The Embers of Heaven (40 page)

The Embers of Heaven

“No matter what they put you through, when they break your body or poison your mind—if you can hold on to a single warm memory that you treasure, it can be your passage back to the world of light. Those memories are the embers of heaven, and from them life and love can kindle again.”

The Song of the Nightingale

I almost expected that Xuan would be gone by the time I finally made my way back to where I had left him—but never, in all the time I knew him, did he prove to be less than faithful once he had pledged his word to something. He did not know what I had gone there to do—he could not know, and I never told him—but he came with me, and he would not leave without me even if his apprehension and all the objections he had voiced to coming here in the first place were plain on his face when I stepped out of the shadows.

“
I was worried,” he said. He had flinched, in the moment before he had seen it was me—he had been coiled tight, tense, just waiting for someone to stumble upon our unsanctioned presence and turn us in—but that was all that he said when I returned. That, and then I saw his shoulders relax. Just a little.

It mattered a ridiculous amount to see that small gesture just then, to know that there was one human being left in this world to whom my safety might matter, who would worry about my well-being, who would guard and shelter me against danger if he could.

“
Was I too long?” I asked. It was a genuine question. I had no idea how long I had spent under that willow tree.

“
Long enough,” he said, after a pause. “Have you done what you came to do?”

“
Yes,” I said. “We can go.”

I did not turn as we walked away, I did not look back—it was doubtful what I would have been able to see in the night and the storm, but whatever there was, it was not the vision I wanted to take with me of the place that had once been the Great Temple of Linh-an. Not the ruin.

“
Xuan…I have to go—I have to leave this city as soon as I can …”

I had not realized that I had been thinking that, not until the words fell into the storm-washed air that still tasted of thunder and of ashes.

He stopped walking and looked at me, his eyes glittering. It had stopped raining by now but we were both soaked; water dripped from our clothes, our hair, and pooled at our wet feet.

“
Stay,” he said unexpectedly, reaching out to take my hand.

“
I can’t,” I said—and for a moment, just a moment, that world-weight reasserted itself on my shoulders and they sagged a little. I had taken it all on, by choice, by oath. I hardly even knew yet what shape the fulfillment of that vow to my land would take, but I did know that I could not fulfill it in this place, not hiding out in cellars and tenements like a mole, too afraid to lift my eyes to the sky.

But I did not pull my hand away.

“
I will tell you where the sword is hidden,” I began and he tossed his head, his wet hair flicking water at my face.

“
Damn the sword,” he said with a quiet violence. “Stay.”

I shook my head. “I have to go.”

“
But where will you go? What will you do?” he asked, his fingers tight around my own.  “I cannot just let you walk away!”

“
I have to go,” I repeated. And then I uttered a sentence which I swear I never meant to say. “You could come with me…”

He stared at me for a long moment, and then made an odd gesture with his head, half a nod, half a shake of denial. “Out of the city?” he whispered. “But where could I take what’s left of my family?”

“
I think,” I said, a plan beginning to form in my mind, “I know a place where we can all go…”

He asked me to marry him, the next day, and then he kept asking me, after—but how could we? In the city we would have to go to an official and sign papers, with our names, and I dared not—not if the note of warning left anonymously at my door was right, and they were looking for me—and he dared not—not if the Golden Wind had come to this house already and had missed taking him only because he had not been home. We were already fugitives; we just needed to take the final step to prove it, and flee.

I might have suggested we detour around the Street of Red Lanterns, and pick up the sword, maybe—or go to the place where he had hidden the journals, and take those—but there was little time left to think of treasures which were, as far as we knew, still safely hidden from harm and which could not be hurt in the way human beings might be.

Xuan’s mother readily agreed to leave the city; his sister balked.

“
How will Wulin know where to look for me, when they let him go?” Xinqian said obstinately, clutching her small child to her breast. “He will come home… he will come home. And I must be here to wait for him.”

But Xuan took her aside, and talked to her, for a long time. And in the end, she agreed. She was quiet and mutinous and her eyes were full of tears, but she was a mother as well as a wife. She could not know if her husband would ever return—but the child, the child was her responsibility, her burden. If the child could be salvaged out of the catastrophe, that would mean something.

There was little to pack. We left towards the middle of the next day, trudging out of the northern gate with our heads down and our eyes downcast, praying that nobody would take a closer look at us—for in fact we had no defenses, and I didn’t even have papers on me that would identify me. We were lucky, or we were in the hands of the Gods—there were four cadres on guard at the gate and every single one of them had his hands full at the time we trudged up to the gate. Three women, one of them a grandmother and another carrying a toddler, and a single man in their wake, on foot—we probably didn’t seem important enough. And then I led us north and west, towards Hian, the province of Iloh’s  boyhood, and a farm where I knew I would be welcome.

It didn’t quite work out the way I intended in the end. Iloh’s father was dead, and Youmei now lived almost on sufferance in a single room in the old farmhouse, with another two families living in the rest of the place and a few new rooms added on to take up the overflow. But Youmei knew me, and the other two families were short on manpower.  Xuan was an asset, a strong young pair of hands, not to mention the added bonus of two healthy young women who could take up the slack on the farm chores. We didn’t have papers, but scrounging for identity was something at which the country people had become adept. We acquired new names, new identities…as was becoming far too easy in Syai, new pasts.

Xuan said we could marry now, as brand new people whom the local authorities would have no reason to suspect. He continued to ask, every time I thought he had accepted the fact that I would stay with him anyway, even without the paperwork; the others on the farm had taken it for granted that we were a couple already, and we shared a room, and a bed. We were together—that much had been sealed that night in the Temple, when he followed me into danger, despite his reservations and accepting without question that there were things he had not been told about what I planned to do, because he could not do otherwise; when we had finally gone to sleep that night, back in the house with the blue tiles, under the falling rain, we had done it in each other’s arms. It was enough, for me.

Youmei and Xuan’s mother struck up an odd friendship, an alliance, two matriarchs who should have ruled over a courtyard full of their grandchildren and great grandchildren but who had to be content with presiding over an uneasy mix of young people and children who were not of their own blood. They could at least commiserate with each other on the matter while stirring the cooking pots or turning coats or trousers to last another season.

<>

It was safe. For the time being, I even allowed myself to be happy.

In the rest of the country, the Golden Rising crescendoed, and then began to falter. Iloh finally withdrew his support, even the tacit unspoken one—but the damage had already been done. When the Army moved in to curb the worst excesses of the Golden Wind, it was far too late. Nobody trusted anybody any more, and people watched one another with hooded eyes. Stolen things remained stolen, and it became routine for people to find the possessions seized by the Golden Wind being sold on the black market or even openly in shops.

The Golden Rising did not burn long, but it burned hot, and its scars were deep—the people had been changed by it, in fundamental ways, and so had the land. The city had its own scars. I knew the Golden Wind had set packs of political prisoners, educated people who had a very good idea of what they were being forced to do, at Linh-an’s  walls—at first just chipping at them with sledgehammers and pickaxes and then, later, with mechanized tools and bulldozers; smashing the massive carved guardian stone lions at the gates. Many of the city’s Temples had been turned into small factories during Iloh’s ill-fated Iron Bridge campaign, and that had only got worse during the Rising, with beautiful old jewel-box places of quiet worship being turned into a mess of machinery, a stench and a noise, a blot on the landscape, tall chimneys belching black smoke and rising higher than the belltowers. These neighborhood factories were used as bases for mechanical workshops or produced incongruous goods—like wire, or lightbulbs. I remember thinking at the time that it was a pity someone had so badly misunderstood the idea of ‘enlightenment.’

There were parts in the city even before I left it where the fruit trees in the gardens, those that survived the axe and the fire, simply ceased to bear fruit any more, succumbing to first sterility and then to blight and disease. It had seemed symptomatic of what had been inflicted upon the people. Some of Linh-an’s ancient walls had already been replaced by a cancer-like growth of grim gray high-rises which rose on the ruins of the ancient courtyard-ringed houses that had once backed against those walls. The city was spilling out into the orchards and the fields, swallowing up the countryside, devouring copses of trees and small lakes—and inside its busy streets the new industries belched out their stinks and their smokes until they covered the sky with an awful patina of a sickly yellowish-gray which smelled faintly of burning oil, and of molten metal, and of many, many people.

I had come to Linh-an with a family, and I was leaving with an entirely different family, someone else’s kin—but they were mine, now. They were all I had.

Iloh had remained in the city, of course. But I was not thinking of Iloh, not then. You would think that I would have, there on the farm where he had been born, but I didn’t, not in that first year or so in the country. Not since the Gods had smiled at me and let me live, and let me find a measure of happiness.

I never went home again, not to the place I had known as home, not to the couple of rooms that I had shared with Aylun and my mother and my stepfather, all of whom were gone from me—Lixao was in the same limbo as Xinqian’s vanished husband but less likely to survive anything harsh or prolonged, Mother was years dead, and Aylun I knew nothing of after she had left me that heartbreaking note on the night I raced out to salvage what could be salvaged from the scourge of the Golden Wind. It was all gone, all the memories that had gathered in that place—both those that were ephemeral and clung like cobwebs under the beds and in unswept corners of rooms, and those more permanent, more damning to me if they had ever been discovered and deciphered, the journals I had kept during the Rising, where I spoke freely of my thoughts and feelings. In the journals, I had never called Iloh by his title; I sometimes wrote harshly of the Rising, and of what had gone before, and the way that Iloh’s dreams were shaping the land and its people. If anyone had wanted to call me counter-revolutionary and hang me for it, the evidence was right there, in those notebooks covered in spidery jin-ashu scrawl.

I suppose I was lucky that few Golden Wind cadres would have bothered to try and get them read by someone who knew how. They were far too busy in those days chasing down actual flesh-and-blood victims—and they had plenty—to bother chasing down the ghosts whose trail was long cold.

But my memories did not vanish with those notebooks; if anything, it was as though the loss of one sense sharpened another. I had always been the one who watched, who observed, rather than the one deeply involved with the events that had shaped my days. It had always been a struggle for me, between the real and the ideal; sometimes it was very hard to tell the two apart, and sometimes it was more of a question of seeing the differences very clearly but trying to reconcile them by looking at the subtle and shadowed things of Syai under the clear, bright, uncompromising light of Elaas. It didn’t always work; I knew myself for a flawed recorder, but it had been that very flaw, the slight edge of detachment while in the very crucible of history, that probably made me the kind of witness that history needed.

I found my memories of those times standing out more and more starkly in my thoughts in the day and my haunted dreams at night. They etched themselves in my face, and hollowed out my cheeks until my cheekbones stood out and my skin stretched tight against my skull. For a while I grew thin and pale, even my courses stopped, and I thought I might be pregnant, but it was just my body reacting to the things that lay buried in my mind.