The Embers of Heaven (29 page)

He had stepped down as the head of the country. He would remain, would always be, Shou’min Iloh, the titular head of the People’s Party—but the new leader of the land, the one responsible for the day-to-day practical running of the country, was
ximin
Tang. Iloh remained, even in the shadows, the most powerful presence in Syai—it was still his ideology that was the guiding light, his thoughs that were the basis on which society and the new Republic were built. But it was Tang’s hand now on the tiller, his touch on the controls, and the people began to look around, see familiar ideas and visions reemerge from the past where Iloh had sequestered them in his headlong rush to the new, to the better, to the improved and the enlightened. The old things had always stood in Iloh’s way, and he had had no compunction of removing them if they became obstacles—Tang, more pragmatic, less visionary, knew how to incorporate them into the daily lives of people. There was a subtle release of breath, which people had been holding without even being aware of doing so; Amais, seeing it happen all around her, felt it like a physical pain—the sense of relief with which Iloh’s absence filled the city hurt her, as though she were personally wounded by it. And yet… this was the man under whose orders her sister had turned into a stranger Amais no longer knew, under whose orders her mother had vanished without a trace.

She did not give up her quest for Vien, although she had a sinking feeling that urgency was no longer necessary, that there was no way Vien could have survived the harshness of a labor camp. But then, finally, she did get some solid information—from Xuelian, of all people, on one of her increasingly rare visits to the Street.

“For what it is worth,” Xuelian had said, handing over a piece of paper with an address written on it—the paper was a scrap torn from the edge of another sheet, with something about iron in a snatch of typewritten text on the other side of the page, but the writing was still
jin-ashu
, elegant and neat. “I don’t know how old this information is. I know it’s true. Your mother was mentioned by name and by provenance—the presence of a Vien from Linh-an must mean something.”

“Thank you!” Amais breathed, her eyes full of tears. She might have had the urge to throw her arms around the older woman, but Xuelian threw up her hand to forestall any untoward expression of affection or enthusiasm.

“Go,” she said, “go on, and find her, and return.”

“If this were the old country, the women’s country, the Syai that my grandmother spoke of and that my mother came here expecting to find… if
jin-shei
still existed… someone would have known, Xuelian. Someone would have known long before now, and got word to me—what if it is too late? What if I am too late already…?”

“You are right,” Xuelian said, “we have lost our connection to our land. There used to be a connection between Syai and her women. Now… I am not so sure. But go, go quickly, go find that which must be found. And return safe. There are still things, even in this new world—especially in this new world, with all that has been lost from it—that we can talk about.”

Amais left the next day, defying warnings from her work unit that her absence would not be tolerated. Nearly five hours on a train took her to a small town consisting of little more than a clutch of houses around a large—and apparently mostly abandoned—factory; from there, she hitched a ride on the following morning with a supply truck that went further into the countryside, to the address supplied on Xuelian’s piece of scrap paper.

The labor camp that was her destination was a depressing, dingy place. After passing a checkpoint on the outer perimeter—Amais had had to buy, bribe and beg her way into the paperwork required to visit a camp such as this one—the truck stopped in a central square, which was mostly churned mud; the square was surrounded on three sides by barrack-like buildings, one apparently a dormitory for women, one for men, and one a mixture of administrative offices and a mess hall. Thin, hollow-eyed inmates stood listlessly in the mud in the square waiting for the truck and its supplies. Others could be seen trudging slowly in from some distant field or other place of labour, or peering through almost opaque glass panes in the narrow windows of the barrack houses.

“Someone will be here to sign for the supplies,” the truck driver told her. “You’d better wait and speak to whoever’s in charge here these days.”

That sounded vaguely ominous, as though things were not really under control out here. The advice, to speak to an official of some description and gain permission to talk to the camp inmates, was good, especially in the political climate of the times. But Amais had waited too long, had come too far, to be able to waste her time in waiting for cadres of any stripe. She was here. There was a good chance, for once, that she had caught up with her mother. Amais thanked the truck driver politely, and walked away from the truck. He clicked his tongue against his teeth in an obvious indication of disapproval, but in the end it was none of his business and he made no further attempt to stop her.

Amais had a photograph of Vien. It had been taken when she had married Lixao, and on it she looked almost happy, her hair neatly dressed with a red flower in it, a small smile revealing white, even teeth behind barely parted lips. She showed the photographs to the women in the square, meeting mostly a dead-eyed stare of a blank stupor—an inability or an unwillingness to give any information. It was a thin, mean-faced cook who finally came up with the information that Amais sought—an inmate herself, but one with more signs of life than most, and one who looked as though the hatchet clutched in her right hand might have been used on more than one previous occasion to slice more than the occasional side of mutton or pork.

The cook came out of the back door of the refectory just as Amais rounded the corner of the building.

“Excuse me,” Amais said, her desperation making her bold, trying hard not to focus on that hatchet, “I am looking for a woman.”

The cook sniffed. “I would not have taken you for one of those,” she said. “Besides, there are probably better looking women to be found somewhere other than this midden. This is the scrap heap, this is where all the rejects have landed—what makes you come here?”

“My mother,” Amais said in a thin voice. “I am looking for my mother.”

“Ah,” the cook said, entirely unapologetic. “I dare say there are a few mothers here. When did she get here?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea how long she might have been here. I’ve been searching for months and always I’m one step behind. I’m hoping…”

“There haven’t been any fresh inmates for a while,” the cook said. “When I first came in, it was right when they started this place, and women came in every day—almost every hour, in the first few weeks. Particularly the politicals.”

“I thought they were all… you were all… that it was a political offense that brought you to this place…” Amais said, startled into speaking her thought out loud.

“Cahan, no. I’m here for murder,” the cook said calmly. “But the rest—the poor political sheep—in ones and twos and in huddled groups, they came. Most of them too cowed to know what’s what. That’s how I climbed up over their backs—I got into kitchen work and I had food when others were starving. But there hasn’t been any new blood for some time. The cadres who run this place, they’ve changed a few times. Some better, some worse. The current crop is confused, I think. What news from outside, then? Things must be changing, if you can walk in here like this. When I first came here you would have already had your hair cut and you’d have been assigned a bunk to share with some other late-come convict—they slept three to a bunk, at one time, although it’s a little more… commodious… these days. What was her name, then?”

“Vien,” Amais said. “She came here from Linh-an, from the city. Political prisoner. Here, I have a picture.”

The cook took the photograph in her left hand and started at it for a long moment. She finally sniffed loudly, handing the photo back with a curt gesture. “I know her,” she said. “You might try the Field.”

“Which one?” Amais asked. She had not heard the capital letter—not until the cook gave her a strange look and thinned her lips into an almost invisible line of a nebulous disapproval.

“There is,” the cook said, “only one Field.”

She gestured at the mess hall, pointing to the muddy square beyond it, and the women’s dormitory at the far end of that, implying there was something behind it worth investigating.

Amais had realized that a specific field had been meant—but she had still to make the real connection, and it was not until she rounded the corner of the women’s barrack and saw the raw wooden planks with names carved on them, rising from a crudely fenced parcel of bare earth filled with barrow mounds, that she realized what the Field was.

She fell to her knees at the Field’s gateway, as though her legs had been chopped out from underneath her by the cook’s hatchet. Her eyes were dry and hot, like Syai had been over that last drought-stricken summer; her soul as barren and empty as Syai’s parched land. Somewhere deep inside her an ocean moved, an ocean full of light, the sea where her father had been lost many years ago—it seemed to be in a different world than this piece of empty ground and its impersonal graves. She caught herself wondering with an almost academic detachment if her parents would find one another in the gardens of Cahan, and then thought, in an equally emotionless way, that it was unlikely that her father would have made it there anyway. They might have been thrown together by the strangeness and the wonder of the world, but they did not share a heaven, or a hereafter.

There was nothing here of her father’s land of life and laughter. Only fear. Only silence. Only loss.

It was a long time before she found the courage to get to her feet and stagger forward, slowly, leaning on individual planks at each grave as though she were a very old woman. And then she paused by one of them, staring down at it, her hand resting above the scanty information carved into the wood. A city. A woman’s name.

Amais remembered her mother’s insistence that
baya-
Dan be properly buried, in accordance with custom and tradition, by no less than the priests of the Great Temple itself. It was only at that thought, as she stared down at the plain burial mound bereft of any rite or ceremony that something that might have been the memory of tears began to sting behind her eyes.

Nine

The first person Amais walked into as she stumbled back into the square, numb and staggering a little on legs which did not seem to quite belong to her, was the cadre in charge of the camp—a middle-aged woman with graying hair cut short to just above her jaw line and the narrowed suspicious eyes of someone who had been a jailor for so long that the concept of freedom was almost beyond her comprehension. There was a moment or two when Amais, part of whom was still utterly detached from what was happening, was almost convinced that the cook’s prediction would come all too true and that she would simply take her mother’s place in the women’s barracks, a pair of hands to replace a pair of hands, much as she had already done in the work unit back in Linh-an. Happily, the cook was also correct in that the current leadership was less than secure in their positions, and that news from the outside world had been hard to come by. The warden decided that Amais did not belong in the camp after all.

Her solution was to evict this possibly pernicious outside influence immediately. The truck was long gone by the time Amais had emerged from the Field, and the day was quickly drawing to a close—but neither of those factors were of any concern to the warden, who told Amais to leave immediately.

Amais walked out of the camp, into the gathering twilight, alone, feeling the weight of many pairs of hopeless eyes on her back as she left. At her mother’s graveside she had reached a kind of nebulous intention to seek out the authorities at the camp, to ask for her mother’s bones, to take her remains back to the city somehow and bury them next to where
baya
-Dan had been buried, with Jinlien’s help and with all the correct ceremonies. It seemed agonizingly unfair that Vien had come home to this riteless, unmarked burial in a shallow grave in a muddy country field. She had chosen to return to Syai, from a place where she might have had a long and sheltered existence, even if—in the aftermath of Nikos’s death—it had been a lonely and isolated one, and it had been at least partly the desire to do right by her mother, to return both
baya
-Dan’s spirit and by extension her own, and her children’s, to the land and the culture to which she felt she belonged. But somehow Amais had never found the words to ask such a thing of the cold-eyed warden, and had no reason to believe that such a request would be met with anything other than derision, at best. In the worst case scenario, the warden could have reconsidered her decision not to incarcerate Amais herself for her obvious reactionary and traditional views—because of which, after all, Vien had been sent to the camp in the first place.

The drive up in the truck had been an uncomfortable one, with that ancient conveyance bouncing and jouncing its way along the unpaved and rutted country road—on foot, and in the country darkness, the road was a treacherous mass of furrows and holes, snatching at Amais’s feet and twisting her ankles. There were few alternatives, lined as the road was with ditches on either side and beyond that unfamiliar and even more rugged terrain. Amais struggled along, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. She must have walked for hours, her body on that endless road, her mind adrift in memories and dreams.

Vien had a wonderful, lilting laugh. It had been years since Amais had heard it—but it was that, now, that returned to haunt her, like a recording of her mother’s soul being played over and over again in her mind. Vien, who had been very young once, and brave, and ready to renounce all that she was by birth and by upbringing because she had fallen in love with a pair of dark dancing eyes that belonged to one not of her kind—who had been courageous enough to re-embrace all of it to do what she saw as her duty to her dead mother and her living children. She had faced choices, and had made them; they had shattered her and broken her and left her helpless in their turbulent wake, but that wasn’t even her fault. It was not her doing that Syai had become what it had become. If she and her girls had returned to the kind of Syai that
baya
-Dan had preached, everything might have turned out different indeed—but they had not, and it was not, and everything changed in the moment when they had first found that out. Amais knew her mother had simply given up, abdicated responsibility, drifted where the tides took her, leaving Amais to be the strong one in the family and the one who took on the burden of Aylun. Aylun was on both their consciences, Vien’s and Amais’s—the one because she had not the strength to cling to her own survival and be a mother to a demanding child at the same time, and the other, because she had been a child herself, scared and ignorant, and had only done what she could under circumstances wildly beyond her control. But Amais could not blame her mother for that. Not now, not here, not on this dark road on a moonless night with the ghostly echo of her mother’s laughter.

It was late summer, but there was a sharp hint of cool air in the deepening night. Autumn was not far away.

A stray thought insinuated itself into Amais’s mind.

In a few weeks
,
I will be twenty one
…

That fact did not seem to matter, could find nothing to connect with in her scattered wits. It was thought without emotion, without making any connection to a possible future. It might as well have been,
In a few weeks, I will be dead.

She did not remember stopping, or lying down on the road side, on ground that already struck cold through her clothes, or going to sleep. But when she opened her eyes, she found herself with her head pillowed on the crook of her arm, and it was day.

Her feet and the abused muscles of her calves throbbed with pain; she must have walked most of the night—and further than she had thought, as she realized that the shape she could make out through her still sleep-clouded eyes was the gigantic factory in the town in which the train from Linh-an had deposited her on her arrival on the outward-bound leg of her journey from the city. She sighed, stirred, sat up and rubbed at her eyes.

On the road, a way away, she could see someone else walking slowly, head bowed, hands swinging free by his sides, as though lost in deep thought. Thinking that perhaps this was a local who might know how best to find the railway station from here, Amais uncurled from her bank, patted down her tousled hair and brushed down her clothes in an unconscious attempt to tidy her appearance, and stepped onto the road.

And froze, as the other walker lifted his head, and likewise halted in mid-step, looking at her.

The moment was brittle, sharp, a glittering shard of ice. Amais might have thought a hundred things at once, or she might have thought nothing at all—his simple presence, here, now, overwhelmed her, held her perfectly still, too full of feeling, too empty of it. And then the ice broke, with a sound in her mind that might have been just as sharp as the snapping of an icicle, and it all rushed back in—his voice, the strength of his arms around her, the memory of his sleeping face under the
wangqai
tree, the appearances she had witnessed in the rain on the Emperor’s Square, the heavy hand and the firm ideas which had guided Syai to the brink of catastrophe, his shining visions of serving the people and his blunders in implementing them—Iloh, Shou’min Iloh, the man to whom she had once given all that she was and who had taken her heart, her body, her spirit, and now… her family.

That was what came bubbling to the surface first—perhaps not unexpectedly, given the place from which she had just come. Those were the first words she spoke to him after the years of their separation.

“
You killed my mother
.”

She saw Iloh physically flinch at that, and was glad of it, glad that she had hurt him, that she had stabbed at his heart, that she had been able to inflict on him the barest fraction of the pain that raged within her. They moved, then, both of them—towards each other, instinctively, with intentions far from clear, but when she was close enough to him to touch him Amais raised her arms, her hands tightly clenched into fists, and hammered his chest with blows even as his arms came around her to hold her.

“You killed my mother,” she said again, her voice breaking, at last, into the tears that would not quite come before. The fists that had been pummeling Iloh’s chest uncurled instinctively and she clutched at the fabric of the gray uniform he wore, burying her face into his chest, feeling a button on his jacket digging sharply into her cheek but welcoming the pain and weeping in the shelter of his arms in a paroxysm of released grief that threatened to go on forever.

“Not here,” he murmured into her hair, his hand moving gently, helplessly, across her back in a small tender motion. “Come.”

But she could not move, stood rooted there in that road, until he finally reached down with another whispered word and slid an arm under her knees, lifting her up with an easy sweeping motion and stepping off the road into the sheltering thicket of trees above the bank, the place where she had just stepped out of, where she had spent the night.

He settled back into the V-split of a small tree, Amais half beside him and half across his lap, and simply held her in silence, gazing into the distance somewhere across the top of her head, until she cried herself out and finally lay quiescent in his arms, her eyes closed.

“Why are you here?” he asked at last, gently, as she drew a deep shuddering breath and fought to steady her resolve—which had melted away, just like that, as soon as he had been close enough to touch.

It took her several tries to speak; her voice kept breaking, thick with tears yet unwept, threatening to drown in them. She sketched out, very briefly, the events of the past few months—the ‘crimes’ Vien had been accused of, her indictment, her disappearance, her lonely and unmourned death.

“They were your idea,” she said. “The camps.
The people must be educated
, you said.
I know who I have to deal with to make sure that the Republic is not undermined even as it is being built.
I cannot begin to imagine what she must have gone through in those last months of her life… oh,
why
can’t I hate you?”

“How do you know what I said?” Iloh said sharply.

“I heard you say it,” she said, wiping at her face with the back of her hand like a child.

“When? I said that to Tang…”

“Yes,” she said.

“But you weren’t… nobody else was…”

“I heard it,” she said. “I don’t know. In a dream. I know I heard it. What were you thinking? For that matter, what are you doing out here anyway?”

“They all turned against me,” Iloh said, with a tinge of defensiveness. “You know that much, you must have seen it happen. I am still head of the Party, always that—they could not take that away from me—but Tang is now in my place as head of the country. Apparently my ideas were fine for running a guerrilla revolution, but when it came to running a country I was finally judged, I don’t know, too idealistic. Or too revolutionary. Too something.” His mouth twisted a little, at that. It was something that had come from Tang, and that had hurt him—Tang had been with him for so long, since the beginning of it all, and now Tang had taken against him. “But they all turned against me,” he said. It had not been only Tang, after all. “It was their idea, the open forum for ideas, and they convinced me—and then all that the people had to say was that everything was wrong…”

“Iloh…”

“That’s what I’m doing out here,” Iloh said. “I needed time… to think. To figure it all out. Tang is backsliding, damn him. He can destroy it all yet, if he goes too far…”

“But you are still Shou’min Iloh,” Amais murmured. “What are you doing walking a deserted country road alone at daybreak? I thought you would never again be out of sight of someone willing to take a bullet for you.”

“A man can feel suffocated,” Iloh said abruptly, “with too much protection. Sometimes I need to be alone with my thoughts if I am to hear myself think.”

“And alone with your conscience,” Amais said.

“There is nothing that burdens my conscience!” Iloh snapped. “I…
we…
needed people to work this land until we got to place I know we can be. But for that I needed people who believed, who knew, who understood. The camps—they were meant to provide a focus for that work, and to be a place where such understanding could be gained…” His voice cracked with passion. These were things he believed in, even if he had gone about achieving them in questionable ways. Amais could feel the power of that vision in the sudden tightening of his arms, in the way his heart beat powerfully against her temple where her head leaned against his chest. “Think about it! In less than a handful of years we achieved what Baba Sung’s Revolution couldn’t accomplish in nearly four decades! Once you get the masses of the people moving, believing, anything can be done. Anything! Oh, I had such dreams…”

“But you destroy,” Amais whispered. “You destroy all that came before. You cannot create a garden in a place which you first make into a desert.”