"No," said Chiun, sitting down in the cave, spreading his thin white winter robe beneath him. "Today we stay not for your foolish loyalty to this foolish country. We stay for Sinanju. We stay because we must not let it happen again."
"Let what happen again?" Remo said.
"You have heard of your Western empire, Rome?"
"Sure. It conquered the world once."
"How white of you to think of it that way. Only the white world was conquered by Rome, and not even all of that."
"All right, all right. It was still the greatest empire the world has ever known."
"For whites," Chiun said. "But I have not told you about ... about Lu the Disgraced."
"Was he a Roman emperor?" Remo asked.
Chiun shook his head. The wisp of beard hardly moved in the icy chill cave, where no wind cut or sun entered.
"A Master of Sinanju," Chiun said.
"I know all the Masters of Sinanju. You made me learn them and I never heard of this Lulu."
"Would that I never had to tell you of Lu the Disgraced."
"I take it he screwed up," Remo said, and Chiun nodded.
Remo said, "No reason to keep him a secret. Sometimes you can learn more from what's wrong than from what's right."
"I did not tell you because you did not have to know. I did not tell you because you might mention his name one day to someone."
"Who would care?" asked Remo. "I care, but who else would care?"
"Whites would care," said Chiun. "Whites would never forget. They are a treacherous gang, just waiting for Sinanju to fail."
"Little Father," Remo said patiently, "they don't care."
"They do," Chiun said.
"No," said Remo. "The line of assassins of Sinanju is not exactly a major study course at American universities. "
"Rome is. The fall of that empire is," Chiun said.
"What are you getting at?"
"Rome fell because we failed it. Sinanju failed Rome. Lu the Disgraced failed Rome."
He folded his long-nailed hands in front of him as he often did when about to begin a lecture. Remo clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the cold wet rock wall of the cave.
As Chiun began to tell it, he slowly started slipping into the familiar phrases of old Korean, the language of the older legends with its sharper cadences.
He related how Sinanju had discovered the Romans many centuries before their prime and marked them as a coming civilization, although in those matters no one ever really knew. So much was left to chance, and this was the way of nations too. The only sure thing about kingdoms and empires was that they came and they went.
Still, the Masters of Sinanju put Rome on their list as a place worth watching, because if it grew and prospered, its emperors would want assassins to prolong their reign, and that was the business of the Masters of Sinanju.
Finally, in the year of the pig, Rome was growing. It had two consuls who ruled together, and one, because of vanity, wished to rule alone. So it came to pass that he employed a Master of the House of Sinanju and paid him, and soon he ruled alone.
Thus Rome became an important city, and often, when there was no call for their work among more civilized courts, Masters of Sinanju would journey to Rome and visit the Western city where people had strange eyes and big noses.
Now, it happened that Lu, in the 650th year since the founding of the city of Rome, which was roughly A.D. 100 by Remo's calendar, came to that city. Rome had changed. There was an emperor now, and the games, once small religious festivals, were now filling giant arenas. Men fought animals. Men fought men. Spears and swords and tigers. So great was their lust that the Romans could not see enough blood.
But because they did not respect life, they could not appreciate a professional assassin. Death was just death to them, nothing special, so there was no work for Lu.
Yet, Chiun related, it came to pass that the emperor heard of the one from the East and wished to see his eyes and his manner, and Lu appeared before him. The emperor asked what weapons Lu used, and Lu answered that the emperor never asked his sculptor what chisel he used or his carpenter what lathe.
"Do you kill with your funny eyes?" asked the emperor.
Lu knew that this was a new land, and so he did not show the disdain he felt. He answered, "One can kill with a thought, Emperor." The emperor thought this empty boasting, but his adviser, a Greek, who were at that time smarter than the Romans, although, Chiun said, it is now a tie for who is stupidest in the world, spoke to Lu and said that Rome had a problem. The problem was with Rome's roads, Lu was told. Rome used them to move legions around the empire, to allow farmers to bring goods to market. The roads were the lifeblood of the empire, this adviser said, and Lu nodded. Masters of Sinanju had already noted that there was only one permanent truth about the prosperity of an empire. With roads, they flourished; without roads, they didn't.
Chiun now pointed out to Remo in the cave of the Rocky Mountains that China's great wall was no wall. The Chinese, Chiun said, are slothful perverts, but they have never been fools. They never thought that a wall would stop an army. It never had and never would. The secret of the Great Wall of China that no one understood these days was that it was not a wall at all. It was a road.
Remo remembered seeing pictures of it. Of course it was a road. It was a raised road, for moving armies and goods. People only called it a wall because they felt safer behind walls, although Remo knew that walls were only illusions of safety.
The Roman emperor's adviser told Lu, "We have bandits on our roads. We crucify them by the roadways so that will serve as a reminder to others not to rob again."
"Do they rob much?" Lu asked.
"What they rob is not important. That they rob at all is. It is the fear of the people we are concerned with. If they fear the roads, if they fear to travel, they will begin to mint their own coins, they will begin to withhold crops."
"But it is not a problem yet," said Lu, who could not help but notice that these barbarians with the big noses had floors of marble as fine as any Ming emperor had ever had.
"The best time to solve a problem is at the beginning," said the adviser. "The robbers know that only a few will be caught and crucified by the roadways. But if something they did not understand was killing them and it was said that it was the will of our divine emperor in Rome, then the robbers would diminish and we could make the roads of Rome truly safe for all."
And to Lu this was wise, so he set forth south toward the city of Herculaneum. Between Brundisium and Herculaneum, he sought out the robber bands and with swift and sure hand dispatched them, even some of them who were in league with local governments. For it happened then, as always, wherever there was money, it could find its way from the robbers to those who were supposed to stop them.
And from Rome the word went out. Divine Claudius had decreed that robbers would die by his will alone. They would suffer in the night the broken neck, the split spine, the crushed skull-all by the emperor's will alone. And none knew that Lu, the Master of Sinanju, was the emperor's secret power.
The sudden terrible deaths were more effective than even crucifixion. Robbers left the roads. Never had the highways been so safe, and travelers and merchants moved along them in confidence, making the empire even stronger and giving an unwarranted reputation for excellence to the fool emperor Claudius. So said Chiun.
And then, just as everything had become successful, the fool Claudius, who was a glutton for the blood arena, wanted more entertainment. He wanted the assassin from far away who was busy protecting the roads of Rome to perform for him.
Now, it is an emperor's right to be a fool, Chiun told Remo. But it is an assassin's everlasting disgrace.
Lu, remembering the fine marble floors and finding boredom and hot winds between Herculaneum and Brundisium, accepted and did perform for the emperor. And also for the crowds in the arena. In three appearances, he made more than he had before in his entire lifetime, and he left. But not only did he leave Rome, he left behind his vow to protect Rome's roads. "He took material wealth and left," Chiun said.