Kiai! & Mistress of Death Read online

  "Perhaps," he agreed. "I did not at first concern myself with them. But first they threatened, then intruded, as you have observed. They would not let me go in peace, and so, necessarily, I opposed them. It was not my choice."

  And that opposition had brought the two of us together. It was evident that Kobi did not know any more about the demons or their source of supply than I did; Pedro's informant must have assumed that anyone the demons wanted to get rid of was a real threat to their operations. Thus Amalita's information was worth less than we had thought. But somehow I didn't mind at all; I was exceedingly glad to have made the acquaintance of this fine man and his daughter.

  Chiyako departed silently, but soon returned with a plate of Chinese delicacies. I wondered how they were able to afford good food, but remembered that many established Chinese would feel it a privilege to make gifts of food to a genuine sifu. I was sure Kobi would not accept anything else. So he would be forced to eat unaffordably elegant meals, when simplicity was his style.

  We moved into a moderate Chinese meal during our conversation, and I was mystified how she accomplished it, for she had had almost no time to prepare. First there was dried seaweed, green like spinach but salty tasting. Then jellied jellyfish. And small pieces of raw fish with vinegar, salt and oil. Some fruits in heavy syrup. Then some nice sharkfin soup with pieces of the dark fin, showing. And finally some fierce mai-tai liquor, the same kind I had seen in the store. I only tasted that, out of politeness. I was glad I knew how to handle chopsticks.

  At some point Chiyako had slipped out again and washed her face and let down her hair. She had applied makeup: white powder on her cheeks. Now her hair flowed blue-black down her back, perfumed and straight. She wore a silk kimono tied at the waist with a red sash, and tight white pants underneath. She looked younger.

  I was struck again by her beauty, and was constrained to analyze it. She was handsome of face and form, true, but it was more than that. She moved with an unobtrusive grace, with a perfect precision and balance, but it was more than that, too. She knew how to fight, and fight well, and had the courage to perform a kind of surgery without fuss on her own father. But even that was not it. There was something she shared with Kobi, a composure in adversity, a dignity, but not ordinary dignity. A special nobility, with indefinable yet unique attributes.

  "If I may ask," I said carefully, concentrating on my chopsticks as though they symbolized something of life and death importance, "what is your school of kung fu?"

  "Shaolin," Kobi said.

  But there were many forms of Shaolin. "Northern or Southern?" My hands were so tight I was afraid the chopsticks would break.

  "Northern."

  Then it fell into place. I had had experience with Northern Shaolin kung-fu, and had developed a fundamental respect for it. I had met men like Kobi, men that shared that aura, that philosophy. I had deep memories of respect, power, horror and grief.

  I covered my face, but there was no concealing my abrupt emotion. It is no shame in the orient for a man to cry; Samurai warriors in Japan do it, and Chinese too. But it was acutely embarrassing for me.

  "Please tell us your story," Kobi said, taking no more notice of my condition than I had of his.

  I told:

  CHAPTER 6

  SHAOLIN

  Somebody was hauling me through the water. For a confused moment I thought it was a crocodile. But it was a man, whether friend or foe I could not tell. He brought me to the overgrown shore and pumped the water out of me. Then he doctored the gashes in my hand and side. I lay there and let him work, though I was now conscious; he seemed to know what he was doing. He was a powerful, silent man.

  But he was on to me. "Up, friend," he said in Khmer, the Cambodian language. I decided not to pretend ignorance; I was weak, in no condition for resistance, and I owed him my life.

  He was a monk. He had a shaven head, was on the thin side, and seemed to be about fifty years old. His face was lined, his hands were gnarled with two fingers missing, from the left, and he walked with a limp. Yet he was strong and competent. He wore long saffron robes and wooden sandals, and carried a wooden staff and a begging bowl. His name, I learned later, was Tao.

  He led me miles through the jungle to his monastery. It squatted on the slope of a mountain, and even though I was largely ignorant of the nuances of Eastern architecture I could tell that the style was primarily Chinese. It seemed old, very old; perhaps it had been built centuries before by Chinese missionaries. It had a wide front entrance, an outer court, an inner court, a chapel, and a number of small chambers for the residence and activities of the monks. It all seemed rather ordinary as monasteries went, but I was soon to be disabused of that impression.

  For this was a Shaolin temple, and the monks practiced that aspect of the faith known as "Northern" though this was in fact well south of China. A Northern Shaolin monk is not an ordinary man.

  They fed me a bowl of brown rice with fish heads and tails in it, and of course the wretched nouc nam sauce. Also an appetizer of a bowl of clear soup with small round quails' eggs in it, and a few Chinese beans and bean sprouts. The monks, it developed, were vegetarians; they consumed fish, eggs and milk, but no meat, and rice was their mainstay. But I was hungry, tired and wounded, and this was a feast. I struggled with the unfamiliar chopsticks, for there was no spoon.

  Then I was conducted through narrow corridors, past a statue of Buddha, down to a stone cell with one high window opening onto ground level outside. A monk took care of my wounds, applying native dressings with seeming competence; at any rate, I felt better. My bed was a straw pallet on the floor, comfortable enough. We can do quite nicely without the amenities of civilized, technological life when we have to, perhaps better than with them. I slept well.

  Next morning I was awoken at five A.M., the monks' normal time of arising, and I joined them in their communal dining hall for a frugal breakfast. There were about thirty monks in all. After prayers and food they dispersed to their several occupations. Some went to the fields beyond the monastery to work until afternoon; others took their begging bowls on a trek to the nearest village. A simple, stifled life, as I judged it. Mistakenly.

  I had an audience with the head monk, Yee Chuen. I wasn't sure of his exact title, as it was rendered in Chinese, but he was obviously the man in charge. He was a tall, spare old man, his skin leathered by the sun. His entire head was clean shaven: beard, brows, hair. His skin was taut parchment stretched across the cheekbones. His teeth were not good. But he was spry and moved rapidly and with certainty. I could not know it then, but his face and form were to have a profound effect on my imagination, so that whenever afterwards I saw a man like him, certain emotions were evoked.

  "It is good to have you with us, Mr. Striker," he greeted me in Khmer. "We very nearly lost you."

  I stiffened. I had told no monk my name.

  "No, no, be at ease," he said immediately. "We know you because we came to free you from your captivity. Unfortunately, there was some confusion. We had not expected you to escape by yourself. You are a resourceful man! Your trail was devious."

  "You were going to rescue me?" I demanded. "I thought the monks took no part in the fighting." But I realized that if these were Chinese monks, they might well be refugees from the Chinese Communists. They could have renovated this old building, that no one else wanted. They would have no brief for the Viet-minh. "That is true. But we had a vision, and knew that you could not be permitted to die at this time."

  I pondered. "What do you want from me?"

  "Nothing, friend," Yee said.

  "I can't give you any information about my mission."

  "We do not want it. We are simple folk, largely unaware of external matters."

  Now I was good and suspicious. Simple folk seldom think of themselves that way. How clever were the Cong getting? This seemed to be a legitimate monastery, but it was possible that money or terror had subverted it. Had they agreed to take me in and use gentle persuasion to ge
t military information I would not otherwise yield?

  "This rescue mission," I said. "How did you propose to get me away from the Cong?" I was sure they would have a cover story, but perhaps there would be holes in it, clues that would betray their collusion with the Cong, Viet-minh or whatever.

  For though I was wary, I was not entirely satisfied that I was in enemy hands. These monks were difficult to corrupt. Sometimes such establishments did help downed American pilots. It depended on the individual situation.

  And of course I wanted to believe in my freedom. I knew that the instinct for survival could be my own undoing, but still I wanted to live.

  "We sent an agent to release you," he said.

  "No agent came," I said flatly.

  "It was difficult, because the enemy is vigilant. They must have discovered her despite our precautions."

  Every nerve charged. "Her?"

  "A young woman. You did not see her?"

  A young woman. I felt suddenly sick. "Did she have a nice figure and a deformed nose?"

  He nodded. "We are celibate, but your description is accurate. She was comely, and her nose was crooked. Her family had been killed by the enemy, and we fed her, and she asked to help us. She could not help us in her normal fashion, but was ideal for this particular task." Delicately put, the girl was obviously a parttime prostitute, hardly a service honest monks could afford. But she had been an excellent infiltrator among soldiers. "She was to wait a few days, diverting suspicion, then release you at night and lead you to us. But she did not return. We found her body where they had left it, carelessly thrown away, after they had beaten her to death."

  Beaten to death...

  Even if this were all part of a plot to make me talk, it had been wrong for me to kill her. I could have gone along with the plan, just as I was doing now. The issue was still to be decided, but at least she would be alive.

  And if these monks really were trying to help me—how much worse that killing was! In that case, I could not ethically accept my freedom from them. I would have to stand trial for murder.

  To hell with it! I was not about to start lying to protect my hide. "Father, the Cong did not kill her. I did."

  He did not show emotion. "Why?"

  "I thought she was an enemy agent."

  He did not respond, so I blurted out the whole story. "Take your vengeance now," I concluded, sure that if these people were legitimate, they would.

  "Vengeance?" he looked puzzled.

  "I killed your agent, when she meant me no harm. My life is forfeit." I was aware that this sounded like a masochistic streak in me, a wanting to be punished. But it was the way I felt. I have never killed with equanimity; there is always a deep remorse, an impossible desire to wipe the slate clean.

  Yee shook his head. "Jason Striker, you have much to learn."

  "No use to spare me. I will not tell you my mission. So you will gain nothing by keeping me alive."

  "Indeed, we shall keep you alive," he said firmly. "And we shall teach you what we must. Only now do I comprehend the second level of the vision."

  This hardly reassured me. "You can torture me, but I doubt if it will help you. You don't have the facilities to get my information, and I don't think the Cong do, either, or they would not have tried anything like this."

  Still he looked at me sadly, as though I were an erring child. "It is not enough for us to free you; we must prepare you for your true mission."

  "I won't tell you my mission!"

  "How could you? You do not know it, as we do not." A strange ploy, but it wouldn't work. "Many years will pass before that mission comes clear. We shall not live to see it, but you will do it in your own time, if only our instruction is good. Therein lies our justification for existence."

  I stared at him. "I don't understand!"

  "Jason Striker, it is seldom given to a man to understand, yet he performs as he must. Had you comprehended our philosophy before this, that girl would not have had to die." That was as close as he ever came to reproving me on that score. Not that he needed to; my guilt was already deeply embedded in my conscience.

  "I'll try to escape, if I get the chance!" I warned him.

  "There is no escape from destiny," he said. "Not for any of us, however we might wish it." And he seemed mortally sad. I did not comprehend his reason until much later, way too late.

  Yee clapped his hands and the monk Tao appeared. "Show Mr. Striker our demesne. Do not hinder him; he will remain with us of his own accord."

  "I will do no such thing!" I protested. "Are you naive?" He gave no answer to that. I followed the monk out of the chamber and down the narrow halls. The monastery was a large stone building, more intricate than I had thought the day before. It was like a small town, self contained, with big courtyards devoted to little vegetable and flower gardens. Statues of Buddha were everywhere. There were cisterns to collect rain water, and it was always pure, but when I got a bucketful myself I discovered giant water cockroaches in it.

  We entered the central court, with flowers growing around the fringe. There was a modest fountain in the center, and assorted fish in the water: huge black and gold goldfish and others I couldn't make out. Monkeys perched atop the walls, watching us and crying out reproachfully.

  "It is time for my practice," Tao said. "Will you indulge me, Ling?"

  Another monk stepped from the silent shadows, nodding. Tao turned to me. "Would you care to watch?"

  I shrugged. Whatever he was leading up to, I would have to go along. "If it is all right with you," I said to the other monk.

  He did not answer, and I thought my Khmer was inadequate; I was hardly expert in that language. "Ling does not speak," Tao explained. "The Viet-minh cut out his tongue."

  Oh.

  Tao and Ling removed their robes to reveal surprisingly well-developed bodies. I had been unobservant before; these monks were muscular, not flabby. I realized that if I had tried to bolt for my freedom, I could have been brought up rather short. No flaccid ascetics here.

  Of course I had judo and karate training, third degree black belt in judo, second in karate. I could handle myself. But I was weak from my Cong experience and my injuries. Unless I put such men away quickly, I would be in trouble. Not that I intended to start anything at the moment.

  At any rate, Tao had already succeeded in showing me one hazard in my potential escape. I would not underestimate my bodyguards. Ling got a spear. Tao picked up a pole about four feet long with a giant curved blade attached to the end, rather like a scimitar. I had never seen a weapon like it, and was amazed to see such devices in the hands of these monks.

  "Quando," Tao said, noting my puzzlement. "Feel it." And he held it out to me.

  I hefted it. The thing was heavy, like an axe, but well balanced. A weapon, surely, but unusable for close quarter combat, as it would be far too slow. No doubt it was used for cutting high vines out of the way during maneuvers; the blade was razor sharp. Tao took it back and faced Ling. The two bowed formally to each other. The ritual was slow and precise, almost like a dance. Then Ling lunged forward, the sharp point of his spear driving for Tao's stomach. I leaped up involuntarily, my mind's eye seeing Tao treacherously skewered.

  But Tao was already moving. Smoothly he parried the strike with the shaft of his quando. I was amazed at the facility with which he handled the heavy implement; I could hardly have done it, even in top condition.

  Tao raised the rear portion of his weapon so that it was level, just above his opponent's spear. He changed his footing; amateurs don't realize how important the stance is in combat, and swung the great blade about. Right for Ling's neck.

  As the flat of the blade threatened Ling's head, Tao made a high kick to Ling's ribs, then jumped back into what I recognized as the kung-fu cat stance.

  Kung-fu. Something clicked. I knew little about it, except that it was a Chinese form of karate, many of whose schools affected religious overtones. Shaolin, that could be a form of the martial art.
r />   The mock battle was over; I recognized it now as mere practice, every aggressive move and defense scripted in advance. No wonder lunge and parry had been coordinated so beautifully; these two monks must have done those same motions a hundred times before, just as we practiced the judo katas.

  Still, I was impressed. Precision drill is as close to genuine combat as you can get without doing the real thing, and any mistake can be fatal. "You must be terrors in battle," I remarked.

  "Battle?" Tao looked blank.

  "Well, when a bandit attacks you, and you have to fight for your life. Those weapons—"

  "Bandits do not attack us," he said. "We do not fight with weapons."

  I stepped back mentally and took stock. Something was funny here. More language trouble? "You are expert with weapons! I just watched."

  He smiled comprehendingly. "You see no use for a weapon except combat?"

  "That's right," I said, feeling inexplicably defensive.

  "Take up the quando," he said.

  "Now wait a bit!" I exclaimed. "I'm no match for you with the—"

  "Peace, friend! Trust me, as I trust you."

  These words were like a stab in the gut. I didn't trust him, or any of these monks. Yet suddenly I knew I ought to, and I wanted to. They had no reason to kill me treacherously; they could do the job openly, anytime, and call it an execution. After what I had done to the girl...

  I, on the other hand, had plenty of reason to kill any monk I could. I had nothing to lose, and my freedom to gain. One savage swipe at Tao, and a swift kick to Ling's groin, and I had a fighting chance. I had not agreed to stay here; I had promised to escape, any time I could.

  I took the quando. It seemed lighter now, and its balance somehow extended out from its wood and metal and transfused into my arm, lending me strength.

  "Move it," Tao said softly.

  I moved it. The head swung about smoothly, reminding me of a comment about, of all things, a car. The Mercedes. One did not steer it, one aimed it. That was the way of this fine weapon. Like the precision machinery, a touch would guide it true.