Dream Thing

For hundreds of years the village was supported by several assassins at any given time, under the leadership of one Master. Then came a time of change, when the greatest of all Sinanju masters discovered a new body of knowledge. The art of Sinanju was the original, and the greatest, martial art. The art made the Master so effective that from that point on, only one assassin was required to provide income for the entire village.

The Masters used their bodies, minds and breath more fully than other men could. This gave them great abilities. They moved with the swiftness of flickering shadows. They fought with the strength of great beasts. They killed with extraordinary ease.

Other martial arts came in time, but they were murky reflections of the shining light that was Sinanju.

When this new knowledge was bestowed upon the great Master named Wang, he slew the other assassins of Sinanju, who were warring among themselves. Wang then started the tradition of one Master and one student. A Master would train a boy of the village as his successor. The old Master might retire when his protégé became a full-fledged Master in his own right, or the old master might surrender his title as Reigning Master to his successor and retain his active status until his successor took on a trainee of his own.

Rarely, if the retired Master lived long enough in his retirement and his protégé trained a successor of his own, there could in fact be three Masters living at one time, but the lineage remained distinct. There was no confusion over the transition of authority down the line.

The tradition had been violated in the naming of Remo Williams as the Reigning Master of Sinanju. He was a white man, where for five thousand years all other Masters were Sinanju Koreans.

Not that Remo had any say in the matter. He was drafted. There he was, happy as a clam, living his mundane life as a New Jersey beat cop. He spent his time arresting lowlifes, drinking beer with the boys and smoking his way to lung cancer. What more could you ask for? Then his life turned upside down. He was framed for murder. He was tried and convicted with unprecedented speed. He was sentenced to death in the New Jersey electric chair. He was fried and he died.

But the death didn’t take. Next thing he knew, he was being trained for government work.

The government work happened to be for the same people who arranged for his convenient death sentence, which made Remo disinclined to work for them, but it was either work for CURE or they’d kill him again. They’d do it right this time.

So Remo Williams went to work for CURE, a secret branch of the federal government that had a mandate to use any means, legal and illegal, to protect the stability of the U.S. He was trained to be CURE’S enforcement arm. He was trained to be an assassin.

One of Remo’s trainers was the old man from Korea. He was named Chiun, and he had been lured to the United States by a generous offer and by an old Sinanju prophecy.

Could Remo Williams be the white man of the prophecy, the one who would become a great Sinanju master?

Unlikely. Remo was a buffoon who ate cow flesh, drank distilled spirits and inhaled the fumes of burning tobacco. He was an adult where all previous masters began training as children. Still, Chiun began to train Remo.

And Remo learned. He absorbed Sinanju as if he was born to be Master. He and Chiun became inseparable, and Remo one day attained the rank of Master of Sinanju.

Years later, he succeeded Chiun himself as Reigning Master of Sinanju.

A white guy from Jersey—who’d have thunk it?

One benefit was that he had seen more of the world than other guys from Jersey, even the enlisted men. Remo had even been to the Basque region of France before.

By afternoon, he was in an infamous Pyrenees mountain town named Duero. Once it had been a safe haven and a tourists’ mecca, where the slightly adventuresome travel and art aficionados would come to experience the best of Basque’s artistic talents. Duero was an artists’ colony devoted to nonviolent separatist activities, with poetry cafés, small shops selling handmade crafts and tiny studios selling the most sensitive inspirational paintings.

The unofficial mayor of Duero was the man known as the Poet of Peace, Martin Copa. He held court at a small, smoky cafe, where he and the other poets would read their heartfelt pleas for freedom for his people. They called him the Martin Luther King of the Basque separatist movement. Like King, his gently confrontational style made him popular—and made it difficult for the government to rationalize any measures against him. His avowal of nonviolence made him politically untouchable in Spain or France.

Up until a week ago, his critics had called him weak, or effeminate, or worse. They didn’t call him that anymore.

The Poet of Peace was now known as the Basque Burner.