Arslan (3 page)

“You are my guests,” he said. Without turning his eyes away from us he gave an order, and suddenly his guards were at us, pinioning our arms, wheeling us face-forward against the wall, and in what seemed seconds we were helpless as papooses, our arms roped tight (they had had those ropes mighty handy) and our mouths choked with cloth gags. All except Betty Hanson.

They turned us again to face Arslan. He let his eyes drift relishingly over us all and settle on Betty. She was leaning against the wall beside me, trembling so hard that I felt it through the plaster. Slowly and thoughtfully he stretched out his left hand and closed it on her right breast. Slowly and thoughtfully he caressed it. “You,” he said tenderly, “will wait.” He nodded to one of the bodyguards, and instantly she was grabbed by the arm and hustled out the back door. The troops shouted applause and groaned disappointment. He threw them an acknowledging grin. Then he took two easy steps to stand in front of Perry Carpenter at my other side. The gleam of his eyes was intensely mocking. “You are not worth keeping alive,” he said. And he turned to another one of his men and gave a brusque order. The soldier looked regretful.

It wasn't necessary to know the language. A quavering whisper of sound came from Perry, and he pitched limply against my shoulder. “You should not worry,” Arslan said consolingly. “I have ordered him to play no games with you. He will kill quickly.”

So he was willing to murder a man to make a point. The soldier who'd received the order pulled Perry off of me and prodded him to the door. Arslan looked us over coolly, wheeled, and mounted the steps to the stage. He waved down their cheers and settled himself on my couch, stretching out full length and sinking his head and shoulders luxuriously onto a pyramid of cushions in the corner. And the feast began.

Maud's scared boys served it—not bringing the food all the way, but forming a bucket-brigade line from the kitchen to just inside the gym door and passing the trays along it. From there the soldiers took them, and they flew, wavering wildly, through a forest of reaching arms, hand to hand up to the highest rows. There weren't enough trays to go around, of course, and well before all the tiers were served, plates began to appear—confiscated plates, no doubt. All things considered, it was a pretty efficient operation.

And whether it was from being under their general's eye or some other reason, for a mob of celebrating soldiers they were pretty gentlemanly. That dawned on me against my will when I saw the emptied trays being passed back. And so far as I'd been able to see all day, not a man had made an improper move—not a serious one—toward any of the girls or the women teachers. They looked wild, they sounded wild, but they were better disciplined than any troop of Boy Scouts I'd ever seen.

As fast as the top tiers finished their noisy meals and politely handed in their trays, they started to sing. There must have been a couple of hundred voices joined in by the time I realized that singing was what it was. It puzzled me, the mindless, tuneless, inhuman noise that came out of them, till I realized this must be what passed for music in Turkistan. Then it grated on me, hard. As noise, it was acceptable. As music, it was desecration.

How long we stood there, deserted and ignored, I wasn't sure. Jean beside me held herself stiff as a poker and alert as a sentry, her face awkwardly strained around the gag. For myself, I was aching just to move—longing just to stretch, just to change position, just to shake off the ropes. I shook my head, shifted my feet, flexed my shoulder muscles. I felt like yelling and stamping and throwing a few things. The worst of it was the gag. It was a lot more than uncomfortable; it was insulting.

Meanwhile the show went on. Maybe we were an exhibit ourselves, but we were something else, too. General Arslan was on stage, all right, and playing to a double audience. It wasn't enough that his own men should respond to him like an orchestra; some representatives of Kraftsville had to hear the performance and watch him conduct. Now he was in his glory. He proposed the toasts, he led the songs. The whole gym echoed and reeked with drunken happiness. Still there was a waiting air, an overture feeling, as if there was some expected climax yet to come. And it came.

Arslan, propped on one elbow, swung his glass arm's-length high; at once they were all attending eagerly. He bellowed a few sentences at them, and each one drew its response of cheers and laughter. Then he drained off his drink, shouted a brisk order backstage, and sank again into his cushions.

A long, welling, multitudinous sound rose out of the relative silence that followed his last word; a growing, blossoming, self-renewing disharmony of whistles, laughter, cries, applause. Paula Sears was being led out from the left wing of the stage. Each of her elbows was gripped by a studiously poker-faced soldier. She was naked. She was thirteen years old.

They kneed the coffee table away, to give the spectators an unobstructed line of sight. They forced her down on her knees in front of the couch, and as Arslan's hand went under her arm and clasped her back they released her and sprang aside, each to one end of the couch, and stood there at attention.

The khaki wave-trough of the gym grew suddenly rough and ragged, as men fought for a better view, climbed on chairs and tables, waved their arms enthusiastically. She was struggling, but it was hardly what you could call a contest. Already he had got her stretched out against himself, rolling upon her hard. The noise took on coherence and rhythm, and in a surging chant they cheered him on. When he was through, he heaved himself against the back of the couch, and with one knee and one elbow he nudged her off onto the floor. She lay tumbled there till the two soldiers hauled her up and walked her stumblingly off the stage and down the steps at our end. They passed within a yard of us on their way to the back door. I saw her face, and I saw the blood that drabbled her legs.

That would have been enough; surely, that would have been enough. But no—any man could have raped one little girl. He took time to enjoy another drink. Then he turned his head and gave his sharp order once more. And this time, to their delirious whoops, it was Hunt Morgan who was led naked onstage.

He was walking docilely enough when I first caught sight of him; but from the second he realized the scene that had been set for him, he was fighting. And the troops were crazy with delight. The whole gym shook with their shouting and stamping. Arslan had trouble keeping Hunt under. The boy fought with flailing arms and legs; the soldiers screamed and bellowed with a new ferocity; and I felt my flesh sag with a cold sadness. Then through a lull in the din I heard Hunt's cry—a muffled, wordless squawl of anguish and shame and rage. It was a signal that set off their cheers again.

Jean Morgan was leaned against the wall, not slumped, but tense and quivering, her face drained. They led Hunt off and past us, and he walked upright, not half-collapsed like Paula, not struggling now, either, but with eyes fixed on the floor, his dark hair falling raggedly around his closed face, and his naked shoulders looked thin and pitiful.

When he was gone, and the troops had settled down a little, Arslan stood up. He made a little speech, and they cheered him, and the liquor detail hauled more bottles out from under the stage and started passing them out. A wiry little corporal, serious as a judge, suddenly bounded up on the stage and knelt to tie the lace of Arslan's shoe, and the soldiers guffawed with happy humor. Arslan made as if to pat the man's head, and then bowed gravely to him instead, doubling the joke. Finally he stooped to finish off his last drink, flipped the glass high over his shoulder in a comedian's gesture, and walked down the steps.

He stopped directly in front of us. Whether the bronze of his skin was suntan or native color, it gave him a discordant look of wholesomeness. He was brimming with glee, glowing, disheveled, with heavy, drunken breath; and I swam in pure fury.

He cocked his head at Jean, his eyes crinkling with laughter. “You should be proud of your son, madam. He fights well—well.” He faced me square and laid the flat of his left hand lightly on my chest. Involuntarily I twisted. “You, sir, you give me much pleasure. You are good—good.” And the hand gave one real, very gentle pat. He beamed intensely on us, and passed us by.

In a little while they took us to the teachers’ lounges, unbound and ungagged us, and locked us in. For a long time yet the noises of the feast went on. I lay on the cot, trying to pray away the pain in my stomach and chest, concentrating everything I had on that simple task—to bur away, dissolve, drain out somehow some part of the killing hate that swelled in me. It was too much. It was too much.

Chapter 2

“I have seen your mayor and your aldermen. I have seen your county supervisor and your commissioners. They are not adequate even for normal times. Their government is now dissolved. If they attempt to revive it, they will be executed. You, sir, will work with my officers. I have assigned an interpreter to you. Your task is to convert your district to self-sufficiency.”

It was morning. I was sitting at my desk, and he was sitting on it, or as near as made no difference—perched sideways on the far edge, his right hand planted flat on my papers and his weight leaned on it squarely. “What do you mean, ‘my district'?” The difficulty I had talking to Arslan was physical. My lips and tongue and vocal cords simply resisted. It was obscene and unnatural to use human speech to him.

“Approximately your county. The boundaries will be demonstrated to you. Any citizen attempting to cross those boundaries is liable to execution. Within the few simple rules that I have given, sir, your people are entirely free.”

They were simple enough. Anyone out after sunset (which he considerately defined for me as the moment the sun disappeared below the horizon) was liable to be shot on sight. Anyone resisting or disobeying a soldier was 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.