"You like it," Remo said. "I'm making the rice."
"This is your vacation," Chiun said. "Let them make the rice." He made the brush strokes for Sinanju. The brush itself seemed to make these sacred marks. For several years of the history he was writing, he did not mention that the new master he was training was white. Now he faced the problem of putting that fact into the history without making it look as if he had intentionally withheld it earlier.
He had once toyed with the idea of just never mentioning that Chiun, hopefully one day to be called the Great Chiun, would have passed on the secrets of Sinanju to a white. Nowhere else was the race of each Master of Sinanju mentioned. Was it mentioned that the Great Wang was Oriental? Or that he was Korean or from Sinanju? And what of Pak or We or Deyu? Was it mentioned that these Masters were all from Sinanju in Korea?
Therefore, would Chiun be to blame for not mentioning that Remo was not from the Orient or Korea or Sinanju? Chiun asked himself this question forthrightly. Unfortunately, he was interrupted before he had a chance to tell himself forthrightly that he could not be blamed for anything.
"Little Father," said Remo. "I am angry and I don't know what I am angry about. I knock down walls for no reason. I want to do something but I don't know what I want to do. I feel I am losing something."
Chiun thought silently for a moment.
"Little Father, I'm going insane. I'm losing myself."
Chiun nodded slowly. The answer was clear.
While he would understand it as natural for him and blameless of him not to mention that Remo was white, what would Remo do when he wrote the history of his Masterhood? Would Remo tell that he was white, thus indicating that for years, the Great Chiun had lied? Would Chiun then cease to be the Great Chiun? These things had to be considered.
"So what do you say?" asked Remo.
"About what," said Chiun.
"Am I going crazy?"
"No," said Chiun. "I trained you."
Chiun pressed in a few more brush strokes. Perhaps there might be hints of Remo's whiteness, then a feeling of how Remo became Sinanju and then Korean and, of course, from the village. It could appear that Chiun had found under that ugly white exterior a true Korean, proud and noble.
It could appear that way, but would Remo let it be? He knew Remo. He never felt any shame in his being white. He would never hide it.
"Chiun, I feel strange almost all the time, as if things are out of order in me. Is it my training? Did you ever go through this?"
Chiun put down the brush. "Everything is a cycle. Some things happen so quickly that people do not see them, and others happen so slowly that people do not see them. But when you are Sinanju, you are aware of cycles. You are aware that slow and fast are both invisible. You are aware of anger in yourself that others, in their sloth and their meat-eating and their crude breathing, do not see."
"I took out a wall because I couldn't get room service fast enough, Little Father."
"Did you get it?"
"Yes," Remo said.
"Then you are the first person in the Caribbean ever to get something when he wanted it." Chiun added to the parchment another sign for great teaching. He had many of them in his history.
"I want to do something, anything. This rest is making everything worse," Remo said. He looked out onto the beach. Pure white, stretching miles. Turquoise-blue water. White-bellied gulls with dip and pivot, moving on the sun breezes of the morning. "This place is driving me crazy."
"If you need something, we will study the histories," Chiun said.
"I studied them," said Remo, reeling off the facts of the lineage of the House of Sinanju, starting with the first who had to feed the village and moving on through the centuries to the feats of the Great Wang, the lesser Wang, what each had learned and each had taught and what someday Remo would teach.
"You've never learned tributes," Chiun said. "The very lifeblood of the village of Sinanju has never been learned."
"I don't want to learn tributes, Little Father. I'm not in this for the money. I'm an American. I love my country."
"Eeeeeyah," wailed Chiun, a delicate hand clutching his breast. "Words that stab this bosom. Lo, that I should still hear such ignorance. Where, O great Masters before me, have I gone wrong? That after all these years, a professional assassin should still utter such words?"
"You always knew that," Remo said. "I never cared about the money. If Sinanju needed the money, I would supply it. But you've still got gold statues from Alexander the Great in that mudhole in Korea and they're never going to starve. So we don't have to kill for some make-believe-poor villagers to live."
"Betrayal," said Chiun.
"Nothing new," Remo said. He looked out at that stinking white beach again. He and Chiun had been here for days. Maybe three of them.
"I've got to do something," said Remo. He wondered if he could break a beach. But a beach was already broken. Broken rock or coral in small parts. He wondered if he could put a beach back together again, since it was broken to start with.
"Then let us learn tribute. Or, as an American merchant might say, billing and accounts receivable."
"I am so jumpy, even that. Okay. Let's go through tribute. You don't have to use English. You taught me Korean."
"True, but I am beginning to mention in my histories that sometimes the language of English was used in my training of you."
"Only now? Why now, when now I'm learning only in Korean and at first I learned only in English?"
"Get the scroll," said Chiun.
The scroll was in one of the fourteen steamer trunks Chiun always had moved from residence to residence. Only two were needed for his clothing and the rest carried mostly bric-a-brac but also many of Sinanju's scrolls. Chiun had tried putting the scrolls on a computer once but the computer had erased a page with his name on it and Chiun had erased the computer salesman.
Remo found the first scroll of tribute which included geese and goslings, barley and millet and a copper statue of a god now dead.
By the time they were into Cathay kings and gold bullion, Remo's mind was wandering. When they got to a point that Chiun said was the most important of all so far, Remo got up to cook the rice.
"Sit. This is most important." And Chiun told about a prince who was willing to pay, but not publicly.
"Is that the last?" Remo said.
"For today, yes," Chiun said.
"Okay. Go ahead," said Remo. He wondered if gulls thought. And if they thought, what did they think? Did sand think? Was the rice really fresh? Should he wear sandals that day? All these things he thought while Chiun explained that it must never be thought that an assassin was not paid, because then others would try not to pay. This had happened once and it was why this one prince had to be chased throughout the known world.
"One defense after another, until six of his defenses were shown to be useless; from one land to another, thus showing Rome and China and Crete and the Scythians that Sinanju was not to be dishonored."
"So where was he killed?" asked Remo.
"He didn't have to be killed. The purpose was to defend the sacred immutable truth that an assassin must be paid. While you, you don't even care about tributes and then you complain to me that you are going crazy."
"What happened to that prince who didn't pay?" Remo asked again.
"He was shorn of kingdom and safe place to sleep, shorn of glory and honor, sent like a thief into the night, cringing like the lowest vermin."
"Did we miss?" Remo asked. "Did Sinanju miss?"