Coin of the Realm td-77

by Warren Murphy

  Chapter 10

  Tu-Min-Ka, High Moo of Moo, Lord of the Water Ocean, Wearer of the Golden Feather Crown, and He Whose Face Adorns the Coin of the Realm, ascended the worn stone steps.

  Two guards, scarlet feathers dangling from their long shark-tooth spears, walked before him. Two others walked behind. Also following behind, ahead of the trailing guards, but a respectful two paces behind the High Moo, was the royal priest, Teihotu. He was cloaked in black, his narrow black eyes intent. Even the moonlight coming through the square openings cut into the passageway walls failed to light his pinched features.

  The lead guards halted at the hardwood door, pivoted in place, and stiffened on either side, their spears snapping across their bare chests in the traditional salute.

  The High Moo stopped. He turned to his royal priest. "Teihotu, I would be alone."

  "As you please," the royal priest replied. He gathered his cloak about him like protective wings.

  "I have asked you to accompany me only because if I lose you too, I will have none to trust."

  "I understand," said the royal priest. His eyes were small, like those of a bird.

  "My guards will see to your safety. But I will pass the evening watching the eastern sky, for although my daughter has been gone far longer than I anticipated, I feel in my heart that she lives yet."

  "So the stars tell me."

  "You trust the stars. I trust my heart."

  "As you wish."

  And without another word, the High Moo passed through the door onto the roof of his palace, overlooking the low rice fields to the north and the mine-dotted slope to the east. He averted his eyes from the south, where the banyan trees grew thick and the Tall-Things-That-Were-Not-Men walked by moonlight. It was the place called the Grove of Ghosts, and for as long as he lived, only forty-one years, he had never dared to enter it. Although he knew some of his subjects were, even now, skulking there to perform who knew what obscene oblations.

  It was to the east that the High Moo directed his kingly visage. His eyes were bold and proud. He was a squat, square man, thick of limb and well-muscled. He ruled this kingdom by dint of his mighty right arm, and he would die before he surrendered the Shark Throne.

  But even he could not battle the things that walked by night and wore the faces of his villagers.

  "Give me a skull to break, and I will prevail," he muttered to the unheeding wind. "But against the very spirits of evil, I am no match."

  The waves to the east were dappled with moonglade. It was a beautiful sight, but it sent chills through the High Moo. For he knew that the greatest portion of his kingdom lay under those fantastic waters. The fishes had long ago ceased to feast on his great-great-great-grandfather's great-great-great-grandfather, but it still chilled him to look at the waters by night. Who could know when the Mighty Giver of Life might rise up to engulf them all? Even the royal priest said that the portents were back. The stars were moving into the position they had occupied when Old Moo, Great Moo, had fallen into oblivion.

  But the High Moo did not truly believe the royal priest's portents. He believed in what he could touch and conquer and vanquish.

  The wind caused the golden plume that stood up stiffly from the metal fillet that served as his crown to shiver. He folded his bronzed arms on his thick hairless chest.

  Where was she? Where was Dolla-Dree, his daughter, Low Moo of Moo, and the only person he could trust to venture into the lost lands? Only she could be trusted to find the Master of Sinanju-if indeed there was a living Master of Sinanju. For had not the priests for centuries said that when Moo sank, so had China and India and Korea and all the other lands with which Moo had traded in those days?

  But the High Moo did not truly believe that all was water beyond the horizon. There had been ships sighted. Some of these vessels were greater than a building. But all passed by without heeding this island far from any other land. There were tales of men with skin the color of a pale moon, who came from lands to the east. Such men had landed on Moo only three or four generations past. No lands to the east were known to Old Moo, just the western lands of Korea and China.

  No, the land world endured, just as this speck of Moo had endured. And if life endured, so would the House of Sinanju. The royal priest had scoffed at the High Moo's assertion that this must be true, but he had held firm. Priests only wanted you to believe what they said was true. Else, how could they control you?

  No, Moo endured. Sinanju endured. But to be certain, he had sent his daughter to the lands to the east, not to the west. She would learn there where to find the Master of Sinanju, if he still lived. Now he must wait for his daughter. He would wait until he was old and white-haired and the sun had wrinkled him like a turtle, and his kingly burdens had bent his spine. He would wait.

  It was in the deepest part of the night, when the sea breezes seemed to hold their breath, and the High Moo's heart held the greatest loneliness, that the stillness of his sleeping kingdom was shattered.

  The High Moo was leaning on the parapet, his arms folded, his eyes set on the eastern sky, when something sailed up from the courtyard below.

  The High Moo's warrior-trained reflexes reacted instantly. He ducked the missile. He threw himself on the roof and rolled.

  "Guards, to my side!" he called.

  The object broke not five feet from him. Two of the guards burst through the door. "There!" he told them.

  And their eyes fell on the clay jar. It lay in pieces, not flat, but completely shattered. Dark liquid drained from it in all directions. And from under the clay shards, something writhed and threw out ropy appendages.

  "Slay it!" ordered the High Moo, coming to his feet. But a single hooded eye peered out in a crack between falling clay bits, and the guards let out a combined screech and fled the roof.

  One of them had dropped a war club, and the High Moo dived to recover it.

  He noticed that the stairwell was dark. There were no signs of the other guards, or the royal priest, Teihotu. He returned to the roof. The thing was free of its prison now.

  It was, as he knew it would be, an octopus. It was black, and the moon was reflected on his shiny hide. It flopped its tentacles weakly in the unfamiliar environment. The greater portion of the seawater had flowed into a drainage channel cut into the roof, and the octopus began to slide along it, desperate to cling to its true element.

  The High Moo pounced as he slipped toward the roofs edge. He mashed one tentacle into jelly. Then, bringing the club up again, he struck the mortal blow.

  It fell on water.

  The octopus had slipped over the parapet with boneless fluidity. It struck the ground below with a wet smack that caused the hairs on the back of the High Moo's head to stand up.

  Down in the courtyard, the royal priest came running from the palace, accompanied by the other guards-the two who had not run away.

  "There!" cried the High Moo. "Below me. Kill it!"

  "Do as your king bids," ordered the royal priest. And the two guards fell upon the octopus. They beat it into submission. A pulpy pop told that its boneless head had burst. They crushed the tentacles methodically. When they stood back after many more blows than were needed, the octopus was a black viscous puddle that did not move.

  "The Enemy of Life is no more," said the royal priest solemnly.

  "No," called down the High Moo wearily. "Only one of his children sent as a warning to me that nowhere am I safe, and no one may I trust, not even those closest to me."

  "But, your highness-"

  "Hold your tongue," said the High Moo. "You guards return to your stations. You, priest, find the guards who ran and punish them. I care not how you do it, just so that it is done. The sun comes up soon, and I will be here to see it rise." Then under his breath he added, "And the Sun God willing, it will bring my daughter, who alone is my only hope."

  Chapter 11

  Dr. Harold W. Smith settled behind his shabby oak desk. It was Saturday and his secretary was not at her desk in
the reception area. That meant Smith would not be interrupted. He had told the lobby guard that unless the missing patient, Gilbert Grumley, who still had not been found, came to light, officially he was not on the premises. Smith pressed the concealed stud that brought the terminal linked to hidden basement computers rising from a recess in his desk. It clicked into place like an obedient robot. Its glass face stared at him blankly.

  He keyed in the password for the day. When the system was up and running, Smith began to key in a series of questions.

  The problem was a simple one: to discover the identity of the new owner of the house next to his own. That information could not be found in Smith's data base, of course. Even after over twenty years of methodically collecting data-some gathered from anonymous field workers who believed they were really feeding their monthly reports to the CIA or the FBI or even the IRS, and some of it siphoned off America's burgeoning computer networksthere was just too much raw data out there, much of it trivia.

  Ordinarily a change in home ownership would also be too trivial to note. Not this time. This time the strangeness was too close to home. Smith knew he was not being paranoid in suspecting the mystery of the empty house next to his own was a possible CURE problem. CURE security had been breached before. Even the Folcroft cover, as innocuous as it was, had nearly been compromised, most recently by a fluke of the last presidential campaign. That problem proved manageable, but it was not beyond the realm of possibility that this could be fallout from that incident. A leak or a slip of the tongue during the pressure of the campaign.

  A pattern was forming. First the mysteriously missing patient. Then the empty house whose owner's face had triggered a memory in Mrs. Smith's mind. Something was going on.

  It was time to put a name to that owner, and if he proved to be a security threat, then Harold Smith must eliminate him.

  Smith logged onto the computer records at the Westchester County Registry of Deeds. The password was easy for a man as computer-skilled as Smith to break. It was simply a date code. He began paging through recent files.

  After twenty minutes he was forced to admit defeat. There was no record of the transaction. That meant one of two things: either the transaction had not yet been filed in the computer-which was reasonable, given the time frame-or the transaction might have been conducted illegally.

  Before he could jump to that last damning conclusion, Smith would have to pay a call on the Registry of Deeds himself. If the house had changed hands legally, their books would contain the answer he sought.

  Chapter 12

  "It is your turn at the rudder, Remo," laughed the Low Moo, Dolla-Dree. Just as Remo reached for it, she threw the tiller to one side. The Jonah Ark heeled sharply and cut away from the wind. Remo grabbed it and hauled back. The ship righted itself.

  The Low Moo giggled, shaking her lustrous hair. It hung long and free. Remo noticed a natural wave.

  "Very cute," he said dryly. "Sit with me?"

  "Maybe," she said coquettishly.

  "Please?" Remo said. He had to say it twice before he pronounced the Moovian word for "please" correctly.

  "Only if you promise not to bore me," the Low Moo said.

  "Promise," said Remo. He decided he liked her. Now that they were on the open sea, she had changed. Gone were her dark moods, her smoldering anger. She was going home, and the knowledge had liberated her spirit. Watching the Low Moo shake the windblown hair from her laughing face made Remo think of free-spirited island girls out of old Hollywood films. She had island written all over her. Remo decided he liked that.

  "Tell me about Moo," Remo suggested.

  "What do you wish to know?"

  "Chiun said it disappeared thousands of years ago."

  "Old Moo sank, yes," the Low Moo said sadly. "Our folk tales say that the sun looked down upon Moo and saw only greed. In punishment, he made the seas to devour Moo. But Kai, the Sea God, spared the highest portion of the empire and those who lived on it. That is where I come from, where we are bound."

  "Is it big?"

  "Oh, very big. It stretches from the north sea to the south sea, and there is the west sea to one side and the east sea to the other. There is a great palace and a city. My father is the High Moo, you know."

  "So I gathered. But you don't act like a princess."

  "And how many princesses do you know, Remo?"

  "One or two. You don't act like either of them. You're more ... down-to-earth."

  The Low Moo's brow puckered. Remo's translation of "down-to-earth" into Moovian came out as "wallowing in dirt."

  "Why do you say that? Why do you say I wallow in dirt?"

  "I didn't mean it like that," Remo said hastily. "It's an expression. I mean 'regular'. 'Normal.'"

  The Low Moo frowned prettily. As a member of the royal house, being called normal was an insult. Every man of Moo would gladly slay his brother for her hand in marriage.

  "'Nice'?" Remo ventured.

  Her brow smoothed suddenly. "Oh, I am that. You are nice too-even if you are a slave."

  "Slave?"

  "You are the Master of Sinanchu's slave. I see him order you about and you obey. I do not mind that you are a slave. I like your white skin. It is so different. I wonder what you are like inside."

  "I'm like I am. Like you see me. And I'm not a slave."

  "Do not be ashamed. On Moo we have no slaves. In older times white men did come to our land. Some we made to be slaves, but not for long. Slavery is cruel and so they were set free."

  "Really? Then what happened to them?"

  The Low Moo looked away suddenly. She started toward the bow, and shaded her eyes from the sun. Seeing nothing, she looked back. She rubbed her stomach. "I am hungry," she said, sounding like a petulant child.

  "Chiun's catching fish."

  "I will go to him and see."

  "Can't you stay a little longer?"

  "I will return," the Low Moo said. She took hold of Remo's arm and stroked it gently. With her fingers she felt his hard muscles. "I like your nice white skin." She gave his arm a playful squeeze and jumped up suddenly.

  Remo thought she was going to kiss him, but instead she bit him on the earlobe, not hard. It was more of a nip. "What was that for?" he asked, taken aback.

  "I like you. I will come back to you."

  And with that she scampered up the steps to the afterdeck.

  That evening an albatross flew along the horizon, making raucous sounds.

  The Low Moo came up from the hold eagerly.

  "A rugu bird!" she exclaimed. "Sail harder, Remo, we are almost to Moo."

  "Are you sure?" asked Remo.

  "There is no other land to be found under last night's stars. Only Moo. Oh, hurry. My father awaits us."

  The Master of Sinanju, hearing those words, went below. He returned with a folded piece of white cotton. He laid it out on the deck and unfolded it until Remo recognized the parallelogram symbol that had been stitched into it with green sailcloth. The symbol of the House of Sinanju.

  "Where'd you get that?" Remo asked.

  "I made it. It will inform the people of Moo that the Master of Sinanju is coming. It will give them time to prepare a proper welcome."

  "We're not there yet," Remo pointed out.

  "Look again, O ye of little faith," Chiun retorted as he inserted the bamboo pole into a sleeve in one side of the cloth.

  Remo looked past the complex of batten-stiffened sails. He thought he could make out a dark blue hump of land. From a distance it looked like an anthill with a flat top.

  As Chiun raised the bamboo pole and the Sinanju flag began flapping and chattering in the crosswind, Remo said, "Looks awfully small for the huge island nation everyone keeps talking about."

  "It is only your mind that is small," huffed Chiun as he marched to the bow, proudly waving his banner.

  Chapter 13

  Trailed by his retinue, the High Moo hurried to the lagoon beach. He did not run, for it would be unseemly. But he walked
with such alacrity that his Red Feather Guard were hard pressed to maintain a decorous pace.

  "See?" said the little boy Mann, the first to sight the great ship.

  The High Moo drank in the sight. It was like no other ship he had ever seen. It was greater than the war canoes, bigger even than the ship in which his daughter had sailed. It had five poles for the sails, which were stiff and oddly shaped.

  As he watched, the craft turned smartly to present its hull to the wind, and its sheer height astounded the High Moo. Sailing ships of such majesty were told of in legend. None had been seen in the lifetime of any living Moovian.

  "What does it mean?" demanded the royal priest, Teihotu, as he hovered by the High Moo's ear.

  "I do not know," said the High Moo, hope dying in his breast. Then the tiny figure in the bow moved to the rail and waved a banner. The wind tore at it, disturbing its emblem, but at last the High Moo discerned the age-old symbol of the House of Sinanchu.

  "My daughter has returned!" he cried. "Go, priest, order the feast to start. You, guards, fetch women to beat a path from this spot to the Royal Palace. We will make my heroine daughter welcome, and treat with the Master of Sinanchu who returns to preserve my kingdom."

  The priest padded off and set a runner to the village. The High Moo turned his eyes to the ship. A massive thing he understood to be an anchor was thrown overboard. And after the sails were pulled up, a small boat was lowered over the side with two figurees in it. A third scrambled down a rope and joined them, taking up the oars.

  One of them, he saw, was his daughter.

  "Remo, you take the oars," commanded Chiun sternly.

  "Why do I always get the scut work?" Remo demanded, one eye on the Low Moo.

  "It is your responsibility to get the princess and me to shore. It is not scut work. It is a privilege. When I inscribe this day's events on a scroll, you may be certain that your honored role will be fully described."