"Coatlicue!" he gasped, rushing to her side.
She stood as always, hulking, resolute, seemingly indestructible, as all around the walls shook and glass cases danced, breaking the precious pottery and firedclay figures of the old cultures.
The building walls were all but screaming now. The hard marble floor cracked and heaved under Lujan's stumbling feet.
"Coatlicue! Coatlicue! What is happening?"
Coatlicue stood firm and unmovable as the rumble grew to a roar and outside, the entire metropolis began to scream in a million voices, only some of them human. Glass was breaking in cascades. But Lujan had no thought for the irreplaceable treasures that were being forever shattered.
He cared only for the goddess who was all.
"Coatlicue. Coatlicue. Speak to me!" he cried in Spanish.
But Coatlicue remained mute until she began to shift on her thick tree-trunk feet.
"What is happening, meat machine?" she asked in unaccented English.
"It is an earthquake, Coatlicue. The ground is shaking."
"I am no longer safe here."
"No. No. You are safe."
Then a wall buckled, and great chunks of stone made a dusty pile that belied the truthfulness of Rodrigo Lujan's words.
"Survive," Coatlicue began saying. "Must survive. Instruct me how to maximize my survival."
"Quickly! We must leave the building before it falls about our ears. Come this way."
And with an awful grinding that was music to Lujan's ears, Coatilcue's feet separated at the vertical seam, and like a stone elephant, she took a step with one stone-taloned foot.
The floor buckled. She froze as if gyroscopes were spinning and compensating for her imbalance. The foot dropped down with a shuddery thud. The other foot lifted, stepped forward less than a foot and dropped heavily beside the other.
Rodrigo Lujan was ecstatic.
"Yes, yes, you can walk. You must walk. Come, follow me."
Coatlicue took another step. And another. They came more quickly now. Lumbering, as heavy as a truck, she thudded a foot at a time, one foot at a time, toward the beckoning figure of Rodrigo Lujan.
"Hurry, hurry. The ceiling is crumbling."
Plaster rained down. More debris. It was terrible, but amid this terror was a raw beauty that struck Rodrigo Lujan's worshipful eyes. His goddess was walking. Before his eyes she was striding purposefully for the outside and safety.
The courtyard beckoned. There the great concrete mushroom-shaped fountain lay on its side, bubbling water. She splashed through the wreckage, grinding concrete shards to powder with every ponderous step.
The great glass entry doors stood in ruins. She hobbled toward them. They shattered before her immense bulk.
"Yes. Like that. Be careful. O Coatlicue, you are magnifico!"
Out on the grass, she came to a stop. Her head, a broad glyph of two kissing serpents, now parted. The heads, though stone, became stiffly flexible. They looked around like a gecko lizard's independent eyes, one head going this way and the other that.
Twin serpents of stone, they seemed to see all that was going on around them. Lujan also stared. And what he saw filled him with wonder and infinite terror.
It was worse than the '85 quake. It was a city falling into ruin-the earth shook and shook and shook while to the southeast Popocatepetl rumbled and belched a volume of ash that darkened the overhead sky like a filthy brown pall.
"Look, Coatlicue! Your brother Popocatepetl is coming to life! All of old Mexico is coming to life. The new is being overthrown and dashed into the cold, unforgiving earth. The old is resurgent, ascendant, invincible!"
And as the thunder of volcanic activity and the rumble of the unstable earth merged into a growling howl of sound, on the lawn of the Museum of Anthropology, Coatlicue stood resolute, her animate serpent heads twisting about, mouthing one word over and over again in a grinding voice.
"Survive, survive, survive..."
Chapter 4
Remo was still feeling good when he arrived home later that afternoon. He felt so good that the sight of the fieldstone monstrosity he called home almost looked good to him.
It took up a huge corner lot bide a sandstone high school. The place had been a church at one time, later subdivided into condo apartments. The roofline was crowded with dormer windows. Instead of a steeple, a squat stone tower bulked up.
As the cab dropped him off before the main entrance, Remo noticed someone was up on the tower roof. There was a flash of plum-colored silk visible between two toothlike merlons.
Remo called up. "That you, Little Father?"
A whimsical, birdlike head poked out from the stone gap. It belonged to Chiun, his mentor and trainer in the art of Sinanju.
"The earth has moved," Chiun said in a squeaky voice. His impossibly wrinkled face was pensive.
"I didn't feel anything."
"How could you? You have only now landed. I have been awaiting you."
"How'd you know what time I'd be back?"
"I spied your pale face as the aerial conveyance descended not forty minutes ago. Come. We must speak."
Remo said, "I'll be right up."
Letting himself in, Remo climbed the stairs to the tower meditation room. The room boasted a bigscreen TV and two VCRs. There was no furniture to speak of. Just clean reed mats scattered about the stone floor in lieu of chairs. The Master of Sinanju refused to let Western-style chairs defile his place of meditation.
Chiun padded down a short spiral stairway lately installed because, he claimed, he liked to breathe the clean air of the higher latitudes.
Remo suspected him of using the roof as a vantage point to spit on passing Chinese. There had been complaints.
Chiun spit on Chinese passersby because a Chinese emperor had once cheated a distant ancestor. Chiun was Korean, the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Sinanju was a fishing village in the western reaches of the Korean peninsula, where the fishing was terrible. Five thousand years ago, the village had first sent its best menfolk out into Asia and beyond to perform assassinations and other distasteful work no self-respecting bowman or samurai would undertake.
From this beginning grew the greatest assassins of the ancient world, the House of Sinanju, which developed the art of Sinanju. Sinanju preceded tae kwon do, karate, kung fu, ninja and the other killing disciplines that had spread to all cultures.
Sinanju was the sun source of them all, and its mysteries never left the village whose desperation had birthed it. Passed down from father to son, it was a closely held secret even today. Chiun was the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Remo was the first American disciple.