The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  It seemed to be deserted. Down-slope, a way away and to the left of her, a handful of people worked in a distant field, but there was no human presence here. Her only companions were the breeze that stirred the long grass by the wayside and the silvery leaves of the old tree, and birdsong coming from somewhere beyond the hill.

  Amais took off her hat and shook her damp hair out, letting it fall about her shoulders and dry naturally in the sun and the summer breeze. She found a spot where a fold in the ground and a couple of old gravestones leaning towards one another made a perfect comfortable cradle, sat down with a small contented sigh, and, offering a small prayer to those who rested in this place, nestled her back against the stones, and hauled out the box and its letters.

  They had been sorted by date and carefully wrapped into individual silk parcels with jin-ashu script on the silk indicating the nature and the dates of the letters within. On one of these another note had been pinned, with a single line of calligraphy—Xinmei’s hand, Amais supposed. It simply said, These are the ones you want to see.

  They were the letters between Xinmei and her jin-shei-bao sister, whose name, as Amais only found out now, was Lianqin. Xinmei’s impassioned letter was there, the one in which she had begged Lianqin in the name of jin-shei to take her place in the Temple, but it was Lianqin’s reply that riveted Amais’s attention:

  If you ask a bird to give up hope of the sky so that another might feel the wind on its wings, if you ask a man to give up his sight so that another might see, if you ask a peach blossom not to bloom so that its fellow on the branch might greet the bee and receive the blessings that allow it to turn, in the Gods’ own time, into the peach—all of these things might seem hard to do, but if you ask any of them in the name of something that is bigger than they or you or I, then it can be done, anything can be done. If you ask me in the name of the vow that binds us, I will give you my space in the sky, my share of the light, I will let you be the blossom that bears the peach. I will climb the mountain and find the Gods that wait for me there and I will make that place the one where I was meant to be in this life and on this earth before Cahan calls me home. And I will learn to understand the blessings that the Gods choose to bestow upon me.

  Amais was so engrossed in this that it was some time before she became aware that she was being watched. When she finally tore her eyes away from the page, she found that she had to blink several times to clear the blur of tears from her vision—and then found herself staring into the eyes of a bare-footed man perhaps in his early thirties, dressed in simple peasant garb with a red kerchief around his neck, a barrel-sized pail on the ground at his feet as he stood looking at her with a slight smile on his face.

  Amais’s heart lurched, but it was not with fear. There was something in that smile that made her throat suddenly close, her breath coming in shallow little gasps through her parted lips.

  They looked at one another for a long moment, and then Amais gathered what shreds of dignity she could and straightened, closing her mouth and tilting her head in a quizzical manner.

  “Is there something you wanted?” she inquired, politely enough, pushing one unruly coil of almost-dry curly hair behind her ear.

  “Ah… no,” the man said. His voice was pleasant, but not cultured; this was no etiolated aristocrat, the richness of the loamy earth of Syai was in his tone and his pronunciation. “It’s just… you reminded me somewhat of me. A very long time ago. Even the place…” He indicated the tilted gravestones with an economical nod of his head. “When I was a boy, I used to escape to just such a spot as this, except that my tree was an ancient, twisted old willow. It was sanctuary, me and my books. And my father coming down upon me in the wrath of the righteous, chivvying me to do my chores. It’s been a long time since I have thought of those days, but seeing you there…I do apologize if I startled you.” His smile broadened slightly, and he offered her a small courteous bow—and suddenly he was something else than Amais had thought that he was. That bow was no sharecropper’s gesture, but something civilized and full of hidden protocol, learned in halls and chambers of power; it was something that would have been worthy in baya-Dan’s shadowy rooms, Imperial Princess in exile that she was.

  “And what was it,” Amais asked after a moment, “that you were reading?”

  “I owned two books at the time,” her companion said. “If it wasn’t one, then it was the other. I don’t recall, any more. It’s been wrapped in the shed skin of too many years, and put away deep.”

  “You’re a poet,” Amais said, in reluctant admiration.

  He offered another light bow, this time of acknowledgment. “It has been said of me,” he said. “It is not all I am.”

  “Are you of these lands?”

  “No. My home—and my willow tree—are far from here. It’s been many years since I’ve been back there, and it will probably be more years before I return. Times are difficult right now… but better times are coming.”

  “You know this? For certain?”

  “Better times are always coming,” he said, and this time the smile was an outright grin. “And you? Your looks alone make you a stranger in this place, to say nothing of that wonderful accent.”

  “I am a visitor,” Amais said carefully, folding away Lianqin’s letter. “I am staying for a few days… with lady Xinmei, at the big house.”

  “Ah,” he said noncommittally, nodding his head. “Then would you permit me, lady Xinmei’s guest, to rest from my work a while here amongst these stones and ask for your company?”

  His eyes had come to rest on Amais’s bare feet, and she suddenly blushed violent pink, drawing her feet up and curling them under her.

  “I… have no objection,” she said faintly.

  He casually hoisted up the barrel he had been carrying as though it weighed nothing at all, although Amais could clearly hear liquid slopping in it and see that it was more than two thirds full of water, and placed it out of harm’s way by one of the gravestones. The strength it took to lift that thing must have been phenomenal; Amais, just from her one quick glance, was quite certain that she herself would not be able to shift it at all. Apparently quite unaware of the feat he accomplished, her companion selected another gravestone, right under the silver-leaved tree, and settled against it with a sigh.

  The day was pure summer, warm and languid and full of contentment and a sense of being safe, secure, as though there was nothing wrong with the world and never would be, as though sorrow were a stranger and never an orphan or a widow had trod upon this blessed soil on which the two of them sat with a summer breeze stirring their hair, as though never an unhappy thought could cross the mind of any being who now drew breath and life. It was two people wrapped in summer and, somehow, in one another, their very presence in this place completing each other’s existence.

  Baya-Dan had had a word for something like this. Once, a long time ago, when Amais had been no more than a small child, baya-Dan had spoken about yuan, relationships that were meant to be, people who were meant to meet, who had to meet, who would unwittingly change the circumstances of the world they lived in just so that their path might cross with the path of this other person with whom they were born to share the same breath, the same light, the same summer’s day.

  They might have known one another for a century, or a thousand years, these two people who had only just met in an abandoned family graveyard which housed kin belonging to neither of them. Neutral ground.

  Amais felt a strange, huge peace unfolding inside her, a great pool of quiet deep water beside which her spirit sighed and subsided in pure surrender.

  “And what are you reading?” her companion asked. It was an oddly intimate question, for one who had not even asked her name—but then, names seemed oddly superfluous here. They already knew each other’s names, or they did not need to know them. It was a simple, complicated thing…

  “Letters,” she said. “From long ago. Letters from one jin-shei-bao to another.”

  “A
h,” he said. “Women’s secrets.”

  “They matter,” Amais said, rousing slightly. His tone had implied a gentle mockery of her reading material.

  “Of course they matter,” he said, his expression serious again, almost apologetic. “But we were two worlds, once, the men and the women of Syai. I would like to think that we are past that now, that we are all a part of something bigger than that, that we are all people and not just who our gender mandates we have to be. I would like to think that there is no more need for secret brotherhoods or sisterhoods, now that all people are brother and sister to one another.”

  “You think that is true? Of our world?” Amais said, turning a surprised gaze on him.

  “Maybe not just yet,” he conceded. “But that is the world I want to see. A world where all would look out for the good of the one, and one would do what is necessary for the good of all—and it would not matter at all if the one was a man or a woman so long as it was a human being.”

  “It is a good dream,” Amais said.

  He blinked, giving a strong impression that he was unused to people being so dismissively cavalier about his ideas. “It is more than a dream,” he said. “It is the future. It is possibility. Your jin-shei, it is what used to be…”

  “I came here to find the things that are lost,” Amais said. “Do you have any idea at all about what jin-shei really was…?”

  Once again she had startled him, putting him in his place with a confidence and a passion that was rare in one her age. But this time he smiled. “Educate me, then,” he said, “if you think it is something that I should know.”

  “It was the thing in the name of which anything could be asked, anything could be possible,” Amais said. “I can’t… I’m not allowed to speak of it, not to you. But I have journals which my ancestors have kept, and jin-shei shaped empires, then—the vow between sisters, the things asked each of the other in the name of that vow. Oh, but it was a glory, and a responsibility…”

  Her passion on this subject had brought color to her cheeks again, a glow to her eyes. He was watching her with one eyebrow raised, a smile hovering on his face—but it was a smile of appreciation, even admiration. Amais, noticing his expression, dropped her eyes in sudden shyness.

  “Sometimes it is a waste to destroy something good, even if it does not hold the power it once held,” she said, after a pause, filling the silence between them because there was more to be said. “Jin-shei… meant something. Something deep. Something that a simple all-encompassing notion of all human beings being brother and sister to one another can never accomplish. There was a choice, you see. You would choose to be someone’s sister, and know that you might be called on to pay the price of that choice. How precious can something be, if you are handed it while you are still in swaddling clothes, simply by virtue of being the issue of a human father and mother?”

  “A young philosopher,” he said.

  “Too ignorant,” Amais said with frank self-castigation. “I would need to be old and gray before I could be that. There is still far more about this world that I don’t know, that I’ll never know, than there is of which I am certain.”

  “But you are certain of this?” he questioned. “This women’s thing?”

  “I am more certain of that than I am of anything else I have ever known,” Amais said.

  And knew she lied.

  Because there was one more thing in this world that she was certain of in that moment, and that was that she was meant to be here, in this place, with this man. Yuan, her grandmother had called it. Destiny. Suddenly she could not lift her eyes to his at all, knowing that this would be written all over her face, knowing only that she was afraid of it.

  She kept her eyes down with such ferocious determination that she utterly failed to notice that he had moved, and when his hand swam into her field of vision and reached out to cup her chin and tilt her face up to his she shivered, as though she had been touched by something not of this earth.

  But he was of this earth. He was real, and solid, and very, very near. And when he made her look up into his face she saw there the same certainty that had been in her own heart, written on her own face, a moment before. Yuan. Destiny.

  “Anything you believe in with the whole of your heart,” he said very softly against her lips, as if afraid of being overheard, as if he was not so much saying the words out loud but transferring them physically from his mouth to hers so that she could taste them, the sweetness of them, “cannot help being true.”

  Nine

  For a moment—a wonderful, exhilarating moment—Amais had known nothing at all about her world except that he was in it, this still-nameless man the mere brush of whose lips against hers made her feel as though she floated above the ground without touching it with her feet. But then the fear had come rushing in, and an absolute blank astonishment, as though she—that part of her that she knew and recognized—was standing somewhere outside her body and watching in a sort of appalled wonder as this man, this stranger, reached for her and touched her lips with his own and woke things in her that she had not known she possessed. She froze, and he felt it, and took that warm strong hand from her face—and she could have wept for the loss of it, and rejoiced that it was gone and did not by its very presence tempt her into thinking things she could not bear to be thinking about.

  She fled, shamelessly, taking care only to gather the precious letters together with trembling hands and make sure they were safe—and then she fled, leaving behind her sandals, her hat, and the man who had kissed her, the poet, the dreamer, who watched her go without moving to stop her.

  She ran all the way back to the house as though it were a sanctuary, knocking on the postern door feverishly until the old servant opened it, practically falling into the house in her haste to be out of that perfect summer’s day that had so treacherously trapped her in its honeyed webs. The old gatekeeper clicked his tongue at her breathless and disheveled state—there was an unspoken I knew she was going to come to no good only barely being reined in from being spoken out loud but it was there in his eyes and the expression on his face, for all to read who were willing to look.

  Amais retreated to the safe solitude of the room that had been given over to her use while she was a guest at this house. It took her almost an hour to stop trembling, to stop feeling the ghost of his kiss on her mouth—for the first time in her life she understood, rather than merely knew, what it would mean to have a real jin-shei-bao right now, someone to whom she could go, whom she could trust, who could give advice and if not advice then at least offer a willing ear.

  The truth of it was, Amais was nearly seventeen years old—and she had never kissed a man before this day. And now, after she had, she could not conceive of ever doing so again if the man was not that stranger from the summer hillside.

  Her hands were cold, and she lifted them to her face and laid her cool palms over burning cheeks.

  “I don’t even know his name,” she whispered out loud, more to hear her own voice and somehow convince herself that she was still the same person she had always been, that she still knew who she was and what her life was meant to be. But it didn’t help. She still felt disembodied, as though her heart was somewhere out of her body and out of her control. It was ludicrous, but it was so.

  She turned to the letters again, her heart still beating like a drum for a war dance, hoping to find solace or understanding in them.

  It was Xuelian’s letters that she found next, the letters written home by what was at first an obviously homesick and very afraid child but which soon changed into something else. Xuelian may not have been the family’s first choice for the Emperor’s concubine, but it quickly became apparent that she might have been born for the part. The Gods, as usual, had known very well what they were doing.

  Xuelian was fifteen years old and had spent just under two years in the Imperial household when the Sun Emperor had been made to abdicate the throne of Syai. The Imperial family had been guaranteed the
ir lives, and even some property—the Emperor, his Empress and a small entourage were allowed to retire to a house in the country where they agreed to live lives of quiet seclusion. But not all of his household would go with him. There would have to be a price for the Imperial family’s freedom to live without fetters after the Emperor’s abdication, and the price was negotiated by the cold and vengeful Empress who had watched the growing affection between her royal husband and his child-concubine with a smoldering jealousy she could do nothing about—until that moment.