Xuelian had been offered to Shiqai, the one-time Imperial general and a powerful warlord in his own right who had negotiated the Emperor’s surrender on Baba Sung’s behalf when Empire first gave way to the dream of Republic—the same Shiqai who betrayed the Empire, then betrayed the Republic by seeking to reinstate the Empire but with himself at the helm. Even shattered and fragmented as it was in the wake of these upheavals, what was left of the land of Syai had rebelled, Shiqai’s plans had been thwarted, and in less than three years the fearsome warlord himself was dead—some said from buckling under the sheer weight of his ambition.
In those three years, he had not been kind to Xuelian. Although she did not say much in her letters, she was used harshly and it would have been impossible for her unhappiness not to filter through in what she wrote to her family, despite the fact that she never gave any details of her life. But that ended with Shiqai’s death, and for a while Xuelian wrote nothing at all. Then, after a gap of nearly two years, she resumed her letters. She had been traded again; or rather another man had reached out and taken her for himself—no less than Shenxiao, Baba Sung’s own protégé, the leader of the Nationalists. A tough man and a shrewd politician, he had understood the value of having access to all the insight and inside knowledge locked in the mind of a woman who had been close to the seat of power in Syai since she had been a young child. The fact that she was still young and beautiful enough to arouse his physical desire was just a bonus.
But times had changed, and Xuelian was no longer a concubine—she was merely a mistress, a woman kept by a man married to another in a house different from his marital home. It might have been better, on the face of it. Unlike a traditional concubine, she would never be subject to the whims and vagaries of the legal wife, to whom a concubine was traditionally subservient, and her experience in the Sun Emperor’s household had given her bitter firsthand knowledge of how a wife who considered herself wronged or abandoned in a concubine’s favor could lash out at the woman whom she thought of as having stolen her husband’s affections. But the removal of this potential source of trouble from her life also meant a loss of privileges that were customarily accorded to a concubine. She had no rights, and could be simply discarded at will when her married lover tired of her.
But what else can I do? Xuelian wrote to her family, in a voice very similar to that of Lianqin when she had accepted the exile to the Temple and spoke of learning to appreciate whatever blessings the Gods had seen fit to bestow upon her life. Xuelian might have been sent out to become a quiet influence in the corridors of power on behalf of her family—but the fact remained that the only way she could do so was from the silken prison of a powerful man’s bed. She was intelligent, and loyal, and keen-witted—but none of those things had been cultivated for or given free rein to express themselves. She was only useful—to anyone at all—if she was, at least outwardly, a compliant sexual partner who would then be allowed the right of offering pillow-talk advice couched as deferential opinion, a kind of reward, a half-hearted permission to offer up her mind after the offer of her body had been accepted and consummated.
There were gaps in the letters. There seemed to have been a child, but that was fragmented and garbled; if there were more letters on the matter, they had been lost, or they had been deliberately removed from the box before Amais received it. And then the letters stopped altogether, petering out on an uncertain note, leaving it open for interpretation as to what happened next.
Amais read through the night, by lamplight, drowning herself in these letters, in the life of a girl whom she had never known, whose troubles were so very different from hers. She hunted for missing letters in the remaining bundles in the box, but found none—and it was with a sense of astonishment that she realized that it was getting light outside, her lamp an increasingly insubstantial ghost of itself as it competed against the dawn.
She gathered up the letters, carefully restored them to their original packaging, closed the carved box and—when she was done and the hour became a little more civilized—went in search of her hostess.
She found Xinmei in the garden.
“Good morning,” Xinmei greeted her. “You look tired; did you not rest well?”
“I was reading all night,” Amais said, offering up the box. “I thank you for these. I thought I knew all I needed to know about this world, but I realize now that I was mistaken—I have learned a lot from these letters. How did Xuelian die?”
Xinmei gave her a strange look. “Whatever made you think,” she asked softly, “that Xuelian is dead?”
It was Amais’s turn to look startled. “But the letters—they just stop, there is no real end to that story—I assumed they just stopped coming, that she was dead…?”
Xinmei shook her head. “Xuelian is alive,” she said. “Very much alive. She is in Linh-an. She owns a tea house called the House of the Silver Moon, the last house on the Street of Red Lanterns.”
“But how do you know of this? There are no letters…”
“She did not write that,” Xinmei said. “I only know because I went to the city to look for her when her letters stopped, to see if she was dead, to give her a decent burial if she was or at least a memorial from the family… but I found her, and she was quite alive and well, and it is a cause of great sorrow for me that she and I found very little to say to one another, in the end. I hear of her, every now and then, through other channels. But she hasn’t written to me for years. I think she feels her duty to the family has been done, more than done; she owes us nothing any more.”
Amais, to whom these words were a shattering shock, was suddenly aware of a strong urge to go back to the city she had left behind—the city where a lot of her answers appeared to lie after all, even if she did have to cross the breadth of Syai to learn how to ask the right questions.
“I must get back to the city,” she said, voicing her thoughts.
“Right now?” Xinmei said. “That might be harder than you think. There is fighting near Linh-an. I think the war is drawing to a close at last, the Gods be praised—I do not pretend to know whether the right people will have won it, or if we will be better off under whoever comes out on top, but for better or worse the news that I hear seems to be that Iloh and his armies are well on the way to taking the city, and the land with it…”
Amais suddenly shivered. “But my mother is in the city,” she said, an afterthought, but a sudden sharp fear that was quite real for all that. “And my little sister. Xinmei, I have to go back—I have to find a way back…”
“You’d have to ask Iloh himself for a pass,” Xinmei said.
Amais looked stricken, and Xinmei allowed herself a small secret smile.
“But there is hope,” she said. “Did I not say that the troops in my courts are Iloh’s men? And who do you think arrived a couple of days ago to join them…?” Amais’s head came up sharply, and Xinmei nodded. “Yes. Iloh himself is here. Come, over here—look…”
She laid a gentle hand on Amais’s elbow and guided her to the wall dividing the outer courts from the inner. A pattern of blue and white tiles decorated the pillars on the inner side of the gate, and Xinmei tapped one of these lightly until it moved sideways, revealing a tiny spy hole through which one could observe the outer courts. Xinmei peered through this herself for a moment, and then stepped away and motioned for Amais to take her place.
“He is there,” she said. “You can see him. In the far corner, talking to three men.”
Amais stepped up to the spy hole.
Perhaps she should have known, should have guessed… but she had not, and it was with an icy shock of recognition that she laid eyes on the face of the man called Iloh, the man who was leading the rebel armies in a bloody civil war that had already claimed thousands of lives, the man whose name had been swirling in the air ever since she had set foot in Syai years before, whose face she had even seen on badly printed posters in Linh-an which announced the price that had been put on his head. The man she had u
tterly failed to recognize when he had crossed her path in the old cemetery in the hills, only a day ago.
“You could ask him, if you wished,” Xinmei was saying behind Amais’s back. “I am told you have to go through channels, but he is quite willing to talk to people who come to ask a favor of him.” And then, as Amais backed away from the peephole, Xinmei reached out instinctively to steady her. “My dear child! Are you all right? You look like you have seen a ghost!”
“I think… I need to be alone for a while,” Amais whispered. “If I may, lady Xinmei…”
“Of course,” Xinmei said. “Please, the garden is yours. I will see that nobody disturbs you.”
Amais wandered in the inner courts for an hour or so, walking the carefully raked pathways with the staggering unsteady gait of the blind. She had deliberately chosen to immerse herself in that other world, the world of the letters, in the hope that she could make herself forget the encounter under the silver-leaf tree—and had thought that she had succeeded, right until the moment she had seen his face again and had known with a painful clarity that she had not, that she never could, that the sight of that face would always be a fire in her heart.
She retired to her room after a while, unable to bear even the thought of being that close to him, a courtyard away, divided only by a gate in a thin wall, both of them bareheaded under the same summer sky. Xinmei had her dinner sent in to her, together with a courteous note expressing Xinmei’s hopes that Amais should feel better soon. Night came, and with it a restlessness the likes of which Amais had never known; she tossed and turned, unable to find comfort, snatching fragments of fitful sleep and waking again with a start to stare with wide, bleak eyes into the empty shadows in the corners of her room. She finally gave up as the night was beginning to fade into the first pale light of dawn, and rose from her bed, putting on the same light peasant garb that she had worn on her previous foray into the countryside. She had seen where the old retainer had left the keys to the little postern, and now she crept there in the pre-dawn half-light, took the postern key off the ring, unlocked the postern door with hands that did not seem to belong to her at all, and slipped outside. She hesitated for a moment—it was, at best, rude to unlock a locked door in a house not her own and leave it unsecured behind her, but if she locked it and kept the key she would effectively be locking in the inhabitants, which seemed worse. However, given the uncertain times, she decided to err on the side of caution and locked the postern behind her, pocketing the key.
The little cemetery seemed a lot farther away than she remembered, and the land a lot more brooding and stark under the gray glow in the sky that faded out colors and cast everything as either shadow or light. But there were other things there, too—a sense of helpless excitement, something that was halfway between fear and exhilaration. And, once again, that thing that her grandmother had called yuan. It was without a trace of surprise that she rounded the final corner of the path and saw that someone was already at the ancient cemetery, waiting.
Iloh was as aware of her as she was of him, apparently, because his head turned sharply in her direction even as she paused at the foot of the hill. They stood looking at one another for a long, silent moment, and then he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper.
“I hoped you would come.”
“Why did you not tell me who you were?” Amais asked, her own voice very low. They spoke as though there were spies in the long grass, in the leaf-concealed branches of the tree above them, behind or even below the sagging gravestones at their backs. “Why were you doing farmyard chores at all… you, here, in this place which is not your own?”
“I sometimes do a chore or two for the peasants on whose land my people are quartered,” he said. “It reminds me of who I am, of where I came from—these are people who could be my own family. I spent my childhood working the earth with my two hands. It gives me roots; it ties me to the land. And if I had told you who I was… you would have done one of two things. You would have recoiled from me, or you would have bowed to me. I find that most people do one or another these days, as soon as I name myself. And you… you were just so beautiful and so passionate and so wise, sitting there in the sunlight with your hair blowing free… perhaps I should have said something. But I was selfish. I wanted a few moments in which I was not the man that you would have expected of the one named Iloh. I was simply… me.”
She appeared to have taken the few steps that had been required to close the space between them, and now stood less than a pace away from him, looking at him mutely with those improbable and astonishing eyes. Iloh found himself reaching out for her with a gesture of pure instinct, his fingers finding a strand of curling hair, twining themselves into it. They stared at each other, devouring one another’s faces with their eyes, frozen by this moment, unable to do anything other than ache for things that appeared both irrevocably beyond their reach and painfully, vividly inevitable.
“Iloh,” she said softly, tasting the name.
His fingers tightened as she spoke, and then his hand followed the fall of her hair, dropped to her shoulder, rested there lightly.
“And what is your name,” he said, “now that you know mine?”
She nearly gave him her travel alias—Mai—but something changed it in her mouth, and she gave him the truth. “Amais,” she said.
He sucked in his breath sharply at that, as though he had been struck, and then, astonishingly, laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh; there was something harsh in it.
“Amais,” he repeated. “Nightingale. Oh, by all that’s holy in this world.”
“What is it?” she said, a little alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“Many years ago,” Iloh said, “a blind girl read my face and forecast my destiny. Most of what she told me has come to pass exactly as she said. And one of the things she said was that I would love truly only one woman my whole life and that she would be a songbird, a free spirit, and someone I could never truly have… And I thought…” He paused, bit his lip, looked down—and then pulled his shoulders back, drawing himself to to his full height, lifting his eyes to meet hers squarely. “There is something you should know,” he said, his voice suddenly changing, becoming rather more matter-of-fact. “I am married. To a woman who is an artist—an actress—a woman whom I wholly and utterly believed at the time to be the soul mate that had been forecast for me. A woman whose stage name is Niaomai.”
“Songbird,” Amais translated softly.
“Yes, my Nightingale,” Iloh said. “I should have waited. I should have known that you would come.”
The first shafts of true dawn had begun to creep over the hills, and glittered strangely in Amais’s eyes as she reached out to lay her own hand lightly over Iloh’s where it still rested on her shoulder.
“But I am here now,” she said.
With a sound that was almost a groan his hand tightened on her shoulder, and then moved to the back of her neck, down her spine, coming to rest on the small of her back and drawing her inexorably towards him. He burrowed his face into the mass of curly hair, nuzzled first the side of her neck and then the hollow of her throat, where a wild pulse beat in time with her heart, as she gave herself to the embrace, molding her body to his.
Iloh slept, after, under the silver-leaf tree—slept as though exhausted, or released. Amais did not. Instead, she watched him sleep as dawn broke and the sun began to climb into the summer sky—and then, finally, she carefully extricated herself from where she was lying with his arm around her and quietly dressed again, running her fingers through her tangled hair to give it some semblance of order and decorum. When she walked away from him, her bare feet made no sound on the soft grass, but he stirred in his sleep and sighed as though he knew she was leaving.
She turned around to look back, once, and it was as though she was watching something she had seen long ago in a dream. There was a single blossom in the silver-leaf tree that she could have sworn had not been there before, a golden flower, huge and br
ight, blooming right above where Iloh lay. Even as Amais watched the golden petals began to fall. One came to rest on his face, on his brow, like a crown bestowed upon a king. One landed softly on his mouth and stayed there for barely a moment until his next exhaled breath made it skitter to the side and then fall away—but it had landed there, the portent of a king’s eloquence. And a third had come to rest where one of his hands lay cupped over his heart, nestling into his palm—gold into the hands of a king.
It was only then that Amais recognized the tree.
She had seen it first in a dream that had come to her at Sian Sanqin, the dream that drove her from the Temple’s tranquility back into the seething and churning real world and its wars and upheavals. But she had not known what it was, what it signified, until she had found mention of it in the letters from Xinmei’s box that she had been reading for two days now. It was the wangqai tree, the heirloom of Xinmei’s family, the tree that bloomed only when a new Emperor was crowned in Syai, a signal that a new concubine needed to be prepared and sent to the royal bed—and then with only a single flower. It was an announcement, a warning, a sign.
The Embers of Heaven Page 19