It was his sneezes that saved him. Sudden, furious, reflexive and unwilled. His entire body was behind them, some good immunological angel so repudiate to the foreign matter trapped in his face that the sneezes brought his neck and head up like the solidest of uppercuts, roundhouses and haymakers, brutally butting Khoraghisinian and catching him, who was already leaning over to receive them, smack in the center of his nose, between his eyes, on each temple and, stretching to evade Mills’s repetitive jackhammer blasts, full in the throat. Khoraghisinian’s neck was broken, the bridge of his nose. His eyes had been pounded deep beneath their sockets and smashed like egg yolks, spread like jelly. Khoraghisinian had been killed instantly.
“Excellent. Good recovery, excellent,” the Soup Man called from his horse. “Fine alertness, Muslim.”
Now, still dazed, Mills used his good friend as a kind of fort — Fort Khoraghisinian, Camp Khory — arranging his old friend’s body about him like a rampart and flattening himself behind it. The melee continued about and above him, a strange, pointless and issueless battle which Mills dreamily contemplated from the shieldy security of his pal’s corpse. He had not bothered — or thought: he was still stunned, still bound by the low conscientiousness of shock — to rub the dung from his eyes and his steaming, teary vision was distorted, not blurred or dulled so much as squeezed and biased with a queer, buckled clarity, like someone’s behind strong new prescription lenses. He perceived the incredible sharpness of blunt objects and instruments, so that rocks seemed thorny to him, cudgels torn from trees serrated, ordinary belts and bits of clothing — buttons, shoelace — sawtoothed. All about him he perceived the cusp of detail. The faces of his companions assumed a sort of tooled devastation. Their awled eyes and axey chins and spiky noses. Their scalpeled teeth and the hair on their heads brambly as barbed wire. Their nettled flesh, the fierce briery and cutting edge of their expressions. Even the sky — it was a bright day — seemed capable of stinging. Only the fighting had no point.
The combatants engaged and disengaged tempestuously, almost restlessly. They flung themselves upon and away from each other as if impatiently seeking something specific and valuable in one another. They were. Their opponent’s weakness like buried treasure. If an adversary seemed capable of absorbing a body blow, his challenger quickly withdrew it, administered instead sharp kicks to the shins, the groin. If he withstood these his assailant abandoned him, changed tactics, sought a more vulnerable victim, great fistfuls of whose hair he might pull at almost as if he were riding bareback at full gallop and clinging to the mane to keep from falling. (Mills wondering how he, the assailant, could bear the pain, the sword edge sharpness of the hairy, glassy shards. He looked for stigmata, bloody palms.)
Meanwhile the Soup Man barked out commands, abuse, encouragements.
“Are you blind? Don’t you see Suleiman has fallen? That he’s rolled to the sidelines? Go after him. Put him out of the picture.
“You, Taurus Konia, you foul mistress of a mildewed eunuch, you sleazeball, you slimy slop jar of an excuse for a man, bite the scuzzy son of a bitch!
“That’s it, that’s the way, Mills, that’s the way to do it. Khoraghisinian’s dead. Use him, use him! Hide in your buddy, use him, live off the land! Did you rob him yet? What? No? What are you waiting for?
“What are the rest of you Muslims waiting for? A comrade has fallen. Have you forgotten the bribegold he carries in case he’s taken prisoner? And what about the rations that must still be on him? It’s not yet lunchtime, the muezzin hasn’t yet called us to midday prayer. His cinch is still good and would make a glorious noose. Are you just going to stand there and let Mills gobble up all the spoils? Rush him. Rush him, you pussies!”
Which brought him out of his daze. Which refocused his eyes. Which detranced him and canceled his lassitude, his tourist’s glum stun, his protective shock like a blast of first aid.
The Janissaries were coming for him and, still behind the fallen Khoraghisinian, he brought himself up on his hands and knees and began to lunge and lurch about like an animal — not like a dog or anything even remotely domestic, nor, for that matter, even like an animal in the wild. Rather he seemed to them, must have seemed to them, like someone stricken with a dazzling terror. But terror would not have stopped them, not even if it had been accompanied — as it was accompanied — by anything so spectacular as the noises now issuing from George Mills’s mouth, if an instrument ordinary as a human mouth could be said to be capable of producing such sounds. Surely, they thought as they pulled up short of the galvanically compelled man loose and lurching now as live wire, he produces those noises in his vitals, his organs, his liver and lungs, his spleen and kidneys and guts and glands.
“After him,” the Soup Man bellows. “Do you think he’s haunted?” But even the commander’s horse shies.
The Janissaries do not think he’s haunted. They recognize the animal analog they had previously perceived. Mills is not terrified. He is outraged. His brutality now is the brutality of bereavement, his bestiality somehow, well, maternal. As though Khoraghisinian were his cub, Khoraghisinian’s corpse something to be defended to the death, all affined biological kindred’s interdictive, no-trespass taboo.
“The bribegold, the bribegold!” the Soup Man calls out. “He carries it too. Fan out, surround him. Smother the bastard.”
And a few of the Janissaries begin to drift away from the main body. Slowly.
They sweep so widely about the flanks of Khoraghisinian’s tautly drawn bow of a form that they seem almost to disperse. Silently, and so very gradually, they sneak-shuffle past him so Mills, glaring round at them, seems to freeze their motion with a glance as if they were subjects in a boy’s game. As soon as he looks elsewhere they are on tiptoe again. Even the Soup Man is silent. Even his horse does not stir. Someone snickers and Mills darts a look behind him, but this time the troopers don’t even bother to suspend their motion. He sees that he is encircled. Taurus Konia holds a dagger in his hand. Suleiman grins from the sidelines where somehow he has managed to survive his tormentors. The Soup Man watches impassively. And sees—
Mills not so much standing, regaining his feet, as actually rearing, rampant as a furious figure in heraldry. He seems suddenly so fierce he might be mortally wounded perhaps, or seized by a peremptory madness. The dung he has not even bothered to remove has dried on his face, assumes some tribal quality of ultimate warpaint. A few bare twigs hang from his nose like an extra row of teeth.
This is the Christian, his fellow recruits think, the fastidious Englishman. How he is transformed!
But he does not apprehend his effect. If Mills is posturing he does not know it. For all the redeemed clarity of his vision, he is unaware of how he must appear to them, is not so much furious or fierce or outraged or maddened or even exalted by his terror as simply alarmed. That they are suddenly so wary — he sees this — he attributes to the complexity of their situation. He has observed their fitful skirmishes, the way they have sought quick advantage, their trial-and-error, upperhand experiments, their sudden disengagements, the violent storms and subsidences of their almost tropical hostility. Their to’s and fro’s like compass work. If they are wary now, he thinks, it is of each other, not of him. He they could dispose of in minutes, seconds. What threat could one Englishman — and that one a Mills, a forty-second or so generated, underwilled survivor on the strength not of strength but of loyalty, good behavior, all the quiet citizen virtues — possibly pose to these elite Paradise Dispatchers?