The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  “Not of me,” he said. “That has always been your hold on me. You have never knelt to me. Come.”

  I suppose I could have proved him wrong and refused what was fairly obviously a command, and one that he assumed would be obeyed—he had turned and walked away, and it was obvious he expected me to follow—but this was what I had come here for, after all. So I obeyed, and fell into step—not behind him, beside him. I saw him smile at that, but he didn’t speak again until we were out of the open courtyard and into a quiet room which was apparently an inner sanctum—a desk, an office chair, a typewriter, a lamp, an iron bedstead, and not much else. He closed the door behind us.

  “You look tired,” I said, and oh, the place where that tenderness came from—the place I still carried within me after all those years—the shores of the ocean of yuan, of the fate that had first delivered me to him. Xuan was my life and the practical sunlit hours of my days—but Iloh had always been the other half of me, the fevered dream of my nights, and nothing had changed there, nothing at all.

  This was the man who had broken my family on the wheel of his ideals, who had fueled the fire of the Rising, who had brought in the Army to quell it when it became inconvenient—a man who had never stopped looking for his Iron Bridge, feeding whatever he could into the furnace to create the New Man who would come to live in his dream and make it a glorious reality. But he was the heart of this country, for all that. And hearts notoriously do not waste time on practical things. They yearn. They want. They love, beyond hope and beyond reason.

  “A few hours’ sleep a night suffices,” he said. And then he looked at me, really looked at me, and I nearly cried out with the naked need of that look. “Where have you been, for so long…?” he whispered, and reached out for me.

  And I understood exactly what I needed to give to my land, My body was the vessel—he was the heartbeat of the life that was to fill it—and that spirit that Xuelian once saw in my eyes, what she called the soul of Syai, that was you, my daughter, waiting to be born.

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  We talked and argued, for hours, wrapped in each other’s arms and minds, as we always did; that was part of what had always drawn us together, the crossing of verbal swords, the occasional flare of pure frustrated annoyance that we could not make one another yield on anything. We were a matched pair, in that regard—both stubborn, both opinionated, both passionately believing in the things that we held dear. If there was something odd about two lovers planning to change the world, it was only that in this instance at least one of them had the power to actually try.

  But Yingchi had been right about one thing—there was something about Iloh that was fey, almost transparent, as though he was already half in another world. I could have asked him about it, because I could have asked him anything—but somehow, maybe it was because of the poetry of the “Song of the Nightingale” world in which I’d been living for so long, it came out less direct that I had wanted.

  “After you’ve lived the kind of life you’ve lived, after you know what it feels to hold your hand in the fire, after you’ve skirted the edge of everything possible… is the rest just waiting…?”

  His face had changed a little, at that, and his eyes looked somewhere through me and into infinity. “Yes,” he said, in reply. Only that.

  It was a bad moment, because in it I could see his end—and so could he. Iloh was not old—but for a moment both of us remembered that Baba Sung had not been old, either, when he had been called to Cahan. It seemed that great dreamers paid for vision with their lives.

  He blinked, focused back on me, smiled; we were, for the time being at least, back in the real world. He asked what I was doing these days, and I told him about the “Song;” he listened intently, and then said,

  “I would like to read that, some day.”

  “You couldn’t,” I said.

  “Jin-ashu, I take it?” he said, grinning. “More women’s secrets?”

  “It has always been far more than that, Iloh!”

  He lifted a hand in a gesture of self-defense.

  “Truce!” he said. “Women hold up half the sky—they have always been our equals! I have never said otherwise! But before, in ancient times, they never stepped up to stand beside their menfolk…”

  “And now you think you have lured them out into the light?” I said.

  “I don’t think, I know,” Iloh said. “I have seen women—no more than girls, some of them—fighting beside me in the wars, I’ve seen them stepping up to the machines in the factories…”

  “All you have done is made them take on the responsibilities of both sexes,” I said.

  “They are free to do what they choose,” Iloh said, “finally, after decades, centuries, of repression and the utter unquestioning attitudes that they belonged in the rear, in the dark, always second, always afraid.”

  “You have never understood a woman, then,” I flung at him, a challenge. “In the Empire that was, the Emperor was chosen by a woman—it was the daughter of the Emperor who inherited the throne, not his son. It was a woman’s wisdom that guided. She taught her children things that children now never learn, because in your world they are raised by strangers, in creches where their mothers deposit them before hurrying off to their important jobs in the factories, in the government. And little by little that wisdom and tradition dies.”

  “But they are now equal,” Iloh said.

  Iloh’s world. The place where all human beings were equal, all were brothers and sisters.

  I argued bitterly against that too-simplistic idea, as always—I might have been one of very few people, possibly the only one, to tell Shou’min Iloh flatly and to his face that he was talking nonsense. To me, the power that was jin-shei was partly rooted in the fact that it was a choice freely made and freely accepted, a choice with rights and responsibilities attached, where Iloh’s version of the bonds of brotherhood existed by default, by the mere virtue of having been born a human instead of a cow or a dog or growing into a willow tree. But he held to his own, and finally I gave him a wry smile.

  “You have your dreams, I have mine,” I said. “And as far as ‘Song’ is concerned…”

  “What?” he asked, when I hesitated.

  “You would not like it,” I said frankly.

  Iloh snorted. “What, you don’t trust me to know my own failings?”

  “Not when they’re filtered through other eyes,” I said. “You are a double-edged sword—you swept through the land and you woke everyone up, and you made your vision their own and made them believe that everything was possible—everything, except remembering anything at all of what went before and calling any of it good. What have you done to this city?”

  “What have I done to the city?” he said, honestly nonplussed.

  “That’s just it—you don’t even notice it. For you, reality has always been just a stage set—the play was the thing. But out where the real people live, Iloh, if you savage the sets, the play itself will falter. You may think you have cured idolatry and superstition but all you’ve done is replace it with something else—they began to worship you instead of the old gods. And you never put a stop to that.”

  “It was useful,” he said reluctantly, “at the time. I did put a stop to it, as it happens…”

  “You did not do nearly enough,” I said. “And you did even that when it was far too late to matter. The problem was that some people never stopped believing in the old, and resented you for dismissing and destroying it—and others believed only in the new, and resented those who did not believe in you. It was hardly the best way to mold a new society.”

  “It is better to believe in everything than in nothing at all,” Iloh said. “Nothing is finished, and everything is possible.”

  “But believing in everything eventually gets you to the brink of believing nothing at all. And people who don’t believe anything have no future, and no past. They live one day at a time. And it is not a comfortable existence.”

  “On the c
ontrary,” Iloh said. “That is the definition of contentment. You get the best out of life every day; you have the desire to enjoy what you hold right now, and no regrets for either failures or consequences.”

  “So is that all that this has ever been to you?” I asked, obscurely disappointed in a way I could not quite pin down. “A passing moment which holds no memory, of happiness or regret?”

  “Oh, but how you do set things on their head,” Iloh murmured, sweeping my hair back from my face with one hand. “You know that you have been my most profound regret…”

  It had been too smooth an answer, in a way—but under the circumstances, right then, I had no right to challenge him about it. Coming here was a double betrayal, after all, a betrayal of both the men I cared about so deeply—Xuan, because I was here with Iloh at all; Iloh, because this time it had been more than just yuan, and I had come here with a cold and deliberate plan to conceive his child. And neither man would ever know, could ever know, the truth.

  We slept for a while, cocooned in each other. It was our bodies that woke first, and I opened my eyes to his fingers moving in sleepy caresses over my shoulders and back, to my own hand, almost without my being aware of it, gently stroking his side from waist to thigh—the hunger that had been banked for the years that we had been apart, that had not yet been sated. This time there was no stolen moment, no fear of being surprised by someone who might happen by—we had the time that we wanted, that we needed, nobody would come in and surprise us, he had given orders that everyone in that compound was to stay away from that door that divided us from the world. I did not ask if his wife was in that house, if those orders also applied to her. We talked, and loved, and argued, and slept, and sometimes just lay in each other’s arms wrapped in long, deep silences; it was the longest I had ever spent with him, and in those hours was a hint of life as it might have been had things been very, very different.

  But outside this door, things had not changed at all. He was still Iloh, Shou’min Iloh, and whatever that implied. I was still Amais. We were still bound by who we were, what we were.

  It was my turn to leave, that time, as one of us always did—and in predawn darkness of that night we had spent together I disengaged my limbs from his, knelt beside him for a long moment as he stirred in his sleep but did not wake, and planted a light kiss on the top of his head before I rose and dressed quietly and then let myself out of that enchanted room. In fact, I had no clear idea of what orders had been given—if I would even be allowed out of this place at all. But when I knocked quietly on the door that led from the inner courtyard to the outer, it was opened.

  “Were you waiting for me?” I asked Tang in a low voice. “I wasn’t sure myself that I would ever…”

  “He might have hoped you’d stay. He knew you would go. Those were the orders that were left—when you knocked, the door was to be opened to you.” Tang shook his head. “Sometimes even I cannot fathom him. He catches himself in his own nets, and trammels himself in hobbles that only he sees as being there. When Yanzi died—that’s his first wife—he married Chen, but that was a pragmatic decision, born of necessity, they were a man and a woman out in the wilderness with no hope of imminent return to the mainstream of life and Iloh is not the kind of man who cares to be alone. It was far too soon after Yanzi, but who was I to argue? But there were always two of him in that skin, the poet and the pragmatist, and when this woman came out of nowhere, with that silly ‘Songbird’ stage name, all he could think of was that prophecy that he was handed when we were all so damned young…”

  “I remember,” I said, with the sound of Iloh’s voice in that ancient family cemetery, on that first night that we shared, loud in my memory. I felt curiously dizzy; it was as though I was ‘remembering’ things that had happened to someone else, a long, long time ago. “That his life’s one great love would be a woman with a songbird’s name. And that he would never really have her…”

  Tang nodded. “And how right she was,” he murmured, looking at me in a strange way, “that blind girl in the tavern. You’re his wild bird. But he had married Niaomei by then… and although he’d had no compunction about divorcing Chen when he wanted to be free to marry Niaomei, that was because the poet in him had won out, and he wanted the reward for all those years of labor and solitude. He never loved Chen, she was a convenience; I don’t really think she loved him either. It was an easy marriage to end. But this one—this one he entered with a different mindset—a sense of fulfillment of something promised him. And he can’t bring himself to break that, even if it was the wrong promise, even if it was for you.”

  I stared at him with tears in my eyes. He looked at me long enough to notice that, and then dropped his eyes down to the keys he jangled in his hand and would not look up again.

  “Come on,” he said abruptly. “The cage door is still open. Don’t linger too long.”

  He let me out of the compound not through the main door but a smaller, side gate, leading out into the alley behind the compound.

  I saw the unmistakable shape of a rat scurry out of the way and disappear into a crack between the pavement and the house across the alley. The city smelled faintly of fading night, and antiquity, and the ashes of burned dreams… and bright new-lit flames of nascent hope. The alley gave out onto the wide avenue on which the main gates gave, the place where I had entered Iloh’s fastness, and that was well-lighted indeed—and some of that spilled into the dark little alley, a wash of light on the pavement that glittered as though it was damp—had it rained, while I was in there, with Iloh?—like the path a full moon leaves on water, like the moon had often left on the seas of my childhood in Elaas. A path to heaven, my father had once told me. Words formed in my head, strung themselves into sentences, formed into, Cahan help me, a poem—it was as though Kito-Tai had reached out through the centuries and planted it in my mind. It was something that I knew would find its way into the manuscript I had left behind at Iloh’s old farm:

  Bright moon, black water —

  A road that is a dream of hope

  Waiting to be born.

  To be born…

  I folded my hands around the warmth that I could feel kindling in my womb. Even the midwives would have said it was too soon to tell, but I knew—I knew that I carried another life within me. I had done what Syai had asked.

  The rest of my time in the city is a blur to me now. I went to the place where Xuan had hidden Tai’s journals, and found them, safe, and took them; I went to the House of the Silver Moon, which was standing derelict, not yet taken over for a new purpose by a new owner and not yet destroyed—and it was an easy matter to slip into the basement and retrieve Xuan’s grandfather’s sword. I made a detour to the tunnel of the Seven Jade Springs, the “secret way” I had spoken of to Xuan, just to see if that was still an option—but I was dismayed at what I found there. The waters had been fouled by the industrial complex that the city was rapidly becoming; what had once been reserved for the holy and the sacred had been freely diverted to other purposes once the holy and the sacred places had been destroyed or subverted, and the channel was slick with algae and weed, the water was at half the level it should have been, and what was there smelled bad and looked worse, with an oily scum on the surface. I decided to brave the gate.

  I did not go back to pay my respects to what remained of the Great Temple—I could not bring myself to do it, to see what had become of it. But once again I was in the hand of the Gods, and I walked out of the city without anyone stopping me or asking any questions at all. I had gone in for two treasures, and I came out carrying three—words of four centuries ago, an ancestor’s sword wrapped in honor and glory, and the promise of new life stirring within me.

  The past and the future, as always.

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  I called you Xeian, when you were born. There are so many meanings to that name. Part of it was a reshaping of the word that means ‘heart’, because that is what you were, heart and spirit of this land made flesh. But it also
means ‘shadow’, because of the way you would have to be hidden and treasured until your time came, because of the fact that Xuan never knew you were not his own as you yourself never knew that you were not his. All of what I have written of so far has been a secret to you your whole life—but now I will write of the times some of which you are old enough to remember.

  You were eight years old when the year of the Black Flux swept the land, and you remember the swathe of destruction that it left within our own circle. Youmei died of it, and so did Lihong—both the matriarchs of our little tribe, both missed fiercely. But it was the loss of the man you always knew and loved as your father that wounded you most deeply. Lihong was already gone by then, but Youmei was still there, and Youmei had been wise, wiser than I, who always wanted to shelter and protect you. The Black Flux was not an easy sickness, not for the one who had it or for the one who had the care of the patient—it was a dirty, smelly, undignified way to go. And yet you would not be kept away from him—at eight years old you insisted that you too would nurse him, and although I still did the necessary in terms of keeping him clean and comfortable it was you who helped feed him the thin gruel that was the only thing that he could keep down, it was you that sat with him for hours and just prattled, like any eight-year-old might, until he fell asleep with a slight smile on his face having forgotten for a moment, in the light of your childish joys and small happinesses, his own suffering. It was you who had been holding his hand when he died. In a way, it was fitting—his sister had gone from the farm by then, and his mother was dead, and I, who loved him but who had dealt him one of the worst betrayals of his life, had probably forfeited my right to be his comfort in the end. But you, he loved, boundlessly and unconditionally, and you returned that love. it was good that Xuan had that, at least, in the hour that Cahan called.