The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “Amais never had a problem,” Elena said defensively, bringing her other granddaughter into the discussion for the first time, but only out of desperation, sacrificing her as a pawn to keep her claim on the younger, the precious one, the now openly wailing toddler in her arms. Amais’s eyes were wide, her mouth parted, her heart beating painfully fast.

  “Amais, korimou…” Vien said, letting a quick and strangely soft glance rest on her oldest for a moment. She had used the word Amais’s father had called her, korimou, ‘little darling’—it was hard to tell whether she had done it deliberately or instinctively, but either way it suddenly sounded strange to Amais, foreign, coming from her mother’s lips. “Would you let your grandmother and I talk alone? I’ll come find you in a few moments.”

  “But, Mother…”

  “Please, Amais-ban. It is important.”

  Amais slipped off the chair where she had perched trying hard to be invisible and dragged herself outside with unwilling obedience. But this concerned her—this was her life they were discussing in there —so she didn’t go far. She merely turned the corner and crouched underneath the window. It was shuttered against the sun, but beyond the shutters the window was open and it was not hard to eavesdrop on the conversation within.

  “Amais is just as much wangmei as anyone,” Vien said as the door closed after her daughter. “But Aylun…”

  “Nika,” said Elena fiercely.

  “Aylun, for that is the name she takes with her to Syai, not Nika,” Vien countered. “She could be Nika only here, in this house, in your heart. But she can still be saved, Elena. She can have one world to choose from and she will never know different. Amais… it is already too late for Amais. She is already of two worlds, and will always be torn between them. My mother is probably to blame for that. Perhaps I was, too, for letting her take my child, so young, so malleable—but Amais is already lost here, in this place, because she already knows who she is, who her ancestors were. She is more than wangmei here, she is always going to be xeimei, stranger of the heart, someone who might well have the sense of belonging to this community but who will never be a real part of it. Just like I never really was.”

  Amais suddenly felt hot tears welling in her eyes. She will take me away…

  “You were,” Elena whispered fiercely, rocking her Nika in her arms. “You were. When you chose to be.”

  “Amais would have chosen to be, in these last months,” Vien said, and tears stood in her eyes. “Why have you not let her, Elena?”

  “No,” Elena said, and for the first time her voice broke, brittle with the weight of too much sorrow. “Don’t take her away from me, Vien.”

  “You have already done that,” Vien said. “I don’t have to do anything—you have already pushed Amais away yourself.”

  “Not Amais. This one. Go, if you have to—take your child—but leave me Nika. Nika has my son’s eyes. She…”

  “Elena,” Vien said quietly, “she does not. Amais does. Nika is Aylun, if anything she has my mother’s face, her hair, her eyes, her mouth. She will never be Nikos, Elena. She can’t be.”

  Elena stared at her, shaking her head minutely, as though she found her words incomprehensible, as if Vien had suddenly started speaking in the language of her ancestors. Which she had, in a way. This had been the first time she had ever used a word of that language in her mother-in-law’s house, and it seemed almost ironic that the words she used meant ‘stranger’.

  “Excuse me,” Vien said, her voice floating out of the shuttered window, filled with the serenity of one who had fought hard battles but who had finally won a war that had been raging for a long time in her soul. “I think I had better go find Amais now, and talk to her.”

  Amais, under the window, uncoiled like a whip and raced across the rocky slope behind the house, down the path that led down to the cove. She knew the track, every stone and rut and bump on it, and she fled surefooted down the familiar route, around the first curve and out of sight of the house before her mother had had a chance to turn around and open the door.

  She wasn’t even aware that the tears that had gathered in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks until she came to a stop at the path’s end, leaping down onto the shallow beach of boulder and coarse sand, and had to wipe the back of her hand across her eyes in order to clear her blurred vision. It was only then that her mouth opened like a wound and she sobbed out loud, her whole body shaking with an unexpected and bottomless grief.

  The ocean glittered in the sunlight, sparking memories, bringing out things that it was suddenly a white pain to think about. Amais covered her mouth with both hands, as though that could keep the memory from coming, as though she could simply banish it back down into the repository from which it had been called—but it was already too late for that.

  She had gone out in a small sailing boat with her father when she was maybe four or five years old, something that she thought of as her first real clear memory. She had already been able to swim like a fish, and there was no fear there—but the women in the household had put up a fight nonetheless. Part of the joy of that memory was the way that her father had cut through the whole squabble with a simple, “She’ll be with me.” And she was, that was exactly what she was—they were out there together, father and daughter, the white sail furled and the boat bobbing on the sapphire waters with the two of them ducking and diving around it and each other in the warm sea. She had giggled with pure joy, and shrieked with laughter when her father splashed her from behind the boat or dived under to tickle her feet as she kicked out.

  That alone would have been enough to hold the magic of the memory, but there had been more.

  Three dolphins had joined in their games, quite suddenly and with startling gentleness. They came to investigate the noise and stayed to play. They did spectacular leaps and flips, dived back into the water, swam underneath their two human companions and around them, occasionally lifting their heads out of the water to gaze upon them with luminous, intelligent eyes. Amais dived under with them, fearless, and could hear the soundings echo in the water. They’d bob their heads to the surface, and so would she, and they’d nod at her as though in approval and utter small chattering noises. They came close enough for her to touch them and she did, running her small hands down the length of the huge animals, almost twice her size. She had finally taken courage and stopped in mid-caress, wrapping her arms around one dolphin’s dorsal fin; it seemed to understand her intentions immediately, squirmed gently until she sat on its back with her feet dangling on either side, and then took off, cleaving the surface cleanly and leaving a white foamy wake behind. Amais was first too startled and then far too enchanted to be in any way afraid. By the time the dolphin circled back to where his companions and Amais’s father waited, she kissed her ocean steed squarely on the nose, which he gave every impression of enjoying, and turned to her father, treading water, her face one huge, exhilarated grin.

  “Did you see me? Did you see me ride him?”

  “I saw you,” Nikos said, his own face wearing an expression of matching joy.

  And then they were suddenly gone, the dolphins, as though they had never been there at all, as though they had been just a dream.

  “I hoped they would come,” Nikos had said, after he’d helped to hoist her back into the boat and had raised the sail for home. “I wanted you to meet them. They’re my friends, they often follow the boat, sometimes they will even lead it to where the best fish are. The littlest one is a baby. He was born last calving season, nearly grown now but I remember him when he was quite small, maybe only a few days old. They brought him, you see, they brought him for us to meet. I promised them I would show them my own child one day, when I had a chance.”

  “Thank you, Papa!” Amais had exclaimed, her face still one huge grin after her experience.

  Nikos had reached out and ruffled her wet hair. “They’re your friends too, now. They always will be. They never forget. You must never forget them, either.”
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  “I won’t,” she had promised.

  She had promised.

  But she had also promised baya-Dan something else, something quite different.

  Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.

  She owed other debts, to long-gone ancestors, to people who walked this earth centuries before her, and who had never seen a dolphin leap from the sea.

  She wished that she didn’t feel as though keeping one of those promises meant inevitably and permanently breaking the other.

  Four

  Aylun was asleep in her mother’s arms when the family boarded the small boat that would take them to the mainland. The bigger pieces of their luggage had been loaded already; the travelers perched on a couple of battered trunks in the midst of the boat, a number of smaller packages at their feet. Vien also wore a bag slung crosswise on her body, strap on one shoulder and the bag itself resting on the hip where she was not balancing her sleeping toddler. In that bag were the most precious of the things they had brought with them—Dan’s ashes in a small bronze urn, what there was of Dan’s gold and valuables that were small enough to be carried by hand and could be exchanged for things they would need on their journey, tickets for the various conveyances that would take them to Syai, and necessities for Aylun.

  Amais carried a similar bag; no concession was made for her size and the thing looked enormous and overwhelming, threatening to make her buckle under its weight. In hers, she carried whatever her mother required but could not fit into her own luggage, as well as the thirteen precious red journals that had been left to her by Dan and (smuggled in as a last-minute sentimental impulse but already starting to be a subject for second thoughts) a couple of pebbles from the cove from which her father had taken her to swim with the wild dolphins.

  The family’s break with the island appeared complete. Elena had not come to see them off at the wharf, and neither had any of Amais’s erstwhile playmates and companions. Those people who did happen to be there as Vien and her daughters departed were reluctant to meet their eyes, to look at them, or even to acknowledge that they saw them. Many found something to be busy with, keeping their heads down. Only a couple of women offered a wan half-smile, and one or two children, too young to know better, waved goodbye as the boat carrying Vien and the girls pushed off from the dock.

  Vien kept her back to the shore, clutching Aylun, occasionally patting the bag she carried with one hand as though to make sure it was still there. It was Amais who sat facing the island they were abandoning, and it was only Amais who saw Elena finally come running all the way down the wharf and then back again to shore, taking an awkward, stumbling leap off it onto the pebbled beach, her customary headscarf clutched in one twisted hand revealing black hair streaked liberally with gray and falling in untidy strands about her face and neck. She was calling something, but they were already too far to hear or her voice was weak— it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Vien sat with her back straight, without turning her head; she must have heard that voice, must have recognized it, but she made no reaction to it at all, and Amais could see nothing on her mother’s face, nothing except a glint in her eye that might have been either determination, or a concealed tear. But Amais, for her part, could not find it in herself to leave without a word, without a thought—even though she had been the despised and ignored one ever since her father had died and her sister had been born to take his place in Elena’s heart. Amais had never forgotten the early years and the fact that her father’s mother did love her once, long ago. And Elena was the last link with that other world, the world with her father and his dolphins, the world where she had been put on trial and declared a stranger.

  With a final glance at her mother, half guilty and half defiant, Amais lifted both hands and waved back to the grandmother she was losing, waved back hard, as though that single simple motion alone could convey all that now would never be said.

  Elena had stopped stock still as Amais’s hands came up, and for the longest moment she stood frozen, immobilized by this farewell. And then she lifted one of her own hands, very slowly, and allowed the black kerchief she carried to be stirred by the breeze. They waved to each other, in silence, grandmother and granddaughter, for as long as they could see one another, until the boat slipped around a promontory and turned towards the mainland and blotted out the small beach and the solitary woman on it, standing alone with the memory of Amais’s childhood dissolving in the white sea foam as waves lapped and whispered at her feet.

  Everything was bigger on the mainland. It was the first time Amais, nine years old, had seen a human dwelling bigger than anything to be found in the village that had been the only thing she had ever known. Amais watched round-eyed as burly men, naked to the waist and burned bronze by the sun under which they toiled, hauled the bigger pieces of their baggage onto their shoulders. They carried the bags onto the larger ship on whichwhere they would continue their journey. Amais watched other passengers stream on board, people wearing strange clothes, the men in buttoned-down jackets and patent leather shoes and the women wearing white gloves and large lace-and-ribbon-trimmed hats which cast their features into alluring half-shadow. She thought they were all beautiful.

  But their own accommodations were not shared with the beautiful people—Vien and her daughters had a tiny cramped inside cabin with no view and no air, just four bunks stuffed into the smallest space into which they could possibly fit and a platform which served as both table and nightstand screwed firmly to the wall in between them. The only other fixtures were a cubbyhole that was supposed to serve as a closet and into which one of their smaller trunks, which still didn’t quite fit inside, had been crammed, and a small porcelain basin in one corner. They were to share a bathroom and toilet with five similar cabins that surrounded them.

  Amais surveyed all this as she paused in the doorway, and her expression must have betrayed something of her appalled dismay because Vien, pushing in behind her with the toddler she carried, now waking and fretful in her arms, clicked her tongue at her eldest daughter and schooled her face into a stern expression.

  “We probably could have done better, yes,” she said, answering an unspoken question. “But it’s a lot more expensive, and our means are limited right now. We must save our gold for when we get home—we will need it there. Besides, it’s ours—we don’t even have to share that fourth bunk with some stranger. There’s more room than you think.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Amais murmured obediently, but her heart quailed at the prospect of spending weeks, possibly months—she had no idea how long this journey was going to take—in this claustrophobic space.

  “You can take the top bunk,” Vien said, inspecting the accommodations. “Aylun cannot sleep up there, and I must be where I can attend to her at night if I need to so the two of us will sleep in the lower bunks. Now. Help me sort this stuff out so that we have room to move. Some of it can go in the other top bunk, the one you aren’t using; it will give us a bit of space.”

  “May I go and see the ship, Mother?” Amais asked, anxious to escape the confines of the cabin, grasping at whatever excuse she could muster.

  “Later,” Vien said implacably.

  So Amais spent the best part of an hour soothing her fractious sister and playing finger-games with her, sorting out the stuff in the trunk and hauling out things her mother considered necessities so that they could be better accessed atop the free upper bunk, and squashing the trunk in as best it would go in between the basin stand and the foot of one of the lower bunks, allowing free space to stand up and turn around in the midst of the cabin. She had not even noticed that the ship had actually started to move until her mother, satisfied with the arrangements in the cabin as best they could be made, took up Aylun in her arms again and told Amais to lead the way up to the deck.

  They were already a couple of ship-lengths away from the shore. A crowd stood shouting and waving, and ship’s passengers thronged the railings and waved back; Vien, with nobody to
bid farewell to, simply turned her back on them and took her children to the opposite side of the ship, where there were fewer people and the view of the sunlit sea was unimpeded.

  “Look,” she said. “Over there, somewhere, is Syai. We’re on our way. We’re going home.”

  But it was her father’s dolphins that Amais searched for in the waters that quickly turned from sapphire to deep cobalt blue, her father’s dolphins and her father’s spirit, wanting to say her farewells to them, wanting to assure them that she could not bid them goodbye because a part of her would never leave them. She thought she saw a silver fin break the surface of the water, once, a long way away—but she could not be sure, and, although she stayed at the railings for a long time after her mother grew bored and a little seasick and retired below with Aylun, she did not see the fin again.

  And the sun rode across the cloudless sky, and dipped towards the horizon, and then beneath it; and the quiet stars came out; and the first day was over. Already Amais was alone and adrift upon the open sea; the land of her birth was lost behind her, the land of her ancestors only a secret promise far away in the night.