Arslan

liable to be shot summarily. Anyone found in possession of firearms or ammunition was liable to be executed—no qualification on that one. Now the boundary rule. And the cruellest of all, the teaser, the killer, the one that knotted up my stomach in the worst spasm I’d felt in years: the billet rule. Every household—whether it was old Billy Moss living alone in his little ramshackle house, or Junior Boyle and his bride in their trailer behind his mother’s place, or the Felix Karchers with eight kids, two grandmothers, and a hired girl—every household was to have one soldier billeted in it. If any one of these soldiers died of any cause or was attacked in any way, anywhere, at any time, by anybody, all the members of “his” household were to be executed. Summarily, no doubt. I didn’t like the distinction between shot and executed, either. Shot was at least definite; it eliminated a lot of possibilities. As for my household, the billet rule didn’t quite apply to us. We had something a little extra. We had Arslan.

Upstairs we had four rooms and a bathroom. They had all been intended as bedrooms, but we’d never needed that many, and since the little boy died a dozen years ago, we’d needed only one. Luella used one of the smaller, back rooms for her sewing, and I had fixed up the other one as a den and home office, where I could play Verdi records as loud as I pleased, and work out the plans for next semester and next year that there was never enough time for in my office at school. The east front room we kept as a guestroom, and we slept in the other ourselves. I assumed that Arslan had taken over the guestroom.

I hadn’t been home yet; didn’t know, as things stood now, if I would ever get home. It looked as though the bivouac was settling into an occupation. The Turkistanis were busy after their debauch. A considerable arsenal was being collected in the school music room, as they brought in confiscated shotguns and rifles. The billet rule sounded like a permanent substitute for hostages; Arslan wouldn’t have any excuse for holding the children much longer. And while I didn’t expect that fact to influence him the way it would a human being, I did expect it to bring a turning point of some kind. Whether I was willing to “work with his officers” was doubtful, to say the least, but it might depend a lot on the direction of the turn.

We had served a breakfast of leftovers, as soon as possible after they had unlocked us. Only Jean Morgan stayed in seclusion in the women’s lounge. I’d known Jean through many years and more than one trouble, and it had taken this to daunt her. We put all the classes to doing calisthenics, and then a singing session, and got started on schoolwork at almost the normal time.

It was barely ten when Arslan appeared, with his twinkling eyes and his few simple rules and the news that he had quartered himself in my house. And gradually I got my vocal apparatus under control. Entirely free, he had said. “What about your soldiers? Aren’t there any restrictions on them? ”

He smiled swiftly. “There are restrictions. It is not desirable that your people should know exactly what restrictions. This would encourage disputes and misjudgments. I myself will judge my men.”

I looked at him. “How old are you?” I asked him. My voice was still a little thick.

He gave my look back steadily, and soberly for the moment. Then he straightened up. “Twenty-five years,” he said softly. “Come.”

He motioned me ahead of him, into the cross-hall and out through the south door into the parking lot. It was the first time I’d been outside since yesterday morning. We had had a late fall, with off-again on-again weather that had put the forsythias in bloom at Thanksgiving, and now in the first week of December it was like October again, mild and sunny and breezy. The air was delicious.

There were soldiers all over the lot, buzzing in every direction like bees at the door of a hive. A good deal of their traffic was straight across Pearl Street to my house. That sharp-eyed colonel was expounding something, without gestures, to a little cluster of noncoms, making them look first west, then south, then east. Arslan spoke, and they all saluted him and stared at me, the noncoms grinning, Colonel Nizam with a mortal frown.

We crossed the street, but when I started up my front walk, Arslan laughed. “This way.” Some kind of armored truck was parked in my driveway—my car had disappeared—and a Land Rover behind it on the lawn. He slid into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover and motioned me toward the seat beside him.

I got in. He threw it into gear and plowed straight across the lawn and one of Luella’s flower beds before he turned down the Morrisville road. Even so, he drove well. He handled the car like a man who made his living driving. There wasn’t a bump or a pothole on the road that he didn’t foresee and compensate for. He was looking very smug.

“Would it be easy to kill me?” he asked pleasantly.

I imagined not. In any case, I wasn’t about to try it, with the school full of children and Luella alone with his soldiers. And it didn’t make any obvious sense for him to drive out into the country with me, alone and unguarded; there had to be a catch. “That’s not why I’m watching you,” I said. “I was thinking you may make some pretty big headlines, but this is the first time I’ve seen you do anything for yourself. It takes a corporal just to tie your shoes.”

He stopped the Land Rover right there in the middle of the road, turned off the engine, leaned his left elbow on the wheel, and slewed around on the seat to face me full. His eyes fairly danced, exactly like some fourth-grader bound to stir up mischief at any cost. And by God, it made me ache to look at him—ache to get my hands on his neck or my foot in his face. We were already out of sight of town, just before the road turned west, with Sam Tuller’s fields on our right and the woods of the old Karcher place on the left. There wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.

“I have brought you here for two reasons, sir. One, that you should tell me about these farms. Two, that you should see that I do things for myself.”

The little breeze stirred the heavy, dead-black hair above his foreign face. He was breathing fast and easily. His eager eyes were no more than two feet from mine. And I felt my blood surge up like a river rising. “Are you daring me to attack you?”

“Yes, sir,” he said softly.

I took a deep breath. “You’re a good seventeen years younger. You’re armed, and you’re a professional soldier. I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw away whatever chance I’ve got just to satisfy your sadistic whims. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to do it on your own initiative.”

He didn’t move a muscle; only the whole expression of his face changed. The smile was still there, but the eyes were serious. “Good.” He stared at me as if he was reading the fine print on the inside of my skull. “Your language has a beautiful saying, ‘Strike while the iron is hot.’ Now, sir, you are hot. You would like to kill me, yes. But you are afraid that if you tried, you would fail; and this is true. Also you are afraid that if you succeeded, my soldiers would take a great vengeance; and this is also true. But there will be times when it will be easy to kill me, for you or for others. I tell you now what will happen if I ever die within the borders of this district—even of what you call … natural causes.” His smile tightened. “Every effort will be made to exterminate the entire population of the district, beginning with Kraftsville, which will be surrounded and burned to the ground.”

I swallowed a swell of rage. “What you mean is, those are the orders you’ve given.”

“This has been sworn to me by Colonel Nizam,” he said portentously—there should have been a dark bass chord of accompaniment—but all at once he grinned. “Yes; yes, sir—orders and oaths are no more immortal than men. So I tell you this, sir: my soldiers are like a pack of hungry wolves; they need no whip to drive them to the kill.” He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it without taking his eyes off mine. “It is important for your people that you should understand this. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I understood it.

“Do you believe it?”

I nodded again. I believed it very well. Whatever was going on in the rest of the world didn’t matter much—this was what was happening in Kraftsville. “Do we have anything to gain by not killing you?”

He smiled sweetly—sweetly is the word. “That, of course, you cannot know with certainty. But it is a chance, and you cannot afford to lose any chance.”

I cleared my throat. “Second question. What if somebody decides to kill you anyway? How are you going to stop them?”

He shrugged. “That is your problem, sir.”

“I’d say it’s yours.”

He pursed his lips—considering, probably, how to make it sound plausible. “I desire to live, yes. But the desire ceases with the life. And the process of dying does not deter me. I am a soldier. Sir, I am Arslan. You should