The Embers of Heaven

‘These belonged to Kito-Tai,’ baya-Dan said, her voice edged very slightly with an odd sort of triumph, watching the many-times-great-granddaughter of the ancient poetess touch the worn covers with light, almost frightened fingers. Amais was wholly here now, completely caught in the moment; the childish games of the Elaas children out on the sunlit shore were not even a memory of temptation. ‘They are yours now. Take care of them – they are very old. They are her journals, and there is a lot of her poetry in there, too. We’ve read some of them already, on the scrolls – but those were transcribed, for sale in the marketplaces. These, in here, are her originals. Written in our own language.’

‘Our own language?’ Amais questioned, looking up. ‘You mean jin-ashu? The women’s tongue?’

‘Yes, and now you know enough of it to be able to read those,’ baya-Dan said, laying a loving and possessive hand over her granddaughter’s where it rested on the red leather of many centuries ago. ‘I have already read some of this to you. But now they are yours, they are my gift to you. They will be here for you, whenever you want them.’

Amais took one of the books at random, opened it, ran her finger reverently down the ancient page that lay revealed. ‘Jin-shei,’ Amais murmured. ‘She was jin-shei to an empress. The empress listened when she talked, and did what she said. And Nhia’s, too, her jin-shei-bao, her heart-sister…and then Nhia became a Blessed Sage and was given a shrine in the Great Temple in Linh-an…’ The latter was catechism; Dan owned a book about the Great Temple, one that described its appearance, its Gods, and detailed biographies of all the emperors and sages whose niches had been dedicated in the Second Circle of the Great Temple. It had been brought over by one of the later waves of immigrants from Syai, and was not quite the age of Kito-Tai’s journals, but it was old enough – sixty or seventy years at least. Amais knew about Nhia because she had been singled out by her grandmother, because they had read her biography together, because she had been mentioned by name in every one of Tai’s journals that resided in the cedar box. Making the leap from Nhia’s status of Tai’s jin-shei-bao to that of Blessed Sage of the Temple, as though the one had naturally followed from the other, however, had been something that Amais had done entirely on her own. Her grandmother might have objected mildly, but before she had a chance to do so Amais fired another distracting question. ‘Baya-Dan…have you ever had a jin-shei-bao?’

‘I was not so fortunate,’ said her grandmother in a tone of noble sorrow.

‘But back in Syai, every woman had them. At least one. Didn’t they?’

‘They still do, I am certain,’ murmured baya-Dan. ‘It is the women’s country, where you could find a sister in a friend, could depend on her, believe in her and in your bond when everything else failed, know that she always stood between you and doom.’

‘Did you ever keep a journal yourself, baya-Dan?’

‘Not quite like this,’ Dan said. ‘She was special, Kito-Tai. She was a poet. She saw every day through a poet’s eyes. She filled a book every year of her life, you know. These are just a handful of her journals. The rest were lost and scattered, or just gone. Four hundred years is a very long life for a book.’

‘Four hundred years…’ Amais breathed, the eyes her grandmother had thought too slanted now quite round with wonder.

‘That is your heritage,’ Dan said. ‘That is what you came from, that stock.’

‘My mother never told me about this,’ Amais said.

Dan allowed herself an inelegant snort. ‘Then it is just as well that you have me,’ she said.

But the passing of the journals seemed to herald a new phase in Dan’s life. Amais had always known her as what she considered to be old – baya-Dan was straight-backed and clean-limbed, but her hands had gnarled with age and her face was seamed with fine lines under the mass of carefully dressed silver hair. After the child she continued to stubbornly call Aylun was born, baya-Dan seemed to consider her task done, her life well spent. She withdrew even further from the reality that was her world. Elaas, the bright sunlight and the sapphire sea and the vines of ancient vineyards twisted with venerable age at least as respectable as Dan’s own, all that simply ceased to exist for her at all. If Vien didn’t come by to make sure she ate – and that the food was prepared properly according to Dan’s own high standards of the lost world of Syai as best as could be managed – the old woman would be just as likely to spend the time in a sort of waking dream, drifting through the days with her eyes wide open but her gaze bent more on the ephemeral glories of her past than on the physical surroundings of her current existence.

Elena had almost forbidden her treasured younger granddaughter to go to what she had taken to calling ‘that woman’s little palace’ when Vien brought the news that Dan was dying, and wanted to say farewell to her grandchildren. The words ‘Good riddance!’ were hovering on the tip of Elena’s tongue, but they remained unspoken. In some ways the two old women were far more alike than they realised or might have wanted to know. Both had a reverence for the circle of life, for those who went before, and for those who came after. Nika, whatever Elena might have wished, was of Dan’s blood, and Elena could not find it in herself to forbid the child to go and receive the dying blessing of her mother’s mother. She watched the three walking away from the house – Amais running ahead to pluck some flowering weed by the roadside to present to her grandmother upon arrival, Vien holding Nika’s still toddler-chubby little hand – and had a sudden vivid premonition that she might not be seeing this for very long, this remnant of family that was hers, this shadow of her lost son.

She almost called them back, ran to snatch little Nika up in her arms, demand that the child renounce her divided blood, that she become her own laughing little boy all over again. But perhaps it was already too late for that.

Vien had brought the toddler into the shadowy room where Dan now lay under the embroidered coverlets on her bed. Sensitive to the solemn mood of the occasion, Nika approached her grandmother’s bed when given a light push by her mother, and Dan lifted a hand over the child’s head, letting it flutter down on her silky dark hair for a moment.

‘My little cricket,’ she whispered. ‘You were born in such an hour…I wish your life could have been easier…but you and I will meet in Cahan one day. May you have light and grace all your days.’ She allowed her hand to stroke Nika’s hair, and then sighed. ‘Send me your sister.’

Vien snaked out an arm and whisked an almost hypnotised Nika, who would always be Aylun in this place, out of the way. Amais stepped into the space so vacated, and this time Dan’s hand was not light, offered no stroking. She reached out and closed her fingers around Amais’s wrist, stared into her eyes with a gaze that was suddenly too full of power and passion to belong to a dying woman.

‘Take the journals,’ she said. ‘They are for you. You are the last of Kito-Tai’s line. Take the journals, and don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.’ Her eyes fluttered, closed, all passion suddenly spent, as though she had been filled by some external spirit which had now left her. ‘Or your own…’ she whispered, releasing Amais’s hand.

Amais turned her head, alarmed, and sought her mother with a gaze that was almost frightened. ‘Mother…’

‘Watch your sister,’ Vien said in a whisper. She pulled Amais free of the dying woman’s bedside, planting a swift kiss of reassurance on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘Wait for me in the sitting room. Go.’

Amais took Aylun into the other room and gave her one of baya-Dan’s shawls to play with – she didn’t think her grandmother would mind. For her own part, she went to the chest where she knew that Tai’s journals were kept. She knelt on the floor beside it for the longest time, her mind curiously blank, and then opened the lid and carefully took out the small pile of red notebooks that were her legacy. They sat there in her lap, in apparent innocence – but they had changed for Amais. Before, they had been a fascinating if somewhat distant link to her ancestry and her past. Now they were heavy with portent. It was as though Amais had been charged with something by her grandmother on her deathbed, and these journals were the only way to find out just exactly what it was that she had accepted as her life’s work. Her grandmother had not exactly asked Amais to promise anything, and Amais hadn’t exactly given her word, but it had been implicit in that last conversation.

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own…

When Vien came out to gather her children up, her eyes were red and swollen.

‘Baya-Dan…?’ Amais asked, her voice quavering just a little.

‘She is gone, Amais-ban. She is gone.’

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own. Those words her grandmother had uttered out loud. But now, as Amais remembered them, it seemed to her that there had been another phrase, unspoken, ephemeral, ghostly, hovering in the air and settling lightly in Amais’s mind and memory: Or mine.

Or mine…

But was it Dan’s name she had wanted made immortal…or that of the strange spirit that had possessed her just before death came to claim her?

‘Come on,’ Vien said, holding out her hand. ‘There’s things I need to do now. Let’s go home.’

Amais got up obediently, gathering up the thirteen precious notebooks, wrapping them up in a secure little parcel and hugging them to her chest all the way back to Elena’s house. Somewhere in between those two places, the shrine to Syai where baya-Dan’s spirit now lived and the cheerful green-shuttered house that her still-living grandmother inhabited, walking in the sunshine of Elaas with the treasure of Syai clasped close to her heart, suspended in the empty air between two worlds, Amais realised for the first time in her life that she was no longer sure just where ‘home’ was or how her heart was supposed to find her way there.

Three (#ulink_605677ef-4432-5555-9b55-a347a0680692)

Amais kept her head down and herself out of the way in the months that followed, months in which everyone around her seemed fractious, annoyed, or outright furious at things that hovered just outside her comprehension. Vien let down her hair and donned the traditional Syai mourning attire for her mother, which led to Elena making somewhat acid comments about the propriety of wearing so much white with her mother newly dead and her husband not a year in his grave. Vien cast her eyes down and took the barbed remarks in pious silence, her hands folded before her in gracious eastern position, suddenly prominently and obviously alien in the house where she had tried so hard to fit in and where she had once been wholly accepted.

Amais had been dressed in like manner, and the small knot of village children who were her companions had been curious and blunt, as children often were.

‘That’s what we wear in mourning,’ Amais had explained, plucking at her white dress with nervous fingers. Out here in the Elaas sunshine, in the bright light of Elaas customs, the white garb did seem outlandish and strange.

‘So your people are happy when someone dies?’ her friend Ennea asked. ‘White is a colour of joy, you wear it when you marry, not when you die.’

‘But back in Syai…’

‘Is that where you’re really from?’ asked Dia, the school-teacher’s daughter, a slightly higher social caste than the rest of them and generally given to passing on oracular pronouncements from her exalted parent as though they were edicts handed down from the Gods on their mountain. ‘My papa says that blood will tell.’

‘I was born here,’ Amais said fiercely. ‘I am from here!’

‘But your mother wore black like she should when your father died,’ said Ennea, with a child’s utter disregard for tact or feelings, intent on pursuing some fascinating nugget of information and oblivious to all else.

‘That was different,’ said Amais, conscious of a sharp pain as the scab over that older wound, unhealed yet, cracked a little to allow a trickle of pain like heart’s-blood to escape. ‘My father was of Elaas, and…’

‘But so is your grandmother,’ another girl, Evania, pointed out. ‘My grandmother says she was born on the mainland, in the city, before she came to live out here – but she was born here. So she was of Elaas, too.’

Amais remembered the silk-swathed rooms of her grandmother’s house, the scrolls of poetry in a foreign tongue, the scent of alien incense.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said carefully, too young to analyse the thing completely, aware that she could not defend it in the face of the practical questions of her playmates because they simply could not understand it.

‘My mother says you’re strange,’ Ennea said.

But she had still been willing to stay Amais’s friend and companion for all that, and no more was said on the matter, at least for the time being.

Dan had been cremated, on Vien’s insistence and with considerable trouble – since the body had had to be removed from the island in order for this to be accomplished, and getting the necessary permits was not a totally straightforward matter. In this, the established Syai community in Elaas stepped in to offer a helping hand – and that might have compensated for much, being welcomed back into her own world after choosing to step out of it for Nikos’s sake. But the relations between Vien and her own people remained formal and a little cool. It was as though Amais’s dilemmas were projected onto her mother, written much larger than those plaguing her own small self. Amais was still a child, and therefore obliged only to obey the instructions of those older and wiser than her – but Vien was an adult, with an adult’s decisions to make. Decisions that would affect not only her own life but those of the people who depended on her – her two daughters.

And it soon became apparent that there was yet another voice, perhaps the most forceful of all, that guided Vien’s choices – the insistent ghost of her mother.

When Vien first said the word ‘home’ and meant something other than the small cottage by the sea where she lived with Elena and the children, Amais almost missed it – but there was something in Vien’s face, a soft and yet steely determination that frightened her into paying much closer attention.