"When I took the Oath of Absolute Obedience, I never thought that I would ever be involved in something like this," Brother Bartholomew said.
"Nor did I, but our orders come directly from the archbishop, himself, and he is having us do this to ease the burdens on the duke."
"But if brutal things must be done, why can't they be done by men trained for brutality? Why can't the duke do his own dirty work himself? And if this is really God's work, why can't we don our cassocks?"
"That was all covered in the archbishop's speech. Weren't you listening? Now, hush. Here they come."
* * *
Once outside the door, Judah ben Salomon asked if it would be all right if he left us there, since he lived in the opposite direction from where we were going.
"Certainly, but how do we find our way home?"
There were no street signs on the island, no street or tunnel names, and no house or apartment numbering system. Since the island was mobile, even directions were hard to give. Designations like East, North, and South were meaningless. To make matters worse, few tunnels were straight. Dug over the centuries, they met each other at odd angles, most of them curved, and they were as apt to slant up or down as they were to go left or right. Some tunnels managed to do all four. Everybody on the island except us had lived there all their lives and already knew where everything was.
"Simply follow this tunnel until it comes to a split. Take the left-hand branch. When it comes to a crossing, turn left, and you are three steps from your doorway," Judah said.
"That's easy enough, but how do we get there in the dark? My penlight won't last forever," Adam said.
"The manager will sell you a lantern. The taverns all have them for sale."
Adam stepped back in and came out with something similar to a Japanese paper lantern on a long, thin bamboo stick. We bid our guide good night and headed out on our way.
"That didn't feel right," Adam said.
"What didn't feel right?"
"The way our guide took off. That innkeeper knew something we don't, too. Something's wrong."
"It's late and he's been drinking. Probably, he was just in a hurry to get home to his girl. A lot of us are," I said.
Adam was shifting his glance, trying to cover both directions of the long dark tunnel. "I'm serious, Treet. Keep your eyes open."
"You're getting paranoid. Anyway, there's nothing to see," I said, looking often over my shoulder. I like to argue with Adam, but I'm smart enough to take his advice.
"Look, you didn't grow up in the slums of Detroit the way I did."
"I thought you grew up in Hamtramck."
"I lived in Hamtramck. I grew up two blocks away, in Detroit, if you get my meaning. On the streets, you get a kind of feeling about when trouble is coming."
"Maybe I wasn't raised in Detroit, but everybody has trouble growing up."
Maybe Bay City was a lot less violent than Detroit, but I grew up as the only Oriental kid in my class, and I was always much smaller than the rest of the guys, besides. After being pounded a few times by the local hoodlums, I suppose that I overcompensated the way any other boy would. With the shining example of those Bruce Lee movies they were showing back then, I studied the martial arts all through high school under a Korean Tae Kwan Do master. After a while, the bullies learned to stay away from me.
Just after my high-school graduation, my problems with religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular came to a head. I had a row with my parents that got me thoroughly disowned. I was out on the street and absolutely penniless. Karate really came in handy then. Teaching it paid for most of my college expenses.
After I got my sheepskin, I grew up some, and have never needed to resort to violence since. I had been twenty years without even seeing a fight, let alone having to get involved in one.
Until that night with Adam in the tunnel.
I first noticed that something was definitely wrong when somebody hit me in the back of the head with a club.
I went flying down on my knees and elbows, but fighting is a lot like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, your head might forget how it's done, but your body remembers just exactly what to do. I slapped the ground, yelled, and came up on the bounce, smashing someone's testicles in the process.
A whole platoon of thugs was pouring out of a small doorway in the side of the tunnel. I caught a flash of Adam propping his lantern against the tunnel wall with one hand while swinging with the other, and then there were other things to do. It seemed like I was surrounded by dozens of the bastards!
In the movies, the hero can take on vast numbers of bad guys because the stunt men have the courtesy to come at him one at a time. That way, he only has to fight one opponent at a time, ten times in a row. If your enemies have any brains and coordination at all, they will mob you, all of them at once, and then you will go down, no matter how good you are. At best, you might take out one or two before you are deleted.
My opponents seemed to have neither brains nor coordination, but they did have enthusiasm, and there were an awful lot of them. Also, even waiting in line takes a certain amount of coordination, and for these idiots, fighting seemed to be a series of random events. Once, apparently by accident, four of them came at me at once, and I had to drop and roll. Fortunately, they weren't bright enough to know what to do to me once I was down. I was up again in a hurry, and dancing around.
I swear that there were at least fifteen of them on me alone. Against odds like that, you fight to win, without thinking about the damage, jail time, or lawsuits you might be generating. The places you go for are right down the center, the weak "seam" where the two halves of the body seem to join together. Eyes, noses, throats, solar plexi, guts and testicles. That and the knees, and I've always been partial to knees. Knees are low and easy to get to without the flashy, dangerous, high kicks that some of the other good targets require. Also, knees break easily, they put your opponent down fast, and barring modern surgery, they generally don't heal properly for years, if they heal at all.
I guess I broke a lot of knees that night. Six or eight, at least. In a while, the still-vertical portion of the crowd had thinned out quite a bit, and it was actually starting to get fun when a shot rang out loud in the stone corridor, and everything stopped.
"Figure it out, you bastards! I got five shots left and there are eight of you!" Adam said with a gun in his hand and blood running down his face. "All you need are five heroes who want to die, and the rest of you can get me! Okay! Step right up! What? No heroes? Okay, I'll pick 'em myself. How 'bout you, ugly? Want to impress your girlfriend with your heroic dead body?"
As Adam pointed the pistol at him, the fellow who had been singled out froze, then broke and ran. That started the the rest of our playmates running for home, limping, bleeding, and dragging some of their friends behind. In a few moments we were alone, except for nine would-be muggers who were out cold on the floor. A few of them were groaning a bit, but none of them looked ready to get up.
Especially the one with the bullet hole through his throat.
"You okay, Treet?" Adam said, leaning wearily against the wall.
"A bump on the back of the head and a few bruises, but I'll live. Your face is bleeding."
"Face wounds bleed a lot, but they heal fast, too. See if you can get a bandage or a handkerchief or something on it, would you?"
I stepped over a few enemy casualties as I went over to him. I stood on top of one to get a better view of Adam's head. That still left me shorter than Adam, and the cut was near the top of his head. I stepped down, piled two more muggers on top of the first, and then stepped up to the top of the heap. Better.
"I didn't know you were carrying a six-gun," I said as I worked.
The wound was a laceration, a tear in the skin. I cleaned it a bit with my handkerchief, and Adam handed me his own from his pouch as well.
"I wasn't. That was my penlight."
"Your penlight? Then what about the bullet I heard go through that guy's throat?"
"It wasn't exactly a bullet. It was a fifty caliber Gyro-Jet."
"I haven't heard of one of those things in twenty-five years."
"That's when I built one into the bottom of my penlight. Back when I was in high school. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ouch!"
"Well, hold still. I'm surprised that it did as much damage as it did. I'd always thought of those little rockets as being one of those neat ideas that didn't quite work out. They were too inaccurate to hit anything at a distance and too slow-moving up close to make much of a hole."
I used my handkerchief as a compress and Adam's, which was bigger, to wrap around his head to hold the compress in place.
"Yeah, well, I had some ideas about that. I figured that if I could grip the rocket tight for a while, until it built up some pressure behind it, it would come out of the barrel fast enough to do you some good without giving the gun too much of a kick."
"There, that should do it, at least until we get home. So your idea worked. But I don't see how you could do that with the other five rounds."
"What other five rounds? How much room do you think there is in a penlight? It was a single shot. All that talk about the other shots was just showmanship."
"Adam, if it works, it's sound engineering. Do you need help getting home?"
"Nah, I can walk okay."
"Good. Then how about you helping me?"
I was beginning to realize that I was more bashed up than I had thought.
"All right. I'll carry you if you carry the lantern."
"Deal."
I counted eight of them still on the floor as we limped home. One must have snuck out.
"Treet, I think somebody around here doesn't like us anymore."
"You think that this was a hit of some kind? Bullshit! It was a mugging. Our sin was hubris. We deserved worse than we got. We've been strutting around these islands with two-hundred-year's pay in our pouches like a couple of oil-fed Arab assholes. With that kind of money on us, we were sure to get mugged. Maybe most of the people here are peaceful, but every place in the world has an underworld, and you know it!"
"Bullshit right back at you. Those guys weren't thugs. Their clothes were too clean, and they didn't have any calluses on their hands. They were students or office workers or some such. What's more, they didn't know jack shit about fighting, or a couple of old farts like us couldn't have taken out so many of them like that."
"Maybe you're right. They could have been young priests or something. Anyway, it was kind of fun, towards the end, there. Thugs or not."
"You got some strange ideas about fun, Treet. They had to be part of some kind of a political outfit. The islands don't have an underworld," Adam said, shaking the blood out of his eyes.
"How do you know that?"
"Because nobody in this whole place puts locks on their front doors. They mostly don't even have front doors," Adam said.
"You've got a point there."
"Did you notice that all those guys used clubs, instead of knives or guns like hoods in the States would use?"
"It figures, considering the way everybody here always wears what amounts to bulletproof clothing," I said. "Then there's the fact that I've seen darn few decent knives since I got here, and no firearms but our own."
"Yeah. Just another case of technology modifying human behavior," Adam said as he staggered home.
We got to my place, pushed aside the heavy curtains that did duty for a door, and got through the zigzag hallway that gave some additional privacy before Roxanna caught sight of us.
She stared at the two of us for a second and then screamed, and I mean the full-lunged, movie-heroine-being-eaten-again-by-the-monster, 130 dB ear bone smashing air-raid siren variety of noise.
Painful. My ears hurt worse than the rest of me.
Adam's women were still at my place, and they came running. Once assembled, all of them, servants included, promptly went into hysterics right along with Roxanna. You'd think that they'd never seen someone come home bloody before.
I don't know. Maybe they hadn't.
"Roxanna!" I shouted above their noise, "Stop acting like a silly little girl! It doesn't suit you, and anyway, I thought you were made of better stuff than that! Get hold of yourself!"
Adam wearily put me down and we stood there bleeding while they took a few more minutes to calm themselves down. Finally, they managed it, and the decibel level dropped below 110.
"Better," I said. "It's pretty sad when the injured have to tend to the healthy before they can get any help themselves. Now, Roxanna, send someone out for whatever passes for a doctor around here. And send somebody else for the police. I want to report an assault with the intent to murder."
That last statement of mine got them all to screaming again. We continued with our standing and bleeding for a while longer, and I added shaking my head to our repertoire. These people were so admirable in so many ways, but they were just not the sorts you wanted on your team when you had an emergency going on.
Eventually, the same lady doctor who patched us up last time arrived. Adam's head was sewn up, this time with the aid of some novocaine from our first-aid kit, and then she went over both of us, tending to dozens of abrasions, lacerations, and contusions. We were even more bashed up than I had thought.
I got my nose reset, and was given something that was supposed to save the teeth that had loosened up during the ruckus. There was a bump on the back of my head the size of half a grapefruit. It was so big that when I put my hand on it, my fingertips couldn't reach my skull. We both got rubbed down with something that was supposed to help bruises, and towards dawn, we were finally permitted to go to bed.
I had to be led there, since by that time, both of my eyes had swollen shut.