Free Arslan by M. J. Engh Page B

completely off limits to me, where he presumably slept and certainly practiced his obscenities. What this came to in terms of practical living was one continual aggravating hassle. The bathroom had to serve a minimum of eleven people, counting Arslan's bodyguard, and with the daily and nightly comers and goers there seemed to be no maximum.
    It cost me an effort to open my bedroom door in the morning; and coming back to the house from outside, I could feel my neck prickle as soon as I got near the front walk. I had had that house built when I could ill afford it, when Luella and I were first married, the year after I came back to Kraftsville for good; and nobody but my family and myself had ever lived in it, and nobody had ever set foot in it without my invitation till now. And now I might as well have invited a circus in.
    None of his soldiers lived in the house, strictly speaking. But there was an orderly forever popping up (the same corporal who had jumped onto the stage to tie his shoe), and there was a bodyguard of six men attending him every moment of the day and night. I counted seventeen individual guards, once I learned to tell them apart. They relieved each other according to some complicated system of rotation, so there always seemed to be a different combination of them on duty. “If it was my bodyguard,” I told Luella, “I'd have them set up in teams. You can train a team to work together.”
    “It does seem inefficient this way,” she agreed. But maybe it wasn't. They kept on their toes; they didn't all get bored at once. Besides, it meant sharing the goodies all round. Because that bodyguard was with him enough to make voyeurism one of the main fringe benefits of their job.
    Betty Hanson was still cloistered, if the word can be applied, in the northwest room. A cot had been brought in for her, and—after I insisted on it to Arslan—Luella's sewing machine had been brought out. Luella cooked her meals, but one of the bodyguards always carried them up. As far as we were concerned, she might as well have been invisible. Even her trips to the bathroom were guarded sneak operations.
    I could have wished, if only for Luella's sake, that she was inaudible, too. She seemed to go into an explosion of some sort every few days—screams of what might have been fear or pain, sounding unpleasantly genuine sometimes; or long, heartbroken wails of sorrow; but most often just an outburst of assorted hysterics. There wasn't anything to be done about it, short of suicide, so I got into the habit of ignoring these commotions right away. There was enough on my mind that I could do something about. But it was hard on Luella, no question of that.
    Maybe it didn't mean anything, but I noticed that Hunt Morgan rated a real bed, even if it was just a little rollaway. I didn't ask for my record player out of that room; I thought it might be of some help to him. But I never heard it play except when Arslan was in there. There were no disturbances from Hunt. I'd have felt better if there had been.
    Arslan must have been born in a crowd—or maybe picked up in the middle of a desert. Whatever the reasons, he couldn't seem to get too much of human company. He was literally never alone, as far as I could tell, or not more than five minutes at a time now and then.
    Not just human company, either, and not just the horses. Sam Tuller told me the fairground camp was full of dogs and puppies; and in a very short time my house was, too. “Every time he goes out in that Land Rover,” Luella complained to me, “he brings back another animal.” The first pup was a beagle. The next was a bluetick hound. Then came a German shepherd bitch with a litter of puppies that didn't look much like German shepherds. In between he had picked up half a dozen kittens and Paula Sears's pet monkey. All of them except the monkey had the run of the house, and all of us were under orders to let them in or out whenever they wanted—which wasn't the kind of