The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  Loyalty to party and state was emphasized—Iloh’s words, quickly blazoned on everything from big posters hung from every available wall to scrolls pinned to individual lapels, were simply “Serve the people”, and by people he meant everyone. No distinctions were to be made for family, friends, and lovers.

  Amais recognized this decree. It was the dream he had spoken of to her, back under the wangqai tree—the brotherhood between all the people. In Iloh’s vision, everybody owed the same allegiance to everyone else, be it a complete stranger a mother or father. In the communes, families were split into compounds where women and men lived separately in dormitories, children were cared for in communal crèches, and married couples had their time together carefully doled out hour by hour according to how the commune leaders decided the place should be run. Family ties, for so long the basic fabric of society in Syai, began to unravel.

  It may be that one day we will all understand it in the way he means it to be understood, Amais wrote in her journal, her heart torn by what she saw happening around her, what she heard whispered about in dark corners in marketplaces where people thought they would not be overheard, and her loyalty to the memory she clung to of the Iloh with whom she had felt so breathlessly connected that night under the wangqai tree. It may be that we will all believe it. But that day is not yet, and he does not want to know that…

  Iloh had no time for social analysis. Having set in motion the reform of the country, he turned his attention to the cities, and Linh-an, the capital, became the laboratory in which social changes were experimented with and then exported as decrees to the rest of the land. In Iloh’s opinion, individual peasants, left unsupervised, would quickly revert to the old feudal ways of doing things because those established hierarchies were the only way of life they really understood; the city dwellers were fundamentally no different, and required a reeducation from the very bedrock of their existence so that they could be forged into Iloh’s new army who would take his ideas forward. Within the first year of the Republic, Iloh’s thoughts had been gathered together and published in a tiny book, small enough to fit into the pocket of one of those uniforms that everyone now wore. Bound in bright yellow leather; it quickly gained the sobriquet of The Golden Words, and became ubiquitous. These were the words that people were expected to study, to know, to live by.

  They included instructions on how to learn, from one’s own mistakes and from others, how to be a better citizen of the Republic.

  Serve the people without thought to self, the Golden Words instructed. Problems are inevitable, but all problems can be solved if they are properly and correctly understood and analyzed. Failure must not be allowed to exist. If at first you do not succeed, you must apply fresh determination.

  In accordance with this dictum, mornings in many work units were devoted to meetings, which sometimes went on for hours, where individuals would stand up and offer up self-criticism of how they had failed to live up to Iloh’s standards. Silence was no defense, because those who would not criticize themselves quickly became the targets of criticism by others.

  Vien was bewildered by the new system, and rarely came up to the front of her work group to “struggle” with her failings. She could also not understand the need to guard one’s tongue, because chance utterances or gestures that, however innocuous, could be used to illustrate a particular “transgression,” were now pounced on and trotted out as evidence for an individual’s veering away from the line of Iloh’s Thought.

  It fell to Amais to try and deal with the situation. Lixao stayed silent and somehow withdrawn, on this as on most other subjects, and Aylun had sought oblivion in becoming utterly and fanatically devoted to Shou’min Iloh’s word and deed and had in fact turned spy for the state on her own family.

  Vien had never thought to conceal any of her past, and now that came back to haunt her.

  “She has always thought of herself as an aristocrat,” a co-worker accused in one of the struggle sessions. “Better than everyone. Just because her mother had married an Imperial Prince.”

  “An exiled Imperial Prince,” another co-worker chimed in. “She could not even get it right—she’s the product of a marriage between a social climber and someone who had to leave the Empire in order to assert his Imperial stature. What, he couldn’t be royal enough if he had stayed here? He had to go and impress exiles overseas?”

  “But I do my work,” Vien had murmured, not even defensively, in simple confusion—she could not wrap her head around the fact that she was being accused of being born to her own parents, as if she could have had any control over that.

  Family members were encouraged to attend these criticism sessions, as if learning about the sins of their mothers or brothers or sons would teach the other members of the stricken family valuable lessons; frequently such “lessons” landed in fertile ground, and families themselves were brought in as accusers and judges. It was Aylun, little Aylun, barely eleven, who jumped up in one of her mother’s criticism sessions and cried out,

  “I saw her sit on a pile of new-printed pamphlets once!”

  “I was tired,” Vien murmured.

  “And how was this wrong?” one of the leaders of the criticism circle said, turning to Aylun with a smile that Amais, who was also present at that session, felt stab her in the heart.

  “The pamphlets had the picture of Shou’min Iloh on the cover!” Aylun declared passionately.

  The people in the circle gasped and murmured, exchanging glances. There was something here—a crowning sin—it wasn’t just that Vien had been observed actually sitting down right on top of Shou’min Iloh’s face, but that was somehow the thing that proved beyond doubt that she was seditious and disloyal. If she hadn’t been so, well, so Imperial in her attitudes, if she had really been one of the people, it would never have even occurred to her to sit on such a place.

  Amais had her hand at her throat, staring at Aylun in disbelief. Her younger sister’s face was alight with a zealot’s fire, the lips of her fine rosebud mouth, inherited from the very grandmother whose existence was being held against Vien in this circle, parted a little as her breath came in quick excited gasps. She had done her bit for Shou’min Iloh—the upper edge of a well-thumbed copy of the Golden Words showing above the edge of her pocket.

  “The family will leave now, please,” the circle leader said, after a moment. “The unit needs to confer on ximin Vien’s punishment.”

  Aylun stood up and bowed to the circle. “Long live Shou’min Iloh!” she said before turning smartly on her heel and marching out of the room.

  Amais, wordless, half astonished and half terrified, followed her sister. In the corridor, Aylun stood waiting beside the door, her arms at her sides like a little soldier. Her hair, which she had recently cropped herself so that it now swung free just brushing the tops of her shoulders, made her oval face with its creamy ivory skin look harsh and somehow both much older than its years and like that of a very young child, one who had failed utterly to comprehend what she had done.

  “They might send her to a labor camp,” Amais said.

  “If they do that, then that is what is necessary,” said Aylun sturdily.

  “Aylun, don’t you realize that would kill her?”

  Aylun turned glittering obsidian eyes to her sister. “And what would you rather do,” she demanded, “shelter someone who doesn’t care one whit about what Shou’min Iloh is trying to do?”

  “Iloh…” Amais began hotly, and then caught herself as her sister’s eyes widened slightly at the omission of the honorific. Amais allowed herself a moment of bitter reflection—if only Aylun knew just what Iloh had been to Amais—but then corrected herself; there was no point in drawing Aylun’s fire onto her own shortcomings. “Shou’min Iloh is only a man…”

  “He is a man we must all try to be like!” Aylun declared.

  “We cannot all be like him,” Amais said.

  “Those who cannot, make us weaker.”

  “She is you
r mother,” Amais whispered.

  “Shou’min Iloh is my leader,” Aylun said, without a trace of remorse.

  They did nothing to Vien, not that time—she got no more than a sharp censure and a somewhat acerbic instruction to watch where she parked herself when she felt the urge to sit down. But the shadow of it remained over her.

  “We will watch you,” her co-workers said. “You must learn to criticize yourself more. You are not better than the rest of us.”

  Amais watched them, too, her mother and her sister, and saw the distance between them widen as the water would widen between her father’s boat and the shore when he cast off for a day on the ocean. And she had an awful premonition that, like her father’s boat, Aylun would sail away to some strange destination and never come back to her family.

  Amais went back to the Temple in the beginning, often, to talk to Jinlien—but even there the mood had changed, become ominous. It was as though the people in the Temple were always looking over their shoulder these days, wondering which of their companions in the First Circle, or the Second, or even the more exalted Third or Fourth, were there only to keep track of who was at the Temple wasting precious time which could better be spent working for Shou’min Iloh’s dream. Jinlien was distracted in those days, as though fighting some secret battle from whose arena Amais was barred—there were circles within circles in Syai now, and it was very hard to know which ones were safe to speak one’s mind in.

  Jinlien did point out, during one visit, a woman who stood out from the rest by the fact that she did not wear exclusively the dark blue or gray drab that seemed to have been adopted by male and female alike in Linh-an in those days.

  “That’s one you want to talk to, if you still have plans on seeking out the House of the Silver Moon,” Jinlien had said. “The one with the orange scarf around her head. She’s been coming here for years, she’s one of the administrators of the House, I think.”

  “Xuelian?” Amais had said, turning sharply to follow the woman as she passed by with a handful of incense offerings, her head down and her face partially obscured by the veil of the scarf.

  “No, that’s not Xuelian. Xuelian herself only comes on special occasions; come to think of it, she hasn’t really been in for months, maybe over a year...

  “You know her?” Amais had asked, distracted by the chagrined discovery that the answer to that particular question had always been this close to her, and she had never known it.

  Jinlien had laughed. “Not personally, but it is hard not to recognize her when she is here. You will see what I mean if you should find yourself in her presence. But it’s that one you should talk to if you want to speak to Xuelian.”

  Amais had waited for the woman with the orange scarf, later, after she had completed her devotions and had come out into the First Circle again.

  “They tell me,” she said to her, “that I need to speak to you if I wish to come and see Xuelian of the House of the Silver Moon.”

  The woman first looked a little surprised, and then apprising.

  “You have not cut your hair,” she said approvingly, scrutinizing Amais closely. “And you have good skin. And your eyes are magnificent. What are your skills?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Amais said, the eyes that had been called magnificent widening in astonishment.

  The woman looked perplexed. “You want to see Xuelian, no?”

  Amais nodded mutely.

  “You are not looking for work…?” the woman from Xuelian’s tea house said after a small pause.

  Amais actually blushed. “I… no. I am not. I have had greetings to deliver to Xuelian, however, for months now… and I have to admit that I have simply not had the time or the strength to seek her out after I returned to the city from her sister Xinmei’s house.”

  The woman threw Amais a sharp glance. “You know Xinmei?”

  “Only as a guest,” Amais said. “I stayed at her house while I was… on a pilgrimage to another Temple, in the mountains.”

  “Well, there is no time like the present,” the woman said, with a half-smile that hid a lot of things. “Why don’t you come with me? Or, if you’d rather not be seen walking with me, follow me, if you like. The House is on the far end of the Street, the last one on your left. Go to the side door, the plain one; the other one, the red lacquered one that faces the street, is only unlocked after nightfall.”

  There was a time that Amais would have replied that she had nothing against being seen in the company of anyone—but in those early days of Iloh’s Republic caution was not just useful, it was sometimes necessary. So she accepted the alternative and walked a few paces behind the woman with the orange scarf until she turned into the street that Amais had first heard of in what now seemed to be another lifetime. She had not been telling a falsehood when she had said that life had run away with her, that she had not had the opportunity or the occasion to come to this place before, despite her best intentions to do so. All the social graces that had stood in her way before seemed somehow unimportant in this strange and plain new world that had been born of war and struggle. And there had been more at stake, too—it wasn’t just Xuelian, now. There was also Yingchi, whose whereabouts Tang had been supposed to ascertain and then get back to her but who had never done so as the demands of the Republic distracted him from the unessential. It seemed that Tang had not been the only one so distracted.

  Walking down this street, with her head down in an unconscious attempt at the necessity to obscure the features of a woman of good family when driven by need or business into this quarter of the city, Amais found herself aghast at how she could have let things go for so long. The quest for jin-shei, for the women’s country—the quest that had driven her across Syai to seek her answers—had seemed to wither in the past year, under the weight of all the things that had been piled on Amais’s shoulders. Now, here, in the Street of Red Lanterns at last, she felt things stir again, that distant dream that had been hers, a memory of a sacred vow.

  Amais did not really know what she expected Xuelian to be, not even after Jinlien’s comments, but it was certainly not the tiny, regal old woman who finally came out to greet her after she had arrived at the House of the Silver Moon and had been invited to cool her heels in a sumptuously appointed waiting room for the better part of an hour. Her first glimpse of the lady of the House made her instantly understand why Xuelian had not been to the Temple for a year—had not been outside these walls, perhaps, for months. Xuelian would have looked sadly out of place in the drab color and cut of the clothes that passed for acceptable on the city streets these days. She blazed in scarlet silks, her feet wrapped in embroidered slippers of yellow satin, her silver-gray hair dressed in the old-fashioned way, held at the top, as though with a crown, by a rare and fragile-looking fan-shaped comb of blue kingfisher feathers held in a filigree of gold. Her eyes were round and bright, like a bird’s, and her hands, the skin on them no longer young but nonetheless meticulously cared for, glittered with jewels.

  “You have been a long time coming, with greetings from Xinmei,” she said by way of an introduction. “You have not heard much news from the country, then?”

  “No,” Amais said, offering the kind of bow her grandmother had once taught her was the polite way to greet a female senior to herself. “I have been remiss, I know.”

  “Xinmei is dead,” Xuelian said in a tranquil voice. “When they came for the land of our fathers, she asked by what right they claimed it. The mob was not in the mood to offer reasons.”

  The shock was a physical one; Amais’s knees began to buckle.

  “Do sit down,” Xuelian said, indicating a chair, and Amais managed a couple of staggering steps backwards before collapsing into it.

  “I am so sorry,” she gasped. “I had no idea…”

  “As it happens,” Xuelian said, “she wrote to me of you, before she died. You are Amais, are you not? You are exactly as she has described you.”

  “She never,” Amais said, “descri
bed you.”

  “She could not, not the way I look now,” Xuelian said. “I haven’t looked like the way she remembered me for, oh, a very long time.” She reached up to brush the kingfisher comb with the fingers of one hand. “The memory she has of me,” she said softly, “is much closer to what I was when my Emperor gave me this, on the first night that I went to him.”