Arslan

patting the fat tears of success. But spring rose always again like a beaten fighter stumbling from his corner for still another round. There was nothing to say to the universe; it was; one could only turn away.

But could not. I breathed, and the air was spring. In Karcher’s woods, the trees stood definite and angled as black crystals; yet a scattered few were hazed with mists of color that showed, through the white rain, uncertain as illusions—faint green, fainter pink, like the pastels of an impressionist. I stood under the stable eaves, leaning and waiting. Arslan might come with Sanjar, to ride in the young rain. Or might not. And my mouth made the small, standard smile of acknowledgment, for I felt the weed of hope rising again, for one more spring.

Chapter 20

Rusudan lay dead on Franklin Bond’s couch. Awkward with fear, an apprehensive covey of women jostled behind Arslan. He had sent the guards beyond the doors. He bent deliberatively over Rusudan and began to strip her of her clothes.

First one, then two, then all, the women shrilled. They wavered; the boldest stepped forward to offer help. Arslan turned on her with a voiceless animal sound, lips shrunk back from his teeth, and she dissolved into wailing cries. He bent again to his work. The women swayed and shrieked, willows with tambourines and sirens. What did it express, this racket of anguish? Perhaps nothing more or less profound than their ache to perform the last offices of their mistress. Perhaps grief, certainly shock. I was shocked myself.

He examined her very thoroughly, and he took care not to obstruct our view of her. Or was “it” the proper term for one so emphatically dead? No; Rusudan was unalterably female. For the first and last time I saw her naked, and the sight stirred something within me, though not (as I had mildly dreaded) necrophilia. I was surprised by the broad aureoles of her nipples; I was impressed by the solid curves of her breasts; and I was strangely touched by the dark turf of hair, scanter than I had expected, at the vulnerable meeting point of thighs and belly— the tender crotch where Arslan’s hands had lain, into whose recesses he had rubbed himself with the authority of love. Now he soberly examined the dead flesh for bruises. It was with a kind of medical-student coarseness that he flopped her broken limbs. And with each manipulation of the silent corpse the women screamed, as though Rusudan’s nerves functioned now in them.

When he had finished, he went to one of the women—the nearest, and also the oldest, who keened a desperate and ritualistic cry—and struck her. She tumbled backwards, all dignity abased. He said to me, moving his mouth laboriously, like one to whom speech returns as a lesson forgotten, “Bring in two men.” I stepped onto the porch. “The general wants two men,” I told the Turkmens in English. It would have been presumptuous now to present myself as anything more than conquered alien. They were accustomed to me as Arslan’s messenger, but they gave me this time the hard looks that uniforms were invented to authorize, the looks that warned, Everything you have ever said is already held against you.

Arslan had covered what he could of Rusudan with the filthy dress he had peeled from her. “For Colonel Nizam,” he said, consigning the women with a gesture. One guard escorted them. Arslan turned to me. “Tell me everything. Everything. Everything.”

Far less prepared for this inevitable moment than for that of death, I felt my eyes go wide, my tongue stiff. All my innocence and ignorance, so valid a minute before, crumbled and evaporated, and I was cowering again in Bukhara, incompetent even in guilt. Stumblingly I told him everything I could remember or imagine that might serve, not to solve his mystery or assuage his pain (helpless with fear, I had instantly forgotten that such purposes might exist), but to protect me from his violence. His eyes blazed out of some distant enmity. He listened, he questioned, and at the end, “Upstairs,” he said to the remaining guard, nudging his head at me. It was the command I had known a hundred times before I understood it literally and grammatically. I was surprised that my heart did not grow cold at the sound of it. But I was chill enough already.

So again I sat the long hours on the bed’s edge, listening, drifting. But I was older now, and knew how to hope for a better thing—that when reality came through the door again, it would be with what I had earned, the possibility of contact, of mutuality. So that when in fact it came, nights later, after Arslan’s hands and heels had wrought the execution that was, for a time, to lose him Kraftsville, there was another hope to be crushed down.

He came to me, those nights, with the unplanned, unplanning, conscious intensity of an elemental. I remembered that demode phrase, “crime of passion,” and understood it in a new light, glaring and garish. For they were crimes that he wrought upon me in the narrow room that had been Mr. Bond’s son’s, crimes in intent and therefore in effect. It was not sadism, in the pure sense, that struck me from my waiting sleep and wrenched my joints into a new and still a new distortion; it was revenge, that Satanistic atonement. He pressed from me not only the immemorial noises of the wounded, but speech, but argument. For I was wounded by his cruelty, but I was outraged by his unreasonableness. It was not appropriate to Arslan to snarl accusations, to sneer insults. Threats were something else again; but it was wrong for him to whisper them. “Your mother, too—she is one of them. I will deal with her personally—personally. Do you wish me to tell you how?” I lay quietly outside my listening body and waited for him to finish, to sleep, to go away, to kill me. “Do you think that you are one of them, Hunt? Wait, wait until they have drained you dry. I protect you now, while you plot with them, while you crawl on your belly to do their errands, and pour for them your little drops of information. But wait, wait until I throw you to them, these jackals. When they have finished with you, then I will destroy them. And perhaps I will take what is left of you again. Perhaps.”

Those nights, he broke upon me like a tempest, waves of lust and fury that overran each other and died not in satisfaction but in collapse. I was roused and tumbled, buffeted with the excitement of the gale that is past pain and near to glee. And in the spent surf of such a dying storm he turned on me a look of so much gentleness that I sank, desolate, forlorn past hope at last. He cared for me; somehow, in some sense, I was of importance to him, a subject for tenderness, a source of joy. Therefore I was lost.

Chapter 21

Somebody’s child came idling down Pearl Street, in grave pursuit of this season’s resident tomcat; an older child than Sanjar, without Sanjar’s aggressive grace. He looked apprehensively at the raw palings of the new fence—fences were not common in Kraftsville—drubbed his fingers experimentally along them for a moment, and stooped for a throwing stone. The cat sprang without visible effort, like a sailplane rising on a sudden thermal, posed a brief second on the gatepost, and descended, ponderous and lithe, upon Franklin’s front walk. The boy flung his stone side-armed toward the other side of the street and trotted past. The cat paced halfway down the walk, turned, seated himself, and began to wash. He was impressive in rear view—thick-necked and chunky-shouldered, like Arslan.

“What do you call that one?” Franklin’s memory for the names of cats was short.

“Bruce,” I said huskily. “Robert the Bruce.”

“I’m glad we put the fence in.” He ran his hand approvingly along the porch rail and turned back toward the front door. “You call me when you get that paint mixed, and I’ll help you paint it.”

What was it Hesse had said in Der Steppenwolf? Something in scorn, or perhaps in envy, of the Faust who complained merely because he had two souls struggling within his breast. (Every book I read had seemed to me momentarily the fated answer to my question, before I learned that literature was an insignificant sham, shallow to its very depths—that there was no vicarious experience, none; that I knew nothing I had not felt in my own flesh.) One of the sparse benefits of having an indefinite number of souls was that one or more of them could find some glint of silver in almost any catastrophic cloud. So that there was a small pleasure in being abandoned by Arslan, an enemy alien in my home town. It was challenging. It had its aspects of unaccustomed freedom, somewhat like being parachuted alone into a jungle. I did not realize at once that he had exactly fulfilled his threat; he had thrown me to the jackals.

One thing I had already learned: it was useless to ask for help unless you didn’t really need it. There were no