Prophet Of Doom td-111

by Warren Murphy

  ' 'At this, the women gave voice to their confusion. 'But you do not have a successor, Master,' they cried. And Paekjo fixed them with an iron stare, intoning, 'I have today chosen a pupil that is more worthy than all others in the village, and it is he.' At that the Master pulled the bewildered idiot-child from the mud and cradled him in his arms."

  "Tang," said Remo.

  "Yes," Chiun said somberly.

  "I thought you said he was a braggart, not a dullard."

  "The two terms are not mutually exclusive," sniffed Chiun. "I have heard you brag. Heh-heh-heh." And though Chiun would ordinarily revel in such a witticism, this day his laughter sounded hollow.

  The tense look on Remo's face shattered Chiun's cackle. He continued the story.

  "On that long-ago day, Master Paekjo detected deep in the eyes of young Tang a certain promise. And

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  while this promise was far from that of the least Master who had come to Sinanju up to that time, it was still superior to the clay available to him.

  "Under the patient and determined guidance of his Master, Tang learned. The day finally came for Tang to assume his role as Master of Sinanju, and when this day arrived Tang the Dullard was assigned the simple task of protecting a minor assemblyman—which was another name for a Greek nobleman—in the town of Bura in one of the far Greek provinces.

  "While not a glorious task, Tang approached it with an enthusiasm normally discovered only in the very young or the very stupid. The noble was old and weak and had made many enemies during his years of public life, which is not only not unusual in a Greek, it is something that is expected in their politicians.

  "Now, this noble had enemies who lusted after his assembly seat. These enemies whispered behind the old Greek's back that he would die on a certain date in a certain way because an oracle had predicted it to be so. And it was with the promise of gold and fine bolts of silk, slaves and fabulous jewels, sweetmeats and confections and many gallons of fine wine that the noble did hire Tang to protect his life from danger until the ordained hour had passed. To this, Master Tang agreed.

  ' 'Now, even Tang at his most obtuse knew that oracles were merely fabrications meant to frighten men. They were nearly always ambiguous and never reliable. So Tang took his place at the nobleman's right hand for a period of one month. And when the day of doom foretold by the oracle was at hand, Master Tang slipped into the Greek's bedchamber under cover of

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  darkness and spirited him away, secreting him in a cave several miles distant until the death hour had passed.

  "At daybreak Tang returned the noble to his home. This man was so overjoyed to have cheated certain death, he offered Tang the hand of his loveliest daughter in marriage. Tang declined the offer, saying that his lot was a marriage of duty and obligation to his tiny village. So he bade farewell to the noble and his daughter who was, in point of fact, far from lovely. The girl was ugly and white and a Greek, and it was for these three reasons that Tang did not wish to wed her, for while he was an idiot, Tang was not completely stupid. He returned home to Sinanju, there to rest from his travels."

  "That's it? End of story?" Remo asked, perplexed.

  "Of course not," Chiun rejoined. "When the day the noble was prophesied to perish came around again—Greeks for some reason repeating their days—word reached Tang that death had struck in the foretold method. In a vile bathhouse where all manner of perversions took place. This on the exact date, one year later, as prophesied by the oracle. While the cause of death was ascribed to heart failure while in the act of pederasty, word was spread that the elderly statesman had been killed in battle against Xerxian forces, an all-too-common lie created to mask an ignominious death among Greek nobles. No one believed the story, save the nobleman's trusting daughter. The very one whom Tang refused to take as his wife. And this daughter traveled in secret from the house of her uncle in Thebes, to Delphi in Phocis, there to visit the famed Pythia who had prophesied the demise of her father.

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  The girl thereupon had vanished—a victim of roadside thieves, according to the slave with whom she had traveled.

  "Now, Master Tang, being an idiot, was troubled by these things. Instead of considering himself fortunate to have earned a large payment despite what some might consider a technical failure, a nagging pressure filled his heretofore empty head, entreating him to return to Greece to avenge the death of his former charge."

  "His conscience," offered Remo.

  "His stupidity," explained Chiun. "The noble was already dead and Tang was already paid. What need was there for him to run halfway around the world on a fool's errand? But this is what Tang did.

  "Tang returned to Greece and made his way to Pho-cis and Delphi, there to confront the priests of the Pythia, the peristiarchoi. Tang assumed, as only a fool would, that the priests had been paid by a rival noble to predict the death of the old man, whereupon the death was arranged, leaving the all-important seat in the assembly open." Here Chiun broke from the narrative and leaned over to Remo. "I say all-important, Remo, because that is how it is written in the histories. But I tell you that nothing white people do is ever important. This is a myth perpetuated by whites about whites to make themselves feel more worthy in one another's futile estimation."

  This stated, Chiun returned to his tale. "The all-important seat was empty. A charge of Sinanju was dead. So Master Tang sought retribution in the place where the prediction had originated. This is a logic not uncommon among idiots."

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  "Delphi wasn't where the hit order came from?" asked Remo.

  "There was no order," Chiun said.

  "So why was the guy killed?"

  "He died of natural causes."

  "So why the fuss?" asked Remo, exasperated. "He just happened to die on the right day. It was a coincidence, right?"

  "Wrong," said Chiun. "It was foreseen by the Pythian oracle at Delphi."

  ' 'But you just got through telling me that these people were fools for listening to oracles."

  Chiun's hazel eyes grew heavy of lid. "Up until that time, no oracle had been known to speak truth."

  Remo felt a lurking presence flit through his mind like a fugitive shadow. He suppressed a shudder.

  "But the Delphic Oracle could predict the future," Chiun said gravely. "And alas for Sinanju, it was the dullard Tang who made this discovery." He returned to the story. "Not knowing the truth behind the nobleman's death, Tang fell upon the priests of Delphi to avenge his murder. Ignorant of all but vengeance, Tang slew the priests of Delphi."

  Chiun raised his arms in pantomime, his long ivory nails flashing like daggers in the fitful candlelight.

  "Thwap! His hand shot east, and a body fell. Snap! His hand flew west, and another's life was snuffed. Many in number were the priests of the Pythia. But Tang, dull though he was, littered the temple floor with their hapless corpses. Through the storm, Tang did shout, 'You have dared discharge one whom it was my duty to protect.' Tang tore through the temple, reaching the very inner chamber where the mythic Py-

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  thia sat atop her tripod. A horrible-smelling smoke filled the large room, pouring from the rocky crevice over which the Pythia sat. And it was in this chamber that strange thoughts began to crowd the vacant mind of Tang, seeking to control his mighty rage."

  At this, Remo sat up. For a moment the alien presence in his own mind seemed to still. Almost as if it heard Chiun's words.

  "But the tendrils that touched the dull mind of Tang slithered back into the circling yellow sulphur smoke. And Tang, in his idiocy, did shout up at the Pythia, 'What is this place of demons that fills my mind with thoughts of death?' And the Pythia on her tripod—her long black hair covering her face—did writhe and twist on her seat as if to do herself harm. And this child of the smoke called down in an unearthly voice, saying, 'Tang, you of simple mind are not a worthy vessel of Apollo's essence, but hear you this. When the time has come for the dead night tiger of Sinanju
to walk the earth, East will meet West and the destiny of Sinanju will be forever changed. This I have foreseen and this is the legacy I bequeath you for that which you are about to do."

  Remo frowned. According to Sinanju legend, Remo was the dead night tiger, the avatar of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Chiun went on.

  "Tang flashed to the top of the Pythia's platform. As the smoke burst into searing yellow flame around him, he spirited Apollo's Pythia to safety, for even Tang's thick mind recognized it was the smoke that made the child what she was. Only after he had carried her from the temple did he push her shining black hair from her face. And, lo, he beheld the nobleman's

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  daughter, who had been offered as bride tribute. Deep was his anger that the girl should have suffered such a fate, for her mind, like Tang's, was empty of thought. In his rage Tang approached the temple and, with hands more powerful than iron and swifter than the eye could follow, he set to work. For one full day he labored, demolishing walls beneath his fists, pounding rock to powder. After his work was done, not one stone stood upon another. It is said, Remo, that an earthquake destroyed the temple at Delphi, but it was in truth the wrath of Master Tang. Tang stood back and admired his handiwork, for such is what children do when they wreak random ruin.

  "And once he was satisfied, Tang left Greece forever, taking with him the idiot girl who could neither speak nor think. A perfect match were these two, and though unable to perform the duties of a proper wife, she did live for many years. Her grave is still tended in my village, although on the far side of the garbage dump because she was, after all, a foreigner."

  Chiun settled back and folded his arms across his chest, signifying that the story was finished.

  "So Tang beat the oracle," Remo said. The shadowy thing in his mind began to stretch its tendrils across his thoughts.

  "The temple was rebuilt not long after," Chiun explained. "The Delphic oracle gave many prophecies long after the death of Tang."

  "So what's the moral?" asked Remo. The dark image of a battlefield that he had seen in the Forrester girl's room appeared like a mirage behind Chiun. Remo stared at the surreal scene.

  "There is no moral, but that I should not have

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  waited for Smith to transport us from this country of Tang-like fools. For now it is too late. For you and for me. But especially for you, my son."

  Remo felt the first strains of panic tugging at his stomach. "But there is something I can do about this, right?" he asked.

  The combatants reappeared on the battlefield in his mind. Somewhere in his consciousness, Remo felt the mocking presence of the Pythian oracle.

  Chiun shook his head slowly, the wisps of white hair decorating his head and chin doing a drifting dance in the darkened room. ' T know of nothing that can help you, my son," he said. "East has met West. We are of the East, and Delphi was the West in the time of Tang. It is the will of the sun god."

  In Remo's mind the malevolent combatant was poised and ready to strike down its weaker rival. He felt the force of the Pythia crawl over him like an icy fog.

  Remo was losing the battle. He needed some normalcy, a compass to orient him. Something to root him in reality. "So why was Tang a braggart?" he asked, trying to pull away from the strange, otherwordly realm intruding on his vision.

  "When he returned to Sinanju, Tang told the villagers that he had grappled with a god and had won. This slory he repeated to the end of his days." Chiun shook his head sadly. "But he did not win, my son. Woe lo us, he did not win."

  Remo could no longer hold up the dam he had built in his thoughts. The malevolent force of the Pythia's

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  consciousness burst loose, pouring through his mind in a sickly warm flood. And like a helpless victim in the raging river of his own thoughts, Remo was swept away into the darkness.

  CHapter Twenty

  Telemachus Anaxagoras Kaspurelakos had always known that he was destined for greatness, and he didn't shy away from sharing this knowledge with those he met. Since Telemachus had no friends, his family was forced to endure the theories of his future ascendancy to power. And since most of that family lived on the other side of the Atlantic, Papa and Mama Kaspurelakos were the ones who had to suffer most through their young son's delusions of grandeur.

  The winds of fate had blown his parents from their native Greece just after the Second World War, and the Kaspurelakos family had eventually settled in the familiar-sounding town called Thermopolis, Wyoming. It was there young Telemachus was born and spent his formative years.

  His mother had gone to work in a local bakery, rising at four in the morning so that she could make enough to school young Telemachus to look and act like the other American children. Telemachus's father was a natural politician, having served in public life for many years in his native land. But in the early 1950s, America found it difficult to accept an ugly little man with hairy ears and an accent thicker than a

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  vat of feta curd sitting on the local city council. And so the elder Kaspurelakos found work as a cobbler.

  Young Telemachus settled into his life in the United States of America, content in the knowledge that, humble beginnings aside, his future was as bright as Apollo's shield.

  But the future had other ideas.

  Telemachus steered a treacherous course through the Wyoming school system, graduating early from high school in the spring of what should have been his junior year. It was of no consequence to him that when he received his diploma on that sunny Sunday afternoon, he was as friendless as he had been his first day of kindergarten. After all, great things lay in store.

  Down at the bakery Mama had gone on double shifts, and Papa—now proud owner of a cobbler shop—had redoubled his tireless efforts to finance Telemachus's continuing education. The young man would be the first of their family to receive a college diploma.

  With no social life and few extracurricular activities to distract him, Telemachus graduated from the University of Wyoming with his B.A. in two and a half years. He then told his aging parents that he wanted to stay on in school to receive his Master's. A good education, he argued, was the surest way for him to achieve his ultimate goal of national prestige and power.

  Once his next educational goal was met, Telemachus Kaspurelakos, who now went by the more American-sounding "Mark Kaspar," had informed his parents that he wanted to stay on in school to get his B.Sc. His father had just celebrated his seventieth

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  birthday and looked forward to Mark's graduation so that he might at last retire from the shoe shop. Arthritis had forced his mother to leave her job long before, and the patriarch of the Kaspurelakos family had worked night and day to fund his only son's ever rising college tuition.

  With a weary sigh of resignation, the senior Kaspurelakos returned to the sweltering back room of his tiny shoe-repair shop. Family was family. And Mark was the future of the Kaspurelakos family.

  The father died a month into Mark's next semester. Young Mark—in truth not quite so young any longer—was devastated. At his father's funeral, he begged his grieving mother to return to the bakery, but his pleas only made the poor woman's mournful wails all the louder.

  Without the financial support, Mark couldn't afford to hide out in the halls of academia. This realization terrified him. For the truth was, in spite of all the grandiose talk of his future greatness, Mark Kaspar hadn't a clue what he was going to do with his adult life.

  Mark ultimately convinced his mother to surrender the proceeds of the sale of the Kaspurelakos shoe-repair shop so he could continue along his march to glory. At that point the old woman was only too willing to give in—anything to get her son out of the house.

  Money in hand, Kaspar returned to the world in which he had squandered his adult life. He got a job as an English professor at a local state college.

  Truthfully the only driving ambition Mark Kaspar owned was a compulsion to further the
myth that Mark Kaspar possessed any ambition at all. He was,

  ultimately and in spite of his own delusions, intellectually lazy and bereft of any marketable skills whatsoever. He never recognized this, however. Everything wrong in his life could always be blamed on some external factors. It was the worst kind of self-deceit, but Mark Kaspar had practiced it skillfully all his life.

  And so it was for fifteen years that the young man with the glorious dream of some ill-defined future languished in a mundane job. As the days stretched into years, his early assuredness of his own destiny devolved into a visceral hatred of all that had cheated him of the life he deserved.

  Until the day a quirk of fate pushed him onto the path of greatness that he had wandered from.

  To impress the faculty dean, Kaspar had signed on to teach a summer course in archaeology. It was a fledgling department, and Kaspar hadn't quite studied the course requirements when he agreed to add it to his schedule. But it meant tenure. And tenure meant job security.

  A month later he was in Greece.

  His class had been signed up as part of an international student team set loose at the site of a new dig in the ruins of ancient Delphi.

  The students—some natives of Greece, others from the U.S., Great Britain, France, Belgium, as well as a handful from as far away as South Africa and New Zealand—attacked the pile of rubble with spoons and brushes. Representatives of Greece's archaeological-affairs office dug in right beside the students, and the careful, studied excavation was soon a bustle of activity.

  Mark Kaspar surveyed the work area from a dis-

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  tance, slumped sullenly in a folding beach chair beneath a heavy, sweat-stained pith helmet.