"He-he say why he left me on the orphanage doorstep"
"No, I did not speak of you to him." "Then -then maybe I'll never know..."
"At dawn you will know or you will not. But in the meantime, there is something you must do."
"What's that?"
"Your last athloi. "
"I thought I was through. I did my twelve."
"No. There is still what the Greeks in their legends called cleaning Augean Stables. For the Greeks miscounted."
"It can wait."
"No. It cannot. This man is dying, as are the others of his tribe-your tribe, Remo Williams-from the mouse disease that is well-known in my land. You must comb the desert for mice and their droppings. Only by ridding the land of mice can this plague be arrested."
"I want to be with him. In case-in case he dies."
"I have promised you that I would take you to your father if you completed the Rite of Attainment. I have kept my part of the bargain. Now you must keep yours."
"I can't go now," Remo protested.
"You will if you are your father's son."
Remo looked to Sunny Joe Roam and back to the Master of Sinanju. Tears started in his eyes. "You can't make me do this."
Chiun indicated the unconscious man. "With his dying breath, he would ask you to save his people. Your people. You know this."
"Okay. But he'd better be alive when I get back."
"I make no promises," Chiun intoned.
"One more thing. If he comes to, ask him why he abandoned me."
"Are you certain you wish to know this?"
"Yeah. I gotta know."
Chiun nodded silently. He handed Remo the tubular gong of Kojong. "This will help you in your athloi." And taking the gong, Remo went out into the desert night, his eyes hot and wet.
REMO MOUNTED THE HORSE, Sanshin, lashing it into action. As he rode, he struck the gong. It rang angrily. Mice jumped out of their desert burrows. The gong's extended note seemed to send them fleeing.
Soon Remo was driving them before him. They were everywhere.
Stripping Sanshin of his saddlebags, Remo used them to catch the rodents. He tore across the desert with his thoughts racing ahead of him like uncatchable ghosts.
He couldn't bring himself to kill. They were only mice. So he carried them to the jeep and locked them inside. Soon they filled the back and front seats, sniffing and clawing at the windows, trying to escape.
When he had cleared the surrounding desert, he entered the deserted hogans he found here and there, driving the mice out with the gong and cleaning the interior with brittle-bush whisks.
In the deepest part of the night, Remo came across a solitary wind-scoured headstone.
It was a simple slab. It stood alone in the desert beside a eroded hump of red sandstone that lay at the end of the depressed crust of sand.
There was a name on the stone. No date, just a name. No stonecutter had carved the name. The letters were too irregular, but they had been carved deep and with great force.
The name was Dawn Starr Roam.
Remo knew instinctively it was the name of his mother.
On that spot, a thousand emotions both cold and hot running through his bones, he broke down and wept bitterly angry tears over what he had never known and only now truly missed.
NEAR DAWN, a light rain fell from the desert sky, and Remo opened his eyes to see Vega and Altair burning faintly on either side of the Milky Way.
He sat up. And in the sand beside him the gong suddenly rang. It was very faint. Nothing seemed to have struck it. Unless it was raindrops.
The faint sound faded. Then it came again. Nothing struck the bar of steel. Unless it was a ghost.
Remo stood up. And to the west he heard the sound of the gong's mate coming across the sands.
"Chiun. He's calling me."
Grabbing the gong, Remo pulled the mallet and struck it in response. Then he took off over the sand, toward Red Ghost Butte. The carrying gong note pierced the still air again, and the gong in Remo's hand answered.
The notes blended into a single sustained cry that didn't subside until Remo reached the cave mouth.
There stood the Master of Sinanju, his face a shell of sorrow and unconcealed pain.
"Don't tell me...." Remo said thickly.
"My sorrow..."
Remo squeezed his eyes tight as fists. "Nooooo."
". . . is only as great as your joy," Chiun continued aridly. "For you have gained a father, and I have lost my only son."
Remo's eyes popped. "He's alive!"
Chiun nodded. "He awaits you within."
Remo started in. "Well, c'mon"
"No. It is not for me to do this. I will remain here. For it is the seventh moon and it is my custom to bathe in the bitter tears of Kyon-u and Chik nyo, whose sufferings I understand only too well."
Chapter 24
Two days later three men rode into the Sonoran Desert on horseback.
Sunny Joe Roam took the lead. Remo rode on his right. Balanced on an Appaloosa pony, Chiun followed at a respectful distance, his face creased with pain like crumpled paper.
The sky was utterly cloudless, and in the clear desert air objects and people possessed an unnatural clarity, as if cut from glass. Overhead the sun beat down like hot jackhammers.
"I owe you two my life," Sunny Joe said after a while.
"Our blood is the same color," said Chiun. "More than that, I owe you some answers."
Remo said nothing. It was a subject no one had wanted to address in the two days that old Bill Roam had recuperated from the Sun On Jo Disease.
"For you to understand," Sunny Joe began, "you have to understand who I am. Long, long before the white man came, my ancestor Ko Jong Oh arrived in this desert. He came from the land that comes down to us as Sun On Jo. They say all us redskins are Asians originally. So I always figured he came across the Bering Strait from somewhere in China. Anyway, Ko Jong Oh settled down here among a tiny group of Indians and married one. We think they were head pounders."
"Head pounders?" Remo said.
"That's what we call the Navajo, on account of they used to bash in the skulls of their enemies. That's to differentiate them from the Hopi, whom we call cliff squatters.
"Now, Ko Jong Oh was a mighty warrior and magician, and he took this tribe under his wing. In gratitude, they took the name Sun On Jo. He taught the Sun On Jos the ways of peace. War and fighting and killing were forbidden. Only Ko Jong Oh and each eldest son descended from him were allowed to fight. And only then to protect the tribe. For it was handed down from the mouth of Ko Jong Oh that if any of his sons brought attention to himself, it would bring down the wrath of the Great Spirit Magician himself, Sun On Jo."
Sunny Joe looked back at Chiun.
"I told you this story that time a few years back, chief."
"And I have told you the legend of my village," Chiun returned coolly. "But you did not believe that our legends were one."
"I'm still on the skeptical side. But we'll get to that." Sunny Joe resumed his tale. "Every eldest male heir of Ko Jong Oh is taught the way of Sun On Jo. How to track game stealthily, to see farther than the hawk, to become one with the shadows. All the better to protect the tribe. When I was born, disease and poverty had claimed many of the tribespeople. It hit the women especially hard. When I came of age, the Sunny Joe before me, my father, took me up to Red Ghost Butte and before I was invested as his successor, he told me that the tribe was dying in spirit. Too many had left for the cities or were buried under the red sands. There were no women my age. And none had been born in a long time. My father thought it might have had something to do with the atomic fallout over in Utah and New Mexico."
Sunny Joe shrugged. "Doesn't matter now. But if the tribe was to go on, I had to go out into the greater world and find the land of Sun On Jo and beg of the Great Spirit Magician for one of his women to be my bride. Otherwise, the Sun On Jos would not survive the century."