The image of Aylun’s face swam into my mind, the sweet face of the child she had been before… before everything. Before she had so fiercely embraced Iloh’s dream, before that had put blood on her hands. The little girl who had once had a different name, in a different land. I spared a moment to wonder if she would have still been alive if she had remained Nika, if she had remained Elena’s favorite granddaughter, if she had never left Elaas.
“How?” I managed to ask. “Do you know?”
“Suicide,” Yingchi said, almost unwillingly, but now that she had uttered those words out loud there was no real point in withholding other pertinent information. “Less than six months after… after the Emperor. You know she was involved with that, she was there that night. Xuelian said you knew.”
“Yes. She told me. Right before they… they… what became of Xuelian?”
“I don’t know,” Yingchi said in a small voice and tears glittered in her eyes. “And I would give much to be able to tell you. She… meant a great deal to me.”
“And to me,” I whispered. “I was there, when they took her. One of them broke her Emperor’s comb, right in front of her eyes; I saw it happen. He might as well have torn the living heart from her breast.”
We shared that, at least—this sorrow, this wound of this wanton, vicious death.
And then Yingchi looked at me again, and her expression was more enigmatic. “She told me, also, about… who the father had been to your unborn child, that time I nursed you back in the House,” she said. “I don’t know if you have heard, but Iloh… doesn’t look well. I was in the city when he gave one of his broadcasts—and I grant you I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in person for too many years to be wholly certain of this, but I think I could hear it in his voice.”
That name… that name woke things in me, things I thought I had lulled to sleep in the past few years. Xuan was enough… should have been enough…But Iloh’s name alone still had the power to move me. My hands had twisted together into a tight knot, without my even having been aware of it. I relaxed them with a conscious command.
“Hear what?” I asked.
“The hopelessness,” Yingchi said. “And I think that is the only disease for which I know of no cure.” She hesitated, would not meet my eyes. “Except… maybe…”
She wanted me to go back, to try and mend the things that were broken. She did not ask, not directly, but the thing hung there between us, left unspoken, left for me to make up my mind—and I was not sure that I could do this, that I was strong enough to do this, that I could pay the price of taking that healing that Yingchi wanted of me back to that place where pain dwelled—I had not seen Iloh since that last searing time, and I did not know if I ever would again. Not because I didn’t want to. More, perhaps, because I wanted to do it far too much—and now there was Xuan, who trusted me, whom I also loved.
But it was Yingchi’s coming, Yingchi’s words, that precipitated one of what I had learned to recognize as my guidance dreams.
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I remembered the place I found myself in that dream—the people wood, the place where I had seen the spirits of people growing as living trees, but this time, at least at first, I appeared to be quite alone here—that little girl who always accompanied me, the child who had led me in these strange journeys of spirit and mind, was not with me. Or at least she was not in person; it was her voice, however, that hung in a whisper under the trembling leaves of the people trees: “Follow…”
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, but after a while I became aware that there was a small figure standing by one of the trees—another child, perhaps, younger than the little girl in my other dreams had been. As soon as it knew that it had been seen, the child turned and slipped away into the shadows under the trees, and my instructions became clear. I ducked under the low branches that had been this new guide’s concealment and stepped into the wood.
At first the child I was following appeared to want to escape from me, because it moved fast, and almost stealthily, and once or twice I even thought I had lost it completely—but every time that happened I realized that it had stopped a little way in front, half-turned in my direction, waiting for me. So intent was I on keeping that elusive forest sprite of a child in my sights that I had simply ceased to notice my surroundings—right until the moment I stepped out into a clearing. In the middle of the clearing, a tiny sapling grew—two pale green leaves, shaped a little like a heart, were all it had had the strength to unfurl. Within it, floating in an ethereal golden-green light—the filtered light of the sun through a forest canopy—I could glimpse the shape of a very young but perfectly formed embryo, its eyes closed, and two tiny hands curled into small fists before its face.
Bent over this sapling, carefully watering around its roots, was a man.
A man whom I knew, whom I would know anywhere. The man to whom Yingchi wanted me to return. The man whose child—just like that unborn baby sleeping in its young tree, oh just like it!—I might easily have borne after the last time we had met on the empty country road.
“No,” said a small voice right beside me, “that child would have been me.”
The man by the sapling straightened. I looked into Iloh’s dark eyes, fell into them, my head spinning from a sudden and yet not unexpected shaft of something that was equal parts pain and joy. And then he was gone, vanished, reabsorbed into the fabric of the dream—except that, when I turned around to respond to the words that had just been addressed to me, I met those eyes again, in the face of the child I had followed through the woods to this place.
“Who are you?”
“I am you, and I am him. I am what might have been born had you not drank of the bitter herbs.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. “I am sorry,” I whispered. It was the only thing I could say, the only thing I could think.
“It was not my time,” the child said gravely. It was extremely difficult to pinpoint that sprite’s gender—its glossy black hair swung just below its ears, parted in the middle, and its features were formed of equal parts a boy’s firmness and a girl’s fragile vulnerability. Its mouth was still full and dewy with childhood, but its eyes… its eyes were the eyes of the never-born and of the often-born, full of a sad strange wisdom that touched me deeply in places I had not known existed inside me. Yes, it was mine—I could sense it, I could feel it, I had a mother’s urge to reach out and gather it into my arms and croon lullabies into that soft dark hair falling around its face. I had not known that I yearned for a child, but in this moment I knew that yearning in full measure—and the child knew, understood, gazed at me with pity and affection and a quiet knowledge reflected in those eyes.
Iloh’s eyes.
“Oh, Cahan,” I whispered, beginning to understand.
“You cannot have them,” my unborn son/daughter said to me, with the weight of prophecy. “You cannot have children before that child, the one child, the child that this land will need—the child that only you and he can make. It was not to be me—but there…” It lifted a hand, pointed to where the embryo hung in its cocoon of light—except that it was no longer asleep, and as I looked into the sapling I met another pair of never-born/often-born eyes, gazing straight into mine. “There,” the other child said. “There, my sister waits.”
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And I knew, when I woke from that dream, with all those voices still echoing in my mind, that the road ahead would be strewn with hard choices. In order to fulfill the pledge I had made to Syai, I would have to betray someone who loved me and trusted me. Perhaps more than one.
The women’s country. She was a woman too, my Syai, but she could not do what needed to be done, not without the living, breathing body of her jin-shei-bao—and the thing that was being asked of me was asked in the name of the vow which I had taken in the ruined Temple in the rain.
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It was spring when I returned to Linh-an.
Oh, how smoothly I had layered my story for all the people who
must never know the real purpose behind my journey, for all the people who knew it all too well! Yingchi said nothing when I explained my reasons for going back; Xuan insisted on coming with me. My heart already bleeding from every treacherous lie I told him wrapped in a tissue-thin layer of truth, I let him come as far as the last train stop before the city. Somehow—and maybe it was those insistent and increasingly demanding voices which I carried that gave me the words I needed—I won the right to go into the city itself alone.
“I have to carry a sword out,” I said to him—for that was my excuse, my reason, my sudden desire to go back. It was to retrieve those treasures that we had once hidden for each other, in a time when there were no reasons for secrets and lies between us, a time when we were innocent strangers to one another. “They would certainly stop you, if you tried to carry it out—and, if necessary, I know a secret way out of the city and they will never find me.”
“But if it is a secret way then I too could use it and escape undetected,” he had protested. “You are not safe in Linh-an by yourself, on false papers—remember how you were once eager to leave before they got their hands on you?”
“You, too, and if they get us they get us both,” I said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I know a safe place where nobody will think of looking for me.”
That much was true. Thank Cahan he didn’t think to ask me why I had not chosen to go to that safe place two years before, when we had fled the city to escape the howling furies of the Golden Rising.
He let me go, in the end. I will never forget, till the day I die, the completely open, trusting, honest look with which he bade me farewell when I left for the city the next day—because I carried it with me through what was one of Linh-an’s last surviving gates like a wound.
The city had already begun to change, by then—too many of the remembrance arches in the streets, once marble and carved or painted wood, were already gone. That had started back when I was still there—ostensibly they got in the way of modern transport, and slowed the modernization of the city—but somehow their loss made the streets look grimier, dirtier, more commonplace, more naked. It was certainly reducing the splendor of the Imperial city to the ranks of its less exalted inhabitants—but I could not find it in my heart to find approval for it. The heart had gone out of the city, the magic of it all. Like too many things that seemed good ideas at the time, this was turning out to be destruction for destruction’s sake, just putting a stamp on the city, claiming it for the plain and workaday Republic from the grandeur and the magnificence of an Empire.
I had been sent here—by a vow, by a dream, in order to conceive a child. I had no idea if any of this wild vision would even succeed. I had not thought it out further than this—I would come to where Iloh was, and then I would see what happened. But what would happen if I did no more than lurk in the teeming city outside the gates of Iloh’s guarded compound would be precisely nothing—and then everything would be wasted, all the treachery which the road back to Linh-an had been paved with, all the pain.
So I did the only thing I could think of that might have had an effect, and I did it within an hour of arriving in the city, before I could lose my nerve. I simply marched up to those gates and told one of the guards to tell Shou’min Iloh that Amais was here.
His reaction, initially, was predictable. He snorted in incredulous disdain.
“I should go and disturb Shou’min Iloh just because some chit from the street tells me to?” he said. “Just who do you think you are? Away with you! Shou’min Iloh is a busy man!”
But I stood my ground, and looked at the two of them. Just looked at them.
One of them cocked his gun and began raising it, but the other reached out and slowly pushed the barrel down again.
“You know we could kill you?” he asked, almost conversationally.
“Yes,” I said.
He shook his head, astonished. “Who do you think you are?”
“He knows,” I said, “my name.”
They were beginning to get interested. After another few moments, the one who had addressed me finally snapped to a decision. “You,” he said to his companion, “keep an eye on her.”
And he himself turned and rapped on the gate behind him. It was opened after a short pause by someone whose bewildered face was visible just briefly as the door opened and shut, and then the guard vanished within.
He had left me with the second one, the jumpy one, and although I found a small, centered, serene place deep inside myself where everything was well and everything was possible, the message hadn’t gotten out to my skin which crawled uncomfortably every time his fingers curled and uncurled on his gun while he watched me with flat, unfriendly eyes.
It seemed to take an eternity, but it was probably less than ten minutes later that the first guard returned—the expression on his face was pure unguarded astonishment, and he was accompanied by someone else. I knew this man; not that many years had passed since we had gone to hunt for chickens for Iloh’s father’s concubine. Those years had brought trouble and disgrace on him, and that showed in the new lines that had been etched in his face, but I knew Tang, and he knew me. He nodded at me in both a tacit recognition of that fact and a coolly impersonal gesture for the benefit of the guards, and said a single word, “Come.”
And I stepped inside, with the guards still staring after me in what was almost disbelief.
I was followed Tang into one of Syai’s ancient languid courtyards, flanked by colonnaded open corridors—and, at the far end, much like Xinmei’s house had done, it had another gate which led into an inner fastness, another, secret, courtyard safe from prying eyes. The corridors in the first courtyard had a multitude of doors opening from them, some of which looked like they were graceless and recent additions; a few were open, and showed glimpses of cramped cubicle-like offices within where the occasional occupant lifted their head and followed my passage through the yard.
“You don’t seem to be surprised to see me,” I said.
“Likewise,” he responded, with a small, twisted grin and a sideways glance.
“I knew you were out of his orbit,” I said carefully. “At a house somewhere in the country. What brings you back?”
“He does. In the spirit of the old saying that you should keep friends close but enemies closer…”
“Are you his enemy now?” I asked, startled.
“I am no longer the chosen successor,” Tang said. “That does make a difference. As for the rest… I don’t know what I am to him any more. I am here at his pleasure; I can be sent away again just as easily if he changes his mind.” His mouth twisted again, into that bitter little half-smile. “You know, it is true what they say --a revolutionary leader who wins power can become just as conservative and tyrannical as any old-style official against whom he has fought.”
“Tyrannical?” I said, rousing in defense, however half-hearted.
“Isn’t he?” Tang said. “But me, he has in his power. You… you and he…” He shook his head. “I have never understood this,” he said after a pause, just as we reached the gate to the inner courtyard and he shook out the proper key from a key ring he fished out of a pocket. “Everything he has wanted, he has reached out and taken, and owned. But you—you he allowed to go free—and yet you come back to him, of your own accord.”
“He could not own me,” I said.
“Perhaps that is why he cares,” Tang said, pushing the door ajar. “I haven’t seen his eyes light up in years, as they did when they told him your name. When you reach his position, few things are left that are both a treasure and a challenge, and you have always been both to him. Go in, he is waiting for you.”
“Thank you,” I said politely, and entered.
He locked the door behind me without a word.
Iloh himself waited in the courtyard.
For a moment, I did not recognize him—he would have been only forty two years old at the time, but he looked older, with prominent bags under
his eyes as if he hadn’t slept well for a long time. But the eyes themselves—ah, the eyes were the same, black and brilliant, and hungry.
I stopped, staring at him. He stared right back.
“You haven’t changed,” he said at last, breaking the silence.
“Oh yes,” I said quietly, “I have…”
“No,” said Shou’min Iloh in the voice he usually must have reserved for proclamations, because it had the ring of because-I-say-so authority. “You have not. Oh, I don’t mean that you are still the child that you were when I first saw you—you’re not that, not by a long way. But you… you are still the same. Only you would walk up to this place and assume that your name alone would get you taken straight through to me. Of all the women I have ever known in my life, you remain the only one who doesn’t know the meaning of fear.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “I? I am afraid of everything…”
The Embers of Heaven Page 40
