The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  The child reached out and closed Amais’s restless fingers around the burl of wood that she was turning over in her palm like a worry bead. “There is more than one kind,” she said, “ of coming of age. There is more than one Xat-Wau in the lives of some people. You might need… a bead to mark the passage.”

  “But even back in the old days there were people who made these things,” Amais said. “I cannot do this by myself! If it is that important…”

  “Anything important it is best to do with your own hand,” the little girl said. And then frowned delicately, reaching for the wood bead. “But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you need to learn how to make it… from the beginning. From small seeds… do big things grow.”

  She rubbed the piece of wood between her small palms, and dropped it to the ground at her feet. It sank into the soil, and the child smoothed the surface of the earth after it with the toe of her shoe, leaving no trace of its passage.

  Amais looked up, confused. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Watch and wait,” came the reply. The voice was disembodied and drifting; there was mist all around, except for the place where the wood had been dropped. On that spot, a white light shone as if from heaven—and even as Amais gazed a small fragile stem broke the ground and raised two pale green leaves towards the sky. The plantlet seemed to sigh, and shudder, and then it burst forth, growing, shooting out of the ground, its girth increasing, its skin growing from soft green to smooth young bark and then the gnarled carapace of a mature tree. Branches flung out from the tree trunk, separated into smaller boughs, twigs, leaf whorls. Acorn-like seeds budded, ripened, fell like bounty—and where each fell another tree sprang, like the first, a grove, a small wood, a forest. Shadows spread on the ground. Wind began to whisper in the crowns of trees.

  “What am I meant to do now?” Amais whispered, alone under the dim eaves of the murmuring trees, lost in the pathless wilderness.

  “Follow,” the voice that guided her said, and it sounded like it came from every one of the trees, a woody whisper laced with susurrations of wind-blown leaves. “Find. Make a bead to mark your passage.”

  “But which way do I go…?”

  “The way your heart takes you,” the voice whispered, and Amais realized that she had said the words out loud too, answering her own question.

  “The way your heart takes you,” she repeated, closing her eyes.

  And then took a step, and vanished into the shadows of the wood.

  The Golden Rising

  “Where there is debt, someone owes it and someone is owed, in turn. And there is always a debt between the future and the past.”

  The Annals of the Golden Rising

  One

  Amais did not go home on her first night back in the city. She had cried herself to sleep, her head pillowed on Xuelian’s hospitable lap, and had then been removed to a comfortable bed—Xuelian’s own, seeing as no other in that house could be trusted to leave its occupant unmolested for the duration of the night. Xuelian had offered what she could in those first few anguished hours, trying to lead Amais through the thorny thickets of love and all that it meant in the real world—but in the cold clear light of the morning, after all that could be said had been said, Xuelian had offered practical advice about things that needed to be done once the talking was over.

  “You have to think about it, Amais-ban,” Xuelian said to Amais, sitting on the edge of the bed beside the younger woman, smoothing back the sleep-tangled hair with tender fingers, calling her by the name a mother might use with her child. “For all things, there are consequences. You have lain with a man, and if what you told me last night was right, you were in the right phase of your cycles. Once is all it takes—and you have to think about the possibility of pregnancy. One of our kind, a very long time ago, wrote a book that became known as The Courtesan’s Journal, and it has been copied by hand over generations, passed down from hand to hand, until all of us know it by heart…”

  “The first time…” Amais began, hoisting herself up on one elbow in bed, her hair falling all around her like a black silk veil. Xuelian smoothed it back again.

  “The first time,” she said, “you were lucky. Think about what might have happened to you if you had walked away carrying his child then.”

  “I did think about it,” Amais said reluctantly. “In the very beginning, I thought about it—but then the soldiers… and the constant running… and the rain…”

  “Well,” Xuelian said soothingly, “at least you have none of those problems now. You’re here. You’re home. You’re safe. But the situation is not much different, in its fundamentals. Amais, you are alone. Your mother is gone, your sister is far too young, and even if that wasn’t the case she is all but lost to you as a support of any kind—even if you told her who the father of your unborn child was, and perhaps especially not then. You cannot count on your stepfather for much assistance. You know that my House will be here for you if you need us—but you may not want to choose this life.”

  Amais roused as if to speak, but Xuelian raised a hand to forestall her. “No, I talk, you listen. I know very well that it is not the kind of life that many women would voluntarily choose to embrace. It has its pleasures but it also has plenty of drawbacks, and for someone like you…” She shook her head slightly. “You have the looks, but that means very little—you might be sought after… but you have no idea how to protect that inner core of yourself. Look at you now, after one… You would give too much away with every encounter, and die a little every time.”

  “But you…”

  “You and I are very different,” Xuelian said. “And besides, I did not set out on my life’s journey in the House of the Silver Moon. I traveled a long road before I got here. I learned survival along the way, and sometimes the price of that knowledge was very high.”

  “Xuelian…” Amais said, strangely moved by this odd confession. But once again Xuelian stopped her, laying her fingers on Amais’s mouth.

  “Hush,” she said. “It is this way. That old courtesan’s journal tells us that it is only in the arms of love that you will find the things to remember the things you have to remember, the strength to abandon the things you must forget, and the wisdom to tell these things apart. But sometimes, like I told you, love is not enough—and you have to think about the rest of your life. By yourself.” She thrust a hand into the folds of her robe, into some secret pocket, and came out with a twist of red silk tied with scarlet satin ribbon—that was the way things were in this house, even the smallest things were lush and luxuriant, as though everything was a challenge flung at the austere gray world outside these walls. Xuelian closed one of Amais’s hands around the tiny scarlet package. “Sochuan,” she said softly. “It is bitter herbs. But if you want to be sure… it is here for you.”

  Amais knew very well what sochuan was. She stared bleakly at the red package, fighting to get her thoughts and emotions under control.

  “If I am not with child, then I’ll take it and that will be that,” she whispered. “But if I am…?”

  “There are consequences, of course,” Xuelian said. “As with everything. We will take care of you, here, until it is over. If that is what you choose.”

  Amais looked up, and a single tear had overflowed from her eyes and ran down her cheek as she lifted those brimming eyes to Xuelian’s’ face. “Xuelian,” she whispered, “there is just this part of me that… that understands him. That knows him so well. It’s like sometimes I think what he’s thinking, feel what he is feeling. Like I carry part of his soul within me...”

  Even as she spoke, she knew she uttered far deeper truth than she knew. It should not have been possible to know such things this fast, and even Xuelian would have demurred at Amais’s sudden certainty that she did carry part of Iloh within her, right at that moment… but Xuelian was saying something, and Amais struggled to focus, to listen, to sort the liquid syllables into language and meaning.

  “Who knows why we are move
d to love whom we love?” Xuelian murmured, a wry half-smile on her lips. “There are those who might say that the Gods are wiser than us mortals, and there are those who think that the Gods are just having their sport with us, a celestial game in which our lives are but pawns on a board… “

  Amais turned her head away, closing her eyes against tears.

  “I do not doubt your yuan,” Xuelian said. “I do not doubt at all that what you have with Iloh is strong, and real. But how can you know that you will ever see him again…? What lies between you was strong enough to ensure that you and he were the only people on a cold morning on a country road empty of other souls—but you cannot trust that to happen again, to keep happening. You then have two choices—to throw yourself in its path and make it happen, or to turn your back on it for good. You have not said to me what you want to do—but from what I have gathered, from things that you have not said, you will never claim him openly.”

  “No,” Amais said, her hand clenching around the twist of herbs. “I cannot do that.”

  “Then consider the alternatives,” Xuelian said gently. “Oh, my sweet child. I wish I could give you a softer choice to make…”

  She had left Amais alone with the sochuan. After a long time in which she simply lay back and let herself remember everything, every detail, every texture, scent, sound of Iloh that she had ever been granted, Amais hesitated for a final moment before unwrapping the herbs from the scarlet silk and stirring them into a cup of green tea that had been left beside the bed.

  It had been Yingchi who sat with her, after, when the herb started to take effect, when the pain came for her—for it proved that she had indeed been carrying Iloh’s child. Yingchi nursed the woman who had been her brother’s lover, changing sheets soaked in blood and perspiration, laying cloths soaked in cool water over Amais’s brow and holding her hand when the pain twisted her body and the regrets came to haunt her in between breaths drawn harshly through dry and cracked lips—I was wrong… what if I was wrong?… ah, what have I done…?

  “I know what it’s like,” Yingchi whispered gently, older sister, holding cups of cool water or herbal tea to Amais’s lips, smoothing sweat-plastered hair from her face.

  “You know?” Amais had whispered back, her eyes dulled with both agony and anguish. “How could you know?”

  “We have all been through it,” Yingchi said. “In the Street, we all know the bitter taste of sochuan.”

  Amais recovered, in a few days, enough for Xuelian to permit her to go home.

  “If anything out of the ordinary happens,” she cautioned, “anything at all—come back at once. We have healers who know how to deal with this sort of thing. Be well, my child. Come and see me again. Soon.”

  So Amais had gone from the House of the Silver Moon, taking her ghosts and her yearnings with her. She tried to remain alert, to listen out for word of something, anything, about what Iloh had done after he had left her on that country road. But if she had thought that Iloh had returned to the city, she found out she was wrong.

  Or at least that was what the rumors seemed to imply, and rumors flew thick and fast. Some sources said that Iloh was still in Linh-an, but that his duties as the chairman of the People’s Party were lighter than those he had been expected to shoulder as the leader of Syai’s Government—and that thus he had retreated from the public eye and was in effect ‘retired.’ Others said that he was not in fact in the city, but had retreated to a different base of operations, from which he was planning on returning to take his rightful place in the Government as soon as circumstances allowed. Still others spoke of his being ill, and that his non-appearance in public meant that he was at death’s door, or well on the way to it. Tang turned up several times on the podium in the Emperor’s Square during the winter and the following spring, but always alone, or with other high-ranking cadres. Iloh was simply… not there.

  There weren’t even any photographs, not for months—once the most photographed man in Syai, Iloh seemed to have dropped off the face of the world. Newspapers tried to steer clear of unsubstantiated gossip but they had been printing what they had been told to print by the Party for so long that they essentially said nothing on this subject—because the Party was saying nothing.

  Until the day that Iloh, ready at last, chose to break the silence.

  The first that the public knew of his return to the halls of power was an almost arbitrary photograph, not even on page one of the daily papers, tucked away somewhere quietly on page three or four—Iloh, in swimming trunks and wearing a loose robe that hung open to reveal a lean and muscled torso of a man in his physical prime, standing on the banks of the great river that wound from Linh-an down to the sea harbor of Chirinaa. Near its mouth it was a wide, muddy, dangerous old river—its deep middle channel, fast flowing and full of deadly eddies and whirlpools, was navigable by the big ships that plied their trade between two of Syai’s bigger cities, but nearer to shore it ran to treacherous shifting mud banks and deep sucking quicksands. It was not a playground, not in any sense at all, but Iloh had chosen it to make a point about his state of mind and body—to prove that he was not by any stretch of imagination an old revolutionary who had been turned out to pasture and was no longer useful or powerful or dangerous. He had swum across the river at one of its widest, most treacherous points. The picture in the papers was of him after his swim, standing triumphant on the other side. There had been no further caption on the photograph, other than identifying the time and place where it was taken.

  Amais had her hands full in her daily life, dealing with her mother’s death and the ramifications of the circumstances of it both in the personal and the work spheres. There had been fallout from her unsanctioned departure from her work unit, with stern reprimands and even certain sanctions being issued, leaving her in no doubt that if she stepped out of line again there would be a far harsher reckoning with the ultimate sanction, her expulsion from her work unit, not ruled out. In the city, in those days, that meant unemployment—worse, unemployability. She would starve.

  Wrestling with all of that, she hadn’t been paying much attention to the newspapers. She would have probably missed the photograph altogether had Aylun not come to the house on the day the newspapers carried the picture, triumphantly waving the papers, folded open to the page on which the image appeared, in her sister’s face.

  “Look! Shou’min Iloh swam the river!” Aylun declared, thrusting the newspapers at Amais.

  Amais took the paper reflexively, and then stood for a moment holding it, gazing at the grainy newspaper picture, running a thumb almost without being aware of her actions across the edge of the photo and brushing the image of Iloh’s hand, feeling—just for a moment—warm skin under her hand rather than rough, bad quality newsprint paper on which the broadsheet was printed.

  “Indeed,” she murmured, aware that Aylun required some sort of response.

  Her attention, however, was focused not so much on Iloh himself—the picture was not a particularly good one, and Amais did not need it to conjure up the man’s image in her mind—but on the small knot of people who stood behind and to the right of him, almost out of frame. One of them was a tiny, bird-boned woman with her dark hair pulled starkly back from her face from an uncompromising center parting, whose features were no more than a blur in the photograph. Amais had never met this woman, had never even seen her—but she knew who it was. The actress who had called herself Songbird, of whom she had first heard Iloh speak in the family cemetery on the country hillside years before. His wife.

  Not mine. Not mine…

  Aylun had babbled happily about Shou’min Iloh and his power and his prowess and how he was coming back to the people, any day now, any day… Amais barely listened, except to braid her own thoughts into the possibilities that Aylun raised, weave her own questions into the fabric of unravelling history, and realize that she possessed no answers whatsoever. You did not come to me, Iloh had accused, the last time they had met.

  Now,
her thumb still covering the image of Iloh’s hand, she found herself wondering—and if you come back to Linh-an, do I come to you then? Or is she going to be with you?

  Do I tell you of the child…?

  Aylun left, at last, to go back to her compound and share her excitement and enthusiasm with a more receptive audience. There had been no gushing paean of praise attached to the photograph, it had been left to stand pretty much without any editorial comment at all, but its very existence, and what it signified, spoke for itself. Syai responded by a renewed surge of adoration for its Shou’min Iloh. All Tang’s initiatives and reforms were suddenly rendered irrelevant and ridiculous. He was not, could not be, Shou’min Iloh. And Iloh now drove that point home, by returning to Linh-an in a very public fashion and calling for a People’s Party Congress.

  The results of that meeting were all over the city in a matter of days. A document of five points, a revolutionary manifesto, a clear signpost to the road ahead.

  1. It is necessary to clear away the old before the new can be achieved. The outlook of the whole society must be changed—education, art, literature, anything that does not correspond to our new order. Let the winds of change blow, let it clear away the cobwebs of old ideas, old culture, old customs and habits! Let not old and outdated ideas in philosophy, history or political science hold sway in your hearts and minds. Reactionary views and those who hold them should be strongly criticized!