Chiun accepted the man's head in his lap. Remo stood up. "What do you need?"
"Viper wine has always been very efficacious against the mouse disease."
"Any viper do?"
Chiun nodded. "So long as it is poisonous."
Remo went out into the night and down into the desert, his heart a stone. Closing his eyes, he swept the desert with his entire sensitive body. It was night. Snakes would be in their holes.
Remo walked purposefully toward the first tiny heartbeat he heard.
It was a mouse. In his anger, he kicked sand toward it. A second mouse led him on a frantic chase through brambles before he saw it was a rodent.
Remo soon learned to tune out the warm-blooded mice and seek the slower heartbeats of cold-blooded creatures.
He found a red-and-black banded coral snake not long after.
When Remo stuck his hand into the burrow, the coral snake struck. Its fangs snapped on empty air, and Remo grabbed its entire head in his hand, dragging it out into the moonlight. With it coiled around his arms, he resumed his hunt.
A sidewinder undulating along the sand saw Remo approach and tried to slither away. Remo enveloped its head in his free hand and, bearing two twisting, squirming, writhing serpents, he ran back to Red Ghost Butte, scared and hopeful at the same time.
But in his heart there was a cold feeling that he had come this far only to watch his father die.
SUNNY JOE ROAM flickered in and out of consciousness as the Master of Sinanju examined the two snakes. Selecting the coral snake, he milked it by holding the head so the jaws gaped. He held the exposed fangs over a rude cup he had fashioned from sandstone, hooking them to the edge. The clear yellow venom dripped for nearly a minute-an agonizingly slow time for Remo.
Chiun added water and, taking some brambles between his hands, set them alight by the friction of his hands.
The venom was soon bubbling.
"Will it work?" Remo asked anxiously.
"We need ginseng root," Chiun said without emotion.
"Where are we going to get ginseng in a desert?" Remo said bitterly.
Chiun looked up. "You must prepare yourself for whatever may come."
"That's easy for you to say. He's not your father."
Sunny Joe's sun-squint eyes fluttered open. He saw Chiun. "Hey, chief. How's it going?"
"I am well, brother. And you?"
"My time's about up, I reckon."
"Do not say that."
Sunny Joe's eyes found Remo's. "I thought I'd dreamed I saw you. The old chief told me you'd bought it during that parachute drop."
"He told me the same about you," Remo said.
"What about it, chief?"
"I did what I must," Chiun said, not looking up from the boiling venom.
Remo swallowed three times before saying his next words, "I'm not who you think I am."
"No. Who are you?"
From his wallet, Remo took the folded drawing. Unfolding it, he held it before Sunny Joe's pain-wracked eyes.
"Do you recognize her?"
Sunny Joe's eyes seemed to pass over the drawing without recognition. Then they grew sharp. "Where'd you get that?"
"It's a police drawing."
"Of my mother."
And Remo held his breath as he waited for a response.
Sunny Joe Roam lay his head back and coughed explosively. "What did you say your name was?"
"Remo."
"That much I remember from before."
"The nuns who raised me said the name on the basket was Remo Williams."
Sunny Joe Roam said nothing. Remo held his breath, waiting for the man's next words. They didn't come. Instead, Chiun said, "It is ready."
Remo watched as Chiun lifted up Sunny Joe Roam's head. With a start Remo saw his eyes were shut.
"He lives yet," Chiun assured him.
Remo subsided. Chiun held the steaming venom before Sunny Joe's nose and the open mouth. Sunny Joe recoiled, coughing. Chiun brought the brew close again. "This is to prepare you," he said.
When the viper wine had cooled, Chiun poured it down Sunny Joe's throat, stimulating his swallowing reflex with a thumb massage of the Adam's apple.
Sunny Joe looked older than Remo remembered. His tall, lean-limbed body seemed to have wasted away in places.
When the cup was empty, Remo eased the head back onto the low hump of sandstone that served as a pillow. Sunny Joe's eyes were completely closed now.
"What do you think, Little Father?" Remo asked in a shrunken voice.
"I am not your father," Chiun said sternly. Then, after a moment and in a softer tone, he added, "We will know by dawn."
"Is there anything we can do?"
"If we had a dragon bone, we could make dragonbone soup."
A strange expression crossed Remo's face. "Yong gave me a dragon bone."
"What did you do with it?"
"I put it in my pocket. But it was only a dream." The strange expression on Remo's face got stranger as his hand came out of one pocket clutching a fragment of bone.
"Did you plant this on me?" Remo demanded of Chiun.
Ignoring him, the Master of Sinanju began to scrape the bone into meal in the sandstone cup.
"I don't know if he heard me," Remo said, voice cracking.
"He heard you."
"No. I don't think he heard me say my name. I don't think he knows who I am."
"He knows. All fathers know."
The last of the bone lay in the cup. Chiun climbed to his feet. Padding over to the mummy encased in yellow silk, he stood looking down upon it. "I bring greetings from the House of Sinanju, O ancestor."
Remo joined him. "That's Kojong, isn't it?"
"Let us be certain." And from his sleeve, the Master of Sinanju drew his tubular gong. He tapped it once. The high note filled the cave. And from the mummy came an answering note.
Chiun silenced his gong. But the mummy continued to ring.
Remo looked down. At its bony feet, covered in dust, a gong identical to Chiun's reposed.
"Yes," Chiun intoned, his voice filled with emotion. "This is Kojong the Lost."
"He looks a lot like you," Remo said softly.
"I have never told you the story of Kojing and Kojong, Remo."
"No. But Mah-Li told me. Years ago. Master Nonja had a wife who bore him identical twins. Because the eldest son was always selected to be trained in Sinanju, she knew one of the boys would have to be drowned in the bay. Otherwise, there could be a succession problem."
"In those days," said Chiun, his voice dropping into the low cadences he used when speaking of his village, "times were poor and the babies were sent home to the sea every few years. So the wife of Nonja, who bore him the twins, Kojing and Kojong, hid one of the babies from the sight of their father. Since Nonja was old and his eyes were failing, this was possible. As the boys grew, Kojing entered training. But the canny mother switched the boys every other day, and both received training.
"When at last Nonja died, two Masters stood ready to become Reigning Master. When they presented themselves to the village, none knew what to do. Should Kojing become Master. Or Kojong?
"In the end Kojong announced that he would seek another land where there would be no question of who was Reigning Master. He disappeared from the village, saying that should the House ever reach a time when there was no succeeding Master, the villagers should seek the sons of Kojong and pick of them the one most worthy."
Chiun's hazel eyes shifted from the dead face of Kojing, so much like his own, and seized Remo's. "You, Remo Williams."
"What?"
"I know this man's story. He is the last Sunny Joe. For he is a descendant of Kojong, whom he calls Ko Jong Oh. The eldest son of this tribe is called Sunny Joe after the name of the Great Spirit Magician Sun On Jo-He Who Breathes the Sun."
"My mother said my people were the people of the Sun. Those were her exact words."
"This man is your father, just as you are the descendant of Kojong."