The Embers of Heaven

Vien hesitated. Just a little. ‘I don’t know yet, Amais-ban. But we will see how it is when we get there. All will be well.’

Amais tilted her head to the side, and regarded her mother with a sudden chill, a touch of fear. There had been a light in Vien’s face just then, something that spoke of an exile’s homecoming, a glow of joyous expectation which might not have been wholly unexpected in one of what baya-Dan had called li-san, the lost generations, the ones who went away, who left Syai behind. But that joy was drifting, ephemeral, rootless. Amais could quite clearly see her mother on this journey, see her wrapped completely in its expectations, its visions, its dreams. She could not, hard as she tried, imagine Vien at the journey’s end, could not see what Vien planned to do with Syai when its soil was firm under her feet. Their lives seemed confined to the limbo of the ship, with quiet waters all around them, an eternal voyage fated never to end.

She did not know what scared her worse – the knowledge that her mother had no real idea of what to do next, or the nebulous thoughts that were forming in her own mind, a still shapeless and formless thing, something that had been born of her dreams and of the promise she had made baya-Dan on her deathbed. Something that was waiting in Syai for her hand to be laid upon it. Something that was for her alone, that nobody else in this world would be able to do.

Five (#ulink_c9b3b5d1-67d5-5db0-af95-9fb3d9fa157c)

The port in Elaas where they had boarded their first ship had been a city, and Amais had thought it huge and full of people. The port across the Inner Sea where they had boarded their second ship had been even larger – a busy, exotic place that smelled strange across the waters a full day before they had caught sight of land – but Amais had not really had the chance or the inclination to explore it in the rush of changing ships, transferring luggage, finding a place to lay their heads, securing their cabin. They had been on their way almost before Amais had really had a chance to feel solid ground under her feet once more. The only thing left in her as she had climbed on deck to watch the ship leaving this ephemeral shore behind it was a faint regret that she hadn’t had a chance to pay more attention to a place she was not likely to come back to.

But that passed. The transit port had not been either kind of home for Amais, and she had been too stretched between future and past to have time to feel anything that didn’t have roots in either fear or impatience. She wanted to see Syai now, the Syai of her grandmother’s tales, of the old poems, of Tai’s journals – the glittering place where she thought she could find what she needed to glue together the mismatched halves of her spirit into something that resembled a whole. The captain’s purloined notebook filled with stories, fairytales describing a world with ancient sages stepping down from their temple niches and walking the city offering blessings, with glittering empresses who were sisters-of-the-heart to little girls who sold fish in the marketplace and the great adventures they had together, with Imperial Guard phalanxes dressed in black and wielding magic daggers. It was a world woven from Tai’s journals, from baya-Dan’s stories, from Amais’s own imagination – something she now anticipated with a feverish desire, waiting to step into those stories herself, become part of them and let them become a part of her.

When the ship’s notices, pasted on the public notice-boards every day, finally started announcing their imminent arrival in Chirinaa, Amais was already exhausted with expectations, building the place up in her mind into a city whose walls would shine with gold, its streets paved with rubies, full of people dressed in bright silks and women whose hair dripped with jewels, with opulent teahouses on every corner serving fragrant mountain tea in white porcelain teapots painted with cranes and hummingbirds.

The reality was quite different – at least the reality that the ship disgorged the small family into on the quay. There might well have been ruby paving stones somewhere, but not here – not out in the busy working harbour, teeming with barrels, boxes wrapped in massive chains and secured with even larger double-lock puzzle padlocks, scraps of torn oilcloth and tarpaulin underfoot, vats that smelled achingly familiar with whiffs of new-caught fish and salty brine clinging to their sides, sloshing open tanks that contained heaving crabs and lobsters, bales bound with thick ropes, and, everywhere in between this chaos and confusion, scuttling and quick-moving no-man’s wharf-cats, and bare-chested and bronze-skinned dockworkers with shaved heads and hooded eyes. The place smelled of coal dust, of sweating bodies, of all the various scents, both pleasant and evil, of the ocean. There was even a very, very faint whiff of something oily and rotten, a miasma that was a reminder of the wide marshes that lay not too far away to the west of the city.

Vien shepherded her older daughter onto the dock, carrying her younger on her hip as she had done when they had departed Elaas in what now seemed to Amais to have been another age of the world, and then stood there surrounded with the luggage that had been unloaded at her feet, hesitating, unsure of what to do next.

‘We should find an inn or a hostel or something,’ Amais said at last, after a long silence.

‘Yes,’ Vien agreed, her tone conveying simple concurrence and a total loss as to how to start looking for such a place. The labourers hefting their loads passed back and forth, parting to flow around Vien and her daughters as though they were a rock in a stream. Some might have turned their heads marginally to glance at the solitary woman and the two children, apparently waiting for something that never came, but most simply ignored them other than as an acknowledged obstacle in their path.

Amais scanned the buildings beyond the wharf. Even to her young and inexperienced eyes they did not look promising at all. Some were no more than padlocked storage facilities, with their windows securely covered by wooden shutters. Others, those that had actual people going in and out of them, seemed to be evenly divided between two types. One consisted of a string of busy offices where men ducked in with bulging bags and armfuls of paperwork, re-emerging with sour faces and tight lips that betokened either their having sucked on a particularly sour lemon or having just paid large sums of money to people they considered undeserving for ‘services’ they resented being obliged to buy. The other, which she could smell all the way across the wharf, had quite different purposes, and the people coming out of these places wore expressions that, if not ecstatic at their lot in life, were at the very least tolerably content with it for the duration of the panacea doled out by rice wine or sorghum ale.

There was nothing visible that would remotely do for lodgings, and from what Amais could overhear from the conversations going on all around her, the language that was spoken here was different from the one she thought she knew, the one she had thought would be spoken by all of Syai – a different dialect, a different accent. It sounded harsh and foreign and she found herself close to tears of pure frustration and helplessness even while her mind was collecting these sounds and smells and images, sorting them, cataloguing them, filing them smartly away for future reference, for future stories. There were lots of stories here. Amais could feel them all around her, rubbing against her ankles like friendly cats, ducking into alleys just out of her line of sight and inviting her to follow.

But those were for later. Those were for when she was fed and housed. And Vien…

‘Nixi mei ma?’ The voice was soft, almost too soft to be heard over the hubbub of the harbour. Both Amais and Vien turned their heads, sure they had heard something but not certain of what. Their eyes met those of the man who had spoken, wiry and barely tall enough to be eye-level with Vien. He bowed to them, having got their attention, presenting them with a brief glimpse of a beaded round cap that fitted snugly around his head, and then straightened again, smiling.

Amais scratched around in her brain for the meaning of the words he had just uttered, and came up, incongruously perhaps, with, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘No,’ she said helplessly, slanting the words in what she thought might be comprehensible to the local speaker, staring at the man. ‘Thank you,’ she added, after a moment, and bowed back in the manner that he had done. It seemed to be called for, just basic politeness.

His eyes glittered as he offered a small smile. When he spoke again, it was slowly, enunciating his words, and Amais found she had little trouble understanding him.

‘I apologise for intruding,’ the man said, ‘but I think that you are strangers in the city. Might you be looking for a place to stay tonight?’

Vien still looked a little confused. Amais glanced at her and translated. Vien blinked several times, quickly.

‘But who is he?’ she asked Amais, in the high-court language of old Syai that she had been taught by her mother.

The man obviously understood, because he bowed again, this time directly to Vien. ‘Beautiful lady,’ he said, in heavily accented but compatible dialect, ‘my sister runs an inn not ten minutes from here by pedicab. It is safe, cheap – might I interest you in lodging there with her tonight?’

Amais found her heart thumping painfully, her eyes darting from the smiling tout to her apparently frozen mother. Aylun, in her mother’s arms, was obviously being clutched at ferociously, but had caught the mood of the moment and didn’t do more than let out a small soft whimper.

‘We have to sleep somewhere, Mother,’ Amais said, in the language of Elaas, something she knew that the man would not understand. His expression didn’t change as she spoke, but she saw his glance sharpen as he tried to interpret her words.

‘But how do I know we can trust him?’ Vien said, thankfully in the same language. Amais had not been at all sure that she would take the hint. ‘I mean, he could be anybody, taking us anywhere…I don’t know this city…’

‘We have to stay somewhere,’ Amais repeated.

‘Do you think we should take the chance?’

Aylun whimpered again, a little more loudly. Vien bent her head over her toddler to hush her, and Amais bit her lip.

‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ she said.

She did not tell her mother, not ever, that she had heard the man give instructions to the lead pedicab that would convey them all to the inn at which they were to stay – and then, a few minutes into the ride, having watched the three lost returning souls staring around them with round eyes and open mouths since he had loaded them and their luggage into the pedicabs, change his instructions. At the very least she had thought she understood, ‘No. Not the other place. Go to…’ and what followed was incomprehensible, perhaps an address. Either way, it would have been imperceptible if she hadn’t been paying attention. But the pedicabs suddenly turned away from the warren of steadily narrowing dirt streets into which they had been heading and emerged onto a busier thoroughfare, a still narrow but cobbled road in decent repair, choked with pedestrians, pedicabs, bicycles, horses, donkey-pulled carts, the occasional antiquated rickety-looking sedan chair that looked more affectation than a comfortable or even convenient form of transportation, sherbet and sweetmeat vendors, and children who appeared to be selling or giving out printed sheets of paper and who were darting in and out of the traffic in a manner that made Amais clutch the edges of her seat in fear for their lives. A couple of times she thought she saw a woman dressed in the silks she had originally envisaged, but the women in question were not out in the street exactly, but hovered in certain doorways, or were in the process of sashaying up narrow stairs that led into mysterious shadows of upstairs parlours.

A sharp bark by the leading pedicab operator brought them all to a halt outside a shabby hostelry. Vien paid the pedicabs, and then offered a handful of what she had been given in change to the man who had brought them here, and again it was only Amais who really paid attention to the reaction that the money produced. His face washed with ephemeral expressions of surprise, delight, and perhaps a faint tinge of regret. She knew that her mother had offered too much, that the man might have wondered how much more she had on her, if it wouldn’t have been more lucrative to have delivered them to the first place he had had in mind, after all, and not to the one where they now found themselves, shabby and threadbare and with the turquoise paint peeling off the pillars outside the front door, but looking quite respectable for all that.

The proprietress, a hatchet-faced woman with a mouth that appeared to have forgotten how to smile if it had ever known it, showed them to a single small room on the third floor of this establishment – but after the cramped cabins on the ships the place looked like a palace to Amais. They would each have a pallet of their own, without the need to climb swaying ladders when ready for bed, with actual room to move between them. The windows were shuttered; the landlady crossed to them and flung the shutters open, letting in light, air, and all the smells of the city.

‘There is a teahouse around the corner,’ she said to Vien, ‘if you want dinner. Rent is a week in advance.’

Vien dutifully counted out the rent money in gold – the only currency she actually had on her – and the landlady left with a raised eyebrow but without another word. Amais had the uncomfortable feeling that once again her mother had doled out too much. It was hard with gold – she made a mental note to find out if any of it could be exchanged for local money that could be better figured out.

Vien deposited Aylun on the nearest bed, and sank down beside her.

‘I don’t think I can go anywhere tonight. I need to rest, I need to think.’

‘Aylun will be hungry.’

‘I know,’ said Vien, rummaging in her bag for more gold. ‘Go to this teahouse. Bring us back something to eat.’

Amais opened her mouth to say something, and then changed her mind, taking the coins her mother had thrust into her hand and turning away. She closed the door very gently behind her, as though she feared that a slam might wake her mother up – for that was exactly what Vien was, dreamy, almost sleepwalking, buckling under the weight of this place and its impressions and all that it meant – and the memories that crowded around incongruously of a different life somewhere far away which now seemed no more than one of Amais’s stories. Amais knew all this because she fought against the same shock herself. Part of her was whispering, Welcome home. The other part wanted nothing so much right at that moment than to hear her father’s deep voice utter, in a language unknown in this strange land, words that would have made her instantly feel cocooned in the security and the power of his love: ‘She is with me.’

Vien ventured out of her room only on the third day, and did not go far. The streets seemed to frighten her a little, and she looked lost and unhappy. She tried for days – she would take the urn with the ashes of her mother, as though that was a talisman against some unspeakable horror that awaited her in the city and which she was pitifully unable to understand, and venture forth with a clear intention of visiting the Chirinaa Temple and taking care of this, the most sacred and – as she had thought – the most pressing of the things she had sworn to do when she returned to Syai. But she never made it to any Temple. She avoided Temples as though she were afraid of them, of what she might find there. Chirinaa had been so very different from what Vien had thought it would be. Not that she had ever had any clear expectations, but the reality had been coldly inimical to all of the ones she might have begun to shape in her mind, and Vien instinctively shied from having this last illusion destroyed. What if the Temple was nothing like she expected? What if there too she was so inept, so inexperienced, so utterly lost? What if she did or said the wrong thing and her mother’s spirit remained forever denied rest?

Amais had immersed herself in the world of Tai’s journals and her own stories and had come to her own conclusions. She was watching her mother; she was watching the city, so different from the Imperial Syai she thought she knew, the one she had believed utterly that she would enter when she stepped onto the shores of Chirinaa. Instead of that, she found herself in an unquiet city seething with sulky rebellion and sometimes overt outrage – a city which had been one of the anvils on which Syai’s revolutions had been forged over years and centuries, a city whose streets had run with blood as one side or another labelled some other group as dangerous and unleashed calamity upon them. It was a city that had risen in rebellion more than once, most recently, according to the street talk that Amais overheard, for a young man called Iloh, whose name was proscribed but was somehow whispered by every shadow. It was a city in which that particular rising had been bloodily and ruthlessly suppressed by the man in Syai’s high seat, General Shenxiao. There was no grace here, no calm nobility of an ancient court, no rich and exotic heritage – nothing, in fact, of what Amais and her sister had been brought here expecting to find. Only bloodshed, only austerity, only fear.

All of this connected, somehow, and the answer to their difficulties became blindingly obvious to Amais.

‘We don’t belong here, Mother. That’s why you won’t even think about leaving baya-Dan here. We aren’t from Chirinaa. We are…we are from Linh-an. We aren’t home after all, Mother. We aren’t home yet.’

Six (#ulink_e7613524-012a-5465-a10f-4e304bd76aa7)

On such small things do fates turn.

There were three sons on the small farm in the fertile hills of the province of Syai known as Hian. Tradition said that one would be educated to take care of the ledgers and the accounting, one would work the land, and one would be responsible for the household and his aging parents, when the time came for them to be taken care of.

Tradition sent the eldest of the three sons, Iloh, into the tiny school in the village below, trudging down the hillside and joining a handful of other small boys in a classroom barely big enough to hold their growing bodies and way too small to confine their boisterous spirits. Every boy, inevitably, had his own interests and concerns – and in some of the pupils the enthusiasm was simply for doing the minimum expected of them and then escaping back into the glories of the real world, hiking into the hills to pick the sweet berries or trap small animals out in the woods. Iloh was one of the few whose passions were kindled for a different thing – for the power of the word.

The boys were taught simple, basic things – how to count, and enough of the hacha-ashu script to be able to produce a coherent sentence in clumsy calligraphy and to read at the very least the simple folk renditions of tales and songs that had been copied out onto scrolls and parchments and notebooks. But Iloh saw more, wanted more, and he was one of the few to whom the teacher showed the school’s real treasures – a couple of scrolls of parchment with classical poetry inscribed on them, works of art in themselves, the calligraphy flowing and perfect and the ink unfaded over the years. Those, and a handful of books, mostly novels, printed on cheap paper with ink that sometimes smudged if you ran your finger over the page too fast. But to Iloh, both the magnificent scrolls and the cheap paperback books were equally valuable. Perhaps the latter even more so than the former, because the novels were written in a language closer to the contemporary vernacular than the poems, and were thus easier to understand.

‘You might want to continue your education,’ Iloh’s teacher had told him when he was eight years old. ‘There are other schools, better schools, bigger schools.’

‘Perhaps Father might allow me,’ Iloh said, but without conviction. His father was a patriarch of the ancient kind, autocratic, indifferent to all except his own will. Iloh had quickly got the idea that the education he received was not for his own sake, but the farm’s, the family’s, and that there would be no indulgences.