The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  There was a man asleep under it now, covered with the petals from that one heraldic blossom.

  A new Emperor for Syai.

  The journal looked old, worn, its leather covers faded with age from what had once been a vibrant red to a sort of dusty purplish shade, the color of dead rose petals. The ghost who was Amais-the-dreamer was looking at this mysterious yet disturbingly familiar object as though over someone’s shoulder—it was that young woman from her dream again, holding the red book in almost reverent hands, gazing at pages thickly covered with a graceful brush-and-ink script.

  It had been a different world, back when these characters were inked onto the paper. A different time. A time of grace and gentleness, and subtle power that never really spoke its name but flowed like smoke into every crack and crevice of society, setting brick and mortar and heart and spirit, giving strength.

  “So long ago,” the young woman who held the book whispered. “So long ago. So fragile. So easy to forget.”

  “Oh, no,” said the other voice from this dream-world, the little girl, who turned out to be sitting on cushions at the young woman’s feet, a stack of red-covered books much like the journal her companion was holding piled around her. “Nothing is ever really forgotten, you know. Time is a heavy thing, like ashes, like snow; things just get buried in it, and by it. But then the ashes are swept away to make room for a new fire, and the snow melts in the spring, and there it is, the thing you buried, and it looks not a day older than when it was left there although a thousand years may have passed.”

  “But I can only read some of this,” the young woman said, lifting her head, tearing her eyes away from the writing in the book.

  “That only means,” said the child at her feet tranquilly, “that there is still enough snow or ashes upon it for you not to be able to see it clearly yet.”

  And she bent over her own task, something quite different from reading ancient script—she had a lap-board cradled across her knees where she sat cross-legged on her cushions, and the lap-board was covered by a piece of aged vellum paper, golden yellow and with the ragged edges that spoke of its having been lovingly hand-made. She held a pen, one with a flat metal nib usually used for calligraphy, but she was drawing something with it instead of writing. She had only just begun her task, and the shape taking form on the paper was still no more than a few bold straight lines, a mere ghost of itself.

  “What are you doing?” asked Amais-and-her-alter-ego.

  The child bent over her task, dipping the pen into a leather inkwell, drawing another careful, purposeful line.

  “You will see,” the small artist said, “when it is time.”

  The young woman turned her attention back to the journal.

  “This is poetry,” she said. “I don’t know this one. I’ve never seen this journal.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “I think so,” said the young woman carefully, and pointed her index finger at the lines she was perusing, following them while she pieced together their meaning, her finger hovering just above the precious page. “I think it says… ‘Dreams are strong, when they are given leave to fly, when they are given wings… dreams have never lived or breathed, and yet they are amongst the most immortal things…”

  “My poetry never rhymes,” the little girl said, without lifting her eyes off her drawing.

  “Your poetry…?” repeated the other, nonplussed. “This is ancient, more ancient than you can know—but you’re right in one thing, in that era poems were pieces of exquisite verbal embroidery, they didn’t need rhyme or meter to make them perfect.”

  “Nothing is perfect,” the little girl said, “not the way you mean, nothing can be that perfect. Things can be almost flawless, but they belong in their time and their age and what was thought without a blemish a moment ago or a hundred years ago is mottled with faults if you look at it again with a different pair of eyes. Dreams and ideas change, as the world changes. That poem was never in that journal—you just wrote it, made it from the words that are on the page and the thoughts that are in your own mind and the feelings in your heart. That’s the way of poetry. You can never read it twice and have it be the same.”

  “So young, and such a philosopher…?” the young woman said, with a raised eyebrow and a smile.

  “I remember,” the little girl said, looking up briefly before her eyes dropped down again, “being young.”

  The glimpse of that single short glance made Amais-the-dreamer shiver suddenly, because the eyes in that childish face were the eyes of a woman who carried the weight of worlds in her soul.

  “There,” said the child, breaking that thought before it led to a conclusion, “I am done. Look.”

  What lay on the page, depicted in heart-stopping detail with only a few essential strokes and yet with a presence so powerful that it stood out in three dimensions from the paper, was a sword. It was an old-fashioned blade, one that might have been used in the armies of an Emperor from half a millennium before—but its edge held its wicked gleam there in the drawing, and it was easy to feel it slicing, chopping, cleaving, going through bone and sinew and flowing with blood.

  The young woman reached for it, instinctively, and her fingers scrabbled for a moment on the paper; it was drawn well enough for the simple fact that she could not touch it to bring a startled small gasp to her lips.

  “What does it mean?” the young woman whispered, because this was a dream, and in dreams things always meant something, carried messages and significance and an otherness that belonged to worlds where every word was a prophecy and every prophecy was true.

  “Look again,” the child said, offering up the pen she had used, wooden handle first.

  The young woman took it automatically, staring at it, and then did a double take as she realized that the metal nib with which the drawing had been made was no longer at the end of the wooden grip. Only a stub remained, something eerie and half-melted, where the nib had been joined to the pen.

  The sword’s blade in the drawing gleamed with a light not its own.

  “It is real,” the young woman whispered. “You made it, out of this thing. It’s real, you turned the pen into the sword…”

  “And yet you cannot hold it,” the child murmured. “It remains but a paper sword upon a painted page.”

  “But I can feel it,” the young woman said. “I can feel the cold of it when I touch it.”

  “The pen could make the sword,” the child said, “but never could the sword make the pen.” She blew on the drawing gently, to dry it, and then removed the paper on which the sword rested from its board backing and offered it up to her companion with both hands. “Here, you keep that, and remember that the pen vanquished the blade, remember that when the time comes for you to believe it.”

  “There will come such a time?” the young woman said, and tears stood in her eyes and in the eyes of Amais-the-ghost behind her, tears for which she could offer no reason or explanation, tears that were tribute to a pain yet to come.

  “Times like that,” the little girl said, her voice a deep well of love and sympathy, “will always come.”

  She raised her hand, then, and something came to alight on it, like a trained hawk to its mistress. Except that this was no hawk—it was a butterfly, huge and yet somehow weightless, ethereal, its wings opening and closing gently as though moved by breath. It gleamed in the half-light of the dream with the gleam that should never have been—its wings were made of iron and copper and gold, razor-edged, glowing. The little girl on whose wrist it rested gazed upon the creature for a long moment, and then lifted her arm, flinging the creature into the sky. It flapped its huge wings and was gone, swallowed by the mists; so was the child; so was the young woman; everything was gone, except the golden mists and a voice that spoke out of it, like a prophecy.

  “Poetry is remembered long after slogans are dust and ashes, dead offerings on the altars of lost gods. In the hour of destiny, remember the strength in fragile things.”


  The Street of Red Lanterns

  “When you are worst beset by your troubles and weighed down by your life’s burdens—it is in the arms of love that you will find the courage to remember the things you must remember, the strength to abandon the things you must forget, and the wisdom to tell these things from one another.”

  The Courtesan’s Journal

  One

  I must go back to the city.

  Amais had told herself that it was this, something that smote her with the force of a command from the Gods themselves, that made her almost vanish from Xinmei’s house on the morning that she had woken to see Iloh asleep under the wangqai tree. Xinmei had been astir when Amais had returned to the house, and had been schooled in enough protocol not to ask about the reasons for her guest’s sudden departure—but there was something in her face, something knowing in her eyes, something that was not censure and yet was not approval, that made Amais certain that Xinmei knew precisely what had happened on that hillside at dawn.

  It was not that Amais wanted to renounce anything that she had said or done in those pearly pre-dawn hours—indeed, she hugged close the memories that she had made, and knew that they would never fade from her heart—but as suddenly and powerfully as she had been compelled to keep that tryst that had taken her into Iloh’s arms so she was now driven to put distance between them, between two people who had connected on such a deep and fundamental level but whose futures lay on such impossibly different and divergent paths.

  She had made a silent vow to him as she had turned to take her last look before she stole away that morning.

  I will always be yours, if not always by your side.

  But that was then. Reality had started creeping in almost as soon as she had left his powerful presence. Too many people were clamoring for supremacy in Amais’s mind—there was the romantic heroine of a deathless love story, who had cast her lot with the one man to whom she belonged and now had to suffer the consequences; the pragmatic, practical fisherman’s daughter from Elaas, who thought of the whole thing as an impossible dream and chided Amais to face the situation honestly, that it was all a fairy tale; the child that she still was in so many ways, who had suddenly realized that she was adrift in a dangerous and unknown world and who only wanted the comfort of her mother—even such scant comfort as Vien had been able to provide in all the previous crises of Amais’s life. It was that last that won. The uncertainty and the apprehension had been clear in her eyes as she had left Xinmei’s house—and Xinmei would have been less shrewd that she was if she hadn’t noticed them there, but it was hardly her place to detain her guest against her will. So Xinmei let Amais go, and then watched her for a long time from the postern gate with mouth pursed into an expression that was half resignation and half genuine concern. Behind her, the expression on her aged gatekeeper’s face had been much easier to read. Not a moment too soon did that girl leave this house.

  As strongly as she had been driven to leave Linh-an, so now the city called to Amais like a lodestone, a homing beacon—both as the place where she needed to return in order to continue her quest for lost jin-shei which she had so vividly glimpsed in Xinmei’s house, and as the only place in Syai that she could think of that was home and safe, that would shelter her against the storms of her life. But going back to the city turned out to be more of a mirage than Amais had realized—because if the Gods had been keeping the war out of her way on her outward journey, they had decided to more than make up for that as she tried to return. The war now faced Amais at every turn, an obstacle, a barrier, a living and breathing enemy from whom it seemed impossible to hide.

  On the second day out from the sanctuary of Xinmei’s house, Amais was apprehended by a troop of the Nationalist army and questioned closely as to her intentions in that part of the country. Iloh’s enemies.

  Amais had been taken by a two-man patrol of grunts, and taken to a tribunal of the three highest-ranking officers for disposal.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” one of the lieutenants demanded, his eyes cold slits of suspicion.

  Amais had offered neither more nor less than the truth. “I am from Linh-an. I came here on a pilgrimage.”

  “Not with that accent,” muttered the other lieutenant.

  “And where is the rest of your group? A pilgrimage to where?” the first man who had spoken said, seemingly unable to communicate except by means of inquisition.

  “I… no group. I came by myself. To Sian Sanqin. I came in search of…”

  “Yes?” barked the lieutenant, leaning forward.

  “I came to look for jin shei,” Amais whispered.

  “What?”

  “Women’s stuff,” said the commanding officer, his eyes resting on Amais with a mixture of wariness and calm appraisal.

  “I never heard of…” began one of the men, but the commanding officer lifted a hand, cut him off in mid-sentence.

  “You wouldn’t have,” he said. It was more than the simple statement of the obvious, that a man would not have known of women’s secrets—it was a judgment, however subtle, of that particular man’s ability to know or understand anything of importance. Amais, having lifted her eyes for a moment, happened to catch the commanding officer’s eyes as his sardonic glance returned to herself from a swift, impatient flicker towards his truculent lieutenant. They looked at each other for a moment, the soldier and the captive, and then Amais dropped her gaze. The officer said nothing.

  “Spy,” the first lieutenant summarized trenchantly.

  The other lieutenant had laughed at the same instant, a single dry chuckle, apparently seconding his fellow’s judgment. “A slip of a girl with a foreign accent, wandering around sensitive strategic territory by herself?” he said, after the other man had sat back and crossed his arms, his mind made up. “A likely story. Who’s your contact?”

  “Please,” Amais said, “I’m just trying to get home… to my family. To the city.”

  “There’s a People’s Army between you and the city,” said the first lieutenant. “How did you hope to get past them? Who’s your contact? What information do you carry?”

  It lasted for more than an hour, this interrogation. Amais told them that she knew nobody at all who belonged to the People’s Party—and didn’t lie, quite, because in a very real way it was the Party that belonged to Iloh rather than the other way around. But although she had answered their questions as honestly as she was able, her answers had apparently not been satisfactory enough for them to let her go; neither had they been incriminating enough for them to kill her. So when the commanding officer had had enough of the cat and mouse game that the questioning had turned into, he simply got up and said,

  “Bring her.”

  Amais was dragged in their wake as they made their way, heavily armed and full of the desperate courage found in men who already know their cause is lost, to one of the ongoing hotspots of the war.

  A battle had been raging for weeks in and around one hapless and deeply strategic village, with skirmishes where victory was alternately tossed from foe to foe as though in a bizarre game of catch. The village was by this time a wasteland of rubble and ghostly burned outlines of what had once been houses and storage barns and pigsties. It had been overrun by one army or the other on a regular basis, its fields and hillsides won and lost and won again. Amais endured four of these confrontations, growing more and more terrified at every turn, fearing that she would be killed at any moment as she and a handful of other prisoners became too much of a burden for the fighting unit to worry about. Her captors lost no chance to tell her that if she had fallen into the hands of their opponents she would be dead by now.

  “They take no prisoners,” one of the men had said, and spat out of the corner of his mouth, with derision, to show his opinion of the guerilla forces his outfit was fighting. Iloh’s men, those; something that Amais could not seem to make herself forget. “They don’t care about the people at all.”

  Amais wanted to ask what
had happened to the villagers who had once peacefully lived here with no thought except a prayer for a good harvest, but she could not scrape together the voice or the courage to even ask one of her fellow captives, all women except for two young boys who clung hollow-eyed to their mothers’ tattered skirts, if any of them were in fact the remnants of those villagers and how it was that the Nationalists cared for “the people” in a manner that they said Iloh’s armies did not. But her spirit quailed at this sudden explosion of noise and chaos and blood, and she was silent in the face of it all, silent and waiting only to die.

  Amais and the other captives had been conscripted occasionally to change dressings and bandages on the wounds of some of the company. She herself had to do it for that commanding officer, once; she tried to keep her head down and her hands from trembling, but all the time she was aware of the eyes that rested upon her as she worked, aware of his gaze as though it had been a physical weight on her skin. He had reached out with his good hand, after she was done, and cupped her chin, lifting her face so that she had to meet his eyes with her own; she had braced herself for what might have followed. It was wartime, after all. People were fodder, one way or another. But he had done no more than that, had said nothing, had merely dropped his hand, sighed, walked away.