The Embers of Heaven (10 page)

“You are betraying the founder of your own party,” Iloh said. “Do you know what they are saying, out in the country? ‘The sky is high and Shenxiao is far away.’ They used to say that about the Emperor. You are no different than that leech on society, and Baba Sung himself said that the Empire had to go.”

“Even Baba Sung knew better than that,” Shenxiao said. “He, too, was young once, that is true, and some of his ideas are those of a young man—but he grew up, and he grew wiser. A man who does not in his youth believe that the world needs to be changed is heartless, and has no feelings. But if a man has not learned by the time he is forty that it is impossible to swap an old world for a new one like a lamp on New Year’s day, that it is only possible to  change the shape of the world so that one can find a higher place to stand within it—that man is a brainless idiot.”

Iloh had said nothing out loud, but his eyes, resting on Shenxiao, were eloquent.
You are wrong
.

They had not met again, face to face. The relationship between the two Parties continued to deteriorate. It appeared that Shenxiao’s people, known as the Nationalists, had put an end to the chaos of the warlord years and had put a central government in place, giving the people something  familiar. There was a place for the Gods, and right underneath that there was a place for the man the Gods had chosen to lead the nation—and everyone else had only to follow where that chosen man led.

But the Nationalists ruled with force of arms—with war clubs, and with guns. Accession to positions of power, promised on the basis of merit alone, devolved into a corrupt system where family or cronies were installed in places where they would be useful to those who wielded real clout. The government that had been Baba Sung’s legacy and which the people had welcomed nowbecame endured, then disliked, then distrusted, and finally hated. The rich landowners and the city bankers and businessmen still had their weight behind Shenxiao and his clique. The rest of the people—the peasants in the countryside, the workers in industry and in service, the young intellectuals of the cities—had increasingly begun to put their faith not so much in the People’s Party but in the hands of a young man called Iloh who traveled the country and who spoke to them of equality, and of power, and of peace.

But Shenxiao held the army, the weapons, and the metaphorical high ground. When Iloh and his people became too dangerous for Shenxiao to even pretend to work together with them, he manufactured an incident in the city of Chirinaa, where the unions were strong. Blood was spilled in the city’s streets, and Shenxiao made certain that blame for that was laid at the feet of Iloh and his ‘shadow cabinet’.

Those of the People’s Party who had still held positions inside Shenxiao’s party were summarily purged—arrested, imprisoned, and executed. The alliance was over. Before the year was out, the People’s Party had gone into hiding. Their leaders were marked men, and hunted.

Iloh had been one of them.  He had married Yanzi less than a year before, and now, with his wife pregnant with their first child, he had to flee into the hills or face prison—or worse.

Yanzi was adamant that she would stay behind, in the city.

“You can’t stay down here alone! It’s dangerous! They know who you are, where to find you…” Iloh had argued, pleaded, begged.

“What do you think they would do?” Yanzi said, her voice sweet reason. “I am a pregnant woman. If they touched me they would have their own people turn on them—some things are sacred, and if you foul them,  you are tainted by it forever more. And here, I can be of far greater use to you than dangling at your tail with this belly up there in the mountains.”

“It would be safer in the middle of nowhere than here in the path of the flood. I don’t think you realize how ugly it’s going to get.”

“Trust me,” she said, laying her hand over his mouth. “I will be better here. I will send word when I can.”

“Then I will stay,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Yanzi said sharply. “Your name is on a list of wanted men. You would not last a week in the city—you couldn’t even be with me, you’d have to go into hiding. You’re better off up there in the mountains, leading, then down here skulking  in a rat trap.”

He had let her persuade him that she would be all right, that nobody would touch her.

But that was before Iloh emerged as the leader of the leaderless men of the People’s Party up in the pathless hills of the north. Before Shenxiao put a price on his head. Before someone delivered Yanzi and her small son into Shenxiao’s hands. Before Shenxiao broke every rule, and executed Iloh’s wife and child to prove a point—
with me or against me, and if against me then no quarter shall be given.

When word of that came, Iloh had asked a single question.

“How?”

“They shot them,” the courier who had brought the news said brokenly. “They stood them up against a wall, and a firing squad shot them both. The boy was in her arms.” He looked up, met Iloh’s eyes, and felt his knees buckle. He knelt at Iloh’s feet whispering the rest, the answer to the question that Iloh had really been asking. “They… it was fast… they didn’t suffer.”

Iloh had turned without another word and walked away into the hills, by himself, his face a battlefield. Nobody dared follow, not even Tang, his closest companion; that grief and guilt had been too heavy, too raw. If they thought they heard a howl from out of the hills, later, a howl that sounded more like a wolf than a man—well, it might have been an animal, after all. Yanzi had been part of the People’s Party from the beginning, she had been there at its birth, she had believed in it no less than anyone else out here—and it had been her choice, after all, to stay behind in the city. But they knew that none of that would weigh with Iloh so much as the fact that he had been her husband, he had been the father to that child, and he had abandoned them to their fate. His choice, in the end, his guilt. Something he would never lay down, for as long as he lived.

When Iloh returned, Tang had uttered a single sentence about the fate of Yanzi, whom he too had loved from afar for many years.

“You should have taken her with you,” he said.

Iloh had stared at him from eyes that were suddenly darker and colder than Tang remembered their ever having been before—it was as though Shenxiao had killed a part of Iloh’s own humanity when he raised a hand against his family. But he said nothing. And Tang had bowed his head, having said what he had to say, and had wordlessly taken on himself the task of taking care of Iloh, even after Iloh entered into what they called a ‘revolutionary marriage’ with another girl in the People’s Party cadres on the run in the hills.

Iloh’s eyes had acquired a strange hard glitter after the news of Yanzi’s death—the gleam of ice, of cold stone. Not tears, never tears, at least not that anyone else had witnessed. Iloh had not had the luxury of giving in to grief—only, perhaps, the chance to work for revenge.

It was the revolution, and revolution exacted a high price.

A revolution…

The unfinished sentence Iloh had left dangling in the cabin in the hills, on that night years after the revolution had begun, on the eve of its being won, still sat there on the page of his notebook, incomplete, nagging at him. A revolution needed a definition. He knew what it was, he knew in his bones, but somehow the pattern of the words would not form in his head; he tried and discarded a few variants, mouthing them silently, tasting the words he might write on his tongue, finding them wanting. There was something vivid and vital that he needed, something that conveyed the necessity of the overthrow of all gods and monsters.

It was… it would be…

A revolution is an act of violence,
he wrote at last,
by which the new overthrows the old, where the oppressed throws off the oppressor, by which all men are made equal in one another’s sight.

It was not perfect, but it would have to do.

Iloh was suddenly surprised by a huge yawn that Tang would have pounced on had he been there to witness it. He got up and stretched, hearing his joints pop as he did so, reflecting wryly on the side-effects that waging revolution could have on a man. He was thirty-two years old and sometimes, in his fifth winter of exile, his bones ached with the arthritis of a graybeard three times that age.

Iloh crossed over to the door and eased it open a crack. It was still snowing outside, and few things moved in the white silence in the space between the huts—one or two muffled shapes hurried somewhere with an air of urgency that probably had less to do with the errand they were on than a desire to be under a roof again with the possibility of a hot stove to thaw out frozen feet and hands. None of them noticed Iloh, or the thin ribbon of yellow light that spilled from the open door.

It was these people, in the name of all the people in the plains down below and in the walled cities of old empire, who had rallied to a dream of a new world, who had helped to raise the flag of Iloh’s vision. The few, in the name of the many. The few who had endured so much.

But soon it would be over—soon… The mandate was changing in Syai. The skirmishes that Iloh’s army had fought with the Nationalists who held the reins of power  had turned into battles, and the battles had begun turning into victories. More and more of the enemy was throwing down their arms—or, better, crossing over to lay their allegiance at Iloh’s feet. Too much was going wrong down there, too fast; their generals had been too complacent, too rushed, too afraid. They had committed everything to this one final push, and it was failing. Thousands of  men, perhaps tens of thousands,  had paid with their lives, but now the prize was near, and Iloh could see the things he had dreamed of, the things he had made others believe with a fervour bordering on fanaticism, starting to take shape before his eyes. This bitter winter of exile, this was the last. He knew that. He could sense it in the wind…

He shivered, suddenly—the wind he had invoked in his thoughts had suddenly reached through the door he had been holding open and had reached out to touch him with icy fingers. He had seen enough. This day, he had done enough. Tang was right—it was time to sleep.

And yet it was a different Tang that he was hearing, the voice echoing in his mind that of a more innocent time, a time when everything had still been possible and the price had not yet been exacted. Iloh remembered, through a mist of memory, a night when  he and Tang had sat by the fire and quoted poetry at each other, the scurrilous and the sublime, the mocking and the prophetic.

“ ‘Oh, but it will be a brave new dance when the music starts to play’,” Tang had quoted.

“But what music will it be?” Iloh had asked. “Will we even know it for music?”

“We will know it,” Tang said. “We will write it!”

“But who will be asked to play it?” Iloh had said, in a strange, introspective mood that night  It was as though he had been handed a shallow bowl of water, and saw in the mirror of its still surface a vision of the years that were to come. “Who will be asked to pay for it? What ancient part of ourselves will we have to give up in order to be granted the music of this new world …?”

Iloh shook his head, clearing his mind of the memories, and retired to the pile of thin quilts on the pallet he used for a bed. He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hand. As almost always when he started drifting off into sleep, but stirred into a particular fury by the memories he had been picking over a moment ago,  questions rose like a flock of disturbed crows and darkened his thoughts with a blackness of fluttering wings
. Could I have done it differently? Could I have done it better? Will it be worth all this struggle and sacrifice in the end? Is it worth the lives that have been spent to buy it? What have we lost, that we might gain this? Who will speak the language of the lost things? This thing that we have bled for, fought to give life and breath to, will it live, thrive, grow strong…?

And then, as usual, he would answer himself, just before he sighed and surrendered to deeper slumber.

The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?

The light was somehow very wrong. The image that shimmered before her eyes was a memory, a recognizable memory, but it had a golden wash over it, a light that suggested something ethereal, something that had never quite happened, or was still to come… the light of dream.

Amais could see the two little girls clearly, herself and her sister, sitting with what they believed to be studied adult elegance and yet still managing to be, endearingly and obviously, thirteen and six years old, sometime in their second year in Linh-an. They wore what they imagined grown-up high society ladies would wear to such an occasion, which in the children’s case meant a hodge-podge of discarded garments from Mama’s closets dressed up with scraps of silk and a heap of cheap bazaar jewelry piled on every available limb. The style of dress was somewhat eclectic, because Amais at least remembered the women of Elaas very well, and recalled the paintings and the ancient statuary depicting the old goddesses of that land and their elegant draped gowns. She never forgot her brief glimpses of more exotic womenfolk, veiled women who had traveled on the same ships as they and effacing themselves into the shadows. Of course they—particularly Amais, the elder, but Aylun had been told the same tales—were well aware of the sartorial traditions of their own cultural legacy, those rooted in the fairy-tales of Imperial past. In play, they used whatever element of these cultures that happened to please them at any given moment. Amais always set the stage, spinning one of her fictions and snaring her younger sister into the charms of “might-have-been” and “once-upon-a-time.” Although Aylun used to copy her she had quickly started rebelling, and used her own ideas.

This particular dream-party, this was a specific occasion. Amais remembered it well. It was one of the first times that Aylun had asserted her independence and had insisted on putting together her own costume. Amais recalled the smooth slide of her mother’s red satin robe as its too-long sleeves whispered past her own bony childish wrists, and the weight of the ropes of fake gold coins, bazaar treasures, that she wore over her hair. Aylun wore a strange mixture of a half-veil covering the lower half of her face—which she finally discarded, after a while, because she had to keep pushing it aside in order to sip her tea—and something that she fondly imagined passed as a classical Elaas gown, a bedsheet in its former existence, wrapped around her chubby frame and tied at the waist with a daringly purloined belt which their mother still regularly wore and which was not really sanctioned as play garb.

They were bent over a low table with a child-sized teapot filled with cold mint tea which their mother indulged them by brewing for them every time they announced one of their “tea ceremonies.” It was Aylun’s turn to be hostess; she was pouring the tea into tiny cups; one for her, one for her sister, a third (as they knew was protocol for any real tea ceremony) for fragrance alone, so that the guests at the tea ceremony might inhale the scent of the carefully selected tea variety offered to them, enhancing the experience with the use of all the senses.

They made what they believed to be polite conversation in the adult world—Aylun inquired about the price of fish in today’s market, and Amais countered with some totally unrelated scrap of poetry or song that she had happened to memorize or had produced herself and which she believed it was the duty of all fine ladies to know. They sipped at their cold mint tea with exaggerated protocol and carefully rehearsed ritual—and then, because they were children, they started laughing. First one, then the other, trying to stifle giggles behind silken veils or flowing satin sleeves, failing, catching one another’s eye, dimpling around the rosebud lips still dewy with their childhood, and then screaming with the laughter that bubbled up from inside them, laughing at nothing at all, for the pure joy of being themselves, and being there, and being young.

But the light was quite wrong—the light of dream, not memory.  And the laughter turned to echoes, faded, vanished… as the children in the golden mists changed irrevocably into something else, someone else, and Amais became aware that she dreamed, and that she knew these two figures kneeling at an inlaid tea ceremony table made of rosewood and mahogany. This was no game of pretend—the tea was real, not the childish mint substitute, and the scent that rose from the spout of the teapot as the honey-colored liquid came steaming out of it into the fragrance-cup was rich and haunting.

It was still a child who was doing the pouring, however, a little girl—familiar from old dreams, remembered as standing dressed in old court garb on the edge of the apocalypse under a fiery sky.

“
It is early spring tea,” the child was saying, handing a cup to her companion, the young woman who had stood with her on the same wind-blown wreckage, under the same sky, whose back was still turned to the one who dreamed this dream, whose face was still hidden. “Can you not smell the sunshine of it in the cup?”

“
Yes,” the young woman said, accepting her cup and inhaling deeply.  “You’re right, of course.—but how can you know such things?”

“
I know,” the child said gravely, “many, many things.”

The young woman’s hands tightened imperceptibly around her cup, and then her fingers relaxed, as though she had made them do so by main force of will. “I wish I could know the things I need to know,” she whispered.

The little girl who had filled her cup paused as she put the teapot away on its warming stove, and then lifted her eyes to her companion, and the dreamer who hovered behind her like a ghost at the feast. “But you do,” the child said. “You will know if anything had happened to her. How could you not…?”

The grammar and tense of that sentence made no sense, and the dreamer, to whom it was not, directly, addressed, wished she could understand why it filled her with such fear and foreboding—but this was dream, after all, and all fears were permitted here.

“
There is danger all around me,” the young woman holding the tea cup whispered, and the dreamer’s own voice shaped the words, like an echo, like the echo of that laughter she had once shared with her sister over their childhood make-believe.

The little girl who was in the dream—not Amais’s sister, ah, not her sister!—reached for the teapot again. Not to pour this time—she lifted it with both hands, heedless of the heat that the boiling water within must have seared her palms with— and then brought it down with full force on the beautiful inlaid table.

The teapot shattered, pieces of fragile porcelain scattering in all directions, hot water spurting from the remnants—but what was inside the pot, what the hot water had washed, had not been the tea-leaves that had been so seductively suggested by the fragrance cup still steaming deceitfully to the side.

What lay revealed inside the broken teapot was not tea… but a small, wickedly sharp dagger, washed clean, washed almost sterile of memory.

But it had held memory, once. The memory was what had been in the tea that had been sipped from the porcelain cup, what still curled in the steam from the fragrance cup, and the memory was pungent, and poignant, and sharply painful. The young woman set her teacup down suddenly with a small cry, and reached for the knife—and then stopped, trembling, her shaking fingers barely above the blade. The hesitation was instinctive, a recoil born of pure supernatural awe—and then her companion, the little girl, reached out with both hands and gently brought those hesitating fingers down until they touched the gleaming metal of the blade.

And Amais the dreamer touched it, too, disembodied as she was, hovering behind and above everything—and yet she could feel it as if under her own fingertips, that cool-warm metal, a presence in her hand as it was pushed down on top of the dagger, flat, palm down.

“
Yes, there is danger,” the little girl said. “But you will always know. And you will always be able to feel it—because this is the truth of it, right here, and you will hold it all in the palm of your hand before you are done. You will bear witness.”

The little girl shaped the other’s hand, curled it around the dagger’s handle, made her hold it, lift it, turn it point first into the wooden table. And then moved the hand that clutched the blade, gouging a symbol on the fine inlay, a symbol of a language that Amais herself was only just beginning to remember, to reclaim.

Her alter ego, the young woman who now held the dagger, suddenly seemed to wake from some sort of a trance. The little girl’s hands fell away, and the other’s fingers tightened around the dagger, shifted for a stronger grip, and she completed the symbol that the little girl had made her begin, and then stared at the thing she had made, and the ruin she had made of the ancient inlay of the old elegant tea table.

The echo of children’s laughter, rippling with innocence and delight, was all around as the scene wrapped itself once again in the golden mists of memory and dream, the last clear image remaining that of a woman’s hand holding what might have been a dagger, or a pen dipped into ink—the symbols beneath it changing from something etched into wood to something stark and black in dark ink on white page, and back again.

“
Bear witness,” the young woman said as the dreamer shaped the words with her own voiceless lips.  “Speak the truth.”

And the water-washed and tempered metal gleamed its answer before it was swallowed by the mists.

Truth. Yes. Witness and testimony.