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The castle was the usual horned roof affair of Japanese prints It stood in a cleft between the mountains that must have once been an important pass, for ancient cannon pointed out froranite blocks They were stopped at the gate to a wooden causeway across a brier showed his pass, and there was uards and a bell clanged in the top edifice, which, as Bond could see from the inner courtyard, was badly in need of a coat of paint As the car ca from various doors in the castle and forround as Tiger descended regally fros were exchanged with the older er then proceeded to fire off a torrent of staccato Japanese which was punctuated by respectful 'Hat's' froed man as obviously the commandant of the team With a final 'Hai, Tanaka-san' this official turned to the twenty-odd students whose ages seemed to be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five He called nuiven orders and ran off into the castle Tiger coo off into theabout they will bring him to us And noill see a little deer fired off some more orders, the er out on to the causeway acco and animated discussion Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, there came a whistle from above them on the ramparts and at once ten men broke cover from the forest to their left They were dressed from head to foot in soh slits in the black hoods They ran down to the edge of the ht wood such as balsa, and ski iant black wall There they discarded their battens, took lengths of rope and a handful of small iron pitons out of pockets in their black robes and proceeded to aler turned to Bond 'You understand that it is nightti siths of rope terminate in an iron hook which they throw up and catch in crevices between the stone blocks' The instructor said soer nodded He said to Bond, 'The man at the end is the weakest of the team The instructor thinks he will soon fall'

The line of cli men was now almost at the suh, with only yards to go, the end , and with a scream of terror, fell back down the sheer black face His body hit once and then crashed into the cal, stripped off his shirt, clambered on to the rail of the causeway and dived the hundred feet down into the water It was a perfect dive, and he swam in a swift craards the body that lay oer turned to Bond 'It is of no account He was going to fail the man anyway And now come into the courtyard The invaders have scaled the wall and they will now use bojutsu on the defenders, that is fighting with the stave'

Bond took a last glance at the instructor, as noing the corpse, which it certainly was, to the shore by its black hood Bond wondered if any of the students was going to fail his test at bojutsu Failure was certainly total in Tiger's training camp!

Back in the courtyard, individual couples, dancing and dodging, were fighting furious single co and parried with two hands on the stave, lunged at the belly, using the stave as a lance, or did coainst face Bond was astonished to see tre the victiony He asked Tiger about this Tiger, his eyes bright with the last of battle, answered briefly that he would explain this later

Meanwhile, the invaders were slowly being overcoroaning with hands clutched to head or stomach or shin Then there came a shrill blast on the whistle from one of the instructors, and it was all over The defenders had won A doctor appeared and attended the fallen, and those ere on their feet bowed deeply to one another and then in the direction of Tiger Tiger made a brief and fierce speech which he later told Bond was of congratulation on the sincerity of the display, and Bond was then led into the castle to drink tea and view the museum of ninja armament This included spiked steel wheels, the size of a silver dollar, which could be whirled on the finger and thrown, chains with spiked weights at each end, used like the South A cattle, sharp nails twisted into knots for defeating barefoot pursuers (Bond remembered similar devices spread on the roads by the Resistance to puncture the tyres of Ger under water (Bond had used the sa an adventure on a Caribbean island), varieties of brass knuckles, gloves whose palhtly hooked nails for 'walking' up walls and across ceilings, and a host of siets of offence and defence Bond made appropriate noises of approval and amazement and reflected on the comparable Russian invention used with as pistol that left no trace and a sure diagnosis of heart failure Tiger's ue!

Out in the courtyard again, the leader of the caed troop reported the discovery of motor-cycle tyre tracks that stopped and turned back a mile from the castle That had been the only trace of a tail Then came, to Bond, the blessed bows and farewells and they were on their way again, bound for Kyoto

'Well, Bondo-san What did you think of ht it was very sincere I can iine that the skills that are learned would be ht that the black dress for night work and the various gadgets would have been as incriht, as a pistol But they certainly went up that wall damned quick, and that bojutsu business would be very effective against the usual night-proith a bicycle chain or a flick knife Istick'

Tiger sucked his teeth impatiently 'You speak like a oes on in a cheap Western You would not get very far with yourto penetrate North Korea dressed as a simple peasant with his staff'

James Bond was rather exhausted by the day He was also sorry for the student who had died showing off for his and Tiger's delectation He said shortly, 'None of your ninjas would last very long in East Berlin,' and relapsed into a surly silence

11

ANATOMY CLASS