The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “I’m sorry,” Amais said through stiff lips that didn’t seem to belong to her. “I mean him no harm, and I am deeply grateful to you… it’s just that I never thought… Iloh… is there an old willow tree by an ancient burial ground near here?”

  It was Youmei’s turn to stare. “The willow died, some years ago,” she said slowly. “We cut it down. It was firewood for two or three seasons. How did you know…?”

  There were tears in Amais’s eyes. She herself did not know why she wanted to weep, but the tears were there, rushing in the back of her mind like water against a dam. It was the first time—the first time since that morning in Xinmei’s house, since the days of captivity during the battles of her Nationalist captors’ private little war against Iloh’s guerillas—that she had felt the urge to give way to tears.

  “I wish I could have seen it,” she whispered.

  Youmei was looking at her with wide eyes. Her expression had graduated from the pure panic of a possibly lethal betrayal of a few moments ago into something more like complete bewilderment. “But who told you about the willow tree?”

  “Iloh did,” Amais said simply.

  A single tear escaped, ran slowly down the curve of her cheek.

  Youmei saw it, misinterpreted it. “Oh, Gods,” she gasped. “The teacher at the village school is out in Iloh’s headquarters somewhere, and he makes sure we get to hear the news as soon as that is possible—but still, there are sometimes months without word… Is he… is he dead?”

  “He was not, the last time I set eyes on him,” Amais murmured. “But that was… many weeks ago. Months ago. A lifetime ago.”

  A new voice, quavering and trembling and thoroughly unexpected, joined the conversation. “Iloh…?” it said, demanded, a world of questions in a single word.

  Both women looked down with surprise. The old man’s eyes had opened; they were far from lucid or clear, and he stared somewhere into the middle distance, but somehow the name of his son had pierced the fog of his drug-soaked brain and he had responded.

  “Shhh,” Youmei said automatically, soothing him as though he were a fractious child. “It’s okay…”

  “Iloh…?” the old man repeated, weakly but insistently.

  “He is fine,” Youmei murmured, letting her fingers caress his temple lightly.

  He subsided, closing his eyes again, drawing a deep and wheezing breath.

  “I should go,” Amais said softly into the silence. “I don’t want to make things any worse. And you can’t…”

  She had tried to struggle out of her quilts but discovered that her legs would not obey her—they felt like a pair of limp eels attached to her hips, without any bone or strength to them. Youmei made a small gesture with one hand.

  “Stay,” she said. “The Gods are wise. They have brought you here for a reason. If you have known him, then you are home. Where were you headed, that you came to this place?”

  “Linh-an,” Amais said. “I have family…”

  “They said there was heavy fighting there, the last we heard,” Youmei said. “I know, I wait for news of that place with fear and sorrow—my daughter is there.”

  “In the city? But who is left here? Just you and… and Iloh’s father?”

  “I told you,” Youmei said. “He lost everything. All his sons are gone—two dead, and one who will never return to this house. I bore him another, but the boy died before he was two years old. And he sold Yingchi, our daughter, a long time before that—to pay for this.” She indicated the pipe with an economical little tilt of her head that hid a world of pain.

  “Sold her?” Amais repeated, astonished. “Do men still sell their daughters…? Does… Iloh know about this?”

  Youmei blinked at her. “You speak with an accent that is strange,” she said, “and you are a stranger, indeed, that you do not know that. Children are often traded for life’s necessities, out on the edge where life is hard.” She paused. “No, I don’t believe Iloh knows. He has not been here for many years. Certainly not since Yingchi has been gone.”

  “Is she all right? Your daughter?”

  “It is hard to say,” Youmei said. “She writes to me little of what her life is like—but it is in the things she does not say that I read the truth, and she has never given me a return address where I might write back to her. Her father did not intend for this, when he sold her to a family who required a servant girl, but times were hard for everyone… it isn’t anybody’s fault that she ended up where she is now—it was the only thing she could do, probably, to survive…” She sighed. Too deeply.

  “How old is she?” Amais asked gently. Somehow they were beyond the social graces; these were not questions that any guest could ask of their hosts and be considered well-mannered, but they were all, strangely, family here—the old man in his drug-blurred dream world, the woman who had borne him children and who now cared for him until such time as the ancient body followed the spirit that had already partly vanished into the realms of Cahan’s Gods, the girl who had last seen the first-born of this house asleep in her arms under a kingmaker tree.

  “Yingchi?… I have lost track,” Youmei admitted. “She has been gone so long, and the years have been hard… I think she is twenty now. Maybe twenty one.”

  Perhaps Amais would not have been able to piece this together only a few short months before—but she had met Xinmei since that time, and read the letters in the cedar box. There were too many things left unsaid in Youmei’s story, but there was more than enough there for Amais to be painfully certain of the address in Linh-an which Iloh’s sister would not send home.

  Xuelian, and now Yingchi—Emperor’s concubine, and half-sister to the man who would become the new leader of Syai—their origins and their fates might have been very different but they had converged onto the same stream of destiny. There was more than one road that led to the Street of Red Lanterns.

  Three

  If, back at Xinmei’s house, Amais had felt herself caught back up in the urgent pull of main currents of history again, her unexpected washing up on its shores right in the heartland of Iloh’s childhood country seemed to lull her into a strange, almost hypnotic calm. It was as though she was drawn aside from the mainstream, into a quiet eddy that was sheltered and serene and somehow outside of the relentless passage of time. Here the days followed one another like beads on a string, like the yearwood beads that Amais’s ancestress Tai would have used to mark them. Perhaps, on the surface, it might have been a strangely unbalanced world – with only Youmei, Iloh’s father, and an assortment of oddly compelling ghosts for company in the dilapidated farmhouse, and all kinds of new things now waiting for her back in the city, Amais might have expected to be itching to leave. But somehow she stayed, day after day, watching the autumn fade away, and a tough, lonely, often hungry winter come in its wake.

  In the years that would follow, Amais would remember this time as the quiet calm before the storm, the season of gathering strength and courage and knowledge. She had once told Jinlien that history was built on people—and here, in this place, she was learning about the person who already had an iron hand on the future that would in its turn become the history of the war-weary land of Syai. Youmei had personally had only the barest glimpse into Iloh’s childhood, but she had been privy to all that had happened in the years that had preceded her arrival into his home. And she had lived, after Iloh left, with the memories that his father had stored up of his eldest, vanished, famous son—memories that he had poured out lavishly to Youmei in the days before the Nationalists had crippled his farm by the heavy taxes he had to pay if he refused to grow the poppies that produced the drug which eventually claimed his land, his memories, and his mind. There was all that—there was a treasure trove of that. And in the company of the ghosts—Iloh’s mother, too deeply wounded by her own early losses; Iloh’s little sister, who had died so young; the two brothers who had also gone—there was the spirit of the old willow tree, brooding by the stump that remained, a place where Am
ais would walk on cold winter mornings and where she could almost feel Iloh’s presence around her.

  And even in the worst of the winter storms, somehow, news trickled down to the three on the farm—it was a new age, and even in the aftermath of the war’s inevitable destruction of the infrastructure and day-to-day functioning of a nation, letters found their way back into the hinterland. The bigger settlements around even had a smattering of radios, which spread news and rumors from the capital faster than ever before. They heard it all, the two women who would go without tea or rice themselves for days in order to offer some to someone bringing a fresh piece of news. They devoured the occasional letters that came from Yingchi in Linh-an, and the dated newspapers that percolated into the back country. It was in the newspaper accounts that they first heard about Iloh’s entry into Linh-an, bareheaded in the rain, riding a white stallion—with the gates thrown open for him and cheering people lining the streets as he made his way to the big square before the Emperor’s Gate that led into the old city Palace. There was even a picture—a fuzzy one, apparently taken from a distance, but Amais didn’t need it to know what he must have looked like, the fire that must have been in his eyes as he rode in to claim his city, his country, his fate.

  “I wish I could have been there, seen that,” she murmured, her eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance, playing the scene in her mind, wondering if Aylun had been there to watch Iloh ride in, if Jinlien had stood in the street outside the Great Temple in the rain, if the women of the Street of Red Lanterns had hung from their windows to see the white horse pass. It was the first time she had seen his title written down—no, not Emperor, despite the wangqai tree. Those days were over. This was Baba Sung’s world, no longer an Empire, a Republic. The newspapers were calling him “Shou Ximin Iloh”—First Citizen Iloh—a word that would be taken by the nation and honed into something simpler and easier to remember, turning it into an extension of his name without which it quickly became unimaginable to think of him. He was never to be just Iloh again, he was Shou’min Iloh for the rest of his days, the anointed one, the first man of the people.

  And so it began. Just when everyone thought it was all over, it began again—the morning of a new day, there in the rain in the Emperors’ Square.

  Without ever quite knowing how it came about, the two women had started sharing the responsibilities of caring for Iloh’s father. It was Youmei who still took care of his basic physical needs, but he had consented without fuss to being fed by Amais, which allowed Youmei a precious few moments of respite a day. When a man wearing the flat cap and the blue uniform of Iloh’s cadres trudged up to the farmhouse as the snows melted in the spring, it was Youmei who came to the door to greet the visitor—Amais was on the qang, in the back room, with Iloh’s father cradled against her arm and a bowl of rice broth balanced on her knee.

  The uniformed man had been formal to the point of stiffness.

  “I am Tang,” he said, giving Youmei a tight little bow. “I come from your son, Shou’min Iloh, in Linh-an. He has charged me to bring his family to the city. For celebrations on the occasion of the birth of the Republic.”

  “I am afraid it might be too much for his father,” Youmei murmured.

  “He is ill?”

  “Iloh hasn’t been home for many years,” Youmei said, “and it was hardly possible to get word to him, after… after he had to disappear.” She spoke warily, keeping her eyes downcast. In the new world, during the war and in the triumphs and uncertainties of its aftermath, words could be sharp and dangerous things and had to be measured with care.

  Tang said, in the clipped precise manner of a man trained and toughened on the battlefield where clear communication was at a premium. “What is the nature of this illness?”

  “Come inside,” Youmei said with a bow, ushering the visitor into the great room. “Come and see.”

  Amais was just finishing up with lunch, in the process of laying aside the bowl of broth and wiping the corners of the old man’s mouth with one end of a faded cotton towel. That was the way Tang first saw her, bent over Iloh’s father, her hair neatly braided into a thick rope that lay over her shoulder and on the crook of her arm, with stray curls escaping around her temples and brushing her cheeks. She looked up as he entered, and their eyes met.

  She straightened.

  He held her eyes for a moment, and then gave her a clipped bow, taking his eyes from her and turning back to Youmei. “I see,” he said. “Will it be of any assistance if all of you were to move to the city? You are no longer working the farm, and it may be easier if there was access to a doctor who did not live half a day’s ride away.”

  “Leave?” Youmei said. “But this is my home…” She had been shocked into what was almost rudeness but she quickly collected herself and remembered her duties. “You will stay for supper? We will talk of it.”

  Tang looked as though he had been about to say something, and then he appeared to think better of it and nodded, sharply. “I will be happy to help with any necessary provisions,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Amais said, when Youmei hesitated. It would, again, have breached protocol to accept such an offer—it would have implied that the invited guest knew that the host was too poor to provide a meal and that was an unforgivable thing for the host to admit. But times were hard, and this guest had come from what was now technically the head of this family. Youmei might never have brought herself to demean her offer of hospitality in this manner, but Amais had no such compunctions. She was at least partly a child of this new age—a new age where need took what it was offered, and refused to gnaw on empty pride instead of a freely given steaming bowl of chicken stew. She laid Iloh’s father down gently on his nest of quilts. “If you are willing to help us procure a chicken I will show you where you can find one for sale.”

  Tang bowed his head in unspoken acquiescence. Youmei looked bewildered, aware of an undercurrent of something she did not understand going on here, but the situation was out of her hands. Amais climbed down from the qang, crossed the room to the older woman, took both her hands in her own and squeezed them in reassurance. “Don’t worry about anything,” she said gently. “We will return as quickly as we can.”

  She reached out for a shawl to wrap around her shoulders against the chill that still lingered in the air, and walked out of the house without looking back. Tang followed her, and then fell into step beside her.

  “I know who you are,” Tang said without preamble as the front door of Iloh’s house closed behind them. “He told nobody… except me. But he did tell me. And it took only a few words, and I knew I would recognize you at once if ever I laid eyes on you. I did not expect to do so in his house.”

  The question was conspicuously unspoken, but loud in its absence. What are you doing in Iloh’s house? What do you want of him?

  “I did not know whose house this was when I came here,” Amais said quietly.

  She told him something of her life since she had left Iloh’s side in that other family graveyard, under that flowering tree—haltingly, because she could somehow both remember too much of it and too little. Tang did not interrupt until she had come to the end, to her arrival at the farmhouse, and Youmei’s nursing her back to health at Iloh’s own hearth.

  “I did not want anything. I did not ask for anything. I myself don’t know why I didn’t leave long ago and go back to the city—that’s where I was headed, that’s where I wanted to go—all the family I still have is there and I have no idea if they are alive or dead right now. But I didn’t go. Somehow, they needed me here, in this place. And somehow…I needed them.”

  “Do you have papers?” Tang asked.

  “Papers?” Amais echoed, turning to look at him blankly.

  “How do you expect to enter the city without papers?” he said. “They will want to know who you are.”

  Amais stared at the ground at her feet, her face white. “I did not even think,” she said, “that this would be a problem. I have no su
ch papers.”

  “You will not be allowed in,” Tang said. It was not a threat or in any way hostile—it was just a flat statement of fact.

  Amais’s head came up sharply. “But my mother… my sister…”

  He shook his head. “That is nothing to do with the men who are at the gates,” he said. “You never left, as far as anyone knows—even if you did leave with all your papers intact it was during the old city, when everything was different. Now, the only people who are allowed to keep a domicile in Linh-an are those who can prove that they belong there. But they will have been issued papers after you left the city. And you do not have those papers.”

  “Perhaps my family did it,” Amais said. “Perhaps there is a record of me, in the city.”

  “But it does not show you left it,” Tang said. “And if you never left, how is it that you are trying to get back in?”

  Amais squared her shoulders under the shawl. “There has to be a way.”

  “Where is Iloh’s sister?” Tang asked unexpectedly.