"We'll store your luggage, Chiun, making sure your picture of Rad Rex is safe and tonight, I'll check out the white house with the iron gate."
"No," said Chiun. "We must wait for that officer. To leave now would be disrespectful to the Loni."
"How come, Chiun, these Loni have your respect?"
"Because, unlike some people, they have earned it."
"Chiun, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but really now. Every Master of Sinanju has been taught Loni dialect for centuries, because you still owe them a contract?"
"Correct."
"I kind of think that little debt might have been forgotten by now. Just how many languages do you know well?"
"Really well?"
"Yeah."
"One. My own. The rest I use."
Remo noticed an imported copy of the New York Times selling for $2.50. Under the fold of the front page, there was a story about the television networks adjusting their Watergate coverage to allow the showing of soap operas.
"As the Planet Revolves is back on the air in the states," said Remo, mildly.
"What?" demanded Chiun.
"Your shows. They're back on."
Chiun's mouth began to work as he fried to speak, but nothing came out. Finally he said, "I left America under the condition that I was leaving a void. America has lied to me. How could they have returned the programs just like that after taking them off just like that?"
""I don't know, Little Father. But I think now we can get about our business so we can get back to the States faster, right? You can pay your respects to the Loni some other time. If they've waited a couple of thousand years, they can certainly wait another one or two."
For the first time, Remo saw Chiun in conflict.
Just then, the Army captain they had spoken to walked up to them, and said, in British-tinged English: "My men and I have been delighted, sir, by your telling of that silly Loni fairy tale. To show our pleasure, we will be glad to retrieve your luggage for only one hundred dollars American."
Remo put his hand up over his mouth to stifle a laugh.
Chiun resolved his internal conflicts. The frail Oriental went whirring into the newspapers, shredding them. The stand went into a wall rack and the wall rack went into the vendor who went into the lighting fixtures along with the rack, stand and little shredded bits of white papers that slowly settled like a soft snowfall in the Busati Air Terminal.
"Just so it should not pass, this perfidy, in calmness," said Chiun. The captain who had tried to shake them down had begun to back away, when a word from Chiun stopped him.
This time, Chiun did not translate for Remo as he spoke with the captain. Finally, Chiun beckoned for Remo to follow him. As they walked behind the captain, Chiun said softly to Remo, "They are not Loni, these people."
"Good. Then let's go to the city and finish what we came to do."
"First I must finish what I came to do," Chiun said.
Several hours later, as they trudged across the Busati plain, Remo was still picking little bits of newsprint out of his jacket pockets and bitching at Chiun for deceiving him into thinking they were going back to the capital city.
"I told you," Chiun said. "An older contract takes precedence."
"That doesn't answer my problem, Little Father."
"To a fool, nothing is an answer."
"You and I are paid by the same employer. We have a job to do and we are not serving him."
"You may leave if you wish," Chiun said.
"How?" said Remo looking around the plain. "I don't even know where I am."
"When did you ever?" said Chiun and marched on happily toward the mountains in the distance. For a full day they walked and Remo complained about the assignment being missed, the Loni who would undoubtedly rob them when the two got to their village and the awesome dryness of the plain which Chiun kept referring to as the lush gardens before the mountains, for they had once, he explained, been the most beautiful gardens in the world.
"The Loni must have paid your ancestors pretty good," said Remo.
"They recognized true worth."
"They're gonna jump us as soon as we get to enough of them."
"The Loni are fair and just and decent."
"They must have really paid," said Remo. He felt, clammy and dusty and grimy, not having changed clothes in two days. Chiun, naturally, had seven trunks full of changes.
As they climbed into the mountains, night descended in its awesome majesty upon the old continent. Remo noticed immediately that these were not simple paths, but stairways cut of rock worn by centuries of feet.
They continued marching into the night, pushing onward and upward. Remo was amazed at the ability of the soldiers to keep going under the burden of Chain's baggage.
Around one bend a fire shone from a high wall.
Chiun cupped his hands to his face and yelled the Loni dialect of Swahili.
"I told them I was here," he said to Remo.'
"Now we get it," said Remo, prepared to slash his way back down the mountain.
From arches in the wall came men bearing torches and spears, just a few men at first who hung back and waited until their numbers grew, and then moved forward, their torches illuminating the night with fire as though they were high beam lamps.
There were too many with too many spears to escape unscathed. Remo decided to take a route through the center, prepare his body to take some wounds, and then to keep going. Retreat was impossible. Behind him he heard Chiun's trunks striking the ground, and the scuffling feet of the Hausa soldiers as they turned and fled down the mountainside.
Oddly enough the Loni tribesmen did not pursue them. Instead, when they got within striking distance, they fell to their knees and a cry of praise rose from their throats in powerful unison.
"Sinanju. Sinanju. Sinanju."
Then, up over their heads on the mountaintop, Remo could see in the flame light, a tall black woman wearing a short white gown. She carried in her hands a shiny metal brazier from which a fire burned. Remo and Chiun moved closer, and the crowd which chanted "Sinanju" stopped, upon one word from her.
She spoke. Chiun translated for Remo.
"Welcome, Master of Sinanju. Our ambitions have been awaiting the return of your awesome magnificence. Oh, Awesome Magnificence, the Gods of the Loni greet you in fire. Our hopes await the glory of thy majestic presence. Oh, Awesome Magnificence, the throne of the Loni once again will be secure because you have deigned to come among us."
"They really saying those things about you, Chiun?" said Remo from the side of his mouth.
"That is how civilized people greet the Master of Sinanju," said Chiun, the latest Master of Sinanju.
"Shit," said Remo Williams, ex-Newark cop.
CHAPTER EIGHT
General William Forsythe Butler rented a car at the Washington, D.C. airport when his plane landed there, and drove out in the quiet night toward Norfolk, Virginia.
The air was sweet with the hot smells of spring and he rode with the air conditioning turned oil and the windows open, listening to the land, feeling its beauty around him.
How long ago had those first slaves set foot on this land? Had they perhaps travelled this same road? Of course, it would not have been much more than a cart path then. Perhaps the rich dirt got between their toes and warmed and welcomed them and they thought the way Butler once had: that the land was rich and good. After a trip of unrelieved brutality, perhaps they felt that they had chanced into something good—a growing, fertile land where they could build a full and rewarding life. The Loni princes would have thought that way. And instead of happiness and fulfilment, they found only the chain and the whip and the sun-hammered days of backbreaking labour in the fields, labour unrelieved by the release of humour, by the circle of family; by the slow, lazy forgetfulness of happiness.