The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “But… how… why…?”

  “How? That I cannot tell you. That is something that lies between heaven and earth, and it is not for such as us to pick at. Why? Because there are people who need to understand. And you are one of the few who do. Come with me.”

  “Where are you?” Amais asked, turning her head, trying to place the direction from which the voice had come. She could see no movement out there, no life except the sleeping people in their trees.

  The response to her question was a lilting laugh. “Oh, I am out there somewhere. So are you. Each of us is planted out here in our time. Just follow.”

  “Follow what?”

  “Follow the edge of the wood. Come. You need to see. You need to know.”

  Amais turned to obey, and trod on something hard and round. She snatched her bare foot back as though the thing had scalded her, with a sinking heart, peering downwards to make sure she had not inadvertently crushed some baby in its sapling cocoon, but all she could see was a tiny round bead on the ground by the side of her foot. She bent to pick it up.

  It was the yearwood bead that the little girl had given her, long ago, another dream away.

  The yearwood bead from which… an entire forest had grown.

  Amais closed her hand around the bead. “I think I begin to understand,” she whispered.

  “Not yet,” the voice of the little girl said. “Not yet. Come. Come and see.”

  Slowly, carefully, Amais threaded her way through the child-wood at the edge of the forest that was people, her hand tightly clasping the bead that had been, perhaps, the physical incarnation of her own spirit. The trees and the saplings and the tiny little barely budded plants eventually started petering out, the gaps between them bigger and bigger, bare ground showing between. Bare ground that was dust blowing in the breeze that stirred the leaves and raised tiny dust devils on the ground. All too soon the plants were gone, except for sedge grasses lifeless with any life other than their own tenacious souls, and the plain that stretched out before Amais was huge, and empty, and parched.

  For some reason the sight made her want to cry, and she clung to her own bead all the more tightly—for if she lost it, if she lost herself, in this desert, she would never gain the living lands again.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she asked the empty trembling air around her.

  “Because everything has an end,” the voice of the little girl said, and it sounded muffled, somehow, as though dust had got into it and started seeping into its cracks and crevices, choking it, damping down its ringing clarity into the mere memory of itself. “But not every end is an ending. Watch, now—look over there, over to the side. Back on the edge.”

  Amais turned an obedient gaze where she was bid, and saw a man walking past a piece of the people-wood. He paced it out, and the plants at his feet were in a grid, planted with precise and meticulous care into rows and columns, regimented, obstinate, applying external order to the primeval chaos. He carried a watering can, and poured exactly the same amount of nourishing water into the roots of every plant, and they all grew almost identical—same height, same form, same shape. The man snipped with a pair of gardening shears at any errant branches, coaxing the plant back into a schooled and educated shape. The plants were flourishing, it could not be said that they lacked care, but several of them had a distinct air of yearning and melancholy, as though they wanted the freedom to cast out branches in whatever direction they wanted and knew that any attempt to do so would be met by the shears.

  The man looked awfully familiar—someone Amais knew, or would know—time was fluid here, and it was hard to tell the future from the past. But he kept his head down and his focus on his work, and since she could not see the whole of his face at any given moment it was hard to be certain.

  “What is he doing?” she asked instead, watching curiously as the gardener went about his work.

  “Taking care of his own,” the voice of the little girl said. “Look at that in his hand. That is not a watering can that he used to scoop out water from some pond or fountain. Look closely—the can is his hand, the can is himself, he is watering those plants, those people, with what is inside him.”

  “And they flourish,” Amais said. “It is good.”

  “They flourish for a moment, for a year, for a decade, for a century,” the voice said. “And then the time of the gardener is over. Sometimes he finds another who comes in his place, another watering can at the ready, and the plants begin to drink again of a different soul, and they might thrive or they might wither. It is hard to say. But that kind of garden… lasts a lifetime. Or a generation. No longer.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “Sometimes, this,” the voice said, and it was obvious that it meant the desert at their backs where nothing living grew. “Some people are the living water that feeds others, and they are rich and nourishing, and their folk grow hardy and grow strong. But then they are gone. Other people…”

  Something rolled against Amais’s foot, and she looked down. It was a yearwood bead, much like her own, but weathered, ancient, its carvings almost scoured by the sands of time. Instinctively she bent to pick it up, and passed it into the palm of the hand which held her own, and began playing with the two beads between her fingers… for just an instant. In a moment she became aware she held only one, as she had held before—her own. But it was different—edged with the age of the other one. Before she had a chance to comment, two more beads rolled towards her and came to rest at her feet. She collected them to, in a silence that was full of wonder, and cupped her hands around them all—and soon they were only one again, her own. And while her bead absorbed its fellows, she felt her own mind and spirit bloom with the souls and memories of those whose beads they had been.

  And then they came to her, from all directions, and piled at her feet, buried her feet up to their insteps, then their ankles, then higher. Amais crouched down and buried her hands in the beads, and felt them all come to her, into her, felt her own yearwood bead gently take them and wrap them into itself and felt her spirit expand to take all the others that came asking admittance.

  “Some people are gardeners for a season,” said the voice that she had followed, and the little girl was finally there, standing a few steps away, her hands tucked into her wide sleeves, wearing a small smile that was almost sad. “Others are born to be the memory of the land, of its people—not for a season, but for always. It is not an easy thing to be, but I think you are starting to know what you need to do.”

  The souls of her people, the bones of the land that had made her, came into Amais and found the empty places within her which had been waiting to be filled for so long. She was weeping, although she did not know exactly why, but her hands were open in the mass of beads at her feet, and her soul was open to the voices of the people who had come to her, and her body was rooted through the soles of her feet of the land that was her home.

  She was smaller than the tiniest of the embryos in the woods behind her, waiting to be born.

  She was bigger than the largest tree in the forest, bigger than the mountains, bigger than the sky.

  She was nothing. She was everything. She was love and memory and dream, and life.

  The Embers of Heaven

  “No matter what they put you through, when they break your body or poison your mind—if you can hold on to a single warm memory that you treasure, it can be your passage back to the world of light. Those memories are the embers of heaven, and from them life and love can kindle again.”

  The Song of the Nightingale

  I almost expected that Xuan would be gone by the time I finally made my way back to where I had left him—but never, in all the time I knew him, did he prove to be less than faithful once he had pledged his word to something. He did not know what I had gone there to do—he could not know, and I never told him—but he came with me, and he would not leave without me even if his apprehension and all the objections he had voiced to coming here in th
e first place were plain on his face when I stepped out of the shadows.

  “I was worried,” he said. He had flinched, in the moment before he had seen it was me—he had been coiled tight, tense, just waiting for someone to stumble upon our unsanctioned presence and turn us in—but that was all that he said when I returned. That, and then I saw his shoulders relax. Just a little.

  It mattered a ridiculous amount to see that small gesture just then, to know that there was one human being left in this world to whom my safety might matter, who would worry about my well-being, who would guard and shelter me against danger if he could.

  “Was I too long?” I asked. It was a genuine question. I had no idea how long I had spent under that willow tree.

  “Long enough,” he said, after a pause. “Have you done what you came to do?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We can go.”

  I did not turn as we walked away, I did not look back—it was doubtful what I would have been able to see in the night and the storm, but whatever there was, it was not the vision I wanted to take with me of the place that had once been the Great Temple of Linh-an. Not the ruin.

  “Xuan…I have to go—I have to leave this city as soon as I can …”

  I had not realized that I had been thinking that, not until the words fell into the storm-washed air that still tasted of thunder and of ashes.

  He stopped walking and looked at me, his eyes glittering. It had stopped raining by now but we were both soaked; water dripped from our clothes, our hair, and pooled at our wet feet.

  “Stay,” he said unexpectedly, reaching out to take my hand.

  “I can’t,” I said—and for a moment, just a moment, that world-weight reasserted itself on my shoulders and they sagged a little. I had taken it all on, by choice, by oath. I hardly even knew yet what shape the fulfillment of that vow to my land would take, but I did know that I could not fulfill it in this place, not hiding out in cellars and tenements like a mole, too afraid to lift my eyes to the sky.

  But I did not pull my hand away.

  “I will tell you where the sword is hidden,” I began and he tossed his head, his wet hair flicking water at my face.

  “Damn the sword,” he said with a quiet violence. “Stay.”

  I shook my head. “I have to go.”

  “But where will you go? What will you do?” he asked, his fingers tight around my own. “I cannot just let you walk away!”

  “I have to go,” I repeated. And then I uttered a sentence which I swear I never meant to say. “You could come with me…”

  He stared at me for a long moment, and then made an odd gesture with his head, half a nod, half a shake of denial. “Out of the city?” he whispered. “But where could I take what’s left of my family?”

  “I think,” I said, a plan beginning to form in my mind, “I know a place where we can all go…”

  He asked me to marry him, the next day, and then he kept asking me, after—but how could we? In the city we would have to go to an official and sign papers, with our names, and I dared not—not if the note of warning left anonymously at my door was right, and they were looking for me—and he dared not—not if the Golden Wind had come to this house already and had missed taking him only because he had not been home. We were already fugitives; we just needed to take the final step to prove it, and flee.

  I might have suggested we detour around the Street of Red Lanterns, and pick up the sword, maybe—or go to the place where he had hidden the journals, and take those—but there was little time left to think of treasures which were, as far as we knew, still safely hidden from harm and which could not be hurt in the way human beings might be.

  Xuan’s mother readily agreed to leave the city; his sister balked.

  “How will Wulin know where to look for me, when they let him go?” Xinqian said obstinately, clutching her small child to her breast. “He will come home… he will come home. And I must be here to wait for him.”

  But Xuan took her aside, and talked to her, for a long time. And in the end, she agreed. She was quiet and mutinous and her eyes were full of tears, but she was a mother as well as a wife. She could not know if her husband would ever return—but the child, the child was her responsibility, her burden. If the child could be salvaged out of the catastrophe, that would mean something.

  There was little to pack. We left towards the middle of the next day, trudging out of the northern gate with our heads down and our eyes downcast, praying that nobody would take a closer look at us—for in fact we had no defenses, and I didn’t even have papers on me that would identify me. We were lucky, or we were in the hands of the Gods—there were four cadres on guard at the gate and every single one of them had his hands full at the time we trudged up to the gate. Three women, one of them a grandmother and another carrying a toddler, and a single man in their wake, on foot—we probably didn’t seem important enough. And then I led us north and west, towards Hian, the province of Iloh’s boyhood, and a farm where I knew I would be welcome.

  It didn’t quite work out the way I intended in the end. Iloh’s father was dead, and Youmei now lived almost on sufferance in a single room in the old farmhouse, with another two families living in the rest of the place and a few new rooms added on to take up the overflow. But Youmei knew me, and the other two families were short on manpower. Xuan was an asset, a strong young pair of hands, not to mention the added bonus of two healthy young women who could take up the slack on the farm chores. We didn’t have papers, but scrounging for identity was something at which the country people had become adept. We acquired new names, new identities…as was becoming far too easy in Syai, new pasts.

  Xuan said we could marry now, as brand new people whom the local authorities would have no reason to suspect. He continued to ask, every time I thought he had accepted the fact that I would stay with him anyway, even without the paperwork; the others on the farm had taken it for granted that we were a couple already, and we shared a room, and a bed. We were together—that much had been sealed that night in the Temple, when he followed me into danger, despite his reservations and accepting without question that there were things he had not been told about what I planned to do, because he could not do otherwise; when we had finally gone to sleep that night, back in the house with the blue tiles, under the falling rain, we had done it in each other’s arms. It was enough, for me.

  Youmei and Xuan’s mother struck up an odd friendship, an alliance, two matriarchs who should have ruled over a courtyard full of their grandchildren and great grandchildren but who had to be content with presiding over an uneasy mix of young people and children who were not of their own blood. They could at least commiserate with each other on the matter while stirring the cooking pots or turning coats or trousers to last another season.

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  It was safe. For the time being, I even allowed myself to be happy.

  In the rest of the country, the Golden Rising crescendoed, and then began to falter. Iloh finally withdrew his support, even the tacit unspoken one—but the damage had already been done. When the Army moved in to curb the worst excesses of the Golden Wind, it was far too late. Nobody trusted anybody any more, and people watched one another with hooded eyes. Stolen things remained stolen, and it became routine for people to find the possessions seized by the Golden Wind being sold on the black market or even openly in shops.

  The Golden Rising did not burn long, but it burned hot, and its scars were deep—the people had been changed by it, in fundamental ways, and so had the land. The city had its own scars. I knew the Golden Wind had set packs of political prisoners, educated people who had a very good idea of what they were being forced to do, at Linh-an’s walls—at first just chipping at them with sledgehammers and pickaxes and then, later, with mechanized tools and bulldozers; smashing the massive carved guardian stone lions at the gates. Many of the city’s Temples had been turned into small factories during Iloh’s ill-fated Iron Bridge campaign, and that had only got worse during the Rising, w
ith beautiful old jewel-box places of quiet worship being turned into a mess of machinery, a stench and a noise, a blot on the landscape, tall chimneys belching black smoke and rising higher than the belltowers. These neighborhood factories were used as bases for mechanical workshops or produced incongruous goods—like wire, or lightbulbs. I remember thinking at the time that it was a pity someone had so badly misunderstood the idea of ‘enlightenment.’

  There were parts in the city even before I left it where the fruit trees in the gardens, those that survived the axe and the fire, simply ceased to bear fruit any more, succumbing to first sterility and then to blight and disease. It had seemed symptomatic of what had been inflicted upon the people. Some of Linh-an’s ancient walls had already been replaced by a cancer-like growth of grim gray high-rises which rose on the ruins of the ancient courtyard-ringed houses that had once backed against those walls. The city was spilling out into the orchards and the fields, swallowing up the countryside, devouring copses of trees and small lakes—and inside its busy streets the new industries belched out their stinks and their smokes until they covered the sky with an awful patina of a sickly yellowish-gray which smelled faintly of burning oil, and of molten metal, and of many, many people.