The Embers of Heaven (46 page)

Xuan knew nothing of that dream—and Iloh, who did, would have smiled at the way I stood thunderstruck with the paper in my hand. Smiled, because he would have both understood in a fundamental way—he had his own dreams and obsessions, after all, and knew how powerful they could be—and because he had always gently mocked me for the struggle that went so radically against his own, to bring back the old and revere it instead of simply razing it to the ground in order to make place for the new.

And I—I was caught in a maelstrom of emotions. I had seen the words written on a piece of paper, which meant that the vow of sisterhood had been exchanged between at least two living women, or at least the intent had been there. But were you, my daughter, one of them? Was this your pledge, given or received, or did someone tuck away a precious slip of paper into a book and then lent it out or let it slip out of their possession without retrieving those two written words of promise? And if it were you… ah, my child, but a part of me was overjoyed and another part deeply envious of your experience—because I, of course, had never had a real jin-shei-bao myself.

Under my own rules, under the rules of the women’s country, I could not ask you, and if I did you did not have to tell me. I had already broken those rules, it was true—there was nothing in the sacred sisterhood that defined the thing that I had done, the offering of the jin-shei bond to the land of one’s birth—but that was something else again, something different, something new. Traditional jin-shei was still a thing that remained between a sister and a sister, and not even mothers, unless invited, could share of it. I ached to talk to you about it, to tell you all that I knew and I believed, to tell you what my grandmother once told me—but I had no right to broach the subject with you, so instead I cheated—I waited until I saw you finish “Song”, and then I gave to you what I had treasured these many years myself—Kito-Tai’s journals.

If there was a place to learn about the power of jin-shei, then it was this wellspring, where I had learned it myself.

And then I realized that I had still things left to learn, and that sometimes mothers can learn from daughters, too.

Jin-shei was a women’s mystery, shrouded in secrecy, buried in centuries of whispers and veils. But there is a time for secrets, and there is a time to bring the secrets out into the light of day and share them amongst all, built on, wished on, wrought into new dreams for a new day. It’s a little bit like those lost and lovely incense burners in the Great Temple, whose embers were carefully tended from the elder days, never allowed to go out, never allowed to die. A living memory of times changing from history into myth and legend, but the scents they served to propagate through the Temple halls was new and fresh every day. I had sworn my own vow to my land, and she was a living thing, Syai, my land, my sister. And I had fulfilled my own part of that vow.

But the child that I bore had her own vision of secrets and vows. How could I have even thought it would be any different? You may not have known the whole truth about your true heritage, but you could not help being what you were, Iloh’s daughter and mine, Syai’s child, born to the instincts of leadership and nurture, of a need to understand, to shape, to make, to do. Even when you were a very little girl you were the one whom the rest of the children followed, yours the decisions, yours the inspiration for games and learning, yours the big dreams that everyone else found hidden treasures in. And that only became stronger as you grew older, more articulate, more self-assured.

I heard you talking to your friends, my daughter, and you told them that you were all Syai’s children. And you gave them all that choice, the choice of love—a melding of Iloh’s dream and my own. You named it; you gave it life. Some of your ancestors might have been shocked at the thing you did, but all I could do was stand awed at the simplicity and power of your own vision.

“Xion-shei,” you said to the boy who was your friend. “You are my heart-brother.”

Xion-shei…

I am a woman. Jin-shei has been ours, our secret, for so long—but it is time, time to change. We will always have that bond, it will always be something special between a woman and a woman, but jin-shei is no longer a child. Your words, my daughter, were its Xat Wau ceremony. It comes of age, the ancient vow… and becomes something else. Something grand, glorious, huge. Something new.

It has always been the same dream, after all—perhaps that is why Iloh and I argued so fiercely over it. Seeing only our own half of it—until now, until you came, our daughter, to make a whole of it, to knit it together… male and female, equal under the arch of heaven. We were both wrong, Iloh, and we were both right.

The past is long dead—Iloh and his years did far too good a job on that. But his own vision was stillborn, lost in war and fire and fury… except, now, we have this new thing that is the old thing reborn—xion-shei—and it may be what will lead this land into the kind of future that even Iloh could hardly have dreamed of.

Long ago, the people of this land helped one another. Then they  turned on one another, and the killing years began. When those times ended, there was nothing left but fear… nothing, maybe, except that one thing, the oldest thing, the women’s country and its vows.

It is like Iloh said to me once, so long ago, on the night that you, my daughter, were conceived.

Nothing is finished. Everything is possible.

“
I have dreamt this place before,” Amais said.

She stood on the crumbling steps surrounded by dirty water, with ruined buildings of a shattered city around her, the sky full of a vivid glow as though from distant, unseen pyres, dressed in the elegant garb of a vanished court, holding an impossibly fragile silk- paper  parasol in one hand and the trusting hand of a small girl in the other.

She turned to look at the girl, who was gazing at her, in turn, from eyes that were impossibly too old and wise and full of love and pity to belong to a child.

The child smiled.

“
Yes, you know me. You have always known me. Why else would you have trusted me to lead you on the path laid out for you in your dreams?”

“
Tai,” Amais said, slowly, her voice full of wonder. “You are Tai. You are the beginning of it all.”

“
There is no beginning,,” the child said. “There is no end. It is the same story, only the people within in change shapes and faces. I had a hand in your life in more than one way—I gave you the fire to seek me, because someone had to find me; when you were in danger, I warned you to flee.”

“
The note,” Amais said. “The note telling me they were coming for me. I never knew who sent that.”

“
It does not matter whose hand penned it, it was I that wrote it,” said her companion. “For that, I needed to take no familiar shape. For the rest… for keeping your footsteps on the path…this was the face that you gave me.  Tai, the face that you trusted and loved—the face that a guide who wanted to speak to your spirit would wear if she wanted to be heard. But I am more than this…”

For a moment the child wavered and her image flowed into an ever-changing stream of other faces, other shapes, some old and bent or dressed in garb of ancient times and others wandering in, it seemed, from the unknown future. Amais recognized some of them as they appeared and vanished, in the blink of an eye. Her grandmother was there—and Xuelian—and the old priestess from Sian Sanqin—and Jinlien—and Xeian herself, her bright eyes smiling with Iloh’s own fiery charm. And then she was Tai again, the grave and serious child that Tai had been, the child who had given all these dreams, whose presence had guided Amais all of her life.

There was something in her that wanted to bow before this beloved ancestress, like others of her kin had worshiped their own ancestors since time immemorial—but she also wanted to simply curl up at her feet as she would do with a favorite grandmother and sigh in contentment and simply be still under a loving hand on her hair. She did neither, in point of fact. Perhaps it was simply that the context of this meeting was the dream, drifting and free, unattached to any stereotype or obligation. In the here and now, on the ruined stairs, wearing their outlandish and wholly inappropriate garb, Amais could look at Tai and see through the patina of protocol and relationships. Here, she was not revered ancestress. Here she could be anything. A guardian angel. A sister. A friend. A stranger who smiled anonymously as she passed on the street.

Here, she was all the women of the land. Here, she was Syai herself.

And Amais, too, was free to choose her own soul, at last.

<>

I am of two worlds, and that will never change. But I do not have a divided heart. I can be both. I can be that ragged child hunting mussels on the shore in Elaas and I can be the woman who gave her soul to Syai. The two oceans in my spirit have flowed into one another and I now sail on a different sunlit sea, and it has all my worlds in it, and it is richer for it.

I am the daughter of a woman who loved her heritage enough not to lose it for her children, yet not so well as to give them something unbroken and whole to treasure. I am a descendant of travelers who chose to turn their faces to the sun and their sails into the wind and seek new worlds without ever quite having released the old. I am the many times great-granddaughter of a poet who once helped to carry the weight of an empire on her slight shoulders, and who did not stumble under the load.

And I am the mother of the child who will take up that load again, and stand at the head of a nation.

I come from strength and from courage and from beauty.

I am one who is two, and two who is one. I am a singer of songs and a teller of tales and a maker of poetry. I am voice and spirit and memory.  I am heart-sister to a nation, I am the vessel that carried the legacy of a people; I am the past that was, the present that is unfolding; I will see, through the eyes of my daughter, the history that is to come. I am a footstep in the stone that is the bones of this earth, and some day, centuries from now, they will still see the shape that my foot left there, and they will wonder, and they will remember.

Who knows what Gods will rule, then—and from what heaven…? But I will be there, a word in the wind, a whisper in the leaves of the willow trees in the springtime; someday I may even worthy of being the face that my land will wear to guide another in the path of her destiny.

I am an ending to a story that began long ago, a beginning to a brand new tale that is only just stirring into life. The words that have come from my heart and my pen open the eyes of the tired and the defeated to the triumphs that lie hidden within tragedy; they reveal to the victorious the tragedy that is the serpent in the bosom of every triumph.

I was. I am. I will be…

<>

“
Look,” said Tai.

Amais followed her gaze, out to where the sky blazed with red and gold on the horizon, silhouetting ruins that sat silent and empty in the shattered city which surrounded them.

“
Yes,” Amais said, “something is still burning. Maybe the poor quarters are well alight by now. There is probably nobody left to fight the flames and those hovels are made of…”

“
No,” Tai said calmly, “look.”

Amais said nothing, merely allowed her eyes to rest on the improbable sky. She felt both vividly exhilarated and deathly tired, all at once, as though she had lived an entire lifetime in the scope of a few minutes of dream.

Which, in a way, she had.

She was on the verge of asking Tai what it was that she was supposed to be seeing as she stared out over the ruins, but then, inexplicably, her eyes filled with tears—and while her physical vision blurred with them into a mere smear of shape and color somehow they opened her inner eye to a glory that lanced at her heart with an exquisite pleasure that was almost as sharp as pain.

The sky was not aflame with the fires of destruction or devastation. She was facing east, and that which she was staring at was dawn, the rising of the sun, the promise of a brand new day. From the darkness beneath the earth’s rim, the orb of the young sun rose slowly over the edge of the night and poured its liquid light into the world, a bright and holy fire, woken by faith and valor from the sleeping embers of heaven.