Arslan – Mary Jane Engh

When his name first cropped up in the news reports, it was just one more foreign name to worry about, like so many others. And like so many others, it graduated in due time to the level of potential crisis. But before it had gone any further than that, suddenly all the rules had been changed when we weren’t looking, and if he said ‘he’ without an obvious antecedent you were talking about Arslan.On TV and in the news weeklies he’d looked no different from a lot of them: young, jaunty, halfway Oriental like the second-row extras in Turandot, and every one of them a major general at the very least. ‘Turkistan – is that independent now?’ Luella had asked me, one of the first times he showed up.

‘I think it always has been.’ I meant to look it up in the big atlas at school; but I was busy…. I never did get around to it till after the Emergency Broadcast Network began its terse announcements that martial law had been proclaimed throughout the United States and that all US armed forces were under the command of General Arslan.