The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “We will know it,” Tang said. “We will write it!”

  “But who will be asked to play it?” Iloh had said, in a strange, introspective mood that night It was as though he had been handed a shallow bowl of water, and saw in the mirror of its still surface a vision of the years that were to come. “Who will be asked to pay for it? What ancient part of ourselves will we have to give up in order to be granted the music of this new world …?”

  Iloh shook his head, clearing his mind of the memories, and retired to the pile of thin quilts on the pallet he used for a bed. He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hand. As almost always when he started drifting off into sleep, but stirred into a particular fury by the memories he had been picking over a moment ago, questions rose like a flock of disturbed crows and darkened his thoughts with a blackness of fluttering wings. Could I have done it differently? Could I have done it better? Will it be worth all this struggle and sacrifice in the end? Is it worth the lives that have been spent to buy it? What have we lost, that we might gain this? Who will speak the language of the lost things? This thing that we have bled for, fought to give life and breath to, will it live, thrive, grow strong…?

  And then, as usual, he would answer himself, just before he sighed and surrendered to deeper slumber.

  The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?

  The light was somehow very wrong. The image that shimmered before her eyes was a memory, a recognizable memory, but it had a golden wash over it, a light that suggested something ethereal, something that had never quite happened, or was still to come… the light of dream.

  Amais could see the two little girls clearly, herself and her sister, sitting with what they believed to be studied adult elegance and yet still managing to be, endearingly and obviously, thirteen and six years old, sometime in their second year in Linh-an. They wore what they imagined grown-up high society ladies would wear to such an occasion, which in the children’s case meant a hodge-podge of discarded garments from Mama’s closets dressed up with scraps of silk and a heap of cheap bazaar jewelry piled on every available limb. The style of dress was somewhat eclectic, because Amais at least remembered the women of Elaas very well, and recalled the paintings and the ancient statuary depicting the old goddesses of that land and their elegant draped gowns. She never forgot her brief glimpses of more exotic womenfolk, veiled women who had traveled on the same ships as they and effacing themselves into the shadows. Of course they—particularly Amais, the elder, but Aylun had been told the same tales—were well aware of the sartorial traditions of their own cultural legacy, those rooted in the fairy-tales of Imperial past. In play, they used whatever element of these cultures that happened to please them at any given moment. Amais always set the stage, spinning one of her fictions and snaring her younger sister into the charms of “might-have-been” and “once-upon-a-time.” Although Aylun used to copy her she had quickly started rebelling, and used her own ideas.

  This particular dream-party, this was a specific occasion. Amais remembered it well. It was one of the first times that Aylun had asserted her independence and had insisted on putting together her own costume. Amais recalled the smooth slide of her mother’s red satin robe as its too-long sleeves whispered past her own bony childish wrists, and the weight of the ropes of fake gold coins, bazaar treasures, that she wore over her hair. Aylun wore a strange mixture of a half-veil covering the lower half of her face—which she finally discarded, after a while, because she had to keep pushing it aside in order to sip her tea—and something that she fondly imagined passed as a classical Elaas gown, a bedsheet in its former existence, wrapped around her chubby frame and tied at the waist with a daringly purloined belt which their mother still regularly wore and which was not really sanctioned as play garb.

  They were bent over a low table with a child-sized teapot filled with cold mint tea which their mother indulged them by brewing for them every time they announced one of their “tea ceremonies.” It was Aylun’s turn to be hostess; she was pouring the tea into tiny cups; one for her, one for her sister, a third (as they knew was protocol for any real tea ceremony) for fragrance alone, so that the guests at the tea ceremony might inhale the scent of the carefully selected tea variety offered to them, enhancing the experience with the use of all the senses.

  They made what they believed to be polite conversation in the adult world—Aylun inquired about the price of fish in today’s market, and Amais countered with some totally unrelated scrap of poetry or song that she had happened to memorize or had produced herself and which she believed it was the duty of all fine ladies to know. They sipped at their cold mint tea with exaggerated protocol and carefully rehearsed ritual—and then, because they were children, they started laughing. First one, then the other, trying to stifle giggles behind silken veils or flowing satin sleeves, failing, catching one another’s eye, dimpling around the rosebud lips still dewy with their childhood, and then screaming with the laughter that bubbled up from inside them, laughing at nothing at all, for the pure joy of being themselves, and being there, and being young.

  But the light was quite wrong—the light of dream, not memory. And the laughter turned to echoes, faded, vanished… as the children in the golden mists changed irrevocably into something else, someone else, and Amais became aware that she dreamed, and that she knew these two figures kneeling at an inlaid tea ceremony table made of rosewood and mahogany. This was no game of pretend—the tea was real, not the childish mint substitute, and the scent that rose from the spout of the teapot as the honey-colored liquid came steaming out of it into the fragrance-cup was rich and haunting.

  It was still a child who was doing the pouring, however, a little girl—familiar from old dreams, remembered as standing dressed in old court garb on the edge of the apocalypse under a fiery sky.

  “It is early spring tea,” the child was saying, handing a cup to her companion, the young woman who had stood with her on the same wind-blown wreckage, under the same sky, whose back was still turned to the one who dreamed this dream, whose face was still hidden. “Can you not smell the sunshine of it in the cup?”

  “Yes,” the young woman said, accepting her cup and inhaling deeply. “You’re right, of course.—but how can you know such things?”

  “I know,” the child said gravely, “many, many things.”

  The young woman’s hands tightened imperceptibly around her cup, and then her fingers relaxed, as though she had made them do so by main force of will. “I wish I could know the things I need to know,” she whispered.

  The little girl who had filled her cup paused as she put the teapot away on its warming stove, and then lifted her eyes to her companion, and the dreamer who hovered behind her like a ghost at the feast. “But you do,” the child said. “You will know if anything had happened to her. How could you not…?”

  The grammar and tense of that sentence made no sense, and the dreamer, to whom it was not, directly, addressed, wished she could understand why it filled her with such fear and foreboding—but this was dream, after all, and all fears were permitted here.

  “There is danger all around me,” the young woman holding the tea cup whispered, and the dreamer’s own voice shaped the words, like an echo, like the echo of that laughter she had once shared with her sister over their childhood make-believe.

  The little girl who was in the dream—not Amais’s sister, ah, not her sister!—reached for the teapot again. Not to pour this time—she lifted it with both hands, heedless of the heat that the boiling water within must have seared her palms with— and then brought it down with full force on the beautiful inlaid table.

  The teapot shattered, pieces of fragile porcelain scattering in all directions, hot water spurting from the remnants—but what was inside the pot, what the hot water had washed, had not been the tea-leaves that had been so seductively suggested by the fragrance cup still steaming deceitfully to the side.
<
br />   What lay revealed inside the broken teapot was not tea… but a small, wickedly sharp dagger, washed clean, washed almost sterile of memory.

  But it had held memory, once. The memory was what had been in the tea that had been sipped from the porcelain cup, what still curled in the steam from the fragrance cup, and the memory was pungent, and poignant, and sharply painful. The young woman set her teacup down suddenly with a small cry, and reached for the knife—and then stopped, trembling, her shaking fingers barely above the blade. The hesitation was instinctive, a recoil born of pure supernatural awe—and then her companion, the little girl, reached out with both hands and gently brought those hesitating fingers down until they touched the gleaming metal of the blade.

  And Amais the dreamer touched it, too, disembodied as she was, hovering behind and above everything—and yet she could feel it as if under her own fingertips, that cool-warm metal, a presence in her hand as it was pushed down on top of the dagger, flat, palm down.

  “Yes, there is danger,” the little girl said. “But you will always know. And you will always be able to feel it—because this is the truth of it, right here, and you will hold it all in the palm of your hand before you are done. You will bear witness.”

  The little girl shaped the other’s hand, curled it around the dagger’s handle, made her hold it, lift it, turn it point first into the wooden table. And then moved the hand that clutched the blade, gouging a symbol on the fine inlay, a symbol of a language that Amais herself was only just beginning to remember, to reclaim.

  Her alter ego, the young woman who now held the dagger, suddenly seemed to wake from some sort of a trance. The little girl’s hands fell away, and the other’s fingers tightened around the dagger, shifted for a stronger grip, and she completed the symbol that the little girl had made her begin, and then stared at the thing she had made, and the ruin she had made of the ancient inlay of the old elegant tea table.

  The echo of children’s laughter, rippling with innocence and delight, was all around as the scene wrapped itself once again in the golden mists of memory and dream, the last clear image remaining that of a woman’s hand holding what might have been a dagger, or a pen dipped into ink—the symbols beneath it changing from something etched into wood to something stark and black in dark ink on white page, and back again.

  “Bear witness,” the young woman said as the dreamer shaped the words with her own voiceless lips. “Speak the truth.”

  And the water-washed and tempered metal gleamed its answer before it was swallowed by the mists.

  Truth. Yes. Witness and testimony.

  Paper Swords and Iron Butterflies

  “Sometimes the things that shatter at the first blow prove strongest of all after a thousand years have gone by.”

  The Book of Ancient Wisdom

  One

  Time had not stood still in Linh-an, despite all of Amais’s dreams, or Vien’s expectations.

  Vien and her daughters had arrived in the city in early spring, after nearly seven months of planning, scrimping, saving, and then doling out gold to agents and officials in expenses, steep travel fares, and sometimes outright bribery. The journey itself had been the least of it, but even that had not been easy or cheap. It had taken almost as much—in terms of money, stress and nervous tension—for a family which had traveled to Syai from halfway across the world to now simply cross the country from one city to another.

  The serene land that baya-Dan had dreamed about in her cocoon on a far-away island seemed to be gone, swept away, vanished without a trace.

  It was impossible to arrange anything in any coherent way because there were so many circumstances beyond one’s control. The only way to get from Chirinaa to Linh-an, two city-islands in a sea of countryside seething with discontent and often open revolt, was to travel light—Vien left the heavy luggage with the woman at whose hostelry the family had stayed, with very little hope of ever seeing any of it again, and they took only the bare minimum with them: what was left of baya-Dan’s gold, the urn with her ashes, a couple of changes of clothes each, and the thirteen precious journals which Amais had flatly refused to leave behind in the face of discussions, pleas, and even direct orders from her mother. They traveled by ship, again, up the river, watching the shores with their hearts in their mouths, waiting for some insurgent group to pick their particular vessel to make a point with; they waited to be stopped, searched, robbed, and despoiled. But they made it to the hills around Linh-an, and then they found a way to slip into the city with a column of exhausted refugees at whom both the guerillas in the countryside and the soldiers guarding the city walls had turned a blind eye.

  It had been harrowing. It had also, at least for Amais, been wildly exciting. But the initial excitement, the sense of finally having completed their journey, had quickly faded into a gray reality. They could not survive on their shrinking hoard of baya-Dan’s gold forever, so the first order of business had been to try and find a means of earning a livelihood here in the city—and Vien’s plans and dreams of what used to be, or what might have been, had withered in the face of a harsh reminder of what was. It might have been different only a handful of short years before, but Linh-an—like most cities in Syai these days—was a city under siege, with Shenxiao’s Nationalists entrenched within and the guerillas of the People’s Party controlling the surrounding countryside.

  Vien shrank away from it all. They were here at last, in Linh-an, with the Temple—the Temple, the Great Temple of their family’s heritage—a few city blocks away from the lodgings they had found, but Vien laid baya-Dan’s ashes into Amais’s young hands and had sent her to the Temple, alone, a week after their arrival in the city.

  “You go,” she said. “Take the ashes, take some gold. Find out where we can bury her.”

  “But Mother…” Amais had protested, her hands closed tight around the urn of her grandmother’s ashes. She had hoped, indeed, that she could go and see the Temple for the first time on her own, unhampered by the presence of her melancholy mother and the little sister who needed supervision and attention—but she had not figured on being entrusted with this, with the thing that Vien had repeatedly said was the most important duty that she had in Syai, the reason for her return here.

  “Just go,” Vien had said, closing her eyes and turning away. “I am so tired, Amais. My head aches so…”

  So Amais, bearing the ashes and bearing gold, had walked to the Great Temple alone. When she reached one of its massive gates she stood for a long moment, her heart beating wildly, her breath coming out in short sharp gasps, her eyes shining—this towering edifice, its complexities known to her from earliest childhood through baya-Dan’s intercession, had been part of the fairy tale from the very beginnings, haunted by its Gods and its Sages and its dead Emperors waiting patiently in their niches.

  The First Circle was an odd and aching disappointment when Amais set foot into the Temple itself. Her fertile imagination had already been here, many times, and she had thought—had believed without a shade of doubt—that she would know the place when she finally stepped into the real thing, quite simply recognize it. But instead of the bustling commercial centre of Tai’s journals Amais found a slightly shabby, strangely forlorn place. It resembled nothing so much as an ancient trade city recently bypassed by a new road, beginning to wither quietly in what would very quickly become backwater country or had already done so without quite realizing that it had been rendered obsolete and insignificant. There was space for hundreds of booths along the outer wall, but many of them were shrouded in tarpaulins or locked down tight under wooden shutters. Those that were open for business still seemed to be carrying on a brisk trade, however—for those who came to the Temple, the requirement to make offerings to the gods and lesser spirits whom they had come here to pray to was still mandatory, and there were plenty of people waiting patiently in queues to purchase bowls, rice, wine, tea, fruit, and incense. There were even a cluster of ganshu booths, with their own clientele clustered
around them and patiently waiting their turn with the fortune tellers—in fact, those seemed to have more customers than the rest. A sense of which way to jump in the current unsettled times was apparently a sought-after commodity in Linh-an.

  Amais tried to orient herself according to Tai’s account of this place, from journal entries she knew faithfully by heart—tried to figure out where the booth of the bead carver had been, the bead carver who had become Tai’s father-in-law. But nothing was the same. Even the blue paint of the outer wall of the Second Circle that Tai had written about in her journals, the pale and delicate ghost-blue that she had once described as the color of Linh-an’s sky at the height of molten summer, seemed to have almost completely faded away into a wash of dingy grayish-white.

  That, obscurely, was something that Amais sharply felt the loss of. She had read about that color, about the color of Linh-an’s sky, and had dreamed about what shade it would be, had been looking forward to seeing it at last…because it would have been new and strange, for her, for the child whose own childhood sky was so different. Elaas blue, the clear sky that gave its waters their sapphire hue, had been a strong bright color, almost garish in Amais’s eyes when she had raised them to the heavens after reading of the delicate nuances of Syai—but it had been the only thing she knew. It had been the sky that had arched over her father and had spilled its sunshine on the day’s catch, the fish thrashing and dancing in the hand-knotted nets, droplets of water flying like diamonds from glittering scales; it was the sky that smiled upon an ocean where dolphins played, a sky where very different Gods lived than those who watched over Syai. Tai had painted a world for Amais, and baya-Dan had made sure that Amais knew its colors—but they had all been just that, colors on a pretty painting, and it seemed that in the real Syai the hues and nuances of that vanished world would remain just the colors of a dream for Amais. The color of the sky was different here, but in a way it hurt more to realize that it was different from the thing that Amais had expected it to be than to know that it was different from Elaas. The latter difference she had expected, had waited for, had even yearned to see. The one she found instead, the difference between past and present rather than between two vividly different places each in its own niche in a world full of change and diversity, made her feel disoriented and not a little afraid.