The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  To give Vien her due, it was obvious to her that, if she did not surrender the gold voluntarily, the woman would go to the authorities and have them come and collect it—in which case she might have no compensation at all. So she had taken all but a last final handful of baya-Dan’s gold, money she had hoped to use to set herself up in some sort of business through which she could support herself and feed her two daughters, and had taken it to one of the city’s banks. She was given so much paper money in exchange that she had to hire an extra pedicab to bring it all home. That second pedicab inexplicably lost its way and never arrived at Vien’s lodgings at all, and the money that she had kept had halved in value almost before she had got it home, and continued to be worth less and less every day, every hour.

  “There is rent,” Amais had told Jinlien, trying hard to hold back tears. “Aylun is so little, she doesn’t know, she cannot help—and Mother… Mother is at the end of her rope…”

  “Do you know that they never printed denominations greater than 10,000?” Jinlien said. “To do so would have caused Shenxiao to lose face by admitting that a problem existed. Instead, now you need ten thousand notes of that denomination in order to buy yourself bread and milk… if you can find it.”

  “I need to find a job,” Amais said.

  “You are a child,” Jinlien protested. “You’re barely fourteen. What about your mother?”

  “She had a good hand in calligraphy,” Amais said, “and she can cook a decent meal, when she is given the ingredients to produce one, that is. There is very little else, Jinlien. She has never been anything else except a dutiful daughter to my grandmother, and then a wife and mother. And she can’t do the heavy work, the factory work, it would destroy her. She’s been doing little things—taking in sewing, cooking for people, caring for a few of the neighborhood children who are not too young to give her one of her headaches—but it’s all so little, and there are still bills to be paid.”

  “It may not be all bad,” Jinlien soothed. “Let me ask my cousin, who works in the University library. It would not pay much, but it would be something—and a neat writing hand would help a lot there.”

  “Library?” Amais said with interest. “Do you know—would they have any jin-ashu writings there?”

  “Why would they?” Jinlien said. “It was never a public language, nothing that would have found its way into scholarly libraries. Nothing that would have been catalogd, anyway.”

  “I was thinking of Tai’s poems,” Amais said.

  “They would probably have some of those,” Jinlien said, “but they would likely be the hacha-ashu versions that were actually published, that were sold to people in the marketplace. The originals… I don’t know that anyone would have even known to save them, if they had come across them in her possessions after she died. Not unless she had left them specifically to a library, or to family, or to friends, or even to a surviving jin-shei sister if there was one. Are you looking for these poems?”

  “The language,” Amais said. “I am looking for the language, and for all that it meant. Syai seems to be a much colder place than it used to be in Tai’s day. At least according to the journals that I have.”

  “You should count yourself lucky that you have that much,” Jinlien said.

  “But is there nothing left…?”

  “Something, perhaps. There are traces of it here at the Temple, in some of the older books. Much of that is lost already for there are none who care to take the time to read it…”

  “May I?” Amais interrupted eagerly.

  “I don’t think it would be allowed,” Jinlien said with regret. “They probably would not wish any secrets to be inadvertently revealed to anyone who isn’t already one of us—one of the Temple’s people. But I know that the midwives still use jin-ashu, by tradition, when they write their patients up in their books. Not the newly trained doctors, though. Not the modern medicine. It doesn’t seem to lend itself to the grace and the beauty of that lost language.”

  “But it can’t all be lost,” Amais said despondently.

  “There are other places,” Jinlien said.

  “Where?”

  “Would you go look? Even if I told you that you might not like what you found…?”

  “Oh yes,” Amais breathed. “Oh, yes, Jinlien. Sometimes I think if I could find another who knew that language, I would find another who could remember Tai’s world with me. A kinder place. With no war, and no hunger.”

  “Who told you there was no war and no hunger four hundred years ago?” Jinlien questioned. “It’s an incomplete history, then, that you know.”

  “But there was always the women’s country. There was always that,” Amais said. “There was always the language of gentle things, the strength that comes from knowing that there was a sister of the heart out there for you in the moments that were the hardest, when you most needed a friend… History isn’t just battles and famines, Jinlien. It’s people. It’s always been people.”

  “Perhaps I can see if both of you can be found a place in the library,” Jinlien said, and she was only half joking.

  She had been as good as her word, and had come herself to Amais’s lodgings to escort Vien—there had been only the possibility of only the one opening, and even that had been granted as a huge favor—to her new place or work and introduce her to her employer. Vien seemed happier for a while, after that, leaving for work in the mornings, returning in the mid afternoon, leaving Amais to supplement their income as best she could and to take care of Aylun.

  Vien had been working in the library for nearly two years before Amais observed that she had begun to take a little more care than usual over her appearance as she left for work, glancing in a looking glass to make sure her hair was tidy, even using some of her hard-earned money to buy cosmetics rather than food. Amais noticed, but she had been so grateful that her mother’s mood was good and that they were somehow keeping their heads above water even though they had to keep swimming hard just to stay afloat that she had turned a blind eye to the possible causes of this state of affairs.

  Until the hour in which Vien returned from work one day and announced that she was married.

  Three

  Lixao was nearly thirteen years older than Vien, a widower for many years. If asked about his work at the University library, which happened rather less often than he would have liked or thought appropriate, he would give an impression of being the head librarian himself, an indispensable part of the library’s workings, without whom the place would grind to a complete chaotic halt. In fact, he was no more than one of the four archivists in the library, answering to several senior officials at least three levels of authority above his head. But he was the supervisor of a clutch of copyists, one of whom was Vien.

  It would have been hard to pinpoint a specific time at which they first became aware of one another as more than a superior and a lowly employee. Lixao might well have been interested in someone as a potential concubine rather than a wife—he was sufficiently of the old school to consider that as a real possibility—but times were changing. Concubinage might have still flourished behind closed doors, in existing arrangements, but it was considered increasingly inappropriate to initiate such a liaison with a woman, especially one who had been married before and was already a mother. So Lixao, once he found his eye caught by his new copyist, had courted her in the traditional manner with a view to marriage—and Vien, lost, lovely Vien, who had been struggling to find her place in a world that had turned harsh and alien on her, surrendered with joy to the idea of belonging to someone again, of having someone who would be obliged to take care of her.

  She did not consult her daughters. She did not feel it necessary. Lixao had asked her to marry him, not the children—they were merely baggage that came along with the deal. He himself had children, after all—a son and two daughters, all grown and with families of their own—and they were not consulted either. When introduced to their father’s new wife, Lixao’s children were polit
e but indifferent.

  Vien’s daughters were another story.

  Aylun was now nine years old, a precocious and beautiful child, but she had been allowed to run wild, to grow up under such discipline as her older sister had been able to provide. She had been taken from Elena’s early influence, and the entire world of Elaas, when she had been almost too young to remember it. She knew of its existence, and she sometimes talked about the journey that had brought her from there to Syai with an air of one who was claiming it for a real memory—but even that was doubtful, and might have just been a cobbled-together version manufactured from the things that Amais had told her. Aylun had grown up in a world where no adult had really had taken charge of her, and she had come to accept the existence of such a world as her due. When Lixao came into her life, he tried to assert a father’s authority over her, attempting to mete out discipline over what he saw as transgressions and childish tantrums. The only result of that was that Aylun became sullen, rebellious, and—because Vien, as a dutiful wife, always took Lixao’s part—estranged from both her stepfather and her mother.

  For Amais, it was quite different.

  She had known her father, and had idolized him. For her, Lixao could never be anything other than a counterfeit copy of a shining original, the figure of legend who had taught the young Amais to swim, who had taken her to play with wild dolphins, who had been a titanic pillar of strength and of unquestioning love. If Nikos had ever disciplined her harshly, she had forgotten it. The word ‘father’ had a specific meaning for her, and it was not associated in any way with Lixao’s prematurely lined face, short-sighted dark eyes behind round spectacles, and primly pursed thin-lipped mouth. He wanted both Vien’s girls to address him as Father—Aylun, although she avoided addressing him at all if she had any choice in the matter, complied, if sulkily, but Amais refused. She was sixteen years old, nearly adult, and Lixao could hardly exact obedience by corporal punishment; he tried stern reprimands, but neither those nor Vien’s tearful requests brought any results. Amais was very polite, adhering to every point of protocol required of her except that one. When she had occasion to speak to her mother’s new husband she found ways of doing so without invoking any form of direct address at all.

  Aylun was too young and far too caught up in her own rebellion to talk this over with in any meaningful way; Vien had happily allowed herself to be subsumed by her new position in life—someone’s wife again, sure of her status, secure in the fact that someone else was dealing with the practical aspects of day-to-day living. She had even been provided with a maidservant, hitherto part of Lixao’s bachelor establishment, who had been retained to cook and clean in the new domestic set-up. Amais fled to the only person in Linh-an to whom she could pour out her troubles, the only person who would listen to her problems and who might give advice for seeking solutions.

  The Great Temple had become a sanctuary for Amais, a place where she could pretend that the old days were real again and all around her. There was a vast and brooding magnificence about the Temple; it was no longer a young and vibrant thing but it wore its centuries with grace, like a Dowager Empress, and if the air trapped in its Circles sometimes felt stuffy and stagnant, unstirred by any breath of change for many years, it was also loaded with the comforting and familiar scents and sounds that made it easier to bear the contemporary dramas that flourished outside these venerable walls. As Jinlien’s friend, Amais had gained access to some of the inner gardens of the Temple, largely unchanged since Tai’s time; she had witnessed the leaves turn and fall in the autumn, and had seen peach and cherry trees, descendants or replacements of those that might have blossomed for Tai centuries before, burst into extravagant bloom in springtime. She had been allowed to tag along as Jinlien did basic Temple housekeeping tasks, like feeding the giant golden carp that moved sluggishly in the ponds and pools of the Third Circle gardens, or lovingly restoring the shrines of the quiet and holy Fourth Circle after supplicants had completed their devotions back to the quiet tranquility and perfect order that the next worshipper would expect to find there, or even helping with the clusters of incense burners at the three gates to the Fourth Circle—no two alike, crafted from copper and gold and ground rubies, glowing in improbable shimmery shades of red and gold, speckled with crimson and dark green.

  The burners had their own rituals and customs, requiring a composed and serene frame of mind; somehow Jinlien contrived to have Amais helping with the burners whenever she turned up at the Temple particularly agitated about something, using the age-old Temple procedures to soothe and calm a distressed supplicant coming to seek peace and fulfillment at the feet of the Gods themselves.

  “They are in your hands,” Jinlien said, handing a dull bronze pot full of smoldering embers to Amais. “There must always be a fire in the heart of the incense burners. These, as you see them, have not been allowed to cool for almost a thousand years.”

  “What happens if you let it go out?” Amais asked, distracted from her own problems by the grandeur of a legacy that had kept the earthly fires burning for almost a millennium with little embers of heaven.

  Jinlien had dug around the fine incense ashes that filled the burners with a tiny ivory-handled spade and had extracted the old ember she was replacing into a brass pot of her own, nodding to Amais to insert a fresh one into the cavity provided, burying it lightly with more ash, laying a curl of new incense on the surface.

  “You’re carrying it,” Jinlien said as she worked, indicating the brass pot in Amais’s hand with a nod. “When they go out, their light dies. They turn into dead dull things, like your ember pot.”

  “But it’s full of embers,” Amais said. “Shouldn’t there be enough warmth to rekindle it?”

  “They never come back to life,” Jinlien said. “If the fire is allowed to die, the incense burner dies—and it cannot be revived. These have not cooled since they came out of the fires in which they were born; no amount of embers can replace that first spark of life once it’s gone. Once a burner is cold, it is dead, good for nothing—its only value as a container in which new embers are brought to these, their living brothers and sisters.”

  “So these were incense burners too? Just like those ones?” Amais asked, inspecting her ember pot with something like astonishment. There didn’t seem to be anything in common between the plain bronze bowl she carried and the wonderful glowing things she was tending.

  “Yes,” Jinlien said, “once upon a time. But their embers were allowed to cool, to die, and the burner died with it.”

  “What happens to the one who allows that to happen?” Amais said, lifting round eyes to her friend’s face.

  “The sight of the dead burner,” Jinlien said quietly, “has often been considered punishment enough. It’s like a murderer being made to spend the rest of his life sharing the same house with the corpse of the person he had killed.”

  After being entrusted with something like this, it seemed churlish to carp too much about the iniquities of a fleeting mortal life whose troubles were to the incense burners as the lifespan of a gnat, flashing past, gone and forgotten almost before they had vanished. The incense burners’ message to Amais, with Jinlien as proxy, seemed to be a soothing litany of calm and serenity, a glimpse of the true Way, a chance to place these temporary annoyances in context and to realize that they would not last forever.

  But it was Jinlien herself, independently of the incense burners and aware of Amais’s continuing interest in the vanishing jin-ashu language of the women of Syai, who had inadvertently set into motion events she could not possibly have foreseen when she encouraged Amais to use her new stepfather as a connection to the library, with its dusty back rooms filled to the rafters with unarchived and esoteric books and scrolls some of which could well have proved to be remnants of the thoughts and prayers of the women who had lived in the lost women’s country of Syai from many centuries ago.

  The first time that Amais approached Lixao to discuss the matter, it was in general terms�
��she had merely asked, without going into details, about uncatalogd material in the library.

  “There are rooms of it,” Lixao said. “We could probably put those rooms to better use—but nobody knows if anything really valuable is lying at the bottom of those stacks. So they are left alone. Of course, it is not for me to say, but if it were up to me the matter would have been dealt with properly years ago. Yes, yes, there are rooms of uncatalogd material.”

  “Perhaps I could help with sorting it out?” Amais suggested hopefully.

  “It needs trained hands,” Lixao said. “We can’t let children do that kind of work. How would you know if something was important?”