The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  Amais stared at the comb with fascination; it was as though she had been offered something from Tai’s time. The Empire, which this woman had known, had lived in, had been a part of, had been so comprehensively erased by the Republic that Amais had almost forgotten that it had still existed—just the same as in Tai’s day—within living memory.

  “The reason,” she began awkwardly, “why I wanted to see you…”

  “She wrote of that, too,” Xuelian said. “She said you were looking for what remained of jin-ashu and jin-shei, the women’s mysteries. Sad, isn’t it—to find them only here, at last…” She paused, staring at Amais for a long moment. “But…yes. Yes.” It was as though she were talking to herself, having asked some esoteric question and had then provided an answer she found more than acceptable. “You have a foreigner’s face and a strange way of speaking,” she said, addressing Amais again, “but you have a Syai soul. I can see it in your eyes, strange as they are to me. You will do.”

  “I will do for what?”

  “I will teach you,” Xuelian said. “I will give you what I know. What you do with it, after, if there is an after…” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Sometimes I wonder if the world hasn’t already ended, and I just haven’t stopped to notice it yet,” she said, another conversational aside aimed at herself rather than her guest. “Will you take tea?”

  For a long moment Amais hesitated—if this should leak out, if it was known that she had come here, if Vien’s co-workers spied on how her children spent their time, it might go even harder with the family than it already had—this was a blatant recidivism, backsliding into a time and place as Imperial as it was still possible to be. But there was, in the end, no choice.

  “Yes, thank you. I will.”

  Xuelian might have been reading her mind, because the smile she returned to that acceptance was a secretive, knowing one.

  “Yes,” she murmured, “you are already here, and the guilt is applied by association… but don’t be afraid. You’re probably far safer if they believe in your guilt without question. If I have learned anything in my day, it is that often only the innocent are punished.”

  Six

  Xuelian had said that she would teach Amais, but it had been an odd comment, and the education, if it could be called that, was even stranger. There were no prearranged meetings; Amais would simply turn up at the House of the Silver Moon at random times, whenever life released her for a few spare hours, and Xuelian would be there, as though she had been expecting the visit.

  Xuelian, too, kept journals—and there were many of them, years of them, decades of them. Sometimes she brought out a double handful at a time, looking for specific things, and she and her pupil would both pore over the tomes covered in fine jin-ashu calligraphy. Xuelian despised modern implements; Amais owned a second-hand fountain pen, and had even stolen a few moments to type up an entry or two which she would then stick into her own journal (that in hacha-ashu, of course) on the typewriters in the office where her mother worked, but Xuelian had dismissed all that with a wave of one be-ringed hand.

  “Jin-ashu is the language of a slower, more subtle time,” she said. “You have to find the time and the grace to write in it. If you don’t possess sufficient of either, you might as well be a hacha-ashu hack.”

  “Can you actually write hacha-ashu?” Amais asked.

  “Yes,” said Xuelian with faint distaste. “I can read it, too. But I have never read anything in a newspaper that was worth repeating. They use day-old newspaper to wrap fish in. That’s about all it is good for.”

  “I read your letters,” Amais said. “They said a lot more than you wrote.”

  “Jin-ashu will do that,” Xuelian said. “Spend enough time on writing a sentence, as you have to with the women’s language, and it grows depth and perception. You have to think about things, writing in jin-ashu.”

  “But there were times you did not write anything,” Amais said.

  “Who said I didn’t write anything?” Xuelian said. “I just didn’t write it back home. They would never have understood. Not the Shiqai years. But I wrote—oh, I wrote. It’s all there.” She caressed one of her journals as if it were a pet.

  And that was how it went. They would start talking about the language and the women who understood it, and it would unwind like a ball of yarn, and Amais would be handed the chronicles of Syai’s history as seen through the eyes of one who had lived it and felt it leave scars on her own skin.

  Xuelian had been a child when she had been packed up and delivered to the Imperial palace as a substitute for her wayward sister. More of a child that Xinmei would have been—Xinmei, who had been carefully brought up to this, reared with the idea planted in her mind from very early on, educated and schooled in what it would mean in both the physical and the psychological sense. Xuelian had been allowed to grow up innocent, or as innocent as any girl in that family had any right to be. Perhaps that was partly why the first thing she did when she first looked on the face of the man she came to think of as “her” Emperor was to wholly and completely fall in love with him.

  It would have been hard for any man to resist the kind of open adoration that Xuelian brought to his life, and the Sun Emperor was even more susceptible to that than most—he was not a strong personality, and he had always been aware that he had come to Syai’s throne in the time-honored way, through his Empress, without whom he would have been nothing. So his relationship with his status as Emperor was ambivalent —he knew himself to have power, and enjoyed using it, but he was also a lonely and insecure man. His royal-born wife might once have chosen him from a clutch of suitors but she had turned, over the years, into a cold and glittering thing who resented the weakness she sensed in her husband and despised him for it.

  The Sun Emperor, the most powerful man in Syai, had wept on the night Xuelian had first come to him. She was a concubine; she belonged to him, and in a traditional relationship he would have reached out, taken what was his, and never even thought about the consequences. But it was hard to keep up that sense of Imperial entitlement when the thing being taken was offering itself with the kind of open innocence which Xuelian brought to him. The romance that suddenly polluted what Xuelian’s family had thought of as a simple business arrangement might have scuttled the whole thing there and then—but in a strange and twisted way it had wound up strengthening the relationship the family had been hoping for and not weakening it. The Emperor had become attached to his child-concubine—would tell her things he would tell nobody else, not even the Empress; Xuelian wrote of her pillow talks to her family, dutifully. And all worked well for three wonderful years.

  But then Baba Sung had happened. And the dream of Republic was born —and was then smothered in its cradle by the treacherous warlord Shiqai.

  “He gave me this on our first night together, my Emperor,” Xuelian told Amais, fingering the kingfisher comb that she always wore in her hair. “I have never been without it, not since he gave it to me, not even when Shiqai came for me and I lost everything else.”

  “You never wrote home about him,” Amais said. “Not really. There was very little about Shiqai.”

  “What was there to write?” Xuelian said pragmatically. “That he was crude, and lecherous, and did not know or want to know the first thing about making anything easy or enjoyable for a woman? I was still barely more than a child when the Empress traded me to Shiqai in exchange for the Imperial family’s life and liberty—I was the price of my Emperor’s survival, and for that alone I would have gone willingly enough but he never even knew about it—it was her, all her, and I never even said goodbye. All I had of him was the comb, and even that I barely managed to smuggle out with me when they came to take me.”

  “Did you ever see him again? The Emperor?” Amais asked.

  Xuelian sat staring at her folded hands for a long silent moment. “No,” she said. “I never saw him again. But I saw her, the serpent Empress… But we’ll get to that. Befo
re anything else happened, there were the Shiqai years. And the only value I had to him, other than the fact that I was a body on which he could slake his lusts, was that I had been an Emperor’s woman—and being an Emperor was all that he ever wanted.”

  “But he was just a soldier,” Amais said. “Nobody high-born.”

  “High-born enough,” Xuelian said. “He was a general in the Imperial army, and then he abandoned that and became a warlord in his own right in those lawless years before Baba Sung came.”

  “And Baba Sung trusted him?”

  “Baba Sung had a dream,” Xuelian said softly. “And he took what tools offered themselves—and when Shiqai came, all Baba Sung saw was a useful tool. But he never asked the price before he took what he thought had been offered. Baba Sung was a dreamer of great dreams, but such a political innocent…”

  “Perhaps it was to him that you should have gone,” Amais said.

  Xuelian gave her a sharp look. “He would never have had me,” she said. “He was such a pure-minded monk when it came to things like this. And besides… this was the man who destroyed my Emperor, in the end.”

  “But I thought Shiqai did that,” Amais murmured.

  “Only as a part of Baba Sung’s plans—it was Shiqai who brokered the Sun Emperor’s abdication for Baba Sung, because he had the Emperor’s ear, because he could. And then he demanded as his reward—and here was the price that Baba Sung had never asked to know—that Baba Sung make him President of the new Republic. And once that was done, Shiqai dismissed the Council that Baba Sung had brought together and manufactured a petition which asked him to become Emperor.”

  Amais blinked. “But you just said …?”

  “Oh, Shiqai believed in Empire,” Xuelian said. “It was just that he saw a different Emperor on the throne. Himself.”

  “Baba Sung couldn’t stop him?” Amais said softly. “But he was this great man, they called him the father of the nation—and he could not make Shiqai stop?”

  Xuelian bared her teeth in what was only barely a smile. “Shiqai did refuse politely, when they first came to ask him. And the reasons he gave then were all that Baba Sung might have wished. So Baba Sung said nothing, until it was too late. But that was all part of the game—one had to refuse something three times, even when one wanted it, in order to be able to accept graciously in the end. In old Syai it would not do show one’s delight at an offered gift. That was considered unseemly.”

  “But Shiqai did accept,” Amais said.

  “Oh yes,” Xuelian said, “naturally. And then, as though the Gods themselves had had enough of his treachery, he simply… died.”

  “How?”

  “Only Cahan knows. Some say it was an overdose of ambition or hubris. I don’t know that I would disagree with that. But he had come to my bed that night, and had taken what he wanted, and had then rolled over and gone to sleep, as he always did. I didn’t realize that he was dead until morning, when I tried to get out of bed without waking him… and realized that he would never wake again. I actually spared a moment to feel happy—before I realized what it would mean for me.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I was wrong, of course,” Xuelian said. “But that, you know. That I wrote about.”

  “Shenxiao?”

  “That… was unexpected,” Xuelian said. “I never thought that he… but then, that’s more than enough for now. Don’t you have to be somewhere…?”

  “It’s another rally,” Amais said. “The podium is back up on Emperor’s Square. There’s to be an announcement, and everyone is to come.”

  “Ah,” Xuelian said dryly. “Everyone.”

  Amais hid a quick smile. “Almost everyone. I will come and tell you what is happening, after.”

  “Another parade, eh. Take my advice—bring an umbrella,” Xuelian said.

  “An umbrella?” Amais echoed, startled.

  “Every time,” Xuelian said, “that Iloh has appeared to the people, it has rained. Do you remember Republic Day?”

  “Oh yes,” Amais said softly, dropping her eyes.

  “Eh. Well. You know what I mean then. It rained when he first came into Linh-an, and it has rained every time he has shown himself to the people since then. And I’m sure I know why, too.”

  “Why?” Amais asked, diverted despite herself, even with the wraith of Iloh invoked in her presence.

  Xuelian waved her hand. “It is of no matter,” she said. “Just a story. But it’s a very tempting explanation.”

  “Tell me!” Amais said. “You said you were going to teach me.”

  “Not this,” Xuelian said. “It’s just an old wives’ tale.”

  “But I’ll be an old wife one day,” Amais said. “I might need to know. So tell me.”

  “Oh, if you insist—it was more than two hundred years ago, back when the Phoenix Emperor was on the throne. His children were on the river, and he was watching, from a pavilion on the shore, as they sailed their boat—and then a storm came up. He saw the boat capsize, and he saw the water demons rise up out of the water, reaching for his children—and he was a new Emperor, of a new dynasty, and he saw his future vanishing before his eyes. So he fell to his knees and he prayed to the water demons, and he made a bargain with them—if they let his children live and his dynasty continue, then in another quarter of a millennium they could come out into the bodies of men and become rulers of the land in their own right. And so they did.”

  “They let the children live?”

  “The storm died,” Xuelian shrugged. “Or so the tale tells. And here we are, those two hundred and fifty years later, and it rains every time Iloh sets foot out in the Emperor’s Square. What else am I supposed to think?”

  “Iloh is not…” Amais began passionately.

  Xuelian, having paused to give her story dramatic impact, spoke at the same instant: “But we will speak of Iloh…”

  They both paused.

  “I’ll be late,” Amais said. “I am to meet my family before we go to the square.”

  “So, go,’ Xuelian said. “I will see you again, after.”

  There was no great downpour as there had been on Republic Day, but it drizzled steadily as Iloh spoke from the podium at the gathering. He had a microphone, and his voice was amplified across the square, sounding thin and tinny as it was carried across the heads of the crowd.

  “The time has come for you to speak,” Iloh was saying. “Let a thousand thousand flowers of thought bloom in the land. Look at the Republic—it is your republic—is it doing the things that you wanted to see it do? Speak out, and let us all know. We will be listening.”

  The words were high-flying, and brave. But Amais had kept her journals too well, and in them she had noted what had happened when people had spoken out against Iloh in the past. When she wrote of the latest gathering in her journal on the night she came home from it, she had flipped back to an old notebook and read what she had written before, about the men who had tried to stem land reforms they had thought too harsh.

  I wonder, she wrote, how much of this comes from Tang. Iloh has never needed people in the past to give his truth vindication. And I wish, she added despondently after a short pause, that it had not rained this time. Xuelian and her stories! I cannot seem to get rid of the image of Iloh and Tang drowning children of a long-dead Emperor in river waters that have lost themselves in the deep ocean hundreds of years ago…

  “It will not last,” Xuelian had predicted, when Amais went back with a report of the proceedings. “Or, rather, let us say that it will last precisely as long as it takes for one person too many to say something Iloh does not like. Oh well—if there is anything I’ve learned in my days is that every dog has his day.”

  “That is not fair,” Amais said.

  Xuelian lifted a quizzical eyebrow in her direction. “Nothing,” she said, “is ever fair.”

  “You hate him,” said Amais. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t think I hate anybody,” Xuelian said. “I spent a
ll my hate a long time ago. I am too old now to waste my time on hating, it takes far too much of my energy and my time. But you have to admit, these days there are only two ways to feel about Shou’min Iloh—you either worship him, or you loathe him.”

  “You would have recoiled from me, or bowed to me,” Amais murmured, very softly.

  “What was that?” Xuelian said. “My dear, my hearing isn’t what it used to be. You need to stop muttering into your chin.”

  “It was just… something he said once.”

  “Who did?”

  “Iloh. Shou’min Iloh,” Amais said, laying ironic emphasis on the title.

  “Was that in the Golden Words?” Xuelian said. “I don’t remember it.”