The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  Seven

  “What did I know?” Xinmei said, after the tea had been brewed, after the scent cup had been poured and set aside to flavor the air with the delicate aroma of fine tea picked in the mountains in springtime. “I was fourteen, with all that age implies. I was selfish and ignorant and I thought—nay, I knew—precisely what I wanted and what my life owed me. And so I wronged two sisters, perhaps, because of my own desires—one of my own blood and my family, the other my sister of the heart. You see, it was I who was supposed to go to the Emperor when the time came for my generation to offer up one of its daughters.…”

  The story was stark in its simplicity, in the end. Fourteen-year-old Xinmei was beautiful and willful and precocious, all qualities that would have made her a natural choice for the Emperor’s concubine even if she had not been reared to the idea that this would be her fate. But that very precociousness came back to haunt her, because, young as she was, she had already chosen the sweetheart with whom she wanted to share her life. Being traded away to a man she did not love, even if he was the most powerful man in Syai, even if her role would be to guide and influence that power into the channels which her family wanted, became an appalling prospect for her, one she could scarcely bear to contemplate, and she recoiled from such a destiny. If she had been left alone to grow up at her own pace she would probably not have made the decisions that she did—but she was young, and desperate, and eloquent. And if truth be told her sweetheart was very young himself, and youthful passions did not need much convincing to come bursting out from behind the carefully constructed dams of protocol and decorum.

  “I cannot go to the Emperor,” Xinmei had told her mother, on the day before she was due to leave for Linh-an. “I am not acceptable.”

  “Whatever do you mean? You are the chosen one, you have been deemed suitable by your father and your entire elder kin!” her mother had protested.

  “I cannot go,” Xinmei had said. “You cannot send the Emperor a woman who is not a virgin.”

  The implications of that calm, quiet statement struck Xinmei’s household like lightning, leaving wreckage in its wake. Her father, summoning her into his presence, had been purple with rage. He had demanded to know who had spoiled her, but Xinmei, finding strength in the sure knowledge that such an admission would spell doom for the boy she had chosen to love, found surprising strength in refusing to name her lover. Her father had threatened to kill her, for bringing dishonor to the family name, for losing face to no less than the Emperor himself; her mother had prostrated herself at her husband’s feet and begged for her daughter’s life. But, in the end, her father had been typically pragmatic about the matter. Xinmei would be allowed to live. Her younger half-sister Xuelian, thirteen at the time and assumed to be too young to have indulged in the kind of behavior that had barred Xinmei from the Imperial bed, would be sent in her stead.

  But Xinmei would not escape punishment. Her fate was announced to her in a full family gathering the day after Xuelian left for Linh-an: if she was not to belong to the Emperor of Syai, then she would belong to its Gods. Instead of entering a household where she would command servants, she would become one—she was to be sent off to Sian Sanqin, the Temple on the mountain, as a handmaiden herself, as one of the dedicated and celibate acolytes of the Gods of Cahan.

  “I was to be punished,” Xinmei said to Amais, her gaze distant, focused somewhere on the long-gone years of her childhood and her youth. “My father could not send me to the Emperor, and thus his plans were thwarted—and he was not going to be the one with whom it all ended, who failed to continue the traditions of our family’s influence at the Court. Very well, he had dealt with that, he was lucky enough to have another daughter to send—although my heart broke for Xuelian at the time. She was a child, such a child…” Xinmei paused, dropped her eyes to the hands in her lap. Outwardly, she was calm, even serene—but as she told the tale of her life it was those hands that gave away her real feelings. They were tightly twined around one another, her fingers white with the pressure she was exerting. “But there was still the matter of what I had done. And allowing me to marry my lover would have been condoning that. So he would make sure it did not happen. I would be locked away in the Temple… for the rest of my life.”

  “And so you asked her to go,” Amais said with quiet conviction, putting the pieces together in her mind. She tried—and failed—to imagine the old woman she had left behind in Sian Sanqin as a young girl who was being asked in the name of the most holy of things to ascend that mountain and never come back down again as a free woman with her own life and dreams and hopes. Who was being asked to give herself, of her own free will, to the Gods of whom she had not thought of until that moment as having any say in how she lived her days. “Your friend. Your jin-shei-bao.”

  Xinmei looked up, and tears stood in her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “I asked her to go in my stead. In the name of jin-shei, I asked her. She was fifteen, a year older than me—but she was quiet, studious, and meek, she had been leading precisely the kind of compliant and sequestered life that my father had demanded of me. She had no man that she loved; she was well past the age where a marriage might have been arranged, though, and I knew that she had refused one suitor when her family had brought him to her. She didn’t want the life I wanted. She wanted something else; something different… even I did not know what. But she could find it in the solitude and the prayer up on that mountain. She could find it there far better than I.”

  “But did she want to go?”

  Xinmei shook her head slightly. “I don’t know,” she said. “That, I never asked. All I did was write her a letter—I told her of my father’s edict, of my love for the man to whom I knew my life belonged, even back then, even when I was such a child. And I also said that I thought I might already be carrying my lover’s child.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Not then,” Xinmei said. “I had hopes, but no evidence, no proof. But there was that to fight for—that life together. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted a family. I wanted an earthly life, full of earthly pain and pleasure… not the life of a priestess on a mystic Temple where people go to find the answers to riddles posed in their dreams.”

  “Like I did,” Amais said, with a small and slightly sad smile.

  “If it had been me that you had met up there instead of my jin-shei-bao,” Xinmei said, “you would not have got your answers. If I were still alive, all these years later, I would have been a bitter and broken old woman. And you say… you say that she is not…?”

  It was a question again, a plea for reassurance, even for redemption. But Amais could not give it, not in the way that it had been asked for; as with Xinmei’s phantom pregnancy of many years ago, where this lost jin-shei-bao’s state of mind was concerned Amais had only her own instincts and intuition and no evidence. She had not known any of this shared history while she was up in the Temple, or that this question would be asked, that an answer would be mutely pleaded for. “I only knew her for a handful of days,” she said at last, choosing her words carefully, “but in that time I never heard say a harsh word—about anything, least of all herself.” She paused. “Did you ever go and see her, up there?”

  “Twice,” Xinmei said. “The first time was when that child I had told her I might be carrying was finally born—it might have been almost a year after she went to Sian Sanqin. And then, once more, years after that, but that time I did not make myself known to her. I was just one of the pilgrims. She probably never even knew I was there. But I needed… I needed to see.”

  “And did you?” Amais said. She felt as though she had reached back in time and brought forward something living and breathing that had not existed in her world for a hundred years or more—that she was looking into the eyes of an ancient truth, one that she knew she had been sent here to find. Her heart was beating hard, and her eyes shone with the light of someone with a mission; she had no idea of just how unutterably beautiful she looked as she sat in the te
a pavilion, wrapped in the scent of the blooming garden and the fragrant tea.

  “I thought that she was angry,” Xinmei murmured. “I thought that she would rather not speak to me. Now… I am not so sure. Perhaps I should have said something then. But I did not, and I have not been back since. I asked for a hard, hard thing, and I knew it, and the canker of that guilt has been eating at my jin-shei vow ever since. I have never quite forgiven myself for it.”

  “But what happened?” Amais said. “How was your father convinced of this? How was it that you were not sent to Sian Sanqin anyway, despite the fact that someone else had agreed to go in your place?”

  “The Temple took care of that,” Xinmei said. “They had been promised an acolyte, and they got one. My father had to be content with that—he could not rail against a Temple decree, that would have been flouting the Gods themselves. As for me, I was now someone else, another person altogether. I was no longer promised. I was free. And my father had run out of options.”

  “He allowed you to marry?”

  “He refused me a dowry, but he said nothing further on the subject,” Xinmei said. “In fact, he never spoke to me again at all—until the time that he was on his death bed, and he summoned me back to the house.”

  “He wanted to say goodbye?…” Amais murmured, finding herself oddly touched by this possibility.

  Xinmei shook her head once. “No. He was not a forgiving man, and he never forgave me. But Xuelian had worked out well, instead, and he had no complaints on that score—and the Gods and the women’s vow had thwarted him on the other project, and he had simply turned his back on it. But none of that meant that I was back in his favor.”

  “Why did he wish to see you, then?”

  “Because of one last act of malicious intent,” Xinmei said. “My husband—the lover of my youth—had been stricken down by a paralysis when he was barely into his middle age, and it was my duty to care for him. He would have no servant do it. In a way, I guess that was expiation, after all.” She allowed herself a tiny grimace, the first time she had let her carefully schooled face show any sign of emotion. “I was responsible to him, to that family; our daughter, the only child we had who survived to adulthood, had married and moved away from our house and it was the two of us and a handful of old family retainers. But now my father summoned me back and told me that I was to inherit the farm, and take over from him.”

  “This farm?”

  “Yes, this place. This house, where I was born, where I rebelled, from which I was cast out once.”

  “And he gave it back to you!” Amais said. “How was that malicious?”

  “Because it meant two things,” Xinmei said. “One was that he was disinheriting his rightful heir in my favor, which meant that my life would be filled for the rest of my days with the bitterness and the endless machinations of that rightful heir against me. In a way, he sundered me from the very family I was to inherit, he knew that I would never have the cooperation of any of them in any decision I chose to make, and that I would be alone all my life.”

  “But your husband…”

  “My husband belonged to another family. I could not refuse my father and his deathbed edict. I could not take care of my husband in the manner that he demanded, and still accept that edict. So he tore me apart from him in the end, my father. He won, even if he did not live to see the fruits of his victory.”

  “What… became of your husband?”

  “He took a concubine, to care for him,” Xinmei said, “and after a while he forgot that he had had a wife… But he has been dead these many years now, and that is not the part of the story you came here to seek—it’s what happened between the two of us, my jin-shei-bao and myself. The things that could be asked of a sister were sometimes impossible, but they could not be refused, they could never be refused, not if asked in the name of jin-shei itself. And look how that shaped all our lives.” She bowed her head. “I still have it, you know.”

  “You have what?”

  “The letter that I wrote to her, to ask her. All the letters that we exchanged, in fact—all of them, mine to her, hers to me. She sent all of my letters to her back to me on the day she left for Sian Sanqin.”

  “Is that why you thought she hated you for it?”

  “No—at least, I don’t think so. It was not an act of retribution; she was not vengeful or mean; it was not in her nature. It was simply itself—it was an act of farewell to the world she knew she would never return to. And yes, before you ask, before you even consider if you may ask, that has already been requested of me in the letter that you brought. The letters are yours to read, if you will.”

  “I am grateful,” Amais whispered.

  “It is the least I can do in payment of the debt I incurred when I asked what I had to ask of her,” Xinmei said.

  “What happened to Xuelian?” Amais asked. That girl’s fate, substitute for her sister in an Emperor’s bed, had not failed to make an impression on her, over and above the story of jin-shei that had followed in the wake of those events.

  “She fulfilled all her duties,” Xinmei said, “and far better than I might have done, perhaps. There are letters that she wrote home, also—would you like to see those? They are, after all, part of the story.”

  “Jin-ashu?” Amais queried softly.

  “Of course,” Xinmei said. “That was our language. Tonight, you are my guest here. Tomorrow I will have the letters brought to you. You are welcome to stay in my house for as long as you need to.” She rose gracefully to her feet. “Fang wodai fang nimen,” she said softly. “My house is your house. Be welcome in my home… in the name of lost jin-shei.”

  Eight

  The same aged retainer who had admitted Amais into the inner sanctuary of the lady Xinmei on her arrival brought her a carved wooden box the next morning and handed it to her in silence with a small bow. If his pursed lips were to be any indication, he strongly disapproved of any of these ‘family’ things being handed out to just anybody simply because they had thought to turn up at the gate and ask. Amais could only guess at how he felt towards the invaders in the outer courts, and how his gnarled hands must itch to usher every last one of the troops quartered in this house out of the gate, lock the doors behind them, and fumigate the quarters they had fouled by their presence in the ancient halls.

  But she spared him little further thought. She had been offered the services of a bathhouse by another aged crone of a female servitor, who escorted her into the facilities and provided her with a cake of homemade soap and a somewhat faded but still resplendent linen towel. Thankful at the opportunity, Amais luxuriated at the chance to get clean, even soaping and rinsing her long hair. She put on a pair of simple country cotton trousers, like a peasant hoyden, a short-sleeved tunic top, and coiled her damp hair under a large conical woven straw hat such as the fieldworkers had worn on the day she had arrived at the farmhouse. Despite the harsh reminder that the country was at war around her, despite the slightly ominous presence of dozens of uniformed men and women with cold eyes and lethal weapons with which to enforce their orders however unpalatable they might turn out to be, despite the traces of tragedy which was waiting for her in the letters she had been handed to read—Amais felt young and free and vivid, and, in the manner of exuberant youth particularly when it found itself in the shadow of danger, invulnerable. She decided on pure impulse that she would leave the farmhouse and find some pretty spot in the surrounding countryside where she could sit and read Xinmei’s letter hoard at her leisure.

  Behind the inner courts was a small postern gate hidden by the giant cedar in the corner, and the old doorman, after its existence had been wrung from him, took her there jangling a handful of keys with every appearance of being resigned as to whether this guest of his mistress’s came to bodily harm out there. It was all there in the square set of those lean shoulders—if she wants to risk her neck by gallivanting across the fields it’s no concern of mine. There might have been a brief impulse to snatch at
the family letters—if the guest wanted to venture out there she was welcome, but she should leave the family treasures behind—but it was scotched. There were too many years here; too many years of obedience and loyalty. The mistress had given the letters; he did not do it willingly or with a good grace but he was a servant, and therefore had to accept that the mistress knew best.

  Released from the gilded cage of the farmhouse, Amais made her way along a narrow path bordered by long grass until she came to a gentle hillside, a long, low slope dominated by a gigantic yet gracefully symmetrical tree of a kind she did not recognize and, at its foot and in its shade, the remnants of an ancient family graveyard with headstones so old that some of them had almost completely sunk into the ground, following the bodies and the ashes of those whose resting places they marked. These old family plots were commonplace in Syai, and if properly planned, facing in the correct directions and on suitable ground, they were remarkably free of ghosts or lingering spirits. There was merely a feeling of peace here, of being at one with the past and the ancestors who had inhabited it, precisely the kind of atmosphere that would go perfectly with the letters Amais had come here to read.