snuffling and fretting around our feet.
“Here,” Sanjar answered. He caught my hand and guided it to something solid.
“Hunt?”
“Hello, Franklin.” His voice was firm and sardonic. I ran my left arm under his right and got a good grip.
“Which is your bad leg?”
“The right. Otherwise known as the wrong. Let’s go.”
I took most of his weight, and we staggered across the yard. I didn’t let him pause till we had struggled through the open door and he could lean against the washstand. He was breathing in ragged gasps of pain and effort, and I could feel him sweating. “Damn it, where’s Sanjar?”
“Let’s go,” Hunt repeated tightly.
Even with Sanjar’s help it would have been hopeless to try to get him up the stairs. I crutched him into the living room and over to the couch and let him painfully down on it. In the darkness I didn’t want to fool with his injured leg; I hurried back to get a light from the cookstove embers and planted my candle on the coffee table. One little flame wouldn’t show through the heavy curtains. Together we got the leg lifted and straightened on the couch. It had been crudely splinted and bandaged, but I could feel the bones grating as we moved it. He lay back panting.
“Okay for a minute, Hunt?”
“Very fine.”
I headed back through the kitchen again, ready to chew out Sanjar and maybe Arslan, too. A minute later I was helping them. It was too much to ask an eleven-year-old boy to carry a grown man, however emaciated. Sanjar had gotten him—part dragging, part supporting—almost as far as the door, and they were both exhausted. Arslan was just conscious enough to try to keep his legs under him. He was shivering in short spasms; you could almost hear his bones rattle.
Between us we manhandled him into the dark house and upstairs to his old bed. He was so light it gave me a peculiar chill feeling in the pit of my stomach. “He’s all yours,” I told Sanjar, and went back down to Hunt. “Well, did you win it?”
“We won it.” He was looking studiously at the ceiling.
I went on through into the kitchen and brought him back a drink of water. He poured it down eagerly and gave me a shy sort of smile in the candlelight.
“I’m going for Dr. Allard.”
“No.” He tried to raise himself.
“Relax, Hunt. You can trust Jack Allard as well as you can me.” I patted him back down on the couch and went out again by the back door. I hadn’t gotten very far before Sanjar caught up with me. He ran like a hunting cat—low, and all but silent. I turned to meet him. “What’s the matter?”
He caught hold of my elbow. “Don’t get the doctor. I can take care of Arslan.”
“You can take care of him all you want to. I’m getting the doctor for Hunt.”
He hung on, and I half dragged him along. “You mustn’t let him know Arslan’s here.”
“Don’t worry, Sanjar. You can trust Doc Allard not to tell tales.”
“No!” he squeaked, his urgency too much for his young voice. He jerked at my arm, and I stopped again and faced him. The moon was down, but I could see that his face was twisted with earnestness. “I can’t even trust
Under the circumstances I couldn’t laugh at him. “All right, Sanjar. My story is that Hunt came in with a broken leg and I went for help without waiting to find out how it happened. You hurry back to Hunt now and figure out a nice plausible lie. Don’t forget he’s got to explain how he got here alone on horseback.”
“Thanks! Thank you!” He melted back into the darkness.
The story Hunt told was sketchy, but not unbelievable. He had been thrown and dragged in the neighborhood of Reedsboro, where there was no doctor, and the Reedsboro people had given him the doubtful favor of an amateur bonesetting job and tied him to his horse. People would do things like that these days. It was a funny thing that Arslan’s plan of independent communities really had taken effect in some ways. There were business trips like Hunt’s, there was trade, and news filtered around fast enough; but by and large, people stayed in their own districts, and they didn’t take in strangers.
When the doctor was gone, I made sure Hunt was as comfortable as he could well be and went upstairs. There was no answer to my knock. I opened the door and stepped into the dawn-lit room. A curious noise was going on, a continuous soft rustle punctuated with irregular rasping sounds.
“Sanjar?” I couldn’t locate him for a few moments. Then I looked at Arslan in the bed and found Sanjar, too. He had fairly plastered himself onto his father, his arms locked around Arslan’s chest, his face profiled against Arslan’s throat. He was looking sidelong up at me with a look I knew all too well, the look I had seen in the eyes of dozens of wastrel’s sons as they faced their inevitable paddlings—the hopeless, utter defiance of the outlaw’s child. The noise was coming from Arslan. He was shaking, shaking helplessly in the grip of his cold disease, and he was not conscious now. His breath came in noisy heaves. Sanjar had put everything available on him—sheet and spread, the blankets he must have found in the old dresser, his own hot body.
I looked at them for a minute. “You’re pretty proud of your father, aren’t you?” He gazed at me with his steady desperation, the look that accepted hell. “Let me know if you need anything,” I said.
Those were a peculiar three days. It was hard to get used to the idea that Arslan might very well die in my house. I had to plan burial arrangements without mentioning the possibility to anybody. As for his northward expedition, I’d heard nothing but Hunt’s “We won it.” The physical results didn’t look very triumphal. Arslan himself had changed from a South American peasant’s rags to an equally ragged uniform—anonymous khaki, totally without insignia. Maybe that was a step up.
Kraftsville was willing enough to do business with Hunt, but he wasn’t what you could call socially popular. The silver lining of that was that we were spared the normal flood of neighborly visits and inquiries. Jean Morgan came, of course. “He’s doing very well,” I told her. “He’s comfortable.”
“May I come in?” We were standing in the open front door. Hunt was just out of sight at the far end of the living room.
“Jean,” I said, “you know I can’t go back on my word.”
She set her jaw and looked at me hard. “I’d laugh, if I felt cheerful enough. Just tell me, Franklin, did you ever hear of a more ridiculous situation? My son is in there with a broken leg, and I’m here on the doorstep begging admittance.”
But begging was something Jean Morgan couldn’t have done. When she saw I meant what I said, she went away without more ado.
I stretched my charity to the point of offering Arslan, through Sanjar, a pair of my pajamas. They were politely declined. As before I saw nothing of Arslan, but this time I saw more of Sanjar. With Hunt immobilized, he undertook to do all the cooking, after he’d asked my permission very prettily. As a cook he was a little less than inspired, but about as competent as you could want for an eleven-year-old. He took whatever I brought into the kitchen, and inevitably he boiled it. We lived on nondescript gruels and unclassified stews. And while his pots simmered, Sanjar squatted or sat cross-legged beside Hunt’s couch, deep in cheery discussion. I left them alone; it was pretty obvious they preferred to speak Turkistani when I was within earshot. I hadn’t seen Hunt so animated in years. And since Arslan had come through his chill, Sanjar was all smiles. He hadn’t really learned yet that his father was mortal.
But except with Sanjar, Hunt had lapsed back into the inarticulateness of his first days with Arslan. I tried exactly once to ask him what had happened. He fixed me with that remote look of a visitor from another world, as if we faced each other through barriers not simply of language but of perception. “It was a battle,” he said. “We won it.”
“What happened to Nizam?”
He shrugged, and after a while he said in an answering tone, “What happens to Nizams?”
“I expect they succeed or they die trying.”
He nodded slowly. “Nizam’s dead.”
“What was he trying for?”
“Exactly,” he said.
