The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  Amais found her heart thumping painfully, her eyes darting from the smiling tout to her apparently frozen mother. Aylun, in her mother’s arms, was obviously being clutched at ferociously, but had caught the mood of the moment and didn’t do more than let out a small soft whimper.

  “We have to sleep somewhere, Mother,” Amais said, in the language of Elaas, something she knew that the man would not understand. His expression didn’t change as she spoke but she saw his glance sharpen as he tried to interpret her words.

  “But how do I know we can trust him?” Vien said, thankfully in the same language. Amais had not been at all sure that she would take the hint. “I mean, he could be anybody, taking us anywhere… I don’t know this city…”

  “We have to stay somewhere,” Amais repeated.

  “Do you think we should take the chance?”

  Aylun whimpered again, a little more loudly. Vien bent her head over her toddler to hush her, and Amais bit her lip.

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

  She did not tell her mother, not ever, that she had heard the man give instructions to the lead pedicab that would convey them all to the inn at which they were to stay—and then, a few minutes into the ride, having watched the three lost returning souls staring around them with round eyes and open mouths since he had loaded them and their luggage into the pedicabs, change his instructions. At the very least she had thought she understood, “No. Not the other place. Go to…” and what followed was incomprehensible, perhaps an address. Either way, it would have been imperceptible if she hadn’t been paying attention. But the pedicabs suddenly turned away from the warren of steadily narrowing dirt streets into which they had been heading and emerged onto a busier thoroughfare, a still narrow but cobbled road in decent repair, choked with pedestrians, pedicabs, bicycles, horses, donkey-pulled carts, the occasional antiquated rickety-looking sedan chair that looked more affectation than a comfortable or even convenient form of transportation, sherbet and sweetmeat vendors and children who appeared to be selling or giving out printed sheets of paper and who were darting in and out of the traffic in a manner that made Amais clutch the edges of her seat in fear for their lives. A couple of times she thought she saw a woman dressed in the silks she had originally envisaged, but the women in question were not out in the street, exactly, but hovered in certain doorways, or were in the process of sashaying up narrow stairs that led into mysterious shadows of upstairs parlors.

  A sharp bark by the leading pedicab operator brought them all to a halt outside a shabby hostelry. Vien paid the pedicabs, and then offered a handful of what she had been given in change to the man who had brought them here, and again it was only Amais who really paid attention to the reaction that the money produced—his face washed with ephemeral expressions of surprise, delight, and perhaps a faint tinge of regret. She knew that her mother had offered too much, that the man might have wondered how much more she had on her, if it wouldn’t have been more lucrative to have delivered them to the first place he had had in mind, after all—and not to the one where they now found themselves, shabby and threadbare and with the turquoise paint peeling off the pillars outside the front door but looking quite respectable for all that.

  The proprietress, a hatchet-faced woman with a mouth that appeared to have forgotten how to smile if it had ever known it, showed them to a single small room on the third floor of this establishment—but after the cramped cabins on the ships the place looked like a palace to Amais. They would each have a pallet of their own, without the need to climb swaying ladders when ready for bed, with actual room to move between them. The windows were shuttered; the landlady crossed to them and flung the shutters open, letting it light, air, and all the smells of the city.

  “There is a tea house around the corner,” she said to Vien, “if you want dinner. Rent is a week in advance.”

  Vien dutifully counted out the rent money in gold—the only currency she actually had on her—and the landlady left with a raised eyebrow but without another word. Amais had the uncomfortable feeling that once again her mother had doled out too much. It was hard, with gold—she made a mental note to find out if any of it could be exchanged for local money that could be better figured out.

  Vien deposited Aylun down on the nearest bed, and sank down beside her.

  “I don’t think I can go anywhere tonight. I need to rest, I need to think.”

  “Aylun will be hungry.”

  “I know,” said Vien, rummaging in her bag for more gold. “Go to this teahouse. Bring us back something to eat.”

  Amais opened her mouth to say something, and then changed her mind, taking the coins her mother had thrust into her hand and turning away. She closed the door very gently behind her, as though she feared that a slam might wake her mother up—for that was exactly what Vien was, dreamy, almost sleepwalking, buckling under the weight of this place and its impressions and all that it meant—and the memories that crowded around incongruously of a different life somewhere far away which now seemed no more than one of Amais’s stories. Amais knew all this because she fought against the same shock herself. Part of her was whispering, Welcome home. The other part wanted nothing so much right at that moment than to hear her father’s deep voice utter, in a language unknown in this strange land, words that would have made her instantly feel cocooned in the security and the power of his love: “She is with me.”

  Vien ventured out of her room only on the third day, and had not gone far. The streets seemed to frighten her a little, and she looked lost and unhappy. She tried for days—she would take the urn with the ashes of her mother, as though that was a talisman against some unspeakable horror that awaited her in the city and which she was pitifully unable to understand, and venture forth with a clear intention of visiting the Chirinaa Temple and taking care of this, the most sacred and—as she had thought—the most pressing of the things she had sworn to do when she returned to Syai. But she never made it to any Temple. She avoided Temples as though she was afraid of them, of what she might find there. Chirinaa had been so very different from what Vien had thought it would be—not that she had ever had any clear expectations, but the reality had been coldly inimical to all of the ones that she might have begun to shape in her mind—that Vien instinctively shied from having this last illusion destroyed. What if the Temple she chose was nothing like she expected? What if there too she was so inept, so inexperienced, so utterly lost? What if she did or said the wrong thing and her mother’s spirit remained forever denied rest?

  Amais had immersed herself in the world of Tai’s journals and her own stories and had come to her own conclusions. She was watching her mother; she was watching the city, so different from the Imperial Syai she thought she knew, she had believed utterly that she would enter when she stepped on the shores of Syai . Instead of that, she found herself in an unquiet city seething with sulky rebellion and sometimes overt outrage—a city which had been one of the anvils on which Syai’s revolutions had been forged over years and centuries, a city whose streets had run with blood as one side or another labeled some other group as dangerous and unleashed calamity upon them. It was a city that had risen in rebellion more than once, most recently, according the street talk that Amais overheard, for a young man called Iloh, whose name was proscribed but was somehow whispered by every shadow in the streets—it was a city in which that particular rising had been had been bloodily and ruthlessly suppressed by the man in Syai’s high seat, General Shenxiao. There was no grace here, no calm nobility of an ancient court, no rich and exotic heritage—nothing, in fact, of what Amais and her sister had been brought here expecting to find. Only bloodshed, austerity, and fear.

  All of this connected, somehow, and the answer to their difficulties became blindingly obvious to Amais.

  “We don’t belong here, Mother. That’s why you won’t even think about leaving baya-Dan here. We aren’t from Chirinaa. We are… we are from Linh-an. We aren’t home after all, mother. We aren
’t home yet.”

  Six

  On such small things do fates turn.

  There were three sons on the small farm in the fertile hills of the province of Syai known as Hian. Tradition said that one son would be educated to take care of the ledgers and the accounting, one son would work the land, and one son would be responsible for the household and his aging parents.

  Tradition sent the eldest of the three sons, Iloh, into the tiny school in the village below, trudging down the hillside and joining a handful of other small boys in a classroom barely big enough to hold their growing bodies and way too small to confine their boisterous spirits. Every boy, inevitably, had his own interests and concerns—and in some of the pupils the enthusiasm was simply for doing the minimum expected of them and then escaping back into the glories of the real world, hiking into the hills to pick the sweet berries or trap small animals out in the woods. Iloh was one of the few whose passions were kindled for a different thing—for the power of the word.

  The boys were taught simple, basic things—how to count, and enough of the hacha-ashu script to be able to produce a coherent sentence in clumsy calligraphy and to read at the very least the simple folk renditions of tales and songs that had been copied out onto scrolls and parchments and notebooks. But Iloh saw more, wanted more, and he was one of the few to whom the teacher showed the school’s real treasures—a couple of scrolls of parchment with classical poetry inscribed on them, works of art in themselves, the calligraphy flowing and perfect and the ink unfaded over the years. Those, and a handful of books, mostly novels, printed on cheap paper with ink that sometimes smudged if you ran your finger over the page too fast. But to Iloh, both the magnificent scrolls and the cheaply bound books were equally valuable. Perhaps the latter even more so, because the novels were written in a language closer to the contemporary vernacular and were easier to understand.

  “You might want to continue your education,” Iloh’s teacher had told him when he was eight years old. “There are other schools, better schools, bigger schools.”

  “Perhaps Father might allow me,” Iloh said, but without conviction. His father was a patriarch of the ancient kind, autocratic, indifferent to all except his own will. Iloh knew that his education was not for his own sake, but the farm’s and the family’s, and that there would be no indulgences.

  But even that small hope had vanished when Iloh turned nine. A widowed sister of his father’s had returned to her family home from a neighboring province in the spring of that year with her own small son after the her husband’s death. Iloh’s father had taken them in, no questions asked—they were family. But the three-year-old boy, Iloh’s little cousin, arrived sallow, sickly, and coughing a lot. Before his fourth birthday came around, he was dead. Less than six months after that, his mother died. And before her body was cold, it became obvious that she had left a deadly legacy behind. She and her son had not died of a broken heart. They had died of a disease.

  The disease, however, had not died with them.

  In the autumn , Iloh’s middle brother, Guan, began to cough and then to waste away. His mother removed him from the rest of the family and stuffed up the gaps in the windows and doors of his room with rags, so that the evil disease could not come out and claim anybody else. Guan fought valiantly for months, isolated and lonely in his convalescent cell, but even his mother’s devoted nursing did not save him. He was just over six years old when the final stages of the illness set in, starting to cough blood into the handkerchiefs his mother left by his bed.

  The convalescent’s father had initially vetoed the doctor’s being summoned to the house, because such visits cost a lot of money—he had suggested to his wife that they pack up Guan and take him to the doctor’s rooms in the village themselves.

  “He will not live through it,” Guan’s mother had said, and had begged, pleaded, for the doctor to be allowed to come. The patriarch finally succumbed, and sent his oldest son to fetch the doctor from the village. Iloh had gone, his mother’s desperate pleading voice echoing in his ears—but it had been a different voice, a sort of strange premonition, that made him pause beside the corner of his schoolhouse, three houses away from the doctor’s home, and stand with his hand on the dirty wall, palm flat against it, oddly convinced that he was somehow saying farewell to the place.

  It had seemed to be only an instant, a stolen moment in time, but it might have made a difference if Iloh had not stopped by the schoolhouse. By the time he arrived at the doctor’s, he was told that the healer had just gone out. Iloh asked his destination but was told that the doctor was not an errant goat to be fetched from pasture, and to sit outside the house and wait for his return.

  The doctor had taken an hour and a half to come back—from, as it turned out, a birthing in the aftermath of which the new father, a wealthy landlord who already had four daughters but whose first son this had been, had kept him aside for a small celebration. He was not drunk—precisely—but there was definitely a brightness in his eye and a looseness to his step that showed that he was not wholly sober, either. Iloh had jumped up from his seat on the bench outside the back door and had waylaid the doctor as he approached his house—and had been rewarded with a small, almost disinterested frown.

  “I don’t really have time to do a house call,” the doctor said.

  “But you just came from one,” Iloh said.

  “That’s different. They promised me a suckling pig to be delivered in time for the Festival days.”

  Iloh thought quickly. “My father has none to spare. But he could give a chicken…”

  The doctor shook his head imperceptibly, and made as if to pass.

  “Two chickens!” Iloh said desperately, heedless of promising such largesse in his father’s name. “Three, if you make him well!”

  “Chickens,” the doctor said with an edge of annoyance. “Everyone gives chickens. What am I to do with more chickens, boy? You can’t afford to pay my fee.”

  “Please, sir,” Iloh whispered, “it’s my brother.”

  “I’m sorry, lad, but I need to get some sleep…” the doctor began.

  Iloh drew himself up to his full height—which was still not much, at nine, but he was certainly tall for his age had promise of more height to come. In any event, the expression on his face made it seem as though he had several extra inches on him that his physical body had yet to provide him with.

  “My brother is dying!” he said. “And if I have to drag you all the way, you are coming to see him, tonight. My father sent me to fetch you, and I am not going back without you!”

  For a moment, the doctor—taller and wider than his diminutive opponent—actually seemed to shrink in Iloh’s presence, but then he reminded himself that this small person that threatened him was a nine-year-old child and had no real power over him.

  “Sorry, lad,” he said. “Bring coin, tomorrow. No chickens. Better still, bring the patient and we can see what can be done for him. But not tonight. Out of my way.”

  He left Iloh standing there in the path with a hot coal of frustrated fury in his belly and eyes burning with something that was almost loathing. The boy actually went back to the house and banged open-palmed on the door, calling for the doctor to come out, but he was ignored and after a while he made his way back home, empty-handed and coldly angry, smoldering with the beginnings of an idea that would one day shape his whole existence. To each according to his needs and from each according to his ability—my brother needed, and could not pay a suckling pig and was therefore not a priority. The world is not a fair place.

  They tried to take Guan down to the doctor the next day, as the doctor had demanded, but by the time they got down to the village from their farm, the boy was dead.

  Guan’s little sister, Leihong, was next—despite her mother’s efforts to isolate her from her sick brother, she succumbed to the disease three days before her second birthday. That left the youngest son, Rubai, and the eldest, Iloh.

  And, just like that, Iloh�
��s schooldays were over.

  If it had not been for his father’s act of charity towards the widowed sister and her child, everything would have gone according to the original plans—but now the farm itself was in jeopardy, the family’s very livelihood. Rubai was four, far too young to do any but the most rudimentary chores—and, even if he had been older, his mother had begun guarding him like a dragon, protecting him from every little thing that could bring him harm. Iloh was all that was left. His father’s edict was pragmatic, and uncompromising. The urgent immediate need for an extra hand at the farm outweighed the potential future requirement for an educated farm manager.

  The village teacher actually wept when Iloh came in to say good-bye.

  “Of all the boys, why you?” the teacher said. “You had the will and the energy and the enthusiasm. All the rest… they would not even miss it. But you…” He had been holding a couple of the novels that Iloh had been particularly fond of, and which he had borrowed from the teacher—for perhaps the fifth time—and which he had come here, principally, to return since he would not have the opportunity to give them back to the lender any time soon. But the teacher had other ideas, because he suddenly put the two shabby books back into Iloh’s hands and closed the boy’s rigid fingers around them. “No,” the teacher said, “you keep them. In your hands they are a far greater treasure than they would ever be in mine. And if you ever have the chance…”