the True Faith, the City of Many Mosques. His city, his country. “For four years I worked hard…” He had left the mosques still standing, as the churches of Holy Russia had still stood in the Soviet Union. But the light had gone out of the dome. And in Kraftsville I recognized at last that the Bukhara through which he had led me, his left hand locked on my wrist and his eyes luminous with joy, was already a ruin. He had cut, methodically, remorselessly, his own roots. And the nourishment he planned for his heir was drawn from other soil.

It was part of his scheme of education that Sanjar should learn, willy-nilly, all the prowess of Huckleberry Finn. For that, too, I was useful. Arslan did not hunt this year, nor the next. (Had it been only a summer’s sport, a bachelor’s game?) It fell to me, Chiron to his infant Achilles, to initiate Sanjar into the art of killing. We were not very successful at hunting together—he was impatient and noisy, too small to help, too young to care—but I supposed he had fun in the woods. “I seen a bluebird, Hunt! I seen roses!” He mimicked my turns of phrase and Arslan’s (diversely stilted), but his grammar was pure Kraft County.

Fishing was better. “Later he may hate me,” Arslan had said to me. “There will be hard times for him.” But Sanjar would croon his little wordless songs and jiggle contentedly the line I had set for him, or sink absorbed into some private game at the water’s edge, while I gazed bemused on the running ripples, a little eased to think that the brown cowponds of Kraft County were moved with the urges of the Pacific. The wavelets of these flowing breezes, baffled on every side, were the very image of those immeasurable surges swept by the Trades around the endless curve of ocean. And I would gaze until, broken from my roots, I felt myself, and the bank I sat on, running like a ship athwart the motionless ripples.

But if motion was relative, could it be real? And anchored by doubt, my bank would brake abruptly, and the ripples run again. Drop fused with drop, the inseparable crumbs of water swung in their trivial orbits, here as in the open sea, a fall for every rise, a retreat for every advance, no particle escaping its tiny province; so that what flung itself at last, heaping and rending, against the helpless shore, was not a thing so much as a force. It was like the headlong incessant lunge of mankind, transmitted by the feeble and frustrate circlings of an infinity of atoms, unendurable in its strength.

That was what made Arslan unique, human but not merely human. How could he be a bobbing droplet in the waves, he who was himself the waves embodied? He would sweep on, carrying all before him, pounding the wreckage of his enemies against the stubborn cliffs of earth until they crumbled at last and the restless waves swept past. He and his own.

Queen of the universe; mistress of its sole master, mother of its sole heir. Tenderness aside, Rusudan stood now, in Kraftsville as never in Bukhara, within the full circle of Arslan’s embrace. They were comrades, bound by a kinship deeper than love, bounded by Kraft County’s alien fields. And I, disconnected and withering on my home soil, felt here as never there the stifled anguish of the concubine. Laden with Arslan’s disregard, goaded by Rusudan’s contempt, I plodded my treadmill way, deeper into desperation. Dutifully I uttered my drops of useless treason (what could I tell Nizam that Arslan did not already know?) and dutifully begrudged them. For the sponge remains wet, the last drops are always unexpressed.

It was possible to look into the chill air for a long time without realizing that rain was falling. Only the whitish blurring of a thin mist intervened, like a dingy windowpane, between eye and landscape. Then, refocused, the ever-falling drops showed faint and cold, like delicate beaded chains sliding and slanting across the blue.

Again, it was spring. Weary and irreversible, again the world heaved round. Autumns were falsely sad,