Batman 5 - Batman Begins (8 page)

“The ninja is thought to be invisible,” Ducard explained. “But invisibility is largely a matter of patience.”

Bruce and Ducard climbed a short flight of steps to a mezzanine full of stacked boxes and bottles. Several ninjas were pouring powders into packets, obviously making compounds. Bruce knew that the ninja’s art had originated in Japan, but these ninjas were a mixed lot: Asians, East Indians, some Caucasians.

Ducard took a pinch of gray powder from an open box and threw it down. There was a flash of light and a loud
bang.
Bruce flinched and Ducard smiled.

“Ninjitsu employ explosives,” Ducard said.

“As weapons?”

“Or distractions. Theatricality and deception are powerful agents. You must become
more
than just a man in the mind of your opponent.”

Bruce took some powder from the box and, with a snap of his wrist, dashed it on the floor. This time Bruce did not flinch at the flash and the noise.

After a lunch of rice and vegetables, Ducard gave Bruce a straight-bladed Chinese sword and a pair of gauntlets similar to those the ninja had worn.

Ducard equipped himself identically and led Bruce down the steep, snowy path to the glacier.

“You’re training me to fight with a blade?” Bruce asked. “Why not a gun?”

“The man who killed your parents—he used a firearm?”

“Yes.”

“Was he a great warrior? Was he even an efficient killer?”

“No, he was a thug, but—”

“The weapon is nothing, the man who wields it everything. Guns are crude and impersonal and a blade is not. With a blade, you do more than learn combat. You develop character.”

Ducard unsheathed his sword, held it in front of himself, and said, “I suppose ‘en garde’ would be appropriate here.”

Bruce and Ducard circled each other. Suddenly Ducard’s blade flashed forward, aimed at Bruce’s chest. Bruce deflected the blow with his gauntlet-sheathed arm. Ducard glided to his left, frozen breath streaming from his nostrils. Bruce, sliding to his right to again face Ducard, heard the ice beneath him creak and shift. And the muted gurgle of running water.

“Mind your surroundings, always,” Ducard said.

They fenced. Bruce thrust and Ducard parried, Bruce thrust again and Ducard turned aside the point of Bruce’s blade with his own. Their faces were inches apart; Bruce could feel the heat of Ducard’s breath on his cheek.

“Your parents’ deaths were not your fault,” Ducard said conversationally. “It was your father’s.”

This remark consumed Bruce with rage. He abandoned all pretense of skill and swung his sword. Ducard caught Bruce’s blade in the scallops of his gauntlet and rotated his arm, wrenching Bruce’s sword from his grasp. The sword skidded across the ice.

“Anger will not change the fact that your father failed to act,” Ducard continued, as though he was discussing the weather.

“The man had a gun,” Bruce blurted.

“Would that stop
you?
”

“I’ve had training—”

“The training is nothing. The will is everything. The will to act.”

Ducard slashed downward at Bruce, who blocked the strike with his crossed, gauntleted forearms. Then Bruce dropped and dove between Ducard’s legs, sliding to where his sword had stopped its skid. He grabbed it and pivoted, his legs sweeping toward Ducard’s lower body. Ducard jumped straight up and Bruce grabbed Ducard’s left foot and yanked. Ducard fell onto his back as Bruce scrambled to his feet and aimed his sword at Ducard’s bare throat. The point stopped only inches from Ducard’s flesh. Ducard lay still, his arms at his sides.

“Yield,” Bruce commanded.

“You haven’t beaten me,” Ducard replied. “You’ve sacrificed sure footing for a killing stroke.”

Ducard tapped the ice beneath Bruce’s feet with the flat of his sword. There was a loud
crack
and the ice tilted and splintered and Bruce plunged into the freezing water.

Ducard watched Bruce flounder for almost a full minute, then reached down to help him up and out.

Later that evening, next to a blazing campfire near the glacier, Bruce shed his jacket and shirt and rubbed his arms, trying to control the violence of his shivering.

“Rub your chest,” Ducard told him. “Your arms will take care of themselves.”

Bruce began to rub his torso.

“You’re stronger than your father,” Ducard said.

“You didn’t know my father.”

“But I know the rage that drives you . . . that impossible anger strangling your grief until your loved ones’ memory is just poison in your veins. And one day you wish the person you loved had never existed so you’d be spared the pain.”

Bruce stopped what he was doing and looked at Ducard as though he had just found something amazing.

“I wasn’t always here in the mountains,” Ducard continued. “Once, I had a wife. My great love. She was taken from me. Like you, I was forced to learn that there are those without decency, who must be fought without pity or hesitation. Your anger gives you great power, but if you let it, it will destroy you. As it almost did me.”

Bruce took his shirt from where it had been drying near the fire and slipped it on. “What stopped it?”

“Vengeance.”

“That’s no help to me.”

“Why not?”

FROM THE JOURNALS OF RĀ’S AL GHŪL

I now know what my weapon must be. Men commit folly after folly because they are afraid. Fear was once mankind’s most powerful ally, giving enormous potency to the instinct for survival. Now, fear has become mankind’s greatest enemy, and such is the obtuseness of my race that its members do not realize it is the most powerful element of human existence. It is what drives them to embrace leaders who offer nothing more than false promises of security and doctrines that assure them that they are exempt from the inevitable consequences of being born, and to destroy the earth with insane consumption that does nothing more than distract them from their own mortality. They venerate charlatans and deny what is necessary to their own well-being because they are afraid. The situation is exacerbated by one of evolution’s cruelest jokes, the capability to deny to themselves what they are doing even as they are doing it.

I have long taught my followers that to overcome fear they must first face it. As the American psychologist Rogers observed, one cannot change until one has accepted oneself fully. Long ago I learned that embrace of any dread that dwells within is necessary to fulfill one’s potential. I have also instructed my minions in manipulating an enemy’s fear, in the use of fear as a tactical weapon. I am woefully late in realizing that fear can also be a strategic weapon and I can base my whole campaign upon it.

Fear is my weapon. I shall use fear.

B
ruce was aware that the months of brute labor on ancient ships had physically changed him, coarsened his rich boy’s palms and thickened the muscles of his arms, chest, thighs. He had thought that by the time he was locked in the Chinese prison, the change was complete. But at Rā’s al Ghūl’s monastery, he realized that his months at sea had only begun his transformation. He learned a different kind of power, one that came from the knowledge and efficient use of his body’s parts, not just raw, untutored strength. His mind, too, was altering. He was coming to depend on a relaxed alertness rather than reasoned thought, which was sometimes slow and not always reliable.

His training, of both mind and body, was of a kind he could not have imagined possible, and he reveled in it. He slept, with a dozen others, on a thin futon placed on the floor of a chamber below the monastery’s main hall; he knew that there were other sleeping chambers both inside the monastery and in outbuildings.

The monastery itself was divided into three tiers. The bottom, where Bruce slept, was barracks-style living quarters, food storage facilities, a kitchen, and a dining area consisting of several long, uncovered tables with backless benches along either side. The ground floor was almost completely occupied by the huge main hall, where Bruce had first entered, and included Rā’s al Ghūl’s throne, which was seldom in use. At its rear were two locked doors—a storage area of some kind, Bruce guessed. Once, he spotted a line of workers carrying crates that bore red warning signs in four languages into one of the forbidden chambers: explosives. Bruce wondered what use they might possibly be put to.

The top floor of the monastery was, on three sides, a mezzanine, with exits to the balcony that overlooked the glacier. The fourth side was another forbidden area: the living quarters of Rā’s al Ghūl and Ducard. There were several outbuildings that, Bruce concluded, were for storage.

Almost every day Bruce arose before dawn, wakened by the striking of a gong—
almost,
because sometimes he and his mates were not roused until the sun was high above the neighboring peaks. No explanation for the delay was ever given. After an hour’s running along the ridge on which the buildings stood, often through dense snow and icy winds, he ate the first of two daily meals, usually vegetables and rice, or a grain Bruce could not identify. To drink, there was a small cup of tea.

At irregular intervals, the morning run was canceled and Bruce and his mates picked their way down the trail to the hamlet Bruce had passed through on his way to the monastery. There, they found stacks of boxes and sacks: supplies. They each lifted something and, sliding and stumbling, struggled back up the mountain. Once, Bruce saw the little boy he had spoken to, peeking around the corner of a hut. At other times, during the warmer summer months, he and his mates were put to work in vegetable gardens near the hamlet.

“It is important that you feel a connection to what sustains you,” Ducard once explained.

The regimen was not unlike what he knew of how religious communities and, for that matter, military boot camps operated. After breakfast, the group disbanded and each of the trainees did something unique to himself. In Bruce’s case, this was what he later realized were exercises and techniques designed to increase his flexibility and litheness. He did yoga stretches and trained on gymnast’s gear: rings, rails, parallel bars, and vaulting horses. Gradually, his bulky muscles grew smaller and sleeker and he was able to stretch and bend and twist his limbs in ways he would have once considered impossible, if not freakish.

Then, for several months, he did very little that was physically demanding. Ducard would give him puzzles, or using cards, flash a random series of numbers and shapes in front of his eyes and demand he reproduce them on paper. Or ask him to work arithmetic problems mentally. Or have him sit in certain positions for hours, or just stand alone in a dark room or on the glacier. He was told that he was in the process of learning what he already knew and that this was not a conundrum, just a simple fact—one of the few times any explanation of any kind was offered.

When Bruce resumed his physical training, he was swifter and stronger than ever.

FROM THE JOURNALS OF RĀ’S AL GHŪL

Bruce Wayne apparently thinks that his training here is akin to the training he would receive at a military or religious installation. Such is his intelligence that he will surely come to realize that what most military and religious leaders do is to minimize individuality and maximize sameness in their charges. Indeed, that is what we do with most of those we recruit so their actions and effectiveness become both optimal and predictable.

However, for centuries the League of Shadows has known that one must deal with extraordinarily gifted individuals differently. We seek to plumb their depths and discover all the strength within them, both physical and mental. We next devise a plan to allow them to access and increase their innate powers. Most of their weaknesses we ignore, for if they are as intelligent as we know they are, they will compensate for most of their weaknesses with no help from without. Fear is always the great exception to this. Fear is usually the last enemy a man conquers and to do so he must be forced to do whatever is necessary. It is unfortunate that most men fail this ultimate test.

At noon each day, Bruce joined his fellow trainees for the day’s second and final meal, usually identical to what they had had for breakfast, but occasionally spiced with a sliver of fish or smoked meat. There was no tea at this second meal, just water from the glacier. Bruce had eaten in the world’s premier restaurants with his parents, both at home and in Europe and Asia during family vacations, had dined on the finest efforts of the finest chefs, and had never enjoyed any food so much as Rā’s al Ghūls starkly simple fare. Not because of the food itself, though it was inevitably fresh and well prepared, but because he was learning to really taste what went into his mouth.

After lunch, more exercises. At dusk, another run outside and then, as the sun was vanishing below the mountains and long shadows spread across the glacier, to bed.

Bruce was always asleep within seconds of touching the futon. If he had dreams, he did not remember them.

He sensed that nothing was done randomly—that every activity, however inconsequential, was part of a carefully planned curriculum.