Stanley Elkin - George Mills

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?

So their wariness — and this bothers George, seems to proviso and moderate still further this already mitigated man — is only a sort of extemporized battle plan. First they will kill him. Easy work. No sooner said than done. What are the odds? Twenty against one? Twenty-five? He is momentarily outraged — more Englishness; perhaps his fellow recruits have his number after all — by the sheer unfairness of his situation. Even the Soup Man, who has complimented him, who has given him high marks for his alertness (though to tell the truth he had not quite taken in at the time what his commander had meant), has sanctioned his slaughter. (And this English too, his complacent pride not so much in distinguishing himself as in pleasing a superior.) So. They will kill him. Steal his bribegold, Khoraghisinian’s. Harvest their corpses for anything of value — matches, a heel of bread, rope, the oranges both carry. What holds them back is what comes next. The free-for-all, that winner-take-all frenzy of their terrible tontine arrangements. Surely, Mills thinks, this is why they stare at him, glance furtively at one another. They are sizing each other up, remembering the power in that one’s fingers, this one’s arms. Dead reckoning will, viciousness. Savages, Mills thinks. They’re savages.

The Soup Man sees Mills squat over Khoraghisinian’s body, the dead man momentarily disappearing beneath the flowing cape George Mills wears. He sees Mills’s quick movements but they’re obscured by his robe and he cannot make them out. Quite suddenly there is blood, but it seems almost of a different color and viscidity than that which flows from the wounds of punctured men. He can’t tell, but it seems cooler.

Mills is standing. He turns in what seems to the troopers a magic circle. Khoraghisinian’s entrails lie gleaming in his left hand. The shit-encrusted bribegold shines in his right. He holds out both.

“We were friends,” he intones. He speaks extra slowly in his new, barely mastered tongue so that he may be understood. He turns so that all might hear him. He means to mollify them with guts and gold and stench. He means to curry favor, to bribe them with atrocity. “We were friends,” he says again of the man whose body he has just mutilated. “At the last minute, at the last minute I remembered something he told me once when we were on fire guard. ‘Bribegold must be well hidden.’ We were friends. He was wily. I frisked his shift and groped his robes. I did his duds like a dowser. ‘ Well hidden,’ he said. And it came to me he must have swallowed it. See,” Mills says and he raises his arms still higher, bringing his palms together in which Khoraghisinian’s bowels slosh, collision and shift like so much damp, dark, swollen seaweed beneath his offering, the surgical, amputate bribegold steaming like carrots in soup.