The Embers of Heaven (28 page)

“What you are doing might reflect poorly on him?” Xuelian said coolly, finishing the unspoken thought, apparently less than troubled by the concept. “It might, in his mind, at that. Men have such a twisted vision of women—they will come here, and to the other Houses, and they will make no secret of the fact that they enjoy the attention that they will pay good money for, and the accomplishments of all the women in the Street.  Did you know that some of the girls I have known could sing better than the professionals in the theaters and the operas, that some of them were better poets than the ones being published and winning acclaim?… These things mean nothing, they are just taken for granted, that is the thing that the men come here for. They come to find women who can hold sparkling conversations on any subject from raising pigs and growing tea to the latest political situation in the land, to find women who dress exquisitely in bright colors and wear jewels in their hair, to find women who can pour tea like the highest unattainable society lady and then turn into a tigress in bed—and they are quite happy that such women are to be found. But let one of their own try to step from their world into this one—and we are all monsters, every one of the women they come here to worship. The Houses suddenly exist for no other purpose than to lure virtuous young maidens into a life of sin and iniquity.” She laughed, and the laugh was short and harsh, a sardonic comment rather than mirth. “I am not entirely displeased that you kept this a secret, child. Let it stay one. Amais, you had a message…?”

“I spent a winter in your mother’s house,” Amais said, unable to take her eyes off Yingchi’s face, looking for Iloh’s features in her face, seeking his voice in her inflections. “I promised her… I would find you.”

“My mother…? You saw my mother…? How is she?”

“She was well, when I left her, but she was tired and somehow… somehow defeated by it all, despite being dignified and brave. Your father… is not well.”

“I know of my father’s…
illness
,” Yingchi said, with a trace of sarcasm so faint that Amais almost missed it.

“Your mother waits for your letters,” Amais said. “It would be a kindness to let her write back to you.”

“I cannot,” Yingchi said, looking up—and there it was, that echo of Iloh that Amais had been searching for, the steely resolve in her eyes. It was mixed with a lot of pain, but it was unshakeable. “You write to her. Tell her I love her. Tell her you found me, and I am doing fine. She is another who does not need to know exactly where I am.”

“Are you that ashamed of your life?” Xuelian questioned softly.

“Others… might be,” Yingchi said. “It would hurt my mother, and my father. It is possible they would lose face in the community, even the little dignity that is left to them after my father… after what happened to him. And I honestly don’t know what it would mean to Iloh.”

“Xuelian,” Amais said suddenly, “has he ever been here?”

“Here, in my House? No, thank Cahan, because right now I would be thinking back as to which girls he was with and praying that Yingchi had not been one of them.”

“No… on the Street,” Amais persisted, and there was color in her cheeks.

Xuelian gazed at her steadily for a long moment. “You are determined to hurt yourself with this as best you know how, aren’t you?” she said softly. “Yes, he has been to the Street. Few men in power resist its lure for long.” She lowered her eyelashes, breaking eye contact, and when she looked up again it was at Yingchi. “You and I,” she said, “will talk more, later.”

It was a dismissal, and Yingchi understood it immediately as such. She rose to her feet and bowed, turning to depart.

“Wait,” Amais said.

Yingchi hesitated at the door, glancing back at her lady for permission, then waiting for Amais to continue speaking.

“I have something for you,” Amais said, “I’ve been carrying the packet with
your
papers for a long time. I was you; that’s how I got into the city, after… after Iloh sent for you all.”

“He sent for us?” Yingchi questioned, and for a moment there was something else in her face—a hope, a fierce longing. “You mean my mother and father are here?”

“No, they stayed at the farm,” Amais said. “But I…”

“You have my permission,” Xuelian said, “to speak further when you are free, Yingchi. I think… the pair of you might have a lot to say to one another.”

It was another dismissal, and this time it was sharper. The quick flash of hope and joy that Yingchi had shown vanished behind a carefully schooled expression. She bowed her head, opened the door a crack, and slipped out of the room.

“
Two
,” Xuelian said pensively. “Two who love him. And both of them in my circle. How the noose tightens…”

“What do you mean?” Amais said, suddenly afraid.

“I think you will find out soon enough,” Xuelian said, cryptic as usual.

<>

Two days after that conversation, Amais had woken from the dream in which Iloh and Tang had been talking of the Republic and what was to be done about the campaign of free thought and criticism that Iloh had rashly, as he thought now, loosed upon the people of Syai.

There would be a price to pay for that freedom.

Less than two weeks after that dream, Amais knew just how high the price was going to be.

Everyone who had said anything against Iloh’s thoughts and ideas, anyone who had had the courage to propose solutions different from the ones that Iloh’s Golden Words implied, anyone at all who could be found to have thought, spoken or acted in a manner that could be called treason, now felt the full weight of retribution descend upon them. People were judged and condemned in intense ‘trials,’ and punishments were instant and harsh—and if the accused did not submit and accept the guilt that had been forced upon them, the punishments could be made even harsher. There was much to do in Syai, Iloh had decreed, and he was going to see it done. Those who could be dangerous—the educated, the eloquent, the people who had criticized some of Iloh’s earlier and more precipitous decisions and who were now being called reactionaries and recidivists—were given days, sometimes hours, to pack a few meager belongings into a small backpack and then marched off to labor camps where they would ‘rebuild the nation,’ where they could be reeducated and remolded to fit the new Republic.

It happened that fast in Amais’s household.

Aylun had left home not too long before this announcement, to live in a dormitory with a dozen like-minded young people, most of them several years older than herself and of a better “class” of revolutionary who were quite at ease with using Aylun as an errand girl and unpaid servant—but she was fiercely proud of that, in her own way, and did whatever was asked of her, hoping to earn her own admittance into the higher ranks. Vien and Lixao went to work every day like automatons, came back, said very little—to their co-workers, to one another, to Amais. Speaking one’s thoughts out loud could be a deadly danger in those days.

And then, one day, Amais left the two of them at home while she went out to buy food for the family. By the time she returned, Vien was gone—taken by a brace of taciturn guards (or so Lixao told Amais later, still shaking) to a destination unknown.

Eight

Lixao knew—or would say—no more than what he had seen happen before his eyes. The men who had come for Vien did not say where they were taking her. Lixao had been too terrified—and Vien herself far too deep in shock—to even ask what would happen to her. When Amais began to try and find out where her mother had been taken, she initially met a stone wall of silence. It was with a sense of something approaching horror that she finally stopped haunting offices of tight-lipped cadres who would not or could not tell her anything, and went in search of her sister.

Aylun, at first, was defiant—and every bit as uncooperative as the officials had been.

“She is our mother,” Amais said. “You have to know what she is, what she has always been. She will fall at the first sign of harshness. She has done nothing
wrong
, Aylun!”

“She must have,” Aylun said, “else they would not have taken her. Shou’min Iloh does not make unjust accusations.”

“At least find out where she is,” Amais said. “No more than that. Please, Aylun.”

She was pleading with an eleven-year-old, and somehow, in the twisted reality of their world, that didn’t seem incongruous. But it was not until Amais tried a different tack—pointed out that Vien’s conviction for treason, if not reversed, might detrimentally affect Aylun’s own chances in getting into the People’s Party hierarchy which now ruled society with an iron fist—that Aylun reluctantly caved in and promised to see what she could find out.

Her information was accurate, but late in coming. Vien, and others like her, had been held for at least a month in a compound in the outskirts of the city—but by the time Amais found that out and went there the place had already been emptied. A sweeper working in one of the courtyards volunteered that she remembered the women who were held here had been transported to a larger camp—she wasn’t sure of the exact location, but she thought it wasn’t far, somewhere just outside the city walls, in the low hills flanking Linh-an. Amais scoured the countryside on that flimsy information, sometimes with her own papers and sometimes with false papers which gave a fake name and let her travel further than the daughter of a convicted traitor might have been allowed, but her timing continued to be bad. By the time she had located the farm that had been converted as a holding center for the women destined for various labor camps in the country, the women were gone, and the paperwork, as usual, was labyrinthine.

Weeks, and then months, went by. Spring turned into summer, and began to slide into autumn again. Amais continued searching, taking desperate and hurried day-trips to places where she heard rumours of convicted women, but her mother was never among them. Aylun remained aloof, more so than ever, required by her own cadre supervisors to ‘draw a line’ between herself and her contentious family lest their guilt taint her own pure revolutionary record. Lixao stumbled through life in a sort of daze, reminding Amais forcefully of Iloh’s own father lost in his drugged stupor; it would not have surprised her to find out that Lixao had taken to the water pipe himself in order to take his overloaded mind and his exhausted spirit away from the harshness of the reality that faced him every day—but there was no evidence of that, and in a way that was far worse. At least, had it been the case, his lethargy and almost child-like dependence on Amais for a soothing word and a square meal would have weighed less heavily on her.

Taking care of her stepfather was something she felt she owed to her mother, but he was often needy, even clingy, taking time she could have used for other, more useful things. She could not find enough hours in a day to work at her own job—her family’s work unit, at the university, had employed her too, but it made little or no allowances for her personal life or her need to find her lost mother. If anything, the circumstances of her mother’s departure from the work unit apparently led the officials in control to extrapolate the loss of one worker into the duties expected of another–Amais was required to do the work she was employed to do and then more on top of that, even if it meant working late or working double shifts with only an hour or two snatched for sleep. In a better world, she would have actually enjoyed the access she had to the library now—but she was given no time and no opportunity to delve too deeply into its resources. Her job was simply to catalog and then remove, if necessary, books judged to be unsuitable for the current ideological climate. New books were being churned out all the time, and handed to her to catalog and display—but she found nothing of any redeeming value in any of these new works, apparently produced only to show the glories of the Republic and the villainy of all that went before. It was as though, in order for Iloh’s shiny new world to be born, the old one had to be comprehensively denied and abjured, its very existence wiped from people’s minds, its treasures destroyed along with its blunders and its mistakes.

Her visits to the Street were severely curtailed, her initial contact with Yingchi and that side of Iloh and his family subsumed into the greater anxiety of her own family and its disintegration. Xuelian was only present as a sort of bejewelled guardian angel to whom she occasionally fled to remind herself of the existence of another world, to read a few pages of journals, written in
jin-ashu
, from a lost and lovely time which seemed doomed to vanish forever from the minds of the very women who once cherished and nurtured it.

That autumn, just after Amais’s nineteenth birthday, Iloh announced another new initiative.

“We are a great nation,” he said, on another rainy gathering on the Emperor’s Square. “We can and we must take our place among the other great nations of the world. But we cannot do it as we are. For too long we have had our face turned inwards, worried only about our land and our crops and our harvests. We are pastoral, agrarian, farmers instead of workers and builders. The land is important—that will never cease to be important—but there are greater things at stake than just our survival. We must take a giant step forward, we must take a chance, we must catch up to all the realms that have had the advantage in the stakes of having the world’s respect and admiration. Our farms are organized now, and are worked by their communities—we need to turn our attention to other things, to factories, and self-sufficiency in our needs. To commerce. To industry. And this is how we will achieve it!” He brandished something in his hand, something that only those in the first ranks of the crowd pressed around him could see was a length of steel piping. “Steel! Steel will give us strength! Steel will give us the beginning of a new Syai! This is the year that we will turn our minds to making steel—and we are many, and determined, and what we set out to do we will achieve. Build your own furnaces, in your back yards, in your farmyards, in your courtyards—rip out the useless old ornamental fountains and raise foundries in their stead! Make steel! We will take iron and forge a bridge into the future!”

Amais had stared up at the podium, trying to understand, knowing what Iloh’s dreams were but failing utterly to comprehend how he thought this latest scheme would do anything to make them true.

But by this time anything that Shou’min Iloh said or asked to be done was treated by the people—half of them fanatically devoted to him in what was almost a cult of worship, the other half cowed into submission—as a direct command. Backyard foundries popped up like mushrooms, just like Iloh had demanded. They were fed with anything that came to hand—iron fences, plowshares, even great cast-iron family cooking pots common in every village house. After all, the peasants were told, they would no longer need those—they would be fed at the communal kitchen, with communal food, and there would be no further use for those heavy ancient monstrosities that their families had used for generations to cook the family’s meals in.

Fields were neglected in a frantic search for iron. In the countryside, field hands raided yards and paddies, taking what iron was offered and often what iron was not, taking the hidden and the hoarded with just as much sense of entitlement as that which had been freely and avidly thrust into their hands. Men, women and even children abandoned chores and school and stumped purposefully along sleepy country lanes, laying hands on iron implements, iron spades and shovels, iron skillets, tearing iron grilles from windows. In the city, Aylun and her friends went on scrap iron drives, lugging back whatever they found to the headquarters of her group where a backyard foundry, kept stoked to a red-hot glow, hungrily ate whatever was fed to it . Even the great grating over the channel of the Seven Jade Springs was ripped from its ancient hinges.

Youmei wrote to Amais about it, letters full of delicate detail and possibly dangerous secrets wrapped in the outwardly innocuous and endlessly subtle syllables of
jin-ashu
.

They came and took the great cooking pot, and the big iron plow, and anything else they could lay they hands on. I buried the other pot—the smaller one—out where the pigs used to be kept, the ground is still all churned up there and they would not notice it had been freshly dug. Perhaps this was unpatriotic of me—me, of all people, Iloh’s own family!—but I could not give that up. It is all I have of my own home, all that I have of my mother’s house. Even if I am never to cook in it again, I want to know it still exists. There is a part of me that would have died in the fires with that pot if it had been taken. Someday perhaps I will have the opportunity to tell Iloh why I did it, to explain, to apologize if I need to. I fully realize that if everyone held back their own sentimental objects nothing will ever get achieved… but it seems so little. I hope he would understand…

But Iloh’s steel pipe was no more than a dream.

What was produced by a developed industrial base could not be matched by the simple enthusiasm of cottage industry, untaught, ignorant, without the necessary underpinnings to produce either the quantity or the quality of the steel that Iloh had dreamed about. That much became obvious fairly quickly. But the vision was pursued with dogged determination—after all, the Golden Words spoke of failure not being an option, that a solution to any problem lay simply in approaching it correctly and applying enough determination to ensure success. So the people fed their furnaces, with more and more fury as raw material became scarcer, and turned from the care of the land.

And then the rains failed.

Youmei wrote of that, too, in the aftermath.

It was late, far too late, when the rains did not come, to plant and expect harvest—but people suddenly started desperately plowing their fields all around us, with the ox-drawn wooden plows of ancient days, old and rotten with their years, sometimes breaking in the traces. They tried everything—precious seed stock of winter wheat raided to keep famine at bay. But it is useless to try to shut the door in the face of a specter that is already half inside the house. I have seen hunger before, but now I have seen people starving, children digging broken roots out of the ground with their bare hands and gnawing on them with their teeth loose in their gums, eating them mud and all. I gave my share to my master, sometimes, and there were days that I too tasted mud in my mouth… but we are surviving. Somehow. I might have known this was coming; I have a little put by, safely hidden, and I feel guilty sometimes just knowing I have it and knowing that others do not—there are times I want to walk out with my pitiful little hoard and hand it out to the children who sit by the dry irrigation ditches with their souls barely connected to their bodies, waiting for a breath of wind to rip them away and take them to Cahan… ah, Gods, what is it that we have done to transgress, to deserve this punishment? How long must we endure…?

That winter was harsh, and dry. The spring rains were late. The summer was hot and the sky hung over the land like an accusation. Autumn came again, and with it a sudden deluge of rain that flooded river banks and swept away the dusty topsoil from parched farmlands, taking what little was left behind by the drought.

Another winter came, and a mass famine stalked the land.

In the spring, it was Tang who came out to the Emperor’s Square, in a mournful drizzle, to talk to the people. Iloh was not on the podium. Amais, in the crowd, tried to scan through narrowed eyes the people who stood behind Tang, their expressions carefully constructed masks, impossible to read—but Iloh himself was not there. She felt a stab of what was almost fear, so powerful that she almost completely failed to hear most of Tang’s speech—but she heard the gist of it. A recantation. A turning away, to ideas that were no longer Iloh’s own.

“Back,” he said. “Back to the land. We will regroup—remember that failure is impossible, that all we need to do is remember how to focus our dreams and our determination. But for now, we will look to providing food for those who have none—take back the land your ancestors tilled; take it, and make it yield its sustenance. We need to care for the land again as though it were our child and the child was sick and we are nursing it back to health and vigour. Back to the land. Under this blessed soaking rain, back to the land. We need to return to our roots…”

It was only later, when she read the accounts of the rally in the newspapers the next day, that she realized what Iloh’s absence had meant.