The Embers of Heaven (2 page)

“She is not pretty…” Elena would say thoughtfully, looking on as the toddler laughed up at her father when Nikos would come home from a long day’s work and sweep his small daughter up in his arms.

“…but  one day she will be beautiful,” Dan would say, across the island in her own exotic house, watching the same toddler explore the texture of some ancient brocade, apparently in completion of the same thought.

“All I want her to be is happy,” Vien would sigh, to both women.

Elena would smile at that, and spill a reassuring fairy tale of how it would be for Amais when she grew up and reached out to claim her place in the world. But Dan was both more pragmatic and more frightening in her response.

“Beware of too much happiness,” she had murmured, and had turned away for a moment as if the laughter of her daughter’s child had been a knife in her heart.

Two

Vien was eight and a half months pregnant with her second child, heavy and graceless and swollen with a baby that could have been born at any minute, when Nikos’s boat went out one spring morning. The crew waved goodbye to such family as had gathered to see them off, as they had done hundreds of times before, and left together with a flotilla of other boats just exactly the same as theirs, sailing off into the sweet newborn sunshine of a spring dawn glinting on the sapphire seas.

Seven-year-old Amais, who had woken early that morning from uneasy dreams, had been fretful and weepy, and Elena, in order to give heavily pregnant Vien some respite, had taken the child out to see her father off on his day’s fishing.

“I will catch a mermaid for you,
korimou,
little darling!” Nikos called to his daughter as the sea widened between them. “Now go home and be good for your mother!”

Amais had clung to that unlikely promise all day. When Elena readied herself to go to the wharf to meet the fishing boats at the end of the day, Amais insisted on going with her, wanting to be right there when her father brought the gift of that mermaid ashore for her.

One by one, the boats came drifting back that night.

Elena and Amais waited there as the boats came in, exchanging smiles and the occasional word of congratulation or commiseration with the crews and their families as they straggled in and showed off their catch. But the sun rode lower and lower in the sky, and still Nikos’s boat still had not returned. Elena grew quieter and quieter, standing carved like a statue, her eyes fixed on the horizon, her lips moving ever so slightly in what might have been prayer. She already wore the black kerchief of the widow, and was no stranger to sea death. Neither were the others, the family members of the men on the lost boat, who also waited on the wharf. They all wore the same expression, which was no expression at all—their faces stony, as though they were already bracing themselves for the grief that was to come. Amais was too young to completely understand, but her grandmother’s hand on hers had turned into a cold and clutching claw made from marble, and the child’s own heart was beating very fast as the lovely spring day drew to a close.

The sunset was beautiful; perhaps the most beautiful that Amais could ever remember having seen. The sky was streaked with unlikely colors—something that resembled the rich red wine they made from the grapes grown on the hillside above the harbor, a deep, violet-amethyst shade where the sky began to darken into twilight as the sun went down, and traces of dark gold… the exact shade that Amais had imagined of a mermaid’s hair. Someone, without speaking, without asking, lit a lantern and hung it on an iron hook set into the wharf—a makeshift lighthouse, calling them home, the lost ones, the ones that most people on that wharf already knew would not return.

It was full dark when the first of the statues, another black-kerchiefed woman, finally moved, let her hands drop helplessly to her sides, let out her breath in a deep sigh that ended in a quiet sob, bowed her head, and walked slowly away from the sea, back to the hushed village. It was as though she broke the stasis. One by one they did the same thing, like a ritual, bowed their heads to the sea, walked away.

Elena was the last to go. Amais had been standing there with her on the wharf for hours, had grown stiff and uncomfortable, but not for anything would she have moved, would she have let go of the hand that clung to her own as though she was the last anchor in a storm-tossed world. But Elena was almost unaware of her. When she too opened her lips a crack and allowed a breath to escape, a sigh that sounded like she was letting her soul out of her body and sending it out over the waves to search for her son’s spirit, her hand relaxed for a moment and it was only then that she looked down and blinked, seeming to have only just realized that she was still holding her granddaughter’s hand in her own.

“Let’s go home, Nana,” Amais whispered, profoundly sad, not yet fully aware of all that this night would mean to her.

“Home,” Elena repeated through cracked lips, as though the word held no meaning.

“Mama has been alone all afternoon,” Amais said, her voice taking on a tone of urgency, “and the baby… the baby is coming…”

“The baby,” Elena repeated again. It seemed as though repeating someone else’s last words was all that she was capable of right then, as if her own mind had ground to a halt, unable to move past this moment, this loss. And then she shook her head once, sharply, as though to clear it from the cobwebs of sleep. “The baby,” she said once more. “Yes, you are right. There is the baby.”

They walked back to their house in silence, still holding hands.

There was a light in the window as they approached, a lamp lit by Vien the good wife and left to light the way home for her family. She herself was waiting inside, very pale, her hands folded protectively over her swollen belly.

She knew, long before she saw only Elena and Amais enter the house. She could hear the absence of Nikos’s footsteps, the void which his voice and his laughter would have filled; her world was emptier for his soul. Her face was stark, her eyes very bright, and when the door closed behind Elena, who had finally let go of Amais’s hand, Vien let out a small whimper and folded over herself as though she had been stabbed in the heart.

The whimper became a moan, something that took all her breath, and it wasn’t until that first spasm had passed that Vien could whisper two words:

“
The baby…
”

There was no time, after that, for going to get the midwife, for going to get any help at all. Vien’s second child, another daughter, was born just before midnight, on the same day that her father had died. Elena, who delivered her, held the tiny newborn infant in her arms and stared at the child’s face. It would have been hard to find any resemblance between that bright-red, puckered face with its eyes tightly shut and its bud of a mouth opening and shutting like a baby bird’s when demanding sustenance—but Elena was seeing things that only a mother who had just lost a child and had been given another in his place could see.

“Her name is Nika,” she said softly, and there was no arguing with that. It was the prerogative of the grieving mother, of the grandmother—this child, at least, her daughter-in-law’s culture would not swallow. This was her son’s child, named for him, born to be his substitute. There had been something implacable in her voice.

But
baya
-Dan was not one to relinquish something she considered hers, not without a fight. This child, as Amais before her, was summoned to the house where the tiny enclave of shadowed imperial Syai was being preserved in the Elaas sunshine. The second grandmother had looked the babe over, and smiled a small secret smile.

“This one,” she prophesied, tracing the contours of the child’s face with one bony finger, “is going to look like you, my daughter. Look at those eyes; look at the shape of her face. Her name is Aylun, little Cricket.”

“Her name is Nika,” Vien said. “Elena already named her for her father.”

“Her name is Aylun,” Dan repeated firmly. “You will see. You will bring this one, too, as you have done with Amais.”

But Elena would have none of that. “Not this child,” she said to Vien when she returned from her visit to her mother, the baby cradled in the crook of her arm. Elena all but snatched the child out of Vien’s arms, inspecting her closely, as though there were traces of the Syai cobwebs still draped on her swaddling clothes or evil spells woven in the air above her small head. “This is my Nika, my baby, the child that will carry the spirit of my son.
She
already has Amais.”

Almost overnight, Amais had been abandoned by her father’s mother. She became almost invisible in her father’s house, with her grandmother’s attention wholly focused on her younger sister.
Baya
-Dan commanded her attendance daily as usual but now Amais chafed at it, feeling as though she had been traded, one child for another, one granddaughter for each grandmother, forced to choose one of her two worlds and barred from the other.

The first year of Nika’s life passed thus, in tension and frustration. A barrier developed between Vien and Elena, who appeared to consider her granddaughter’s mother merely a necessary evil, basically handing the child over to be nursed and then snatching her back as though prolonged contact with her mother would infect her with an incurable disease. But as that first year passed, it began to become painfully obvious that fate had played a joke on the family.

Amais, the elder, the one who had been abandoned to whatever destiny her Syai heritage might have in store for her, grew into her father’s image, gently made female by the curve of cheek or the slope of delicate shoulder inherited from her mother and with a captivating touch of the exotic. She had her father’s wild black hair, gleaming with blue highlights, curling riotously around her face, setting off those beautiful and almost uncanny eyes—she was a melding of all that was beautiful from her two worlds, as though she had been a work of art which had had two bright and vivid colors mixed on a palette and emerged with a shade that was unique and all her own. But at least she had that trace of her father’s kin in her.

Nika was all Syai—tawny ivory skin, round eyes with eyelids draped in drowsy epicanthic folds over irises that were so dark that the pupil of her eyes could barely be seen. She had the rosebud mouth and the small-boned grace of a Syai Empress. It was as though Nikos had had nothing to do with her at all. She was, as Dan had said she would be, far more Aylun than she could ever be Nika, the Elaas name sitting almost gracelessly on this tiny alien person to whom it just did not seem to belong.

But it was this child that held the spirit of Elena’s son. Somehow, she managed to ignore the incongruities in the physical appearance of the children. Vien sometimes smuggled Nika, or Aylun as she always was in her Syai grandmother’s house, out of Elena’s sight for a few hours, and Aylun, too, would drowse happily in the lilting tones of
baya-
Dan’s lullabies.

As for Amais, her own education at her Syai grandmother’s hands—and it had become painfully obvious that it was just that, an education, that Amais was being groomed for something—accelerated. Amais and her grandmother were now reading the classics together, accounts of Imperial life in old Syai, ancient poems inscribed in crumbling books carefully put away in wrappings of silk and waterproof oiled cloth, tales of travel and trade set down by generations of exiles, all hoarded and treasured for four hundred years and passing down the centuries from generation to generation until it came down to this—an old woman and a young child who only half-belonged to this lost world.

It was not as though Amais had no interest in the things that she was given to study—some part of her was held rapt and fascinated by it. But there was that other part of her, the same restless spirit that had made her own mother respond to the laughter she heard echoing from beyond the brooding walls of Dan’s house, and there were days that she squirmed and sighed and cast longing glances at the shuttered windows, struggling with the overwhelming feeling that she should not be in this room but rather out on the rocky shores of Elaas’s blue seas, scooping out small crabs from their hidey-holes or gathering clams at low tide. It was in that year, aware that Amais’s attention was slipping away, that Dan allowed Amais to actually hold in her hands a set of thirteen small notebooks bound in faded red leather—Amais recognized them: her grandmother had read from those books while she listened, rapt, to the tales of long ago. The diary of a girl, who, Dan said, was not much older than Amais herself when she began writing down the days of her life.

“These belonged to Kito-Tai,”
baya
-Dan said, her voice edged with an odd sort of triumph, watching the many-times-great-granddaughter of the ancient poetess touch the worn covers with light, almost frightened fingers. Amais was wholly here now, completely caught in the moment; the childish games of the Elaas children out on the sunlit shore were not even a memory of temptation.  “They are yours now. Take care of them—they are very old. They are her journals, and there is a lot of her poetry in there, too. We’ve read some of them already, on the scrolls—but those were transcribed, for sale in the marketplaces. These, in here, are her originals. Written in our own language.”

“Our own language?” Amais questioned, looking up. “You mean
jin-ashu
? The women’s tongue?”

“Yes, and now you know enough of it to be able to read those,”
baya-
Dan said, laying a loving and possessive hand over her granddaughter’s where it rested on the red leather of many centuries ago. “I have already read some of this to you. But now they are yours, they are my gift to you. They will be here for you, whenever you want them.”

Amais took one of the books at random, opened it, and ran her finger reverently down the ancient page that lay revealed. “
Jin-shei
,” Amais murmured. “She was
jin-shei
to an Empress. The Empress listened when she talked, and did what she said. And Nhia’s, too, her
jin-shei-bao
, her heart-sister… and then Nhia became a Blessed Sage and was given a shrine in the Great Temple in Linh-an…” The latter was catechism; Dan owned a book about the Great Temple, one that detailed its appearance, its Gods, and detailed biographies of all the Emperors and Sages whose niches had been dedicated in the Second Circle of the Great Temple. It had been brought over by one of the later waves of immigrants from Syai, was not quite the age of Kito-Tai’s journals, but it was old enough—sixty or seventy years at least. Amais knew about Nhia because she had been singled out by her grandmother, because they had read her biography together, because she had been mentioned by name in every one of Tai’s journals that resided in the cedar box. Making the leap from Nhia’s status of Tai’s
jin-shei-bao
to that of Blessed Sage of the Temple as thought the one had naturally followed from the other, however, had been something that Amais had done entirely on her own. Her grandmother might have objected mildly, but before she had a chance to do so Amais fired another distracting question. “
Baya-
Dan… have
you
ever had a
jin-shei-bao
?”