The Embers of Heaven (3 page)

“I was not so fortunate,” said her grandmother in a tone of noble sorrow.

“But back in Syai, every woman had them. At least one. Didn’t they?”

“They still do, I am certain,” murmured
baya
-Dan. “The women’s country, where you could find a sister in a friend, could depend on her, believe in her and in your bond when everything else failed, know that she always stood between you and doom.”

“Did you ever keep a journal yourself,
baya-
Dan?”

“Not quite like this,” Dan said. “She was special, Kito-Tai. She was a poet. She saw every day through a poet’s eyes. She filled a book every year of her life, you know. These are just a handful of her journals. The rest were lost and scattered, or just gone. Four hundred years is a very long life for a book.”

“Four hundred years…” Amais breathed, the eyes her grandmother had thought too slanted now quite round with wonder.

“That is your heritage,” Dan said. “That is what you came from, that stock.”

“My mother never told me about this,” Amais said.

Dan allowed herself an inelegant snort. “Then it is just as well that you have me,” she said.

But the passing of the journals seemed to herald a new phase in Dan’s life. Amais had always known her as what she considered to be old—
baya
-Dan was straight-backed and clean-limbed, but her hands had gnarled with age and her face was seamed with fine lines under the mass of carefully dressed silver hair. After the child she continued to stubbornly call Aylun was born,
baya
-Dan seemed to consider her task done, her life well spent. She withdrew even further from the reality that was her world. Elaas, the bright sunlight and the sapphire sea and the ancient vineyards twisted with venerable age at least as respectable as Dan’s own, all that simply ceased to exist. If Vien didn’t come by to make sure she ate—and that the food was prepared properly according to Dan’s own high standards of the lost world of Syai as best that could be managed—the old woman would be just as likely to spend the day in a sort of waking dream, drifting through the days with her eyes wide open but her gaze bent more on her past’s ephemeral glories than on her current existence.

Elena had almost forbidden her treasured younger granddaughter to go to what she had taken to calling “that woman’s little palace” when Vien brought the news that Dan was dying, and wanted to say farewell to her grandchildren—the words “Good riddance!” were hovering on her tongue, but they remained unspoken. In some ways the two old women were more alike than they realized. Both had a reverence for the circle of life, for those who went before, and for those who came after. Nika, whatever Elena might have wished, was of Dan’s blood, and Elena could not find it in herself to forbid the child to go and receive the dying blessing of her mother’s mother. She watched the three walk away; Amais running ahead to pluck some flowering weed by the roadside for her grandmother, Vien holding Nika’s still toddler-chubby little hand, and had a sudden vivid premonition that she might not be seeing this for very long, this remnant of family that was hers, this shadow of her lost son.

She almost called them back, ran to snatch little Nika up in her arms, demand that the child renounce her divided blood, that she become her own laughing little boy all over again. But perhaps it was already too late for that.

Vien had brought the toddler into the shadowy room where Dan now lay under the embroidered coverlets on her bed. Sensitive to the solemn mood of the occasion, Nika approached her grandmother’s bed when given a light push by her mother, and Dan lifted a hand over the child’s head, let it flutter down on her silky dark hair for a moment.

“My little Cricket,” she whispered. “You were born in such an hour… I wish your life could have been easier… but you and I will meet in Cahan one day. May you have light and grace all your days.” She allowed her hand to stroke Nika’s hair, and then sighed. “Send me your sister.”

Vien snaked out an arm and whisked an almost hypnotized Nika/Aylun out of the way. Amais stepped into the space so vacated, and this time Dan’s hand was not light, offered no stroking. She reached out and closed her fingers around Amais’s wrist, stared into her eyes with a gaze that was suddenly too full of power and passion to belong to a dying woman.

“Take the journals,” she said. “They are for you. You are the last of Kito-Tai’s line. Take the journals, and don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.” Her eyes fluttered, closed, all passion suddenly spent, as though she had been filled by some external spirit which had now left her. “Or your own…” she whispered, releasing Amais’s hand.

Amais turned her head, alarmed, and sought her mother with a gaze that was almost frightened. “Mother…”

“Watch your sister,” Vien said softly. She pulled Amais free of the dying woman’s bedside, planting a swift kiss of reassurance on the top of her daughter’s head. “Wait for me in the sitting room. Go.”

Amais took Aylun into the other room and gave her one of
baya
-Dan’s shawls to play with—she didn’t think her grandmother would mind. For her own part, she went to the chest where she knew that Tai’s journals were kept, She knelt on the floor beside it for the longest time, her mind curiously blank, and then opened the lid and carefully took out her legacy – the small pile of red notebooks. They sat there in her lap, in apparent innocence—but they had changed for Amais. Before, they had been a fascinating if somewhat distant link to her ancestry and her past. Now they were heavy with portent. Amais had been charged with something by her grandmother on her deathbed, and these journals were the only way to find out just exactly what it was that she had accepted as her life’s work. Her grandmother had not
exactly
asked Amais to promise anything, and Amais hadn’t
exactly
given her word, but it had been implicit.

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own…

When Vien came out to gather her children up, her eyes were red and swollen.

“
Baya
-Dan…? Amais asked, her voice quavering just a little.

“She is gone, Amais-
ban
. She is gone.”

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own. Those words, her grandmother had uttered out loud. But now, as Amais remembered them, there had been another phrase, unspoken, ephemeral, ghostly, hovering in the air and settling lightly in Amais’s mind and memory: Or mine.

Or mine….

But was it Dan’s name she had wanted made immortal… or that of the strange spirit that had possessed her just before death came to claim her?

“Come on,” Vien said, holding out her hand. “There are things I need to do now. Let’s go home.”

Amais got up obediently, gathering up the thirteen precious notebooks, wrapping them up in a secure little parcel and hugging them to her chest all the way back to Elena’s house.  Somewhere in between those two places, the shrine to Syai where
baya-
Dan’s spirit now lived and the cheerful green-shuttered house that her still-living grandmother inhabited, walking in the sunshine of Elaas with the treasure of Syai clasped close to her heart, suspended in the empty air between two worlds, Amais realized for the first time in her life that she was no longer sure just where ‘home’ was or how her heart was supposed to find her way there.

Three

Amais kept her head down and herself out of the way in the months that followed, months in which everyone around her seemed fractious, annoyed, or outright furious at things that hovered just outside her comprehension. Vien let down her hair and donned the traditional Syai mourning attire for her mother, which led to Elena making acid comments about the propriety of wearing so much white with her mother newly dead and her husband not a year in his grave. Vien cast her eyes down and took the barbed remarks in pious silence, her hands folded before her in gracious eastern position, suddenly prominently and obviously alien in the house where she had tried so hard to fit in and where she had once been wholly accepted.

Amais had been dressed in like manner, and the small knot of village children who were her companions had been curious and blunt, as children often were.

“That’s what we wear in mourning,” Amais had explained, plucking at her white dress with nervous fingers. Out here in the Elaas sunshine, in the bright light of Elaas customs, the white garb did seem outlandish and strange.

“So your people are happy when someone dies?” her friend Ennea asked. “White is a color of joy, you wear it when you marry not when you die.”

“But back in Syai…”

“Is that where you’re really from?” asked Dia, schoolteacher’s daughter, slightly higher social caste than the rest of them and generally given to passing on oracular pronouncements from her exalted parent as though they had been edicts handed down from the Gods on their Mountain. “My Papa says that blood will tell.”

“I was born here,” Amais said fiercely. “I am from here!”

“But your mother wore black like she should when your father died,” said Ennea with a child’s utter disregard for tact or feelings, intent on pursuing some fascinating nugget of information and oblivious to all else.

“That was different,” said Amais, conscious of a sharp pain as the scab over that older wound, unhealed yet, cracked a little to allow a trickle of pain like heart’s blood to escape. “My father was of Elaas, and…”

“But so is your grandmother,” another girl, Evania, pointed out. “
My
grandmother says she was born on the mainland, in the city, before she came to live out here—but she was born here. So she was of Elaas, too.”

Amais remembered the silk-swathed rooms of her grandmother’s house, the scrolls of poetry in a foreign tongue, the scent of alien incense.

“I don’t think so,” she said carefully, too young to analyze the thing completely, aware that she could not defend it in the face of her playmate’s practical questions because they simply could not understand it.

“My mother says you’re strange,” Ennea said.

But she had still been willing to stay Amais’s friend and companion for all that, and no more was said on the matter, at least for the time being.

Dan had been cremated, on Vien’s insistence, and with considerable trouble—since the body had to be removed from the island in order for this to be accomplished, and getting the necessary permits was not straightforward. In this, the established Syai community in Elaas offered help—and that might have compensated for much, being welcomed back into her own world after choosing to step out of it for Nikos’s sake. But the relations between Vien and her own people remained formal, and a little cool. It was as though Amais’s own dilemmas were projected onto her mother, written much larger than those plaguing her own small self. Amais was still a child, and therefore obliged only to obey the instructions of those older and wiser than her—but Vien was an adult. Her choices would affect not only her own life but those of the people who depended on her—her two daughters.

And, it soon became apparent, the insistent ghost of her mother.

When Vien first said the word ‘home’ and meant something other than the small cottage by the sea where she lived with Elena and the children, Amais almost missed it—but there was something in Vien’s face, a soft and yet steely determination, that frightened her into paying much closer attention.

The change came quite softly, nearly imperceptibly.

“I must take Mother home.”

That innocuous sentence let the first breath of moving air into the little house’s cold, stagnant air which was demoted, without ceremony, into a temporary dwelling. No longer the ‘home’ that Amais had known; the only home that she had ever known.

Elena did miss it the first time. She simply ignored it, like she ignored so many things in those days. She ignored Vien’s views on how her younger daughter should be dressed, fed, disciplined. She ignored Vien’s older daughter altogether. She tried hard to ignore Vien’s white clothes and the white ribbon Vien wore woven into that incongruous glossy smooth black hair that now hung long and loose down her back.

But it quickly became too big to ignore. Mysterious people with inscrutable faces and round dark eyes called on Vien at Elena’s cottage, treating Elena herself with scrupulously correct if icy politeness; Vien herself would disappear for several days at a time, to the mainland, her only word on her absence that she had ‘arrangements’ to make. When she returned to the island after her final visit to the mainland, she carried something in a large envelope, clutched to her breast as though the contents were more precious than jewels.

That time even Elena had to notice.

“What do you have there?” she asked in the voice she now customarily used with Vien when she spoke to her at all, clipped and brusque, as though she had judged her daughter-in-law of some crime and found her unforgivably guilty.

“Tickets,” Vien said. “We’re going home, the three of us and Mother. Back to Syai.”

Everyone looked up at that, Amais in stark astonishment and Elena with something indefinable that was equal parts fury and fear.

“It’s a long, wasted journey for a baby to make,” Elena said at last, after a moment of silence, riding her emotions on a tight rein. “Really, Vien. Your mother lived on these shores all of her life. She can hardly object being buried in those hills now.”

“Did she?” Vien questioned softly, and Amais began to pay much closer attention. This was starting to sound a lot like the frustrating conversations she had with her friends at the rock pools, dressed in her incongruous and inconvenient white ‘mourning’ garb. “I don’t think she ever quite lived here. Not really.”

“She was born here,” Elena snapped. “As far as I know she had never set foot in Syai.”

“Her body, no,” Vien said. “But her spirit… I do not think her spirit ever left Syai. She was half a woman all of her days, yearning back to the things that had made her who she was. She deserves to rest there, at peace at last.”

“Syai is a long way to take the child to a funeral, ” Elena said crisply.

Amais bowed her head, to hide the sudden tears that welled in her eyes. There was only one child in Elena’s mind, and it was not herself.

Her little sister slept in her crib, oblivious to the conflict around her and about her. She would never know, Amais thought, she was too young for any of this to have any meaning. She had never known her father, could never remember him.

“It is a long way, yes,” Vien said, and lifted her head, meeting her mother in law’s eyes. “But it isn’t just a funeral that we would go for, Mother-in-law. We go… to stay.”

Elena’s eyes widened for a moment, in pure shock that she could not hide, and then narrowed again and hardened until they were chips of obsidian in her set face.

“I forbid it,” she said, dropping each word like a pebble. Amais could almost hear them rattle as they rolled around on the floor around the women’s feet.

“I’m sorry,” Vien said, “but you cannot. It is not your place.”

“This is my son’s child,” Elena said, crossing the room and snatching up the sleeping toddler out of her crib. Nika woke up abruptly, knuckled her eyes with her hands and began to whimper softly as Elena’s hands were clutching claws locked around her, holding on tight.

“It is my child,” Vien said. “And here, she would always be
wangmei
, just like… just like I was.”

“What are you talking about? What is that? She is my son’s daughter, the last thing of his that I have on this earth. She is no wing… whatever that is.”

“
Wangmei
,” Vien repeated patiently, standing her ground. “It means ‘stranger of the body’, an outsider, someone who obviously does not belong in a community. Someone different. Look at her and tell me how she will fit in here in a few years time, when she’s grown enough to want playmates, friends.”

“Amais never had a problem,” Elena said defensively, bringing her other granddaughter into the discussion for the first time, but only out of desperation, sacrificing her as a pawn to keep her claim on the younger, the precious one, the now openly wailing toddler in her arms. Amais’s eyes were wide, her mouth parted, her heart beating painfully fast.

“Amais,
korimou…
” Vien said, letting a quick and strangely soft glance rest on her oldest for a moment. She had used the word Amais’s father had called her,
korimou
, ‘little darling’—it was hard to tell whether she had done it deliberately or instinctively, but either way it suddenly sounded strange to Amais, foreign, coming from her mother’s lips. “Would you let your grandmother and I talk alone? I’ll come find you in a few moments.”

“But, Mother…”

“Please, Amais-
ban
. It is important.”

Amais slipped off the chair where she had perched trying hard to be invisible and dragged herself outside with unwilling obedience. But this concerned her—this was her life they were discussing in there —so she didn’t go far. She merely turned the corner and crouched underneath the window. It was shuttered against the sun, but beyond the shutters the window was open and it was not hard to eavesdrop on the conversation within.

“Amais is just as much
wangmei
as anyone,”  Vien said as the door closed after her daughter. “But Aylun…”

“
Nika
,” said Elena fiercely.

“Aylun, for that is the name she takes with her to Syai, not Nika,” Vien countered. “She could be Nika only here, in this house, in your heart. But she can still be saved, Elena. She can have one world to choose from and she will never know different. Amais… it is already too late for Amais. She is already of two worlds, and will always be torn between them. My mother is probably to blame for that. Perhaps I was, too, for letting her take my child, so young, so malleable—but Amais is already lost here, in this place, because she already knows who she is, who her ancestors were. She is more than
wangmei
here, she is always going to be
xeimei
, stranger of the heart, someone who might well have the sense of belonging to this community but who will never be a real part of it. Just like I never really was.”

Amais suddenly felt hot tears welling in her eyes.
She will take me away…

“You were,” Elena whispered fiercely, rocking her Nika in her arms. “You
were
. When you chose to be.”

“Amais would have chosen to be, in these last months,” Vien said, and tears stood in her eyes. “Why have you not let her, Elena?”

“No,” Elena said, and for the first time her voice broke, brittle with the weight of too much sorrow. “Don’t take her away from me, Vien.”

“You have already done that,” Vien said. “I don’t have to do anything—you have already pushed Amais away yourself.”

“Not Amais. This one. Go, if you have to—take your child—but leave me Nika. Nika has my son’s eyes. She…”

“Elena,” Vien said quietly, “she does not. Amais does. Nika is Aylun, if anything she has my mother’s face, her hair, her eyes, her mouth. She will never be Nikos, Elena. She can’t be.”

Elena stared at her, shaking her head minutely, as though she found her words incomprehensible, as if Vien had suddenly started speaking in the language of her ancestors. Which she had, in a way. This had been the first time she had ever used a word of that language in her mother-in-law’s house, and it seemed almost ironic that the words she used meant ‘stranger’.

“Excuse me,” Vien said, her voice floating out of the shuttered window, filled with the serenity of one who had fought hard battles but who had finally won a war that had been raging for a long time in her soul. “I think I had better go find Amais now, and talk to her.”

Amais, under the window, uncoiled like a whip and raced across the rocky slope behind the house, down the path that led down to the cove. She knew the track, every stone and rut and bump on it, and she fled surefooted down the familiar route, around the first curve and out of sight of the house before her mother had had a chance to turn around and open the door.