The Embers of Heaven (19 page)

He blinked, giving a strong impression that he was unused to people being so dismissively cavalier about his ideas. “It is more than a dream,” he said. “It is the future. It is possibility. Your
jin-shei
, it is what used to be…”

“I came here to find the things that are lost,” Amais said. “Do you have any idea at all about what
jin-shei
really was…?”

Once again she had startled him, putting him in his place with a confidence and a passion that was rare in one her age. But this time he smiled. “Educate me, then,” he said, “if you think it is something that I should know.”

“It was the thing in the name of which anything could be asked, anything could be possible,” Amais said. “I can’t… I’m not
allowed
to speak of it, not to you. But I have journals which my ancestors have kept, and
jin-shei
shaped empires, then—the vow between sisters, the things asked each of the other in the name of that vow. Oh, but it was a glory, and a responsibility…”

Her passion on this subject had brought color to her cheeks again, a glow to her eyes. He was watching her with one eyebrow raised, a smile hovering on his face—but it was a smile of appreciation, even admiration. Amais, noticing his expression, dropped her eyes in sudden shyness.

“Sometimes it is a waste to destroy something good, even if it does not hold the power it once held,” she said, after a pause, filling the silence between them because there was more to be said. “
Jin-shei
… meant something. Something deep. Something that a simple all-encompassing notion of all human beings being brother and sister to one another can never accomplish. There was a
choice
, you see. You would choose to be someone’s sister, and know that you might be called on to pay the price of that choice. How precious can something be, if you are handed it while you are still in swaddling clothes, simply by virtue of being the issue of a human father and mother?”

“A young philosopher,” he said.

“Too ignorant,” Amais said with frank self-castigation. “I would need to be old and gray before I could be that. There is still far more about this world that I don’t know, that I’ll never know, than there is of which I am certain.”

“But you are certain of this?” he questioned. “This women’s thing?”

“I am more certain of that than I am of anything else I have ever known,” Amais said.

And knew she lied.

Because there was one more thing in this world that she was certain of in that moment, and that was that she was meant to be here, in this place, with this man.
Yuan,
her grandmother had called it. Destiny. Suddenly she could not lift her eyes to his at all, knowing that this would be written all over her face, knowing only that she was afraid of it.

She kept her eyes down with such ferocious determination that she utterly failed to notice that he had moved, and when his hand swam into her field of vision and reached out to cup her chin and tilt her face up to his she shivered, as though she had been touched by something not of this earth.

But he was of this earth. He was real, and solid, and very, very near. And when he made her look up into his face she saw there the same certainty that had been in her own heart, written on her own face, a moment before.
Yuan.
Destiny.

“Anything you believe in with the whole of your heart,” he said very softly against her lips, as if afraid of being overheard, as if he was not so much saying the words out loud but transferring them physically from his mouth to hers so that she could taste them, the sweetness of them, “cannot help being true.”

Nine

For a moment—a wonderful, exhilarating moment—Amais had known nothing at all about her world except that
he
was in it, this still-nameless man the mere brush of whose lips against hers made her feel as though she floated above the ground without touching it with her feet. But then the fear had come rushing in, and an absolute blank astonishment, as though she—that part of her that she knew and recognized—was standing somewhere outside her body and watching in a sort of appalled wonder as this man, this stranger, reached for her and touched her lips with his own and woke things in her that she had not known she possessed. She froze, and he felt it, and took that warm strong hand from her face—and she could have wept for the loss of it, and rejoiced that it was gone and did not by its very presence tempt her into thinking things she could not bear to be thinking about.

She fled, shamelessly, taking care only to gather the precious letters together with trembling hands and make sure they were safe—and then she fled, leaving behind her sandals, her hat, and the man who had kissed her, the poet, the dreamer, who watched her go without moving to stop her.

She ran all the way back to the house as though it were a sanctuary, knocking on the postern door feverishly until the old servant opened it, practically falling into the house in her haste to be out of that perfect summer’s day that had so treacherously trapped her in its honeyed webs. The old gatekeeper clicked his tongue at her breathless and disheveled state—there was an unspoken  
I knew she was going to come to no good
only barely being reined in from being spoken out loud but it was there in his eyes and the expression on his face, for all to read who were willing to look.

Amais retreated to the safe solitude of the room that had been given over to her use while she was a guest at this house. It took her almost an hour to stop trembling, to stop feeling the ghost of his kiss on her mouth—for the first time in her life she understood, rather than merely knew, what it would mean to have a real
jin-shei-bao
right now, someone to whom she could go, whom she could trust, who could give advice and if not advice then at least offer a willing ear.

The truth of it was, Amais was nearly seventeen years old—and she had never kissed a man before this day. And now, after she had, she could not conceive of ever doing so again if the man was not that stranger from the summer hillside.

Her hands were cold, and she lifted them to her face and laid her cool palms over burning cheeks.

“I don’t even know his name,” she whispered out loud, more to hear her own voice and somehow convince herself that she was still the same person she had always been, that she still knew who she was and what her life was meant to be. But it didn’t help. She still felt disembodied, as though her heart was somewhere out of her body and out of her control. It was ludicrous, but it was so.

She turned to the letters again, her heart still beating like a drum for a war dance, hoping to find solace or understanding in them.

It was Xuelian’s letters that she found next, the letters written home by what was at first an obviously homesick and very afraid child but which soon changed into something else. Xuelian may not have been the family’s first choice for the Emperor’s concubine, but it quickly became apparent that she might have been born for the part. The Gods, as usual, had known very well what they were doing.

Xuelian was fifteen years old and had spent just under two years in the Imperial household when the Sun Emperor had been made to abdicate the throne of Syai. The Imperial family had been guaranteed their lives, and even some property—the Emperor, his Empress and a small entourage were allowed to retire to a house in the country where they agreed to live lives of quiet seclusion.  But not all of his household would go with him. There would have to be a price for the Imperial family’s freedom to live without fetters after the Emperor’s abdication, and the price was negotiated by the cold and vengeful Empress who had watched the growing affection between her royal husband and his child-concubine with a smoldering jealousy she could do nothing about—until that moment.

Xuelian had been offered to Shiqai, the one-time Imperial general and a powerful warlord in his own right who had negotiated the Emperor’s surrender on Baba Sung’s behalf when Empire first gave way to the dream of Republic—the same Shiqai who betrayed the Empire, then betrayed the Republic by seeking to reinstate the Empire but with himself at the helm. Even shattered and fragmented as it was in the wake of these upheavals, what was left of the land of Syai had rebelled, Shiqai’s plans had been thwarted, and in less than three years the fearsome warlord himself was dead—some said  from buckling under the sheer weight of his ambition.

In those three years, he had not been kind to Xuelian. Although she did not say much in her letters, she was used harshly and it would have been impossible for her unhappiness not to filter through in what she wrote to her family, despite the fact that she never gave any details of her life. But that ended with Shiqai’s death, and for a while Xuelian wrote nothing at all. Then, after a gap of nearly two years, she resumed her letters. She had been traded again; or rather another man had reached out and taken her for himself—no less than Shenxiao, Baba Sung’s own protégé, the leader of the Nationalists. A tough man and a shrewd politician, he had understood the value of having access to all the insight and inside knowledge locked in the mind of a woman who had been close to the seat of power in Syai since she had been a young child. The fact that she was still young and beautiful enough to arouse his physical desire was just a bonus.

But times had changed, and Xuelian was no longer a concubine—she was merely a mistress, a woman kept by a man married to another in a house different from his marital home. It might have been better, on the face of it. Unlike a traditional concubine, she would never be subject to the whims and vagaries of the legal wife, to whom a concubine was traditionally subservient, and her experience in the Sun Emperor’s household had given her bitter firsthand knowledge of how a wife who considered herself wronged or abandoned in a concubine’s favor could lash out at the woman whom she thought of as having stolen her husband’s affections. But the removal of this potential source of trouble from her life also meant a loss of privileges that were customarily accorded to a concubine. She had no rights, and could be simply discarded at will when her married lover tired of her.

But what else can I do?
Xuelian wrote to her family, in a voice very similar to that of Lianqin when she had accepted the exile to the Temple and spoke of learning to appreciate whatever blessings the Gods had seen fit to bestow upon her life. Xuelian might have been sent out to become a quiet influence in the corridors of power on behalf of her family—but the fact remained that the only way she could do so was from the silken prison of a powerful man’s bed. She was intelligent, and loyal, and keen-witted—but none of those things had been cultivated for or given free rein to express themselves. She was only useful—to anyone at all—if she was, at least outwardly, a compliant sexual partner who would then be allowed the right of offering pillow-talk advice couched as deferential opinion, a kind of reward, a half-hearted permission to offer up her mind after the offer of her body had been accepted and consummated.

There were gaps in the letters. There seemed to have been a child, but that was fragmented and garbled; if there were more letters on the matter, they had been lost, or they had been deliberately removed from the box before Amais received it. And then the letters stopped altogether, petering out on an uncertain note, leaving it open for interpretation as to what happened next.

Amais read through the night, by lamplight, drowning herself in these letters, in the life of a girl whom she had never known, whose troubles were so very different from hers. She hunted for missing letters in the remaining bundles in the box, but found none—and it was with a sense of astonishment that she realized that it was getting light outside, her lamp an increasingly insubstantial ghost of itself as it competed against the dawn.

She gathered up the letters, carefully restored them to their original packaging, closed the carved box and—when she was done and the hour became a little more civilized—went in search of her hostess.

She found Xinmei in the garden.

“Good morning,” Xinmei greeted her. “You look tired; did you not rest well?”

“I was reading all night,” Amais said, offering up the box. “I thank you for these. I thought I knew all I needed to know about this world, but I realize now that I was mistaken—I have learned a lot from these letters. How did Xuelian die?”

Xinmei gave her a strange look. “Whatever made you think,” she asked softly, “that Xuelian is dead?”

It was Amais’s turn to look startled. “But the letters—they just stop, there is no real end to that story—I assumed they just stopped coming, that she was dead…?”

Xinmei shook her head. “Xuelian is alive,” she said. “Very much alive. She is in Linh-an. She owns a tea house called the House of the Silver Moon, the last house on the Street of Red Lanterns.”

“But how do you know of this? There are no letters…”

“She did not write that,” Xinmei said. “I only know because I went to the city to look for her when her letters stopped, to see if she
was
dead, to give her a decent burial if she was or at least a memorial from the family… but I found her, and she was quite alive and well, and it is a cause of great sorrow for me that she and I found very little to say to one another, in the end. I hear of her, every now and then, through other channels. But she hasn’t written to me for years. I think she feels her duty to the family has been done, more than done; she owes us nothing any more.”

Amais, to whom these words were a shattering shock, was suddenly aware of a strong urge to go back to the city she had left behind—the city where a lot of her answers appeared to lie after all, even if she did have to cross the breadth of Syai to learn how to ask the right questions.

“I must get back to the city,” she said, voicing her thoughts.

“Right now?” Xinmei said. “That might be harder than you think. There is fighting near Linh-an. I think the war is drawing to a close at last, the Gods be praised—I do not pretend to know whether the right people will have won it, or if we will be better off under whoever comes out on top, but for better or worse the news that I hear seems to be that Iloh and his armies are well on the way to taking the city, and the land with it…”

Amais suddenly shivered. “But my mother is in the city,” she said, an afterthought, but a sudden sharp fear that was quite real for all that. “And my little sister. Xinmei, I have to go back—I have to find a way back…”

“You’d have to ask Iloh himself for a pass,” Xinmei said.

Amais looked stricken, and Xinmei allowed herself a small secret smile.

“But there is hope,” she said. “Did I not say that the troops in my courts are Iloh’s men? And who do you think arrived a couple of days ago to join them…?” Amais’s head came up sharply, and Xinmei nodded. “Yes. Iloh himself is here. Come, over here—look…”

She laid a gentle hand on Amais’s elbow and guided her to the wall dividing the outer courts from the inner. A pattern of blue and white tiles decorated the pillars on the inner side of the gate, and Xinmei tapped one of these lightly until it moved sideways, revealing a tiny spy hole through which one could observe the outer courts. Xinmei peered through this herself for a moment, and then stepped away and motioned for Amais to take her place.

“He is there,” she said. “You can see him. In the far corner, talking to three men.”

Amais stepped up to the spy hole.

Perhaps she should have known, should have guessed… but she had not, and it was with an icy shock of recognition that she laid eyes on the face of the man called Iloh, the man who was leading the rebel armies in a bloody civil war that had already claimed thousands of lives, the man whose name had been swirling in the air ever since she had set foot in Syai years before, whose face she had even seen on badly printed posters in Linh-an which announced the price that had been put on his head. The man she had utterly failed to recognize when he had crossed her path in the old cemetery in the hills, only a day ago.

“You could ask him, if you wished,” Xinmei was saying behind Amais’s back. “I am told you have to go through channels, but he is quite willing to talk to people who come to ask a favor of him.” And then, as Amais backed away from the peephole, Xinmei reached out instinctively to steady her. “My dear child! Are you all right? You look like you have seen a ghost!”

“I think… I need to be alone for a while,” Amais whispered. “If I may, lady Xinmei…”

“Of course,” Xinmei said. “Please, the garden is yours. I will see that nobody disturbs you.”

Amais wandered in the inner courts for an hour or so, walking the carefully raked pathways with the staggering unsteady gait of the blind. She had deliberately chosen to immerse herself in that other world, the world of the letters, in the hope that she could make herself forget the encounter under the silver-leaf tree—and had thought that she had succeeded, right until the moment she had seen his face again and had known with a painful clarity that she had not, that she never could, that the sight of that face would always be a fire in her heart.