The Embers of Heaven (17 page)

But the question had made Amais cast her mind back to the Temple, and she suddenly had the vivid impression that the woman who had cast her lot with the Gods was somehow far happier than this sister of her heart, living in what was luxury and opulence compared to the frugal existence in Sian Sanqin.

“She is content,” Amais said carefully, after a pause. “Or at least she seemed that way to me. Content and at peace with herself. But she said that there was a story behind your life, and hers—and that it was your story to tell, Lady Xinmei. So I come to you from the Temple, as a supplicant.”

“What is it you were seeking at Sian Sanqin?”

“The women’s country,” Amais said. “The language that is lost, and the secrets it carried.”

Xinmei gazed at her for a long moment with glittering eyes, and then sighed; seeming to release a breath she had been holding against some unlooked-for evil thing. She courteously indicated the small tea table and the seating cushions piled around it. “Will you sit?” she asked. “We will talk. It has been a while since I have spoken on this with anyone… with another woman… with a woman so young. You have an unusual face, a strange accent. If I may ask, where do you come from, that your paths bring you to my door? Perhaps you will tell me your story, too, if you come asking to hear mine.”

It was the time-honored trade, news and stories for hospitality. Amais was no stranger to it, after her journey across Syai. So she told of her birth in a distant land, of a grandmother whose spirit had always dwelled in the Syai of old while her body lived out its days on a sunny island halfway across the world, of her own travels back to Syai with her mother and little sister, of the years in the city seeking answers to questions which had ceased to be asked a very long time ago.

“Have you been to the city? To Linh-an?” Amais asked. “This… all this… this garden, the music of your fountains, the cut of your gown, it is all almost forgotten in Linh-an, I think, unless it is kept as a careful secret behind high walls and locked doors, hoarded against a stray glance of a stranger’s eyes, against the coming of the night. Everything is so different from the world my grandmother told me about. I grew up believing in things that no longer exist.”

“It may be that it will soon be forgotten here, too,” Xinmei said, with a veiled glance towards the gate that led into the occupied outer courts.

“If I may be permitted to ask… who are they? What do they want here?”

“They are lIoh’s people,” Xinmei said. “They are brave men and women, but they come with the winds of change, with talk of reform and what they call redistribution. Those of us who own property or collect rents are in danger for no other reason than being what we are—they call us landlords, and evil. I think these are here because of three things—they wish to let us know that they are near, and they matter; they say they are here to protect us, the family and the retainers inside this house, from the mobs if such should rise against us, although if this happens it will have been the talk of these very soldiers which precipitates it; and, perhaps most obvious of all, they needed a place to sleep and they would have had to evict the peasants from their homes if they chose to stay at their poor houses in the village. So far, they’ve paid for their keep—but they’ve been here for nearly three weeks now, and I very much fear that the gardens of my father’s house will never be the same again…They are everywhere, and it was brave of you, my dear, to even think about travelling across Syai at this time at all, let alone by yourself and with no protection. But let us not speak of them now. They are nothing to do with your own journey.”

“I had to go,” Amais said simply. “I did not even think about this, about people like that, when I set out.”

“Brave,” Xinmei repeated. “You have a courageous heart. If you come seeking the places where some trace of
jin-ashu
remains and it is still strong, you have found one right here. You do not know this, you are far too young and you have not lived in the land for long enough to have a memory of it—but in the days of Empire one of the daughters of this house was always sent out as a new Emperor’s concubine. I have letters, thousands of letters, some of them dating back four or five changes of Emperors, from the women who were sent to the foot of the Imperial throne. All in
jin-ashu
, all written in a secret language that no man in the palace of their origin could understand if the letters were intercepted, and no man in the house of destination could understand until its women read it to their husbands by candlelight in the darkness before dawn. And then the letters going back across the land, with quiet instructions as to what the concubine should tell her Emperor in the nights she shared with him back in the city. For generations, my family has been the counsel in the shadows, the whisper that ruled the command that ruled the land… I myself would have been that woman, in my generation, if it weren’t for
jin-shei
. That is the story that you came here to hear, I think.” She paused for a moment, her eyes veiled by dark lashes, and then lifted them again to meet Amais’s own. “It is not,” she said, “a story that I can be proud to tell. There are things in my past that I am not proud to have done. But my
jin-shei-bao
has asked me to do it in the letter that you brought, and it is a far, far lesser thing that she asks of me, so many years later, than I have ever asked of her when we were both young. So I will do it. But first and foremost—you are a guest, and I have the hospitality of my house to offer you. Will you have tea?”

Seven

“What did I know?” Xinmei said, after the tea had been brewed, after the scent cup had been poured and set aside to flavor the air with the delicate aroma of fine tea picked in the mountains in springtime. “I was fourteen, with all that age implies. I was selfish and ignorant and I thought—nay, I
knew
—precisely what I wanted and what my life owed me. And so I wronged two sisters, perhaps, because of my own desires—one of my own blood and my family, the other my sister of the heart. You see, it was I who was supposed to go to the Emperor when the time came for my generation to offer up one of its daughters.…”

The story was stark in its simplicity, in the end. Fourteen-year-old Xinmei was beautiful and willful and precocious, all qualities that would have made her a natural choice for the Emperor’s concubine even if she had not been reared to the idea that this would be her fate. But that very precociousness came back to haunt her, because, young as she was, she had already chosen the sweetheart with whom she wanted to share her life. Being traded away to a man she did not love, even if he was the most powerful man in Syai, even if her role would be to guide and influence that power into the channels which her family wanted, became an appalling prospect for her, one she could scarcely bear to contemplate, and she recoiled from such a destiny. If she had been left alone to grow up at her own pace she would probably not have made the decisions that she did—but she was young, and desperate, and eloquent. And if truth be told her sweetheart was very young himself, and youthful passions did not need much convincing to come bursting out from behind the carefully constructed dams of protocol and decorum.

“I cannot go to the Emperor,” Xinmei had told her mother, on the day before she was due to leave for Linh-an. “I am not acceptable.”

“Whatever do you mean? You are the chosen one, you have been deemed suitable by your father and your entire elder kin!” her mother had protested.

“I cannot go,” Xinmei had said. “You cannot send the Emperor a woman who is not a virgin.”

The implications of that calm, quiet statement struck Xinmei’s household like lightning, leaving wreckage in its wake. Her father, summoning her into his presence, had been purple with rage. He had demanded to know who had spoiled her, but Xinmei, finding strength in the sure knowledge that such an admission would spell doom for the boy she had chosen to love, found surprising strength in refusing to name her lover. Her father had threatened to kill
her
, for bringing dishonor to the family name, for losing face to no less than the Emperor himself; her mother had prostrated herself at her husband’s feet and begged for her daughter’s life. But, in the end, her father had been typically pragmatic about the matter. Xinmei would be allowed to live. Her younger half-sister Xuelian, thirteen at the time and assumed to be too young to have indulged in the kind of behavior that had barred Xinmei from the Imperial bed, would be sent in her stead.

But Xinmei would not escape punishment. Her fate was announced to her in a full family gathering the day after Xuelian left for Linh-an: if she was not to belong to the Emperor of Syai, then she would belong to its Gods. Instead of entering a household where she would command servants, she would become one—she was to be sent off to Sian Sanqin, the Temple on the mountain, as a handmaiden herself, as one of the dedicated and celibate acolytes of the Gods of Cahan.

“I was to be punished,” Xinmei said to Amais, her gaze distant, focused somewhere on the long-gone years of her childhood and her youth. “My father could not send me to the Emperor, and thus his plans were thwarted—and he was not going to be the one with whom it all ended, who failed to continue the traditions of our family’s influence at the Court. Very well, he had dealt with that, he was lucky enough to have another daughter to send—although my heart broke for Xuelian at the time. She was a child, such a child…” Xinmei paused, dropped her eyes to the hands in her lap. Outwardly, she was calm, even serene—but as she told the tale of her life it was those hands that gave away her real feelings. They were tightly twined around one another, her fingers white with the pressure she was exerting. “But there was still the matter of what I had done. And allowing me to marry my lover would have been condoning that. So he would make sure it did not happen. I would be locked away in the Temple… for the rest of my life.”

“And so you asked her to go,” Amais said with quiet conviction, putting the pieces together in her mind. She tried—and failed—to imagine the old woman she had left behind in Sian Sanqin as a young girl who was being asked in the name of the most holy of things to ascend that mountain and never come back down again as a free woman with her own life and dreams and hopes. Who was being asked to give herself, of her own free will, to the Gods of whom she had not thought of until that moment as having any say in how she lived her days. “Your friend. Your
jin-shei-bao
.”

Xinmei looked up, and tears stood in her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “I asked her to go in my stead. In the name of
jin-shei
, I asked her. She was fifteen, a year older than me—but she was quiet, studious, and meek, she had been leading precisely the kind of compliant and sequestered life that my father had demanded of me. She had no man that she loved; she was well past the age where a marriage might have been arranged, though, and I knew that she had refused one suitor when her family had brought him to her. She didn’t
want
the life I wanted. She wanted something else; something different… even I did not know what. But she could find it in the solitude and the prayer up on that mountain. She could find it there far better than I.”

“But did she want to go?”

Xinmei shook her head slightly. “I don’t know,” she said. “That, I never asked. All I did was write her a letter—I told her of my father’s edict, of my love for the man to whom I knew my life belonged, even back then, even when I was such a child. And I also said that I thought I might already be carrying my lover’s child.”

“Was it true?”

“Not then,” Xinmei said. “I had hopes, but no evidence, no proof. But there was that to fight for—that life together. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted a family. I wanted an earthly life, full of earthly pain and pleasure… not the life of a priestess on a mystic Temple where people go to find the answers to riddles posed in their dreams.”

“Like I did,” Amais said, with a small and slightly sad smile.

“If it had been me that you had met up there instead of my
jin-shei-bao
,” Xinmei said, “you would not have got your answers. If I were still alive, all these years later, I would have been a bitter and broken old woman. And you say… you say that she is not…?”

It was a question again, a plea for reassurance, even for redemption. But Amais could not give it, not in the way that it had been asked for; as with Xinmei’s phantom pregnancy of many years ago, where this lost
jin-shei-bao
’s state of mind was concerned Amais had only her own instincts and intuition and no evidence. She had not known any of this shared history while she was up in the Temple, or that this question would be asked, that an answer would be mutely pleaded for.  “I only knew her for a handful of days,” she said at last, choosing her words carefully, “but in that time I never heard say a harsh word—about anything, least of all herself.” She paused. “Did you ever go and see her, up there?”

“Twice,” Xinmei said. “The first time was when that child I had told her I might be carrying was finally born—it might have been almost a year after she went to Sian Sanqin. And then, once more, years after that, but that time I did not make myself known to her. I was just one of the pilgrims. She probably never even knew I was there. But I needed… I needed to see.”

“And did you?” Amais said. She felt as though she had reached back in time and brought forward something living and breathing that had not existed in her world for a hundred years or more—that she was looking into the eyes of an ancient truth, one that she knew she had been sent here to find. Her heart was beating hard, and her eyes shone with the light of someone with a mission; she had no idea of just how unutterably beautiful she looked as she sat in the tea pavilion, wrapped in the scent of the blooming garden and the fragrant tea.

“I thought that she was angry,” Xinmei murmured. “I thought that she would rather not speak to me. Now… I am not so sure. Perhaps I should have said something then. But I did not, and I have not been back since. I asked for a hard, hard thing, and I knew it, and the canker of that guilt has been eating at my
jin-shei
vow ever since. I have never quite forgiven myself for it.”

“But what happened?” Amais said. “How was your father convinced of this? How was it that you were not sent to Sian Sanqin anyway, despite the fact that someone else had agreed to go in your place?”

“The Temple took care of that,” Xinmei said. “They had been promised an acolyte, and they got one. My father had to be content with that—he could not rail against a Temple decree, that would have been flouting the Gods themselves. As for me, I was now someone else, another person altogether. I was no longer promised. I was free. And my father had run out of options.”

“He allowed you to marry?”

“He refused me a dowry, but he said nothing further on the subject,” Xinmei said. “In fact, he never spoke to me again at all—until the time that he was on his death bed, and he summoned me back to the house.”

“He wanted to say goodbye?…” Amais murmured, finding herself oddly touched by this possibility.

Xinmei shook her head once. “No. He was not a forgiving man, and he never forgave me. But Xuelian had worked out well, instead, and he had no complaints on that score—and the Gods and the women’s vow had thwarted him on the other project, and he had simply turned his back on it. But none of that meant that I was back in his favor.”

“Why did he wish to see you, then?”

“Because of one last act of malicious intent,” Xinmei said. “My husband—the lover of my youth—had been stricken down by a paralysis when he was barely into his middle age, and it was my duty to care for him. He would have no servant do it. In a way, I guess that was expiation, after all.” She allowed herself a tiny grimace, the first time she had let her carefully schooled face show any sign of emotion. “I was responsible to him, to that family; our daughter, the only child we had who survived to adulthood, had married and moved away from our house and it was the two of us and a handful of old family retainers. But now my father summoned me back and told me that I was to inherit the farm, and take over from him.”

“This farm?”

“Yes, this place. This house, where I was born, where I rebelled, from which I was cast out once.”

“And he gave it back to you!” Amais said. “How was that malicious?”

“Because it meant two things,” Xinmei said. “One was that he was disinheriting his rightful heir in my favor, which meant that my life would be filled for the rest of my days with the bitterness and the endless machinations of that rightful heir against me. In a way, he sundered me from the very family I was to inherit, he knew that I would never have the cooperation of any of them in any decision I chose to make, and that I would be alone all my life.”

“But your husband…”

“My husband belonged to another family. I could not refuse my father and his deathbed edict. I could not take care of my husband in the manner that he demanded, and still accept that edict. So he tore me apart from him in the end, my father. He won, even if he did not live to see the fruits of his victory.”

“What… became of your husband?”

“He took a concubine, to care for him,” Xinmei said, “and after a while he forgot that he had had a wife… But he has been dead these many years now, and that is not the part of the story you came here to seek—it’s what happened between the two of us, my
jin-shei-bao
and myself. The things that could be asked of a sister were sometimes impossible, but they could not be refused, they could never be refused, not if asked in the name of
jin-shei
itself. And look how that shaped all our lives.” She bowed her head. “I still have it, you know.”

“You have what?”

“The letter that I wrote to her, to ask her. All the letters that we exchanged, in fact—all of them, mine to her, hers to me. She sent all of my letters to her back to me on the day she left for Sian Sanqin.”

“Is that why you thought she hated you for it?”

“No—at least, I don’t think so. It was not an act of retribution; she was not vengeful or mean; it was not in her nature. It was simply itself—it was an act of farewell to the world she knew she would never return to. And yes, before you ask, before you even consider if you may ask, that has already been requested of me in the letter that you brought. The letters are yours to read, if you will.”