The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  I had come to Linh-an with a family, and I was leaving with an entirely different family, someone else’s kin—but they were mine, now. They were all I had.

  Iloh had remained in the city, of course. But I was not thinking of Iloh, not then. You would think that I would have, there on the farm where he had been born, but I didn’t, not in that first year or so in the country. Not since the Gods had smiled at me and let me live, and let me find a measure of happiness.

  I never went home again, not to the place I had known as home, not to the couple of rooms that I had shared with Aylun and my mother and my stepfather, all of whom were gone from me—Lixao was in the same limbo as Xinqian’s vanished husband but less likely to survive anything harsh or prolonged, Mother was years dead, and Aylun I knew nothing of after she had left me that heartbreaking note on the night I raced out to salvage what could be salvaged from the scourge of the Golden Wind. It was all gone, all the memories that had gathered in that place—both those that were ephemeral and clung like cobwebs under the beds and in unswept corners of rooms, and those more permanent, more damning to me if they had ever been discovered and deciphered, the journals I had kept during the Rising, where I spoke freely of my thoughts and feelings. In the journals, I had never called Iloh by his title; I sometimes wrote harshly of the Rising, and of what had gone before, and the way that Iloh’s dreams were shaping the land and its people. If anyone had wanted to call me counter-revolutionary and hang me for it, the evidence was right there, in those notebooks covered in spidery jin-ashu scrawl.

  I suppose I was lucky that few Golden Wind cadres would have bothered to try and get them read by someone who knew how. They were far too busy in those days chasing down actual flesh-and-blood victims—and they had plenty—to bother chasing down the ghosts whose trail was long cold.

  But my memories did not vanish with those notebooks; if anything, it was as though the loss of one sense sharpened another. I had always been the one who watched, who observed, rather than the one deeply involved with the events that had shaped my days. It had always been a struggle for me, between the real and the ideal; sometimes it was very hard to tell the two apart, and sometimes it was more of a question of seeing the differences very clearly but trying to reconcile them by looking at the subtle and shadowed things of Syai under the clear, bright, uncompromising light of Elaas. It didn’t always work; I knew myself for a flawed recorder, but it had been that very flaw, the slight edge of detachment while in the very crucible of history, that probably made me the kind of witness that history needed.

  I found my memories of those times standing out more and more starkly in my thoughts in the day and my haunted dreams at night. They etched themselves in my face, and hollowed out my cheeks until my cheekbones stood out and my skin stretched tight against my skull. For a while I grew thin and pale, even my courses stopped, and I thought I might be pregnant, but it was just my body reacting to the things that lay buried in my mind.

  It had been Youmei—to whom I had talked freely, of everything except that last photograph I had seen of her daughter in the newspapers and of what that might have meant for her—who gave me the means of surviving this harrowing time.

  “You have to write it all down, let it all out, before it eats you alive,” she said as she sat at my bedside. I had blacked out in the courtyard, and they had brought me back in to revive me on the qang, the same one where I had watched Youmei care for Iloh’s father for so many months when I had first come to the farm. “You’re holding everything inside, and you’re letting it consume you. It’s like a cancer of the spirit, and you have vowed that to a greater thing than yourself. You owe it—you owe your health and well-being to this land. Do what you have to in order to pay that debt.”

  So I started again, from nothing, jotting down the memories and the dreams as they came, and something released inside of me. But it wasn’t a journal that I wrote—it was back to my earliest roots that I went, and what emerged from under my pen was a story once more, fiction in terms of its characters and its actual setting, but purest truth in the events I wrote of and the way in which they affected a nation. The language that flowed from my pen was raw and visceral and although such things don’t often have much to do with poetry that is what this was—a harsh poem, cast as story, a history of our times, a truth of the kind that can best be told cloaked in a layer of story grown into legend growing into myth, like bitter herbs drunk in a tea sweetened with honey. I wrote it in jin-ashu; this was a woman’s story, seen through a woman’s eyes, and it seemed to be the only language it wanted to be told in.

  I did not know, before I started to write it, just how much pain there was to be shared—because the word spread, and people started wandering in, first from the surrounding area and then from further afield, with stories to tell. Some of those found their way into what I was writing; others were simply salt and saffron, seasoning the narrative with the knowledge that they existed and had taken place, without mentioning detail. I could not write much at a sitting because it affected me so powerfully—it was as though I had woken up a thousand voices in my head and they were all clamoring to be heard, and I had only the one voice, the one hand, to let them all through and let them out and let them have their say.

  It was the story of revolution and the storms of war—but that was only the public side of it. Woven into it was the secret that had never been told before, the secret I had come to Syai to find, the legend that I had made myself a part of that night in the Temple—the dream of jin-shei, and of what it meant for the land, and the people of that land.

  It was initially written for me, for my own eyes—but the women who came to see me and talk to me began asking diffidently if they could copy out this scene or that scene and take it home to treasure it. And those hand-copied fragments began to be read far more widely than I realized. People began asking me to come to their homes, their communities, and talk to them about what I was writing. I said no, at first, but the requests did not stop and somehow I found myself the kernel around which something began to form.

  “We should have taught them,” a woman who was a stranger to me said after she listened to me talk to a group in a neighboring village. “We, who know. Oh, but sometimes I find myself yearning for the days that the women held it all—in the old days, an Emperor ruled Syai, but it was a woman who chose him, and it was that woman whom he asked for advice because he knew he ruled by her word. It was the women who knew everything, and were able to tell each other things that the men never knew, and hold the world in the palms of their hands…”

  “But that was legend,” I said carefully, calmly, but my heart was beating very fast as I listened to her. “And it isn’t as if no blood was spilled in the Imperial days.”

  “Blood will always flow,” said the other woman, mother of three children, pragmatic, practical, utterly rooted in Syai and the way its people saw the world. “That we will never be rid of, not completely. People cannot, it seems, live in complete peace—Cahan does not allow it, outside its own gardens. But that ancient blood was spilled in the name of different things. In the women’s country, it would not be the children who would be sent in to do the work of changing the world. Jin-shei would have taken care of it—a sister would ask it of a sister, and there would be influence brought to bear. Even Tang—even Iloh—had mothers. And mothers and their jin-shei-bao would have known, would have understood, would have spread the word in places where you might have thought it could never reach. All of us listen to our mothers, when we are young enough to be molded.”

  Initially it was a community of women I became a part of, a web of communication, a sharing of knowledge and experience. Jin-shei—the kind of the jin-shei vow that I knew of from Tai’s writings and from baya-Dan’s stories—was not quite what was happening here. That had been, in ancient times, more something shared between individuals than this sense of belonging to a group with a set of special responsibilities to one another.

  But I had already chang
ed the nature of everything when I invoked the old oath between myself and my country rather than another woman, and something began to bind us together, a new bedrock, a foundation on which a new society might be built, in time. It was, after all, the women’s country—not the one for which I had naively gone searching when I was a passionate sixteen-year-old, but it was here, after all, and I would have a hand in making it re-emerge from its centuries of shadow and silence.

  So I gave them everything, in that book. I was writing a book of fiction, but that fiction was woven from the truths of my own life, my own terrors and triumphs and secrets and achievements—the way things had been, the way things had really happened.

  I wrote of a poet who had lived more than four hundred years before, whose blood ran in my own veins, who had been jin-shei-bao to an Empress of ancient times. I wrote of my exiled grandmother, waiting for Syai to rise again like a phoenix from its own ashes, living out her days on the far side of the world. I wrote of the mother whose bones I had left lying in a field which had no name. I wrote of my little sister, who wanted nothing more than to serve the people, just like the Golden Words had taught, and ended up taking lives. I wrote of a woman who had loved an Emperor once, who could have stood any amount of physical pain inflicted on her frail old body but whose great and generous heart had been broken by the wanton destruction of the last precious legacy of that love at the hands of brutes who could never understand. I wrote of the friend who died in the wreckage of the Great Temple, protecting the things she loved and believed in, and of the way the Temple bell had tolled for her passing as well as its own.

  I wrote about things that had been secret for centuries.

  There were things I did not write about. Not then. What I had done in the Great Temple on the night of its fall would not let itself be told, not yet. That was for the future.

  All of it had become greater than me, somehow. I wove a tale of my own life, but my as yet nameless account had become part of a hundred personal little stories—and I remembered, once, a long time ago, Iloh telling me that only history could judge him. It seemed that he was quite right, and that I would be the one to write that history.

  In my life I have loved two men, and it was Iloh who had been the poet—but it had been Xuan who named what I was writing. For a long time it was simply nameless—I called it “the thing” when I called it anything at all, Lihong liked to refer to as my “tapestry,” and Youmei, who had begun it all, simply dubbed it “Amais’s antidote.” It was Xuan—who could not read it, to whom sections of it were read out loud by Lihong or, sometimes, late at night, by myself—who finally wrapped his head around what it truly was. It was more than just story, more than even just history—it was an elegy, for a thing that needed to be remembered, that did not want to be remembered.

  “You were named right, after all,” he said to me one night, lying beside me, his head propped on one hand and his eyes full of tears after I had just finished reading a particularly harrowing part of it. “You are the nightingale, singing after night has fallen, singing in the twilight of a tragic day from which even the sun has fled and hid his head. That’s exactly what this is—the song of the nightingale.”

  He wrote that phrase out, the only one in the notebook in which I was writing that was written in firm, bold, masculine hacha-ashu script, on the title page.

  It seemed that this was payment, after all, of that debt I had taken on in the ruins of the Temple, in the rain.

  But it proved to be only a part of that debt. And not, by any means, the greater part of it.

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  I had nearly two years of this respite—and then, one day, quite suddenly and without warning, an old woman turned up at the door of the farm house. At least it seemed to be an old woman, because she moved very slowly and as though she were in great pain. I probably should have recognized her, even so—but perhaps it was more fitting that Youmei did so first, with a gasp, and then a cry, and then, when the visitor lifted her face to us, I too knew her.

  It was Yingchi, come home at last—but this was a woman who looked ten years older than when I had had my final glimpse of her, a gargoyle in a blurry newspaper photograph. She seemed to take just as long—maybe even longer—to remember me, though—it was as though her mind had been plowed over so comprehensively in the last two years that memories had been buried very deep. Too deep. She came just in time to add her own brand of thin poison into the potion that “Song of the Nightingale” was brewing up to be; but more than that, she was a sudden reminder of that other life which I had somehow managed to completely bury out of sight, clinging to this tiny piece of sunlight that I had found in the center of the storm, unwilling to look out where the dark clouds were still gathered all around us. Yingchi was a cold wind from reality, blowing into our sheltered little corner of the world. And she brought more news than we really wanted to hear.

  “They gathered us up like cattle,” she told us later that night, after supper was over, and we all huddled on the qang to listen to her story. “I grasped at that like a straw, you know—at least we would be together, at least there would be a friendly face, perhaps, or a voice you knew, something, something of that other life, something to remind you of who you had been, that once you had thoughts and dreams and memories that were your own… but it didn’t last. They split us all up, after—sent us all over the place, I heard some were sent to the marshes and made to work like slaves at draining them, reclaiming the land—city women, who might have come from farming stock once but who had long forgotten what it was like.”

  “What about you?”

  “I wound up in a mountain camp,” she said. “They made us walk there, a hundred miles, maybe, more—we walked every step of the way, and the pace was a punishing one—and then, at the end of a long day’s march, we had an hour with Shou’min Iloh and his Golden Words before we were allowed to eat anything and collapse for a few hours’ sleep…”

  “Did they know,” I asked her, “who you really were?”

  “What would have been the point?” Yingchi asked.

  “It would have brought her nothing but heartache,” Youmei said, nodding her head. “They would have used her as an example. They would have devoured her.”

  “They told us we would be going to a village,” Yingchi continued, “but there were only caves when we got there, caves and a broken down old storage shed. So we had to start from the beginning. We had almost no tools, but we made everything we owned—our food bowls, our beds, baskets and tiles, dug our own latrines.”

  “But what were you supposed to accomplish there?”

  “We cleared the land,” she said, and lifted her hands for our inspection. They were raw, red, nails broken into the quick and showing no sign of wanting to grow again, grimy with earth that was ground into her pores. “Where there was no soil, we carried it, on our backs. There were two hundred women in the camp, and some had duties in the actual encampment—call it a hundred and fifty of us who were the drudges. We carried soil in buckets and baskets until our shoulders were bleeding and our backs felt broken; it took one hundred and fifty women nearly three weeks to carry enough soil to a barren mountain ridge, and reclaim one sixth of an acre. And down below, they dug spillways and drainage ditches and terraces and made rice paddies.”

  “My poor baby,” Youmei murmured.

  “And then the ridge we had disturbed came down in a mudslide, and covered the spillways, and we had to start again. But we restored the fields in time, that year, for a crop—we planted, and we harvested. In some ways, I have never been more savagely proud of anything I did than of those grains of rice at the end of the season. They were born from me as surely as children might have been…”

  “They let you go?”

  She shook her head. “They quit guarding us. It’s different. Some stayed, even—it’s home, now, after everything… but I wanted to… I needed to come back. It’s been so long… so long…”

  We left them together, mother and daughter
; there was too much there that was for the two of them alone. But, later, when the tears she had brought to shed in her mother’s arms were done, Yingchi sought me out.

  “Xuelian said to me that she would tell you, also, where the treasure of the House of the Silver Moon lies. Did she?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And what it should be used for. I have not touched it—not yet. There had been no means to use it in the manner that she had wished, and… and I’m afraid I grew to like my cocoon too much. I am guilty of that. Will you help me? You know these women, you know where to deliver that silver…”

  “I went back to Linh-an first, to try and find you,” Yingchi said. “But you were long gone by the time I got there. All I could find out was that your sister was dead…”

  The words, so bluntly uttered, were a stab in the heart; I made a small sound of pain. She heard, stopped, stared at me.

  “I am sorry,” she said, her voice very gentle. “I thought you must have already heard. Oh, but I did not mean to come back here meaning to bring pain…”