The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “You will become a great man,” she said, “a prince, or a councilor… and if not that, then you will at least lead a band of outlaws from a mountain top. You have ambition and patience. You know how to hold people in the palm of your hand.” She hesitated, snatched her hand back, stepped backwards as if she had second thoughts about the rest of her reading. But she had accepted the copper, and she owed it. “But you will be stone-hearted,” she whispered. “You would command a hundred thousand deaths, and it would mean nothing to you if that was the price of achieving a cherished goal. You…” she hesitated again, but took a deep breath and continued, although a faint blush had come onto her cheeks, “you will have many women, but you will truly love only once—and that will be a songbird, a woman whose spirit is free, and one you can never truly have…”

  She bit her lip, as though she was regretting her candor now that she had said all that, and then turned around and hurried back the way she had come with the sureness that only a blind person walking a familiar path could understand.

  “Cheerful, isn’t she,” Iloh said after a moment, staring after her.

  The other two ‘beggars’ were still staring at Iloh’s face.

  Iloh glared at them. “It wasn’t my idea,” he growled. “It’s all a bunch of superstitious nonsense, anyway. Let’s eat; I, for one, am starving.”

  They went on, later, and spent the rest of the summer climbing hills and crossing valleys, sleeping by streams or in sheds offered by friendly farmers, sharing space with plows and shovels and sometimes, memorably, dogs, goats, or wandering pigs. But then summer was over, and they returned to school—and then the years started piling on, faster and faster, and things ran away from them all. Shiqai, the warlord whose rise and fall had been the topic of their discussions that summer, had stolen the vision of the venerated man who had become known throughout the land as Baba Sung, ‘Father Sung’, the father of a new nation; Shiqai’s death, something that seemed to come at the hands of the gods themselves extracting payment for his many betrayals, had left a nation leaderless and fragmented, with a thousand petty tyrants leaping up to take his place, plunging the country into nearly a decade of misery and suffering at the hands of mercenary armies who took what they pleased from the people—money, livestock, men for labor and women for pleasure—and were answerable to nobody at all. But now, at last, things were moving again, and Baba Sung had gathered a new vision together—and for the first time since the Sun Emperor had been forced to step down from his throne Syai found itself emerging from chaos into a semblance of calm and order.

  Iloh followed all this with an eager curiosity. Back at the school, in the year following the beggars’ holiday with his friends, he read more and more books in his headmaster’s study—frequently proscribed material that access was granted to only on the basis of the unspoken understanding that its existence was not to spoken of outside that room, often with Tang or Yanzi at his elbow to discuss the issues raised by what had been read. The whole churning mess of human endeavor as history unfolded—especially the turbulent times that he himself lived in—fascinated him. He had begun to eat, sleep and dream politics; he talked of little else.

  “Baba Sung has all the right ideas,” he told Yanzi once, as they were both poring over the same broadsheet detailing some recent achievement or atrocity. “But he has had no power to make them happen. No real power.”

  “You mean enforce them,” Yanzi said, with some distaste. “And you mean military power.”

  It was an old argument between them. Iloh shrugged it off. “But don’t you think Baba Sung’s ideas are good? Remember what he said—the nation was just a sheet of loose sand, not solid like a rock—the winds of change blow us all every which way and until we start pulling together—all the people—until we start believing in a single truth…”

  “Truth can never be proved,” Yanzi said. “Only suggested.”

  “Well, then, let us suggest a truth!” Iloh said. “Baba Sung himself has said it—there are the three principles that he has written about…”

  “Hush!” Yanzi said instinctively, glancing around. “You only know about those because you read it in the secret things that Father has received. Do not endanger us all by speaking of it. Baba Sung and his principles are far away, and the warlord’s armies are near.”

  “But I have been thinking about it,” Iloh began.

  She placed a finger on his lips. “Keep thinking,” she said. “There will come a time for talking.”

  But Iloh was consumed by his own private fires. He had been exposed to Baba Sung’s high but distant political ideals, and they had acted like grit in an oyster, irritating his mind until they began accreting a layer of his own ideas, reinterpretations, and beliefs. By the time he was eighteen years old he was eager to leave the country behind and go to where the events that would shape his country’s history would play themselves out—Linh-an, the capital. The headmaster wrote him a letter of introduction to the librarian at the University in the city, asking if a job could found for this student, for whom he had developed both affection and respect. The librarian found a job for Iloh—a menial one, to be sure, cataloguing the library scripts and books in the back rooms, with pay that was barely enough to scrape rent together in the small compound he shared with four other students, one of whom was his friend Tang. Often meals were barely more than hot water seasoned with a few vegetables or a scrap of meat once in a while. But Iloh did not care about the hardships. He was poor, he was almost always hungry—but was at the center, where he wanted to be, where the ideas were.

  He came back to the school only once, accompanied by Tang and another student from the University, an emissary from the librarian for whom Iloh worked. The librarian, a canny if covert politician, knew very well that he, himself, was watched, that the authorities viewed his ideas—despite appearing so very close to Baba Sung’s own catechism —with deep suspicion. He had been branded as a troublemaker years before, and his dossier bristled with terms such as “anarchist” and “radical;” the only reason he had been allowed to keep his job at the University Library at all had been the authorities’ belief that he could do little harm buried in the library stacks.

  But he found a way to communicate his dreams and to light a spark in others. It only took a handful of people like Iloh, young and bright and full of fire. If the librarian, the sage in the tower, could not pass his message to the followers who waited to rise for him, his acolytes could. And the message itself was a heady one for free-spirited youth—a new order, a new kind of society, one based on equality and fairness, one where one law held for all. It was Baba Sung’s ideas, distilled and crystallized into a vision—and Baba Sung had not been called a dreamer for nothing.

  Iloh was twenty years old; he could see the defining moment of his life waiting for him. He was ready. He had volunteered to come, but his mission was a commandment—he had never lost touch with a network of like-minded people with whom he had been friends while at school, and returned to enlist them in a new enterprise that would change their world.

  “There is always a beginning,” the librarian, Iloh’s employer, had said on the eve of Iloh’s departure from Linh-an. His narrow ascetic face was alight, his eyes aglow with determination and zeal. “And this is our beginning. I charge you today to take the torch and set the flame to the bonfire that is to come. I cannot go—the authorities know my face and my name, and the only reason they have not yet swooped down on me is because they think they have me pinned here. But you, you are different—you are young, and you are going back to see your friends, and you have the freedom that I lack. Take this idea out there, give the People’s Party to the people. Go, with my blessing.”

  The librarian had been right in that the authorities had not put any obstacles in Iloh’s path as he journeyed back to his old school, contacted old friends, walked once again the streets he had walked as a boy. But he had been wrong about Iloh’s activities going unremarked. The authorities may not have known Il
oh, personally—he was young and had not had a chance to establish the kind of reputation that would imply any kind of government dossier for himself—but he was already known, if only around the University, as a young firebrand with new and sometimes dangerous ideas. He had been the library assistant for only a brief while, but in that while he had forged a firm bond with his master and when he had left that job and been reassigned elsewhere he had continued to be a recognized associate of the old librarian. Iloh’s comings and goings were not hindered, but neither was he left to pursue them unobserved.

  “We are being followed,” Tang told him on the second day of their stay in their old school. “I can see a tail on us, everywhere we go. They note who we meet, who we talk to. They note who we have bought food from; I’ve seen one fellow just after we left, with two policemen at his elbows. We can’t talk freely, not here. What are we going to do?”

  “What did you want to talk about that is so secret?” Yanzi, who was with them, asked.

  “There is…” Tang began, but Iloh lifted a hand.

  “What?” Yanzi said. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “With my life,” Iloh said. “But I cannot do it with the lives of the people who are with me. Not to one who is not part of it.”

  “But I want to be a part of it,” Yanzi said.

  Iloh glanced back at Tang. “I have an idea,” he said. “we will all—separately, without really hanging together as a group—go on a sightseeing trip. We can rent a boat on the lake, and it will be easy to control who can get on that boat. We can talk freely at last.”

  “If I come,” Yanzi said, “they will only think you are taking a girl out on the lake.”

  “You have a point,” Iloh said, with a wolfish grin.

  So she was with Iloh and Tang on the night that they pledged their lives to the new force, under a banner that would be their own vision of Baba Sung’s ideas. The three of them and a handful of others, all young, all full of plans and ideas and an unshakeable belief that they were building something that would last forever, lighting a flame that would lead the generations that followed straight into paradise.

  It was Iloh who wrote the founding declaration, and it was perhaps not grammatically immaculate or calligraphically perfect but he poured out so much of the poetry that was in his soul onto that piece of parchment that the thing rang with power. Others took the original away, to copy it, to distribute it, and to gather others into the fold.

  That was the night on which the People’s Party was born, on the altar of which Iloh would lay his heart, his soul, and his life.

  And then the wind of time swept through the pages of history, and years tumbled past like fallen leaves in an autumn storm. And the revolution was upon them.

  Nine

  “Gaichi mei!” Iloh swore violently as he snatched his feet back from where he had been resting them against the warmth of the stove. They actually smoked; he stomped on the packed earthen floor of the hut, putting out the smoldering leather, wincing a little as the dance jarred his seared feet. The stool he had been sitting on overturned, and the battered notebook he had been writing in fell from his lap and landed upside down on the floor. He reached to rescue it and then lifted his feet one by one for an inspection.

  Two holes, charred on the edges and still smoldering from where the hot stove had burned through, gaped in his soles. His toes, visible through the gap, smarted; there would probably be blisters there before long.

  The hut’s door opened with a little too much force and Tang peered inside, his gaze sharp and suspicious above the scarf that wrapped his entire face from the eyes down. Outside, it was snowing.

  “It is nothing,” Iloh said, in response to the unspoken question.

  “It was something,” Tang replied, his words muffled through the scarf. “I distinctly heard you, right through the closed door. I brought you something to eat, Iloh—you have to eat, you are flesh and blood like the rest of us, even if you can’t admit that to yourself. When was it you last slept? What happened just now?”

  By way of reply, Iloh lifted a foot and displayed one ruined shoe.

  Tang stepped inside, nudged the ill-fitting door shut with his hip, and put the bowl he had carried in both hands onto the nearest horizontal surface before unwrapping his nose and mouth and displaying what might have been an intimidating scowl. But he was Tang, and Iloh was Iloh, and they had too many years between them. The scowl twitched, one eyebrow went up, Tang’s mouth quirked at the corners, and before long he could not help laughing out loud, a short sharp bark of a laugh that had as much wry resignation in it as humor.

  “I suppose you’re going to want new boots,” Tang said.

  “Just patch these, as best you can,” Iloh said. “I have no need of luxury, only the bare necessities. I can even live with the…”

  “The practical answer to that is that there is going to be a foot of snow outside by the morning, and it’s likely to stay there until spring,” Tang interrupted. “If you intend on leaving this place before the thaw I don’t think that even you will want to do it barefoot. Eat the beans. They will get cold.”

  “In a minute,” Iloh said, gesturing with the notebook. “I need to get this…:

  “Now,” Tang said, straightening up and crossing his arms belligerently. “Right now, while I’m watching. Just so that I know you have done it and not simply forgot about it again like last time. Do you have any idea how much disrespect you are showing to Shao by simply wasting these hard-come-by meals?”

  Iloh looked duly chastened. “Give me the bowl,” he said, laying aside the notebook which he still held.

  Tang picked the food bowl up and passed it into Iloh’s hand with a satisfied nod. “And after you eat,” he said, pursuing his advantage, “you’re going to sleep. Two days, it’s been.”

  Iloh glanced at him over the rim of the bowl; his eyes were filled with the affection of one old friend for another but also with the kind of determination that Tang, resigned, recognized at once as being futile to struggle against. His shoulders drooped.

  “Fine,” he said. “At least eat. If I were ximin Chen, you might listen… ”

  “My wife,” said Iloh mildly, “does not nag me. It is not her sole task to see to my needs. She is my companion and my comrade. And yours, Tang. She is part of the revolution.”

  “As we all are,” Tang retorted. “But revolution or no, somebody’s got to do it. Give me your shoes.”

  Iloh obediently eased the burned-through shoes off his feet without relinquishing the bowl of beans. In spite of himself, he had been hungry; something that he would never have admitted, but the simply prepared beans tasted like a festival feast. He was scraping the bowl clean even before he had eased the second shoe off his heel with his other foot, clad only in a none-too-clean and now very-definitely-holed sock.

  Tang sighed.

  “There’ll be a pair of socks in it too, when I come back. Iloh, I wish you would sleep. You could carry an entire company’s gear in the bags under your eyes.”

  Iloh shrugged. “These lean days,” he said, “that would not be hard to accomplish.”

  “Iloh…”

  “Yes,” Iloh said impatiently, “yes, yes, yes. I cannot carry the revolution alone. You have no idea how much I am relying on the people. But there are some things…”

  Tang was shaking his head, but there was a wry and admiring smile playing about his thin-lipped mouth. “I don’t know why that is true,” he said, “but it is true nonetheless. Your words matter. The people will rally to the flag when the time comes, but they will come because you have called them. The right words and the right time, and there is magic made, right before your eyes…”

  “So, then,” Iloh said.

  “So,” Tang agreed. Without wasting further words, he stomped out of the hut hugging the empty bowl and a pair of still faintly smoldering shoes.

  Iloh bent to retrieve his notebook and his writing implements and settled back down before the stove. Flipping bac
k a few pages, he tried to recapture his train of thought.

  A revolution is not a dance party, or a silk painting, or a comfortable chair, or pretty embroidery. A revolution is not pleasant like a summer’s day. A revolution cannot by its very definition be kind, gentle, courteous, magnanimous. A revolution…

  He had stopped there, mid-sentence, when his feet had caught fire. Like much of what he wrote, things that were copied and printed and passed out to the cadres and the soldiers and the people in the fields and the factories and the villages and towns, it was homespun wisdom—he was one of them, after all, a man of the people, born in the countryside with a family that was moderately well off by the standards of the times but which, like most people in Syai did sooner or later, knew what it meant to be on the edge of hunger.

  He stared at his own words. What was revolution, really? He had been born into an era which fairly crackled with it, one wave after another, a society constantly in its death-throes… or was it just trying to be properly born…? Iloh did not, in theory, believe in the gods of his ancestors or in the heaven they were supposed to inhabit, but there were times he could see those gods looking skeptically at the newborn nation that emerged gasping for breath, again and again, and waving their immortal hands over that hard-won life with a celestial pronouncement that the thing was not good enough, throw it back, start again. He had read about it in the books and pamphlets that he had devoured when he had become a hot-blooded young man, when he had begun to think, as all young men do, about changing the world—he had read about it happening elsewhere, and how other peoples and nations had risen to take their own destiny into their hands. And he had felt some of it on his own skin, when he was a child, when he was a youth. But there had been many like him, back then—children born into times of struggle and blood. Many who knew all about it, who could testify to it by their own scars. But not that many who were able or willing to reach out and grasp the nettle, to take the choice away from those capricious gods, to build a nation in the image of mortal man, in the name of mortal man.