The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  That was what came bubbling to the surface first—perhaps not unexpectedly, given the place from which she had just come. Those were the first words she spoke to him after the years of their separation.

  “You killed my mother.”

  She saw Iloh physically flinch at that, and was glad of it, glad that she had hurt him, that she had stabbed at his heart, that she had been able to inflict on him the barest fraction of the pain that raged within her. They moved, then, both of them—towards each other, instinctively, with intentions far from clear, but when she was close enough to him to touch him Amais raised her arms, her hands tightly clenched into fists, and hammered his chest with blows even as his arms came around her to hold her.

  “You killed my mother,” she said again, her voice breaking, at last, into the tears that would not quite come before. The fists that had been pummeling Iloh’s chest uncurled instinctively and she clutched at the fabric of the gray uniform he wore, burying her face into his chest, feeling a button on his jacket digging sharply into her cheek but welcoming the pain and weeping in the shelter of his arms in a paroxysm of released grief that threatened to go on forever.

  “Not here,” he murmured into her hair, his hand moving gently, helplessly, across her back in a small tender motion. “Come.”

  But she could not move, stood rooted there in that road, until he finally reached down with another whispered word and slid an arm under her knees, lifting her up with an easy sweeping motion and stepping off the road into the sheltering thicket of trees above the bank, the place where she had just stepped out of, where she had spent the night.

  He settled back into the V-split of a small tree, Amais half beside him and half across his lap, and simply held her in silence, gazing into the distance somewhere across the top of her head, until she cried herself out and finally lay quiescent in his arms, her eyes closed.

  “Why are you here?” he asked at last, gently, as she drew a deep shuddering breath and fought to steady her resolve—which had melted away, just like that, as soon as he had been close enough to touch.

  It took her several tries to speak; her voice kept breaking, thick with tears yet unwept, threatening to drown in them. She sketched out, very briefly, the events of the past few months—the ‘crimes’ Vien had been accused of, her indictment, her disappearance, her lonely and unmourned death.

  “They were your idea,” she said. “The camps. The people must be educated, you said. I know who I have to deal with to make sure that the Republic is not undermined even as it is being built.I cannot begin to imagine what she must have gone through in those last months of her life… oh, why can’t I hate you?”

  “How do you know what I said?” Iloh said sharply.

  “I heard you say it,” she said, wiping at her face with the back of her hand like a child.

  “When? I said that to Tang…”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But you weren’t… nobody else was…”

  “I heard it,” she said. “I don’t know. In a dream. I know I heard it. What were you thinking? For that matter, what are you doing out here anyway?”

  “They all turned against me,” Iloh said, with a tinge of defensiveness. “You know that much, you must have seen it happen. I am still head of the Party, always that—they could not take that away from me—but Tang is now in my place as head of the country. Apparently my ideas were fine for running a guerrilla revolution, but when it came to running a country I was finally judged, I don’t know, too idealistic. Or too revolutionary. Too something.” His mouth twisted a little, at that. It was something that had come from Tang, and that had hurt him—Tang had been with him for so long, since the beginning of it all, and now Tang had taken against him. “But they all turned against me,” he said. It had not been only Tang, after all. “It was their idea, the open forum for ideas, and they convinced me—and then all that the people had to say was that everything was wrong…”

  “Iloh…”

  “That’s what I’m doing out here,” Iloh said. “I needed time… to think. To figure it all out. Tang is backsliding, damn him. He can destroy it all yet, if he goes too far…”

  “But you are still Shou’min Iloh,” Amais murmured. “What are you doing walking a deserted country road alone at daybreak? I thought you would never again be out of sight of someone willing to take a bullet for you.”

  “A man can feel suffocated,” Iloh said abruptly, “with too much protection. Sometimes I need to be alone with my thoughts if I am to hear myself think.”

  “And alone with your conscience,” Amais said.

  “There is nothing that burdens my conscience!” Iloh snapped. “I… we… needed people to work this land until we got to place I know we can be. But for that I needed people who believed, who knew, who understood. The camps—they were meant to provide a focus for that work, and to be a place where such understanding could be gained…” His voice cracked with passion. These were things he believed in, even if he had gone about achieving them in questionable ways. Amais could feel the power of that vision in the sudden tightening of his arms, in the way his heart beat powerfully against her temple where her head leaned against his chest. “Think about it! In less than a handful of years we achieved what Baba Sung’s Revolution couldn’t accomplish in nearly four decades! Once you get the masses of the people moving, believing, anything can be done. Anything! Oh, I had such dreams…”

  “But you destroy,” Amais whispered. “You destroy all that came before. You cannot create a garden in a place which you first make into a desert.”

  “Yes,” Iloh said emphatically. “You can. You have to. If you do not root out the poisons that have grown in the good earth before, they will keep sprouting, and they will suffocate the new things that you are trying to grow. But you are using the wrong vision. You, yourself, tell me you heard me say it—and I still don’t understand how, damn it! Dreams—superstitions—I have never believed in any of that…”

  “Yes, you have,” Amais whispered. “At least once in your life, you have. Or you would never have married your wife for the reasons you once gave me, you would never have recognized my name.”

  Iloh, aware that he was staring at her with his mouth open, shut it with a snap. “There was that,” he admitted at last.

  “But you are still wrong,” Amais said.

  “I am never wrong,” he said, and his tone was amused, self-deprecating… and completely convinced of the truth of those words.

  “Once a desert, always a desert,” Amais murmured. “There are certain things that you can never get back, if you annihilate them. And then the garden…”

  “But this isn’t a garden, it’s a house, and you cannot build a new house until you clear away all the rubble of the old. You have to have a clear foundation, if what you want to build is going to stand!”

  “People aren’t bricks, Iloh!” Amais said, rearing away from him, pushing at his chest with open palms of both hands. “You cannot use them this way. If they do not agree with you or they do not understand your dream, that doesn’t mean they are simply obstacles to remove from your path. There is a choice…!”

  “There is a choice in peacetime. But we are still at war, Amais.”

  “With what?” she demanded. “With whom? Why? Iloh, if there is war here, then you are the one fanning its flames!”

  “I am not!” he responded with equal fire. “Amais, I did not invent any of this—I set out the seed of the idea and then I watch it bloom…”

  “You see,” she said, returning to her metaphor. “A garden.”

  He made a swift chopping motion with one hand. “False analogy,” he said. “Maybe that is my fault. But I didn’t start this war, Amais—people were more than ready to rise to a new world, to tear off the trammels of the centuries that have been binding them and keeping generations of them poor and subservient and ‘in their place’—and they were supposed to know their place, and to stay there. Back in the days of Empire, people who tried t
o break out of their social stratum and their class were not put in camps for a re-education—they were executed without any further question! Why is what I tried to do so wrong? It is the people, Amais, the people! They will rise like a mighty wind and they will sweep all before them—the Imperial aristocrats, the corrupt warlords, all will break before that storm and fall like the dust they are into their graves! You speak of choice? Yes, there is a choice—what do I do with this force that I have seen gathering, that I have seeded with my dreams? Do I step in front of it and let it crush me like it will crush everything else that stands in its way? Do I trot in its wake, criticizing and whining? Or do I, if I am given that chance, march at the head of this army of enlightenment and lead them as best I know how?”

  “But things were done in your name… will be done in your name…”

  “Yes, and I will use them,” Iloh said. “If I do not, I fail at my task. I did not ask for the title—but they still call me that, Shou’min Iloh, the first citizen. And I have to live up to that standard. What I ask my people to do, I am always willing to do myself. Only history can judge me…”

  Their eyes locked, fire with fire, both passionate believers, both willing to spend mind and spirit in the pursuit of a higher goal—but all of a sudden the one thing that mattered was she was still cradled in the circle of his arms, and that her hands, still flat against his chest, were suddenly tingling with the pulse of the heartbeat she could feel beneath them. She drew a small gasping breath and moved, instinctively, shifting one leg down so that it lined up with his thigh, the knee of the other creeping up towards his hipbone. His hand knotted in her hair.

  “You were in the city,” he said hoarsely. “You never came to me.”

  “You never sent for me,” she whispered, against his lips, closing her eyes, surrendering to something stronger than herself. She felt his hand slide down, his palm hard against the curve of her breast, and then fumble with her jacket, slip in through an opening, find bare skin and sear it with his touch. “Oh, Cahan…” she whispered, her lips against his ear, as his weight shifted, she yielded to it, and then her own hands were helplessly inside his clothes, needing skin under her fingertips, needing to find and remember the shape of him against her, around her, within her.

  Her mind didn’t understand this, did not even want it—not now, not after the things she had just seen and endured, not with this man of all men—but her heart and her body understood, and for now that was enough, more than enough. Nothing had changed between them—he was still not hers, not, as she had said to Xuelian, her fairy tale. But somehow, somehow, he was in her destiny. And she was powerless to change that.

  This time it had been Iloh who had gone. Not, as she had once done, leaving her asleep in the aftermath of love—they had talked, later, in each other’s arms; they had whispered words that were a breathless, heady mix of love, and dreams, and politics. Then they had stopped talking, for a while, lost in each other again, limbs twined, skin straining against skin. And then he had sat up, and had said he had to go.

  “I know now,” he told her, “what I need to do. When next we meet, remember that—I need to do it. Remember that, if you find it hard to forgive me.”

  He had asked if he could take her back to the city, or arrange transportation to any other place she wanted to go—but Amais had hesitated, and declined. There would be too many questions asked that could not be answered. She had somehow managed to pull her mind and body together, after he was gone, and find her own way back to the city—following, perhaps, in Iloh’s wake, she had no way of knowing. When she alighted from the train in Linh-an’s crowded, busy station, she realized that she could not face going home, not to that empty house with Vien imprinted on it, not yet—so she made her way to the Street of Red Lanterns, and Xuelian. She had wept in that ornate lacquered room, into Xuelian’s silk-clad lap, the old woman’s hand on her hair like a grandmother’s.

  “Oh, sweet child,” Xuelian had said. “How I wish I had an answer for you. But if I have learned anything in my days, it is that sometimes love is simply not enough.”

  Amais looked up, her face tear-streaked, her eyes framed by eyelashes spiked with tears. “You always say that,” she said, her voice trembling a little.

  “Say what?”

  “Something—always something. ‘If I’ve learned anything in my days’—as though it were only one thing, the ultimate lesson. But you keep on saying it. Whatever is necessary, that’s the one thing you have learned.”

  Xuelian smiled, and it was a smile of love. “Child,” she said, “and I do not use the words lightly, this time—if I have learned anything in my days…”

  Amais hiccoughed, a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan. Xuelian smoothed her hair back from her face and gently laid her head back onto her lap, heedless of the wreck that Amais’s tears were making of her silk gown.

  “If I have learned,” she said quietly, “anything at all in my days, it is that I will never know enough about life to understand it. That doesn’t mean that I will ever stop trying. Just remember one thing, in the storm that is to come—men are like mountains, and they will raise the earth to do their bidding; but women are like water, and the more barriers they place in our path the more we will find a way to flow around and through and underneath them. That is power. Nothing can stand against it. And you… you carry the soul of Syai within you.”

  She was whittling.

  And this time it was different. It was she, herself, who was doing it—there was no sense of separation, no sense of looking over someone else’s shoulder, no sense of being a dreaming disembodied ghost—it was as though she had found an anchor, and the anchor was what she had always known it had to be—in the body of the young woman in her dream. In all the time she had dreamed of her, over and over again in dream after dream, Amais had never been able to see the young woman’s face—and now it seemed blindingly obvious why. It would have been her own. She could not have seen her own face, not without the mirror that the dreams never seemed to provide She was the one looking out from within it.

  As now she looked down onto a pair of hands that were very familiar, and held a piece of soft wood and a curved carving blade.

  The wood was still a shapeless burl, with no hint of what it was supposed to emerge as after its transformation . Dream-Amais appeared to have known this, however, before the dreamer-Amais woke inside her body and stilled her hands with her own ignorance and incomprehension.

  She turned the piece of wood over in her hands, pondering.

  “Time was,” someone said softly, “everyone would recognize a yearwood bead.”

  Amais looked up, and met the serene eyes of the little girl who had always been her dream-companion. She wore her hair in two braided pigtails now, tied with lengths of scarlet ribbon, and had changed her high-court garb for the kind of plain robe an ordinary child might wear… if it hadn’t been touched with gold embroidery and images of stylized water buffaloes worked in yellow silk didn’t twine around the edges of her wide sleeves.

  “I’ve never seen a real yearwood,” Amais said.

  “I kept one all my life,” said the child incongruously, giving every indication that she meant decades and not just a childish handful of years.

  “But weren’t they supposed to be made of material that matched the reign?” Amais queried, fingering her wood burl.

  “Jade for the Jade Emperor. Ivory for the Ivory emperor. Yes, if the reign rested on something rare and precious, that was what the yearwood was carved from—but even then there were those who could not afford to buy a jade bead every day of their lives. Wood has always been used as a substitute. Cherry wood and bone and soapstone, the poor man’s ebony and ivory and jade. And besides…”

  “Besides,” whispered Amais, “there is a Wood Emperor on the throne. It is right and fitting. But I don’t know how to do this… what am I making?”

  “Not many keep them any more, but there are still some who have a yearwood in their home
, counting their days,” the little girl said. “And almost everyone still has the special beads made for the special occasions, like they had always done. For births and deaths and weddings and for Xat-Wau. It is necessary to mark the passage of those times in one’s life, after all.”

  “I have a birth bead,” Amais said. “My mother had one made for both of us, my sister and me. But none… of the others.”

  “You had your Xat-Wau, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yes. The occasion, not the ceremony. I don’t think my mother had the red pin to put in our hair, either Aylun or myself.”