James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

Jak was at his heels, followed close behind by J.B. and Mildred.

Ryan and Krysty had started walking after them, when their nerve went and they both started to spring toward the crest of the ridge. Behind them, it seemed they were being chased by a panther in a hurricane, the roaring ever closer and more frightening, as if it was aimed solely at the runners.

Ryan risked a glance behind him again, pausing in midstride, seeing that they were truly high enough to be safe, though not by as much as he’d been calmly claiming.

Even as he stopped, the tsunami reached the shore.

There was a moment when it seemed to hang, a mile high, frozen in time and space, like a mighty cliff of dark green jade, topped with snowwith the samurai, trapped forever beneath it.

If they screamed at the last moment, it was swamped by the tumult of the tsunami.

The earth shook as the wave landed, burying the promontory, surging high up over the cropped turf, almost reaching the site of the ronin camp, water roiling over the dusty land, covering everything.

The foaming combers reached within a hundred paces of where Ryan, closest of the group, stood to watch.

Then it sucked back, exposing the muddied bottom of the ocean, where hundreds of blind creatures flopped and writhed in the dense mud.

There were other, smaller tsunamis, following on the heels of that first monster wave. But none of them was more than forty or fifty feet high, still profoundly impressive, but like pygmies chasing a giant.

Krysty took Ryan’s arm, staring out at the scene of Nature in its awesome pomp.

“That was something else, lover,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Poor devils never had a chance.”

“If we’d been farther down, nearer the sea, it would have taken us all out.”

Krysty nodded. “Mashashige’s lost most of his top fighting men.”

“Plenty of Indians and no chiefs.”

She smiled. “Nice to see you trying to run like mad and keep your cool all at the same time.”

“I knew in my brain that the wave wouldn’t reach us. But my heart wasn’t so sure.”

“The retreat’s stopped up the hill. Mashashige and the other samurai are coming back.”

The shogun stopped in front of the outlanders, still a little out of breath. “The ronin have gone. So we will follow them.”

Ryan nodded. “Why not?”

Chapter Seventeen

“Howling Metal?” Jak had halted his pony, pointing at one of a row of abandoned, tumbledown stores in a village west along the coast from the scene of the tidal wave.

“It was name of a place selling American ceedee rock,” Hideyoshi said.

It was possible to read the faded names of some of the stores, and Ryan was surprised how many were in American rather than in Japanese.

Carrot on Horseback looked as if it had once been a supertrendy boutique, with some naked dummies still leaning crookedly in the broken window. Two health shops stood side by side, one called Superfreaks and the other the No Lemon Juice Bar. There was Happy Calling, with no clue at all to what they might have once sold. The same with a store called Cuter and Cuter. Art Flower had a subtitle offering beginners’ courses in origami and ikebana.

“What are they?” J.B. asked.

Mildred answered him. “The first refers to artistic paper folding and the second one’s the art of flower arranging.”

“I confess that I had no idea how deeply American custom and usage had infiltrated your country,” Doc said to Yashimoto.

“Some say it was very bad and made us weak and feeble like old women,” the samurai replied.

“Whose side were you all on in the war? Us or them?” Ryan asked, as the shogun reined in his stallion alongside them.

It was midafternoon. They had retraced their steps to rejoin the supply wags, striking westward as soon as samurai scouts brought word that they had finally picked up the trail of the fleeing ronin.

“War? I know of no war. The blossom was shaken from the cherry trees. Peaches fell from branches. The face of the sun was hidden behind frowning clouds.” The man’s face was a graven mask. “But I do not remember a war.”