Chiun ran up alongside Remo. Their feet were barely touching the water’s surface, and they rose and fell with the breathlike rising and falling of the surface.
The method of running on the surface of the water was simple enough to understand. Did one not see insects in streams who stood on the water and flitted from place to place? And yet, such a thing is the ignorant mind of most men that they don’t believe a human being can do what a simple insect can do.
The principle was quite the same. One must simply detect the pressure limit of the surface of the water and not exceed it. Thus, one does not sink into the water. Chiun knew that anyone could be taught to perform such a feat of novelty—even ancient carpenters.
They found just a small and weary band of travelers who had sailed and rowed all the way from Tahuata in the Marquesas. Their passion to reach the vortex wasn’t as strong as their bodies. Still, they attempted to put up a fight that ended when their cackling old crone of a priest got broken and jettisoned over the side.
“This will become tiresome quickly, Remo,” Chiun admitted finally.
“What?” Remo asked. The young Master ceased his stroking. He had the tow rope for the Tahuatian boats tied around his waist. “You’re tired? Maybe you could try some of this and we’ll see if you get tired.”
“I think not. Continue, or the outgoing tide will carry us away from the atoll.”
Soon the Tahuatians were stranded on the small atoll, which had already been stripped of the few edible fruits that grew there. Remo left their few supplies and smashed their boats, leaving only one canoe for him and Chiun to take back to their rented sailboat. Remo was actually sitting inside the canoe and looking from side to side before he realized that all the paddles had been destroyed. Chiun sighed, embarrassed for him under the eyes of the islanders, and whittled a new paddle from the trunk of a strong palm tree.
The stranded islanders eyed the stripped palm foliage as if it were a buffet.
Chiun handed the paddle to the Reigning Master, who began rowing them out to sea while the rabble tussled over their meal of leaves.
“If you’re really bored …” Remo held up the paddle.
“No, thank you,” Chiun answered.
Chiun wondered how long this would go on. Would it take them days to starve Sa Mangsang? Weeks? Or would it never happen? Surely, Sa Mangsang had capabilities that were yet to be revealed.
Would this end, ever?
Chapter 44
Finally, the end was coming. It had been an eternity, this waiting without hope of release.
They were the Faithful of Saraswati, and they had existed for a thousand generations, or so their tradition claimed. For a thousand generations they had been waiting.
When he was a child, Urik had believed in the doctrine of his father and mother. When he was beginning to become a man, he questioned their teachings.
“How can you trust in this tradition, if it had existed for twenty thousand or thirty thousand years?” he demanded of his father. “Legends alter in a single generation—how could our worship be pure since the beginning?”
“The One comes to our dreams and reminds us,” his father explained.
“When? When will I have the dream?”
“Never,” his father said, “for I have had it. It comes only once in many generations. That is all that is needed.”
Urik disputed that. He didn’t wish to carry on the tradition. His family told him, “It is simply what you must do.”
“And if I do not?” he demanded.
“Then the Faithful of Saraswati grow fewer in number.” His father waved at the village.
Saraswati was the name of the town and had been for all time. Once it was huge, as the Faithful numbered in the thousands. Today, most of the unneeded structures were crumbling ruins that the villagers kept buried and hidden. There was much that would stir international attention should those ruins become known. Saraswati was just a small enclave now, a hundred or less.
“The One asks too much!” Urik protested when the time came for him to take his vow. “It is inhumane that we are forced to live our lives in expectation of this thing that will never come.”
“One day, it will come,” his mother promised.
“Father wasted his lifetime and you ask me to waste mine!”
His mother was always tolerant, even of this insult of her recently deceased husband. “He did not think so.”
Urik prayed to the One to send him the dream—he needed something to give him the will to carry on the tradition. The dream, however, never came.
Urik took his vows, despite his lack of belief. He had no choice. Generations of the Faithful had come before him. He couldn’t break their lineage of service to the One—this was his prison.
Then, afterward, came the dream—to Urik and to all the people. They felt it long before the rest of the world. After all, this was what they were bred for.
The dictates of the One, passed down through the generations, told just how to seek the best bloodlines. For centuries the men of Saraswati had journeyed throughout the Indian subcontinent searching for the brides with the best attributes—then they went to great lengths to obtain them. All this was done to make the Faithful highly sensitive to the call of the One, if he should ever call.
When he did, his call was only a whisper, but it grew louder every day.
They prepared their journey. All the true Faithful would go, leaving the non-Saraswati wives and the children and the very few of the Faithful who weren’t sensitive—there were always some in every generation. Their disappointment was bad enough before the call—after the call, these unfortunate nonsensitives were driven to suicide.
Urik and his people left behind the village and the tradition of a thousand generations. They were finally fulfilling their purpose.
Urik was ecstatic. The dreams proved the One was real. His life wouldn’t be wasted, and soon he would sit at the right hand of the One.
Then—he wasn’t sure what came after that. Surely, it could only be eternal paradise.
They had accumulated much money, saved just for this purpose. They took plane after plane to get to a small island in the far reaches of the South Pacific Ocean, and then they purchased large ocean canoes. Not one of the Faithful had ever been on the ocean, but their will was so strong that they dug into the water and paddled out to sea, guided by the siren song that was always present in their specially attuned minds. They could almost hear the sibilant call. It led them into a passage that would take them through the patrol ships.
Then the servants of the One gathered around their boats. It was difficult for the Faithful of Saraswati to look at these huge and tentacled monsters as their brethren.
The ways of the One were indeed strange and wondrous.
Chapter 45
“What are they?” Remo asked.
“They are the Faithful of Saraswati. Can you not read the inscription upon their lead craft?”
Remo could see the characters on the sash that was draped around the stem of the canoe, but he didn’t know what they said. “They Hindu?”
“Of a type,” Chiun said shortly. “They have existed for long years and married among those they felt best suited to increasing their people’s sensitivity to the call of their unnamed master.”
“I guess we know his name now,” Remo said.
“Never have they deviated from their purpose, until all who knew them assumed they were but one more dynasty of dedicated acolytes,” Chiun said. “They are ignorant of their own purpose. Think of what the unnameable one has bred them for.”
Remo thought about it. “Nutritional supplements.”