'So, in other words, I must let sleeping dogs lie."

'I'm sure we can come up with some ploys that'll give them a few restless nights. But even if the TohShiba went over, it still wouldn't guarantee Lord Yama-s.h.i.ta a clean hit. Neither side wants to get bogged down in another long-running civil war. We've all got too much to lose. No - what we've got on our hands right now is a battle for hearts and minds."

'The most difficult kind of battle to win."

Toshiro bowed. 'Sire, with you at the helm..."

'Is that aliT' 'Not quite."

Yoritomo sighed again. This time, the air of regret had been replaced by a note of weary exasperation. 'Tread carefully, my friend. You're beginning to spoil the view."

Toshiro accepted this philosophically. The risk of incurring the Shogun's wrath by being the bearer of bad tidings went with the territory. 'A rumour, sire, nothing more. I just thought you ought to know about it."

'I'm waiting."

Toshiro steeled himself. Rumour it might be but it was still dynamite.

'The flying-horse was driven through the air by an engine whose workings could not be fathomed."

'I know. Yama-s.h.i.ta ordered it to be destroyed."

'It wasn't."

The news raised the Shogun's painted eyebrows.

'Nothing's happened yet, but the word is our friends in the north have decided to ask their tame long-dog to reveal its secrets and help them devise ways to ' 'To what...?"

'To recapture the..." Toshiro's throat dried.

'... The Dark Light." The words conjured up a chill spectre of death and disaster.

The five samurai guarding the Shogun did not understand what he was saying, but they sensed the feeling of dread in his voice and looked at each other uneasily.

Toshiro averted his eyes as Yoritomo willed himself to remain calm. In this situation, the laws of etiquette forbade him to look at the Shogun. He had to kneel with his head bowed until Yoritomo addressed him.

As the present holder of the supreme office and guardian of the sacred principles and traditions that governed the world of the samurai, the Dark Light was the thing Yoritomo feared most. It was the evil force that had led to the destruction of The World Before; the power that must never again be allowed to fall into the hands of men. Its secrets had become hidden knowledge, shunned and feared like the magic spells cast by the wizards and witches of ancient times.

The long-dogs were masters of the Dark Light and also its slaves. It gave strength to their awesome weapons and controlled their thoughts.

It was the lifeblood of their underground world; its beating heart.

But it was a diseased organ; within it were the seeds of a plague that weakened the body, paralysed the brain and destroyed the soul. In time, the Sons of Ne-Issan would find a way to tear that heart from its earthly body. And once it was stilled, the long-dogs would be trapped like maggots in a buried corpse, forced to feed on each other in the darkness until the last were overcome by suffocation and the stench of decay.

But first, their advance had to be halted with the aid of the Plainfolk. Only then, when a way had been found to overcome their war machines, could they be driven back into their desert lair and sealed off for ever from the rest of mankind.

The Dark Light was both beautiful and terrible. It seduced and corrupted, and made prisoners of all who tried to master it. The fools who now sought to resurrect it would first be driven mad, then be utterly destroyed by the demons that dwelt within it. From the moment the warriors of the Seventh Wave had stormed ash.o.r.e, those demons had been banished from the lands bordering the Eastern Sea, and those that haunted the minds of the long-dogs had been kept at bay far beyond the Western Hills. But now, moved by blind ambition, a cabal of domain-lords was planning to let them loose again! It was insane!

Yoritomo felt himself gripped by a deepening despair. Was history forever bound to repeat itself?.

Like all true Sons of Ne-Issan, Yoritomo knew the story well. It was a cautionary tale that had been handed down through the ages; a lesson to which, from early childhood to his accession, his parents, teachers and advisers had constantly returned.

Ne-Issan, the Land of the Rising Sun, lay on the eastern sh.o.r.e of a vast continent that, in The World Before, had been called Iyuni-steisa.

In those far-off days, the warriors whose descendants had given birth to the Sons of Ne-Issan had lived in a distant place that had also been called the Land of the Rising Sun. A land of great beauty, whose people had risen to great wealth and power and had then lost their souls to the spinners and the weavers of the Dark Light.

The Dark Light was the earth-bound brother of the white sky-fire that split the heavens when the evil kami of the cloud-world tried to storm the castle of Ameratsu, G.o.d of All. The blinding flash was made up of the chain of sparks that flew from his sword as he struck down 10,000 of his foes with one fearful blow. And the fire that fell to earth and flowed through the world was filled with his divine power.

The spinners found secret ways to draw this power from the forests and rivers, the stones and the gra.s.s, and from the air men breathed. They captured it on magic wheels and bound it fast with metal threads as fine as silk. The weavers took these threads and wove them into thin ropes from which they made a giant net which, in time, encircled the globe. No one resisted because, in the beginning, they were entranced by its magical power.

At the snap of a finger, the ropes brought light where there had been darkness, provided warmth for cold bones, and filled the air with music.

These were good things, but it did not stop there. New ways were found to throw the Dark Light through the air. A second net was woven across the sky using invisible threads. The world was made prisoner by stealth but once again no one resisted, for the spinners had built ever more powerful magic wheels and the weavers had devised ways to release men from his labours. The Dark Light turned drills, drove saws, raised hammers, forged iron and joined metals with a single spark of fire.

For the dull-brained layabouts and the'erdo-wells this, too, was a good thing. Idleness became a virtue.

But the craft-masters soon found no market for their skills. Their nimble fingers were replaced by the metal talons of headless slaves with tireless arms of steel. Fed by the Dark Light, oblivious of the seasons or whether it was night or day, they fashioned objects in the twinkling of an eye out of materials which had not sprung from the natural world. Such objects, fashioned without love, had no soul.

They were worthless baubles, pa.s.sing fancies for people who would pay any price to cloak the growing emptiness of their lives.

It was the weavers who had created the emptiness and now they worked ceaselessly to fill it. The world of nature was replaced by a world of illusion: a world of false hopes and hollow dreams which grew ever stronger as it fed on the energy stolen from the old.

Within less than a century, the earth was turned into a giant pleasure dome filled with magic windows that seduced the eye and siren sounds that lured all but the strongest from the Way of the Warrior. Fantasy became the new reality. Men lost all sense of honour as sensation replaced sensibility. The principles which underpinned the samurai's code of ethics were discarded; the fruits of ancient wisdom withered untended on the vine. Wives neglected their family duties; husbands abandoned their trades and professions and all sense of honour to take part in absurd games and trivial pursuits, eagerly submitting themselves to public ridicule and humiliation in the vain hope of winning worthless prizes. Fool's gold.

The spinners and weavers grew richer and ever more powerful. Anyone who resisted was pilloried and crucified. Rulers played host to them and sought their favours; governments acquiesced or fell.

Given the example of their parents, it was inevitable that the children born into the Age of the Dark Light would reject the moral and spiritual traditions of the past. As for the future, it did not exist.

They lived in a lurid world which offered instant, mindless gratification and where Time was eternally present. They became shadow-people, rising with the moon to roam the streets, gathering together in their thousands when offered some new sensation.

Pain or pleasure, it mattered little. Jammed back and front and shoulder to shoulder in the gaudy temples of the dream-makers, they swayed like river-weeds in the grip of a flood tide of sound, their arms and eyes raised in adoration to the images created by the light.

They were in the power of the weavers and their dress reflected their condition. Their bodies were strapped and chained, they had rings through their ears and noses, and needles stuck in their arms. Their hair stood up on end like the quills of demented porcupines and their faces were striped like rainbow-coloured Mutes. In a world without meaning, style was all. Like strutting peac.o.c.ks, outward display was their only concern; eccentricity the ultimate goal.

Freed from the restraints imposed by moral and spiritual laws, men and women became prey to criminal elements which pandered to their worst instincts, drawing them down into a mora.s.s of licentiousness and corruption. Terror ruled the cities, cowards attacked the weak and defenceless, armies lost the will, to fight, government became a meaningless ritual, kings and their ministers were publicly mocked and scorned by scribes and merchants and the lowest rapscallions.

Ameratsu-Omikami, the great sky-spirit, sickened by the evil in the world below, hurled the sun into the sea where it exploded with a mighty roar, setting the oceans aflame. Those who dared to look upon the scene were struck dead with terror. The waves bubbled and boiled like molten gold. Driven by a twisting wind with the voice of a thousand storms, they rose high in the air, clawed at the layered clouds with glowing fingers, then crashed down upon the sh.o.r.e, consuming everything in their path. No one was spared, not even those who had fled to the summit of the sacred Mount Fuji.

Only the boat-people survived, hidden behind the iron walls of their floating villages among the snow mountains beyond the Southern Seas.

They saw the fire in the sky but the flames did not reach them, for Ameratsu, who wished to spare them, summoned cold white winds to draw the heat from the waves. For these were the chosen ones. Within their souls dwelt a spark that would become a flame. The flame that would one day temper the steel in the heart and mind of a new nation of samurai.

Time stood still. The sun had vanished, swallowed up by the oceans leaving a fugitive after-image in the sky; a dull red ball which occasionally pierced the leaden gloom that had descended like a funeral shroud.

As they drifted silently amid the pillars of grey ice, the boat-people slowly became aware that the world they had known had vanished. The earth had been turned into a charred wasteland where nothing moved and nothing grew. The clouds sucked up the death-laden dust and cast it down upon the sea as poisonous rain. Since their only source of food was the fruits of the ocean, the boat-people reaped a deadly harvest.

Many perished, but not all. Some, blessed by Ameratsu, fell sick then recovered a measure of their former strength. Their numbers dwindled, but a nucleus survived and were joined by other ocean-wanderers who spoke their tongue and shared their dreams.

The odyssey lasted for more than two centuries.