The Embers of Heaven

‘What do you think they would do?’ Yanzi said, her voice sweet reason. ‘I am a pregnant woman. If they touched me they would have their own people turn on them – some things are sacred, and if you foul them you are tainted by it forever more. And here I can be of far greater use to you than dangling at your tail with this belly up there in the mountains.’

‘It would be safer in the middle of nowhere than here in the middle of the hornet’s nest. I don’t think you realise how ugly it’s going to get.’

‘Trust me,’ she said, laying her hand over his mouth. ‘I will be better here. I will send word when I can.’

‘Then I will stay,’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Yanzi told him sharply. ‘Your name is on a list of wanted men. You would not last a week in the city – you couldn’t even be with me, you’d have to go into hiding. You’re better off up there in the mountains, leading, than down here skulking in a rat trap.’

He had let her persuade him that she would be all right, that nobody would touch her.

But that was before Iloh had fully emerged as the leader of the leaderless men of the People’s Party up in the pathless hills of the north. Before Shenxiao put a price on his head. Before someone delivered Yanzi and her small son into Shenxiao’s hands. Before Shenxiao broke every rule, and executed Iloh’s wife and child to prove a point – with me or against me, and if against me then no quarter shall be given.

When word of that came, Iloh had asked a single question.

‘How?’

‘They shot them,’ the courier who had brought the news said brokenly. ‘They stood them up against a wall, and a firing squad shot them both. The boy was in her arms.’ He looked up, met Iloh’s eyes, and felt his knees buckle. It was kneeling at Iloh’s feet that he whispered the rest, the answer to the question that Iloh had really been asking. ‘They…it was fast…they didn’t suffer.’

Iloh had turned without another word and walked away into the hills, by himself, his face a battlefield. Nobody dared follow, not even Tang, his closest companion; that grief and guilt had been too heavy, too raw. If they thought they heard a howl from out of the hills, later, a howl that sounded more like a wolf than a man – well, it might have been an animal, after all. Yanzi had been part of the People’s Party from the beginning, she had been there at its birth, she had believed in it no less than anyone else out here – and it had been her choice, after all, to stay behind in the city. But they knew that none of that would weigh with Iloh so much as the fact that he had been her husband, he had been the father to that child, and he had abandoned them to their fate. His choice, in the end; his guilt. Something he would never lay down, for as long as he lived.

When Iloh returned, Tang had uttered a single sentence about the fate of Yanzi, whom he too had loved from afar for many years.

‘You should have taken her with you,’ he told the man who had been Yanzi’s husband.

Iloh had stared at him from eyes that were suddenly darker and colder than Tang remembered them ever having been before. It was as though Shenxiao had killed a part of Iloh’s own humanity when he raised a hand against his family. But he had said nothing. And Tang had bowed his head, having said what he had to say, and had wordlessly taken on himself the task of taking care of Iloh, even after Iloh entered into what they called a ‘revolutionary marriage’ with another girl in the People’s Party, one of the cadres on the run in the hills.

Iloh’s eyes had acquired a strange, hard glitter after the news of Yanzi’s death – the gleam of ice, of cold stone. Not tears, never tears, at least not that anyone else had witnessed. Iloh had not had the luxury of giving in to grief – only, perhaps, the chance to work for revenge.

It was the revolution, and revolution exacted a high price.

A revolution…

The unfinished sentence Iloh had left dangling in the cabin in the hills, on that night years after the revolution had begun, on the eve of its being won, still sat there on the page of his notebook, incomplete, nagging at him. A revolution needed a definition. He knew what it was, he knew in his bones, but somehow the pattern of the words would not form in his head. He tried and discarded a few variants, mouthing them silently, tasting the words he might write on his tongue, finding them wanting. There was something vivid and vital that he needed, something that conveyed the necessity of the overthrow of all gods and monsters.

It was…it would be…

A revolution is an act of violence, he wrote at last, by which the new overthrows the old, where the oppressed throws off the oppressor, by which all men are made equal in one another’s sight.

It was not perfect, but it would have to do.

Iloh was suddenly surprised by a huge yawn that Tang would have pounced on had he been there to witness it. He got up and stretched, hearing his joints pop as he did so, reflecting wryly on the side-effects that waging revolution could have on a man. He was thirty-two years old and sometimes, in his fifth winter of exile, his bones ached with the arthritis of a greybeard three times that age.

Iloh crossed over to the door and eased it open a crack. It was still snowing outside, and few things moved in the white silence in the space between the huts – one or two muffled shapes hurried somewhere with an air of urgency that probably had less to do with the errand they were on than a desire to be under a roof again with the possibility of a hot stove to thaw out frozen feet and hands. None of them noticed Iloh, or the thin ribbon of yellow light that spilled from the open door.

It was these people, in the name of all the people in the plains down below and in the walled cities of the old empire, who had rallied to a dream of a new world, who had helped to raise the flag of Iloh’s vision. The few, in the name of the many. The few who had endured so much.

But soon it would be over – soon…The mandate was changing in Syai. The skirmishes that Iloh’s army had fought with the Nationalists who held the reins of power had turned into battles, and the battles had begun turning into victories. More and more of the enemy were throwing down their arms – or, better, crossing the great divide and coming to lay their allegiance at Iloh’s feet. Too much was going wrong down there, too fast; their generals had been too complacent, too rushed, too afraid. They had committed everything to this one final push, and it was failing. Thousands of men, perhaps tens of thousands, had paid with their lives, but now the prize was near, and Iloh could see the things he had dreamed of, the things he had made others believe with a fervour bordering on fanaticism, starting to take shape before his eyes. This bitter winter of exile, this was the last. He knew that. He could sense it in the wind…

He shivered, suddenly – the wind he had invoked in his thoughts had reached through the door he had been holding open to touch him with icy fingers. He had seen enough. This day, he had done enough. Tang was right – it was time to sleep.

And yet it was a different Tang that he was hearing, the voice echoing in his mind that of a more innocent time, a time when everything had still been possible and the price had not yet been exacted. Iloh remembered, through a mist of memory, a night when he and Tang had sat by the fire and quoted poetry at each other, the scurrilous and the sublime, the mocking and the prophetic.

‘“Oh, but it will be a brave new dance when the music starts to play”,’ Tang had quoted.

‘But what music will it be?’ Iloh had asked. ‘Will we even know it for music?’

‘We will know it,’ Tang said. ‘We will write it!’

‘But who will be asked to play it?’ Iloh had persisted, in a strange, introspective mood that night. It was as though he had been handed a shallow bowl of water, and saw in the mirror of its still surface a vision of the years that were to come. ‘Who will be asked to pay for it? What ancient part of ourselves will we have to give up in order to be granted the music of this new world…?’

Iloh shook his head, clearing his mind of the memories, and retired to the pile of thin quilts on the pallet he used for a bed. He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hand. As almost always when he started drifting off into sleep but now stirred into a particular fury by the memories he picked over, questions rose like a flock of disturbed crows and darkened his thoughts with a blackness of fluttering wings. Could I have done it differently? Could I have done it better? Will it be worth all this struggle and sacrifice in the end? Is it worth the lives that have been spent to buy it? What have we lost, that we might gain this? Who will speak the language of the lost things? This thing that we have bled for, fought to give life and breath to, will it live, thrive, grow strong…?

And then, as usual, he would answer himself, just before he sighed and surrendered to deeper slumber.

The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?

The light was somehow very wrong. The image that shimmered before her eyes was a memory, a recognisable memory, but it had a golden wash over it, a light that suggested something ethereal, something that had never quite happened, or was still to come…the light of dream.

Amais could see the two little girls clearly: herself and her sister, sitting with what they believed to be studied adult elegance and yet still managing to be, endearingly and obviously, thirteen and six years old, sometime in their second year in Linh-an. They wore what they imagined grown-up high society ladies would wear to such an occasion, which in the children’s case meant a hodge-podge of discarded garments from Mama’s closets dressed up with scraps of silk and a heap of cheap bazaar jewellery piled on every available limb. The style of dress was somewhat eclectic, because Amais at least remembered the women of Elaas very well, and more particularly recalled the paintings and the ancient statuary depicting the old goddesses of that land and their elegant draped gowns. She had also never forgotten her brief glimpses of more exotic women; veiled women who had travelled on the same ships as them. Of course they – particularly Amais, the elder, but also Aylun who had been told the same tales – were well aware of the sartorial traditions of their own culural legacy, those rooted in the fairytales of Imperial past. In play, they used whatever element of these cultures happened to please them at any given moment. Amais always set the stage, spinning one of her fictions and snaring her younger sister into the charms of ‘might-have-been’ and ‘once-upon-a-time’. Although Aylun used to copy her almost precisely, she had quickly started rebelling and using her own ideas.

This particular dream-party was a specific occasion. Amais remembered it well. It had been one of the first times that Aylun had asserted her independence and had insisted on putting together her own costume. Amais recalled the smooth slide of her mother’s red satin robe as its too-long sleeves whispered past her own bony, childish wrists, and the weight of the ropes of fake gold coins, bazaar treasures, that she wore over her hair. Aylun wore a strange mixture of a half-veil covering the lower part of her face – which she finally discarded because she had to keep pushing it aside in order to sip her tea – and something that she fondly imagined passed as a classical Elaas gown, a bedsheet in its former existence, wrapped around her chubby frame and tied at the waist with a daringly purloined belt which their mother still regularly wore and which was not really sanctioned as playgarb.

They were bent over a low table with a child-sized teapot filled with cold mint tea brewed for them by their mother who indulged them every time they announced one of their tea ceremonies. It was Aylun’s turn to be hostess; she was pouring the tea into tiny cups, one for her, one for her sister, a third (as they knew was protocol for any real tea ceremony) for fragrance alone, so that the guests at the tea ceremony might inhale the scent of the carefully selected tea variety offered to them, enhancing the experience with the use of all the senses.