The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  Amais turned her head to stare at him. “What?”

  “He had a half-sister. Yingchi. She would be… maybe a few years older than you. The daughter of his father’s concubine.”

  “She is in the city,” Amais murmured. “Youmei does not know exactly where, but we do know it’s in Linh-an, because that’s where her letters come from.”

  “Linh-an? Yingchi is in Linh-an? How long has she been there? What does she do there?”

  “She has not been living in that house for some years,” Amais said. “When her father… took to the pipe… it was his daughter’s purchase price as a bondservant that bought his habit. And after—her mother does not know. There is never a return address on the letters.” She left it at that. Youmei’s suspicions, the possibility of Iloh’s sister plying her trade in Linh-an’s tea houses, was not her story to tell or to judge.

  “But she has never officially entered the city,” Tang said after a thoughtful pause.

  “Not with the new papers,” Amais said, glancing up at him.

  “This can be straightened out, in the city,” Tang said at last, coming to a decision. “The real Yingchi is in the city, and she is supposed to be here. You are here, and you are supposed to be in the city. You are of an age, within a few years. If the family comes to Linh-an with me, we will show that Yingchi entered the city—and after that, the bureaucracy can untangle it.”

  “Thank you,” Amais said. “Yes, I will come to Linh-an with you. I will help you find Yingchi, even, and return the identity I am borrowing.”

  Tang hesitated, avoided looking at her, his left hand closed around the wrist of his right on his back as he walked. “Iloh… would want me to bring you to him, now that I have found you. He wanted to… wants to… ask you…”

  “The answer to that question,” Amais said softly, “he already knows. He has always known it.”

  Four

  In the end, it was only Tang and Amais who left for Linh-an. Youmei had too many reasons not to want to go. Here, on the old farm, she was surrounded by country she knew and understood and by people who knew and understood her. In the city, she would be unknown, mistrusted, suspicious—a stranger, without friends or any kind of real support, saddled with the responsibility of caring for a sick old man and possibly with the heartbreak of finding out what had become of her daughter in the years that they had been apart.

  They had talked of it, Amais and Youmei, one morning—very early, in the dark hours before the dawn broke, almost in whispers so that they would not wake the others.

  “I do not need much,” Youmei said to Amais. “You fixed the roof for me before the snows came, and so the house will be dry, and there will be just the two of us here, and even if I don’t work the outer paddies I can make enough of a harvest to feed us—and anyway, when you and… Tang, is it?…went away to get one chicken for supper and came back with three that in itself is enough to keep me going for a while. And now that he knows about us… about his father… perhaps Iloh will send us food if times get tough again.”

  “Tang will tell him,” Amais said. “Perhaps now that he has done what he has set out to do, now that he has nothing more to prove to himself or to his father—perhaps he will come back and see you.”

  “And you will write, and tell me what is going on in the city,” Youmei said, her eyes huge and eloquent.

  “I will do my best to find her,” Amais said, squeezing the other woman’s hands, answering the unspoken question.

  So they had gone, Tang and Amais, with Youmei watching from the doorway of the farmhouse until they were completely out of sight.

  It had been over a year since Amais had last seen the walls of Linh-an. On the outside, nothing seemed to have changed—those walls were eternal, had always been there, would always stand. But within them, inside the city, the year that had passed had changed everything—and things were still changing.

  The gates were guarded by men and women wearing Iloh’s blue or gray uniforms and the ubiquitous flat caps worn low on their foreheads, and they were not window dressing or decoration—they scrutinized everyone who passed the gates with narrowed eyes and tight lips, the first redoubt, the frontline soldiers on whose shoulders the security of the city rested. Because she was with Tang, whom they recognized and deferred to, Amais’s passage was smooth—but she was very aware of how different things might have been if she had tried to return on her own, without papers, without identity. Tang had stopped a little way into the city, out of sight of the gates and their intense and devoted guardians, and had handed Amais a piece of paper with a red seal stamped on it.

  “That will get you through to me,” he said. “See what you can find out from your family, what they’ve done about you and come and give me the paperwork. Do it soon.”

  The words had been a warning. Paperwork mattered in this new world. As with everything new, this newborn republic was insecure enough to set tough rules and demand that everyone abide by them—thus continuing to prove and justify its own existence.

  “What do I do with these?” Amais said, holding up the papers that identified her as Iloh’s sister Yingchi. “I promised her mother I would find her.”

  “I will start a discreet inquiry,” Tang said. “Don’t stir things up by blundering about by yourself. Given the situation, you might seriously endanger both of you. Hang onto the papers, keep them safe. I will send word.” He paused, took a moment to give her another long, apprising look. “I will tell him that you are here,” he said.

  Amais dropped her eyes and bowed her head in a motion that was many things—gratitude, deference, pride. When she looked up, Tang was gone.

  The city itself was different. It was as though even the air had changed—there had been little enough of old Syai in the atmosphere of Linh-an when Amais and her family had first got here, but now even that tiny whiff of it seemed to be gone. There was a new mood, an excitement tinged with fear. Huge banners filled with slogans were hung from windows and across walls; Amais detoured to walk by the Great Temple and even that, in between two of its gates, had an enormous picture of Iloh draped on its outer wall. There seemed to be just as many people gathered in the street underneath the picture, gazing up at it, as there might have been inside the Temple itself kneeling before the niche of any given deity. Amais shivered, ever so slightly, at the unbidden comparison of Iloh not with a mortal Emperor but with an immortal, a God, something that had stepped out of Cahan itself and now strode the world like a giant, crushing things under its heels without even realizing that anything had been there. She paused for a moment, staring at the suddenly unfamiliar place that the Temple had become with the addition of that poster, wondering if Jinlien was somewhere inside—if life went on as usual, with the carp needing to be fed, the burners needing to be tended and the niches cleaned of old offerings—but she did not go in, letting her step lengthen again, tearing her eyes away. The urgency that beat in her blood was for other things right now, for other people.

  The building where her mother and stepfather lived had another poster on it, with a smaller Iloh portrait and underneath that the word Xiqanin! The calligraphy was crude—splashed on with huge brushes and paint rather than ink—but the word was an elegant relic from the Imperial age. Xiqanin—“Ten thousand years”—was the cry that the people had traditionally greeted their Emperors with when they had walked the city’s streets. Amais’s heart lurched with a sudden and painful memory of the wangqai tree and its golden flower.

  Nobody was home. For one terrified moment Amais succumbed to an impulse of pure panic—what if none of them are there any more? What if they are gone? What if they are all dead?—and the specters of those lifeless eyes she had seen on the battlefields rose to haunt her, set in the familiar faces of her mother and her little sister. And then she took herself in hand.

  “They weren’t in the war,” she muttered to herself, shaking off the icy touch of the dead. “They were within the city. They are perfectly safe.”

  The
y were just not here. She considered waiting until someone—anyone—showed up, but it was mid-morning and it could conceivably be hours before anybody did. She suddenly and painfully wanted her mother—wanted a chance to throw herself into her mother’s arms, bury her face into Vien’s shoulder, feel Vien’s arms come around her and rock her like she had done when Amais was a child and some exaggerated childish calamity had exploded into her world. Or as Youmei might have done with her daughter. It was hard to remember, in the end, after watching Vien fade into a gray wraith that had needed protecting by her children rather than rousing to protect them against others, if she had ever in fact done what Amais now pictured in her mind or whether it was just something that Amais had made up from scraps of other people’s memories, from the fragments of stories that she herself had scribbled down in her notebooks when she was younger.

  She could have gone straight to the University library, but something in her shrank from her first meeting with her mother to be under the curious, watchful eyes of all the other people there—and particularly the weight of Lixao’s resentment and disapproval. She needed privacy for that first meeting, needed… needed time, time to retrace some of her steps, find her way back to the place she was before.

  Time. Hesitating under the benign gaze of Iloh’s portrait and its heartfelt wish for eternal life, Amais wondered a little bleakly if anyone would know if she took some of that surfeit of time wished on Shou’min Iloh on the poster, whether a couple of years siphoned off here or there would be noticed in that extravagant, monumental pile of ten thousand of them. But it seemed that the Universe had already granted her what time it could, in those quiet months of learning how to breathe again in Iloh’s house. Now, back in the city, time shook itself off like some creature waking from a deep sleep and launched itself forward in an almost unseemly rush.

  Vien did take Amais into her arms when she finally came home, and had held her for a long time, crying quietly, without saying a word. Lixao had been haughty but oddly quenched, as though he might at one time have demanded an apology from the wayward child before he would allow her to live under his roof again but had been forced by the new rules of the city and the land to question his own authority. Aylun, at first, would not speak to Amais at all. But it was with all of them that she was part of the crowd who thronged the streets and squares of Linh-an on the afternoon of that day in late Chanain, mid-summer, that Iloh had chosen for the official birthday of his Republic. With her family at her side, in the midst of the surging masses of the cheering people of Linh-an, Amais was just one of a multitude, another body in a thousand bodies, not even considered important enough to be given access to the front part of the great Emperor’s Square where the podium had been built on which Iloh and his high-ranking officers were to stand. She was almost all the way in the back, where parents hoisted small children onto their shoulders to let them glimpse the podium and Shou’min Iloh, blocking the view of those behind them, hauling the children back down again when the protests became too loud. There were thousands of lanterns, hundreds of thousands of voices raised in an endless echoing cry of “Xiqanin! Xiqanin! Shou’min Iloh!”

  To Iloh, the square beneath his benevolent gaze and waving hand was just a mass of upturned faces, a thunder of voices. To Amais it was as though all of that were in a different dimension, a background roar of noise, an overwhelming mass of flesh pressing against flesh. Through it all, even when her view was blocked by those pushing and shoving for better vantage positions in front of her, she could clearly see Iloh’s face, the fire in his eyes, feel the surge of his triumph as he stood on this pinnacle of his achievement—at the helm of a new state he had fought and bled for, with his hand on the dream once given to Syai as a legacy by Baba Sung. Be a nation again.

  And he had done it. He had achieved it. Amais could see the pride of it sit on him, like a crown.

  Amais felt it surge through her, too, that pride—she could feel it beating in her blood as well, helplessly remembering little things from back on that lonely hillside near Xinmei’s farm. I was his; he was mine, she caught herself thinking, fiercely, like a raptor bird claiming its prey. She knew she would never forget that night, she had always known it, but even she was taken by surprise by the strength of that memory, carried in her mind, her heart, her very skin that prickled as a random brush of another body against hers there in the crowd became reinterpreted as the remembered caress of Iloh’s fingers. She had to wrap her arms around herself, suddenly clutching at her shoulders with her hands, to stop herself from trembling.

  There were supposed to be fireworks that night, but the day that Iloh had chosen for the occasion had dawned hot and sultry and before it was half over big thunderheads had gathered in from the north. Iloh’s speech, the proclamation of the Republic, was delivered to the accompaniment of streaks of lightning and the ominous rumbling of thunder. The storm broke well before things had been concluded, and rain sluiced down onto the city as if poured down from the heavens in bucketfuls. It took only a moment for everyone to be drenched, wet hair plastered over people’s faces, guttering lanterns succumbing to the downpour—but even the prospect of a delay in the promised fireworks, even the deluge drowning the city streets, the streams of dirty water running down Linh-an’s thronged, dusty streets, none of it could dampen the fire of enthusiasm that glowed in the city on that day. People were celebrating. It was probably true that many of them were not clear as to exactly what, but at this point nobody cared. The next day they would have to deal with everything again, all the problems, all the niggling bureaucracies of a brand-new state, all the guards on the gates, all the wreckage of a long and bitter war that still had to be cleared up; things would still cost too much in the markets and there would still be bad news in the newspapers, people would still die and be born, all the normal workaday everyday world would return. But for now, at this moment, they had a new star in their heaven, and even if the people in those crowded streets did not know where it would lead them in the end they were happy just to have something to follow.

  Amais stood in the midst of this mass of surging emotion, in the rain, at once utterly a part of it all and completely isolated from everything. She watched it all, watched the people dance and sing and shout “Xiqanin!” until their throats were raw. She stayed as the crowds began to thin, as though in a trance, after Iloh had left, after the excitement began to dissolve in the rain and people began to drift off and away. She only came back to herself with a start at a small but insistent tug on her sleeve, and turned to blink owlishly at a young girl at her side for a moment before realising it was her sister.

  “Come home,” Aylun said. “Come on home. They’re all gone. Amais… are you crying?”

  “It’s the rain,” Amais lied, smearing at her wet face with the back of an equally wet hand, doing very little good.

  “I missed you,” Aylun said unexpectedly, and the brightness in her own eyes was quite definitely not the rain. “I missed you so much…”

  Aylun was ten years old. Later, much later, Amais would remember this moment, standing with her arms around her sister in the rain, staring over Aylun’s head at the empty podium where Iloh had been not so long before, waving at the crowds. Aylun had still, at that moment, been a child—inasmuch as either of them, with Vien as their mother, had ever been allowed to be children. But they were all about to be swept up into a time and place, a crisis, with everything they knew about to tear itself apart and remake itself in a new image. In such a moment, when a world was young and newborn, as this rain-washed evening was, nobody in it would be allowed to remain a child for long.

  Five

  The day after the annunciation of Iloh’s Republic, Amais, driven by an odd premonition of doom, started keeping a journal again—one in which she wrote every day, much as Tai had done. This time, unlike the previous attempt she had made which had not lasted and had morphed into her fictional worlds, she stuck to it—she felt as though this was the only real way to steer a straight cours
e through the chaos of the young republic’s growing pains.

  There were many things she had wanted to do once she was back in the city—go to the Temple and talk to Jinlien, find Yingchi as she had promised that she would do and write back to Youmei; go in search of the House of the Silver Moon and the secrets of jin-shei that it held. But Iloh had big ideas and even bigger dreams, and it seemed that he could not wait for them to ripen in their own time. The edicts from the top came thick and fast, and Syai struggled to keep up with the changes that were mandated. Amais found herself just another cog in that wheel.

  Baba Sung had talked about land reform, but had lacked the power and the means to ever push them through in the manner that he might have wanted; Shenxiao had fudged the issue completely because he knew that his own support depended on the moneyed classes who would have taken it exceedingly amiss if their land had been summarily confiscated and redistributed to the poor peasants who had hitherto toiled on the landlords’ fields. Iloh had no such compunctions. He came from the land; although his own family had been reasonably well off by the standards of the countryside, he had seen enough of the way things really were to take on the idea of land redistribution head first. It had been there, from among the poor and the dispossessed of the hinterlands, that his support had come from—and he had a debt to pay. There were those who grumbled—the ones who would have to foot the bill for Iloh’s ideas, but Iloh proved to be remarkably ruthless in dealing with opposition. He demanded honesty, and then he turned around and removed the people whose honesty spoke against him. Those who did side with him he rewarded with power, and they repaid him with utter loyalty. The result of this was the countryside seethed with reform and fundamental transformation, with the gift of land being offered at the cost of an ideological conversion. Huge tracts of land were parceled out to individual peasants to work, but then these were reorganized further—first into small cooperatives of only a few households at a time and with families still occupying their own homes, and then larger communes, with private land ownership to all intents and purposes abolished and land and tools being pooled and jointly owned by dozens of families, hundreds of people.