The Embers of Heaven (7 page)

“And who is supposed to recall? I cannot stand over you every moment of every day. You are nearly twelve years old. You are practically a man. It should be your responsibility to take care of this job that you have been given to do! Four buckets! Pah! That is barely enough for a quarter of that field!”

“But the house is so far from the field, Father,” Iloh said, still dreamily.

“So I should move the house to the paddy fields so that it is more convenient for you?” his father demanded.

Iloh blinked several times, closed his book, and rose to his feet. Already he was as tall as his father, and showed signs of growing even taller—but somehow his father still managed to give the impression that he was talking down to the boy from a great height. “So how many buckets should I bring?” Iloh asked, his voice clipped and precise.

“I don’t know! Ten buckets! Sixteen!” his father said, transported beyond the realm of the reasonable to the extremes of the ideal.

Without another word Iloh bowed his head a scrupulously measured fraction that denoted just enough of the respect due to a father from a son and not an ounce more. He stowed his book back into his pouch, and walked past his father without a backward look to hoist his yoke and its two empty buckets onto his shoulders and head towards the farmhouse. Somehow curiously deflated, his son’s immediate obedient response having taken the sting out his bluster, Iloh’s father followed him out of the shelter of the old willow, shaking his head.

Towards the end of the day, with the sun low and golden, ready to vanish behind the hills, Iloh was missed again. This time the father knew precisely where to look—and that was exactly where he found his wayward son, reading the same book he had been reading that morning.

“Once already I have spoken to you, and here I find you back again wasting your time!” his father shouted, standing before his son with his feet planted wide on the earth of his ancestors, his arms akimbo.

Iloh lifted his head, a lank strand of his straight black hair falling over his face. “You said I should do my chores before enjoying my reading, Father,” he said quietly. “I have done them.”

“What? What have you done?”

“Those sixteen buckets of fertilizer. They are at the paddy,” Iloh said. “You can go and count them if you don’t believe me.”

His father stared at him for a moment without a word, and then turned and stalked off down the path in the direction of the paddy field. He intended to go there and catch the boy out in a flat lie—because the sixteen buckets he had named would have been a good day’s work for a grown man twice Iloh’s age. But instead he could only stand and stare at the field’s edge as it became obvious that Iloh had spoken the truth. He also saw how Iloh had done it. The yoke used to carry the buckets had been left beside the field, perhaps as an unspoken but pointed comment—Iloh had rigged the yoke to carry four buckets instead of the usual two. He must have staggered under the load on the narrow path from the farmhouse to the field, the heavy buckets dragging barely above the ground; his shoulders must have been purple with bruises, his back must have been screaming from the strain. But there was enough strength left in his arms to hold the book he loved. For that, he would have moved mountains.

No more was said about the reading of books behind the ancestral tomb.

Seven

Perhaps it was his father’s silence about his reading habits that put the idea in Iloh’s head, or perhaps it was the echo of the conversation he had once had with his village teacher.

Or perhaps it was the arrival in the household of a quiet woman carrying a small child in her arms, the widow of a man who had owned the fields abutting those belonging to Iloh’s father, a man who appeared to have died from the same disease that had claimed Iloh’s aunt, his cousin, and his two siblings. The land had been for sale. Iloh’s father bought it with money he raised on loan. Part of the price was that he care for the widow and her baby, and so she moved into his house and, in the time-honored way of old Syai, she became his concubine.

It was more mouths to feed, but there was also more land with which to do so. More land meant more work; it became obvious that it was more work than Iloh’s father could do, even with both his sons. He parceled out a section of his new land and rented it out to another family, in exchange for a third of their harvest.

The concubine changed everything. She was young enough to be fertile, and in the year that Iloh turned thirteen the concubine produced a child, half-sister to Iloh, named Yingchi. The little girl was a concubine’s child and tradition said that such children called the primary wife ‘mother’—but this was a little girl who was not Iloh’s mother’s child, and whose cries and gurgles reminded her constantly of her own lost daughter, and made her sad-eyed and melancholy as she drifted about the house, mistress of the house in name but barely able to bring herself to care anymore. Rubai, the cherished and protected second son, was also lost to her—he was growing up fast, fast enough to start being assigned farming chores.

Iloh was thirteen years old, fiercely intelligent, aching for knowledge and understanding, aware that he was never going to find them with his feet in the oozing mud of the paddy fields or bent over the grain with a harvesting sickle in his hand.

He simply announced to his father one morning that he was going away to school.

“There is a new school,” he said, “in the city. The village schoolmaster tells me that they will take boarders. I will go there, and start from the beginning.”

“And who do you think will pay for such schooling?” his father said. “I barely have enough money to scrape by as it is. And besides, you are too old. Look at you, strapping lad that you are. You practically have to shave in the mornings. Are you telling me that you will go into the same classroom as seven-year-old children? And endure it?”

“If that is what it takes then that is what I will do,” Iloh said. “And do not worry about the money. I will manage somehow.”

“And what am I to do for help on the farm?” his father said. “Rubai is too young to replace you, and a laborer costs money I don’t have.”

“I will study,” Iloh said, “and I will work. When I have money, I will send it.”

“And when you do not have money you will starve, and so will we,” his father prophesied.

His father complained and protested right up until the morning that Iloh packed up to leave for school. He took no more than his precious books, a change of clothes, and two pairs of new shoes that his mother  had made for him. She also handed him a package of sweet cakes for his journey, and managed a smile for him as he bade her farewell. She had not made the cakes. It had been the concubine who had done that—the silent woman who had taken over the running the household when she abdicated responsibility. But the concubine had no claim on Iloh, and she had merely done what she thought was her duty. As he left the house she said nothing, waiting silently in the shadows.

But Yingchi, Iloh’s little half-sister, could not allow him to leave without her blessing. She was lying on her back in a makeshift crib and raised both her chubby arms as Iloh passed, her hands spread out like a pair of small fat starfish as she waved them about. Iloh paused, glanced down at the child, who chose that moment to offer a guileless and completely endearing toothless smile, baring her pink gums at him so widely that her eyes were practically screwed closed by the breadth of her grin.

Iloh reached out and offered a finger to one of those hands, betrayed into an answering smile. The starfish fingers closed around his finger, tightly, and Yingchi opened her eyes just a little, staring at him gravely, her lips still curved in an echo of the smile that had riveted her brother.

“You take care of things here,” he said to his sister. “I’ll be back soon.”

She gurgled at him, and a bubble of baby drool formed in the corner of her mouth. He gently disengaged his finger and wiped her face, stood staring at her for another long moment, and then turned and walked away without looking back.

He could not afford a conveyance to take him to the city, so he slung his bundle over his shoulder and walked—every step of the way. It was a long and lonely journey, nearly four days passed before he could glimpse the outskirts of his destination, and another day to find his way in an unfamiliar warren of streets, asking directions of strangers who would shrug their shoulders and pass him by or point him to wrong addresses or dead ends—but he found himself at the school’s gate late on the fifth day, a grubby, ragged boy with hungry eyes.

“I have come to learn,” he said to a gatekeeper who came to ask his business.

“But this is a primary school,” the gatekeeper said, looking him up and down. “How old are you?”

“Twelve,” said Iloh. It was a lie, but not a huge one; being thought younger might increase his chances of being accepted, and yet he could not shave too many years off his true age and be believed. Not with his height; not with a face that was fast losing the round curves of childhood, revealing the features that would belong to a grown man.

Some of the other pupils clustered inside the gate, sniggering and pointing. Iloh tried to ignore them, holding his chin high.

“You’re too old,” the gatekeeper said after a moment, dismissing the new ‘pupil’, and turned to go back inside.

“That is not your decision to make!” Iloh said, desperation making him insolent and discourteous. “I have come a long way… and I would like to speak to a teacher, or the headmaster!”

“The headmaster is busy,” the gatekeeper said archly. “He cannot see just any riffraff who walks in from the street.”

“And what riffraff would that be?” a serenely commanding voice interrupted.

The gatekeeper flinched, and then turned with a deep bow. “I did not know you were here, Excellency.”

“I am where the will of heaven wishes me to be,” said the second voice. Its owner emerged from the gate’s shadows, miraculously emptied of sneering schoolboys. The voice seemed too strong and powerful to belong to the frail-looking, white-haired gentleman, his back unbent by his years, his hands decorously tucked into the wide sleeves of the scholar’s robe that he wore. His eyes were a dark slate gray, luminous and serene; but Iloh did not have that much chance to observe any more than this. He bowed immediately, very low, and kept his head down until he heard that voice speak again. “Do I understand you come seeking tuition, boy?”

“Sir… yes, please, sir. I want to learn.”

“And what is it that you wish to learn here, son?”

Iloh looked up at that, his own eyes blazing. “I will take,” he said, “whatever knowledge you are willing to give me.”

One of the headmaster’s bushy white eyebrows rose a fraction. “Oh? Tell me, if you had a cabbage, a rabbit and a stoat, no cage, a single boat which only holds you and a single one of those things, and a raging river to cross and only the boat to do it with, how would you ferry your three treasures across and have them all safe at the end of the day?”

Iloh had heard that one before—the reply would be to make the trip over with the rabbit, to return alone, to fetch the stoat over, take the rabbit back, take the cabbage over, return alone, bring over the rabbit—but that would take too long, and so he simply cut through it.

“I would sell the stoat and the rabbit at market on this side of the river, for the fur, and I’d make sure I got a good price,” he said. “I’d eat the cabbage for my supper. Then I’d cross the river in my boat, sell the boat on the other side, and buy myself a stoat, a rabbit, and a cabbage. You said the three treasures—you didn’t say I had to keep the boat.”

The headmaster laughed. “I think you had better come inside, young man.”

It might have been Iloh’s obvious thirst for learning, his penchant for creative thinking, the glimpse that the headmaster got of an empty chalice aching to be filled. It might have been the fact that one of the pupils in the school, Sihuai, was serendipitously from Iloh’s own village—a few years older than Iloh himself, he had shared the same tiny village schoolhouse for a short while before Iloh was snatched from it to work his father’s land, and vouched for his erstwhile younger colleague. It might have been simply the fact that Iloh said he would pay for his education in whatever way he could, including, farmer’s son that he was, tending the school gardens. Whatever it was, after nearly two hours of being interrogated on his future plans and subtly tested for his abilities, the headmaster’s verdict was positive.  Iloh was in.

It was nearly a year before he went back home again, a grueling and sometimes soul-destroying year in which he started from the bottom, in a class of eight-year-olds, and found himself wanting in the most basic skills. They teased him mercilessly, knowing that he could not retaliate, knowing that anything he did to them in return would draw harsh official censure, him being so much bigger and stronger than them. It was a year that almost made Iloh doubt his choice to come here, and doubt his need to learn. But it was also a year that built his character, his spirit, his mind. When he did return to his home fro a visit visit, he was wearing the invisible cloak of a young scholar, and the villagers deferred to it. Even the old doctor—now somehow shrunken and made impotent by Iloh’s new and broader vision of the world—gave him a small bow when they passed in the village street. Sihuai had been back before him, and had talked of him. People knew who Iloh was, and respected him.

He never forgot that first homecoming.

After that first hard, horrible year, Iloh showed such rapid progress and such promise that the headmaster himself promoted him—his calligraphy would always be crude, because he had first learned it that way, but Iloh’s essays showed that he was a thinker, even a poet. His essays were posted on the classroom walls, examples for other students, an achievement which Iloh was proud of. He still had few friends—but a surprising one turned out to be none other than Sihuai, who was the scion of a scholarly family and therefore, in the class-conscious society of Syai, vastly Iloh’s social superior. Sihuai was another student whose essays found pride of place on classroom walls—but his refined and elegant calligraphy made them far more of a pleasure to look at than Iloh’s attempts, and it sent Iloh to his schoolmate, humbly begging for help to better his writing skills. From those small beginnings an unlikely friendship bloomed, with the two boys, nearly of an age and with a shared love of the hills and valleys where they had grown up in their own separate spheres, finding many things to talk about.

Sihuai was one of a small set of boys who were regularly invited into the headmaster’s own home for lessons and discussions on the classics and history. It was a combination of Iloh’s losing his temper with one of his younger classmates while insisting that the version of events portrayed in his treasured novels was actual history and not just a dramatic rehash of really happened, and his friendship with Sihuai—who had been aware of that particular event and had spoken of it to the headmaster—that Iloh was invited to join the headmaster’s circle. There, his misconceptions were gently dealt with; he was given other books to read, true histories, biographical works on great leaders of past centuries, and then he was invited to talk about them with his companions in the headmaster’s office.

“Histories were written by people who had power,” Iloh said once, in that circle.

“Histories always are,” the headmaster said. “Histories are written after battles are over, by those victorious in those battles. There are other versions of history, known only to the losers. We might never hear anything about those at all. But what do you mean by power?”

“Money,” one of the other pupils said.

“Yes, rich people are respected and honored,” said another.

“No matter how unworthy they might be,” Iloh said darkly.

“But there are other kinds of power,” murmured the headmaster.

“Military,” said a pupil.

“But that is bad,” said the headmaster’s daughter, Yanzi, who was a part of these study sessions. Two years older than Iloh, she was a willowy teenager with lustrous black hair and huge bright eyes and there wasn’t a boy in the school who wasn’t half in love with her from the first time he laid eyes on her. “That means that the way to have power over people is simply to have a bigger bludgeon.”