The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  It was true that most of the people who took Amais in could be of no more assistance in finding Jinlien’s fabled Sian Sanqin than they might have been if she had asked which way the heavenly gardens of Cahan lay, but if she asked to be pointed in the direction of the mountains nearly everyone knew enough basic geography to be of that much assistance. And if there was a presence that guided her steps and kept her purpose, however nebulous and lacking in actual detail, firmly focused, it helped to bring her to the foot of the right mountains—as she got closer to her destination, she even began to find individuals who had heard of the Sian Sanqin Temple itself and were able to provide more and more accurate directions.

  It was still with a sense of astonishment, after weeks of wandering, that she found herself at the foot of Jinlien’s three thousand stairs—a place she might have thought was no more than a romantic exaggeration that people were often given to in bestowing place names. But it proved to be no more than the truth, a wide, meandering staircase of ancient and uneven steps leading up to a high saddle between two peaks where, from the bottom of the stair, a pagoda-shaped roof tiled in vivid blue was barely discernible.

  Amais took almost three and a half hours to climb all the way to the top. Sian Sanqin had none of the grandeur of the Great Temple in Linh-an—few places could—but its setting more than compensated for that. Every now and then she’d pause to nurse the stitch in her side and look down the way she had come, and find her breath taken away by the beauty of the vista—or else she’d look up at what she still had to climb and a new angle of the staircase would show her a new vision of the Temple on top, or hide it completely behind some looming rock so that it looked like she was climbing a stairway that led only to the clouds in the sky. Here and there at the edges of the stair ancient images of gods and spirits had been carved into the rocks, often with niches obviously intended for offerings hollowed out within the images themselves and within arm’s reach of the staircase. Most of them had been there for so long that their faces, if they had ever had any distinguishable features at all and the original carvers had not balked at giving the holy ones human and therefore mortal faces, had faded to a softly rounded indistinguishable blur, with only gentle hollows where eyes might have been. The effect on the supplicant climbing the tall stair, oddly enough, was to feel more watched rather than less so—and it was with a peculiar lack of surprise that Amais finally rounded the final corner, gasping for breath in the thin mountain air, and found a monk wrapped in loose brown robes waiting for her. He held a handful of incense sticks, some with smoke already gently curling from them and some brand new and waiting to be lit, and his eyes were folded into what were almost twin horizontal slits by the breadth of the largely toothless smile he offered as he greeted Amais with a bow.

  She returned the bow, gulping air, and accepted instinctively the handful of incense sticks he handed her. Seeing him waiting there had been oddly inevitable, as though he belonged with the three thousand stairs and the old blind gods and the blue pagoda that rose at his back—but this welcome, complete with waiting means of making an offering, did startle her a little.

  “Were you expecting me?” she asked hesitantly, glancing behind her as though someone else might be following her, someone for whom this greeting might really have been meant.

  “In a manner of speaking, young sai’an,” the monk said in a high reedy voice, his language far closer to the classical high tongue that baya-Dan had spoken in far Elaas than the language used in the streets of contemporary Linh-an. “When someone begins to climb the staircase of three thousand steps, we expect that they are heading for Sian Sanqin.”

  “But how did you know when I…” Amais began, and by way of forestalling reply the monk gestured with his hand for her to turn and look down.

  From the vantage point on which they stood, it was perfectly possible to see all the way down the fantastic staircase, every step of the way, all the way down to the floor of the valley—and even beyond, along the slopes of the foothills, the eye being led further and further until it seemed as though all of Syai lay open and waiting as though in the palm of one’s hand. Amais could not suppress a small gasp, what breath she had managed to catch suddenly torn from her at the sheer beauty of it all, at the quiet power of this place.

  “This way, young sai’an,” the monk said. “We will show you to the Temple. After, there is food ready in the refectory, and there is a bed waiting in the guest house. We are told many answers come from the dreams that are dreamed in this place.”

  Five

  There was no order in Sian Sanqin as in the Great Temple, no hierarchy of the Gods and spirits. It was as though here, this high up, this much closer to Cahan, it didn’t matter any more who was of Early Heaven and who was of Later Heaven—all that was holy was equally holy, equally worthy of worship and praise. Reared by her staunchly hierarchical, old-fashioned grandmother, and then having every such notion reinforced by the tiered Circles of the Great Temple, Amais initially found herself at a loss when she entered Sian Sanqin. Everything seemed random. She recognized some of the statues—they were not identical to the ones in Linh-an, but they were similar enough in their features and their offerings for their identity to be obvious—but there were others she could only stare at blankly and conjecture as to what they were meant to represent. In front of one particular and very unfamiliar faceless statue, the body of a dead cat lay in state, whether as offering on behalf of a human supplicant or as a supplicant in its own right it was hard to tell.

  Amais thought it would be prudent to cultivate a broad base of benevolence in Cahan, and distributed the incense sticks she had been given across the breadth of the God-spectrum at random, not allowing herself to make any difference between those she recognized and those she did not. If they were here, they were worthy of an incense stick. She even left one at the shrine with the cat. It could do no harm, for her own soul or the animal’s.

  When she came out it was already getting dark, the sun being taken early by one of the two peaks above the temple. Such warmth as the day had carried lingered like a brief memory in places where sunlight had but recently fled, but deeper shadows already carried the night’s chill and Amais, shivering lightly, picked up the pack she had left by the entrance of the Temple when she had gone inside, slipped her bare feet back into her shoes, and hurried towards the nearest building that showed a light in the hope that it would be the promised refectory.

  There were only a handful of people in the long, low room when she pushed the door open and entered the place. It was furnished with a couple of tables, nearly the length of the room itself, with backless benches flanking them on either side. Three men not wearing monkish robes, pilgrims like herself, perhaps, sat in a cluster at the far end of one of the tables, talking quietly amongst themselves; they lifted their heads as Amais had come in, registered her presence, and then went back to their conversation, giving no sign that she would be welcome in their circle. At the other table a cluster of Temple acolytes bent over their own suppers. Amais had had a quick pang of misgiving when she had first seen the toothless monk who had greeted her—he had been male, and what she had come here to seek was a woman’s secret. Indeed, she had come to this place because Jinlien had spoken of ‘crones.’ But, as she took a longer and more apprising look, Amais saw that there were a couple of ancient women in the Temple group, their heads shaven just like their male counterparts, but unmistakable in their shape even underneath the drapery of their robes.

  It was one of these who rose from the table and crossed the room to Amais.

  “Be welcome,” the woman said. She was thin and reedy, with shapes of elongated dugs discernible through her robe, and looked ancient enough to have remembered the first pilgrim that ever set foot in this place, before even the statues by the stairs had been carved. But her voice belied the vessel from which it issued, because it was warm and rich, liquid and gold like honey, and seemed to belong rather more to a wealthy aristocratic dowager who had be
en well-fed and pampered all her life than to a woman whose life was pledged to serve others and who owned nothing, not even the clothes on her back. “Would you like to join us for your meal?”

  “I… yes, thank you,” Amais said.

  “You can leave your things there in the corner,” the old woman said. “I will show you to your bed after supper.”

  She was greeted with smiles and nods as she approached the table where the Temple people were sitting, but they all ate in companionable silence. Supper was simple enough, a thick vegetable stew and a hank of coarse brown bread, but Amais ate ravenously, not even having realized how hungry she was until the bowl was set in front of her with a heavenly aroma tickling her nose. She had barely paid attention to her companions other than to return their greetings as she sat down, and it was with some surprise that she realized, after she had sopped the last of the stew with her remaining piece of bread, that she and the old woman were the last people left in the refectory. The woman’s eyes were enormous in her ascetic face, twin dark pools filled with a deep quiet serenity and a sense that time had stopped, had ceased to be of any importance whatsoever, that the old woman had no other place to be and no other thing to do than to sit at the table and wait until Amais was done with her meal. Amais’s initial instinct had been a sudden urge to apologize for keeping the woman from her duties at the Temple, such as they might be, but that was quickly smothered out of existence by the sheer weight of the other’s presence in this place, as though she had been assigned to this and had no other duties except to be at Amais’s side.

  “Thank you,” Amais said at last, choosing the path of courtesy and simple good manners as she gathered up the detritus of her meal and took it to the washing-up bowl in the far corner of the refectory. “It’s been a long time since I’ve tasted a stew like that.”

  “We are close to Cahan here,” the old woman said, “and heaven is kind.”

  “Where do you get…” Amais began, but the old woman lifted a hand to stop her.

  “No questions are answered in this place,” she said, “until the sun comes up over the mountains. Come, I will show you where you will sleep. Tomorrow, we can speak further.”

  Amais, who had been about to inquire about nothing more pressing than the provenance of the vegetables, which did not seem likely to have been grown on this holy crag, swallowed the rest of the question and did not speak again. The old woman took up one of the handful of lanterns that had been hung around the refectory walls on iron hooks and beckoned Amais to follow. Gathering her pack from where she had left it by the door, Amais obeyed.

  The dormitory was another long, low building, behind the refectory. The single room inside had been divided into two by a partition wall-screen of woven bamboo, providing a dormitory for men and for women on either side. Amais could hear the faint murmur of male voices from the other side of the partition, probably the other pilgrims from supper, but she appeared to be the only woman in residence at this time. Eight narrow pallets, unoccupied and neatly made with a small pillow and a rough blanket apiece, were ranged against the far wall of the dormitory, and Amais’s guide hung her lantern above one of them on another iron hook.

  “We rise at dawn to worship in the Temple,” the old woman said, “and you are welcome to join us, or go there yourself at a later time. We will speak in the morning.”

  If she dreamed, she did not remember it the next day, woken by the sun and by chanting of voices. There was a chill in the air; Amais breathed a prayer of apology to the Gods and stayed in her bed, pulling the blanket up over her head. She slept again, evidently, because the next time she became aware of her surroundings the sun was slanting at a different angle through the single window, pooling in a gentle wash at the foot of her pallet. Amais yawned, stretched, and swung her legs out of bed.

  There were questions that had to be asked that day in Sian Sanqin.

  By the time she made her way to the Temple—she felt an obligation somehow, here, to stop at the Temple before she went on to the refectory to see about breakfast—the place was deserted. Even the dead cat had gone; it was equally easy, in this rarefied mountain air where anything seemed possible, to believe that the cat had been removed as an unsuitable offering or that it had been granted access into Cahan. The humdrum and the miracle seemed so close in this strange Temple in the clouds that they might almost have been interchangeable.

  The refectory was empty, too, and there seemed to be few places where one could go to actively seek the acolytes themselves—who apparently melted into the crags and the twisted mountainside trees when they were not required for Temple duties, because the place appeared utterly devoid of human life except for herself. Amais found breakfast of sorts laid out—goat’s cheese and more of that brown bread from the previous night, and a tiny oil burner over which stood a cast-iron stand supporting a plump pottery teapot. She finished what had been provided—she was either in need of more sustenance than usual after her long climb to this place or else the food really tasted better in Sian Sanqin than any she had ever had before—and then wandered outside again, into the mountain sunshine, breathing deeply of the crisp and clarifying air. A part of her was grateful that she was alone; this was the kind of place where solitude could be a gift, not a burden. And in any event Amais was never quite alone—not while she carried Tai’s spirit with her, in the shape of the journals. She was perfectly content to wait, if waiting seemed to be required; she found a sheltered spot on the far side of the Temple, where the mountains opened up into a view of an alpine valley and then more snow-bound peaks rising beyond it, and settled on a sun-warmed rock like a contented cat with one of Tai’s journals in hand.

  She might have thought that here, removed from the bustle of Linh-an in which the events in the journal had been rooted, Tai’s world would seem somehow more distant, more removed from her own. But it seemed that one of the virtues of Sian Sanqin was indeed, as Jinlien had said, the tearing away of the barriers of time—and everything that could happen in the world had probably already happened, or was about to happen somewhere. All things were true, all things were possible, nothing was ever dead and gone or irretrievably lost because if it was gone from the place where it had been expected to be it would probably appear in another place, wholly unlooked for.

  In this context, it did not seem surprising in the least for Amais, when she looked up from the pages of the journal she had been reading to rest her eyes on the distant mountaintops again, to find that she had company. The old woman from the previous night had made herself comfortable nearby, sitting against another sun-drenched rock, with her hands folded in her lap, her head resting against the rock wall at her back, and her eyes closed. She might have even been asleep, but there was a sense of being awake and aware that rested lightly on her, and that left Amais herself in no doubt of the truth.

  “Have you ever,” Amais said, as though she was picking up a conversation they had already been having, something that had merely been interrupted by responsibility to everyday tasks and chores, “had a jin-shei-bao?”

  “Once,” the old woman said in that rich honeyed voice, giving no sign that the question asked had been in any way unexpected or extraordinary. She might as well have been answering that first unasked question that Amais had posed, about where the acolytes got the vegetables for their stew. “I had two. A long time ago.”

  Amais, who had not even been aware that she was holding her breath, let it out with a sigh. “Where are they now?”

  “One is dead, she has walked in the gardens of Cahan for many years,” the old woman said without emotion, with an air of merely imparting information. “The other is down in the valley, there below us, with her family, with the responsibilities of her house and her kin.”

  Sitting limned in the mountain sunshine, her eyes glowing, Amais had never felt so alive in her life—she felt the wind brushing the skin on her face and hands like a caress, she felt her blood rushing in her veins, her heart beating fast against her bre
ast. For all her faith, for all the stubborn belief, this was the first time that she had touched the living thing and known it to be true.

  “Can you tell me about it?” she asked, and her voice was full of passion, of quiet exhilaration, of the humility inherent in asking such a thing from one who shared that bond.

  “Were it not for jin-shei,” the old woman said, “it would be her you would be speaking to now, here on the mountaintop, and I would be in a house in the valley with grandchildren around my feet. But perhaps it is better if she told you, for it is her story, more than mine. You will pass her house when you come down the Great Stair and make your way out of the valley; I will give you a letter, and you can bear my greetings to her.”

  “Thank you. I will. When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Nigh on forty years,” the old woman said, her voice still full of serene tranquility. “What you come seeking, young sai’an, sometimes comes at a great price.”