The pupil absorbed the Master's words with thoughtful silence. This was good. At last the Master had given the pupil something weighty enough to absorb his flitting white mind. When the pupil finally spoke, his eyes held a gleam of devout sincerity. "You're a racist," proclaimed the pupil.
"What is that?" Chiun asked.
"It's someone who thinks he's better than everybody else just because he happened to be born a certain way."
"Ah, this have I heard," Chiun said. A pleased smile spread across his face. "Thank you."
"That isn't a good thing, Chiun," Remo said flatly. "It isn't right to feel superior to other people." Obviously, the pupil truly believed this. The Master could see the words he spoke were heartfelt.
What is this lunatic land to which the wicked fates have brought me? the Master thought. To the sincere pupil with the wrong ideas of race, he said, "Tell me, Remo, if the sun tells the stars that their light does not shine as brightly as its own, is the sun being racist?"
"Yes," Remo said. "Because the sun is just a star like all the other stars. They're just farther away. It's no different. In fact, some of the other stars are bigger and brighter if you match them up side by side with the sun."
Chiun was aghast. "Who told you such nonsense?"
"Science. And it's not nonsense. It's the truth."
Chiun shook his aged head. "Thank the gods you are not the one destined to be my pupil. There is far too much foolishness that would have to be unlearned first. Even so, you have been adequate in some ways so I will give you some free advice that will help you as you bumble through life: The truth is everything you were not taught in school."
He went back to studying the sunrise. The red sky had burned away to yellow. The disk of the sun flamed white as it peeked over the horizon.
"They did okay with what they had," Remo said. "And whatever you think of us whites as a race, and no matter what you were hired to do by the guys upstairs, I think I'm learning more than you or they bargained for."
At this the Master fell silent.
It was true. This Remo, this white with the rude tongue and the vile beef-fueled appetites, was learning Sinanju.
It had not been Chiun's intention. He had come to this land in search of a legend. To find, as it was written, the dead night tiger that he would make whole in Sinanju. What he found was a gorging white thing. This Remo could not be fulfillment of the legend, could not become Shiva, the Destroyer. And yet there was something there.
Chiun had planned to teach a few tricks. But he found to his amazement that this Remo was capable of much more than mere tricks. Almost without realizing it, Chiun had begun to pour the ocean into a teacup because, miraculously, the teacup was accepting it. It was most disturbing. Chiun would have to pray to his ancestors for guidance.
"And I'd still like some water," brayed the pupil.
"When you are done your exercises," Chiun said.
"When's that gonna be? You've had me dangling out here like a fish on a line for the past three hours." With his chin he pointed up the length of rope. The thick braided line ended at an ancient chunk of corroded metal. To Remo it looked like something that had been left in the desert since the gold rush days. Chiun had found it on the desert floor near where they had parked their Jeep. Right now, if Remo twisted just right as he hung from the rope, he could just make out their Jeep. It was parked on a lonely, rutted desert path a thousand feet below where he dangled out in open air.
They had come to Arizona after leaving Texas. At first there was something that felt right about the Arizona desert. Remo had no idea why. It was a feeling of something old and instinctive that made his bones ache for family. A strange thought for an orphan from Newark, New Jersey. Especially given the company he was with.
For the days since their arrival here, Chiun had been putting Remo through his paces. There was a lot of climbing and jumping and scampering from rock to rock.
Remo had been forced repeatedly to pull his hand from the darting fangs of a flashing rattlesnake. This, he was told, to increase his hand-eye coordination. "Incentive," was the word Chiun used as justification for this exercise.
Hours of running in bare feet on sand had caused Remo's soles to blister, then callus. He was repeatedly scolded for doing it wrong. The right way, he learned, was when he did not leave "those mammoth churned-up hoofprints" in his wake. The one time Remo managed to run through the soft desert dust without leaving a single discernible mark, he thought he heard the Master of Sinanju utter a solitary word of praise. He knew he was mistaken, however, for when he looked the old man was wearing his usual nasty scowl.
Still, all in all it was better than Folcroft. At least he was outside. But this latest exercise was ridiculous. They had climbed up to the top of the butte in the wee hours of the night, without aid of rope or piton or any climbing gear whatsoever. Once they were at the top, Chiun drove the metal post deep into the rock. Even though he'd been watching at the time, Remo still had no idea how the old man had done it. It looked as if he'd just jammed it in, like sticking a straw into a thick milkshake. Remo was sure the post would give. But somehow the metal was secure.
The post hung out over desert. Remo was given a length of rope and told to go and secure it to the far end. Once he had done so, Chiun sat to await the sunrise while Remo was forced to climb up and down the rope endlessly.
Just a few short months ago Remo would not have thought it possible to do something like this even once. But he was in his third hour now and had not yet broken a sweat.
"So what are you saying, if I was Korean you'd let me have a drink of water?" Remo groused as he climbed and slid, climbed and slid. His hands were beyond rope burns.
"If you were Korean, you would know enough to be grateful to me for all I have done for you," Chiun replied.
The old man had stopped watching the sun to turn his attention back to Remo.
Chiun was careful to keep his face bland as his pupil continued to perform his exercises flawlessly. It was an amazing thing. Most Korean boys would have given up after the first half hour. In the light of a new day, Chiun noted that the pupil's wrists were coming along nicely.
"Yeah? Well, I'm not a freaking camel, for Christ's sake."
Seated at the edge of the butte, Chiun frowned. "Do not invoke that name in my presence," he sniffed.
At the top of the rope now, Remo stopped. "What name?"
"That Nazarene carpenter," Chiun replied. "I assume you are a Christian of some sort. You people usually are."
"I'm Catholic," Remo replied. A gust of desert sand pelted his face. He gritted his teeth against it. Still stationary on the rope, he rocked back and forth in the wind.
"Worse," said Chiun.
"What do you mean worse? What's wrong with Catholics?"
"What isn't wrong with Catholics? You may start with that busybody carpenter. Did you know that he ruined the reigns of not one but two King Herods? Of course you didn't. Because it wasn't written down in your precious white Bible. By his birth alone he forced poor Herod the Elder into the tragic and rash act of executing the firstborn son of every family in Egypt. Does your Bible tell of the sleepless nights that plagued Herod for days after initiating that unfortunate social policy? No. It was a week before his appetite returned, but was that recorded? Of course not. Here was a poor, sensitive man going through terrible emotional upheaval, but does anyone care? No, they don't. It is always Jesus this and Jesus that."