The Embers of Heaven

The wind of change started blowing quite softly, nearly imperceptibly.

‘I must take Mother home.’

That had been the innocuous sentence that let the first breath of moving air into the cold, stagnant little house, which was thus demoted, without ceremony, into a temporary dwelling. No longer the ‘home’ that Amais had known – the only home that she had ever known.

Elena did miss it, that first time. She simply ignored it, like she ignored so many things in those days. She ignored Vien’s views on how her younger daughter should be dressed, fed, disciplined. She ignored Vien’s older daughter altogether. She tried hard to ignore Vien’s white clothes and the white ribbon she wore woven into that incongruous glossy smooth black hair that now hung long and loose down Vien’s back.

But it quickly became too big to ignore. Mysterious people with inscrutable faces and round dark eyes came to call on Vien at Elena’s cottage, treating Elena herself with scrupulously correct if icy politeness. Vien herself would disappear for several days at a time to the mainland, her only word on her absence that she had ‘arrangements’ to make. When she returned to the island after her final visit to the mainland, she carried something in a large envelope, clutched to her breast as though the contents were more precious than jewels.

That time even Elena had to notice.

‘What do you have there?’ she asked in the voice she now customarily used with Vien when she spoke to her at all, clipped and brusque, as though she had judged her daughter-in-law of some crime and found her unforgivably guilty.

‘Tickets,’ Vien said. ‘We’re going home, the three of us and Mother. Back to Syai.’

Everyone looked up at that, Amais in stark astonishment and Elena with something indefinable that was equal parts fury and fear.

‘It’s a long, wasted journey for a baby to make,’ Elena said at last after a moment of silence, riding her emotions on a tight rein. ‘Really, Vien. Your mother lived on these shores all of her life. She can hardly object to being buried in those hills now.’

‘Did she?’ Vien questioned softly, and Amais began to pay much closer attention. This was starting to sound a lot like the frustrating conversations she had had with her friends out at the rock pools, dressed in her inconvenient white ‘mourning’ garb. ‘I don’t think she ever quite lived here. Not really.’

‘She was born here,’ Elena snapped. ‘As far as I know, she never set foot in Syai.’

‘Her body, no,’ Vien said. ‘But her spirit…I do not think her spirit ever left Syai. She was half a woman all of her days, yearning back to the things that made her who she was. She deserves to rest there, in peace at last.’

‘Syai is a long way to take the child to a funeral,’ Elena said crisply.

Amais bowed her head to hide the sudden tears that welled in her eyes. There was only one child in Elena’s mind, and it was not herself.

Her little sister, untroubled by all this, slept in her crib, oblivious to the conflict around her and about her. She would never know, Amais thought. She was too young for any of this to have meaning. She had never known her father, could never remember him.

‘It is a long way, yes,’ Vien said, and lifted her head, meeting her mother-in-law’s eyes. ‘But it isn’t just a funeral that we would go for, Mother-in-law. We go…to stay.’

Elena’s eyes widened for a moment, in pure shock that she could not hide, and then narrowed again and hardened until they were chips of obsidian in her set face.

‘I forbid it,’ she said, dropping each word like a pebble. Amais could almost hear them rattle as they rolled around on the floor at the women’s feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ Vien said, ‘but you cannot. It is not your place.’

‘This is my son’s child,’ Elena said, crossing the room and snatching up the sleeping toddler out of her crib. Nika woke up abruptly, knuckled her eyes with her hands and began to whimper softly as though Elena’s hands were clutching claws locked around her, holding on tight.

‘It is my child,’ Vien said. ‘And here she would always be wangmei, just like…just like I was.’

‘What are you talking about? What is that? She is my son’s daughter, the last thing of his that I have on this earth. She is no wing…whatever that is.’

‘Wangmei,’ Vien repeated patiently, standing her ground. ‘It means “stranger of the body”, an outsider, someone who obviously does not belong in a community. Someone different. Look at her and tell me how she will fit in here in a few years’ time, when she’s grown enough to want playmates, friends.’

‘Amais never had a problem,’ Elena said defensively, bringing her other granddaughter into the discussion for the first time, but only out of desperation, sacrificing her as a pawn to keep her claim on the younger, the precious one, the now openly wailing toddler in her arms. Amais’s eyes were wide, her mouth parted, her heart beating painfully fast.

‘Amais, korimou…’ Vien said, letting a quick and strangely soft glance rest on her oldest for a moment. She had used the word Amais’s father had called her – it was hard to tell whether she had done it deliberately or instinctively, but either way it suddenly sounded strange to Amais, coming from her mother’s lips. ‘Would you let your grandmother and I talk alone? I’ll come and find you in a few moments.’

‘But, Mother…’

‘Please, Amais-ban. It is important.’

Amais slipped off the chair where she had been perched trying very hard to be invisible and dragged herself outside with unwilling obedience. But this concerned her – this was her life they were discussing in there! – so she didn’t go far. She merely turned the corner and crouched underneath the window. It was shuttered against the sun, but beyond the shutters the window was open and it was not hard to eaves-drop on the conversation within.

‘Amais is just as much wangmei as anyone,’ Vien said as the door closed after her daughter. ‘But Aylun…’

‘Nika,’ said Elena fiercely.

‘Aylun – for that is the name she takes with her to Syai, not Nika,’ Vien countered. ‘She could be Nika only here, in this house, in your heart. But she can still be saved, Elena. She can have one world to choose from and she will never know different. Amais…it is already too late for Amais. She is already of two worlds, and will always be torn between them. My mother is probably to blame for that. Perhaps I was, too, for letting her take my child, so young, so malleable – but Amais is already lost here, in this place, because she already knows who she is, who her ancestors were. She is more than wangmei here, she is always going to be xeimei, stranger of the heart, someone who might well have the sense of belonging to this community but who will never be a real part of it. Just like I never really was.’

Amais suddenly felt hot tears welling in her eyes. She will take me away…

‘You were,’ Elena whispered fiercely, rocking her Nika in her arms. ‘You were. When you chose to be.’

‘Amais would have chosen to be, in these last months,’ Vien said, and tears stood in her eyes. ‘Why have you not let her, Elena?’

‘No,’ Elena said, and for the first time her voice broke, brittle with the weight of too much sorrow. ‘Don’t take her away from me, Vien.’

‘You have already done that,’ Vien said. ‘I don’t have to do anything – you have already pushed Amais away yourself.’

‘Not Amais. This one. Go, if you have to – take your child – but leave me Nika. Nika has my son’s eyes. She…’

‘Elena,’ Vien said quietly, ‘she does not. Amais does. Nika is Aylun – she has my mother’s face, her hair, her eyes, her mouth. She will never be Nikos, Elena. She can’t be.’

Elena stared at her, shaking her head minutely, as though she found her words incomprehensible, as if Vien had suddenly started speaking in the language of her ancestors. Which she had, in a way. This had been the first time she had ever used a word of that language in her mother-in-law’s house, and it seemed almost ironic that the words she used meant ‘stranger’.

‘Excuse me,’ Vien said, her voice floating out of the shuttered window, quietly filled with the calm serenity of one who had fought hard battles but who had finally won a war that had been raging for a long time in her soul. ‘I think I had better go and find Amais now, and talk to her.’

Amais, under the window, uncoiled like a whip and raced across the rocky slope behind the house, down the path that led to the cove. She knew the track, every stone and rut and bump on it, and she fled surefooted along the familiar route, around the first curve and out of sight of the house before her mother had had a chance to turn around and open the door.

She wasn’t even aware that the tears that had gathered in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks until she came to a stop at the bottom of the path, leaping down onto the shallow beach of boulder and coarse sand, and had to wipe the back of her hand across her eyes in order to clear her blurred vision. It was only then that her mouth opened like a wound and she sobbed out loud, her whole body shaking with an unexpected and bottomless grief.

The ocean glittered in the sunlight, sparking memories, bringing out things that it was suddenly a white pain to think about. Amais covered her mouth with both hands, as though that could keep the memory from coming, as though she could simply banish it back down into the repository from which it had been called – but it was too late, already too late for that.

She had gone out in a small sailing boat with her father when she was maybe four or five years old, something that she thought of as her first real clear memory. She had already been able to swim like a fish, and there was no fear there – but the women in the household had put up a fight nonetheless and part of the joy of that memory was the way that her father had cut through the whole brouhaha with a simple, ‘She’ll be with me.’ And she was, that was exactly what she was – they were out there together, father and daughter, the white sail furled and the boat bobbing on the sapphire waters with the two of them ducking and diving around it and each other in the warm sea. She had giggled with pure childhood joy, and shrieked with laughter when her father splashed her from behind the boat or dived under to tickle her feet as she kicked out in the water.

That alone would have been enough to hold the magic of the memory, but there had been more.

They had been joined in their games, quite suddenly and with startling gentleness, by three dolphins who came to investigate the noise and stayed to play. They did spectacular leaps and flips, dived back into the water, swam underneath their two human companions and around them, occasionally lifting their heads out of the water to gaze upon them with luminous, intelligent eyes. Amais dived under with them, fearless, and could hear the echo of their sounds in the water. They’d bob their heads to the surface, and so would she, and they’d nod at her as though in approval and utter small chattering noises. They came close enough for her to touch them and she did, running her small hands down the length of the huge animals, almost twice her size. She had finally taken courage and stopped in mid-caress, wrapping her arms around one dolphin’s dorsal fin. It seemed to understand her intentions immediately, squirmed gently until she sat on its back with her feet dangling on either side, and then took off, cleaving the surface cleanly and leaving a white foamy wake behind. Amais was first too startled and then far too enchanted to be in any way afraid. By the time the dolphin circled back to where his companions and Amais’s father waited, she kissed her ocean steed squarely on the nose, which he gave every impression of enjoying, and turned to her father, treading water, her face one huge exhilarated grin.

‘Did you see me? Did you see me ride him?’

‘I saw you,’ Nikos said, his own face wearing an expression of matching joy.

And then they were suddenly gone, the dolphins, as though they had never been there at all, as though they had been just a dream.