The Embers of Heaven (30 page)

“Yes,” Iloh said emphatically. “You can. You
have
to. If you do not root out the poisons that have grown in the good earth before, they will keep sprouting, and they will suffocate the new things that you are trying to grow. But you are using the wrong vision. You, yourself, tell me you heard me say it—and I still don’t understand how, damn it! Dreams—superstitions—I have never believed in any of that…”

“Yes, you have,” Amais whispered. “At least once in your life, you have. Or you would never have married your wife for the reasons you once gave me, you would never have recognized my name.”

Iloh, aware that he was staring at her with his mouth open, shut it with a snap. “There was that,” he admitted at last.

“But you are still wrong,” Amais said.

“I am never wrong,” he said, and his tone was amused, self-deprecating… and completely convinced of the truth of those words.

“Once a desert, always a desert,” Amais murmured. “There are certain things that you can never get back, if you annihilate them. And then the garden…”

“But this isn’t a garden, it’s a house, and you cannot build a new house until you clear away all the rubble of the old. You have to have a clear foundation, if what you want to build is going to stand!”

“People aren’t bricks, Iloh!” Amais said, rearing away from him, pushing at his chest with open palms of both hands. “You cannot use them this way. If they do not agree with you or they do not understand your dream, that doesn’t mean they are simply obstacles to remove from your path. There is a
choice
…!”

“There is a choice in peacetime. But we are still at war, Amais.”

“With what?” she demanded. “With whom? Why? Iloh, if there is war here, then you are the one fanning its flames!”

“I am not!” he responded with equal fire. “Amais, I did not invent any of this—I set out the seed of the idea and then I watch it bloom…”

“You see,” she said, returning to her metaphor. “A garden.”

He made a swift chopping motion with one hand. “False analogy,” he said. “Maybe that is my fault. But I didn’t start this war, Amais—people were more than ready to rise to a new world, to tear off the trammels of the centuries that have been binding them and keeping generations of them poor and subservient and ‘in their place’—and they were supposed to know their place, and to stay there. Back in the days of Empire, people who tried to break out of their social stratum and their class were not put in camps for a re-education—they were executed without any further question! Why is what I tried to do so wrong? It is the people, Amais, the people! They will rise like a mighty wind and they will sweep all before them—the Imperial aristocrats, the corrupt warlords, all will break before that storm and fall like the dust they are into their graves! You speak of choice? Yes, there is a choice—what do I do with this force that I have seen gathering, that I have seeded with my dreams? Do I step in front of it and let it crush me like it will crush everything else that stands in its way? Do I trot in its wake, criticizing and whining? Or do I, if I am given that chance, march at the head of this army of enlightenment and lead them as best I know how?”

“But things were done in your name… will be done in your name…”

“Yes, and I will use them,” Iloh said. “If I do not, I fail at my task. I did not ask for the title—but they still call me that, Shou’min Iloh, the first citizen. And I have to live up to that standard. What I ask my people to do, I am always willing to do myself. Only history can judge me…”

Their eyes locked, fire with fire, both passionate believers, both willing to spend mind and spirit in the pursuit of a higher goal—but all of a sudden the one thing that mattered was she was still cradled in the circle of his arms, and that her hands, still flat against his chest, were suddenly tingling with the pulse of the heartbeat she could feel beneath them. She drew a small gasping breath and moved, instinctively, shifting one leg down so that it lined up with his thigh, the knee of the other creeping up towards his hipbone. His hand knotted in her hair.

“You were in the city,” he said hoarsely. “You never came to me.”

“You never sent for me,” she whispered, against his lips, closing her eyes, surrendering to something stronger than herself. She felt his hand slide down, his palm hard against the curve of her breast, and then fumble with her jacket, slip in through an opening, find bare skin and sear it with his touch. “Oh,
Cahan…
” she whispered, her lips against his ear, as his weight shifted, she yielded to it, and then her own hands were helplessly inside his clothes, needing skin under her fingertips, needing to find and remember the shape of him against her, around her, within her.

Her mind didn’t understand this, did not even want it—not now, not after the things she had just seen and endured, not with this man of all men—but her heart and her body understood, and for now that was enough, more than enough. Nothing had changed between them—he was still not hers, not, as she had said to Xuelian, her fairy tale. But somehow, somehow, he was in her destiny. And she was powerless to change that.

This time it had been Iloh who had gone. Not, as she had once done, leaving her asleep in the aftermath of love—they had talked, later, in each other’s arms; they had whispered words that were a breathless, heady mix of love, and dreams, and politics. Then they had stopped talking, for a while, lost in each other again, limbs twined, skin straining against skin. And then he had sat up, and had said he had to go.

“I know now,” he told her, “what I need to do. When next we meet, remember that—I
need
to do it. Remember that, if you find it hard to forgive me.”

He had asked if he could take her back to the city, or arrange transportation to any other place she wanted to go—but Amais had hesitated, and declined. There would be too many questions asked that could not be answered. She had somehow managed to pull her mind and body together, after he was gone, and find her own way back to the city—following, perhaps, in Iloh’s wake, she had no way of knowing. When she alighted from the train in Linh-an’s crowded, busy station, she realized that she could not face going home, not to that empty house with Vien imprinted on it, not yet—so she made her way to the Street of Red Lanterns, and Xuelian. She had wept in that ornate lacquered room, into Xuelian’s silk-clad lap, the old woman’s hand on her hair like a grandmother’s.

“Oh, sweet child,” Xuelian had said. “How I wish I had an answer for you. But if I have learned anything in my days, it is that sometimes love is simply not enough.”

Amais looked up, her face tear-streaked, her eyes framed by eyelashes spiked with tears. “You always say that,” she said, her voice trembling a little.

“Say what?”

“Something—always something. ‘If I’ve learned anything in my days’—as though it were only one thing, the ultimate lesson. But you keep on saying it. Whatever is necessary, that’s the one thing you have learned.”

Xuelian smiled, and it was a smile of love. “Child,” she said, “and I do not use the words lightly, this time—if I have learned anything in my days…”

Amais hiccoughed, a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan. Xuelian smoothed her hair back from her face and gently laid her head back onto her lap, heedless of the wreck that Amais’s tears were making of her silk gown.

“If I have learned,” she said quietly, “anything at all in my days, it is that I will never know enough about life to understand it. That doesn’t mean that I will ever stop trying. Just remember one thing, in the storm that is to come—men are like mountains, and they will raise the earth to do their bidding; but women are like water, and the more barriers they place in our path the more we will find a way to flow around and through and underneath them. That is power. Nothing can stand against it. And you… you carry the soul of Syai within you.”

She was whittling.

And this time it was different. It was she, herself,  who was doing it—there was no sense of separation, no sense of looking over someone else’s shoulder, no sense of being a dreaming disembodied ghost—it was as though she had found an anchor, and the anchor was what she had always known it had to be—in the body of the young woman in her dream. In all the time she had dreamed of her, over and over again in dream after dream, Amais had never been able to see the young woman’s face—and now it seemed blindingly obvious why. It would have been her own. She could not have seen her own face, not without the mirror that the dreams never seemed to provide She was the one looking out from within it.

As now she looked down onto a pair of hands that were very familiar, and held a piece of soft wood and a curved carving blade.

The wood was still a shapeless burl, with no hint of what it was supposed to emerge as after its transformation . Dream-Amais appeared to have known this, however, before the dreamer-Amais woke inside her body and stilled her hands with her own ignorance and incomprehension.

She turned the piece of wood over in her hands, pondering.

“
Time was,” someone said softly, “everyone would recognize a yearwood bead.”

Amais looked up, and met the serene eyes of the little girl who had always been her dream-companion. She wore her hair in two braided pigtails now, tied with lengths of scarlet ribbon, and had changed her high-court garb for the kind of plain robe an ordinary child might wear… if it hadn’t been touched with gold embroidery and images of stylized water buffaloes worked in yellow silk didn’t twine around the edges of her wide sleeves.

“
I’ve never seen a real yearwood,” Amais said.

“
I kept one all my life,” said the child incongruously, giving every indication that she meant decades and not just a childish handful of years.

“
But weren’t they supposed to be made of material that matched the reign?” Amais queried, fingering her wood burl.

“
Jade for the Jade Emperor. Ivory for the Ivory emperor. Yes, if the reign rested on something rare and precious, that was what the yearwood was carved from—but even then there were those who could not afford to buy a jade bead every day of their lives. Wood has always been used as a substitute. Cherry wood and bone and soapstone, the poor man’s ebony and ivory and jade. And besides…”

“
Besides,” whispered Amais, “there is a Wood Emperor on the throne. It is right and fitting. But I don’t know how to do this… what am I making?”

“
Not many keep them any more, but there are still some who have a yearwood in their home, counting their days,” the little girl said. “And almost everyone still has the special beads made for the special occasions, like they had always done. For births and deaths and weddings and for Xat-Wau. It is necessary to mark the passage of those times in one’s life, after all.”

“
I have a birth bead,” Amais said. “My mother had one made for both of us, my sister and me. But none… of the others.”

“
You had your Xat-Wau, didn’t you?”

“
Well, yes. The occasion, not the ceremony. I don’t think my mother had the red pin to put in our hair, either Aylun or myself.”

The child reached out and closed Amais’s restless fingers around the burl of wood that she was turning over in her palm like a worry bead. “There is more than one kind,” she said, “ of coming of age. There is more than one Xat-Wau in the lives of some people. You might need… a bead to mark the passage.”

“
But even back in the old days there were people who made these things,” Amais said. “I cannot do this by myself! If it is that important…”

“
Anything important it is best to do with your own hand,” the little girl said. And then frowned delicately, reaching for the wood bead. “But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you need to learn how to make it… from the beginning. From small seeds… do big things grow.”

She rubbed the piece of wood between her small palms, and dropped it to the ground at her feet. It sank into the soil, and the child smoothed the surface of the earth after it with the toe of her shoe, leaving no trace of its passage.

Amais looked up, confused. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“
Watch and wait,” came the reply. The voice was disembodied and drifting; there was mist all around, except for the place where the wood had been dropped. On that spot, a white light shone as if from heaven—and even as Amais gazed a small fragile stem broke the ground and raised two pale green leaves towards the sky. The plantlet seemed to sigh, and shudder, and then it burst forth, growing, shooting out of the ground, its girth increasing, its skin growing from soft green to smooth young bark and then the  gnarled carapace of a mature tree. Branches flung out from the tree trunk, separated into smaller boughs, twigs, leaf whorls. Acorn-like seeds budded, ripened, fell like bounty—and where each fell another tree sprang, like the first, a grove, a small wood, a forest. Shadows spread on the ground. Wind began to whisper in the crowns of trees.

“
What am I meant to do now?” Amais whispered, alone under the dim eaves of the murmuring trees, lost in the pathless wilderness.

“
Follow,” the voice that guided her said, and it sounded like it came from every one of the trees, a woody whisper laced with susurrations of wind-blown leaves. “Find. Make a bead to mark your passage.”

“
But which way do I go…?”

“
The way your heart takes you,” the voice whispered, and Amais realized that she had said the words out loud too, answering her own question.

“
The way your heart takes you,” she repeated, closing her eyes.

And then took a step, and vanished into the shadows of the wood.