The Embers of Heaven (6 page)

Amais had immersed herself in the world of Tai’s journals and her own stories and had come to her own conclusions.  She was watching her mother; she was watching the city, so different from the Imperial Syai she thought she knew, she had believed utterly that she would enter when she stepped on the shores of Syai . Instead of that, she found herself in an unquiet city seething with sulky rebellion and sometimes overt outrage—a city which had been one of the anvils on which Syai’s revolutions had been forged over years and centuries, a city whose streets had run with blood as one side or another labeled some other group as dangerous and unleashed calamity upon them. It was a city that had risen in rebellion more than once, most recently, according the street talk that Amais overheard, for a young man called Iloh, whose name was proscribed but was somehow whispered by every shadow in the streets—it was a city in which that particular rising had been had been bloodily and ruthlessly suppressed by the man in Syai’s high seat, General Shenxiao. There was no grace here, no calm nobility of an ancient court, no rich and exotic heritage—nothing, in fact, of what Amais and her sister had been brought here expecting to find. Only bloodshed, austerity, and fear.

All of this connected, somehow, and the answer to their difficulties became blindingly obvious to Amais.

“We don’t
belong
here, Mother. That’s why you won’t even think about leaving
baya-
Dan here. We aren’t from Chirinaa. We are… we are from Linh-an. We aren’t home after all, mother. We aren’t home yet.”

Six

On such small things do fates turn.

There were three sons on the small farm in the fertile hills of the province of Syai known as Hian. Tradition said that one son would be educated to take care of the ledgers and the accounting, one son would work the land, and one son would be responsible for the household and his aging parents.

Tradition sent the eldest of the three sons, Iloh, into the tiny school in the village below, trudging down the hillside and joining a handful of other small boys in a classroom barely big enough to hold their growing bodies and way too small to confine their boisterous spirits. Every boy, inevitably, had his own interests and concerns—and in some of the pupils the enthusiasm was simply for doing the minimum expected of them and then escaping back into the glories of the real world, hiking into the hills to pick the sweet berries or trap small animals out in the woods. Iloh was one of the few whose passions were kindled for a different thing—for the power of the word.

The boys were taught simple, basic things—how to count, and enough of the
hacha-ashu
script to be able to produce a coherent sentence in clumsy calligraphy and to read at the very least the simple folk renditions of tales and songs that had been copied out onto scrolls and parchments and notebooks. But Iloh saw more, wanted more, and he was one of the few to whom the teacher showed the school’s real treasures—a couple of scrolls of parchment with classical poetry inscribed on them, works of art in themselves, the calligraphy flowing and perfect and the ink unfaded over the years. Those, and a handful of books, mostly novels, printed on cheap paper with ink that sometimes smudged if you ran your finger over the page too fast. But to Iloh, both the magnificent scrolls and the cheaply bound books were equally valuable. Perhaps the latter even more so, because the novels were written in a language closer to the contemporary vernacular and were easier to understand.

“You might want to continue your education,” Iloh’s teacher had told him when he was eight years old. “There are other schools, better schools, bigger schools.”

“Perhaps Father might allow me,” Iloh said, but without conviction. His father was a patriarch of the ancient kind, autocratic, indifferent to all except his own will. Iloh knew that his education was not for his own sake, but the farm’s and the family’s, and that there would be no indulgences.

But even that small hope had vanished when Iloh turned nine. A widowed sister of his father’s had returned to her family home from a neighboring province in the spring of that year with her own small son after the her husband’s death. Iloh’s father had taken them in, no questions asked—they were family. But the three-year-old boy, Iloh’s little cousin, arrived sallow, sickly, and coughing a lot. Before his fourth birthday came around, he was dead. Less than six months after that, his mother died. And before her body was cold, it became obvious that she had left a deadly legacy behind. She and her son had not died of a broken heart. They had died of a disease.

The disease, however, had not died with them.

In the autumn , Iloh’s middle brother, Guan, began to cough and then to waste away. His mother removed him from the rest of the family and stuffed up the gaps in the windows and doors of his room with rags, so that the evil disease could not come out and claim anybody else. Guan fought valiantly for months, isolated and lonely in his convalescent cell, but even his mother’s devoted nursing did not save him. He was just over six years old when the final stages of the illness set in, starting to cough blood into the handkerchiefs his mother left by his bed.

The convalescent’s father had initially vetoed the doctor’s being summoned to the house, because such visits cost a lot of money—he had suggested to his wife that they pack up Guan and take him to the doctor’s rooms in the village themselves.

“He will not live through it,” Guan’s mother had said, and had begged, pleaded, for the doctor to be allowed to come. The patriarch finally succumbed, and sent his oldest son to fetch the doctor from the village. Iloh had gone, his mother’s desperate pleading voice echoing in his ears—but it had been a different voice, a sort of strange premonition, that made him pause beside the corner of his schoolhouse, three houses away from the doctor’s home, and stand with his hand on the dirty wall, palm flat against it, oddly convinced that he was somehow saying farewell to the place.

It had seemed to be only an instant, a stolen moment in time, but it might have made a difference if Iloh had not stopped by the schoolhouse. By the time he arrived at the doctor’s, he was told that the healer had just gone out. Iloh asked his destination but was told that the doctor was not an errant goat to be fetched from pasture, and to sit outside the house and wait for his return.

The doctor had taken an hour and a half to come back—from, as it turned out, a birthing in the aftermath of which the new father, a wealthy landlord who already had four daughters but whose first son this had been, had kept him aside for a small celebration. He was not drunk—precisely—but there was definitely a brightness in his eye and a looseness to his step that showed that he was not wholly sober, either. Iloh had jumped up from his seat on the bench outside the back door and had waylaid the doctor as he approached his house—and had been rewarded with a small, almost disinterested frown.

“I don’t really have time to do a house call,” the doctor said.

“But you just came from one,” Iloh said.

“That’s different. They promised me a suckling pig to be delivered in time for the Festival days.”

Iloh thought quickly. “My father has none to spare. But he could give a chicken…”

The doctor shook his head imperceptibly, and made as if to pass.

“Two chickens!” Iloh said desperately, heedless of promising such largesse in his father’s name. “Three, if you make him well!”

“Chickens,” the doctor said with an edge of annoyance. “Everyone gives chickens. What am I to do with more chickens, boy? You can’t afford to pay my fee.”

“Please, sir,” Iloh whispered, “it’s my brother.”

“I’m sorry, lad, but I need to get some sleep…” the doctor began.

Iloh drew himself up to his full height—which was still not much, at nine, but he was certainly tall for his age had promise of more height to come. In any event, the expression on his face made it seem as though he had several extra inches on him that his physical body had yet to provide him with.

“My brother is dying!” he said. “And if I have to drag you all the way, you are coming to see him, tonight. My father sent me to fetch you, and I am not going back without you!”

For a moment, the doctor—taller and wider than his diminutive opponent—actually seemed to shrink in Iloh’s presence, but then he reminded himself that this small person that threatened him was a nine-year-old child and had no real power over him.

“Sorry, lad,” he said. “Bring coin, tomorrow. No chickens. Better still, bring the patient and we can see what can be done for him. But not tonight. Out of my way.”

He left Iloh standing there in the path with a hot coal of frustrated fury in his belly and eyes burning with something that was almost loathing. The boy actually went back to the house and banged open-palmed on the door, calling for the doctor to come out, but he was ignored and after a while he made his way back home, empty-handed and coldly angry, smoldering with the beginnings of an idea that would one day shape his whole existence.
To each according to his needs and from each according to his ability—my brother needed, and could not pay a suckling pig and was therefore not a priority. The world is not a fair place.

They tried to take Guan down to the doctor the next day, as the doctor had demanded, but by the time they got down to the village from their farm, the boy was dead.

Guan’s little sister, Leihong, was next—despite her mother’s efforts to isolate her from her sick brother, she succumbed to the disease three days before her second birthday. That left the youngest son, Rubai, and the eldest, Iloh.

And, just like that, Iloh’s schooldays were over.

If it had not been for his father’s act of charity towards the widowed sister and her child, everything would have gone according to the original plans—but now the farm itself was in jeopardy, the family’s very livelihood. Rubai was four, far too young to do any but the most rudimentary chores—and, even if he had been older, his mother had begun guarding him like a dragon, protecting him from every little thing that could bring him harm. Iloh was all that was left. His father’s edict was pragmatic, and uncompromising. The urgent immediate need for an extra hand at the farm outweighed the potential future requirement for an educated farm manager.

The village teacher actually wept when Iloh came in to say good-bye.

“Of all the boys, why you?” the teacher said. “You had the will and the energy and the enthusiasm. All the rest… they would not even miss it. But you…” He had been holding a couple of the novels that Iloh had been particularly fond of, and which he had borrowed from the teacher—for perhaps the fifth time—and which he had come here, principally, to return since he would not have the opportunity to give them back to the lender any time soon. But the teacher had other ideas, because he suddenly put the two shabby books back into Iloh’s hands and closed the boy’s rigid fingers around them. “No,” the teacher said, “you keep them. In your hands they are a far greater treasure than they would ever be in mine. And if you ever have the chance…”

“Thank you!” breathed Iloh, staring down at the books as though he had been given gold. He would have loved one of the beautiful old poems, too, but he was practical enough to realize that he could not care for that as it should be cared for. He was grateful for what he was given.

The two books were all he had to read. He learned both books by heart, but he clung to them with a fanatical zeal, and read them and re-read them. The stories were fiction, but both were based on some tenuous historical facts, and it was easy for Iloh to think of them as though they were real history, that the events they depicted really happened. One of them was a tale of ten thousand brigands, no more than a collection of episodic stories—but the other, a tale of an ancient kingdom of his own land, powerfully gripped his imagination. He was learning from the tattered novel lessons which its creator had never dreamed he had placed in there.

Iloh grew taller still as the next few years dragged by in endless farming chores, and so did his little brother; some of Iloh’s lighter chores around the house became his brother’s duties before he had turned seven. That meant that greater duties, field work, the tending of the rice paddies and the narrow sorghum fields cut into the hillsides, fell to Iloh.

One of the most important and perhaps the most onerous of the chores was the constant need for fertilizer—and fertilizer was no more than farm muck, the manure of the family’s few animals and the nightsoil of the family themselves. By the time he turned twelve Iloh was charged with carrying balanced buckets of this ‘fertilizer’ from its origins in the house and the farmyard to the paddy fields. It was hard work, and Iloh escaped from it into his own head, letting his body tread the well-worn paths it knew well while his mind roamed across the landscapes of his imagination, dwelling in the worlds of his novels, extrapolating his reality and weaving it with fiction and wondering what kind of a world that would make—even putting together his own tenuous poetical lines while he shoveled the farm manure in the rice paddies.

The work was necessary, and Iloh understood this—but still he would often snatch a break from it, laying the wooden yoke he carried on his shoulders, on whose ends the two manure buckets were balanced, by the path he trod between the house and the fields. He would sneak off into the shade of an ancient willow tree that trailed concealing tendrils on several crumbling tombstones belonging to forgotten ancestors, long scoured bare of any identifying marks. The tombstones were scattered in a way that concealed Iloh from anyone taking the path to the paddy fields. They provided the boy with a secret place he could  read a few pages of his precious books, which he always carried in a pouch at his waist, and escape for a few moments from the drudgery of his daily life.

The fact that his pair of malodorous buckets, abandoned by the side of the path, would be a telling clue to his whereabouts had not even occurred to him—but it was thus that his father, who had noted his son’s frequent absences, discovered him happily poring over his beloved book.

“And do you think that the work will do itself?” Iloh’s father demanded.

“But I have already carried some fertilizer to the fields this morning,” Iloh said, looking up, still half-lost in his other world, only barely registering his father’s fury.

“How many? How many have you done?”

“Four, I think. Or perhaps even six. I don’t recall.”