The Embers of Heaven (26 page)

“No, that’s not Xuelian. Xuelian herself only comes on special occasions; come to think of it, she hasn’t really been in for months, maybe over a year...

“You
know
her?” Amais had asked, distracted by the chagrined discovery that the answer to that particular question had always been this close to her, and she had never known it.

Jinlien had laughed. “Not personally, but it is hard not to recognize her when she is here. You will see what I mean if you should find yourself in her presence. But it’s that one you should talk to if you want to speak to Xuelian.”

Amais had waited for the woman with the orange scarf, later, after she had completed her devotions and had come out into the First Circle again.

“They tell me,” she said to her, “that I need to speak to you if I wish to come and see Xuelian of the House of the Silver Moon.”

The woman first looked a little surprised, and then apprising.

“You have not cut your hair,” she said approvingly, scrutinizing Amais closely. “And you have good skin. And your eyes are magnificent. What are your skills?”

“I beg your pardon?” Amais said, the eyes that had been called magnificent widening in astonishment.

The woman looked perplexed. “You want to see Xuelian, no?”

Amais nodded mutely.

“You are
not
looking for work…?” the woman from Xuelian’s tea house said after a small pause.

Amais actually blushed. “I… no. I am not. I have had greetings to deliver to Xuelian, however, for months now… and I have to admit that I have simply not had the time or the strength to seek her out after I returned to the city from her sister Xinmei’s house.”

The woman threw Amais a sharp glance. “You know Xinmei?”

“Only as a guest,” Amais said. “I stayed at her house while I was… on a pilgrimage to another Temple, in the mountains.”

“Well, there is no time like the present,” the woman said, with a half-smile that hid a lot of things. “Why don’t you come with me? Or, if you’d rather not be seen walking with me, follow me, if you like. The House is on the far end of the Street, the last one on your left. Go to the side door, the plain one; the other one, the red lacquered one that faces the street, is only unlocked after nightfall.”

There was a time that Amais would have replied that she had nothing against being seen in the company of anyone—but in those early days of Iloh’s Republic caution was not just useful, it was sometimes necessary. So she accepted the alternative and walked a few paces behind the woman with the orange scarf until she turned into the street that Amais had first heard of in what now seemed to be another lifetime. She had not been telling a falsehood when she had said that life had run away with her, that she had not had the opportunity or the occasion to come to this place before, despite her best intentions to do so. All the social graces that had stood in her way before seemed somehow unimportant in this strange and plain new world that had been born of war and struggle. And there had been more at stake, too—it wasn’t just Xuelian, now. There was also Yingchi, whose whereabouts Tang had been supposed to ascertain and then get back to her but who had never done so as the demands of the Republic distracted him from the unessential. It seemed that Tang had not been the only one so distracted.

Walking down this street, with her head down in an unconscious attempt at the necessity to obscure the features of a woman of good family when driven by need or business into this quarter of the city, Amais found herself aghast at how she could have let things go for so long. The quest for
jin-shei
, for the women’s country—the quest that had driven her across Syai to seek her answers—had seemed to wither in the past year, under the weight of all the things that had been piled on Amais’s shoulders. Now, here, in the Street of Red Lanterns at last, she felt things stir again, that distant dream that had been hers, a memory of a sacred vow.

Amais did not really know what she expected Xuelian to be, not even after Jinlien’s comments, but it was certainly not the tiny, regal old woman who finally came out to greet her after she had arrived at the House of the Silver Moon and had been invited to cool her heels in a sumptuously appointed waiting room for the better part of an hour. Her first glimpse of the lady of the House made her instantly understand why Xuelian had not been to the Temple for a year—had not been outside these walls, perhaps, for months.  Xuelian would have looked sadly out of place in the drab color and cut of the clothes that passed for acceptable on the city streets these days. She blazed in scarlet silks, her feet wrapped in embroidered slippers of yellow satin, her silver-gray hair dressed in the old-fashioned way, held at the top, as though with a crown, by a rare and fragile-looking fan-shaped comb of blue kingfisher feathers held in a filigree of gold. Her eyes were round and bright, like a bird’s, and her hands, the skin on them no longer young but nonetheless meticulously cared for, glittered with jewels.

“You have been a long time coming, with greetings from Xinmei,” she said by way of an introduction. “You have not heard much news from the country, then?”

“No,” Amais said, offering the kind of bow her grandmother had once taught her was the polite way to greet a female senior to herself. “I have been remiss, I know.”

“Xinmei is dead,” Xuelian said in a tranquil voice. “When they came for the land of our fathers, she asked by what right they claimed it. The mob was not in the mood to offer reasons.”

The shock was a physical one; Amais’s knees began to buckle.

“Do sit down,” Xuelian said, indicating a chair, and Amais managed a couple of staggering steps backwards before collapsing into it.

“I am so sorry,” she gasped. “I had no idea…”

“As it happens,” Xuelian said, “she wrote to me of you, before she died. You
are
Amais, are you not? You are exactly as she has described you.”

“She never,” Amais said, “described you.”

“She could not, not the way I look now,” Xuelian said. “I haven’t looked like the way she remembered me for, oh, a very long time.” She reached up to brush the kingfisher comb with the fingers of one hand. “The memory she has of me,” she said softly, “is much closer to what I was when my Emperor gave me this, on the first night that I went to him.”

Amais stared at the comb with fascination; it was as though she had been offered something from Tai’s time. The Empire, which this woman had known, had lived in, had been a part of, had been so comprehensively erased by the Republic that Amais had almost forgotten that it had still existed—just the same as in Tai’s day—within living memory.

“The reason,” she began awkwardly, “why I wanted to see you…”

“She wrote of that, too,” Xuelian said. “She said you were looking for what remained of
jin-ashu
and
jin-shei
, the women’s mysteries. Sad, isn’t it—to find them only here, at last…” She paused, staring at Amais for a long moment. “But…yes. Yes.” It was as though she were talking to herself, having asked some esoteric question and had then provided an answer she found more than acceptable. “You have a foreigner’s face and a strange way of speaking,” she said, addressing Amais again, “but you have a Syai soul. I can see it in your eyes, strange as they are to me. You will do.”

“I will do for what?”

“I will teach you,” Xuelian said. “I will give you what I know. What you do with it, after, if there is an after…” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Sometimes I wonder if the world hasn’t already ended, and I just haven’t stopped to notice it yet,” she said, another conversational aside aimed at herself rather than her guest. “Will you take tea?”

For a long moment Amais hesitated—if this should leak out, if it was known that she had come here, if Vien’s co-workers spied on how her children spent their time, it might go even harder with the family than it already had—this was a blatant recidivism, backsliding into a time and place as Imperial as it was still possible to be. But there was, in the end, no choice.

“Yes, thank you. I will.”

Xuelian might have been reading her mind, because the smile she returned to that acceptance was a secretive, knowing one.

“Yes,” she murmured, “you are already here, and the guilt is applied by association… but don’t be afraid. You’re probably far safer if they believe in your guilt without question. If I have learned anything in my day, it is that often only the innocent are punished.”

Six

Xuelian had said that she would teach Amais, but it had been an odd comment, and the education, if it could be called that, was even stranger. There were no prearranged meetings; Amais would simply turn up at the House of the Silver Moon at random times, whenever life released her for a few spare hours, and Xuelian would be there, as though she had been expecting the visit.

Xuelian, too, kept journals—and there were many of them, years of them, decades of them. Sometimes she brought out a double handful at a time, looking for specific things, and she and her pupil would both pore over the tomes covered in fine
jin-ashu
calligraphy. Xuelian despised modern implements; Amais owned a second-hand fountain pen, and had even stolen a few moments to type up an entry or two which she would then stick into her own journal (that in
hacha-ashu
, of course) on the typewriters in the office where her mother worked, but Xuelian had dismissed all that with a wave of one be-ringed hand.

“
Jin-ashu
is the language of a slower, more subtle time,” she said. “You have to find the time and the grace to write in it. If you don’t possess sufficient of either, you might as well be a
hacha-ashu
hack.”

“Can you actually write
hacha-ashu
?” Amais asked.

“Yes,” said Xuelian with faint distaste. “I can read it, too. But I have never read anything in a newspaper that was worth repeating. They use day-old newspaper to wrap fish in. That’s about all it is good for.”

“I read your letters,” Amais said. “They said a lot more than you wrote.”

“
Jin-ashu
will do that,” Xuelian said. “Spend enough time on writing a sentence, as you have to with the women’s language, and it grows depth and perception. You have to think about things, writing in
jin-ashu
.”

“But there were times you did not write anything,” Amais said.

“Who said I didn’t write anything?” Xuelian said. “I just didn’t write it back home. They would never have understood. Not the Shiqai years. But I wrote—oh, I wrote. It’s all there.” She caressed one of her journals as if it were a pet.

And that was how it went. They would start talking about the language and the women who understood it, and it would unwind like a ball of yarn, and Amais would be handed the chronicles of Syai’s history as seen through the eyes of one who had lived it and felt it leave scars on her own skin.

Xuelian had been a child when she had been packed up and delivered to the Imperial palace as a substitute for her wayward sister. More of a child that Xinmei would have been—Xinmei, who had been carefully brought up to this, reared with the idea planted in her mind from very early on, educated and schooled in what it would mean in both the physical and the psychological sense. Xuelian had been allowed to grow up innocent, or as innocent as any girl in that family had any right to be. Perhaps that was partly why the first thing she did when she first looked on the face of the man she came to think of as “her” Emperor was to wholly and completely fall in love with him.

It would have been hard for any man to resist the kind of open adoration that Xuelian brought to his life, and the Sun Emperor was even more susceptible to that than most—he was not a strong personality, and he had always been aware that he had come to Syai’s throne in the time-honored way, through his Empress, without whom he would have been nothing. So his relationship with his status as Emperor was ambivalent —he knew himself to have power, and enjoyed using it, but he was also a lonely and insecure man. His royal-born wife might once have chosen him from a clutch of suitors but she had turned, over the years, into a cold and glittering thing who resented the weakness she sensed in her husband and despised him for it.

The Sun Emperor, the most powerful man in Syai, had wept on the night Xuelian had first come to him. She was a concubine; she belonged to him, and in a traditional relationship he would have reached out, taken what was his, and never even thought about the consequences. But it was hard to keep up that sense of Imperial entitlement when the thing being taken was offering itself with the kind of open innocence which Xuelian brought to him. The romance that suddenly polluted what Xuelian’s family had thought of as a simple business arrangement might have scuttled the whole thing there and then—but in a strange and twisted way it had wound up strengthening the relationship the family had been hoping for and not weakening it. The Emperor had become attached to his child-concubine—would tell her things he would tell nobody else, not even the Empress; Xuelian wrote of her pillow talks to her family, dutifully. And all worked well for three wonderful years.

But then Baba Sung had happened. And the dream of Republic was born —and was then smothered in its cradle by the treacherous warlord Shiqai.

“He gave me this on our first night together, my Emperor,” Xuelian told Amais, fingering the kingfisher comb that she always wore in her hair. “I have never been without it, not since he gave it to me, not even when Shiqai came for me and I lost everything else.”

“You never wrote home about him,” Amais said. “Not really. There was very little about Shiqai.”

“What was there to write?” Xuelian said pragmatically. “That he was crude, and lecherous, and did not know or want to know the first thing about making anything easy or enjoyable for a woman? I was still barely more than a child when the Empress traded me to Shiqai in exchange for the Imperial family’s life and liberty—I was the price of my Emperor’s survival, and for that alone I would have gone willingly enough but he never even knew about it—it was her, all her, and I never even said goodbye. All I had of him was the comb, and even that I barely managed to smuggle out with me when they came to take me.”

“Did you ever see him again? The Emperor?” Amais asked.

Xuelian sat staring at her folded hands for a long silent moment. “No,” she said. “I never saw him again. But I saw
her
, the serpent Empress… But we’ll get to that. Before anything else happened, there were the Shiqai years. And the only value I had to him, other than the fact that I was a body on which he could slake his lusts, was that I had been an Emperor’s woman—and being an Emperor was all that he ever wanted.”

“But he was just a soldier,” Amais said. “Nobody high-born.”

“High-born enough,” Xuelian said. “He was a general in the Imperial army, and then he abandoned that and became a warlord in his own right in those lawless years before Baba Sung came.”

“And Baba Sung trusted him?”

“Baba Sung had a dream,” Xuelian said softly. “And he took what tools offered themselves—and when Shiqai came, all Baba Sung saw was a useful tool. But he never asked the price before he took what he thought had been offered. Baba Sung was a dreamer of great dreams, but such a political innocent…”

“Perhaps it was to him that you should have gone,” Amais said.

Xuelian gave her a sharp look. “He would never have had me,” she said. “He was such a pure-minded monk when it came to things like this. And besides… this was the man who destroyed my Emperor, in the end.”

“But I thought Shiqai did
that
,” Amais murmured.

“Only as a part of Baba Sung’s plans—it was Shiqai who brokered the Sun Emperor’s abdication for Baba Sung, because he had the Emperor’s ear, because he could. And then he demanded as his reward—and here was the price that Baba Sung had never asked to know—that Baba Sung make him President of the new Republic. And once that was done, Shiqai dismissed the Council that Baba Sung had brought together and manufactured a petition which asked him to become Emperor.”

Amais blinked. “But you just said …?”

“Oh, Shiqai believed in Empire,” Xuelian said. “It was just that he saw a different Emperor on the throne. Himself.”

“Baba Sung couldn’t stop him?” Amais said softly. “But he was this great man, they called him the father of the nation—and he could not make Shiqai stop?”

Xuelian bared her teeth in what was only barely a smile. “Shiqai did refuse politely, when they first came to ask him. And the reasons he gave then were all that Baba Sung might have wished. So Baba Sung said nothing, until it was too late. But that was all part of the game—one had to refuse something three times, even when one wanted it, in order to be able to accept graciously in the end. In old Syai it would not do show one’s delight at an offered gift. That was considered unseemly.”

“But Shiqai did accept,” Amais said.

“Oh yes,” Xuelian said, “naturally. And then, as though the Gods themselves had had enough of his treachery, he simply… died.”

“How?”

“Only Cahan knows. Some say it was an overdose of ambition or hubris. I don’t know that I would disagree with that. But he had come to my bed that night, and had taken what he wanted, and had then rolled over and gone to sleep, as he always did. I didn’t realize that he was dead until morning, when I tried to get out of bed without waking him… and realized that he would never wake again. I actually spared a moment to feel happy—before I realized what it would mean for me.”

“What?”

“Well, I was wrong, of course,” Xuelian said. “But that, you know. That I wrote about.”

“Shenxiao?”

“That… was unexpected,” Xuelian said. “I never thought that he… but then, that’s more than enough for now. Don’t you have to be somewhere…?”

“It’s another rally,” Amais said. “The podium is back up on Emperor’s Square. There’s to be an announcement, and everyone is to come.”

“Ah,” Xuelian said dryly. “Everyone.”

Amais hid a quick smile. “Almost everyone. I will come and tell you what is happening, after.”

“Another parade, eh. Take my advice—bring an umbrella,” Xuelian said.

“An umbrella?” Amais echoed, startled.

“Every time,” Xuelian said, “that Iloh has appeared to the people, it has rained. Do you remember Republic Day?”

“Oh yes,” Amais said softly, dropping her eyes.

“Eh. Well. You know what I mean then. It rained when he first came into Linh-an, and it has rained every time he has shown himself to the people since then. And I’m sure I know why, too.”

“Why?” Amais asked, diverted despite herself, even with the wraith of Iloh invoked in her presence.

Xuelian waved her hand. “It is of no matter,” she said. “Just a story. But it’s a very tempting explanation.”

“Tell me!” Amais said. “You said you were going to teach me.”

“Not this,” Xuelian said. “It’s just an old wives’ tale.”

“But I’ll be an old wife one day,” Amais said. “I might need to know. So tell me.”

“Oh, if you insist—it was more than two hundred years ago, back when the Phoenix Emperor was on the throne. His children were on the river, and he was watching, from a pavilion on the shore, as they sailed their boat—and then a storm came up. He saw the boat capsize, and he saw the water demons rise up out of the water, reaching for his children—and he was a new Emperor, of a new dynasty, and he saw his future vanishing before his eyes. So he fell to his knees and he prayed to the water demons, and he made a bargain with them—if they let his children live and his dynasty continue, then in another quarter of a millennium they could come out into the bodies of men and become rulers of the land in their own right. And so they did.”

“They let the children live?”

“The storm died,” Xuelian shrugged. “Or so the tale tells. And here we are, those two hundred and fifty years later, and it rains every time Iloh sets foot out in the Emperor’s Square. What else am I supposed to think?”

“Iloh is not…” Amais began passionately.

Xuelian, having paused to give her story dramatic impact, spoke at the same instant: “But we will speak of Iloh…”

They both paused.

“I’ll be late,” Amais said. “I am to meet my family before we go to the square.”

“So, go,’ Xuelian said. “I will see you again, after.”

There was no great downpour as there had been on Republic Day, but it drizzled steadily as Iloh spoke from the podium at the gathering. He had a microphone, and his voice was amplified across the square, sounding thin and tinny as it was carried across the heads of the crowd.

“The time has come for you to speak,” Iloh was saying. “Let a thousand thousand flowers of thought bloom in the land. Look at the Republic—it is
your
republic—is it doing the things that you wanted to see it do? Speak out, and let us all know. We will be listening.”