The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  He never forgot that first homecoming.

  After that first hard, horrible year, Iloh showed such rapid progress and such promise that the headmaster himself promoted him—his calligraphy would always be crude, because he had first learned it that way, but Iloh’s essays showed that he was a thinker, even a poet. His essays were posted on the classroom walls, examples for other students, an achievement which Iloh was proud of. He still had few friends—but a surprising one turned out to be none other than Sihuai, who was the scion of a scholarly family and therefore, in the class-conscious society of Syai, vastly Iloh’s social superior. Sihuai was another student whose essays found pride of place on classroom walls—but his refined and elegant calligraphy made them far more of a pleasure to look at than Iloh’s attempts, and it sent Iloh to his schoolmate, humbly begging for help to better his writing skills. From those small beginnings an unlikely friendship bloomed, with the two boys, nearly of an age and with a shared love of the hills and valleys where they had grown up in their own separate spheres, finding many things to talk about.

  Sihuai was one of a small set of boys who were regularly invited into the headmaster’s own home for lessons and discussions on the classics and history. It was a combination of Iloh’s losing his temper with one of his younger classmates while insisting that the version of events portrayed in his treasured novels was actual history and not just a dramatic rehash of really happened, and his friendship with Sihuai—who had been aware of that particular event and had spoken of it to the headmaster—that Iloh was invited to join the headmaster’s circle. There, his misconceptions were gently dealt with; he was given other books to read, true histories, biographical works on great leaders of past centuries, and then he was invited to talk about them with his companions in the headmaster’s office.

  “Histories were written by people who had power,” Iloh said once, in that circle.

  “Histories always are,” the headmaster said. “Histories are written after battles are over, by those victorious in those battles. There are other versions of history, known only to the losers. We might never hear anything about those at all. But what do you mean by power?”

  “Money,” one of the other pupils said.

  “Yes, rich people are respected and honored,” said another.

  “No matter how unworthy they might be,” Iloh said darkly.

  “But there are other kinds of power,” murmured the headmaster.

  “Military,” said a pupil.

  “But that is bad,” said the headmaster’s daughter, Yanzi, who was a part of these study sessions. Two years older than Iloh, she was a willowy teenager with lustrous black hair and huge bright eyes and there wasn’t a boy in the school who wasn’t half in love with her from the first time he laid eyes on her. “That means that the way to have power over people is simply to have a bigger bludgeon.”

  “Power you can buy is bad,” Iloh said thoughtfully. “It is political power that is good.”

  “But political power is worse than all the others!” Yanzi objected. “Because it already contains both money power and military power. It is impossible for anyone to get political power, or to hold onto it, without having either that bludgeon or the money to pay for someone else wielding it on your behalf.”

  “Power corrupts,” Sihuai said. “You can see that everywhere.”

  “Of course it does,” Iloh said. “That is its nature. But power is a tool, and needs to be applied properly. In the history that we are learning, in the books that we are reading, it is a tool that is often misused—but it is power and circumstances that dictate that. The power itself is not necessarily a bad thing, just the way it is wielded. And nowhere in the books does it say that giving a man the power to make change is bad in itself—it’s just that when…”

  “Of course not,” Sihuai interrupted. “The people who wrote those books were the winners, and the winners do not write histories that put themselves in a bad light.”

  “One of the ancient Emperors,” the headmaster said, cupping his hands together serenely and interrupting the squabble without raising his voice, “was helped to change the Mandate of Heaven and overthrow an old dynasty before establishing his own. Within a year of ascending the throne, he had had most of his erstwhile friends and allies killed or exiled. Why do you think he did this?”

  Iloh gave the headmaster a long look of blank incomprehension. “Those people knew the way to a throne,” he said, sounding almost astonished that this needed to be said at all. “If he had not done so, the new Emperor’s throne would never have been secure.”

  “You do not think he was a bad man to have done this?”

  “It was the only thing he could have done,” Iloh said.

  “He had gained power,” one of the other pupils, a sallow-faced boy named Tang, said slowly. “And he could not afford to let those others go free. Power can be lost as easily as it can be gained. All it takes is a single betrayal…”

  “Power corrupts,” Yanzi said, her eyes cast down.

  “Corrupts what?” the headmaster asked.

  “Principles,” Yanzi said. “Ideals. Character. Power changes people.”

  “Wait,” said Sihuai, “wasn’t that the Phoenix Emperor? Didn’t he turn aside a famine? He gave from his own table, shared the Imperial reserves of grain when the country starved. He saved a lot of people.”

  “But at what cost?” Yanzi said, her voice passionate. “The principles…”

  “High principles carry too high a price if people are starving,” Iloh said. “The Emperor did away with the threats that could have been a danger to his rule. He then… ruled. If he was a good ruler… if he fed a starving people… how then could this be bad?”

  “He bought the people,” Yanzi said obstinately. “They kiss the hand that feeds them, no matter how black the heart that rules it.”

  “When people have nothing in the food bowl,” Iloh said, “they are unlikely to think about morality. They do what they need to do. And power is given to those who are not afraid to use it.”

  A silence descended at those words. It took Iloh a moment, and all of the strength of his developing convictions, to lift his head and meet the eyes of everyone else in that class—ending with Yanzi herself, who did not hold his gaze long before letting her own luminous eyes rest on the folded hands in her lap.

  “Very interesting,” the headmaster said, throwing the words into the silence like pebbles into a still pond. “I would like you all to write an essay on the use of power, please. By the end of the week. You may all go now.”

  Iloh, his blood still stirred in the aftermath of the discussion, hesitated briefly at the door of the headmaster’s study and turned once, briefly, to look back. He had just a glimpse of Yanzi standing there in the middle of the room, looking straight back at him, with eyes that were steady, sad, and perhaps a little afraid.

  Eight

  Iloh and Sihuai were sharing a room at the school before Iloh’s second year ended. Sihuai, whose own family background was considerably more aristocratic than Iloh’s own and who might thus have been expected to have learned to rely far more on the ministrations of servants, was a neat and almost obsessively tidy boy. Iloh, by contrast, took up every inch of available—and sometimes even not so available—space. When he worked at his desk it always overflowed with spilled papers, sheets of smudged calligraphy, trails of spilled ink, glue, discarded pens, dog-eared books with sometimes deeply outlandish objects used as bookmarks, half-eaten meals with remnants of rice which were acquiring the constituency of cement or in the process of giving birth to entirely new and hitherto unknown species of mold, even the occasional broken shoe or bent belt buckle or torn quilted jacket that he had been in the process of repairing, straightening, or patching, and which had been simply discarded as a fresh idea occurred to him and he swept all else aside to set it down on paper.

  “For someone who thinks that it’s his fate to save the world,” Sihuai would mutter in a long-suffering tone o
f voice as he picked up three of Iloh’s books off his bed or a sheaf of Iloh’s notes from his own immaculately tidy desk, “you can’t seem to keep your own nest tidy.”

  “The world needs saving, and how!” Iloh would reply, with a self-mocking grin. “I wasn’t really planning on doing anything about it until after graduation, Sihuai… but if I were to start thinking about cleaning up the universe, sweeping rooms seems an awfully parochial way of going about it. ”

  They were very different, but they got along well for all that—and the pair was quickly joined by Tang, who was a sort of bridge between the two of them, himself half Sihuai and half Iloh. He could understand both Sihuai’s aristocratic dignity and Iloh’s down-to-earth zeal with equal pragmatism—and it was he who launched the idea of a shared adventure in the summer of Iloh’s third year.

  “A beggar’s holiday,” he said. “We take nothing except a change of clothes and a towel and a notebook to write a journal in. And we wander where the roads take us, and we live on what we are given by the people we meet.”

  “But what would be the purpose of such a journey?” Sihuai asked, considering the idea with doubt and not a little distaste.

  “Consider it a test of your ideas,” Tang said. “You and Iloh, you have such different ideas about people. Why not prove which of you is right? And besides—it is a study of power. You know what the old saying is—only a beggar knows what true liberty is. Give a man a chance to live free of obligation or responsibility, and I suspect few would choose even to be Emperor, after.”

  “I’m in,” Iloh said, with his usual immediate and fiery enthusiasm at an idea that caught his imagination.

  “So am I,” Sihuai said after a hesitation. He was still in two minds, but he could not allow himself to lose face by admitting his misgivings about the propriety of such an adventure to his friends.

  The three of them met up at the school’s gate the day classes broke for the summer, dressed in old clothes and comfortable sandals, each carrying a bundle into which were folded the items that Tang has decreed they might bring. They wore their beggar’s garb with a sense of shining pride as they set out—but, inevitably, they were young scholars and they could not quite leave school behind. The discussion about power and the essays that they had written on the subject were still on their mind.

  “Remember the ancient poet—‘I did not see those who came before me, and I will not know those who will follow’—a man can only be responsible for the days of his own life,” Sihuai argued as they walked, their bundles slung jauntily on their shoulders.

  “If a man takes responsibility for others, then that is not true,” Iloh said. “Then he needs to know those who will follow. Look at Shiqai. He held it all in the palm of his hand and then he let it all shatter.”

  “But that was in times of turmoil,” Tang said.

  “Not so very long ago,” Iloh said thoughtfully. “It was only a few years before I was born.”

  “The problem is that he tried to make new things with old tools,” Sihuai said. “He was part of the court, and then he went over to Baba Sung and his party when the republic was proclaimed and made the Emperor resign, and then he made Baba Sung resign and tried to be Emperor himself. And after that, there was none strong enough to be any kind of leader at all—not of the whole country. Even we, here, have a lord who rules with an iron fist over this single province—and raises taxes for himself and not for any government in Linh-an. He took three times the usual annual taxes from my father last year, and there is nothing my father can do about it.”

  “Mine, too,” Iloh murmured. There had been letters from home. Things were not going well on the ancestral farm.

  “A new force is needed,” Tang said. “Something to change each individual. Something strong enough to pass from one man to another, to spread through the people, like a thought, like a touch of the hand. Something to make them believe something. Together. And then the power of many people, believing that one thing... under a strong leader.”

  “You are thinking people are like a flock of sheep,” Sihuai said.

  “But that is right,” Iloh said. “People are a flock of sheep. And a strong leader is like a shepherd.”

  “If sheep are looked after by a shepherd they have already lost their freedom,” Sihuai said. “They are locked in a paddock out of which they cannot move. They are at the shepherd’s mercy and can be moved from one place to another or killed at his whim. They seek safety in numbers and simply obey orders. What, then, is there left to do except eat, work and sleep—and all for someone else’s benefit?”

  “But they are fed and sheltered and cared for,” Iloh said. “What else do they really need? They cannot all be scholars or philosophers.”

  “Look,” Tang said, as they passed a cow pasture just in time to see a cowherd armed with a long whip enter the enclosure and the cows, up until then peacefully chewing their cud, got up and began edging away from the whip and its wielder, rolling their eyes. “The people are not happy with having a shepherd…”

  “That only means,” Iloh said trenchantly, “that the shepherd is weak and flawed, not that the theory is unsound.”

  They traveled on foot, stopping when hunger overtook them to knock on doors of village homes and scattered farmhouses and beg their supper. Sometimes, with a little bit of coin offered in lieu of food, they would go into a cheap roadside tea house and pay for a large bowl of rice and vegetables or a meat broth which they shared between them. They came to no lasting political agreement but they did not seriously quarrel either—they squabbled about ideas until things got heated but Tang usually defused things by laughing even-handedly at both Sihuai’s frosty injured sulks and Iloh’s eruptions of volcanic temper if things came to such a pass.

  It was Tang, too, who helped a girl at a country tea house where they had broken their travels. It seemed ostentatious, on the surface, because he carried almost everything that they had ordered for their meal, leaving her to cradle a pitcher of weak ale in her arms—it was outrageously extravagant for a trio of ‘beggars’, but they had had a particularly good day, and were flush with coppers they had to get rid of fast under the rules of their journey. Tang laid the bowls down on the table before his friends, and then turned to help the girl with the pitcher. She was smiling, but her gaze was steady and distant, focused somewhere far beyond the three friends.

  “She is blind,” Tang said conversationally, “but she can read faces, you know.”

  It was typical that he had been the one to charm the girl, to flirt with her, to gain all kinds of information about her on less than a few minutes’ acquaintance.

  “I heard about that,” Sihuai said. “One of my great-uncles studied this art, many years ago. I still recall the stories they tell about how accurate and precise his predictions were, all on the basis of running his hands over the bones of people’s faces. Can you truly do this?”

  “Yes,” the girl said with a quiet serenity.

  “Do mine,” Sihuai said.

  “Oh, young sir!” she demurred, sweeping her long lashes down on her cheeks. “Your voice is so strong and assured. I am certain your future is already known to you…”

  “Here,” Tang said, folding their last copper into the girl’s hand. “It isn’t much but it’s all we have and that means we have paid you a treasure. Can you do all of us?”

  For answer she reached out a hand, and Tang guided it to Sihuai’s face. She ran long fingers across his features, and then pulled back. “You have the face of a scholar, or a sage,” she said. “You will write many scholarly books, and live far, far away from your home. But it will… it will be exile, of a sort. You will want to come back, but you won’t be able to, because you will be proscribed in the land of your childhood. You will have fame, but no fortune, and little happiness… and you will have many regrets in your life. Sorry. This is not very nice to tell. But that is in your face.”

  “What about me?” Tang said, thrusting his face forward into her hand and
closing his eyes.

  “You are a man who knows how to make friends and keep the peace, although you have no idea of how you do this,” the girl said, and smiled with what was real warmth and almost affection despite her short acquaintance with her subject. “But the friends you make are often only on the surface, and the peace is dearly paid for. You will love a woman who will marry another, and that other man will be your friend, and it won’t be the first woman he gets that you will covet. You will hide your envy well, though. Your abilities will make you valuable to men in power—but they will balance their need of you with their fear of you, and you will need to learn to do the same. Your life will be hard but you will always know how to find the treasure within it… although you might think in the end that you have paid too high a price for it.”

  “You really tell it like it is,” Tang said. “What about Iloh?”

  “Wait, I don’t think…” Iloh began, but Tang had already grabbed the girl’s hand and laid it on his friend’s face. Her fingertips feather-light on his cheekbones, on his lips. And then she sat back and gave him a long thoughtful look.