The Embers of Heaven (14 page)

“I recognize this,” he said. “Or at least I think I do. It’s different from the version I know. But it’s familiar…”

“That is Kito-Tai’s original,” Amais said, unable to prevent a note of triumph coming into her voice. “You see? Women wrote great things. And it’s all being lost, and buried, and forgotten.
Jin-ashu
…”

“
Jin-ashu
is obsolete,” Lixao said, throwing the paper down on the table in front of him. “It is simply archaic; it’s a useless fossil. Nobody would have bothered to collect anything written in it, not for decades. The only place any of it’s left is where it rightly belongs—in the back streets where the women rule—and why on earth would you want to go learning a language in which worn-out whores write of their worn-out dreams?”

Amais could have taken a week to answer that particular calumny, or else reward it with no answer at all. Her face set, cold fury blazing in her eyes, Amais had turned and left the room—and then, that very night, her mother’s house, and the city of Linh-an.

She had taken nothing but a bundle of clothes and Tai’s journals, and left a short note for Vien to find the next morning on the undisturbed quilts that were Amais’s bed. It said nothing about where she had gone, or why she had done so—in fact, it said very little, aside from ‘goodbye.’ But it said that in elegant and neatly lettered
jin-ashu
—proclaiming as living the language her stepfather had relegated to the scrapheap of history.

Four

Security was tight, and on the face of it entering or leaving the city should have been fraught with enough difficulty for Amais’s enterprise to be frustrated from the very start—she ought, by rights, never to have got as far as beyond the radius of a couple of blocks of her home. There was a curfew hour, and there were patrols dedicated to enforcing it; they would have made short work of a young girl who was barely more than a child and who could not, if she wanted to, provide them with any rational reason for being out in the night on her own.

But perhaps it was a night on which the old Gods of Linh-an chose to stir themselves and cast a cloak of invisibility over this young seeker. It had been under their watchful eyes, after all, that Amais’s nebulous plans had been hatched in the first place. The lost sisterhood of
jin-shei
was something she often talked about with Jinlien in the Temple, and it had been Jinlien who had furnished both the impetus and the means to Amais’s escape.

Amais had balked at the idea that the women’s language and all that it meant had survived only in narrow circles of midwives and courtesans. She had brought Tai’s journals to the Temple, and had read passages from them to Jinlien while she was on a break from Temple duties.

“Yes,” Jinlien had said, stirring with a trailing hand the quiet surface of a pond in the Third Circle gardens as she sat listening to Amais read, “it was real, and it was powerful… the vow that could not be broken, the bond between one heart and another in the name of which anything could be asked and had to be offered. But that was then, in the women’s country of ancient times, and this is now—and I have not heard of a real
jin-shei
bond in my lifetime, not here in the city, not with any woman I have known. None that move in my circles, anyway. I know that the midwives use
jin-ashu
and have a guild—but that isn’t the same thing. And then there’s the Street, with a sisterhood of the House, but that’s transient, as far as I know, and shifts if a woman changes Houses…And there is no real trace in the Temple annals any more —I know, Amais, because you actually made me go and look. It’s been decades, if not longer, since the word has been even mentioned in any of the records we have kept here.”

“But I don’t believe it could just disappear,” Amais had said stubbornly, sitting up and lifting her chin in an attitude of obstinate and absolute conviction that made her look far younger than her sixteen years.

“Perhaps not,” Jinlien had admitted. “It is quite possible that out in the country it still flourishes as it always did. But in Linh-an—in the cities—times have changed. It has become dangerous and complicated to own a bond of such absolute loyalty to anyone.”

“And when were times not dangerous and complicated?” Amais had retorted. “You yourself told me that history is not a summer picnic. Why would it be more dangerous to have a
jin-shei-bao
now than it would have been while an Emperor sat on the throne?”

“Because the Empire believed in the vow,” Jinlien had said. “The Republic does not. It believes in loyalty to itself, not to individuals, not something that cannot be controlled—Baba Sung’s vision itself was to make us into a nation, and a nation is one thing, a monolith, indivisible, responsible only to itself.”

“But out in the country…”

“There may still be places where the law of the Republic is still an alien and faraway thing,” Jinlien had said thoughtfully. “I have no doubt that ancient loyalties will die out much more slowly in places where the modern Republican writ does not run—or at least does not run
yet
…. But there are still parts of Syai where nothing changes, no matter who rules in Linh-an. There is a temple in the mountains called Sian Sanqin, the Temple of Three Thousand Stairs—where the servants of the Gods are ancient bent crones and toothless old men who remember when the world was young and the stars were barely kindled, but they couldn’t tell you what day it is on the current calendar, and they are at least two Emperors behind if you ask them who is currently on the throne in Linh-an. ”

“Where?” Amais had asked, at the time genuinely diverted by the idea of this temple apparently outside the constraints of the passage of time and the three thousand steps that had given it its name.

“You plan on paying a visit?” Jinlien had said, entertained.

She had not given directions—not precisely—but she had given Amais a good idea of where to seek Sian Sanqin.

It had also been Jinlien who had taken Amais to see the place where the waters from the Seven Jade Springs, clear glass-green streams from the hills which were channeled into the city specifically for use in ornamental lakes and ponds and fountains and most particularly the water features in the Great Temple itself, were gathered into a single wide tunnel just outside the great walls of Linh-an and then brought into the city underneath a massive buttress, with a heavy iron grating across the mouth of the tunnel where it entered the city. A short stretch of the canal was out in the open, close to the wall where there were few formal dwellings or streets, but the city quickly asserted its supremacy and need for every inch of available space and the canal dived underground, flowing in brick- and stone-lined channels underneath the cobbles of Linh-an’s streets, directed to the places where it needed to go by a network of smaller conduits built thousands of years. Amais had asked why the whole thing had not been simply buried underground, and Jinlien had not known the answer to that—the reasons as to why the system was built the way it was built had been lost for many centuries. But the grating in the tunnel had been designed to keep foreign objects or bodies out of the city, not in—and it was an unguarded, if somewhat difficult, way to escape Linh-an if ordinary roads were closed or crawling with armed soldiers.

That was the place that Amais made her way to on the night that she left the city. She was young and slender enough to slip over the top of the iron grating, between its straight top edge and the curve of the round tunnel, and slip into the waters beyond. It was deeper than she had thought it would be, and colder; the channeled stream was chest-high, and flowed strongly against her, making every movement a battle between her will and the water’s mindless push into the city. There was always just enough room between the roof of the tunnel and the stream itself for Amais to keep her head above water and to keep her small pack, with its precious cargo of Tai’s journals, dry.

It was dark there in the tunnel, after she had left behind the faint light of the mouth through which she had entered and before she could glimpse the other end, and unexpectedly loud with the sound of rushing water—she had moments of doubt, of anxiety, even stirrings of abject terror. Sometimes she could have sworn that the sound of the water was the sound of someone breathing, that she was not alone in this place; and that the water, changed from the brilliant clear glass-green that it was in the light of day to a black and unseen thing that made its presence known by touch and sound alone, harbored more underneath it than Amais wanted to think about—things with teeth and claws that fed not on flesh and bones but on the very souls of those who dared to trespass in this place.

The worst moment, perhaps because it came right at the end and seemed to make an end of all Amais’s plans, was the surge of absolute joy when she realized the tunnel was ending, when the stale air she breathed in short, sharp gasps was unmistakably stirred and sharpened by a freshness that came from
outside
—and then the realization that on this end the tunnel split into seven smaller tunnels, each bringing its own stream from the hills to be mixed into this one body of water and that she could not hope to crawl her way into any one of those. But then she saw that this mixing chamber had a grating that opened out above her, a part of the outside wall through which the pre-dawn light was filtering down into the gloom of the tunnels. There didn’t seem to be a gap through which any creature larger than a small cat could pass, and it seemed high—way too high to reach. But after the first moment of panic, Amais stumbled against the first rung of what could only be a ladder—and knew that a ladder leading up to the grating must mean that the grating had to be a way out of this place. She climbed the first few rungs precariously dangling the pack from the fingers of one hand, still keeping it out of the water, and then shouldered it awkwardly halfway up the ladder and climbed the rest of the way up.

The grating resisted her pressure at first, when she reached it, but she braced herself against the wall and kicked against it with one foot, again and again, until something creaked and then cracked and then the grating gapped on one side. She pushed it apart far enough for herself and her pack to pass through. And then, somehow, she was out, cowering against Linh-an’s massive walls
on the outside,
with Linh-an’s fields and orchards climbing the hillsides that rose against the rapidly lightening sky
.
She was wet and shivering, and the first order of business, heedless of who might have been watching, was to change into a set of dry clothes she had bundled into her pack for just this purpose. And then she crept away from the walls, into the light of the dawn that had begun to pour itself over Linh-an hills.

Her midnight plunge into the Seven Jade Springs might have been considered desecration, seeing as that water was Temple-bound and could therefore be thought of as sacred by virtue of that alone—but Amais was in pursuit of a truth she considered to be holy in its own way. She had murmured her own prayers asking pardon before doing what she did, but not to any of the gods whose statues she had seen in the niches of the Great Temple. Amais had her own holy thing to worship, and that was what she had prayed to—
In the name of jin-shei, I ask passage…
But a prayer was a prayer, and all prayers were heard in Cahan. If the water was indeed holy, as the Temple claimed, then it didn’t matter that Amais had invoked a spirit not of the pantheon, or that she had said her prayer at the mouth of the tunnel and not burning incense at the Great Temple itself.

The city was not going to help Amais in her quest.

Jin-shei
was a lost and abandoned thing, it seemed, buried under the heedless rush to progress. There didn’t seem to be time for such grace and elegance in the modern world any more. The things embedded in the ancient vow, its joys and its responsibilities, appeared to have been superseded or reinvented. It used to be that a woman knew what her heritage was, taught from the cradle, observing her mother’s
jin shei
circle—the secret smiles that passed between two
jin-shei-bao
who lived close enough to touch lives every day, and the warmth and candor and honesty that pervaded the letters exchanged between those separated by Syai’s vast and pitiless miles. It was something as natural as the wind in the leaves of the silver bamboos in women’s gardens on warm summer evenings, something that had hardly ever needed to be studied or explained or dissected. It was there, for every woman—the sense of belonging, the sense of being a part of another woman’s life, the sense of owing trust and joy to that sister, of being responsible to her, and for her. All of that, it seemed, had almost entirely vanished away, falling through the sieve of years like fine sand.

The Temple, apparently, had had nothing to say on the subject of the women’s language and its secrets for generations—or so Jinlien had said, having consulted its records. Amais had approached a known neighborhood midwife once and broached the subject of
jin-ashu
with her, but the woman was strangely reluctant to speak to her about it. As for the other sisterhood, the women of the Street of Red Lanterns, Amais may not have been born into wealth but she was still a girl of good family and she simply had no obvious means to contact such women. She did not know how. And if she did, the level of distrust, even if couched in terms of distant politeness, would be high enough for any meaningful communication to be extremely difficult. The midwives would not talk to Amais about
jin-ashu,
because it was the language they kept their last secrets in, and the other sisterhood, the women of the city’s tea-houses who plied that other ancient trade, could not speak to her because of the social barriers that stood in their way. So if there was anything to be learned, anything to be saved, it was out there, in the country—out where the civil war was now heating up to an incandescent final push, where the People’s Party forces were apparently, according to rumor, answering the prayers of those young men at the Temple and promising,
After this, peace
. The truth that Amais sought was hidden in secret places like Sian Sanqin, and the memories locked in the minds of ancient acolytes still serving the Gods long toppled in Linh-an in the wake of the Empire’s fall.

Amais, her mind full of
jin-shei
and her determination to rediscover its ancient secrets, had not even considered the political situation when she had left her mother’s house. The civil war was peripheral, not part of her quest—it was as though there was a road of destiny before her, wide and straight, and Amais could see nothing else, nothing to distract herself with. In some ways it was very like something Tai had once called the ‘ghost road’ in one of the journals, something mystical and magical that she had had so much trouble understanding that she had cast the whole idea in terms of high poetry. Amais could not be sure, four hundred years later, how much of it—if any—was based on reality and how much was pure dream, a vision seen through a poet’s eyes, something not unlike the strange dreams that sometimes guided her own footsteps. But something seemed to be guarding her own path, because she had passed out of the city unseen, and then somehow drifted north and east across the country, skirting areas of particularly intense conflict by serendipity or by instinct, finding places to shelter and—out here in the countryside—more people who willing to help a stranger, in a matter of weeks, than she had done in all the years she had spent in Linh-an.