You did not know I watched you for a long time, as you sat there without moving, Xuan’s hand in your own. When I finally came into the room you lifted your head and looked at me out of those big, eloquent eyes of yours.
“Go away, he is asleep,” you said, “He doesn’t need you.”
You had no idea how much that hurt, but I obeyed you, and I left you with him until you were finally ready to leave him.
You mourned him by yourself, in your own heart—you would barely talk to me about him for years. It was only when you were older that you started wanting to know more about him, and I grew to treasure those occasions when you would come and wordlessly begin helping me with some tedious chore expecting a story of Xuan’s life in return.
But I never spoke to you of your real father.
I kept waiting—I don’t even know for what myself, now.
Until I had the time—for word had spread, and I traveled ever farther to gather in the women of Syai to that groundswell that had been begun; I even went as far as that village carved out of the mountainside where Yingchi had made the fields yield their harvest, fittingly, for that had been a miracle wrought by women’s hands.
Until you were ready; until you were older; as though being who you were didn’t make you ready enough, and having lived through that tragic Black Flux year didn’t make you as ready as you would ever be to hear hard truths told.
Until the world turned one more time, and one more time, and everything shook itself down into its proper place.
Excuses were easy, and plentiful. But I made all the choices, it was I who delayed, waited for the better time, the blessed hour which never quite came. It was my fault, and I regret it now—I can already see things in you, I know that you have it in you to risk everything for a dream or an idea, you would not be my daughter if you did not, let alone Iloh’s… oh, there was so much I could have told you, should have told you. But chances kept coming my way, and I kept on letting them slip through my fingers like they were sand.
You were thirteen when he died, your real father, whom you never mourned at all because you never knew him.
All you knew about that was what you read in the newspapers, what you heard people say in the streets or on the radio or on the one television set with its abysmal reception that lived in the village store. You had no idea of the reality of it… or of the fact that your mother knew long before the rest of the world did; that your mother, who lived and worked and ate and slept at your side on a village farm half the country away, was also at Shou’min Iloh’s bedside as he died.
I was there.
It could not have been any other way, really. Some part of me had known that when I had gone to him in Linh-an those many years ago, when you were conceived, was the last time I would see him—but oh, we were always so tightly bound, he and I, and he was not the kind of man to go without having the last word. And it was his turn to leave, after all.
I thought I was dreaming, at first—because that’s when it came, late in the evening, and I was almost drowsing after all my chores had been done. It felt strange, because part of me was still there, hearing the farm noises, hearing people talking around me—and half of me was not, was somewhere else, in a room that I did not immediately recognize although I found it oddly familiar. It took a moment, but then I realized I knew that desk, that bed, that rug on the stone-flagged floor—all a little shabbier, older, but unmistakably the furnishings of the place where you had been conceived thirteen years before. And in the bed… the man.
I was there, a ghost by the bedside, as he slept, his face as familiar to me as though I had shared a pillow with it for twenty years. I watched for a moment, and then I saw his eyelids flutter, once, twice, again; his breathing changed, became sharper, faster, shallower. And then his eyes flew open, as though in a panic. And he looked straight at me.
And saw me.
I could see him try to speak, but his mouth opened and no sound came out; it was as though at this final hour it had all been said, and nothing further remained. But there was one thing that he had said once, and those words were heavy in this room now, at this moment: only history can judge me, he had told me, and he had had no idea how right he was. Because history had caught up with him and run him over, and he had been broken by it as surely as if he had gone under the treads of one of the bulldozers with which he attempted to remake the landscape of Syai. And I… I had been part of that judgment.
Yingchi had taken “Song of the Nightingale”, when I was done, and given it to someone she had known in the city, someone who had a printing press that could print jin-ashu—and the book had been published. At first there were only a handful of copies, but already the women of Syai had done their work, and the book’s existence had not been a secret. Those first copies disappeared practically overnight. More were printed up, hundreds of them, and those too vanished into the populace, and then someone transcribed it from jin-ashu into hacha-ashu and printed that version. Thousands of copies, that time.
And it was suddenly everywhere—ironically, much like Iloh’s own Golden Words had once been. It fit the mood of the times, when the Golden Rising and its atrocities could be reviled—if not yet quite openly, then certainly just under the surface, bubbling away like something just coming to a boil. Iloh must have seen it, must have read it—he already knew it existed, I had told him of it, and he would have read it because of me even had nothing else mattered. But the things that “Song of the Nightingale” said did matter, and those things were sometimes harsh, accusing. But Iloh had done nothing, said nothing, not in his defense, not to me in accusation. It had almost been a tacit acceptance.
But now he was suddenly faced with the stark reality that he would be given no more chances—no chances to do anything new, to undo anything old, to explain or justify any of those choices. No chance, even, of anyone who would listen to such justification—because by the time someone came, he would no longer be capable of making them.
There was only me, and to me he could talk with his face, with his eyes, with his mind. Yes, I knew him that well—for all that our lives physically touched only three times.
I could not, even now, wholly forgive him—not for Vien’s lonely death among strangers, not for demanding everything Aylun had and then asking for more. But sometimes—and even Xuelian could be wrong occasionally—love was enough.
It was not the kind of love that you shared with Xuan, my daughter—not the glow of simplicity and innocence—what Iloh and I had had was always tainted by so many other things, complicated by history, divided loyalties and passion. It was not pure and it had certainly never been simple. We had had to make choices, he and I, and sometimes the wrong choice was leaving one another and sometimes the wrong choice had been choosing one another in the face of a thousand reasons to do otherwise. But we were here at last, at this moment, and all I could choose in the end was just to love him.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said. Somehow, it did not seem to be in the least incongruous that someone like me could be telling the most powerful man in my world not to be afraid, nor that I knew that he would be, in this moment.
I spoke in a whisper, Cahan alone knew why—I was a ghost in this place, who could have overheard me? But as I reached for his hand, even though I believed I could not physically touch him, I was surprised that there was a certain amount of physical sense of touch there. It did not feel like touching skin, more like something hard and cool, like marble—but I could touch him, and it didn’t matter. I stroked his fingers with my own, sitting beside him on the bed, whispering to him like I had done over your sick-bed many a time, Xeian, when you were small—holding the hand of Shou’min Iloh and watching his years reverse themselves, and time turn back on it like the serpent who is always eating his own tail. I watched it all fall away from him, all that he had accumulated over his life—he lost that title that had first ennobled him and then elevated him and set him apart from everyone else, the loneliness of the Chosen One; he lost
the grim desire to return to power after he thought he saw it snatched from him by his friend; he lost the hard revolutionary shell he had acquired in his years of a general, as a revolutionary, as a guerrilla, as his friends and the people he loved were sacrificed to the larger goal; he lost the glowing fanaticism of his early idealistic years, when he had believed that everything was possible if only he dreamed it; I finally watched him change back into the boy he must have once been, the boy who loved to read and would shirk his chores to go and hide in the shade of the old willow in the family cemetery with his beloved books.
I saw his soul leave his body, a pearly breath that came out of his mouth and dissipate into the emptiness of the room. Only then did I go back to my own shell, away in the country, and lie the rest of the night awake, remembering.
There were people who celebrated his passing, and many more who wept at the news. You were thirteen years old. To my shame, today, I do not remember what your reaction was when you heard of the death of the man who was your father.
<>
I never gave you “Song of the Nightingale” to read—it was, perhaps, another instinct that was wrong and that in retrospect I find it hard to explain. I should have done it, that story was your heritage, too, and it would have been an easy thing to use that as the springboard from which I could start talking to you of everything else that you needed to know about your past. But although I gave Syai the heart and spirit made flesh that the jin-shei vow I had made to the land had demanded of me, I balked at making you take on that load too young, too soon. The mother in me was always at war with that girl who had chosen to become one with her country and her people—that had been a high ideal, and I had believed then—I still believe—that I could have done nothing else, that this was what I had left Elaas and come back to Syai for. There is a saying in Syai, that predestined enemies will always meet in a narrow alleyway—and my world shrank and shrank until that narrow alleyway was all that there was and I had to look my fate in the eye and either accept it or die. But somehow, somehow, I always thought I had the power to shield you from arriving at that place. That was the mother in me talking, and sometimes that voice is stronger and louder than all the rest.
That is only natural.
But there were times that Xuelian’s words returned to haunt me—and sometimes, perhaps, not even a mother’s love is enough…
When I first saw you with the book in your hand—a dog-eared second-hand copy of “Song of the Nightingale”—I confess to a pang of absolute panic. I had still told you nothing, and it had been years since I had finished that story, and I found myself frantically reviewing it in my head as I saw you bent over it, enthralled, wondering if I had let anything slip in the narrative, if my protective wing would only serve to make you learn a hard truth the hard way—but you were safe from that, then, because that part of my life I had never put openly into the “Song” story. But you and that book had other ramifications.
You had left it, that time, to go and do something else—and I confess to being unable to resist going over to pick it up and turn it over in my hands. I still found it hard to believe that it was something that I had done, something that had come from such depths of anguish and that had served to help heal the pain of others; there were things that I heard said about that book that humbled me, and it almost terrified me to realize how many people found traces of themselves, of their own stories, within that book. Seeing one, picking one up, always gave me a shiver down the spine—and seeing you reading it only made that shiver stronger. But there was nothing out of the ordinary about the copy that you had… or so I thought, at first.
Before I started to put it down, and a thin, almost transparent, piece of paper fell out of the back of the book, folded over once. It fell open as I bent to retrieve it, and I stood frozen by the two words that were on it, two simple words, but so wholly unexpected and astonishing that they swam in my vision as though I had just taken a swallow of a most potent wine and it had gone straight to my head.
Jin-shei.
“Song” had been about other things as well—about the bloodshed and the senseless death and destruction, the things that happen when family, neighbors, friends turn on one another and rend each other with tooth and claw because to do otherwise would mean their own failure to survive. But I had written about the bonds that connected people, and of how they had been shredded in the bitter years of Syai’s revolutions, thrown into the bonfires, used as kindling in order to make the flames hotter and more capable of forging a new society like a blade of a new sword. The book had not been about jin shei, not directly, but it had been a lament to its loss—the vanishing of that solid bedrock on which society had once been firmly fixed and which left Syai teetering unsteadily on crumbling stones which were the side of a mountain about to slide into the abyss and disintegrate into sand and dust, flat featureless desert, a place where nothing lived or moved.
I had thought I could sense the spirit of jin-shei working its magic in the women whom I had met, who had read “Song of the Nightingale”, who had made the connection. But the last time I had crossed paths with the actual words, uttered as the vow itself, it had been when I spoke them to Syai in the ruins of the Great Temple, and nobody had even heard them except me, the storm, and the land to which they had been said. Now, here, there was evidence that somewhere that seed had fallen into fertile soil, and although I had never believed that I would see the fruit of it—not in my lifetime, at least—here it was, proof in my hand, that somewhere, somehow, I had managed to find the true path to the ancient women’s country and bring a little of it back with me.
Xuan knew nothing of that dream—and Iloh, who did, would have smiled at the way I stood thunderstruck with the paper in my hand. Smiled, because he would have both understood in a fundamental way—he had his own dreams and obsessions, after all, and knew how powerful they could be—and because he had always gently mocked me for the struggle that went so radically against his own, to bring back the old and revere it instead of simply razing it to the ground in order to make place for the new.
And I—I was caught in a maelstrom of emotions. I had seen the words written on a piece of paper, which meant that the vow of sisterhood had been exchanged between at least two living women, or at least the intent had been there. But were you, my daughter, one of them? Was this your pledge, given or received, or did someone tuck away a precious slip of paper into a book and then lent it out or let it slip out of their possession without retrieving those two written words of promise? And if it were you… ah, my child, but a part of me was overjoyed and another part deeply envious of your experience—because I, of course, had never had a real jin-shei-bao myself.
Under my own rules, under the rules of the women’s country, I could not ask you, and if I did you did not have to tell me. I had already broken those rules, it was true—there was nothing in the sacred sisterhood that defined the thing that I had done, the offering of the jin-shei bond to the land of one’s birth—but that was something else again, something different, something new. Traditional jin-shei was still a thing that remained between a sister and a sister, and not even mothers, unless invited, could share of it. I ached to talk to you about it, to tell you all that I knew and I believed, to tell you what my grandmother once told me—but I had no right to broach the subject with you, so instead I cheated—I waited until I saw you finish “Song”, and then I gave to you what I had treasured these many years myself—Kito-Tai’s journals.
If there was a place to learn about the power of jin-shei, then it was this wellspring, where I had learned it myself.
And then I realized that I had still things left to learn, and that sometimes mothers can learn from daughters, too.
Jin-shei was a women’s mystery, shrouded in secrecy, buried in centuries of whispers and veils. But there is a time for secrets, and there is a time to bring the secrets out into the light of day and share them amongst all, built on, wished on, wrought into new dreams for a new day. It
’s a little bit like those lost and lovely incense burners in the Great Temple, whose embers were carefully tended from the elder days, never allowed to go out, never allowed to die. A living memory of times changing from history into myth and legend, but the scents they served to propagate through the Temple halls was new and fresh every day. I had sworn my own vow to my land, and she was a living thing, Syai, my land, my sister. And I had fulfilled my own part of that vow.
But the child that I bore had her own vision of secrets and vows. How could I have even thought it would be any different? You may not have known the whole truth about your true heritage, but you could not help being what you were, Iloh’s daughter and mine, Syai’s child, born to the instincts of leadership and nurture, of a need to understand, to shape, to make, to do. Even when you were a very little girl you were the one whom the rest of the children followed, yours the decisions, yours the inspiration for games and learning, yours the big dreams that everyone else found hidden treasures in. And that only became stronger as you grew older, more articulate, more self-assured.
The Embers of Heaven Page 42
