She took one look at that cold, bitter face and strictly parted white hair and knew that he would do just what he promised.
"Call me Mildred," said Dr. Pensoitte.
Chapter Ten
Africa," Remo muttered.
Chiun couldn't choose someone for Remo to fight in Ohio. First Peru, then freaking central Africa.
He walked for miles along a bone-dry dirt road into a village where the thatch-and-earth houses seemed to grow like trees out of rock cliffs. It was the third such village he had been to in the Dogon country of Mali, but smaller by half than the other two.
He was looking for a man named Kiree. Nearly everyone he had talked to was familiar with the name, but no one had seen him.
"The greatest among the Dogon," he had been told. Some said that the warrior was old and wise and lived in the middle of the earth. Others insisted that Kiree was a spirit who only materialized when his people were in need. Some of the older villagers thought he was a giant whose footprints had created the sheer cliff faces of the countryside. And there were some who said that Kiree wasn't a man at all, but an insect.
Great, Remo thought. Here I am in the wilds of Africa to talk sense to a beetle.
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Maybe this is Chiun's idea of a joke. See how far he can jerk me around.
But no. There was Ancion. For the Inca, the Master's Trial had been serious, serious enough to die for. Remo would try again with Kiree, but he wasn't optimistic about the outcome. These people wanted to fight. It didn't make sense, but then nothing about this whole spooky business made much sense.
He stopped in his tracks. Ahead, in a small clearing, a group of men wearing fifteen-foot-high wooden masks and dressed in bizarre costumes of shells and grass skirts danced and shouted in a circle. Apart from them, a few grizzled old men the color of ebony picked at the raw carcass of a goat with their fingers. Musicians played on flutes and drums while gyrating dancers, brightly decorated with exaggerated wooden breasts to resemble women, wove through their column.
Onlookers clapped and chanted as they emerged from the precariously balanced houses on the cliffs. They were a striking people, very tall and long-limbed, with large eyes. The women, their heads draped with colorful turbans, wore silver hoops through their noses.
"Excuse me," Remo asked a group of passersby bedecked in yellow beads. "Can you tell me what's going on?"
The people, all taller than Remo by a head, smiled politely and spoke something that sounded vaguely like water going down a drain.
"I'm looking for someone," he said, pronouncing each word carefully.
The natives laughed apologetically and waved, talking the same incomprehensible tongue.
Remo exhaled noisily, wiping some grime off his face. Another bum steer. This town was your standard African backwater. The other villages he'd passed through at least
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had donkeys in the streets. There were nothing but scrawny dogs here, along with the dancing Africans.
It must have been hotter than a hundred degrees. Remo felt a rising tide of irritation inside him. How many more dusty, dry villages would he have to visit before the elusive Kiree finally acknowledged his presence? Mali was a big place.
"Thanks anyway," he said to the group wearing the beads. He made the universal gesture of resignation. The Africans nodded and ambled away.
"Are you searching for something?" a voice said in English, seemingly from out of nowhere.
Remo looked around. The only person near him was a dwarf who stood as high as Remo's belt buckle.
"Kind of," Remo said. "A guy named Kiree. You ever hear of him?" .
The dwarf shrugged. "One hears many things." He pointed to the dancers. "Would you like to join the funeral?"
"Funeral? That? Looks like a party."
The dwarf smiled as he led Remo past the gathering throng of women on the outer circle of the festivities toward the clearing where the dancers performed. "The Dogon do not believe in death the way westerners do. For them, it is a time of celebration when the spirit leaves, because it will be born again in another, stronger body. Ah, here comes the dannane, the hunter."
A dancer in a fierce-looking black mask, clothed in rags and straw, sprang out from behind a spreading bala tree to stalk imaginary prey. "It is hoped that the spirit of the departed will come to rest in the body of one who will grow to be a fine hunter and warrior, like him." He laughed easily. "The Dogon do not yet understand that the best hunters are not men with angry expressions, but the small beasts of many legs, who weave beautiful nets to capture their prey without effort. The spider is truly the
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king of beasts, but the Dogon are still too young a race to
understand."
"Aren't you one of them?" Remo asked.
The dwarf took Remo's measure with kindly eyes, "Do I appear to be one of them?"
Remo had to laugh. "No, 1 guess not." The dwarf slapped him on the back like an old friend. What a strange character this little squirt is, Remo thought. "Where do you come from, then?"
"1 am of the Tellem tribe."
"Oh." Remo had never heard of the Tellem before. But then, he realized, he hadn't known or cared very much about the world outside of his work before the Master's Trial. "Are your people nearby?"
The dwarf squinted, surveying the ragged cliffs on all sides of them. "We are everywhere," he said. "The Tellem are an ancient race, older than time. We believe that the first men on earth were of our tribe. The spirits of those first men have stayed within us."
"And you live . . ."
"In the caves. In the hills. On the grass plains. The Tellem keep no home. We are like the spider-small, almost invisible, who can weave her nets anywhere. Yet she finds the prey she seeks because her net accepts all, watches everything, discards no being because of its appearance."
Remo looked at him for a long moment. There was no need to ask the dwarf's name. He reached into his pocket and produced the piece of carved jade.
The dwarf matched it with his own. "Kiree," he said.
"Remo."
"We will go to the cliffs."
"Kiree" Remo took the dwarf's arm.
"You do not wish to fight?"
"No. I don't like to fight men who aren't my enemies."
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"Ah," Kiree said. "I thought you did not possess the face of one who kills for pleasure."
"Then-"
"The choice is not ours, my friend. We fight not out of hatred for each other, but out of respect for the Master's Trial. For our ancestors."
Remo gritted his teeth. The longer he was involved with the Master's Trial, the more he hated it. "There never seems to be any way out," he said so quietly that he could have been talking to himself.
"Do not be confused. See, the kanaga, the dancers, are performing the dance of death. It is a happy dance, for the spirit of the dead is about to be reborn." He squeezed Remo's shoulder. "We, too, when our time comes, will leave this world to return, stronger, wiser, better."
He took Remo away from the crowd to the base of a cliff unobstructed by houses. It was a slab of rock so sheer that an egg could have rolled down the height of it without cracking. From a leather pouch tied around his waist, Kiree poured some yellowish powder into his palms and spat, rubbing his hands together.
Remo knew better than to question the man's fighting ability. Pint-sized or not, if Chiun considered him in the same league with Ancion, Kiree had to know what he was doing. But he didn't expect the little man to climb straight up the cliff.
Remo watched in amazement. As far as he knew, no one outside of Sinanju could scale walls without tools.
"Do you need assistance?" Kiree called, his face anxious.
"No, thanks," Remo said. He began the methodical climb, using his toes and the suction of his palms to carry the momentum of his movement upward. It was an elementary move, learned during the first year of his training with Chiun, and Remo executed it perfectly. And yet Kiree was