The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “You’ve read the Golden Words?”

  “And so has every one of my girls,” Xuelian said. “It would not do to be caught out not knowing them. But where was it that he said that people would either bow or recoil?”

  “Your hearing is better than you think,” Amais said, unable to stop herself.

  Xuelian’s mouth quirked.

  “He knows exactly what he is,” Amais said, with a touch of passion she wasn’t even aware of coloring her words. She herself had questioned whether this directive had come from Iloh, but that was in the secret places of her journal, and out here, in the real world, she could not help rousing herself in his defense if someone else uttered the exact same sentiments. “He has always believed in what he knew to be true. He has never needed anyone’s praise or approbation to do what he believed was right. Look how far he has come…”

  “He really did get inside you, didn’t he?” Xuelian said, looking at her pupil with sudden interest.

  Amais dropped her gaze, bringing up both hands, with fingers that had gone icy, to cover and cool the hot blush that had leapt to her cheeks. “Oh, Cahan,” she whispered despairingly. “Is it that obvious?”

  “I did not mean it in that sense,” Xuelian said slowly, “but now it is. Some adore him, some hate him… and then there’s one who loves him.” She reached out and tipped Amais’s chin back with one imperious hand so that Amais had to look at her, through eyes swimming in tears. “I’ve been doing all the talking,” Xuelian said, “perhaps too much talking. The best education always goes both ways, with the teacher always learning from the pupil—we both know how I came to be in the place that I am, but you will have to tell me just how a girl like you could have stumbled into being Shou’min Iloh’s lover.”

  Seven

  There were just voices, in the beginning—voices in the darkness, familiar voices both, raised in argument.

  “But speaking out is what you asked them to do,” said the first voice, and it was Tang, with his unmistakable crisp clipped tones. “It is your republic, you said.”

  “I did,” said the second voice, and it was Iloh’s—not the tinny, almost artificial voice familiar to thousands as transmitted through the microphones on the podium in the Emperor Square or broadcast through cheap radios, but the real voice, that rich, full, loamy dark voice that Amais had first heard in the ancestral burial ground near dead Xinmei’s house. “I asked for help, Tang, I asked for opinions, for visions of a way forward. Not an outcry in favor of returning to all those Imperial iniquities that we have done away with! Not a concerted front against every idea we’ve ever put forward!”

  “You put forward,” Tang said, and the darkness was dissipating a little—he was visible, in his stark blue-gray uniform, a slight frown on his face. “Most everything we’ve done has been your vision—there are the Golden Words out there, you can read the story of the Republic in them. Iloh… you asked them to tell you what they thought.”

  “That is not what I had in mind,” Iloh said, waving a thick sheaf of papers in Tang’s face. “I said constructive opinion, I wanted input on building up, not just cavils and complaints and ideas on how to tear down what we’ve achieved and go back to things that most people who propose them haven’t an inkling of what they would mean to society.”

  “Perhaps you’ve been too harsh with them,” Tang said. “From the day you declared the Republic to now, they’ve had to live very different lives than those they have known before.”

  “Baba Sung proposed most of these ideas before I did,” Iloh said stubbornly. “The only difference is that I’ve actually worked to make them a reality.”

  “Still,” Tang said, “your primary directive is serve the people. You, yourself, said that every kind of service is noble. When they ask you for certain things and you refuse to even consider them, you are not living up to your own words, Iloh.”

  “Do you agree with all those people?” Iloh said.

  “Not all of them,” Tang said, and his voice was careful. “But some of them…”

  “No, you’re right,” Iloh said. “It’s been useful, in some ways.”

  “That’s something, at least,” Tang said.

  “I know who is against me now,” Iloh said, and his voice was low and dangerous, almost fey. “I know who I have to deal with to make sure that the edifice of the Republic is not undermined even as it is being built. I have already made plans—people need to be educated.”

  “Iloh…” Tang had a hand out, palm open towards Iloh, as though he was trying to ward off a premonition.

  “Here,” Iloh said, snatching another file off the desk beside him and thrusting it at Tang, “This is what we are going to do…”

  But the voices were fading. A glimpse of faces, one determined, one inscrutable but with a hint of appalled astonishment, and then the veil of darkness came down again, and it was all gone.

  And Amais woke with a start, alone in her room, with her heart beating very fast, the dream still clinging to her inner eyelids as though it had been painted there, the voices still echoing in her ears.

  She had not always been blessed with the facility to remember her dreams, but ever since the journey from Elaas to Syai, the endless days and nights on the ship upon the open ocean, she could recall some, the important ones, when she woke. It had become almost a problem-solving device for her over the years, one she had grown to rely on—because the remembered dreams often held solutions to current problems and impasses in her life, couched in the usual exaggerated and sometimes odd dream-metaphor, something she had had to work at learning how to interpret.

  Some of the dreams had been vivid but unexplained and possibly unexplainable—visions about things that were yet to come in her life, perhaps, preparing her for something, showing her the way. But she had never yet had the kind of dream from which she had just woken, something so real and so clear, so much as though she had been there, physically present, rather than asleep in a bed across the city from where that conversation might have been taking place. But she had absolutely no doubt that she had somehow “heard” something that had really been said. It was as though that connection she had had with Iloh from the very beginning had suddenly been sharpened to something new and keen-edged, the kind of blade that sliced through the fabric of space and time and made a bridge out of air and darkness between two people so linked.

  Perhaps that had been brought into focus by the simple fact that she had been talking about Iloh with somebody else for perhaps the first time ever since she had met him, trying to come to terms with his presence in her life. She had tried to explain to Xuelian, when the subject had come up—tried, and failed, because she herself was completely unable to rationalize her feelings for Iloh and the way they had been consummated. She constantly found herself surprised that the events of which she told had happened barely a year before. Sometimes it felt like centuries had gone by.

  “You were sixteen years old,” Xuelian had said, “and he was a charismatic and powerful man in the prime of his life. It happens…”

  “I did not know who he was when I first saw him,” Amais said. “And it didn’t matter, not in the least. I first thought he was just a local peasant, doing his chores.”

  “But you found out that he was not,” Xuelian said. “Be honest—would you have gone back that night to meet that peasant, if that was who you still believed him to be?”

  Amais hesitated, searching herself, wanting more than anything to give Xuelian nothing less than the truth. Xuelian noted the pause and—unusually, for the observant woman that she was—misinterpreted it completely.

  “See?” she said, while Amais was still trying to find the right words. “It mattered—even if only just a little, but it mattered.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” Amais said. “The only moment in which his true identity really made a difference was not the one in which I came to him. It was the one in which I left him.”

  “How so?”

  “Xuelian… this w
as not my fairy tale,” Amais said. “I stumbled into it, and it held me—more of a trap than a dream…”

  “A honeyed one,” Xuelian murmured.

  “However sweet,” Amais said, managing to dredge up a smile. But behind it, her eyelashes glittered with tears as though they had been strung with tiny diamonds. “He was not mine and could not be mine. He was just… mine.”

  “Child,” Xuelian said, “you are making no sense at all.”

  “Did you ever believe that one day you could marry your Emperor?” Amais said softly.

  Xuelian reached up to caress the kingfisher comb in her hair, a motion that was totally instinctive, beyond any conscious intention or control, and when she realized where her hand had strayed she snatched it away as though caught in the act of doing something indecent.

  “No,” she said, too quickly. And then looked down at her silk-clad lap, where both hands now lay with their fingers tightly laced, as though one hand was preventing the other from further betraying motion. “Yes,” she said, after a pause. “There are times… I still do.”

  “But you knew…”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. I knew.” Xuelian lifted her head again and skewered her pupil with a gaze that was at once savage and somehow astonished. “Child, how did you get to be so wise, so young?”

  They had spoken of it many times, after—but it was not until some time later that Amais had mentioned her stay at Iloh’s farm, his concubine ‘stepmother’, and the half-sister who had vanished into the city.

  “When Tang came to get the family, just before Republic Day, he hardly realized that it was going to be only a stranger masquerading as Iloh’s sister with whom he would return to Linh-an,” Amais said. “I promised her mother, you know—I promised her I would find her daughter and send word. And then Tang said that he would take care of that, and things happened, and I never did anything—but perhaps you would know… Youmei said her letters came from the city but with no return address, and I thought…”

  “You thought that she might be here, on the Street,” Xuelian said. “Not impossible, but I doubt that anyone knows her real identity if she is Iloh’s sister. There would be few houses brave enough to take that on.”

  “She might not have said anything,” Amais said.

  “What was the name?”

  “Yingchi.”

  Xuelian blinked, and then inclined her head in a quizzical manner, like some bright-hued bird of paradise. “Oh, my,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I thought she might have changed her name, at least,” Xuelian said. “But I do have a girl here… how old did you say she would be?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think in her early twenties. Something like that. Iloh was thirteen or so when she was born.”

  “Oh, my,” Xuelian said again. She reached out with one glittering hand and rang a small silver bell that had been left within her reach on a side table lacquered in bright scarlet. A girl dressed in saffron-colored silk popped her head around the door.

  “Xuelian-lama?”

  “Is Qiying with anybody right now?” Xuelian asked, and Amais sat up as though she’d been stung. “No…? Then bring her to me.”

  “Qiying?” Amais queried softly.

  “It’s possible,” Xuelian said. “It’s a direct inversion. She might just have thought that was enough. We shall soon see.”

  “You mean,” Amais said, almost stuttering in disbelief, “that… all the time… right here…?”

  Xuelian turned back to Amais, and actually laughed out loud.

  “You never asked for her by name,” Xuelian said. “And I certainly had no reason to think anything of it, under the circumstances—she certainly never said anything, not a word. She was a country girl from a farming family—that much I knew. But when you come to this place what you were ceases to matter very much. If you want to shroud your past, nobody will ask questions—but should it prove to be dangerous for the house you become a part of, and endangers you or your jin-shei-kwan, your house-sisters, you will be held accountable.” She paused. “And women have been. Make no mistake. We have our own code of honor here on the Street, and our own justice.”

  There was a soft knock on the door, and Xuelian called out permission to enter. A girl with wide bright eyes and two coiled braids of long, lustrous black hair pinned so that they framed her face slipped into the room.

  “You called for me, Xuelian-lama?” said Iloh’s sister.

  “Why did you not tell me who you were, Yingchi?” Xuelian said calmly, without preamble.

  Yingchi flinched as though she had been struck, and then dropped her eyes to where the toes of her embroidered slippers peeped out from under the hem of her silk gown. “Xuelian-lama, there are times I myself do not know who I am,” she said.

  “But you do know who your family is,” Xuelian said. “That might not have mattered, had you been no more than the country girl you said you were when you came here. But you must know that knowing what I know now changes everything.”

  Both Amais and Yingchi looked at Xuelian in pure consternation—the one because she had hardly wanted to be the one who would be responsible for turning Iloh’s sister out into the streets, and the other because women plying this particular trade as independents, with no House behind them to protect them should things turn ugly, usually led short and brutal lives.

  Xuelian noticed both looks, and understood perfectly where both were coming from. She smiled, motioned for Yingchi, standing frozen by the door, to come inside.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I did not know until now, and nobody else outside this room knows—and as far as I am concerned nobody needs to know. I could have wished that you’d thought to change your name, Yingchi-mai, if only to protect the rest of us. I do wonder, though—now that he is here, and that he is powerful, why did you make no attempt at all to contact him?”

  “He does not know me, or anything about me,” Yingchi said, moving as though her legs were made of glass and then collapsing on a seat very suddenly, as though the glass had turned to jelly. “And… and he scares me, Xuelian-lama. I did not know if he would even see me, and if he did what he would do to me. What I am doing…” She ground to a mortified halt, glancing up at Xuelian, aware that she was passing judgment not only on her own lifestyle but on that of the woman who controlled her daily bowl of rice, the roof over her head, and such security as could be hoped for in this particular trade.

  “What you are doing might reflect poorly on him?” Xuelian said coolly, finishing the unspoken thought, apparently less than troubled by the concept. “It might, in his mind, at that. Men have such a twisted vision of women—they will come here, and to the other Houses, and they will make no secret of the fact that they enjoy the attention that they will pay good money for, and the accomplishments of all the women in the Street. Did you know that some of the girls I have known could sing better than the professionals in the theaters and the operas, that some of them were better poets than the ones being published and winning acclaim?… These things mean nothing, they are just taken for granted, that is the thing that the men come here for. They come to find women who can hold sparkling conversations on any subject from raising pigs and growing tea to the latest political situation in the land, to find women who dress exquisitely in bright colors and wear jewels in their hair, to find women who can pour tea like the highest unattainable society lady and then turn into a tigress in bed—and they are quite happy that such women are to be found. But let one of their own try to step from their world into this one—and we are all monsters, every one of the women they come here to worship. The Houses suddenly exist for no other purpose than to lure virtuous young maidens into a life of sin and iniquity.” She laughed, and the laugh was short and harsh, a sardonic comment rather than mirth. “I am not entirely displeased that you kept this a secret, child. Let it stay one. Amais, you had a message…?”

  “I spent a winter in your mother’s house,” Amais said, unable to take her ey
es off Yingchi’s face, looking for Iloh’s features in her face, seeking his voice in her inflections. “I promised her… I would find you.”

  “My mother…? You saw my mother…? How is she?”

  “She was well, when I left her, but she was tired and somehow… somehow defeated by it all, despite being dignified and brave. Your father… is not well.”

  “I know of my father’s… illness,” Yingchi said, with a trace of sarcasm so faint that Amais almost missed it.

  “Your mother waits for your letters,” Amais said. “It would be a kindness to let her write back to you.”

  “I cannot,” Yingchi said, looking up—and there it was, that echo of Iloh that Amais had been searching for, the steely resolve in her eyes. It was mixed with a lot of pain, but it was unshakeable. “You write to her. Tell her I love her. Tell her you found me, and I am doing fine. She is another who does not need to know exactly where I am.”