Arslan (38 page)

What had happened in religion was funny. The regular churches had just faded away without much fuss during Arslan's first occupation—oh, some of them had shown signs of life longer than others—as if the ban on meetings had been the excuse they were waiting for. Most people had either lost their religion or preferred to exercise it privately. Even when meetings were possible again, the churches hadn't come back to life, in spite of all the attempted revivals. But the Last Days was different. It started out as just another revival, but people were swept up by it. It had one main doctrine: that Jesus Christ would come to judge the quick and the dead pretty darn soon, while there were still some quick left. Which made as much sense, when you came to think about it, as a lot of other doctrines I'd heard in my life.

“What's he telling those boys?” I asked Hunt, and he answered dryly, “Whatever they want to hear.” Hunt didn't like the way the boys had started to flock to Arslan like flies to honey. For a little while Arslan had been all his—profoundly and poignantly his. “Isn't it obvious?” he added. “He's collecting a gang.”

No, after all, maybe the strength was on Arslan's side again. At least he had certain advantages. He offered those restless kids a freedom that amounted to riot and the discipline of the wolf pack. I couldn't match that.

Sanjar was finding Arslan's new role a little hard to take, too. He was doggedly adoring—whenever he had a chance to be—but the betrayed look in his eyes told it better. Arslan's new playmates were a far cry from the troopers who had made Sanjar their mascot. These boys were boys; that was the long and the short of it. They didn't have enough years on Sanjar (and, God knows, not enough security) to see him as anything but a competitor. The fact that he could do practically anything as well as any of them—anything that didn't demand weight or sexual development—just made it worse. And Arslan was no help. I'd used to think, when Sanjar was a three-year-old with a talent for finding trouble, that Arslan was trying to toughen him up. Now I was beginning to wonder if he just didn't give a damn.

By the end of September they were moving in. Arslan had finished his fortifications and fixed up enough of the interior to make a little livable spot. It was like moving into a half-built house, but he knew what he was doing. The boys he was wooing had to have work to do—otherwise the whole setup would have fallen apart in a hurry—and this was the only work he had to offer them. So far, at least.

I wasn't surprised when Hunt silently packed up his belongings and plodded across the street. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd stayed put, either; but since he'd made up his mind to go, it behooved him to go early and get himself established on Arslan's right hand.

Once Arslan, Hunt, and Sanjar were well bedded down in what had been the A-V room on the second floor, the boys started moving in, two or three at a time. A few of the parents came to me, either threatening or appealing, to try to get their sons home again, but Arslan was ready for that, too. If the boys were eighteen, they had a legal right to live anyplace they chose; and if they were younger, he didn't let them actually move in unless they got their parents’ consent in writing. He wasn't prepared to fight Kraftsville.

“People ask me why the dickens we didn't shoot him when we had the chance.” Leland Kitchener was too tactful to put his question more directly. “Looks like we could have had a trial to make it legal.”

“We could have.”

“Had to hang him then, I guess,” Leland added thoughtfully. “But I reckon he'd find his way home either way—sniff his way along by the smell of the brimstone.”

“Leland, when I accept a man into my house, he's entitled to all the protection I can give him.”

He rubbed his jawbone pensively. “We might of had somebody waiting for him when he come out.”

“Well, the thing is this, Leland. Arslan hasn't committed any crimes as a private citizen, and we don't have the authority to try him for war crimes. And even if we did, what good would it do? From here on in, he
is
a private citizen, and nothing more than a private citizen. He's entitled to the same rights as anybody else.”

He thought that over and then grinned his sly, sweet grin. “You mean when he's got a army we
can't
get him, and when he don't, we ain't supposed to?”

“That's about the size of it.”

Of course Arslan would never be exactly a private citizen. But he'd come a long way down since the day he drove me out on the Morrisville road.

“At least you got Hunt Morgan to tell you what goes on in there.”

“I don't rely too much on what Hunt Morgan tells me, Leland. He's let me down a few times too many.” Which wasn't entirely accurate. Hunt was useful enough, but even without him, it would have been pretty clear where Arslan was heading.

He was a politician now. A real politician. It wasn't hard to make fun of everything the government did, and mockery was one of Arslan's specialties. People were ready for that—people were always ready for that kind of thing. He didn't make fun of the KCR, though; in fact, to the extent that he had any public position on the subject, you could say he supported the KCR.

He kept his boys well enough in line not to cut himself off from the rest of the population. (Plenty of hard drinking and hard riding, but no vandalism of private property. Plenty of flirting, and probably seductions, but no rapes.) The next step would be to start offering the same services as the KCR. Already people with a grudge or a gripe—and there were always those—were starting to think of Arslan as a man who might know how to run things better. “Nizam was behind a lot of that business before.” I don't know how many times I heard it. “Things are different now. Arslan knows he's got to behave himself. He's only alive by the good will of the county.” That was as much as they needed—just an excuse for not shooting him on sight. Arslan's position in Kraftsville was a little like Hunt's, now; people didn't have to accept him to do business with him.

“He's on city property, Mr. Bond. Looks like we got a right to evict him.”

“Maybe we've got the right, Leland, but he's got the arsenal.” As soon as he'd collected enough reliable recruits to garrison his new quarters, he had dispatched Hunt and Sanjar with a couple of boys to some cache farther east, and they had come back loaded with automatic rifles and ammunition.

What Leland was really asking, and a lot of other people, too, was why I'd stood by and
let
Arslan set himself up as an independent power. Well, there was no way they could have understood the answer—or appreciated it if they had. Arslan wasn't going to take over the world a second time, and I was ready to swear he wasn't going to take over Kraftsville. If it ever came to fighting, I knew how to crack his famous fortifications (Hunt was useful, all right). And besides, there was a lot of solid power in that school, and I didn't want to see it wasted. Putting Arslan out of action for good would be too much like cutting off my right hand.

Chapter 27

Leland Kitchener himself brought the alarm, and Leland never wasted much time on introductory remarks.

“There's a gang riding down this way from somewhere upstate. We're in trouble, Mr. Bond. Only good thing, the General could be in trouble, too. Looks like his little plan went
pffft
.”

“Let's have it.”

“A girl up there got pregnant.”

My throat and chest tightened. My stomach felt frozen. “How do you know? What happened?”

“Got the word from Colton. Don't know where they got it from—nor how much you can believe of it. Must not have been a very smart girl. She tried to get rid of it. Killed the baby, and herself, too. Or maybe that's what she had in mind. Anyway, the thing is, she wasn't what you'd call a decent girl. And they got a theory up there, somebody got a theory, it was by her having so many
different
gentlemen friends she got the baby.”

I turned my head in disgust and spat into the dead grass (something I wouldn't have done, anywhere, while Luella was alive). “It won't hold much water, Leland.”

“No, I guess not. Not when you think about the girls in the houses. But I hear that's the theory.”

“What are they doing about it?”

“What they're doing about it is, they've organized themselves a kind of a army. A bunch of them are just riding around the country, taking a town at a time.”

“I don't get it.” But I did get it, by premonition.

“Seems like they take that theory as gospel. And they're spreading the gospel.”

“Where are they?”

“They'd have been here by now, only they veered off north of Colton. You know they got to stop and recuperate now and then.”

“All right, Leland, pass it on. Not everything you've told me—just a KCR alert. I'm going to see Arslan.”

It was apparently news to him, and interesting news, but it didn't seem to bother him. He said nothing—politely—but the corner of his mouth tucked in with amusement. The idea of a troop of dedicated rapists, riding out to save the world by force, had to appeal to him. Salvation through violation—it was a concept that suited Arslan, even when it meant salvation from him.

“So much for Plan Two,” I said as viciously as I knew how.

“Perhaps. At worst, it was worth a try.” And he gave me the old bland look of half-surprise. It only needed the caption:
What fools these mortals be
.

I stood and leaned my palms on his desk, leaned far over to him. “You stinking bastard,” I shouted into his face, “I'm going to round up all the women and children in this county and I'm going to bring them here, and you're going to defend them or die trying, and if you don't I'm going to kill you—I don't know how, but I'll kill you by quarter-inches!”

And he laughed—a big, open, joyful laugh that tossed his head back and pointed his beard at me. “Hurry,” he said. “No men, no boys who can fight. We can't take more than a thousand. Sanjar will go to scout out these raiders of yours.”

It was the biggest single operation we'd had to handle in years, and we weren't really geared for that kind of an operation any more. I'd said “all the women and children,” but in fact we only needed to bring in the women of child-bearing age—stretching it a little on both ends, of course. We released as much ammunition as we could afford to people with families to protect—those that wouldn't be likely to waste it—but we took nothing to the school. The rest of our little stock would be safe where it was, and Arslan could spare bullets better than we could.

Well before sundown we had the school crammed full. We had brought in practically all of the girls—the very youngest, after all, were already twelve—and women and girls were all over everywhere. Every room, every hall, every other step of every staircase. It would have been impossible to conduct a defense, or anything else, in such a mob. Arslan's answer was to set two of his boys to painting boundary lines. (They had turned up some usable paint in the course of their remodeling, and Hunt had done good work with it.) A bright stripe down every staircase reserved a broad passageway “for authorized personnel,” as Arslan put it. Stripes on the floors packed the crowd into the rear of the classrooms and against the corridor walls; the window areas were off limits to them, along with generous aisles that would make it easy for the defenders to get around in a hurry.

One of the things Arslan's gang had done was take out most of the basement floor. The concrete slabs had been put together on the remaining part to form a rainwater cistern, fed from the gutters by a pipe that came in through a convenient chink. In the dank subsoil they had excavated a large-scale latrine. The school was ready for a siege.

If the raiders had guns or explosives, there might be one; otherwise, it looked like no contest. Arslan was as serious about the Battle of Kraftsville School as if the fate of the world depended on it. He hadn't hesitated to hand out automatic weapons to my men, with a little lecture on how to use them. The KCR was manning the first floor and the basement, with a few monitors scattered through the crowd of females to keep them in line. Arslan's boys were bubbling like a pot of soup, full of pepper and hotter than sin. This was what they'd been waiting for all their lives—all summer, anyway. Arslan himself looked a good ten years younger and ten pounds heavier.

“What happens if nothing happens?” I asked him. “These kids can't keep the steam up very long. Ten to one there won't be any attack tonight, and tomorrow they'll be down.”

He fairly chortled. “There will be an attack tonight. At least, it is very probable.” And it occurred to me that Sanjar had never returned from his scouting.

“When's Sanjar getting back?”

“When he is ready.”

So Sanjar was dropping some kind of bait to bring the raiders hot on his tracks. There was a lively blaze now in the big fireplace where the furnace used to be, and there must have been plenty of smoke coming out of the chimney. They wouldn't have any trouble finding us—and just in case they did, Arslan was already having the lamps lit on the top floor.

They came without much commotion, riding down Pearl Street at an easy pace. There must have been about a hundred. They pretty nearly filled the block, not solidly, but in ragged clumps. At the southwest corner of the schoolground they stopped and bunched up into a dense mass. “Why not fire now?” I didn't see how we'd ever get a decent shot, otherwise, in the dusk.

Arslan shook his head. We were watching from a second-floor window. “No. We shall get a better return for our bullets.” And he added, not as casually as he seemed to think, “Sanjar may be with them.”

For all the orders of silence, the crowd inside kept up a steady buzz of noise. Everything considered, they were being pretty quiet, but you couldn't expect that many women to be soundless. The horsemen were talking, but there was no hope of hearing anything they said.

Now they started their move, still not in much of a hurry. Maybe twenty-five or thirty of them peeled off and came across the parking lot at what started as a walk and ended as a fast trot, bringing up at the south door in a flurry of shouts. “Now!” Arslan bellowed. His boys were hanging half out of the second and third-floor windows; the line of fire was practically straight down. Arslan himself was fairly mortised into the window frame, his hip on the sill, the light rifle making one stiff vertical rod with his left arm and shoulder. One momentary burst of fire was enough; then he was yelling, swearing at his boys furiously, and the shooting sputtered out. The poor fools outside hadn't exactly expected this kind of treatment, judging from the screams. A belated volley of missiles came from the main body in the road—rocks, or something just as futile. I felt like the U.S. Cavalry in an old western.