A thousand horses came to snorting, stamping rest around the two whites. Clouds of warm air from their nostrils puffed out into the cold Siberian air. "Oh Skirah spirit, what have you come for, what can we give you to appease you, to honor you so that you will leave our souls in peace and seek others?"
"Get your horses back, they smell. The whole horde smells like a shit farm," said the white man in the older tongue used at the time of Genghis Khan himself.
"How many languages do you speak?" whispered Anna. She had seen Remo kill before, and all of it looked so smooth, it could have been someone stacking crates at an hourly wage.
"I dunno," answered Remo in English. "You read the scrolls, you pick up dozens of languages. Sinanju needed them for work."
"I presume, darling, that's Mongolian," said Anna.
"No. The horde spoke a dialect peculiar to Genghis Khan's tribe."
"How many words do you know?"
"If you know to tell them to move their smelly horses back, you've got fifty percent of everything you ever need to tell a Mongol," said Remo, and in the language Chiun had taught him during a training session outside Dayton, Ohio, while Remo was still learning basic breath, he said:
"Horses, move backward. Back. And you there. Clean up the droppings. Don't litter the tundra. Bunch of dirty dogs. Back."
A warrior dismounted, and quickly gathered a loose plop of goo in a skin.
"You didn't have to use your hands. We may be eating supper with you. On second thought, if you've only got yak meat, we'll do without. I'm looking for someone."
"Whom, Skirah, do you seek?"
"He calls himself Mr. Arieson and I think he should be around here."
"Arieson?"
"Thick neck. Beard. Blazing eyes. Hard to put a spear through. Probably impossible."
"Oh, you mean our friend Kakak."
"White?" asked Remo.
"What else is the color of ugly dead flesh?" asked Huak.
"Do you want to stay on that horse or would you like to blend in with the tundra?" said Remo.
"I did not mean to dishonor your color, Skirah. Come with us and take your glorious bride spirit with you. Our encampment is not far away."
"Ride ahead and clear the horses out. I don't want to be downwind from you guys."
"As you say, Skirah," said Huak to Remo.
"Who is Skirah?" asked Anna.
"One of their spirits. Maybe the way they pronounce Sinanju."
"I think I understand. Religion, spirits, and gods are the way people explain to themselves what they don't understand. So when Genghis Khan died at the hands of Sinanju, they explained it away as a bad spirit. And it had to be a great bad spirit because Genghis Khan was great. It's all logical. Everything in the world is logical, except we don't always understand the logic right away. Don't you think?"
"We're walking behind eight hundred horses, and you're thinking about rational explanations for myths?" asked Remo.
"What should I be thinking about?"
"Where you're stepping," said Remo.
Anna felt a sudden warm moistness up around the calf of her boot. She realized Remo could be brilliant at times.
But there was something far more sinister on the tundra. As they approached the encampment, great gaping cracks appeared around them, parallel paths chewing up the frost-white earth, churning up frozen blackness underneath. Something had passed here very recently, and it used treads. Tanks.
But the Mongols of the horde did not use tanks, at least not to Anna's knowledge. With modern equipment like that, these horsemen-invincible in the frozen wastes of Siberia-could theoretically overrun Europe, something they could not do with Genghis Khan.
Then again, the family that had stopped him was back again. He might stop them before they broke out.
Unless, thought Anna, the treads were not made by Mongol-driven tanks at all. Maybe it is something worse.
And as soon as they saw the encampment, Anna knew the worst had happened. Walking freely among the Mongols were Russian soldiers and officers. Thousands of them. She saw them with their arms around the shoulders of the Mongols, and vice versa.
That meant the prohibition against whites was not universal. The Russian soldiers had somehow earned the friendship of the Mongols, and considering the Mongol mentality and the military mentality, she was fairly certain how it happened.
"Remo, ask the leader why they are friendly with Russians now."
She heard Remo call out to the backs of the hundreds of horsemen and one of them turned around and galloped back. She heard Remo ask questions in that strange tongue and saw many hand motions on the part of the Mongol.
Remo translated as the Mongol spoke.
"There was a great battle, not in numbers but in spirit. The whites showed they did not fear death. They only feared dishonor. They showed a love of battle and a love of war."
Anna nodded. It was all coming together now. Remo continued:
"They did not fight as whites ordinarily do, to steal something, to protect something, or just to save their miserable lives. They fought for the honor of fighting. These are the first whites who understood war."
"He mentioned that name for Arieson. Kakak."
"No," said Remo. "That is their name for war. Mr. Arieson, I guess quite logically, means war."
"That's the only thing he seems to mean," said Anna. So elements of the Russian army had joined the Mongol horde. And she was fairly certain how they would pull off this war with America. And they just might win it, even without the use of nuclear weapons.
They could pour over the Bering Strait supported by ships from the Vladivostok naval station that had sailed north. It would not be easy, but since America always suspected an attack against Europe and not its own borders, then they could be taken by surprise. What forces did America have to oppose the Russians? Nothing but what was in Alaska, and the trek up through Canada would be almost as long as Russia's trek to its borders. They could battle down through Canada, and with the spirit of these soldiers, they could just as well win.
What was she thinking? Was she insane? Was she so marrow-deep a Russian that she thought they would win something by conquering America?
How could they occupy a country of two hundred and forty million, moving their forces not only through Siberian transit but down across Canada as well? They would also have to conquer Canada. And should that even be possible, should moving the troops be as easy as moving from Minsk to Pinsk, why on earth would they think that occupying America would do them any good? To be free of a competitor with nuclear weapons? There would surely be another, and if Russia should attain its age-old dream of conquering the world, anyone who knew how men traditionally ran things had to understand that the world would have to split up into two camps and there could just as easily be a war between Russia East and Russia West.
No, this had to be stopped here. This had to be stopped now. And she was grateful that the man beside her, this glorious, handsome, wonderful anachronism, was the only man to do it.
As for Mr. Arieson, she was sure there was a logical explanation for this creature that had not occurred to Remo or his rather intelligent superior, Harold W. Smith.