The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  2. We are all the people—workers, students, soldiers, revolutionary thinkers. All must unite. The revolutionary youth must become courageous fighters against the inevitable resistance to the revolution. Remember, there will be obstacles in our path—but they are there to temper our ideas and strengthen our resolve!

  3. Let the people learn how to draw a line between enemy and friend—for sometimes an enemy is closer to their hearts than they believe and a friend may be one who speaks against them and in whose words they can then find vindication of their own ideas! Let the line of the Party be followed, and let none steer you away from that path—even though the other road might look smooth and easy and your road may be strewn with thorns and stones!

  4. It is normal and fitting that people should hold different views—but a difference of opinion with a friend is different from that with an enemy. Within the ranks of the people themselves there will always be those who hold opinions that are wrong, but unless someone has become irredeemable they should always be given the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. And even those whom you think are beyond deliverance should be given the same chance.

  5. Remember that in all things it is necessary to grasp both revolution and production. They are twin hammers, one for each hand. We will use our revolutionary ideas to achieve better, faster, grander results in every field of human endeavor! Stand with both feet on the ground, let not thoughts of anything greater than us prevent us from becoming all that we can be—that we were born to be. Let Shou’min Iloh’s Golden Words be our guide in all that we do!

  It took only another week or so before the storm gathered by those fighting words broke upon the city.

  Two

  It took a single night—but it was a night during which many hands must have worked themselves raw in order to achieve what Shou’min Iloh’s Manifesto said that needed to be done. Linh-an had already known its fair share of posters and huge photographs of Shou’min Iloh that adorned any building with space enough to support one—these were workaday, familiar. But overnight another kind of poster bloomed throughout the city. Written in crude hasty calligraphy, on enormous sheets of paper, they were plastered on every wall, every pole, every conceivable surface. Initially they were just reiterations and rephrasings of the Five Point Manifesto from the Party Congress—they screamed things like:

  TO REBEL IS GOOD!

  DRAW A LINE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR ENEMIES!

  CRITICIZE REACTIONARY VIEWS AND THE PEOPLE WHO HOLD THEM!

  LET THE WINDS OF CHANGE BLOW AWAY OLD IDEAS, OLD CULTURE, OLD CUSTOMS!

  SHOU’MIN ILOH’S GOLDEN WORDS ARE OUR GUIDE!

  They were particularly plentiful in the university district, where students had taken it upon themselves to suspend classes—until such time, one young girl told Amais passionately as Amais hesitated at the doors of the library in the morning, new things could be taught in a proper way.

  “We need to educate the teachers,” the girl said, “before they are allowed to educate us! We are the Wind of Change!”

  That was the first time Amais had heard the name. The Wind of Change. Those who named themselves thus quickly changed it into something subtly different, something that combined the idea of that wind with their devotion to Shou’min Iloh and his ideas; before the day was out the youth had adopted another banner, the Golden Wind. The next day’s posters were all signed with that name.

  It might have petered out if the students had been given no overt support, but another poster appeared on the walls of Linh-an on the morning of the third day, and it was signed Shou’min Iloh. Its wording and tone was not cast in the form of a command—but with that signature below it, it instantly became one—a single sentence, interpreted and misinterpreted in a hundred different ways within the first hour of its appearance, pouring oil onto the flames: Attack the core.

  It was a blessing laid on what the students had started. A vindication. A rallying cry, and a pointing finger giving them direction and purpose.

  Amais found it hard to sleep, her whole being attuned to noises in the night, wondering what kind of posters, what kind of protests, would be on the streets the next day. She knew that Iloh was savvy enough to know what those few words of his would do to the situation—and she found herself recalling his earnest voice, back by the side of that country road many weeks ago: I know now what I need to do next. I need to do it. Remember that, if you find it hard to forgive me.

  Units of the Golden Wind began springing up everywhere, like poisonous mushrooms; and it quickly became obvious that Iloh’s dream of all his people being equal was just a dream. Social class had always mattered in Syai, but those boundaries were supposedly one of the things that the revolution had been intent on erasing. However, in the new and zealously revolutionary hierarchies, class now became paramount—a different kind of class, to be sure, but one that ruled society with every bit of an iron hand that the old Imperial strata had done in their day. A prospective member of any of the Golden Wind units had to show an impeccable political pedigree—a pure bloodline, descended from one of the so-called Golden Lines, the offspring of peasants, workers, martyrs of the revolution or revolutionary officials. Those who sprang from the loins of parents from Gray Lines—secretaries and clerks, shop assistants—would be considered, on merit, for “promotion” into the more desirable ranks. But if one’s parents ranked somewhere in the Black Lines—landlords or land owners, counterrevolutionaries (and that meant anything and everything, including expressing discontent with the price of eggs in the market on any given day), former aristocracy, and other miscellaneous ‘bad elements’—one was effectively branded, removed from the circle of the blessed, deemed unsuitable to be one of the defenders of Iloh’s Golden Words.

  Amais was on the cusp, just too old to be part of the student movement on campus, to be in the thick of things—the main thrust of the movement appeared to center on children still in school and the younger university students—but Aylun, who had turned thirteen that spring, found that the years she had put into the system as a devoted disciple of the Golden Word suddenly counted for nothing in the light of the fact of her parentage. Aylun mother was not only the offspring of an Imperial Prince of the blood—something established beyond doubt in Vien’s criticism sessions at her work unit—but Vien had been tried as a counterrevolutionary, a reactionary, a rightist, and she had been convicted of that crime, punished for it, she had even died in the correctional camp to which her sentence had sent her. And Aylun herself, to exacerbate matters, was foreign-born. When she stepped up to ask to join the Golden Wind, full of fire and fervor for her cause, the senior officers in her unit suddenly turned icy and dismissed her as unfit.

  Devastated, she crept back to Amais and sat dry-eyed and shivering in the middle of the cramped living room of the quarters which Amais and her stepfather still shared.

  “It isn’t the end of the world,” Amais said to her little sister. “Before this is over, it is quite possible that not having been a part of it will be…”

  “You don’t understand,” Aylun said bleakly. “I want to live my life in the service of the people, just like Shou’min Iloh said. I have always wanted that, just that. It isn’t fair… if I could renounce my father and the tainted blood in my veins, I would…”

  “Never say that again!” Amais said, her voice sharp. Aylun did not remember her father; she had been born on the night he had died. But for Amais Nikos remained a shining memory of childhood, a pure image of love. “You have never even known him. He is worth eight times what you are sitting here whining after. He was brave and true-hearted, and he loved us.”

  “What use is that?” Aylun asked, staring at her. “He’s gone, and we’re here, and what matters here, now, is impossible because he existed. I want to give my whole life to Shou’min Iloh, and he won’t have me…”

  Amais flinched as though she had been struck. I need to do this. Remember that, if you find it hard to forgive me… His voice, in her ear. His hands warm on
her skin.

  His words, his ideas, wrapping Aylun into a cloud of ideological fury.

  Yes, she was struggling to forgive this.

  “Perhaps,” Amais murmured, “you misinterpreted his words…”

  Aylun reacted as though that was purest heresy, told Amais tartly once again that she did not, could not, understand, and left to find a more receptive audience for her grief.

  In the meantime, the Golden Wind had done its own interpretation of Iloh’s words, and was starting to put them into action.

  Groups of them roamed the streets of Linh-an, acting on informants’ tip-offs, and would smash into the houses of people accused of having counterrevolutionary ideas or active ties to anti-Iloh factions. Whether or not any of these accusations were true was rendered increasingly irrelevant as the Golden Wind took on the responsibility of annihilating those four old things that Iloh had decried—old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. They were to die, and they were to die hard.

  Amais just heard of this, at first, from whispered conversations, from frantic warnings passed between people in hushed whispers or scribbled notes passed from hand to hand in corridors or streets. People would be dragged out of their houses, sometimes out of bed in the middle of the night. Everything that had a connection to the history or culture of Syai—books, letters, statues, paintings, clothes that had an ounce of silk or a thread of embroidery on them—was hauled out and piled into triumphant mounds of ‘evidence’ for crimes that, if they had not actually been committed or were impossible to prove, were taken as being inevitable and simply treated as though they were already history. Often people’s belongings were confiscated outright and packed up into boxes or crates that would be sealed and then left in the compound—and woe to the original owners if the seal was shown to be tampered with when a member of the Golden Wind came back to check on it. Sometimes the ‘evidence’ was taken in to be ‘processed’ somewhere, but often it would simply be left in a pile, doused with something flammable, and torched.

  In a way it was like those ancient funerals of old Syai, where all the paraphernalia of the deceased would be burned with the body in the same funeral pyre for his or her use in Cahan in the hereafter. In their zeal to destroy everything old, the Golden Wind was using one of the oldest customs of all.

  But all of that was just hearsay, rumor, the chatter of frightened women in the marketplace. It was different when it struck close to home.

  The first time it was a family who lived next door to Amais—she had known them for years, and their only possible crime was that they owned two of the housing units in that block and most of their income, their bread and butter, came from renting out the second unit to another family. It had been that very family who had denounced them, their tenants—Amais knew them, too, and could see some of them peering around corners as their landlords were hauled out into the courtyard by three or four Golden Wind cadres.

  “Decadent lifestyle!” one of their captors jeered, holding up a white silk robe.

  “It was a mourning robe for my grandmother,” the wife of the targeted family said hopelessly, her eyes cast down.

  One of the Golden Wind people backhanded her across the face, hard enough to snap her head back. “Quiet, you.”

  “And this,” the original cataloger of ‘evidence’ was saying, weighing a handful of books in both hands. “All of this. Look at it! Just look at it!”

  “Please,” the husband began, rousing, and then cringed as a blow was aimed at him, too. It never landed, and the youth who was holding him laughed, the laugh loud and ugly in the night.

  “Not just a counterrevolutionary, but a cowardly dog of a one, too,” the youth jeered. “Look at him cringing there at my feet!”

  “And what are these?” the first youth asked, flipping through a different book.

  “It’s my journal,” said the daughter of the old couple, her voice the texture of cold ashes.

  The youth snorted, throwing the journal carelessly onto the heap of other belongings already at his feet.

  Amais felt a cold wind of terror blow through her. Journals. Tai’s precious journals, which had survived so much, for so long. Would this be their fate, too…?

  There were four of them there, the two old people, their widowed daughter, and the daughter’s daughter, a child about Aylun’s age. The granddaughter wore her hair in two long pigtails, tied up with a length of ribbon; when the Golden Wind people finally had enough of torturing the family in that unit and put the mound of their belongings to the match, one of the other Golden Wind cadres, a young girl herself, grabbed hold of the child’s braids and severed them close to her head with a single sweep of a sharp serrated knife.

  “This is an imperialist hairstyle,” the Golden Wind girl said severely. “It is not permitted any more!”

  She tossed the hair into the burning pyre, and the young granddaughter’s heartbroken wail tore through Amais’s heart like a dagger.

  She spent a couple of sleepless nights trying to decide what to do with Tai’s journals, where a safe place could be found for them—if a safe place even existed in the madness of those days. And then, a few days later, she saw Lixao standing in their quarters, his hands helplessly hanging at his sides, his head bowed.

  “It is my turn,” he said to Amais when she came into the room.

  “What do you mean, it’s your turn? Your turn for what?”

  “They needed to find someone to blame.”

  “To blame for what?”

  He simply shrugged. “I have had to write criticism after criticism,” Lixao said, “pointing out all the bad things I have done, I have thought. I even admitted that my marriage to your mother was a mistake. But nothing would satisfy them. My final criticism session… my trial… is tonight. Please don’t come.”

  Amais suddenly felt a surge of quite unexpected affection for this man, who had outlived his time in much the same way that Vien had done—the only difference was that he had been better at hiding it.

  “Would it help if I was there?” she asked gently.

  “I wouldn’t want you… to see…” He cleared his throat. “The truth is, they asked me to draw a line between myself and her family. Vien’s children. If you were there…”

  “Do I need to leave your house?” Amais asked.

  “I don’t think that would matter any more,” Lixao said. “It’s tonight. Don’t come.”

  But Amais did go. She herself did not know why—she felt as though she owed it to herself, to her mother. Owed a debt—she had to go, to do something… but in the end, she did nothing, only sitting in the back of the room, a quiet witness with tears pouring down her cheeks, as the young people put her stepfather through a chain of indignities and then through pain. They shaved his head, and then poured ink down his pitiful bald pate until it ran down his face and dripped off his chin giving him the theatrical face of a traditional opera demon. They made him kneel on his ancient creaky knees, reach out behind his back until he could grab hold of one wrist with the fingers of his other hand, and hold out his arms as high as he could over his back, twisting his shoulders, trembling with no support as he knelt there—and if he wavered or lurched they said that the time he had already spent in the position “did not count” and he had to start over. They took his glasses and made him smash them and grind them to dust with the heel of his foot. They made him stand on one leg like a heron, stripped down to a loincloth, his saggy old body bared to the laughing world. And then they took him away, after hours of this, and another man was brought out in his place.

  Amais did not know if she would ever see him again.

  A week after Lixao’s ‘trial’, another big rally was called for the Emperor’s Square—a Golden Wind rally, called by Iloh himself. Amais, despite herself, went—standing on the outskirts, too far away to even see the podium, but driven to be present, to be there, to bear witness.

  “The Golden Wind is the flower of the revolution!” she heard Iloh’s voice say, ove
r the microphone, floating above the heads of the cheering crowds. “I am here today to tell you so! I am here to tell you—to show you—that I wear your colors proudly!”

  A roar swept the crowd. Amais could not see, but the word came back like quicksilver through the ranks until it reached the outer edges of the crowd, where Amais was.

  “Did you see? Did you see? He wore the yellow armband—Shou’min Iloh wore the yellow armband—he said he was one of us—one of the Golden Wind!”

  Numbed with foreboding, Amais returned home from the rally—to find two notes left for her while she was gone, one, in her sister’s hand, tucked in between the door and the doorjamb and the other slipped under the door and lying, sealed and addressed in an unfamiliar hand, just inside the entrance. Amais opened Aylun’s first.