James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

“Not for me.”

“No. For me, if it was thought by the peasants that my guests had to walk in the dust.”

“Then let the women take a pair of the spare ponies. Be obliged.”

Mashashige sighed. “Your barbarian ways will never be understood by me, however long I try.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Let them do this.” A thought struck him. “They will ride with their legs apart?”

“Only way they know,” Ryan replied.

Mashashige sighed, closing his deep-set eyes for a moment as though he were suffering from an agonizing migraine. “Let it be so.”

IT SEEMED that the gang of masterless samurai, known as the ronin, had been roaming the land for some time, either years or months, depending on who was telling the stories. And there was anywhere between a dozen and a hundred of them.

Yashimoto had warned Ryan, when they were safely out of the hearing of the shogun, that this expedition was fraught with danger.

“You may not return from it, gaijin . Any accident might happen. A false step or an unlucky blow. And then the spirit of my brother can sleep at ease.”

The route would take them close to one of the sprawling conurbations that housed some of the smoke-belching factories, into the mountains and down toward the sea.

The camp of the ronin was believed to be on a headland jutting out into the ocean, something like a day and a half’s steady march from Mashashige’s fortress.

But like so much else in Japan, the real facts seemed shrouded in doubt and confusion.

Mashashige himself led the procession, with banner-carrying warriors on either side of him, the huge silken flags proclaiming to the world that it was the great shogun Mashashige who was passing by with his army of retainers.

There was also a marching band with brazen gongs and drums so large that two men were needed to carry them. They beat out a blaring rhythm for the whole long column, from the lord at its head to the dozen or so four-wheeled ox carts that carried provisions and extra weapons.

Ryan rode in the center, with Krysty at his side, her fiery hair catching the bright afternoon sun whenever it broke through the reddish haze of pollution.

“This air is vile,” she said, wiping at her sore eyes, the bright green irises rimmed with painful crimson.

“There doesn’t seem to be any quiet bits of country.” Ryan stood in the narrow stirrups and scanned the area. They were climbing up a winding path that appeared to lead toward a steep hog-back ridge. “It’s either barren rock, or it’s filled with sprawling villes of little crowded houses and these stinking factories. And so many people.”

Doc was just behind and he heard the conversation. “I lived in England for a time when I was a young man. The big cities. London, of course, and Manchester and Birmingham. They were rookeries of narrow streets and crowded back-to-back houses, with noisesome alleys running between them. I saw a dozen or more living in a single room, packed between the factories that vomited poisonous black fumes into the lowering air, day and night. Slums! Stooped, sallow figures, coughing their lungs out, and pinch-faced babies with hollow eyes and spavined ribs. It was a dreadful sight that I shall never forget.” He blew his nose, wobbling dangerously in the saddle, his long legs sticking out on either side of the pony, looking in his frock coat like Abe Lincoln on a sway-backed mule.

HALFWAY UP THE MOUNTAIN they passed some kind of crude processing plant that Hideyoshi said was for alum. Low sheds stood between steaming vats of bubbling, foul-smelling liquid that was constantly stirred with long ladles suspended a few feet above the cauldrons.

As the noise and color of the procession reached the place, the workers came scurrying from their dangerous positions to watch Mashashige go by.

By the time Ryan and friends reached the spiked iron gates, it looked as if the whole labor force was standing there, in an uncanny silence.

Not one of them was over ten years of age.

Ryan turned his head from side to side, hearing the sharp intake of breath from Krysty at his elbow.