The Embers of Heaven

‘Do mine,’ Sihuai said.

‘Oh, young sir!’ she demurred, sweeping her long lashes down on her cheeks. ‘Your voice is so strong and assured. I am certain your future is already known to you…’

‘Here,’ Tang said, folding their last copper into the girl’s hand. ‘It isn’t much but it’s all we have and that means we have paid you a treasure. Can you do all of us?’

For answer she reached out a hand, and Tang guided it to Sihuai’s face. She ran long fingers across his features, and then pulled back. ‘You have the face of a scholar, or a sage,’ she said. ‘You will write many scholarly books, and live far, far away from your home. But it will…it will be exile, of a sort. You will want to come back, but you won’t be able to, because you will be proscribed in the land of your childhood. You will have fame, but no fortune, and little happiness…and you will have many regrets in your life. Sorry. This is not very nice to tell. But that is in your face.’

‘What about me?’ Tang said, thrusting his face forward into her hand and closing his eyes.

‘You are a man who knows how to make friends and keep the peace, although you have no idea of how you do this,’ the girl said, and smiled with what was real warmth and almost affection despite her short acquaintance with her subject. ‘But the friends you make are often only on the surface, and the peace is dearly paid for. You will love a woman who will marry another, and that other man will be your friend, and it won’t be the first woman he gets that you will covet. You will hide your envy well, though. Your abilities will make you valuable to men in power – but they will balance their need of you with their fear of you, and you will need to learn to do the same. Your life will be hard but you will always know how to find the treasure within it…although you might think in the end that you have paid too high a price for it.’

‘You really tell it like it is,’ Tang said. ‘What about Iloh?’

‘Wait, I don’t think…’ Iloh began, but Tang had already grabbed the girl’s hand and laid it on his friend’s face. Her fingertips were feather-light on his cheekbones, on his lips. And then she sat back and gave him a long, thoughtful look.

‘You will become a great man,’ she said, ‘a prince, or a councillor…and if not that, then you will at least lead a band of outlaws from a mountaintop. You have ambition and patience. You know how to hold people in the palm of your hand.’ She hesitated, snatched her hand back, stepped backwards as if she had second thoughts about the rest of her reading. But she had accepted the copper, and she owed it. ‘But you will be stone-hearted,’ she whispered. ‘You would command a hundred thousand deaths, and it would mean nothing to you if that was the price of achieving a cherished goal. You…’ she hesitated again, but took a deep breath and continued, although a faint blush had come onto her cheeks, ‘…you will have many women, but you will truly love only once – and that will be a songbird, a woman whose spirit is free, and one you can never truly have…’

She bit her lip, as though she was regretting her candour now that she had said all that, and then turned around and hurried back the way she had come with the sureness that only a blind person walking a familiar path could understand.

‘Cheerful, isn’t she,’ Iloh said after a moment, staring after her.

The other two ‘beggars’ were still staring at Iloh’s face.

Iloh glared at them. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he growled. ‘It’s all a bunch of superstitious nonsense, anyway. Let’s eat; I for one am starving.’

They went on, later, and spent the rest of the summer climbing hills and crossing valleys, sleeping by streams or in sheds offered by friendly farmers, sharing space with ploughs and shovels and sometimes, memorably, dogs, goats, or wandering pigs. But then summer was over, and they returned to school – and then the years started piling on, faster and faster, and things ran away from them all. Shiqai, the warlord whose rise and fall had been the topic of their discussions that summer, had stolen the vision of the venerated man who had become known throughout the land as Baba Sung – ‘Father Sung’ – the father of a new nation. Shiqai’s death, something that seemed to come at the hands of the Gods themselves extracting payment for his many betrayals, had left a nation leaderless and fragmented, with a thousand petty tyrants leaping up to take his place, plunging the country into nearly a decade of misery and suffering at the hands of mercenary armies who took what they pleased from the people – money, livestock, men for labour and women for pleasure – and were answerable to nobody at all. But now, at last, things were moving again, and Baba Sung had gathered a new vision together – and for the first time since the Sun Emperor had been forced to step down from his throne, Syai found itself emerging from chaos into a semblance of calm and order.

Iloh followed all this with an eager curiosity. Back at the school, in the year following the beggars’ holiday with his friends, he read more and more books in his headmaster’s study – frequently proscribed material that access was granted to only on the basis of the unspoken understanding that its existence was not to be spoken of outside that room, often with Tang or Yanzi at his elbow to discuss the issues raised by what had been read. The whole churning mess of human endeavour as history unfolded – especially the turbulent times that he himself lived in – fascinated him. He had begun to eat, sleep and dream politics; he talked of little else.

‘Baba Sung has all the right ideas,’ he told Yanzi once, as they were both poring over the same broadsheet detailing some recent achievement or atrocity. ‘But he has had no power to make them happen. No real power.’

‘You mean enforce them,’ Yanzi said, with some distaste. ‘And you mean military power.’

It was an old argument between them. Iloh shrugged it off. ‘But don’t you think Baba Sung’s ideas are good? Remember what he said – “The nation was just a sheet of loose sand, not solid like a rock” – the winds of change blow us all every which way and until we start pulling together – all the people – until we start believing in a single truth…’

‘Truth can never be proved,’ Yanzi said. ‘Only suggested.’

‘Well, then, let us suggest a truth!’ Iloh said. ‘Baba Sung himself has said it – there are the three principles that he has written about…’

‘Hush!’ Yanzi said instinctively, glancing around. ‘You only know about those because you read it in the secret things that Father has received. Do not endanger us all by speaking of it yet. Baba Sung and his principles are far away and the warlord’s armies are near.’

‘But I have been thinking about it,’ Iloh began.

She placed a finger on his lips. ‘Keep thinking,’ she said. ‘There will come a time for talking.’

But Iloh was consumed by his own private fires. He had been exposed to Baba Sung’s high but distant political ideals, and they had acted like grit in an oyster, irritating his mind until they began accreting a layer of his own ideas, reinter-pretations, beliefs. By the time he was eighteen years old he was eager to leave the country behind and go to where the events that would shape his country’s history would play themselves out – Linh-an, the capital. The headmaster wrote him a letter of introduction to the librarian at the university in the city, asking if some job could not be found for this student, for whom he had developed both affection and respect. A job was found – a menial one, to be sure, cataloguing the library scripts and books in the back rooms, with pay that was barely enough to scrape rent together in the small compound he shared with four other students, one of whom was his friend Tang. Often meals were barely more than hot water seasoned with a few vegetables or a scrap of meat once in a while. But Iloh did not care about the hardships. He was poor, he was almost always hungry – but he was at the centre, where he wanted to be, where the ideas were.

He came back to the school only once, accompanied by Tang and another student from the university, an emissary from the librarian for whom Iloh worked. The librarian, a canny if covert politician, knew very well that he himself was a marked man, that his ideas – despite being, on the face of it, so very close to Baba Sung’s own catechism – were viewed with deep suspicion by the authorities. He had been branded as a troublemaker years before, and his dossier bristled with terms such as ‘anarchist’ and ‘radical’; the only reason he had been allowed to keep his job at the university library at all had been the authorities’ belief that he could do little harm buried in the library stacks.

But he’d found a way to communicate his dreams and to light a spark in others. It only took a handful of people like Iloh, young and bright and full of fire. If the librarian, the sage in the tower, could not pass his message to the followers who waited to rise for him, his acolytes could. And the message itself was a heady one for free-spirited youth – a new order, a new kind of society, one based on equality and fairness, one where one law held for all. It was Baba Sung’s ideas, distilled and crystallised into a vision – and Baba Sung had not been called a dreamer for nothing.

Iloh was twenty years old. The turning point of his life was just around the corner for him, and he knew it. He was ready. He had volunteered to come, but his mission was a commandment – he had never lost touch with a network of like-minded people with whom he had been friends while at school, and he had returned to enlist them in a new enterprise that would shake their world.

‘There is always a beginning,’ the librarian, Iloh’s erstwhile employer and his political mentor, had said on the eve of Iloh’s departure from Linh-an. His narrow ascetic face was alight, his eyes aglow with determination and zeal. ‘And this is our beginning. I charge you today to take the torch and set the flame to the bonfire that is to come. I cannot go – the authorities know my face and my name and the only reason they have not yet swooped down upon me is because they think they have me pinned here where they can keep an eye on what I do. But you, you are different – you are young, and you are going back to see your friends, and you have the freedom that I lack. Go, with my blessing. Take this out there, to the people.’

‘A People’s Party,’ Iloh had murmured, his eyes alight.

The librarian had been right in that the authorities had not put any obstacles in Iloh’s path as he journeyed back to his old school, contacted old friends, walked once again the streets he had walked as a boy. But he had been wrong about Iloh’s activities going unremarked. The authorities may not have known Iloh personally – he was young and had not had a chance to establish the kind of reputation that would invoke any kind of government dossier for himself – but he was already known, if only around the university, as a young firebrand with new and sometimes dangerous ideas. He had been the library assistant for only a brief while before he had been reassigned elsewhere, but in that while he had forged a firm bond with the old librarian. As a recognised associate of a man whose own government dossier ran to quite a thick file, Iloh’s comings and goings were not hindered, but neither was he left to pursue them unobserved.

‘We are being followed,’ Tang told him on the second day of their stay in their old school. ‘I can see a tail on us, everywhere we go. They note who we meet, who we talk to. They note who we have bought food from. I’ve seen one fellow just after we left with two policemen at his elbows. We can’t talk freely, not here. What are we going to do?’

‘What did you want to talk about that is so secret?’ Yanzi, who was with them, asked.

‘There is…’ Tang began, but Iloh lifted a hand.

‘What?’ Yanzi said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘With my life,’ Iloh said. ‘But I cannot do it with the lives of the people who are with me. Not to one who is not part of it.’

‘But I want to be a part of it,’ Yanzi said.

Iloh glanced back at Tang. ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘We will all – separately, without really hanging together as a group – go on a sightseeing trip. We can rent a boat on the lake, and it will be easy to control who can get on that boat. We can talk freely at last.’

‘If I come,’ Yanzi said, ‘they will only think you are taking a girl out on the lake.’

‘You have a point,’ Iloh replied, with a wolfish grin.

So Yanzi was with Iloh and Tang on the night that they pledged their lives to the new force, under a banner that would be their own vision of Baba Sung’s ideas. The three of them along with a handful of others, all young, all full of plans and ideas and an unshakeable belief that they were building something that would last forever, lighting a flame that would lead the generations that followed straight into paradise.

It was Iloh who wrote the founding declaration, and it was perhaps not grammatically immaculate or calligraphically perfect, but he poured out so much of the poetry that was in his soul onto that piece of parchment that the thing rang with power. Others took the original away, to copy it, to distribute it, to gather others into the fold.

That was the night on which the People’s Party was born, on the altar of which Iloh would lay his heart, his soul, and his life.

And then the wind of time swept through the pages of history, and years tumbled past like fallen leaves in an autumn storm. And the revolution was upon them.

Nine (#ulink_033db304-799a-5fb0-8410-2831b9f16752)

‘Gaichi mei!’ Iloh swore violently as he snatched his feet back from where he had been resting them against the warmth of the stove. They actually smoked. He stomped on the packed earthen floor of the hut, putting out the burning leather, wincing a little as the dance jarred seared feet. The stool he had been sitting on overturned from the violence of his motion, and the battered notebook he had been writing in fell from his lap and landed upside-down on the floor. He reached to rescue it and then lifted his feet one by one for an inspection, ruefully contemplating the soles of his shoes.

Two holes, charred on the edges and still smouldering from where the hot stove had burned through, gaped in his soles. His toes, visible through the gap, smarted; there would probably be blisters there before long.

The door of the hut opened with a little too much force and Tang peered inside, his gaze sharp and suspicious above the scarf that wrapped his entire face from the eyes down. Outside, it was snowing.

‘It was nothing,’ Iloh said, in response to the unspoken question.

‘It was something,’ Tang replied, his words muffled through the scarf. ‘I distinctly heard you, right through the closed door. I brought you something to eat, Iloh – you have to eat, you are flesh and blood like the rest of us even if you can’t admit that to yourself. When was it you last slept? What happened just now?’

By way of reply, Iloh lifted a foot and displayed one ruined shoe.