The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  The shipboard days followed one another, monotonous and long, marked by long bouts of seasickness on the part of Vien and Aylun. Amais was apparently her father’s daughter in more than one sense—she was remarkably unaffected, having got her sea legs within hours of boarding the big ship, and when she wasn’t tending to her prostrate mother and sister she spent her time exploring the ship. Frequently she was gently but firmly steered away from areas of special sensitivity or specific salons on the top deck which were exclusively reserved for the passengers travelling in spacious outside cabins with portholes out of which one could see the sea and the sky. Amais didn’t care, really—she didn’t want to join the ship’s aristocracy, only to explore the ship, to see the places which they claimed. Denied those, she found other spots that she made her own. One of her particular favorites—and one from which she would probably have been evicted had she been observed, because of some silly idea that it might have been unsafe—was the very point of the ship’s prow, where huge ropes and the anchor chain were coiled and stowed. The place, once rearranged just a little for her convenience, made a comfortable nest for Amais. On several occasions, when her family had been particularly violently ill and the cabin smelled overwhelmingly of sick, she had even escaped and slept out here in the open air, lulled by the hiss and lap of the ship’s prow cleaving the waters beneath her. She’d take her journals out there with her, Tai’s journals, and pore over them, immersing herself in Tai’s world, deliberately turning her back on the sea and the dolphins and the call of her father’s blood. Those were in the past, for now. There were things she needed to know, for her future.

  She was troubled by dreams out there on that prow. She had always slept soundly and deeply, and—as far as she knew—dreamlessly. If she ever dreamed before she never remembered the dreams when she woke. But now she did, and they came thick and fast, and some were of the lost past and some were simply… dreams, unknown, unexplainable, impossible to interpret or understand without the context which, as yet, she completely lacked. Sometimes there was nothing but voices—her grandmother’s, for instance, reading a familiar passage from a poem or a genealogical line or uttering those last words of hers that were so much a binding laid on Amais by a dying woman; or an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s, calling, I’m lost, I’m lost, come and find me, come and set me free… There were weird dreams that frightened her, sometimes a single phrase or even a single word written on scarlet pennants in gold calligraphy, things she could not quite read but knew that they were written in jin-ashu, the women’s tongue her grandmother had taught her, and that they were very important, if only she could get close enough to see them clearly and understand them. And sometimes there were dreams that were almost complete stories in and of themselves—she dreamed of strange skies, as though something far away, something vast and distant, was on fire. Once she woke from a vivid dream where she stood under such skies with a child, a little girl, both of them dressed in a manner described by Tai in her journals, their hair dressed in courtly style, standing on a shattered piece of stairwell with only a shattered city around her—and she thought she knew what was burning, then, but that didn’t seem quite right, either.

  It was then that she started keeping her own journal, not meticulously and neatly and every day like Tai had done all her life but haphazardly, whenever the mood took her, using a half-filled notebook she had found abandoned on the deck after one of the beautiful people from the forbidden salon had passed that way. She had not believed that the precious notebook, with all those inviting blank pages waiting to be filled, had been simply dumped—and she had spent an entire morning stalking it, wandering around that part of the deck, waiting for somebody, anybody, to come and claim it. Nobody had done so, and Amais decided that the Gods of Syai must have sent her this gift, and took the notebook with a completely clear conscience. She wrote her journal half in the language of Elaas, which was the language of her father and her childhood, and half in graceful but oddly-formed and unsteady characters of jin-ashu—Amais had been taught how to read the women’s tongue, but the calligraphy of it, writing it herself, was something that baya-Dan had begun to teach her in earnest only a few years back. She was quickly beginning to realize that she had barely scratched the surface of jin-ashu, that there were so many more layers there than she had believed. She was using Tai’s journals partly as inspiration and partly as a manual to teach herself more of the secret language, forcing herself to write it using the coarse lead of a broken pencil instead of the delicate brush and ink in which they ought to have been inscribed, finding it hard work but in general quite pleased with her progress.

  But the journal proved to be a stepping stone for something quite different. She soon found that she was not as comfortable in the journal format as her ancestress had been. She started writing down her thoughts as long poems. Initially they were pastiche, no more than clumsy copies of the classical poems her grandmother had read to her and those she found in the pages of Tai’s books, but even to her own untutored eye they improved with daily practice until she was quite proud with what she could do with the old and glowing words of the classical high language that had been her grandmother’s gift to her. The poetry, however, turned out to be another stepping stone, to something else again. She started writing down stories, casting her own dreams into fiction, writing about her hopes and fears and expectations as though they were happening to someone removed from herself, finding it easier to conquer them and understand them that way.

  The notebook she had found on deck soon ran out of room to write in, thickly covered with what was a remarkably good calligraphy for having been produced by someone of Amais’s age, without proper implements, and with the added constraint of having to be smaller and smaller as the space to write in grew more and more cramped and valuable. One of the ship’s officers found her sitting cross-legged in the sun one morning, squinting morosely at her notebook, trying to find a margin she had not yet written in.

  “Hey,” the man had said in a friendly manner, smiling at the picture of the intense little girl bent over her words. “Much too nice a day for that long face. Looks like that’s pretty much all that your book will take—what are you doing, writing a diary? Could you use another of those?”

  It was impolite to answer in the affirmative; one never asked for gifts. But Amais looked down at her notebook, and then up at the officer, and nodded mutely.

  “Then I will see you get one. There are plenty of notebooks in the back of the storage cabinet. I’ll see what I can dig out.”

  “Thank you, sei,” Amais said, using the old form of address. The officer wasn’t even one of the higher ones, hardly a ‘lord’. But he was offering a precious thing. That entitled him.

  He didn’t understand the honor, naturally, and merely smiled as he tipped his cap at her. “I’ll find you,” he said.

  And he did. He came up with two partly filled and discarded notebooks and—greatest treasure of all—a completely blank notebook of substantial proportions, bound in thin leather.

  “The captain’s log is far more boring than what you might want to use it for,” he said.

  “This is the captain’s book?” Amais demanded, too impressed to be polite.

  “Yours now,” the officer said. “He’ll only think they forgot to load his usual quota. You’d better keep it out of sight, though. You know.” And he had winked at her in a conspiratorial manner.

  She didn’t know whether to believe him—taking one of the notebooks destined for the official log of the ship’s journey sounded entirely too outrageous, and might well have been a story invented to create a connection between the giver of the gift and its recipient. But she did it anyway, keeping the book hidden even from her mother, no small achievement given their cramped and untidy cabin.

  Vien and the girls changed ships after they crossed the big inland sea on the far shores of which Elaas lay, and loaded themselves into another, even bigger vessel sailing east, all the way to the Syai port of Ch
irinaa, familiar to both Vien and Amais only as a lost city of legend. On the first night of this, the last leg of their journey, Vien felt well enough to leave Aylun sleeping in the even more cramped cabin, if that were possible, than the one in which they had traveled on the first ship, and join her older daughter on deck.

  It was evening, and the sea breezes were cool. Vien wrapped her shawl tighter around her and leaned her elbows on the railing, leaning out to look down into the water below.

  “Soon,” she said to Amais. “Soon we will be there.”

  “What will we do there, Mother?”

  “I will make proper arrangements for your grandmother,” Vien said. “That is the first thing that I will do.”

  “But where will we live?”

  Vien hesitated. Just a little. “I don’t know yet, Amais-ban. But we will see how it is when we get there. All will be well.”

  Amais tilted her head to the side, and regarded her mother with a sudden chill, a touch of fear. There had been a light in Vien’s face just then, something that spoke of an exile’s homecoming, of a glow of joyous expectation which might not have been wholly unexpected in one of what baya-Dan had called li-san, the lost generations, the ones who went away, who left Syai behind. But that joy was drifting, ephemeral, rootless. Amais could quite clearly see her mother on this journey, see her wrapped completely in its expectations, its visions, its dreams. She could not, hard as she tried, imagine Vien at the journey’s end, could not see what Vien planned to do with Syai when its soil was firm under her feet. Their lives seemed confined to the limbo of the ship, with quiet waters all around them, an eternal voyage fated never to end.

  She did not know what scared her worse—the knowledge that her mother had no idea what to do next, or the nebulous thoughts that were forming in her own mind, a still shapeless and formless thing, something that had been born of her nebulous dreams and of the promise she had made baya-Dan on her deathbed. Something that was waiting in Syai for her hand to be laid upon it. Something that was for her alone, that nobody else in this world would be able to do.

  Five

  Amais had thought the port in Elaas where they had boarded their first ship had been huge and full of people. The port across the Inner Sea where they had boarded their second ship was even larger—a busy, exotic place that smelled strange across the waters a full day before they had caught sight of land—but Amais did not have the chance or the inclination to explore it in the rush of changing ships. They had been on their way almost before Amais had really had a chance to feel solid ground under her feet once more; as she watched while on deck as the ship left this ephemeral shore behind, she held a faint regret that she hadn’t had a chance to pay more attention to a place she was unlikely to return.

  But that passed; the transit port had not been either kind of home for Amais, and she had been too stretched between future and past to have time to feel anything that didn’t have roots in either fear or impatience. She wanted to see Syai now, the Syai of her grandmother’s tales, of the old poems, of Tai’s journals—the glittering place where she thought she could find what she needed to glue together the mismatched halves of her spirit into something that resembled a whole. The captain’s purloined notebook filled with stories of ancient sages stepping down from their Temple niches and walking the city offering blessings—stories of glittering Empresses who were sisters-of-the-heart to little girls who sold fish in the marketplace, and the great adventures they had together —stories of Imperial Guard phalanxes dressed in black and wielding magic daggers. It was a world woven from Tai’s journals, from baya-Dan’s stories, from Amais’s own imagination—something she now anticipated with a feverish desire, waiting to step into those stories herself, become part of them and let them become a part of her.

  When the ship’s notices, pasted on the public boards every day, finally announced their arrival in Chirinaa, Amais was already exhausted with expectations, building the place up in her mind into a city whose walls would shine with gold, its streets paved with rubies, full of people dressed in bright silks and women whose hair dripped with jewels, with opulent tea houses on every corner serving fragrant mountain tea in white porcelain teapots painted with cranes and hummingbirds.

  The reality was quite different—at least the reality that the ship disgorged the small family into on the quay. There might well have been ruby paving stones somewhere, but not here—not out in the busy working harbor, teeming with barrels, boxes wrapped in massive chains and secured with even more massive double-lock puzzle padlocks, scraps of torn oilcloth and tarpaulin underfoot, vats that smelled achingly familiar with whiffs of new-caught fish and salty brine clinging to their sides, sloshing open tanks that contained heaving crabs and lobsters, bales bound with thick ropes, and, everywhere in between this chaos and confusion, scuttling and quick-moving no-man’s wharf-cats, and bare-chested and bronze-skinned dockworkers with shaved heads and hooded eyes. The place smelled of coal dust, of sweating bodies, of all the various scents, both pleasant and evil, of the ocean. There was even a faint whiff of something oily and rotten, a miasma that was a reminder of the wide marshes that lay not too far away to the city’s west.

  Vien shepherded her older daughter onto the dock, carrying her younger on her hip as she had done when they had departed Elaas in what now seemed to Amais to have been another age, and then stood surrounded by luggage, hesitating, unsure of what to do next.

  “We should find an inn or a hostel or something,” Amais said, after a long silence.

  “Yes,” Vien agreed, her tone conveying simple agreement and a total loss as to how to start looking for such a place. The laborers hefting their loads passed back and forth, parting to flow around Vien and her daughters as though they were a rock in a stream. Some might have turned their head marginally to glance at the solitary woman and the two children, waiting for something that never came, but most simply ignored them.

  Amais scanned the buildings beyond the wharf. Even to her young and inexperienced eyes they did not look promising at all. Some were no more than padlocked storage facilities, with their windows securely covered by wooden shutters. Others, those that had actual people going in and out of them, were divided between two types. One consisted of a string of busy offices where men ducked in with bulging bags and armfuls of paperwork, re-emerging with sour faces and tight lips that betokened either their having sucked on a particularly sour lemon or having just paid large sums of money to people they considered undeserving for ‘services’ they resented being obliged to buy. The other, which she could smell all the way across the wharf, had quite different purposes and the people coming out of these wore expressions that, if not ecstatic at their lot in life, were at the very least tolerably content with it for the duration of the panacea doled out by rice wine or sorghum ale.

  Amais saw no apparent lodgings and what she could overhear from the conversations going on all around her the language that was spoken here was different from the one she thought she knew, the one she had thought would be spoken by all of Syai—a different dialect, a different accent, it sounded harsh and foreign and she found herself close to tears of pure frustration and helplessness even while her mind was collecting these sounds and smells and images, sorting them, cataloguing them, filing them smartly away for future reference, for future stories. There were lots of stories here. Amais could feel them all around her, rubbing against her ankles like friendly cats, ducking into alleys just out of her line of sight and inviting her to follow.

  But those were for later. Those were for when she was fed and housed. And Vien…

  “Nixi mei ma?” The voice was soft, almost too soft to be heard over the hubbub of the harbor. Both Amais and Vien turned their heads, sure they had heard something but not certain of what. Their eyes met those of the man who had spoken, wiry and barely tall enough to be eye-level with Vien. He bowed to them, having got their attention, presenting them with a brief glimpse of a beaded round cap that fitted snugly around his head, a
nd then straightened again, smiling.

  Amais scratched around in her brain for the meaning of the words he had just uttered and came up, incongruously perhaps, with ‘Have you eaten?’

  “No,” she said helplessly, slanting the words in what she thought might be comprehensible to the local speaker, staring at the man. “Thank you,” she added, after a moment, and bowed back in the manner that he had done. It seemed to be called for, just basic politeness.

  His eyes glittered as he offered a small smile. When he spoke again, it was slowly, enunciating his words, and Amais found she had little trouble understanding him.

  “I apologize,” the man said, “for intruding, but I think that you are strangers in the city. Might you be looking for a place to stay tonight?”

  Vien still looked a little confused. Amais glanced at her quickly, and ‘translated’. Vien blinked several times, quickly.

  “But who is he?” she asked Amais, in the high court language of old Syai that she had been taught by her mother.

  The man obviously understood, because he bowed again, this time directly to Vien. “Beautiful lady,” he said, in heavily accented but compatible dialect, “my sister runs an inn not ten minutes from here by pedicab. It is safe, cheap, might I interest you in lodging there with her tonight?”