Last Rites td-100 Page 5

  When there was a tiny mountain, Remo's fingernails scratched metal.

  "Found something," he said, lifting a dirt-caked disk to the hot Spanish sun.

  "Clean it," commanded Chiun.

  Rising, Remo gave the disk a flick as if flipping a coin. The disk spun upward, shedding the accumulation of grit through centrifugal force. Then it landed in his open palm. It was a thin bit of hammered metal with the profile of a man on one side. An inscription ran around the rim.

  "Looks like an old Roman coin."

  "A denarius," corrected Chiun. "Did the vestal virgins who reared you teach you Latin?"

  Remo looked at the inscription. It read J. CAES. AUG. PONT. MAX. P. P.

  "Yeah. It says, 'Julius Caesar Augustus Pontifex Maximus.' I don't know what the 'P. P.' part stands for."

  "Pater Patriae. Father of his Country."

  "Just like Washington," grunted Remo.

  "Once the Roman Empire extended to the far corners of the earth. Now all that is left are ruins, countless worthless coins in the dirt and idle eaters of pasta and makers of pizza."

  "Meaning?"

  "You must find the meaning for yourself. For it is time for you to run."

  "Run where? I thought we came to see a bullfight."

  Chiun examined Remo critically. "Let me straighten your scarf, for it is on wrong."

  "It's fine," said Remo, nevertheless letting the Master of Sinanju adjust his scarf.

  When it was retightened, it covered his eyes completely.

  "Now I can't see," Remo complained.

  "Can you hear?"

  "Of course I can hear."

  Then a dull whoosh like a rocket going up came from a mile or so away.

  "You must run toward that sound," said Chiun.

  "Why?"

  "You will know when you get there. Let me point you in the proper direction." Remo felt himself being spun in place. "Do you remember the open gate?"

  "Yeah."

  "Run through it. Follow the cobbled path. Do not stop. Do not allow any obstacle to dissuade you from your path. There will be barriers on either side to keep you on the correct path."

  Chiun gave Remo a quick shove and said, "Now go!"

  Remo ran. His memory guided him to the open gate at the far end of the ring, and when the dirt beneath his feet became wood and then cobblestones the size of loaves of bread, he switched from a flat-footed run to a toe sprint that propelled him lightly from cobble to cobble.

  His other senses guided him along. He heard cheers. They swelled. A few shouted Spanish at him, he didn't understand.

  "iEsticpido! iNo te das cuenta de que te estas equivocado?"

  The cobbled pathway twisted and turned as Remo ran through a world of smells. There was bread and coffee and liquor and the sweat of human beings worked up in a frenzy of excitement.

  Far ahead he heard the sound of another rocket. Then a rumble. It grew nearer. The cobbles, connected to one another by mortar, communicated an impending vibration that grew and grew the farther Remo ran.

  Something was coming his way. But Remo couldn't stop to worry about it now. He had a goal. He didn't know what it was all about, but the Master of Sinanju had given it to him. And his training wouldn't let him turn away until he reached it.

  EVERY YEAR Don Angel Murillo looked forward to the Festival of San Fermin.

  And every year he was glad when it was over. The foreigners with their drinking and their drugs and their lack of appreciation for the glorious art of bullfighting were difficult to stomach.

  But he took solace in the running of the bulls. Always in the running of the bulls.

  It was Don Angel's responsibility to oversee the running of the bulls so foolish men, both Spanish and otherwise, did not ruin the glorious event.

  The rules were firm. From the moment the first rocket was fired from the town hall to set the runners on their way to the firing of the second rocket, announcing that the bulls had been released from their corrals at the bottom of Calle Santo Domingol, no man intending to stay ahead of the bulls could call attention to himself or incite the brave bulls in any way that brought harm to others.

  If a man stumbled before the rushing hooves, that was his privilege. If the horns caught him and hooked him upward, well, that was what the horns of the bull naturally did. Everyone knew that. Even drunken Princeton students.

  It was strictly forbidden for a runner to do anything to cause a bull to deviate from the barricade-lined nine-minute run to the bull-ring. Or injure an unsuspecting runner or bystanders.

  Don Angel Murillo was stationed at the barricade along Dona Blanca de Navarra to see that none of these things happened.

  When the first rocket was fired, the runners were off and the first cheers went up. When the second rocket arced smokily upward in the bright blue sky, the rattling drum of hooves made the very ground vibrate and the souls of men and woman thrill with anticipation.

  Don Angel Murillo was looking up toward the town hall in heart-pounding anticipation of the first redsashed runners in white pants when a man in gray chinos wearing the scarf of San Fermin, the patron saint of Pamplona, and the red sash of a runner came flying up the course.

  He was going in the wrong direction. This was not only very definitely against the rules but very strange indeed.

  More strange undoubtedly was the fact that he wore the scarf over his face, obscuring his vision. "iEstupido!" Don Angel called in Spanish. "Do you not know you are running the wrong way?"

  Then around the corner came the first stumbling wave of men, and behind them the snorting black bulls of Pamplona.

  A WALL OF MOVING FLESH jumped around the corner. Remo heard their feet and hooves mingle and blend into a mass of sound as great as the mass of flesh and bone he faced.

  The panting of men mixed with the snorting of bulls. Remo recognized that the brutes were bulls. This was Pamplona, made famous by Ernest Hemingway for the running of the bulls, despite whatever name the Master of Sinanju called it.

  Calculating the closing distance, Remo flashed ahead, knowing he had a better chance of surviving if he shortened the ordeal's duration.

  Men were stumbling and pressing themselves up against the barricades as the bulls pounded down the straightaway.

  Remo fixed on the heartbeat of one man who ran ahead of the pack and made for him.

  The man tried to swerve from the unexpected obstacle, but Remo was too fast for him. Leaping off the cobbles, Remo used his shoulder for a catapault. Remo launched himself over the heads of the other runners and toward the mass of bulls.

  One foot touched an undulating back, rebounded, and the other jumped off the bullish rump.

  After that, his feet took him from bull to bull, so tightly clumped there was almost no space between them. They were running in a bunch. No stragglers. No mavericks. And though they were moving fast, especially if one was trying to keep one step ahead of them, to Remo's highly trained reflexes they might as well have been grazing.

  His toes bounced him from back to back with such grace the spectators lining the barricaded runway exploded into spontaneous applause. And then Remo alighted back on the cobbles and was racing toward the place where he had fixed the sounds of the rockets.

  When he reached it, he sensed a broad plaza and a rowdy crowd who shouted Spanish compliments. "iBravo! iBravo!"

  "iMagnifico!"

  "iYva San Fermin!"

  "iTlenes duende! iSe siente tu duende!"

  Remo reached up to remove his scarf when a third rocket pistol banged back the way he had come. "What the heck does that mean?" Remo muttered, wondering if he was supposed to run back the way he had come or not.

  "It means," squeaked the Master of Sinanju, suddenly at his elbow, "that you have braved the first athloi."

  Remo snatched off his scarf.

  Chiun stood looking up at him, his face unreadable. "Athloi?"

  "Yes."

  "Is that a Korean word?"

  "No."

&nb
sp; Remo looked back down the road he had come. "That was the running of the bulls I just screwed up, wasn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "You're supposed to run ahead of the bulls, not into them."

  "Any fool can be trampled. A Master of Sinanju requires a greater test of his grace."

  "I think my intelligence was just tested, not my grace."

  "And you may be correct, for you lack all graces," spat Chiun.

  "What are they saying about me?" Remo asked as the crowd surged drunkenly toward them.

  "That you have duende."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Some say it means grace."

  Remo grinned. "I like the Spanish. They recognize quality when they see it."

  Chiun didn't return the grin. Instead, he turned away with a swirl of kimono skirts. "Come. We are through here."

  "We just got here."

  "And now we are leaving."

  "But we just got here."

  "Pah. I am glad too that my ancestors did not survive to see the town that Pompey's son founded become a den of besotted Christianity."

  And they melted into the alleys and byways around the great square, often leaping over the sprawled figures of drunken tourists.

  "Where to next?" wondered Remo.

  "Hellas."

  "What did you say?"

  "I said Hellas."

  "That's good," said Remo. "For a minute I thought you said we were going to Hell."

  "We are not yet going to Hell," said the Master of Sinanju. "For you, however, there may be no difference."

  Chapter 6

  Remo got off the Olympic Airways plane in Athens, Greece, wearing a T-shirt that read I Ran With The Bulls Of Pamplona, a red baseball cap that sported bull's horns and a fan club consisting of an assortment of Greek stewardesses-along with one cow-eyed steward who ardently tried to interest Remo in an alternative life-style.

  Remo ducked into the nearest men's room, which took care of the stewardesses, and locked the lovestruck steward in a toilet stall.

  When he emerged again, the stewardesses were singing his praises in a kind of Greek chorus.

  "You are so manly," one cooed.

  "For an American," another amended.

  "Do you like Greek women?" asked a third.

  "Greek women," Remo said, "should be neither seen nor heard."

  The collection of Greek stewardesses looked at one another with baffled black olive eyes.

  "I like women who are hard to get," Remo clarified. "Hard to-"

  "Very hard to get," said Remo.

  "If we are hard to get, will you seek us out?"

  "Only if you're completely out of my sight," promised Remo.

  The stewardesses made themselves scarce, and Remo and Chiun sought a cab.

  "You are learning," said Chiun as the cab took them away.

  "Not what I want to learn. Why are we in Athens?"

  "You have your Roman coin?"

  "Yep."

  "We must find you a Greek coin."

  "Why would I want a Greek coin?"

  "Because you failed to discern the meaning of the Roman coin."

  Remo shrugged and watched the city go past. The driver drove like a maniac. Remo wondered what it was about European capitals that made the taxi drivers drive as if suicidal.

  "Where to, guys?" the driver asked, turning his head. His breath filled the back seat with a commingled grape-leaf, onion, olives, lamb and feta-cheese odor.

  "Piriaevs," said Chiun.

  The driver seemed to know where that was and redoubled his speed, banging around narrow corners like a caroming billiard ball.

  He took them to the waterfront smelling of creosote and tar, where small, flat octopuses hung drying on lines like wash. There the Master of Sinanju engaged a seamfaced Greek trawler captain in fluent Greek. Some gold changed hands, and Remo was waved aboard.

  "Where are we going this time?" Remo asked once on board.

  "You are going sponge diving."

  "What are you going to be doing?"

  "Hoping you do not take all day because we have to be in Kriti by nightfall."

  The trawler was ancient and barnacle encrusted. It muttered out into the brilliant blue Aegean and its many sun-drenched islands.

  When they reached an island that stood out from all the others by its crusty gray-and-white streaked homeliness, the boat stopped and dropped anchor.

  Chiun faced Remo, saying, "There are sponges below us. You must find the two largest and bring them back."

  "Why."

  "Because your Master has told you to do this." Remo hesitated. Then, stepping out of his shoes, he somersaulted from a standing position from the aft deck and into the water. He went in like a dolphin, with hardly a splash.

  The Greek sea captain happened to be in midblink when Remo left the deck, so to his slow brain and eyes, it was as if Remo had abruptly dwindled into his shoes. He knelt to examine the shoes, found them empty but still warm with the vitality of the man who had stood in them just a moment before. The captain crossed himself fervently.

  THE AEGEAN WAS AS BLUE below as it had been above. Remo arrowed through the crystalline water and found the bottom.

  A ghost-gray octopus went flowing past, tentacles spread like a flower, two touching the bottom to guide itself along.

  It saw Remo with its sleepy, human-looking eyes, went from gray to a livid green in a glimmering and pulled itself into the safety of a broken ceramic pot, so that one near-human eye peered out warily.

  Remo swam on. Fish he did not recognize swam and darted by.

  The sea bottom was silty, and when he touched it, sediment curled up in brownish obscuring clouds. Remo found a bed of sponges and began picking through them. They were of all sizes and shapes but the largest ones were easily the size of both his hands joined together. He found one he liked and spent a casual five minutes looking for its mate.

  Meanwhile, carbon-dioxide bubbles dribbled from one corner of his grim mouth at a rate of one every quarter minute. The lack of oxygen bothered Remo not at all. His training had expanded his lung capacity so that once he charged them, he was good for over an hour underwater. More if he didn't exert himself. Since there was no rush and he knew Chiun would be critical of his choices if he wasn't careful, Remo took his time finding two matching sponges.

  "THESE ARE THE BEST you could find?" the Master of Sinanju demanded when Remo's head popped up alongside the fishing boat, hands held high, the sponges upraised for his inspection.

  "You saw how long I was down there."

  "You were playing."

  "I scoured the bottom for the best sponges," Remo insisted. "These are them."

  Chiun turned to the boat captain and gave him a withering stare. "You and your greedy kind have taken all the best."

  The boat captain shrugged. He was still trying to figure out how Remo had gotten into the water in the first place.

  Chiun turned back to Remo. "Take your sorry prizes to that isle and do what has to be done."

  "What's that?"

  "You will know what the moment you step onto its shore."

  Remo turned. The isle was a hump not bigger than a city parking lot. Sea gulls and other ocean birds circled it. Some alighted, paused and flew off again.

  They made no attempt to peck or claw its surface for food scraps. Not surprising, Remo saw. There wasn't a shred of vegetation on the thing.

  Remo saw why when he reached the place. The water at the edge was gray and scummy, the smell rank. "Wanna throw me my shoes? I think I'm going to need them."

  The shoes plopped obligingly into the water, only to sink from sight.

  "Damn," said Remo, diving after them.

  Putting them on underwater, he surfaced and recovered the sponges, which bobbed in the grayish water. Remo jumped straight out of the water and onto the crusty shore. His feet splashed up grayish-white goo. "What do they call this place?" Remo called back.

  "In Greek you would not understand the w
ords. In English it is called Guano Isle."

  "Why aren't I surprised?"

  "If you are not surprised, why do you dally?"

  "Because I have a sinking feeling what these sponges are for now."

  "What are sponges for?"

  "Not for eating."

  "Good. If not for eating, what then is their purpose?"

  "Cleaning," Remo said without enthusiasm.

  "You may begin now. You have until sundown." Remo started at one end of the isle, standing in water so he wouldn't have to kneel. Seabirds eyed him with hostile intent. Occasionally one dropped a present where he stood.

  Soon Remo was covered in malodorous stuff. He kept scouring.

  "This is starting to feel like the twelve freaking labors of Hercules," Remo complained.

  And from the sponge trawler the Master of Sinanju burst into brief but polite applause.

  "Why are you applauding?"

  "Because you are half through with your noble chore."

  "What's noble about being hip deep in bird shit?"

  "The knowledge that you are conveniencing the seabirds of the next century who will have a clean nest to feather."

  "Bulldooky," Remo grumbled.

  "No. Gull guano."

  When Remo was finally finished, it was late. The sun was going down, and the lights of Athens were coming on. High on the hill called the Acropolis, the many-columned Parthenon burst into radiance like an ivory shrine.

  Remo raised his tattered sponges to the night sky. "Hallelujah. I'm done!"

  A sea gull dropped a spatter of gray and white just in front of one ruined shoe.

  Keeping his face triumphant, Remo eased one foot over the offending blot.

  "I saw that," said Chiun.

  Reluctantly Remo dropped to one knee and cleaned up the spot. He flung the sponge at the offending bird, and it dropped into the water, flustered and chastised.

  As he climbed off the isle, other seabirds came along. Remo tried shoo them away. They shooed. But they also came back.

  "You cannot leave as long as one spot remains," Chiun called out.

  "The minute I turn my back, there's going to be more than one spot."

  "This is your athloi."

  "I thought cleaning the isle was my athloi!"

  "No. You had to scour Guano Isle in order for the athloi to commence."

  "That wasn't the freaking athloi? This is the freaking athloi?"