Remo ran to catch up with him. "You're talking in riddles again. He looked alone to me. Who's with him?"
"We are." He nodded toward the left. Two dark eyes peered out of the foliage. A small hand beckoned them forward. When they arrived at the spot where the boy had stood, he was gone, staring at them from a place beyond.
"He is leading us to the temple."
"We can find our own way," Remo said. "This is no place for a kid."
Chiun sighed. "You forget, my son. He has lived here all his life."
"We can't be responsible for him."
"And so, then, to whom are we responsible?" Chiun's withered old face was suddenly, passionately full of emotion. "I carry the responsibility of a whole village upon my shoulders each day. For whom do you toil, my son? For yourself, who has no family, no home? For me, who already possesses the skills of a thousand men? For your Emperor Smith, perhaps, who loves a country, but cannot see the faces of the people who make up that country?"
A heavy feeling settled into Remo's chest. He did not like to be reminded that he was an outcast. An orphan, raised by nuns. A soldier, returning from a hideous war to no one. A policeman, framed and scapegoated by his peers. And now an assassin with no official identity, no friends, no family. He had been born, it seemed, to dance on the fringes of humanity, never touching the real people of the real world.
"Don't get philosophical on me," he said thickly.
The boy beckoned. They followed.
"He needs a doctor or something," Remo said. "He can hardly walk."
"And yet he struggles to keep ahead of us," Chiun said.
It was true. Through the orchestra of sound that pervaded the jungle at full daylight, Remo could make out the boy's raspy breathing. He was gasping as his footfalls fell harder and more unevenly with each step.
"True strength is not in the muscles of the body," Chiun said. "It is something in the mind, a power that makes the muscles work beyond endurance. That is the difference between man and beast. It is what separates the teachings of Sinanju from the trickery of the lesser martial arts. The boy has strength. The Master respects that."
"Even if he dies?" Remo said with more than a touch of sarcasm.
"Death comes to us all at the appointed time," Chiun said simply. "The boy knows that. Why don't you?"
"For Pete's sake, he's a child. A baby."
"And he is showing us the way," Chiun said, following the trembling, beckoning hands of the boy.
They walked for several hours, the boy darting ahead, silent, waiting. The jungle changed color from green to indigo again, the sunlight blocked out by the thickening foliage.
"One thing I'd like to know," Remo said. "Why are you making such a big deal about this kid? You act like you know him."
"Perhaps I do," Chiun said cryptically. "There is something in his eyes. Maybe what I see there is all the children of Sinanju who were sent back to the sea."
Remo took a deep breath. "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's Oriental sentimentality," he said.
There was a crackle in the forest, nearby. Feet, many feet moving swiftly, intakes and outrushes of breath. The boy's ragged gasp. Chiun leaping ahead like a bird, grasping the boy in one swift motion, hurling the child behind him to safety. Remo's reflexes, like lightning, shooting through his body, melting it to liquid, moving it smoothly, automatically.
Seconds expanding into hours. Time, time enough for everything as Remo's body readied, his senses taking in everything, his mind sorting, storing, reacting. The men— six of them— their naked bodies brown and tough as leather, their faces stained with color to make them look ferocious. At the center of each brown forehead was a black ash dot, the tribal marking.
The Lost Tribes. They fought, not like modern men with soft hands and clumsy legs, but like jungle fighters. Smooth, interchangeable cogs, surrounding the two of them, a circle of black dots, like third eyes peering from the dense greenery. Their weapons were primitive but wielded with precision. The first spear was aimed at Chiun. He caught it in midair and turned it, in the same movement, on the attackers. One fell, screaming. The others did not even seem to notice. The knives came. Slingshots filled with sharp stones.
They kept away. No hand-to-hand. No way to use Sinanju until they were close enough. But they would be close enough. A frontal rolling attack, two of them at once, and...
Remo stopped cold. Two men stepped out in a blaze of the whitest light Remo had ever seen. Behind Chiun, giant trees crashed to earth like broken toothpicks. Yards of moss and dense, low plants turned into smoldering black goo.
In the warriors' hands were weapons. They vaguely resembled the M-16s used during the Vietnam war, but they were sleeker, cleaner looking. The metal they were made of was green and sparkling with newness. The men handled them as if they were made of balsa wood, tossing them onto their shoulders with delicate deftness. When they fired, there was no explosion, no crack as bullets shot out from the barrel. Except for a whining ping like the sounds on a television video game, the weapons worked in silence, sending out beams of blinding light.
"Lasers," Remo whispered, marveling at the destruction wrought by the two weapons.
"Move," Chiun commanded. "Match me."
Automatically Remo obeyed, his body moving opposite Chiun's, circling, crouching, leaving the ground in what would have been a flying tackle if there had been less flying.
They moved so fast that the men with the weapons hadn't even turned their heads to follow them when the assault came, crumpling the two warriors into one another, kicking out at the others who rushed to their flanks, circling, moving, always moving, a cracked spine, a crushed skull, two fingers in the windpipe, a kick that turned one warrior's intestines to jelly.
A weapon was pointed directly at Remo. One stroke, and it lay on the ground in shards. Metal was easy enough to break, but this metal had shattered as if it had been made of glass. Remo finished the man off with a snap of the neck, and then everything was still.
"These things fell apart like Tinker Toys," Remo said, picking up the shattered fragments of the weapon. Only one remained whole. Remo fired experimentally into the air. With a ping, a shaft of light blazed in a visible line from the barrel to the sky. Everything in its path— leaves, branches, even a low cloud— disintegrated. The cloud rumbled once, distant thunder, and then dissipated into thin air. "Well, it works," Remo said.
He placed it in the empty bag he carried, proof for Smith. "Whoever made this thing is light years ahead of us, only..." He squeezed the butt of the rifle between his thumb and his forefinger. It crumbled beneath his touch as if it were made of paper. What kind of weapon was this, sending deadly power from a casing as fragile as butterfly wings?
The boy stepped cautiously out of the brush. His face looked pale beneath the sun-browned skin, his dark eyes wide.
"Do not be afraid, my child," Chiun said gently, extending his arms. The boy took two steps nearer, his left leg dragging uselessly behind the right. Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he fainted.
"Fools," Chiun said angrily. "We have both been fools." He bent over the boy and propped him up in his arms. "He no doubt has not eaten for two days or more. He needs food. Go find us fish, Remo."
"Fish? We left the river six hours ago."
"It has wound around this way," Chiun said stubbornly. "I can smell it."
* * *
Chiun carefully unwrapped the bandage around the boy's knee. Inside, next to the skin, was a poultice made of hundreds of the white flowers he and Remo had seen the night before. They were crushed and fragrant, their effect making Chiun dizzy. He slowed his breathing, watching the boy take in the quieting fumes as he slept. His leg was mangled, hurt beyond repair. The boy would never walk normally.
His parents must have been compassionate indeed, Chiun thought. Few outside of the "civilized" countries of the world, where everyone was forced to live long lives while encouraged to poison themselves with bad food and alcohol and tobacco and medical drugs and worries, would have allowed this child to live. Small, maimed, silent.
Did he speak any language? Did he understand words at all? He must. He said something at the river, one word. Had it just been nonsense, the babbling of an idiot?
The sight of the boy tore at the old man's heart. This lame child, mute and doomed, unreachable, was the lost babies of Sinanju, all of the bright new lives that were never to be. By right, this boy should not have lived, either. But he had somehow escaped the Great Void to be with Chiun and Remo now.
The question was why. Chiun did not know the boy's destiny, but he knew, understood without words, that it was somehow tied in with his own.
He spotted a few of the flowers near where the boy lay. Keeping his breathing slow, he gathered them up and crushed them into a fine paste, which he smeared on a piece of silk torn from his kimono.
The boy had awakened when he got back. In the distance, he could see Remo returning, three fat fish in his hands. Chiun wrapped the bright blue bandage around the boy's knee and knotted it expertly. The boy followed him with his eyes.
"Why have we been brought together, my strange little one?" Chiun said softly. "Is it you who needs, or is it I?"