Batman 6 - The Dark Knight (2 page)

“Who said anything about stopping it?”

The train car shook and Rā’s al Ghūl’s grasp relaxed for an instant. He looked through the windshield at the track, twisted and smoking.

“You’ll never learn to mind your surroundings,” Batman said, “as much as your opponent.” He slammed his right gauntlet into Rā’s al Ghūl’s face. Rā’s toppled sideways, and Batman scrambled to his feet. He grabbed his opponent’s hair with his left hand and pulled a scalloped Batarang from under his cloak with his right. He raised the weapon over his head; a single downward swing would bury it in Rā’s al Ghūl’s skull.

Rā’s smiled. “Have you finally learned to do what is necessary?”

Batman flung the weapon at the windshield. The glass cracked, then broke. “I won’t kill you
. . .”

Batman pulled a small grenade from his belt and threw it at the back door of the car. There was an explosion, and the door was gone.

“But I don’t have to save you.”

Batman moved to the other side of the microwave transmitter and thrust his hands into his cape. It stiffened and became a wing.

Batman caught a thermal, which lifted him a couple hundred feet into the air. He looked down. There was a fire gouting up the wall of the Tower, and in it, he could see the silhouette of the monorail car. To the south, he saw the flashing red lights of fire engines and heard the distant wail of sirens, mingled with the sighing of the wind . . .

Bruce Wayne opened his eyes and, for a moment, let the nightmare that was a memory fade, then sat up in his bed, feeling the pleasant silkiness of the sheets against his bare skin. He swung his legs onto the floor, stood, walked to the window. In the glow of the eastern sky, he could see, on the street below, the burned remains of a large chunk of the monorail leading to Wayne Tower—the only remaining visible reminder of his battle with Rā’s al Ghūl.

For him, it had been the end of a long journey.

He could not say what the real beginning of that journey was. The time, in early childhood, when he’d been playing in the yard with Rachel Dawes and fell into a well, breaking the wall and loosing the thousands of bats that lived in the cave beyond?

The ordeal hadn’t lasted long. Within a minute, two at most, Thomas Wayne had climbed down a rope, enfolded his son in strong arms, and taken him back to sunlight. But that short time alone, in the cold and dark, with the monstrosities flapping around him, was grim, would have left a scar on any child’s memory.

But the worst was still ahead. The worst was the night when Bruce and his father and mother were walking on a side street after watching an opera performance and a mugger had murdered Bruce’s parents.

Two pulls of a trigger—
bang bang
—and Mother’s pearls were spilling into the gutter, stained with her blood, Father lying sprawled next to her. Bruce listened to the sound of the mugger’s running feet on the pavement and knew, to an absolute certainty, that his life had changed forever.

Was
that
the real beginning? Yes. Surely, something else was born the instant his parents fell, and Bruce Wayne—whoever he was, whatever he might have become—was extinguished.

But there were other moments, ones that accelerated the process, the transformation that had begun with the death of the Waynes.

His impulsive decision to leave Gotham City:
Bruised and bleeding from an encounter with Carmine Falcone, he ran across the rotting board of a dock, cold fog in his face and the smell of decaying fish in his nostrils, and leapt, grabbed a chain trailing from the stern of a rusty freighter and climbed aboard, beginning an odyssey that took him deep into the underbelly of civilization. He met and mingled with the angry and insane beings who preyed on their fellows, the thieves and sadists and murderers, trying to understand them, eventually becoming one of them . . .

The meeting with Rā’s al Ghūl:
It was in a prison cell. Bruce had been consigned to solitary confinement after he had severely injured several other prisoners in a mess-hall brawl. The tall, solemn man offered Bruce not only release, but redemption. Bruce accepted, and soon became an acolyte of the most dangerous man on Earth . . .

The years at the monastery:
Rā’s was his master, Rā’s was his savior, and in the monastery, unknown to the world, high in the Himalayas, Bruce learned the mental discipline and physical skills that made him nearly invincible in combat. The training was harsh and merciless; mistakes were not tolerated and usually resulted in death. But those who survived were something just shy of supermen, and of them all, Bruce was the best. He imagined that he would live as Rā’s al Ghūl’s servant for quite some times until he learned that Rā’s planned to save humanity by slaughtering tens of millions, beginning with the citizens of Gotham City . . .

He had help from others—from Rachel Dawes, childhood friend and sweetheart, whose quiet idealism inspired him, and Lucius Fox, who supplied him with the tools and technology he needed, and Alfred, his closest friend and constant advisor, and even his ancestors, the Wayne dynasty, who were kind enough to amass the vast fortune that financed his activities.

That money enabled young Bruce to give himself a first-rate education. Until he was twelve, he attended the best private schools in the area. Then, when a principal told Alfred that there was “nothing more we can give the lad,” he studied with a series of tutors. In science, he was always excellent. In languages, also excellent. In history, so-so. In social sciences, fair, and in liberal arts, mediocre, except in drama; he loved to read plays, and when he learned that Alfred had once been a child actor in Great Britain, he asked a lot of questions, especially how performers achieved their effects.

By Bruce’s fourteenth year, Alfred got used to looking out one of the big windows of the mansion and seeing young Bruce running around the grounds, climbing and swinging from trees, sometimes just throwing rocks, hard and far. Bruce heard of a local soccer league for young folks that had just formed in the neighborhood, and, although he was not enrolled in any of the local schools, he managed to join one of the teams. He quit after his second practice. “Guess I’m just not the locker-room type,” he told Alfred, and never mentioned the subject again.

But he didn’t abandon sports, just teams. When he was sixteen he asked Alfred if they could go skiing. Alfred had never been near a ski slope, but he made some calls and learned of an excellent, though pricey, resort in Vermont and phoned for reservations there and went shopping for equipment.

They decided to drive, which was a mistake. A bad blizzard struck, and driving became both slow and hazardous. They didn’t manage to check in until after ten. The pretty young woman at the desk said that the ski lifts were closed for the night and wouldn’t open again until six, but that the lounge was open, where there was a roaring fire going, and plenty of good company. Alfred thought that sounded pretty good, but Bruce begged off—too tired, he said. Alfred bade him good night and went into the lounge where, for an extremely pleasant hour, he drank hot cider and chatted with a retired schoolteacher whose hobby was growing begonias.

Alfred decided to look in on Bruce before retiring. He found Bruce’s room empty, the bed unslept-in.

“I should have known,” he muttered. “Too tired indeed!”

Bruce bought a pair of snowshoes from a man in the parking lot, who was packing his car. He put them on, shouldered his skis, and began the trek to the top of the expert slope. It was slow, tedious going, filled with slipping, sliding, and snowdrifts that were waist high. A bit after midnight, Bruce finally stood atop the mountain. The sky was empty of clouds, and moonlight glowed on the snow: a Christmas card, a breathtakingly beautiful night, which Bruce noted only in passing. He had a mission. He shed the snowshoes, put on the skis, and stood poised at the top of the trail. Someone shouted at him—a night watchman, probably. Bruce turned his head in the direction of the shout, saluted with two fingers, and pushed off.

Ice flecks stung his cheeks, and his skis hissed on the powder as the trail rushed up to meet him, and he was enjoying himself until the world turned upside down . . .

The watchman had called the police, the police called the rescue patrol, and the rescue patrol, two medics, found Bruce at the bottom of a shallow gorge, unconscious, a bloody gash across his forehead, one of his skis lying in two pieces nearby, the other one canting his leg at an unnatural angle.

An hour later, Alfred entered the lodge’s sick bay and found Bruce propped up in bed, his left leg encased in a cast, a white bandage across his forehead.

“I trust you had a pleasant rest,” Alfred said.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a comeback,” Bruce said. “Head’s pounding just a bit. Rain check?”

Alfred conferred with a doctor, who had been summoned from a nearby town, and learned that Bruce’s leg was broken, but cleanly, and he had a slight concussion, a bad gash above his eyes that had required eleven stitches, and a lot of contusions. But, the doctor concluded, if Alfred wanted to take Bruce to Gotham, and could guarantee proper transportation, there should be no problem.

The “proper transportation” was a big, twin-rotor Sikorsky helicopter, which set down in a field next to Wayne Manor. Bruce slept in his own bed that night.

The bandage and cast came off, the contusions healed, and the Wayne family physician pronounced Bruce intact again.

Bruce never skied recreationally again, though he did do some cross-country skiing when he was at Rā’s al Ghūl’s monastery—he once went three days across snow-covered mountains without sleep—and on another occasion Rā’s challenged him to ski down an almost vertical sheet of ice with jagged rocks at the bottom.

Bruce’s interest eventually shifted to other athletics. He ordered a complete set of Olympic-grade gymnastics gear and spent most of a summer with an instructor learning how to use it. He had an Olympic-size pool dug behind the garden, and for several months swam laps before breakfast. He lifted weights. He ran. He cycled. But he wasn’t good at everything. He was never able to get any arrow he loosed from a bow to go where it was aimed, and he was never better than a mediocre skater.

Rachel would sometimes join him at the manor to swim, or bounce around on the trampoline, or just hang out. Bruce seemed to enjoy these visits, but then, suddenly, he was seventeen and gone, without so much as a phone call.

The comings and goings continued until Bruce failed in an attempt to kill the man who had murdered his parents, had a final, ugly argument with Rachel and jumped aboard a rust bucket of a ship leaving Gotham Harbor. He was gone for years and when he at last reappeared, he was a different man. But only Alfred and Rachel could see what had changed . . .

W
ith Batman came baggage. Most of it Bruce carried deep within himself, in the form of regrets, unanswered questions, and memories. During his pilgrimage from rich kid to vigilante, he’d gone many places, done many things, a lot of them ugly, one or two perhaps unforgivable. But he’d succeeded in what he wanted to accomplish; he’d learned, and equipped himself. He had been considering returning to Gotham City when a betrayal and a few other unforeseen circumstances put him in a filthy hole of a prison. There, he’d been offered a chance at freedom, and when he took it he found himself in yet another prison—a monastery, high in the Himalayas, where he became the acolyte of the most dangerous, and perhaps the most charismatic, man he had ever known.

Rā’s al Ghūl. A man who hid both his brilliance and his malevolence behind another’s identity until it pleased him to reveal himself. Bruce sometimes wondered if Rā’s concealing himself behind another identity somehow lodged in his subconscious and, when the time came, prompted him to adopt a similar strategy.

Even now, Bruce could not decide whether Rā’s was truly insane. Bruce knew that, by his own reckoning, Rā’s was an altruist, a savior who would restore social and, more importantly, environmental order to a stricken planet. He would do this by means that would make Vlad the Impaler seem like a Sunday school teacher. He would eliminate most of the human beings on the Earth, and force the rest to live according to strict rules.

Rā’s tolerated no disobedience, as Bruce learned when he ordered Bruce to execute a farmer who was guilty of theft. Bruce had refused, and in fleeing had set the monastery ablaze.

But before he had made his way down the mountain, he had stopped to rescue his mentor. That had been a mistake. Rā’s had followed him to Gotham City and initiated a scheme to drive everyone there into hallucinating madness, and had partly succeeded.

You sometimes see them around town,
Bruce thought.
The ones I couldn’t save. The ones the doctors gave up on. Hollow-eyed, unaware of their surroundings . . . And those are the fortunate ones. The others . . . they’re behind walls. They’re fed, and sheltered, and clothed, and they scream and scream . . .

It all came to an end on a train speeding toward the center of the city, when student and mentor confronted each other a final time