From the words Zhang Zingzong had overheard pass between the old Korean and the Mongol who dared to call himself khan, he knew that they were on the site of Karakorum, which had been razed by the Chinese Army in 1382, after the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty that had ruled China.
He prayed they had reached the end of their quest. He was sick of eating rancid Mongol food.
The Master of Sinanju finished his inspection of the tortoise, which was less than a man high and longer than a full-grown horse. It weighed perhaps a ton.
So when the Master of Sinanju stepped behind the tortoise and slipped off his padded jacket to expose his spindly arms, Zhang Zingzong let the cigarette dangle from his slackening lips unsmoked.
The Master of Sinanju sucked in a lung-paralyzing quantity of cold Mongolian air, expelling it with sudden violence. More air came in, and was released. His old-ivory face reddened and then, eyes brighter than seemed possible for mere eyes to become, he put his shoulder to the tortoise's blunt backside.
The dirt protested. Then the tortoise began to move.
Boldbator the Mongol, seeing it lurch forward, fell in next to the Master of Sinanju, even though his strength made the tortoise move no faster.
Then, overcome by a sense of history, Zhang Zingzong joined them. He braced his shoulder and began pushing with his long legs. The tortoise kept sliding, pushing dirt ahead of its lifted throat.
Zhang felt the hard ground under his straining feet turn soft. They had exposed fresh ground, which had been disturbed by the undershell of the stone tortoise.
"It moves now," Boldbator grunted. "But not only through time, eh?"
The Master of Sinanju said nothing. His breathing came in surges. Each inhalation was a pause. Each exhalation seemed to inch the tortoise ahead another half-foot.
At length, ground that had not seen sunlight in generations lay in the dying red light of the Mongolian sun.
It looked like ordinary dirt.
Sweating in his fur-lined clothes, Boldbator Khan stepped around it, kicking tiny stones away with a boot.
Zhang, breathing hard, reached for a pack of cigarettes.
"The ground is hard," Boldbator told the Master of Sinanju without emotion.
"We are harder," Chiun said.
Boldbator retrieved his sword from his mount. On hands and knees, he crawled over the exposed ground, probing it with the point of his sword.
"Nothing," he said forlornly.
"Let me," said Chiun, taking the sword from him.
The Master of Sinanju took the sword in both hands and, holding it perpendicular to his body, walked back and forth the length of the patch of exposed earth.
The sword quivered each time he walked over a certain point, but nowhere else.
The Master of Sinanju raised the sword overhead and with a sudden cry brought it down.
It sank into the ground to its very hilt.
"Here!" cried the Master of Sinanju. "Dig here."
Boldbator Khan walked up to his sword and began to wrestle with it. It refused to budge at first, but by dint of main strength he got it to work back and forth, loosening the hard frozen ground.
As the sun set on them, he used his sword to excavate a deep hole as the Master of Sinanju stood watching, saying nothing, except to remark to Zhang Zingzong that if he intended to wither his lungs with tobacco stink, that was his business, but to burn them downwind.
Zhang wandered off, and like a peasant, squatted in the dust, smoking cigarette after cigarette, his eyes intent, his face without expression.
He felt useless. The Mongols despised him. Even the Master of Sinanju treated him ill. He wished he had never left China in the first place. He had been a hero there.
True, Zhang Zingzong never really believed himself a hero. He had been a simple student who, in the white-hot aftermath of the Battle of Beijing, had stepped into the path of a T-55 tank column, unthinking, only hating. The shamed tank drivers had lost face and he had melted into the crowds. A tiny victory, nothing more. Everyone else called him hero. And the PLA branded him a counterrevolutionary.
Zhang Zingzong had lost his life, his wife, and his freedom. He had been hunted from Paris to New York. The West wanted to make of him a symbol of bravery, but Zhang had felt only fear after Tiananmen. Only the treasure of Temujin promised hope. He felt like a failure among these fearless Mongols. Sometimes he wished the tanks had ground him into dust with the true heroes, the martyrs.
It was two hours later that Boldbator Khan, while driving his sword deeper, felt the vibration of steel against something hard and resisting. It felt as if the blade were running through bone.
"I have struck something, O Master!" he called.
The Master of Sinanju padded forward unhurriedly. But his controlled movement bespoke his eagerness, as did his bright, avid eyes.
Boldbator withdrew his sword, offering it to the old Korean. Chiun disdained it with a wave and sank to his knees in the pit.
He drove one spindly arm into the cold disturbed soil and his fingers rooted around, his eyes shut.
At length he excavated a round dirt-caked object. His wrinkled visage was alight with a keen joy. His eyes became wide with anticipation, as his long nails dragged clods of dirt from the long-buried artifact.
The last crumb of dirt hit the ground. Chiun's eyes widened to their furthest. Then they squeezed with a sudden lid-tightening contraction.
"Aiieee!" he wailed, his mouth going round with despair.
Boldbator leaned down. Zhang ran up, losing his half-smoked cigarette.
"Another skull," Boldbator said bitterly.
"Another riddle!" Chiun spat. "Another stupid riddle. Had your ancestors nothing better to do than carve riddles in bone?"
Boldbator stiffened, but had no reply.
"What does this one say?" Zhang Zingzong asked in Mandarin.
The Master of Sinanju brushed the brow clean. The crown of the skull was broken, where Boldbator's sword cracked it. A jagged lightninglike fracture fissured the brow, but the ideographs were decipherable.
Chiun read them aloud.
" 'Now that you have beheld the seat of my mighty power, go to the lands that I have conquered. In Five-Dragon Cave you must walk the left path, or the false path will claim you.' "
He repeated the riddle in Mongolian for Boldbator's benefit.
"I have never heard of Five-Dragon Cave," Boldbator said.