Six
The promised letter materialized before the end of the day, an old-fashioned scroll sealed with red wax as though it had been an imperial directive, its destination and the name of its recipient written on the outside in an ethereally graceful jin-ashu script. But it was not just the sheer beauty and virtuosity of the calligraphy that moved Amais almost to tears when the letter was first delivered into her hand. It was its mere existence—its matter-of-fact existence, here on the edge of the world, the only place in what had once been baya-Dan’s beloved homeland where, apparently, the values she had cherished still flourished and were carefully tended and nurtured. Almost everywhere else in Syai the language and the secrets of the women had been trampled in the wake of wars, revolutions, the rush to apparent equality in status and education of men and women, the path of progress strewn with the wreckage of the grace and beauty that had gone before and that apparently could not stand against the weight of the march of years, fluttering underfoot like the broken wings of crushed butterflies. But here, in a lost Temple where time had stood still or had at least moved at a slower, more careful pace, things like jin-ashu and jin-shei not only still existed but they actually existed in their ancient state, accepted as part of contemporary reality, never thrown over for the shiny new baubles promised by progress and modern times, never dismissed, destroyed or defeated. The last refuge of something at the same time unutterably fragile and stronger than the granite in the mountains at Sian Sanqin’s back, the Temple seemed to be one of the few places where those ancient butterflies still lived and thrived—iron butterflies, stronger than their peers in city and village where the tentacles of progress had reached, a shelter from which that which had been lost could begin to be found again.
Amais stayed at Sian Sanqin longer than she had thought she would. She did not wholly understand this place, not reared as she was in the city traditions of Linh-an which had, in the four centuries of her family’s exile from Syai, solidified into a monolithic slab of truth and the accepted way of doing things. It seemed to leave no room for addition or alteration but simply was, demanding acceptance in its entirety simply by virtue of its existence. But Amais was beginning to realize that a resurrection of all the things that she wanted to see return to the fabric of life in Syai would not only need changes to that ancient unalterable creed, it would depend on them. A melding of the old and the new would be the only way to restore that ancient secret language, and its power, to the women of Syai—and in mere days Amais was beginning to understand how much she still needed to learn about her land’s past and its present before she could begin even contemplating a future, let alone attempting the daunting task of shaping one.
Without a word Amais would rise at dawn, and walk down to the Temple with the acolytes who tended its Gods; without a word, she labored at their side at whatever task she was handed—and her presence had been accepted and unquestioned by the Temple and its folk, and tasks had been found. She spent nearly two weeks on the mountaintop, attending dawn prayers, cleaning out old incense and offerings which somehow magically appeared at various shrines and niches although it was impossible to ever actually catch anybody in the act of making them, sweeping the Temple floors, changing viscid and fouled old oil in the Temple lamps, lighting them when the sun went down and extinguishing them after dawn prayers. She sank into the Temple, became part of it, learning from its words of worship and its silences, dreaming strange dreams, none of which she ever seemed able to remember when she woke, as she slept in her assigned pallet.
But it was a dream, in the end, that made her leave the quiet holy mountaintop at last. It was nothing coherent or recognizable, just a series of images that she retained as her eyes flickered open one cool morning: a knot of silent women standing together and staring at her mutely, some of them with their hair cropped short and just brushing their shoulders or else hacked off in uneven clumps so that they had the haunted and hunted look of fugitives or transgressors who had been on the receiving end of mob ‘justice’; a pile of notebooks, filled with fine jin-ashu characters, overflowing with a sense of something urgent and important; a flowering tree in a field above an ancient family cemetery whose markers had long been wiped clean by the centuries and leaning at odd angles out of the soil where they had been planted; a woman’s cry echoing as though uttered in a cavern or a dungeon deep beneath the earth…herself, opening up her hands and releasing a cloud of brilliantly colored butterflies into a cloudless blue sky.
As urgently as she had been driven to find this place, so now she began to feel she needed to leave it. The dream images haunted her for a brace of days, and then she went to the old woman who had written her the letter of introduction and asked her blessing on the road ahead.
“Not my blessing but Cahan’s be upon you, young seeker,” the old woman said with a small serene smile. “We will give you bread and mountain water for your first day’s journey.”
“Thank you, for everything,” Amais said, instinctively bowing her head as though to something holy.
“We are here to be found,” the old woman said. “Thank you for coming, for bringing the world up here with you, the world that turns outside our walls and leaves us in its wake. Sometimes we need to be reminded of it.”
Amais rose before the dawn light summoned the acolytes to another day of prayer and began descending the long staircase of Sian Sanqin while night was still upon it, in a wash of starlight, under a moon that was a pale sliver in the cold night sky. Sunrise caught her halfway down the stair, pouring down the mountainside, pooling into the valleys below, bright light of the gods released from Cahan, changing the monochromatic silver and shadow of night into the many-hued brightness of day, and it was as if that was a sign—Sian Sanqin had been a gateway, and now she was walking from darkness into light, from ignorance into knowledge, from captivity into freedom, the thing sought hanging bright and beautiful close to the seeker’s hand, like a ripe peach on a tree in the gardens of Cahan. All Amais had to do was reach out and pluck it.
She had been given directions as to where to seek the house of the surviving jin-shei-bao of the Sian Sanqin priestess, and they were clear and unequivocal—the road she needed to travel seemed to pick up from the foot of the staircase and lead her straight down into the valley, past cultivated fields where, already, workers wearing workclothes of undyed cotton and large conical hats of woven straw toiled in the furrows and the paddies under the new day’s sun, straightening occasionally as Amais walked by to look at her and follow her with curious eyes until she passed out of sight.
The house that was her destination was an ancient country farmhouse, changed and added to over generations but retaining a sense of gracious harmony, its outside gate recently painted in a shade of deep brick red, a narrow pagoda-style roof tiled in glazed dark-red tiles supported by two side pillars which sported hacha-ashu characters proclaiming prosperity, health and happiness within. There was space for a summoning gong that announced the arrival of visitors, but the gate was ajar, and the gong was missing. There was a sound of voices coming from within. Amais, hesitating, pushed the gate open a little wider and slipped inside.
The door was faced with a traditional screen, hiding the courts beyond from casual glances and opportunistic evil spirits. Amais stepped into the entry archway and cautiously peered around the screen. The source of the voices she had heard was just beyond—the cultivated formal garden of the outer courts, faced on two sides with colonnaded walkways with doorways opening from them, now filled with men and women in plain blue or gray uniforms, stepping in and out of the rooms, lounging on the edges of the stone fountain, lighting cigarettes and dropping used matches or grinding out spent cigarette butts underfoot on the once pristine walkways. The soldiers had piled a tidy stack of assorted weapons close to the gate, where they could be quickly accessed. A white horse stood in one corner, resting one dainty hoof on its point with a dancer’s grace, munching peacefully on a delicately blooming shrub. There was a lull in
the various conversations as Amais stepped in, and many pairs of eyes turned in her direction, not all of them friendly.
Directly ahead, opposite the main gate, another gateway arched, providing access into the inner courts This gate was firmly closed, and here was the small gong that Amais had missed at the front gate, with an accompanying striker made of polished wood hung alongside .
Amais lifted her chin and crossed the yard full of the uniformed troops without any impression of fear or haste. She struck the gong when she arrived at the inner gate, and waited in the pool of silence, those watchful eyes still boring into her back. She was rewarded in a short span of time by a small window on the inner red gate opening to reveal the wizened face of what must have been a thoroughly ancient family retainer.
“I have a letter,” Amais said, “for the lady Xinmei.”
“If it would please you, give it to me,” the doorkeeper said in a reedy voice.
“It requires a response,” Amais said.
“Very well. Wait here, then.”
The letter from the Temple on the mountain top changed hands through the window in the gate, and the window was shut. Amais heard footsteps shuffling away. She waited patiently; her face schooled into an expression of indifference as the minutes piled up. Behind her, the murmur of conversations interrupted by her arrival started up again, and although it was impossible to distinguish what was being said, Amais had the feeling that she herself was the subject of most of them. Then, thankfully, the same shuffling footstep returned, there was a rattling sound, and the gate swung open, revealing the complete person of old gatekeeper who bowed low as he motioned Amais inside.
“My lady bids you enter,” the doorkeeper said. “This way, sai’an, this way please, follow me.”
The gate was carefully closed and locked as Amais stepped through it.
The doorkeeper ushered her into a graceful and beautiful place dominated by a large ancient cedar in the far corner and with walkways of white sand curving around flower beds, ponds, and stones and boulders of every color, size and shape, which looked as though they had been brought here at great expense. Chief amongst them was a trio of upright stones of about Amais’s own height, silver-gray, pointed toward the sky. A few steps from them rose a small, exquisite pavilion fluttering red ribbons with golden writing upon them. The doorkeeper conducted her to the pavillion, and then politely requested her to wait.
A small table of inlaid rosewood sat in the middle of the pavilion, and on it the iron burner and a green-glazed teapot, implements of the traditional tea ceremony, with several tiny handle-less cups laid ready. For a moment Amais was back in her grandmother’s shadowy house, where she learned how these ceremonies were properly conducted; the memory was so vivid that for a moment she breathed the salt-laden air of Elaas once more, and was almost the child that she had been, listening to baya-Dan’s yearning, aristocratic voice reading the ancient poems of her race. Baya-Dan had been a strict old dragon when it came to things like this, but somehow Amais had not even realized just how much she missed her grandmother until she was faced with a reminder this potent, this familiar.
“Huan-jie jin-shei”, a melodious voice from behind Amais interrupted her musings. “Be welcome in my house, in the name of the jin-shei vows of my past. How fares my jin-shei-bao in Sian Sanqin? I have not seen her in too many years.”
“Thank you for your hospitality” Amais said, turning to accept this welcome and bowing to her hostess. “She is well, your sister of the heart.”
“Is she happy?”
The tone of voice was almost plaintive, but there was more to it than this—allowing herself to take stock of her companion for the first time Amais saw a lady who was well beyond what could be considered middle age. At first sight she was still youthful in her looks, but the lines showing in her face, although few, were cut deep. Her hair was mostly gray, with a few stray strands remaining to show the brilliant black it had been in her youth, and carefully styled in the traditional manner with jeweled hair pins holding the heavy coils. She wore a robe of saffron-colored silk with scarlet embroideries on the sleeves.
The jin-shei tie usually implied peers or contemporaries, but the old woman in the mountaintop Temple might have been the mother of the woman in the house in the valley. Life appeared to have weighed heavily on both the jin-shei sisters, the one in Sian Sanqin and the one in the valley below, but the more worldly of the two women had taken steps to hide those burdens from casual eyes and the other had allowed her life to show in her face and in her eyes. It was far harder to lie to Gods than to men.
But the question had made Amais cast her mind back to the Temple, and she suddenly had the vivid impression that the woman who had cast her lot with the Gods was somehow far happier than this sister of her heart, living in what was luxury and opulence compared to the frugal existence in Sian Sanqin.
“She is content,” Amais said carefully, after a pause. “Or at least she seemed that way to me. Content and at peace with herself. But she said that there was a story behind your life, and hers—and that it was your story to tell, Lady Xinmei. So I come to you from the Temple, as a supplicant.”
“What is it you were seeking at Sian Sanqin?”
“The women’s country,” Amais said. “The language that is lost, and the secrets it carried.”
Xinmei gazed at her for a long moment with glittering eyes, and then sighed; seeming to release a breath she had been holding against some unlooked-for evil thing. She courteously indicated the small tea table and the seating cushions piled around it. “Will you sit?” she asked. “We will talk. It has been a while since I have spoken on this with anyone… with another woman… with a woman so young. You have an unusual face, a strange accent. If I may ask, where do you come from, that your paths bring you to my door? Perhaps you will tell me your story, too, if you come asking to hear mine.”
It was the time-honored trade, news and stories for hospitality. Amais was no stranger to it, after her journey across Syai. So she told of her birth in a distant land, of a grandmother whose spirit had always dwelled in the Syai of old while her body lived out its days on a sunny island halfway across the world, of her own travels back to Syai with her mother and little sister, of the years in the city seeking answers to questions which had ceased to be asked a very long time ago.
“Have you been to the city? To Linh-an?” Amais asked. “This… all this… this garden, the music of your fountains, the cut of your gown, it is all almost forgotten in Linh-an, I think, unless it is kept as a careful secret behind high walls and locked doors, hoarded against a stray glance of a stranger’s eyes, against the coming of the night. Everything is so different from the world my grandmother told me about. I grew up believing in things that no longer exist.”
“It may be that it will soon be forgotten here, too,” Xinmei said, with a veiled glance towards the gate that led into the occupied outer courts.
“If I may be permitted to ask… who are they? What do they want here?”
“They are lIoh’s people,” Xinmei said. “They are brave men and women, but they come with the winds of change, with talk of reform and what they call redistribution. Those of us who own property or collect rents are in danger for no other reason than being what we are—they call us landlords, and evil. I think these are here because of three things—they wish to let us know that they are near, and they matter; they say they are here to protect us, the family and the retainers inside this house, from the mobs if such should rise against us, although if this happens it will have been the talk of these very soldiers which precipitates it; and, perhaps most obvious of all, they needed a place to sleep and they would have had to evict the peasants from their homes if they chose to stay at their poor houses in the village. So far, they’ve paid for their keep—but they’ve been here for nearly three weeks now, and I very much fear that the gardens of my father’s house will never be the same again…They are everywhere, and it was brave of you, my dear, to even think about
travelling across Syai at this time at all, let alone by yourself and with no protection. But let us not speak of them now. They are nothing to do with your own journey.”
“I had to go,” Amais said simply. “I did not even think about this, about people like that, when I set out.”
“Brave,” Xinmei repeated. “You have a courageous heart. If you come seeking the places where some trace of jin-ashu remains and it is still strong, you have found one right here. You do not know this, you are far too young and you have not lived in the land for long enough to have a memory of it—but in the days of Empire one of the daughters of this house was always sent out as a new Emperor’s concubine. I have letters, thousands of letters, some of them dating back four or five changes of Emperors, from the women who were sent to the foot of the Imperial throne. All in jin-ashu, all written in a secret language that no man in the palace of their origin could understand if the letters were intercepted, and no man in the house of destination could understand until its women read it to their husbands by candlelight in the darkness before dawn. And then the letters going back across the land, with quiet instructions as to what the concubine should tell her Emperor in the nights she shared with him back in the city. For generations, my family has been the counsel in the shadows, the whisper that ruled the command that ruled the land… I myself would have been that woman, in my generation, if it weren’t for jin-shei. That is the story that you came here to hear, I think.” She paused for a moment, her eyes veiled by dark lashes, and then lifted them again to meet Amais’s own. “It is not,” she said, “a story that I can be proud to tell. There are things in my past that I am not proud to have done. But my jin-shei-bao has asked me to do it in the letter that you brought, and it is a far, far lesser thing that she asks of me, so many years later, than I have ever asked of her when we were both young. So I will do it. But first and foremost—you are a guest, and I have the hospitality of my house to offer you. Will you have tea?”
The Embers of Heaven Page 16
