The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  On another night not too long after that Amais had woken to the sound of stealthy motion, of grasping fingers groping for any reachable woman in the huddled pile in which they all slept—had known that others were awake, around her, that all were holding their breath and muttering words resembling prayer, asking that this shadow might pass—had heard a smothered gasp as that exploring hand had closed around somebody’s wrist or ankle. And then there was another noise, a startled yelp, a scuffle. Amais had opened her eyes and had seen the commanding officer hauling one of his men off the pile of cowering women by the scruff of his neck

  “They are prisoners,” the commanding officer had said, softly but trenchantly. “They are not whores. Truth is the first thing that dies in any war; let not honor follow it.”

  “You are no soldier,” Amais had whispered, her voice a bare breath between cracked lips. This was the man who had known what jin shei was, someone who still clung, in small ways, to the kind of honor and high principles that had guided Syai’s ancient society. Someone who pragmatically wore the Nationalist uniform, but underneath it still belonged, perhaps, to the vast and complex Empire that Syai once was.

  He heard, turned his head marginally. “I am now,” he said. “If there was another life before this, count that, too, among the casualties.”

  His authority held, still; the midnight groping by frustrated and angry soldiers had not been repeated. But even without that prospect hanging over the prisoners’ heads, their captivity and their unwilling participation in this war was a brutal forge for the spirit. There was no trace of the women’s country in any of this. There was no place for softness or gentleness or kindness—as Amais learned the hard way, when on the fourth skirmish the troop she was with lost badly. The captives had long since ceased to be guarded during these encounters, merely dumped in whatever hiding place their current handler thought most convenient and then picked up again when the skirmish was over—there was every confidence that the cowed women were still focused enough on survival not to do anything stupid like actually run into the crossfire to escape, and if they did then it was their own doing and not their captors’ responsibility. That time, the fourth time, the man who came for them was not the Nationalist officer but someone wearing the same kind of uniform that Amais had seen not so long ago in the gardens of Xinmei’s outer courts. Iloh’s man stared at the terrified women with cold eyes that glittered like obsidian; after a long moment he lifted up the gun he was carrying without saying a word and aimed it at the group of dry-eyed captives, too spent even to flinch out of his way.

  Perhaps Amais could have taken this as her fate, just as the others had apparently done—but the man had pointed that gun at one of the children, one of the little boys, that had found the sudden strength to turn and whimper, burying his face into his mother’s ragged skirts. Something suddenly woke inside Amais—a resolve, a strength of heart, a quiet rage. Iloh, the Iloh she had loved with such a purity of spirit, would never have done this.

  “The child has done nothing to you,” she said out loud, her voice, so long silent, sounding harsh to her own ears, like the cawing of a crow.

  The man looked up at her, narrowing his eyes. “What was that?” he said. “Posh accent—you aren’t from around here. What are you doing with these dregs? Did they send you to spy on us?”

  “Spy?” Amais actually found the memory of laughter bubbling to the surface of her mind, laughter that threatened to turn unto hysteria if left unchecked. It had been that word, exactly the same word, that had been leveled at her from the other side when she had been taken. “Spy? Look at us… look at them, for the love of Cahan. They are starving children, they are women too afraid to breathe. Their menfolk are probably dead. Who would they be spying for? And what possible use would any information be, gathered by the likes of them… the likes of us… you are the People’s Party, you say, well, we are the people. What are you going to do with us?”

  “Killing you would be kindest,” he said, his hands shifting on the gun.

  “Do you have a mother?” Amais said, very softly.

  He gave her a long look, and then he spat sideways into a ruin, much like the Nationalist officer had done, and turned away.

  “I never saw you,” he said, throwing the words over his shoulder like a bone to a starving dog as he picked his way across the remnants of a ruined wall towards a pocket of still sporadically chattering gunfire.

  They were free, at last—but these women had been taken beyond the point at which Amais had taken her stand. She tried to cajole, beg, even gently bully them into moving when night fell and the gunfire fell silent, but they did not move from their safe spot. Perhaps they could not move. Amais finally gave up and crept away, in tears, as the darkness of a moonless night fell around her and she knew that this was maybe the one chance she would get to find her way out of this hell. So she left them, the others, the children because of whom she had perhaps been willing to take a bullet with her own body, the tired and terrified women, the flotsam and jetsam of a war where both sides claimed to be “of the people” and rode roughshod over whoever stood in the path of their progress.

  She had seen the young Nationalist officer as she picked her way out of the churned-up battlefield, in the aftermath of the next battle, underneath a still-smouldering tree casting just enough light from its dying flames for her to recognize his face—abandoned on a battlefield as his men pulled out, his eyes dead and staring, his stubborn sense of honor now gone from the pack of men he had been commanding leaving them prey to Gods-alone knew what.

  Amais remembered Iloh’s dreams, the brotherhood that would bind one human being to another, that would make this land a single living, breathing giant—it was what Baba Sung had wanted, what he had left as his dying legacy—be a nation again. He could not have known how much blood would need to be spilled for that to become a reality.

  The troop she had been with had crisscrossed the land so many times, gone this way and that, their only landmarks burned houses and ravaged fields, that Amais had completely lost her sense of direction—she had not known which way they had been headed for a long time. Now, alone again in a hostile land crawling with armed men many of whom might shoot first, this time, without bothering to saddle themselves with the burden of a prisoner, she watched the sun come up that morning in a quarter that made her blink at it with owlish surprise—but she decided to trust the wisdom of the Gods, after all, who knew which way East was better than she did right at that moment and turned her face in the opposite direction. Linh-an had been south and west of Sian Sanqin and Xinmei’s house. Amais had no idea where she was now, but south and west was still the only direction in which she knew to look for her home.

  She starved, for a while. There were things to scavenge, but often there was danger involved in doing so, and if there was one thing that Amais knew in her sometimes lost and drifting frame of mind, it was that she must not fall into anyone’s hands again. She had seen enough to realize that it was all coming to a head, and it would be her life next time, not just her liberty. And she had started to remember, however nebulously, through the fog of the experience of her captivity, that she still had much to live for.

  Her family—the mother and sister to whom she was trying to return, back in Linh-an, and the vanished ones whose legacy she carried within her, Nikos, baya-Dan, Elena.

  Her quest—taking a lost vow and the mysteries of a secret language from the obscurity into which they had been allowed to sink, back out into the light.

  Iloh.

  Iloh…

  She dreamed of him when she slept, constantly, the way his smile curled his generous mouth, the way his eyes picked it up and glinted with mirth in the corners, the way his strong hands had curled around the handle of that barrel-pail of water he had carried on the day they had first met, the broad brown peasant’s feet with which he stood rooted in the land from which his ancestors had come. He was everyman, in love with life—with its beggars and its monks and it
s robbers and its emperors, with the whole rich tapestry of it, the poetry of it, the love and the jealousy and the generosity and the wisdom and the folly of it. He embraced what came and did not shrink from anything; he was of Syai, deeply and completely, and believed that its future lay in his hands—and was willing to take any risk, submit to any torment, to grasp it.

  Amais wondered, and wept while thinking of it, if he realized what was being done in his name out here—if the farmer’s soul in him had spared a thought for the harvest that he was gathering, for the pain of the scythed corn as it fell under the blade, while he thought of the bread that would be made from the flour which was to be ground from it.

  Two

  The seasons were changing again as Amais crossed into Hian province—Iloh’s home province, although she had no means of knowing that. She could smell autumn in the morning air and in the sudden chill that came on the land after the sun went down, and in the dreary gray rain that set in and would not cease for days leaving her either drenched and shivering as she pushed on through it or else cowering in some makeshift shelter, bleakly watching it fall, waiting for she did not know what. Sometime during this time her birthday came and went, unremarked, uncelebrated. She was seventeen. She felt a thousand years old.

  Amais found shelter where she could, sometimes surreptitiously and alone in someone’s barn or storage shack or byre, and sometimes invited in by people who looked barely above the edge of starvation themselves but who, in the manner of country folk everywhere, always found enough for a guest. There was more suspicion now than there had been in the years, the centuries that had rolled over the land up until the latest war had been unleashed upon it. There had been conflicts before, to be sure, but nothing quite like this—not the squaring off of brother against brother, the mistrust of a son belonging to one Party of a father belonging to another. There were places where careful questions were asked before Amais was invited in, and there were places where whatever hospitality was gained appeared to be balanced on a knife-edge, its very existence depending on a single voice within the family. She spent anything from a few hours to a handful of weeks with people like this, confused and often mistrustful country folks who could not quite allow the distrust and suspicion that were a mark of the times to overthrow an ancient instinct of hospitality.

  She paid her way as best she could, taking on any job, no matter how filthy or onerous or hard; she retched as she cleaned out a piggery ankle-deep in manure, bore in silence the bite from a whelping bitch which she helped deliver of a litter of no less than eleven mewling mongrel puppies, nursed without complaint the aches and pains and the runny nose and constant sneezes of a lingering cold caught while working out in the rain. And sometimes it really was better, and she would sing a child to sleep, or tell tales to the family after whatever poor meal had been cobbled together for them all. But all of it took its toll, weakened her in small ways she sometimes did not even recognize, exhausted her more and more with every step that she took, bled her mind and spirit dry of everything except pure survival.

  Amais could not know, when she finally collapsed on the doorstep of a particular farmhouse badly in need of care and repair, just where it was that the Gods had delivered her—she only knew that she was weary beyond belief, lost, hungry, soaked to the skin in the aftermath of yet another of those endless drizzles that had dogged her footsteps for more than two days, and past caring what happened to her next. She could remember—or thought she could, by this stage she was finding it hard to tell the difference between what she dreamed and real memory—the shape of mist-wreathed hills, a sodden path worn by generations of feet that led her from the slopes of the hills down to the house, a shadowy figure of a woman bending over her. But the first coherent thing that she thought when next she opened her eyes and knew herself awake was the fact that she was tucked into a pile of quilts on the qang, the heated sleeping platform abutting the stove that was common in so many rural houses in Syai. She was in fact probably usurping her hosts’ own bed. There seemed to be a good reason for it—she felt drained by malaise, emptied by either transcendent fatigue or some more physical condition like pneumonia. There was barely enough strength in her to speak in a voice that rose above a whisper.

  “Hello…?”

  She had the sense that she was not alone in the room, but her greeting brought no response. She lifted herself up with some difficulty on her elbows, with every bone in her body aching as though she had been trampled by a herd of wild horses, and looked around.

  There was another pile of quilts on the qang, not too far from where she lay, and she had allowed her gaze to skim it assuming it to be more unused bedding—but it stirred, ever so weakly, with life and breath. There was also a set of water pipes in the far corner, bubbling quietly, and somewhere in that pile of bedding the pipe’s owner sighed and stirred, almost invisible under his coverings.

  “Hello?” Amais tried again, struggling to sit up.

  There was still no response, and now, sitting up and able to see better, she could understand why. The man wrapped in the other set of quilts looked asleep at first glance, with only a restless quivering of eyelids and a faint suckling noise coming from where his hand, infant-like, nudged the mouthpiece of the water pipe against his pursed lips. He was shrunken, his skin the color and texture of aged parchment, his cheeks sunken and throwing his cheekbones into skull-like prominence. A few strands of thinning gray hair hung on to his scalp, straggling untidily from underneath a tight-fitting blue cap.

  “You’re awake,” said a new voice, a woman’s voice, from the far side of the room.

  Amais turned at the sound, and saw a woman whose age she could not guess at all, hollowed out and drained by the troubles of her life, dark circles underneath her eyes and her lips white and cracked. Her hands, where they curled around a basket she carried, were an old woman’s hands, worked to the bone, red and chapped and with nails pared or bitten back into the quick.

  “You were sick,” the woman said, after a beat of silence. “You’ve been asleep for two days. I am Youmei. I have some broth simmering—it was the last but one of the chickens, but I thought you might wake today and you would need it. Will you have some?”

  “You shouldn’t have…” Amais said, honestly appalled that this struggling farmlet’s last dregs of livestock were being slaughtered for her sake.

  “It was time,” Youmei said, dismissing it. “If that rooster had lived any longer he’d have been too stringy to eat anyway. No, don’t get down from there. I’ll get you a bowl.”

  She set down the basket she carried, shook off the rain off the threadbare shawl she had had wrapped around her head and draped it over the basket, and presently approached the qang with not one but two steaming bowls in her hands.

  “I need to feed my master,” she said, handing one of the bowls to Amais and setting the other one down on the qang until she could patiently worry the water pipe mouthpiece free from the old man’s spasmodic grip and settle him more comfortably in a more upright seated position so that she could spoon the broth into his mouth. The first few spoonfuls dribbled from the old man’s half closed mouth and Amais actually physically flinched at the sight of it—the broth was precious enough, it seemed, and seeing it wasted like this was almost too hard to bear. But then the old man seemed to recognize the taste of the thing as food, and began cooperating more fully. He folded his mouth around the bowl of the spoon and sucked greedily, like a child.

  “How old… how old is he?” Amais asked diffidently, feeling as though she were transgressing the boundaries of courtesy and hospitality but somehow deeply moved by the loving devotion of this woman to the wreck of the man who lay cradled against her breast.

  “It is not the age,” Youmei said, without looking up, spooning another helping of broth into his mouth. If she had been offended, she gave no sign of it. “It is the drug. And it is everything—everything… it is the way that life has ground him into dust and ashes and left him helpless. This was
a good farm—but that was back then, before he lost everything. When I first came here, it was after his middle son had died, but he still had two sons he believed he could entrust his old age to—but Iloh first went to school and then Rubai was killed by the Nationalists when Iloh became a wanted man…” She had finally glanced up, and then did a sharp double take, straightening. “Are you all right?

  Amais’s hands had trembled as Iloh’s name was uttered, and the spoon had rattled against the soup bowl; under Youmei’s gaze all color had suddenly drained from her cheeks and she sat with her shoulders rigid, staring.

  Youmei’s own expression suddenly changed, into one that was almost fear. The blood that had drained from Amais’s face seemed to rush into Youmei’s.

  “Are you one of…? Did you…? Oh, please, don’t let them harm him!” She folded protectively over the old man, as though she could physically shield him from attack. “He’s an old man who has lost his entire family… Let him live out the rest of his days in peace…”