The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  I heard you talking to your friends, my daughter, and you told them that you were all Syai’s children. And you gave them all that choice, the choice of love—a melding of Iloh’s dream and my own. You named it; you gave it life. Some of your ancestors might have been shocked at the thing you did, but all I could do was stand awed at the simplicity and power of your own vision.

  “Xion-shei,” you said to the boy who was your friend. “You are my heart-brother.”

  Xion-shei…

  I am a woman. Jin-shei has been ours, our secret, for so long—but it is time, time to change. We will always have that bond, it will always be something special between a woman and a woman, but jin-shei is no longer a child. Your words, my daughter, were its Xat Wau ceremony. It comes of age, the ancient vow… and becomes something else. Something grand, glorious, huge. Something new.

  It has always been the same dream, after all—perhaps that is why Iloh and I argued so fiercely over it. Seeing only our own half of it—until now, until you came, our daughter, to make a whole of it, to knit it together… male and female, equal under the arch of heaven. We were both wrong, Iloh, and we were both right.

  The past is long dead—Iloh and his years did far too good a job on that. But his own vision was stillborn, lost in war and fire and fury… except, now, we have this new thing that is the old thing reborn—xion-shei—and it may be what will lead this land into the kind of future that even Iloh could hardly have dreamed of.

  Long ago, the people of this land helped one another. Then they turned on one another, and the killing years began. When those times ended, there was nothing left but fear… nothing, maybe, except that one thing, the oldest thing, the women’s country and its vows.

  It is like Iloh said to me once, so long ago, on the night that you, my daughter, were conceived.

  Nothing is finished. Everything is possible.

  “I have dreamt this place before,” Amais said.

  She stood on the crumbling steps surrounded by dirty water, with ruined buildings of a shattered city around her, the sky full of a vivid glow as though from distant, unseen pyres, dressed in the elegant garb of a vanished court, holding an impossibly fragile silk- paper parasol in one hand and the trusting hand of a small girl in the other.

  She turned to look at the girl, who was gazing at her, in turn, from eyes that were impossibly too old and wise and full of love and pity to belong to a child.

  The child smiled.

  “Yes, you know me. You have always known me. Why else would you have trusted me to lead you on the path laid out for you in your dreams?”

  “Tai,” Amais said, slowly, her voice full of wonder. “You are Tai. You are the beginning of it all.”

  “There is no beginning,,” the child said. “There is no end. It is the same story, only the people within in change shapes and faces. I had a hand in your life in more than one way—I gave you the fire to seek me, because someone had to find me; when you were in danger, I warned you to flee.”

  “The note,” Amais said. “The note telling me they were coming for me. I never knew who sent that.”

  “It does not matter whose hand penned it, it was I that wrote it,” said her companion. “For that, I needed to take no familiar shape. For the rest… for keeping your footsteps on the path…this was the face that you gave me. Tai, the face that you trusted and loved—the face that a guide who wanted to speak to your spirit would wear if she wanted to be heard. But I am more than this…”

  For a moment the child wavered and her image flowed into an ever-changing stream of other faces, other shapes, some old and bent or dressed in garb of ancient times and others wandering in, it seemed, from the unknown future. Amais recognized some of them as they appeared and vanished, in the blink of an eye. Her grandmother was there—and Xuelian—and the old priestess from Sian Sanqin—and Jinlien—and Xeian herself, her bright eyes smiling with Iloh’s own fiery charm. And then she was Tai again, the grave and serious child that Tai had been, the child who had given all these dreams, whose presence had guided Amais all of her life.

  There was something in her that wanted to bow before this beloved ancestress, like others of her kin had worshiped their own ancestors since time immemorial—but she also wanted to simply curl up at her feet as she would do with a favorite grandmother and sigh in contentment and simply be still under a loving hand on her hair. She did neither, in point of fact. Perhaps it was simply that the context of this meeting was the dream, drifting and free, unattached to any stereotype or obligation. In the here and now, on the ruined stairs, wearing their outlandish and wholly inappropriate garb, Amais could look at Tai and see through the patina of protocol and relationships. Here, she was not revered ancestress. Here she could be anything. A guardian angel. A sister. A friend. A stranger who smiled anonymously as she passed on the street.

  Here, she was all the women of the land. Here, she was Syai herself.

  And Amais, too, was free to choose her own soul, at last.

  <>

  I am of two worlds, and that will never change. But I do not have a divided heart. I can be both. I can be that ragged child hunting mussels on the shore in Elaas and I can be the woman who gave her soul to Syai. The two oceans in my spirit have flowed into one another and I now sail on a different sunlit sea, and it has all my worlds in it, and it is richer for it.

  I am the daughter of a woman who loved her heritage enough not to lose it for her children, yet not so well as to give them something unbroken and whole to treasure. I am a descendant of travelers who chose to turn their faces to the sun and their sails into the wind and seek new worlds without ever quite having released the old. I am the many times great-granddaughter of a poet who once helped to carry the weight of an empire on her slight shoulders, and who did not stumble under the load.

  And I am the mother of the child who will take up that load again, and stand at the head of a nation.

  I come from strength and from courage and from beauty.

  I am one who is two, and two who is one. I am a singer of songs and a teller of tales and a maker of poetry. I am voice and spirit and memory. I am heart-sister to a nation, I am the vessel that carried the legacy of a people; I am the past that was, the present that is unfolding; I will see, through the eyes of my daughter, the history that is to come. I am a footstep in the stone that is the bones of this earth, and some day, centuries from now, they will still see the shape that my foot left there, and they will wonder, and they will remember.

  Who knows what Gods will rule, then—and from what heaven…? But I will be there, a word in the wind, a whisper in the leaves of the willow trees in the springtime; someday I may even worthy of being the face that my land will wear to guide another in the path of her destiny.

  I am an ending to a story that began long ago, a beginning to a brand new tale that is only just stirring into life. The words that have come from my heart and my pen open the eyes of the tired and the defeated to the triumphs that lie hidden within tragedy; they reveal to the victorious the tragedy that is the serpent in the bosom of every triumph.

  I was. I am. I will be…

  <>

  “Look,” said Tai.

  Amais followed her gaze, out to where the sky blazed with red and gold on the horizon, silhouetting ruins that sat silent and empty in the shattered city which surrounded them.

  “Yes,” Amais said, “something is still burning. Maybe the poor quarters are well alight by now. There is probably nobody left to fight the flames and those hovels are made of…”

  “No,” Tai said calmly, “look.”

  Amais said nothing, merely allowed her eyes to rest on the improbable sky. She felt both vividly exhilarated and deathly tired, all at once, as though she had lived an entire lifetime in the scope of a few minutes of dream.

  Which, in a way, she had.

  She was on the verge of asking Tai what it was that she was supposed to be seeing as she stared out over the ruins, but then, inexplicably, her eye
s filled with tears—and while her physical vision blurred with them into a mere smear of shape and color somehow they opened her inner eye to a glory that lanced at her heart with an exquisite pleasure that was almost as sharp as pain.

  The sky was not aflame with the fires of destruction or devastation. She was facing east, and that which she was staring at was dawn, the rising of the sun, the promise of a brand new day. From the darkness beneath the earth’s rim, the orb of the young sun rose slowly over the edge of the night and poured its liquid light into the world, a bright and holy fire, woken by faith and valor from the sleeping embers of heaven.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  I write of a land called Syai, and its people.

  It is not China. But when I wrote my novel “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, the historical background in which it was rooted was recognizably that of a glittering Imperial China, from which the story drew its inspiration. The follow-up to that book, “Embers of Heaven”, is more that just historical fantasy—it is a contemporary historical fantasy, one in which my Imperial Syai evolves for four hundred years before I (and my protagonist) return to it, and which slips into a parallel history in which it will be easy for the reader to find parallels to that which has been happening in our China, the one in this world, the real one. There are some characters whose real-life inspirations will not be hard to spot—Shou’min Iloh, Shenxiao, Baba Sung are all based on real historical figures, although I have taken what liberties I needed to make them live in my own story, in my Syai. Even Tang, although he is a bit of a composite of at least three contemporary Chinese political figures, should be familiar. Events such as the Golden Rising and the Iron Bridge, and especially the student protest on the Emperor’s Square, should also find a ready parallel in the minds of contemporary readers—and so should the rampaging cadres of the Golden Wind.

  But while the parallels are there, and there is a very real history behind all of this, “Embers of Heaven” remains a historical fantasy about a land called Syai and the events that shaped that land. Conversations between Shou’min Iloh and any other character in this book are pure fiction, for instance, and as far as I know the mystical connection between Iloh and a girl called Amais has never actually existed. Some readers might recognize a very famous photograph that was used as inspiration for the denouement of the students’ rebellion—but they should realize that I have used the photograph, and indeed the very events of which I write, as a palimpsest on which I have created my own dramas, my own history, my own country. China pervades this book, and is a fundamental building block of its storyline—but think of “Embers” as a painting rather than a photograph. You will see things that never were, and things that might have been, and you may well not see the things you expect to see. Just remember—there is a veil between the “real” China and the land called Syai, and by reading this book you have stepped through it and into a world that is mine alone and where actual China, as potent as its presence there is, must be seen as merely a guiding spirit, a Muse, an inspiration. You will find many things very similar, but do not expect to be reading a contemporary history of the facts exactly as they were.

  History is complex and complicated, and the history of China more so than most. I know that I have found myself mystified and astounded and sometimes outright awed at some of the things I have found out while doing my research reading—I have tried to distil the whole potent brew into something that retains the richness and the bittersweet taste of the original concoction while proving to be more easily accessible and understandable for the average Western reader. It may not be a history textbook, but it may well be a starting point for a lasting fascination with China and all things Chinese. I know I have learned a whole lot while writing “Embers of Heaven”, both in terms of hard facts and in beginning to understand the way a culture very different from mine thinks, feels, functions. I hope that some of that wonder will find its way into the minds of the readers and stay there long after they put down this book.

  Alma Alexander

  About the Author

  Alma Alexander is a novelist and short story writer who writes for both YA and not-so-YA audiences, with eleven books to her credit published in 14 languages worldwide to date. Some of her other works include 2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens, the international bestseller Secrets of Jin Shei, the fantasy duology Hidden Queen/Changer of Days, and the YA Worldweavers trilogy. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two presumptuous cats.

  About the Artist

  Laura Givens is a Denver-based author and artist. Her art has graced the covers of numerous publishers' books and may be viewed at http://www.lauragivens-artist.com. She was co-editor and contributor to Six-Guns Straight From Hell, a weird western anthology recently released. She performed improv comedy on stage for a decade then produced, wrote and directed her no-budget masterpiece, The Jerusalem Tango, which you will never see, for good cause.

  Books Published by Sky Warrior Books

  Purchase them through online resellers and better independent bookstores everywhere. Visit us at www.skywarriorbooks.com for news and upcoming books and promotions.

  Alma Alexander

  2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens (E-book, Trade Paperback)

  Embers of Heaven (E-book, Trade Paperback)

  S. A. Bolich

  Firedancer (E-book, Trade Paperback)

  M. H. Bonham

  Prophecy of Swords (E-book)

  Runestone of Teiwas (E-book)

  Serpent Singer and Other Stories (E-book)

  Carol Hightshoe (Editor)

  Zombiefied: An Anthology of All Things Zombie (E-book)

  Gary Jonas

  Modern Sorcery (E-book, Trade Paperback)

  One-Way Ticket to Midnight (E-book)

  Quick Shots (E-book)

  Michael J. Parry

  The Spiral Tattoo (E-book)

  Phyllis Irene Radford (Editor)

  Healing Waves: A Charity Anthology for Japan (E-book)

  Deborah J. Ross (Editor)

  The Feathered Edge (E-book, Trade Paperback)

  Laura J. Underwood

  Ard Magister (Book One of Ard Magister) (E-book)

  Dragon’s Tongue (Book One of the Demon-Bound) (E-book)

  The Hounds of Ardagh (E-book)