"Perhaps tomorrow you will cry out like a man," the guard said.
"Gee, wouldn't that be nice," Remo said.
After the guard left, Remo removed the cover from the young woman. She replaced her veil and rose quickly to her feet.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"For making love to me. It has been so long."
She started away, but Remo caught her wrist. "What is your name?" he asked.
"Zantos," she said. "Be careful tomorrow."
"I will."
"I will pray for you," she said and was gone.
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Chapter Nine
The two horsemen faced each other across a distance of 100 yards. Directly between them, a five-foot-high wooden post, four inches thick, was anchored into the sand, supported by smaller posts propped at angles against it.
Sheik Fareem sat next to Remo on the small raised platform. He slowly lifted his hand and then dropped it, and as he dióV the two horsemen prodded their big, muscular stallions with their heels, and the two horses bolted forward, racing toward the center post. As they rode, the two Arab soldiers withdrew long, curved swords from scabbards at their sides.
The horseman coming from the left reached the post first. He waved his sword over his head in a large, sweeping arc, then swung it in laterally, parallel to the ground. Flashing in the sun, the blade bit cleanly through the four-by-four post, with the thunk of a melon hitting the ground. But even before his sword exited the wood, the second soldier was there. He raised his sword high over his head as he was riding, and then, without his horse even slowing down, he brought the sword down vertically on the wooden post. He slashed it through, almost to the base, his blade missing only by millimeters the side-moving sword of the first horseman. The top of the four-by-four, severed two feet above the sand by the first soldier and then split lengthwise by the second, dropped to the sand in two neat pieces.
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The gathered crowd followed Sheik Fareem in applause.
Remo clapped too, as did Chiun next to him.
Fareem leaned toward Remo and said, "The finest light cavalry in the world. And now, only one hundred of them are left."
Remo saw Zantos, the green-eyed girl, on the other side of the platform and nodded to her, but the girl looked away. He felt Chiun tapping his shoulder.
"Pretend that this is good, Remo," Chiun whispered. "That those two horseback-riding monkeys impress you. It is good manners."
"You desert me and go over to the enemy, and now you're worried about my manners?" Remo said.
"Must you always argue with me?" Chiun said, still applauding vigorously.
Dutifully, Remo put his hands together, clapping softly. He looked around the small platform. Beyond the sheik was Reva Bleem, still wearing a long desert robe. Next to her was a pudgy young Arab with beard and mustache, who looked as if running him through a ringer would produce enough oil to light Tacoma for a week. Prince Abdul. The sheik had introduced his son to Remo and Chiun when they arrived at the platform for the Arabian martial arts display, and the prince had acknowledged the introductions by looking away from them and walking to his seat.
The sheik's wish for an Arab soldier, Remo thought. Too bad. Prince Abdul looked as if he would be more at home at the baccarat table in the MGM Grand than on a horse.
Standing behind the sheik, leaning over, whispering in his ear, was Ganulle, his advisor. He was a rat-faced man with a long, pointed nose that he kept aimed in Remo's direction.
Suddenly, over a large sand dune, came a dozen men on horseback, and Ganulle leaned back from the sheik as the ruler concentrated on the riders. They wore the red and brown robes that signified they were of the Hamidi tribe. Shouting war chants as they rode, waving
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their swords over their head, they came down the side of the dune, their Arabian stallions plunging forward, not leaning back on the hills the way American cow ponies would, but using the hills to create even greater speed and forward momentum. The entire village of 500 people cheered their arrival, and their full-throated cheers overwhelmed the war cries of the horsemen. As they reached the flat table of desert in front of the reviewing stand, half the soldiers freed their feet from their stirrups, then rose up and stood on the horses' saddles, seemingly oblivious to the need to balance themselves, their swords still flashing hi the sun as they swung them over their heads. The other six riders released one foot from their stirrups, then hooked their free legs around their saddle horns. Then they fell backward until they were riding upside down, their heads dangerously close to the flashing hooves of the giant stallions. Easily, they transferred their swords to their left hands and kept swinging and slashing at air, eighteen inches above the ground.
A great maneuver if they were fighting Munchkins, Remo thought to himself.
The soldiers standing on the saddles jumped into the air and came back down in a seated position on the horses' rumps, behind the saddles, while the other horsemen executed a tricky maneuver by passing under the bellies of the horses and coming up standing in a single stirrup on the far side of the stallions.
All twelve reached the far end of the level clearing. At full speed, the horses turned, and the men came riding back, side by side, two by two. In each pair of horses galloping shoulder to shoulder, the two riders moved up out of their stirrups and switched from one horse to the other. Then they turned neatly in their saddles, and as the horses galloped up over the dune and out of sight, the twelve horsemen were facing backward in their saddles, waving their swords over their heads in a farewell salute.
The sheik leaned toward Remo.
"Do you ride?" he asked.
"No. But I can."
"Like that?" asked the sheik.
"Only with practice," Remo said. "They're good."
Sheik Fareem nodded. "Once all our men could ride that way. They were feared from Persia to Libya. But now, no more. There are very few left." Remo heard the tone of regret and sorrow in his voice, and he found himself feeling a tinge of pity for the sheik. The Arab's world was vanishing, swallowed up by the twentieth century, and he didn't like it, and Remo understood how he felt. Fareem's world might be duty and barren and uncomfortable, but it was his. It was the devil he knew, and he preferred it to the devil he didn't know. That was his right.
But he was wrong in trying to impose his devil on everybody else in the world. Fareem could choose to live out here in this sandbox forever, Remo thought, but he had no right to try to make everyone else's world into a sandbox. And that was why Remo would find that rapid-breeder bacterium when it arrived and bring it back to Harold Smith.
Whether Chiun liked it or not.
Remo leaned over to Chiun and nodded toward the last of the horsemen, who was vanishing over the crest of the dune.
"What do you think, Little Father?" Remo asked.
"The Koreans are very good horsemen."
"These aren't Koreans."
"I know they are not Koreans. I am just telling you that the Koreans are very good horsemen. We introduced horses into Japan. Did you know that?"
"I didn't, but I'm sure I'm going to find out all about it now."
"No, you won't," Chiun said, shaking his head. "I am finished telling you things that you do not appreciate or understand."
"We've got to talk," Remo said.
"About what?"
"About this whole thing. You and I just can't go
tangling with each other because of some damned oil-eating bug."
"That's what am talking about," Chiun said.
"Huh?"
"Really, Remo, you are hopeless. What do you think would happen if you went into the capital city and told them that Sheik Fareem was going to destroy the country's oil supply?"
"I think they'd send the army back here to wipe him out."