The Embers of Heaven (12 page)

Leaning on a cane…

Nhia. Nhia had been a cripple. And now a ghostly figure with a limp approached as Amais knelt before Nhia’s own shrine. A superstitious dread gripped Amais all of a sudden, and she scrambled to her feet, gathering up the urn with unseemly haste as she did so and almost spilling the contents.

“Do you wish to make an offering?” the limping ‘ghost’ asked Amais in a pleasant low alto voice.

Amais blinked, clearing her sight. It was no ghost—this was not Nhia. It was just a girl, perhaps only a few years older than Amais herself, garbed in Temple robes and leaning on a cane while favoring one bandaged foot.

Amais glanced down at the urn she held and then back at the other girl, trying to gather her scattered thoughts together.

“This is my grandmother,” she said incongruously. That bald fact seemed to be all that she could come up with. “I need… I need to bury her.”

The girl who had spoken to Amais—and in fact she was little more than a girl, despite the oddly mature, dark voice—was dressed in a dark blue silk gown, and wore her long hair in a single simple braid down her back. There was little to identify her as belonging to the Temple but somehow she gave the impression of being an indelible part of the place, as though the Temple itself had grown a human avatar in order to address, without frightening it to death, the lost soul that had found its way to the sacred portals. She inclined her head at Amais’s words, without giving any indication that they had been startling or impolite in any way. Amais had an uncanny feeling that the acolyte’s next words would be something like,
We have been expecting you
.

Instead, the other girl gave a slight bow. “I am Jinlien, of the Fourth Circle,” she said. “You can discuss funeral arrangements with me, if you wish.”

But Amais stood rooted to the spot, staring up at Nhia’s shrine.

“I thought you were
her
,” she whispered. “I thought you were a ghost…”

For the first time the priestess, Jinlien, looked a little startled. “I beg your pardon?”

“She had a deformed foot,” Amais said softly, in the hypnotizing singsong voice that
baya-
Dan would have recognized, the storytelling voice. “The Blessed Nhia. She was born with a deformed foot, and she limped…”And then the voice broke, and Amais indicated the cane with a small helpless gesture. “And then, you came in…”

“Yes,” Jinlien said, surprised, but with dawning understanding. “This? I twisted my ankle falling down some stairs. The cane is temporary. I am sorry I startled you.”

“I should make an offering,” Amais said, talking almost to herself. “A proper offering, something fitting, something that I would do in Tai’s name and my own…”

“Tai? Who is Tai?”

Amais turned wide eyes to her companion, almost ludicrously taken aback that she did not know this immediately, that everyone in Syai didn’t know this immediately. “Nhia… the Blessed Sage Nhia… was
jin-shei-bao
to Kito-Tai. The poet. I am her many times great-granddaughter…”

Jinlien conquered her astonishment, inclined her head again. “
Jin-shei
,” she said. She tasted the word as though it was something rich and strange… but not wholly unfamiliar. As though a hidden hoard of some precious spice had been discovered many years after it had been laid down, and found to be still good. “It’s been a long time since an offering was made here in the name of
jin-shei
. If you have a mind to do a formal offering, I can tell you exactly what you would need. But in the meantime…” She fished in the folds of her robe, came up with two incense sticks, and offered both of them to Amais. “In the meantime, you can consider this a promise of what is to come.”

Amais hesitated for a moment, and then slowly reached out to take the incense, bowing her head lightly in gratitude. “Do you usually carry spare offerings around with you?”  she asked, holding the two sticks like they were something very precious.

“Often,” Jinlien said, with a tight and enigmatic kind of smile. “For the shrines where no other offering has been made. Or for those who need something to make an offering with… like yourself.”

Jinlien waited politely, a few steps back, as Amais approached the shrine and lit the incense with a strange awe, half offering the required reverence to a sacred being raised to godhood and residing in Later Heaven, only a step away from the blessed gardens of Cahan itself, and half in a mystified but genuine sense of coming home across the centuries to say hello to a long-lost friend. This had been a living, breathing woman once—Tai’s own
jin-shei-bao
and the companion of her youth, someone whom Amais almost felt that she had met, immortalized as Nhia had been in Tai’s journals. It was as though this shrine was a vindication, proof that everything that Amais had believed in and dreamed of was true, could be true,
should
be true…

And at the same time a reminder of so many things that had not been.

Amais hadn’t realized that she was quietly crying until Jinlien put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Come,” she said gently. “I will have some tea brought to us in the gardens. Let us talk of your grandmother.”

Two

Weeks turned into months, and months began growing into years.

The maples were scarlet and gold, shedding leaves like blessings over the heads of the surging crowds thronging the streets around the marketplace and near the Great Temple. The Mid-Autumn Festival had come round again, a time full of poetic significance and mystical augury. In the busy marketplace, a customer would haggle happily over the very last of the festival Mooncakes shaped like animals or Temple pagodas, and then bear them away in triumph even as the stall owner brought out a brand-new tray from underneath the bench, at twice the price, for the next customer in line.

The skies were clear; the moon would be full and yellow that night, and it would hang in the heavens like a golden coin, pouring a rich shimmering glow over the piled offerings of peaches and pomegranates and those cannily bargained-for mooncakes.

It should have been perfect. This was supposed to be the end of a fairy tale, the part where the Gods benevolently handed out happiness and contentment and belonging. This was the fairy tale which Amais had gleaned from her many times great-grandmother Tai’s journals—those that she had and treasured, a collection far from complete, fragmented and broken. But there were gaps of lost years even between the individual journals in Amais’s possession, never mind the chasm that yawned after the final one that she owned and the later ones, those that she knew had to have existed given the fact that Tai produced one every year of her life but which Amais had never even seen. She knew of her poet-ancestress’ official biography from second-hand sources, from things she had heard or read from other people, but the real end of Tai’s story—as she herself wrote it— was never to be known, lost, unknowable. Amais almost preferred it that way—she had always been free to supply whatever ending she wished, sometimes simply making it up as she went along. But that had been the fairy tale that she had grown up with, had often taken refuge in when her real life had become too heartbreaking, when things had been too difficult to understand.

In her childish dreams it had looked like this—almost exactly like this. The ancient walls, the cobbles piled with burnished leaves, the smell of roasted nuts and fresh-baked pastries in the air, the noise of the crowd as it milled around her. Like this… except that in those dreams she had been part of it all, she had worn the same happy excited smile, she had skipped over the leafy cobbles holding some friendly hand of someone… it might even have been Tai herself, in Amais’s young mind… someone whose presence would ensure that she belonged to this time and this place, absolutely, without question.

This was Linh-an, the city of what had been legend to Amais, the holy ground  where the spirits of her ancient ancestors lingered in the narrow alleys and by the massive gates cut into a wall that seemed rooted in time itself.

But it was far from perfect.

Even the brightness of the Autumn Festival—something that the government threw to the people of the city like a bone to a starving dog, something good and glowing to play with, to make them forget about their daily lives—had been a veneer, something almost awkward and fake, despite the mooncakes and the vivid autumn maples. For Amais, despite her initial enthusiasm for the Festivals of Linh-an, the whole thing had quickly turned sour. The orderly and dutiful way in which the government trotted out all the ancient festivals in order to keep the populace happy had only served as window-dressing for Amais, a routine, a stage set which promised continuity and safety, shelter against life’s storms. But it had proved to be a false sense of security. Too many things in Amais’s life were uncertain, unpleasant, slipping out of control.

Those first years in Linh-an had been lonely ones for Amais. An exotic-looking stranger speaking with an unusual outlander accent and wearing shabby clothes was less and less likely to be greeted with a smile and a kind word in the unsettled times of war and conflict; if she was lucky, she would get served in the market without her order being accompanied by a suspicious stare from the shopkeeper—whose shelves were increasingly bare—and half a dozen bystanders who appeared to be taking mental notes on what she bought and where she went. Vien’s invoking of the concept of
wangmei
and
xeimei
, the state of being a stranger both of body and of heart, when she had told Elena she was taking her daughters away now  began to take on a cruel irony—for Amais could not have been more of a stranger in the city of her ancestors if she tried. She had wandered Linh-an’s streets, taking in the buildings and the people, seeking some trace, somewhere, of the world that had been ruled by
jin-shei,
the world of the ancient and sacred vow in which Tai had once walked. But there seemed to be little else in the air around her but talk of war, and unspoken fear. People kept to themselves. The thick walls around the city kept out undesirables, and it seemed to Amais that every inhabitant of Linh-an had taken a lesson from their city and raised equally impregnable walls around themselves.

She had made one friend—a somewhat unexpected one, perhaps, but it had been the one kind face, the one warm voice, that she had found in the whole of Linh-an. Jinlien, the young priestess, had been intrigued by Amais’s invocation of
jin-shei,
and Amais had returned to the Temple again and again, even after her grandmother’s remains had been suitably bestowed, just for the pleasure of seeing a smile on someone’s face as she approached.

It was here that Amais came when her mother, apparently oblivious to everything that was going on around her, had been persuaded to finally exchange what was left of her gold hoard for paper money.

“It would be the patriotic thing to do,” Vien had been told by her neighbor, the wife of a junior Nationalist officer, who had ferreted out the existence of the gold from Vien in an unguarded moment. “Our men fight for us. They are often not paid at all, for months—I would know, wouldn’t I? And you—you’ve lived here long enough to see—my own children go hungry sometimes. All gold belongs rightfully to the government, they can use it to settle debts, pay their armies, make sure we can sleep safe at night. It is not right to have treasure and keep it to yourself.”

To give Vien her due, it was obvious to her that, if she did not surrender the gold voluntarily, the woman would go to the authorities and have them come and collect it—in which case she might have no compensation at all. So she had taken all but a last final handful of
baya-
Dan’s gold, money she had hoped to use to set herself up in some sort of business through which she could support herself and feed her two daughters, and had taken it to one of the city’s banks. She was given so much paper money in exchange that she had to hire an extra pedicab to bring it all home. That second pedicab inexplicably lost its way and never arrived at Vien’s lodgings at all, and the money that she had kept had halved in value almost before she had got it home, and continued to be worth less and less every day, every hour.

“There is rent,” Amais had told Jinlien, trying hard to hold back tears. “Aylun is so little, she doesn’t know, she cannot help—and Mother… Mother is at the end of her rope…”

“Do you know that they never printed denominations greater than 10,000?” Jinlien said. “To do so would have caused Shenxiao to lose face by admitting that a problem existed. Instead, now you need ten thousand notes of that denomination in order to buy yourself bread and milk… if you can find it.”

“I need to find a job,” Amais said.

“You are a child,” Jinlien protested. “You’re barely fourteen. What about your mother?”

“She had a good hand in calligraphy,” Amais said, “and she can cook a decent meal, when she is given the ingredients to produce one, that is. There is very little else, Jinlien. She has never been anything else except a dutiful daughter to my grandmother, and then a wife and mother. And she can’t do the heavy work, the factory work, it would destroy her. She’s been doing little things—taking in sewing, cooking for people, caring for a few of the neighborhood children who are not too young to give her one of her headaches—but it’s all so little, and there are still bills to be paid.”

“It may not be all bad,” Jinlien soothed. “Let me ask my cousin, who works in the University library. It would not pay much, but it would be something—and a neat writing hand would help a lot there.”

“Library?” Amais said with interest. “Do you know—would they have any
jin-ashu
writings there?”

“Why would they?” Jinlien said. “It was never a public language, nothing that would have found its way into scholarly libraries. Nothing that would have been catalogd, anyway.”

“I was thinking of Tai’s poems,” Amais said.

“They would probably have some of those,” Jinlien said, “but they would likely be the
hacha-ashu
versions that were actually published, that were sold to people in the marketplace. The originals… I don’t know that anyone would have even known to save them, if they had come across them in her possessions after she died. Not unless she had left them specifically to a library, or to family, or to friends, or even to a surviving
jin-shei
sister if there was one. Are you looking for these poems?”

“The language,” Amais said. “I am looking for the language, and for all that it meant. Syai seems to be a much colder place than it used to be in Tai’s day. At least according to the journals that I have.”

“You should count yourself lucky that you have that much,” Jinlien said.

“But is there nothing left…?”

“Something, perhaps. There are traces of it here at the Temple, in some of the older books. Much of that is lost already for there are none who care to take the time to read it…”

“May I?” Amais interrupted eagerly.

“I don’t think it would be allowed,” Jinlien said with regret. “They probably would not wish any secrets to be inadvertently revealed to anyone who isn’t already one of us—one of the Temple’s people. But I know that the midwives still use
jin-ashu
, by tradition, when they write their patients up in their books. Not the newly trained doctors, though. Not the modern medicine. It doesn’t seem to lend itself to the grace and the beauty of that lost language.”

“But it can’t all be lost,” Amais said despondently.

“There are other places,” Jinlien said.

“Where?”

“Would you go look? Even if I told you that you might not like what you found…?”

“Oh yes,” Amais breathed. “Oh,
yes
, Jinlien. Sometimes I think if I could find another who knew that language, I would find another who could remember Tai’s world with me. A kinder place. With no war, and no hunger.”

“Who told you there was no war and no hunger four hundred years ago?” Jinlien questioned. “It’s an incomplete history, then, that you know.”

“But there was always the women’s country. There was always that,” Amais said. “There was always the language of gentle things, the strength that comes from knowing that there was a sister of the heart out there for you in the moments that were the hardest, when you most needed a friend… History isn’t just battles and famines, Jinlien. It’s people. It’s always been people.”

“Perhaps I can see if both of you can be found a place in the library,” Jinlien said, and she was only half joking.

She had been as good as her word, and had come herself to Amais’s lodgings to escort Vien—there had been only the possibility of only the one opening, and even that had been granted as a huge favor—to her new place or work and introduce her to her employer. Vien seemed happier for a while, after that, leaving for work in the mornings, returning in the mid afternoon, leaving Amais to supplement their income as best she could and to take care of Aylun.

Vien had been working in the library for nearly two years before Amais observed that she had begun to take a little more care than usual over her appearance as she left for work, glancing in a looking glass to make sure her hair was tidy, even using some of her hard-earned money to buy cosmetics rather than food. Amais noticed, but she had been so grateful that her mother’s mood was good and that they were somehow keeping their heads above water even though they had to keep swimming hard just to stay afloat that she had turned a blind eye to the possible causes of this state of affairs.

 Until the hour in which Vien returned from work one day and announced that she was married.