James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

The wife visited him as a ghost, wandering in slow motion across the stage, calling out to him that she had loved him but she had loved honor more.

The husband and lover met on a battlefield, set on a darkling plain, where mists blew and ghostly corpses writhed and staggered across the stage. They fought each other in a stylized duel and struck simultaneous mortal blows, dying together amid much mutual forgiveness, watched by the white-faced ghost of the princess, who moved and stood silently between the two bodies, looking from one to another.

And there, in that frozen tableau, the play finally came to its end.

There was a ripple of polite applause, and the elegant leader of the actors, who had played the beautiful princess, came to the front of the stage, bowing so low that his black wig brushed against his knees.

He spoke in stilted English. “Thank you for honor of appreciation. We do short play in honor of foreigners, written partly by great warlord Mashashige.”

The curtains were drawn across the stage, and there was a short delay.

Doc leaned across to Ryan. “What do you think of this Kabuki, my dear fellow?”

“Found it bit like trying to track an Apache walking over a mountain.”

“How’s that?”

“Difficult to follow.”

Doc smiled, showing his perfect set of teeth. “Dashed pretty little filly, the ghostly princess. If I hadn’t known that it was a chap, I might have made a bit of a fool myself over her. Him, I mean.”

Mildred heard him and grinned. “Not too difficult for you to make a bit of a fool of yourself, Doc. God gave you a running start at it.”

“Why”

But the curtain drew back, cutting him off in his righteous anger.

The stage had been split into two equal parts, with a strip of rippled blue silk laid between them.

“It is the ocean,” Hideyoshi said, “dividing the two countries.”

A white-bearded actor sat alone on one side, dressed in a blue frock coat covered in spangled stars and maroon stripes, wearing a top hat and carrying a long musket.

“Looks like Uncle Sam,” Krysty said.

Hideyoshi nodded in approbation. “That is well seen. He is the spirit of Deathlands.”

The other side of the stage was packed with all the other members of the company. They were dressed in a variety of fashions and seemed to be playing families, with some capering like children and others imitating women, working at laundry and on what looked to be factory production lines.

Most of them had white faces with red-rimmed eyes and weeping sores painted on their cheeks. All of them suffered from dreadful coughs and running noses. They all mimed extreme exhaustion, and when they sat to eat, it was obvious that there wasn’t enough to go around.

“I believe I am getting the picture,” Doc said quietly. “Sort of a parable, isn’t it?”

“That left-hand side of the stage is supposed to be here, isn’t it?” Ryan asked. “I guess that it’s supposed to represent what’s left of Japan.”

Mashashige nodded, turning from his cushion in the front row. “It is how we see the world.”

“We have all the land and few people,” Ryan said. “You have the other side of the jack.”

“Watch,” the shogun urged.

One of the peasants, who had donned armor to make himself look like a samurai, had stumbled upon some sort of cave, which he entered. There was a flash of orange flame and a puff of smoke. The stage went dark for a moment, and when the light came back, the man had shifted to the Deathlands side of the stage.

“Jump from a gateway,” Ryan said.

More flashes, and more of the actors crossed from one side of the stage to the other, circling around a frantically terrified Uncle Sam, who had fallen to his knees, trembling like an aspen in a typhoon, hands clasped together.

“Get the picture?” J.B. whispered.

“Yeah, I see.” Ryan watched, fascinated at the way that the shogun seemed happy to reveal his plans to them in this obvious allegory.

He was going to use the gateway to ship his fighting men, then some of the grossly surplus population, back into Deathlands to take what they wanted.