The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  That revolution.

  The revolution that changed everything, that changed the very nature of the sky that arched above the world—the sky that would deliver the rain to nourish crops in the fields and no longer be sanctuary for the distant and removed deities who cared nothing for the people so long as the temples were swept, the incense lit and sweet, the offerings properly presented. And under that sky, men would be the same, with equal rights, equal privileges, no matter how much incense they burned to the forgotten gods.

  There was a phrase that was the guiding idea for everything that Iloh had dreamed about, had founded, created, or set in motion. It had been there with him from the very beginning, from the day he had been turned away by the village doctor because his dying brother had not been wealthy enough to rate a visit from the healer, from the night on the lake that he and Tang and Yanzi and a handful of other firebrands had created something strong and new, a banner to unite a nation under. It had been a mantra, an incantation, a guiding light. Now he scribbled it down in the margin of his book, to remind himself, to re-inspire himself:

  To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.

  That had been the principle of the thing. Iloh had not stopped thinking of people as a flock of sheep that needed a shepherd’s hand to guide them—but it would be a different kind of shepherd. It would have to be one of the sheep themselves, raised to the high place. One of the people.

  Baba Sung had learned his lesson from the first time he had tried to wage revolution—this time he had a warlord of his own to wage his battles. Shenxiao was a skull-faced, whippet-thin man who dreamed, ate, lived and breathed army. Shenxiao and Baba Sung, together, might have been a formidable force—but Baba Sung had burned his candle at both ends and it became tragically clear that his race was run. He died a relatively young man, perished on the burning flame of his own bright spirit, leaving behind a legacy that took root in the popular mind: be a nation again.

  And it seemed that it might have been possible. But as with every prophet there were always many who came in his footsteps ready to interpret his words. Shenxiao was one. The People’s Party, where Iloh, although young, was already an important figure, was another. For a while they had worked together, yoked under the last will and testament of the founder of the Republic. But then Shenxiao made a sharp turn to the right, the People’s Party reacted by veering to the left, the traces broke and the alliance died hard.

  In the beginning, the People’s Party was small, and led by the young and the inexperienced, advised by a handful of older intellectuals who shared their ideals. But it was the youth and the vigor of it that swept it to power, its principles proselytized as only the young and idealistic could do, and the Party’s numbers swelled from hundreds to thousands, then hundreds of thousands. With its plain principles, pure from the well of ideal and not yet tainted by the thin poison of politics, it quickly attracted a membership that ranged from University students and office workers to the stevedores and factory workers and tillers of soil—there appeared to be something of value in the Party’s manifesto to a plethora of different kinds of people, giving the seal of its name an odd authenticity. The People’s Party quickly became a force to be reckoned with.

  Iloh was one of many, in the beginning—a group of young cadres who had been given tasks instrumental to the birth of the People’s Party and its early years, and had acquitted themselves well enough to be rewarded with positions of authority where they could continue to prove themselves. In a handful of short years the many were whittled down to a few, and Iloh was among them. The first time he met General Shenxiao face to face, he was a junior Party secretary—one of a delegation, running errands, keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut and learning the ropes. The second time, Iloh had been given a place at the discussion table—still a junior, but one who had been tapped for advancement. The third time, some four years later and with an unbroken and unblemished record of service at government level under his belt, he was second in command, and he was no longer just a silent participant.

  “It was Baba Sung’s own idea,” he said at one of the meetings on that third occasion, when the topic of discussion had been land reform. “But equal distribution of land does not have strings. You are still pandering to the landowners, and the workers at the very bottom, who work their way to an early grave, still get nothing except perhaps a tiny reduction in taxes—and even that is only on paper, and if their landlord wants to ignore it he can.”

  “You are young,” Shenxiao said, his lips parting in a thin, skeletal smile. “You have still to understand why we sit here today. Baba Sung never said that land should be taken from those who have worked so hard to gain it…”

  “Their ancestors might have worked hard,” Iloh said. “For many the land is simply inherited, a part of their patrimony, something they feel entitled to. Whether or not it’s justifiable.”

  “…and summarily handed over to the barefoot peasant who has done nothing to deserve it except exist,” Shenxiao finished, as though Iloh had not spoken at all.

  “But you say in public that the barefoot peasant will get that land,” Iloh said. “You promise this.”

  “Yes, and so long as the promise hangs there, all golden and shining like a riddle-lantern at Lantern Festival, everything is peaceful and calm—if they can guess the riddle they can have the land, but in the meantime let those who know what to do with it have a hand in controlling it. We need a lot of people fed—that happens when there are large fields and large harvests. Not when every small landgrubber plants a few stalks of wheat for himself.”

  “You are betraying the founder of your own party,” Iloh said. “Do you know what they are saying, out in the country? ‘The sky is high and Shenxiao is far away.’ They used to say that about the Emperor. You are no different than that leech on society, and Baba Sung himself said that the Empire had to go.”

  “Even Baba Sung knew better than that,” Shenxiao said. “He, too, was young once, that is true, and some of his ideas are those of a young man—but he grew up, and he grew wiser. A man who does not in his youth believe that the world needs to be changed is heartless, and has no feelings. But if a man has not learned by the time he is forty that it is impossible to swap an old world for a new one like a lamp on New Year’s day, that it is only possible to change the shape of the world so that one can find a higher place to stand within it—that man is a brainless idiot.”

  Iloh had said nothing out loud, but his eyes, resting on Shenxiao, were eloquent. You are wrong.

  They had not met again, face to face. The relationship between the two Parties continued to deteriorate. It appeared that Shenxiao’s people, known as the Nationalists, had put an end to the chaos of the warlord years and had put a central government in place, giving the people something familiar. There was a place for the Gods, and right underneath that there was a place for the man the Gods had chosen to lead the nation—and everyone else had only to follow where that chosen man led.

  But the Nationalists ruled with force of arms—with war clubs, and with guns. Accession to positions of power, promised on the basis of merit alone, devolved into a corrupt system where family or cronies were installed in places where they would be useful to those who wielded real clout. The government that had been Baba Sung’s legacy and which the people had welcomed nowbecame endured, then disliked, then distrusted, and finally hated. The rich landowners and the city bankers and businessmen still had their weight behind Shenxiao and his clique. The rest of the people—the peasants in the countryside, the workers in industry and in service, the young intellectuals of the cities—had increasingly begun to put their faith not so much in the People’s Party but in the hands of a young man called Iloh who traveled the country and who spoke to them of equality, and of power, and of peace.

  But Shenxiao held the army, the weapons, and the metaphorical high ground. When Iloh and his people became too dangerous for Shenxiao to even pretend to work together with
them, he manufactured an incident in the city of Chirinaa, where the unions were strong. Blood was spilled in the city’s streets, and Shenxiao made certain that blame for that was laid at the feet of Iloh and his ‘shadow cabinet’.

  Those of the People’s Party who had still held positions inside Shenxiao’s party were summarily purged—arrested, imprisoned, and executed. The alliance was over. Before the year was out, the People’s Party had gone into hiding. Their leaders were marked men, and hunted.

  Iloh had been one of them. He had married Yanzi less than a year before, and now, with his wife pregnant with their first child, he had to flee into the hills or face prison—or worse.

  Yanzi was adamant that she would stay behind, in the city.

  “You can’t stay down here alone! It’s dangerous! They know who you are, where to find you…” Iloh had argued, pleaded, begged.

  “What do you think they would do?” Yanzi said, her voice sweet reason. “I am a pregnant woman. If they touched me they would have their own people turn on them—some things are sacred, and if you foul them, you are tainted by it forever more. And here, I can be of far greater use to you than dangling at your tail with this belly up there in the mountains.”

  “It would be safer in the middle of nowhere than here in the path of the flood. I don’t think you realize how ugly it’s going to get.”

  “Trust me,” she said, laying her hand over his mouth. “I will be better here. I will send word when I can.”

  “Then I will stay,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Yanzi said sharply. “Your name is on a list of wanted men. You would not last a week in the city—you couldn’t even be with me, you’d have to go into hiding. You’re better off up there in the mountains, leading, then down here skulking in a rat trap.”

  He had let her persuade him that she would be all right, that nobody would touch her.

  But that was before Iloh emerged as the leader of the leaderless men of the People’s Party up in the pathless hills of the north. Before Shenxiao put a price on his head. Before someone delivered Yanzi and her small son into Shenxiao’s hands. Before Shenxiao broke every rule, and executed Iloh’s wife and child to prove a point—with me or against me, and if against me then no quarter shall be given.

  When word of that came, Iloh had asked a single question.

  “How?”

  “They shot them,” the courier who had brought the news said brokenly. “They stood them up against a wall, and a firing squad shot them both. The boy was in her arms.” He looked up, met Iloh’s eyes, and felt his knees buckle. He knelt at Iloh’s feet whispering the rest, the answer to the question that Iloh had really been asking. “They… it was fast… they didn’t suffer.”

  Iloh had turned without another word and walked away into the hills, by himself, his face a battlefield. Nobody dared follow, not even Tang, his closest companion; that grief and guilt had been too heavy, too raw. If they thought they heard a howl from out of the hills, later, a howl that sounded more like a wolf than a man—well, it might have been an animal, after all. Yanzi had been part of the People’s Party from the beginning, she had been there at its birth, she had believed in it no less than anyone else out here—and it had been her choice, after all, to stay behind in the city. But they knew that none of that would weigh with Iloh so much as the fact that he had been her husband, he had been the father to that child, and he had abandoned them to their fate. His choice, in the end, his guilt. Something he would never lay down, for as long as he lived.

  When Iloh returned, Tang had uttered a single sentence about the fate of Yanzi, whom he too had loved from afar for many years.

  “You should have taken her with you,” he said.

  Iloh had stared at him from eyes that were suddenly darker and colder than Tang remembered their ever having been before—it was as though Shenxiao had killed a part of Iloh’s own humanity when he raised a hand against his family. But he said nothing. And Tang had bowed his head, having said what he had to say, and had wordlessly taken on himself the task of taking care of Iloh, even after Iloh entered into what they called a ‘revolutionary marriage’ with another girl in the People’s Party cadres on the run in the hills.

  Iloh’s eyes had acquired a strange hard glitter after the news of Yanzi’s death—the gleam of ice, of cold stone. Not tears, never tears, at least not that anyone else had witnessed. Iloh had not had the luxury of giving in to grief—only, perhaps, the chance to work for revenge.

  It was the revolution, and revolution exacted a high price.

  A revolution…

  The unfinished sentence Iloh had left dangling in the cabin in the hills, on that night years after the revolution had begun, on the eve of its being won, still sat there on the page of his notebook, incomplete, nagging at him. A revolution needed a definition. He knew what it was, he knew in his bones, but somehow the pattern of the words would not form in his head; he tried and discarded a few variants, mouthing them silently, tasting the words he might write on his tongue, finding them wanting. There was something vivid and vital that he needed, something that conveyed the necessity of the overthrow of all gods and monsters.

  It was… it would be…

  A revolution is an act of violence, he wrote at last, by which the new overthrows the old, where the oppressed throws off the oppressor, by which all men are made equal in one another’s sight.

  It was not perfect, but it would have to do.

  Iloh was suddenly surprised by a huge yawn that Tang would have pounced on had he been there to witness it. He got up and stretched, hearing his joints pop as he did so, reflecting wryly on the side-effects that waging revolution could have on a man. He was thirty-two years old and sometimes, in his fifth winter of exile, his bones ached with the arthritis of a graybeard three times that age.

  Iloh crossed over to the door and eased it open a crack. It was still snowing outside, and few things moved in the white silence in the space between the huts—one or two muffled shapes hurried somewhere with an air of urgency that probably had less to do with the errand they were on than a desire to be under a roof again with the possibility of a hot stove to thaw out frozen feet and hands. None of them noticed Iloh, or the thin ribbon of yellow light that spilled from the open door.

  It was these people, in the name of all the people in the plains down below and in the walled cities of old empire, who had rallied to a dream of a new world, who had helped to raise the flag of Iloh’s vision. The few, in the name of the many. The few who had endured so much.

  But soon it would be over—soon… The mandate was changing in Syai. The skirmishes that Iloh’s army had fought with the Nationalists who held the reins of power had turned into battles, and the battles had begun turning into victories. More and more of the enemy was throwing down their arms—or, better, crossing over to lay their allegiance at Iloh’s feet. Too much was going wrong down there, too fast; their generals had been too complacent, too rushed, too afraid. They had committed everything to this one final push, and it was failing. Thousands of men, perhaps tens of thousands, had paid with their lives, but now the prize was near, and Iloh could see the things he had dreamed of, the things he had made others believe with a fervour bordering on fanaticism, starting to take shape before his eyes. This bitter winter of exile, this was the last. He knew that. He could sense it in the wind…

  He shivered, suddenly—the wind he had invoked in his thoughts had suddenly reached through the door he had been holding open and had reached out to touch him with icy fingers. He had seen enough. This day, he had done enough. Tang was right—it was time to sleep.

  And yet it was a different Tang that he was hearing, the voice echoing in his mind that of a more innocent time, a time when everything had still been possible and the price had not yet been exacted. Iloh remembered, through a mist of memory, a night when he and Tang had sat by the fire and quoted poetry at each other, the scurrilous and the sublime, the mocking and the prophetic.

 
“ ‘Oh, but it will be a brave new dance when the music starts to play’,” Tang had quoted.

  “But what music will it be?” Iloh had asked. “Will we even know it for music?”