The Embers of Heaven (11 page)

Paper Swords and Iron Butterflies

“Sometimes the things that shatter at the first blow prove strongest of all after a thousand years have gone by.”

The Book of Ancient Wisdom

One

Time had not stood still in Linh-an, despite all of Amais’s dreams, or Vien’s expectations.

Vien and her daughters had arrived in the city in early spring, after nearly seven months of planning, scrimping, saving, and then doling out gold to agents and officials in expenses, steep travel fares, and sometimes outright bribery. The journey itself had been the least of it, but even that had not been easy or cheap. It had taken almost as much—in terms of money, stress and nervous tension—for a family which had traveled to Syai from halfway across the world to now simply cross the country from one city to another.

The serene land that
baya
-Dan had dreamed about in her cocoon on a far-away island seemed to be gone, swept away, vanished without a trace.

It was impossible to arrange anything in any coherent way because there were so many circumstances beyond one’s control. The only way to get from Chirinaa to Linh-an, two city-islands in a sea of countryside seething with discontent and often open revolt, was to travel light—Vien left the heavy luggage with the woman at whose hostelry the family had stayed, with very little hope of ever seeing any of it again, and they took only the bare minimum with them: what was left of
baya-
Dan’s gold, the urn with her ashes, a couple of changes of clothes each, and the thirteen precious journals which Amais had flatly refused to leave behind in the face of discussions, pleas, and even direct orders from her mother. They traveled by ship, again, up the river, watching the shores with their hearts in their mouths, waiting for some insurgent group to pick their particular vessel to make a point with; they waited to be stopped, searched, robbed, and despoiled. But they made it to the hills around Linh-an, and then they found a way to slip into the city with a column of exhausted refugees at whom both the guerillas in the countryside and the soldiers guarding the city walls had turned a blind eye.

It had been harrowing. It had also, at least for Amais, been wildly exciting. But the initial excitement, the sense of finally having completed their journey, had quickly faded into a gray reality. They could not survive on their shrinking hoard of
baya
-Dan’s gold forever, so the first order of business had been to try and find a means of earning a livelihood here in the city—and Vien’s plans and dreams of what used to be, or what might have been, had withered in the face of a harsh reminder of what was. It might have been different only a handful of short years before, but Linh-an—like most cities in Syai these days—was a city under siege, with Shenxiao’s Nationalists entrenched within and the guerillas of the People’s Party controlling the surrounding countryside.

Vien shrank away from it all. They were here at last, in Linh-an, with the Temple—
the
Temple, the Great Temple of their family’s heritage—a few city blocks away from the lodgings they had found, but Vien laid
baya-
Dan’s ashes into Amais’s young hands and had sent her to the Temple, alone, a week after their arrival in the city.

“You go,” she said. “Take the ashes, take some gold. Find out where we can bury her.”

“But Mother…” Amais had protested, her hands closed tight around the urn of her grandmother’s ashes. She had hoped, indeed, that she could go and see the Temple for the first time on her own, unhampered by the presence of her melancholy mother and the little sister who needed supervision and attention—but she had not figured on being entrusted with this, with the thing that Vien had repeatedly said was the most important duty that she had in Syai, the reason for her return here.

“Just go,” Vien had said, closing her eyes and turning away. “I am so tired, Amais. My head aches so…”

So Amais, bearing the ashes and bearing gold, had walked to the Great Temple alone. When she reached one of its massive gates she stood for a long moment, her heart beating wildly, her breath coming out in short sharp gasps, her eyes shining—this towering edifice, its complexities known to her from earliest childhood through
baya-
Dan’s intercession, had been part of the fairy tale from the very beginnings, haunted by its Gods and its Sages and its dead Emperors waiting patiently in their niches.

The First Circle was an odd and aching disappointment when Amais set foot into the Temple itself. Her fertile imagination had already been here, many times, and she had thought—had believed without a shade of doubt—that she would know the place when she finally stepped into the real thing, quite simply
recognize
it. But instead of the bustling commercial centre of Tai’s journals Amais found a slightly shabby, strangely forlorn place. It resembled nothing so much as an ancient trade city recently bypassed by a new road, beginning to wither quietly in what would very quickly become backwater country or had already done so without quite realizing that it had been rendered obsolete and insignificant. There was space for hundreds of booths along the outer wall, but many of them were shrouded in tarpaulins or locked down tight under wooden shutters. Those that were open for business still seemed to be carrying on a brisk trade, however—for those who came to the Temple, the requirement to make offerings to the gods and lesser spirits whom they had come here to pray to was still mandatory, and there were plenty of people waiting patiently in queues to purchase bowls, rice, wine, tea, fruit, and incense. There were even a cluster of
ganshu
booths, with their own clientele clustered around them and patiently waiting their turn with the fortune tellers—in fact, those seemed to have more customers than the rest. A sense of which way to jump in the current unsettled times was apparently a sought-after commodity in Linh-an.

Amais tried to orient herself according to Tai’s account of this place, from journal entries she knew faithfully by heart—tried to figure out where the booth of the bead carver had been, the bead carver who had become Tai’s father-in-law. But nothing was the same. Even the blue paint of the outer wall of the Second Circle that Tai had written about in her journals, the pale and delicate ghost-blue that she had once described as the color of Linh-an’s sky at the height of molten summer, seemed to have almost completely faded away into a wash of dingy grayish-white.

That, obscurely, was something that Amais sharply felt the loss of. She had read about that color, about the color of Linh-an’s sky, and had dreamed about what shade it would be, had been looking forward to seeing it at last…because it would have been new and strange, for her, for the child whose own childhood sky was so different. Elaas blue, the clear sky that gave its waters their sapphire hue, had been a strong bright color, almost garish in Amais’s eyes when she had raised them to the heavens after reading of the delicate nuances of Syai—but it had been the only thing she knew. It had been the sky that had arched over her father and had spilled its sunshine on the day’s catch, the fish thrashing and dancing in the hand-knotted nets, droplets of water flying like diamonds from glittering scales; it was the sky that smiled upon an ocean where dolphins played, a sky where very different Gods lived than those who watched over Syai. Tai had painted a world for Amais, and
baya
-Dan had made sure that Amais knew its colors—but they had all been just that, colors on a pretty painting, and it seemed that in the real Syai the hues and nuances of that vanished world would remain just the colors of a dream for Amais. The color of the sky was different here, but in a way it hurt more to realize that it was different from the thing that Amais had expected it to be than to know that it was different from Elaas. The latter difference she had expected, had waited for, had even yearned to see. The one she found instead, the difference between past and present rather than between two vividly different places each in its own niche in a world full of change and diversity, made her feel disoriented and not a little afraid.

Linh-an had changed… the Temple had changed. Amais had a sudden sense of the Great Temple, and all it had once stood for, teetering on the edge of a chasm, a balancing act between true faith and a shoring-up of at least a semblance of belief. Times were tight—while the Temple had traditionally been the place where the people had flocked for succor during their fallow years and bitter days, it had found its road much rockier since the fall of the old Empire and all it signified. It had been centuries since yearwoods had been universally used as Syai’s calendars and the bead carvers had found a home on the First Circle, with Cahan’s blessing on all the days that the beads they made would signify for those who came to buy them. The secular replaced  the religious, and even those who wanted to keep the old ways had to carefully weigh the  material costs against its spiritual benefits.

Amais belatedly realized that she no real idea of what to do next. Purchase an offering? An offering for which deity—and what kind of offering? Was that still required in order to gain admittance into the inner sanctums of the Temple? Where was she to look for anyone at all who would know what to do with the ashes of a woman whose spirit had dwelt in these halls long before her body had failed her, half the world away? She vaguely recalled that there had been funeral brokers in the First Circle once, but they seemed to belong to a lost age of the Temple, to the days when funerals were elaborate and complicated ceremonies requiring the manufacture of paper effigies of whatever the deceased might need in the afterlife. And even those had dealt with the actual dead, with a body which was to be sent to Cahan with all of its paper-rendered treasures.
Baya-
Dan was already ashes, and Amais didn’t have any idea if the correct protocol had even been followed back in Elaas, in the small community of Syai four hundred years removed from its roots. What if the Temple refused to deal with her grandmother’s ashes at all?

She looked around, almost furtively, not quite knowing what to expect but half bracing for armed guards should she break any Temple taboo—but nobody seemed to be paying her any attention. Sparing a final glance for those phantom Temple guards, Amais slipped quietly past the gate and into the Second Circle.

There was a susurrus of sound around her, with kneeling supplicants, mostly older women but an incongruously large number of young men clad in some sort of military uniform, murmuring prayers at the stone statues that stood in their niches as they had done from time immemorial and gazed out over the heads of the worshippers with blind stone eyes. In some ways, the people were here to ask for the things that they had always asked for—the small miracles of everyday lives—and to give thanks for things that had gone right in increasingly complicated lives; Amais could glean words and phrases as she walked past the kneeling women:
why is my husband so unhappy?…my child is getting married, her happiness… my baby is healthy now… I need a child… food, blessed spirit, we are hungry…
 But the young men in uniform had come here on a far more urgent errand, and had a single simpler prayer that Amais overheard over and over again as she walked past whispering petitioners on their knees below a deity wreathed in incense smoke.
Let me survive. Let the storm pass over my head. Let the sword, the bullet, with my name on it not have been made yet.

Amais knew that her business here was important, but all that the Temple had meant in her life was stronger than her—these walls of legend that now rose about her took her breath away. This was the Temple—she was in the Great Temple—people from the pages of Tai’s journals had walked these paving stones four centuries before. But there was more than just an echo of ghostly footsteps. There was a solid link here. A particular niche. A woman raised first to a position of status and influence and then to a place in the Later Heaven, by the power of
jin-shei
.

Amais had never been here before, and for all the detail of their maps and descriptions and drawings her grandmother’s books were old and outdated and sometimes deliberately less than complete. Despite all that, despite even her inability to map the First Circle with the ancient vision she carried in her head, Amais’s feet now took her, with an uncannily sure instinct, around the perimeter of the Second Circle until she reached the niches of the Sages, and then to a particular niche on the wall where the Sages had been placed.

The niche of a woman who had lived and laughed in the same bright days that Tai herself had been young. Nhia, Blessed Nhia, the Sage who had been
jin-shei-bao
to a poet, and an Empress.

Somehow none of the supplicants crowding the Second Circle all gathered before the more popular niches with their constant and insistent murmur of prayer and invocation, had chosen to come to this part of the Circle on this day, and Amais found herself quite alone with the ancient Sages. Nhia’s niche had a single incense stick burning in a holder, a thin trail of scented blue smoke curling around the carved image within. Amais stood before it, aware that she was staring but unable to do anything about it. And then her legs gave way, as though all the weight of the occasion had descended on her shoulders at once, and she fell to her knees on the stone paving slabs, settling back onto her heels, her eyes following the coils of smoke as they rose towards the ceiling. The urn with her grandmother’s ashes had somehow ended up in front of her, between her and the niche.

Her mind was both blank and awash with so many thoughts at once that it all just added up to white noise. And then something caught her eye, a movement in the corridor, and she turned her head marginally to look. Her eyes blurred with an unexpected film of tears, she could initially make out no more than an approaching shape of a feminine form, someone who walked with a limp, leaning on a cane.