The Embers of Heaven (43 page)

So I did the only thing I could think of that might have had an effect, and I did it within an hour of arriving in the city, before I could lose my nerve. I simply marched up to those gates and told one of the guards to tell Shou’min Iloh that Amais was here.

His reaction, initially, was predictable. He snorted in incredulous disdain.

“
I should go and disturb Shou’min Iloh just because some chit from the street tells me to?” he said. “Just who do you think you are? Away with you! Shou’min Iloh is a busy man!”

But I stood my ground, and looked at the two of them. Just looked at them.

One of them cocked his gun and began raising it, but the other reached out and slowly pushed the barrel down again.

“
You know we could kill you?” he asked, almost conversationally.

“
Yes,” I said.

He shook his head, astonished. “Who do you think you are?”

“
He knows,” I said, “my name.”

They were beginning to get interested. After another few moments, the one who had addressed me finally snapped to a decision. “You,” he said to his companion, “keep an eye on her.”

And he himself turned and rapped on the gate behind him. It was opened after a short pause by someone whose bewildered face was visible just briefly as the door opened and shut, and then the guard vanished within.

He had left me with the second one, the jumpy one, and although I found a small, centered, serene place deep inside myself where everything was well and everything was possible, the message hadn’t gotten out to my skin which crawled uncomfortably every time his fingers curled and uncurled on his gun while he watched me with flat, unfriendly eyes.

It seemed to take an eternity, but it was probably less than ten minutes later that the first guard returned—the expression on his face was pure unguarded astonishment, and he was accompanied by someone else. I knew this man; not that many years had passed since we had gone to hunt for chickens for Iloh’s father’s concubine. Those years had brought trouble and disgrace on him, and that showed in the new lines that had been etched in his face, but I knew Tang, and he knew me. He nodded at me in both a tacit recognition of that fact and a coolly impersonal gesture for the benefit of the guards, and said a single word, “Come.”

And I stepped inside, with the guards still staring after me in what was almost disbelief.

I was followed Tang into one of Syai’s ancient languid courtyards, flanked by colonnaded open corridors—and, at the far end, much like Xinmei’s house had done, it had another gate which led into an inner fastness, another, secret, courtyard safe from prying eyes. The corridors in the first courtyard had a multitude of doors opening from them, some of which looked like they were graceless and recent additions; a few were open, and showed glimpses of cramped cubicle-like offices within where the occasional occupant lifted their head and followed my passage through the yard.

“
You don’t seem to be surprised to see me,” I said.

“
Likewise,” he responded, with a small, twisted grin and a sideways glance.

“
I knew you were out of his orbit,” I said carefully. “At a house somewhere in the country. What brings you back?”

“
He does. In the spirit of the old saying that you should keep friends close but enemies closer…”

“
Are you his enemy now?” I asked, startled.

“
I am no longer the chosen successor,” Tang said. “That does make a difference. As for the rest… I don’t know what I am to him any more. I am here at his pleasure; I can be sent away again just as easily if he changes his mind.” His mouth twisted again, into that bitter little half-smile. “You know, it is true what they say --a revolutionary leader who wins power can become just as conservative and tyrannical as any old-style official against whom he has fought.”

“
Tyrannical?” I said, rousing in defense, however half-hearted.

“
Isn’t he?” Tang said. “But me, he has in his power. You… you and he…” He shook his head. “I have never understood this,” he said after a pause, just as we reached the gate to the inner courtyard and he shook out the proper key from a key ring he fished out of a pocket. “Everything he has wanted, he has reached out and taken, and owned. But you—you he allowed to go free—and yet you come back to him, of your own accord.”

“
He could not own me,” I said.

“
Perhaps that is why he cares,” Tang said, pushing the door ajar. “I haven’t seen his eyes light up in years, as they did when they told him your name. When you reach his position, few things are left that are both a treasure and a challenge, and you have always been both to him. Go in, he is waiting for you.”

“
Thank you,” I said politely, and entered.

He locked the door behind me without a word.

Iloh himself waited in the courtyard.

For a moment, I did not recognize him—he would have been only forty two years old at the time, but he looked older, with prominent bags under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept well for a long time. But the eyes themselves—ah, the eyes were the same, black and brilliant, and hungry.

I stopped, staring at him. He stared right back.

“
You haven’t changed,” he said at last, breaking the silence.

“
Oh yes,” I said quietly, “I have…”

“
No,” said Shou’min Iloh in the voice he usually must have reserved for proclamations, because it had the ring of because-I-say-so authority. “You have not. Oh, I don’t mean that you are still the child that you were when I first saw you—you’re not that, not by a long way. But you… you are still the same. Only you would walk up to this place and assume that your name alone would get you taken straight through to me. Of all the women I have ever known in my life, you remain the only one who doesn’t know the meaning of fear.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “I? I am afraid of everything…”

“
Not of me,” he said. “That has always been your hold on me. You have never knelt to me. Come.”

I suppose I could have proved him wrong and refused what was fairly obviously a command, and one that he assumed would be obeyed—he had turned and walked away, and it was obvious he expected me to follow—but this was what I had come here for, after all. So I obeyed, and fell into step—not behind him, beside him. I saw him smile at that, but he didn’t speak again until we were out of the open courtyard and into a quiet room which was apparently an inner sanctum—a desk, an office chair, a typewriter, a lamp, an iron bedstead, and not much else. He closed the door behind us.

“
You look tired,” I said, and oh, the place where that tenderness came from—the place I still carried within me after all those years—the shores of the ocean of yuan, of the fate that had first delivered me to him. Xuan was my life and the practical sunlit hours of my days—but Iloh had always been the other half of me, the fevered dream of my nights, and nothing had changed there, nothing at all.

This was the man who had broken my family on the wheel of his ideals, who had fueled the fire of the Rising, who had brought in the Army to quell it when it became inconvenient—a man who had never stopped looking for his Iron Bridge, feeding whatever he could into the furnace to create the New Man who would come to live in his dream and make it a glorious reality. But he was the heart of this country, for all that. And hearts notoriously do not waste time on practical things. They yearn. They want. They love, beyond hope and beyond reason.

“
A few hours’ sleep a night suffices,” he said. And then he looked at me, really looked at me, and I nearly cried out with the naked need of that look. “Where have you been, for so long…?” he whispered, and reached out for me.

And I understood exactly what I needed to give to my land, My body was the vessel—he was the heartbeat of the life that was to fill it—and that spirit that Xuelian once saw in my eyes, what she called the soul of Syai, that was you, my daughter, waiting to be born.

<>

We talked and argued, for hours, wrapped in each other’s arms and minds, as we always did; that was part of what had always drawn us together, the crossing of verbal swords, the occasional flare of pure frustrated annoyance that we could not make one another yield on anything. We were a matched pair, in that regard—both stubborn, both opinionated, both passionately believing in the things that we held dear. If there was something odd about two lovers planning to change the world, it was only that in this instance at least one of them had the power to actually try.

But Yingchi had been right about one thing—there was something about Iloh that was fey, almost transparent, as though he was already half in another world. I could have asked him about it, because I could have asked him anything—but somehow, maybe it was because of the poetry of the “Song of the Nightingale” world in which I’d been living for so long, it came out less direct that I had wanted.

“After you’ve lived the kind of life you’ve lived, after you know what it feels to hold your hand in the fire, after you’ve skirted the edge of everything possible… is the rest just waiting…?”

His face had changed a little, at that, and his eyes looked somewhere through me and into infinity. “Yes,” he said, in reply. Only that.

It was a bad moment, because in it I could see his end—and so could he. Iloh was not old—but for a moment both of us remembered that Baba Sung had not been old, either, when he had been called to Cahan. It seemed that great dreamers paid for vision with their lives.

He blinked, focused back on me, smiled; we were, for the time being at least, back in the real world. He asked what I was doing these days, and I told him about the “Song;” he listened intently, and then said,

“I would like to read that, some day.”

“You couldn’t,” I said.

“Jin-ashu, I take it?” he said, grinning. “More women’s secrets?”

“It has always been far more than that, Iloh!”

He lifted a hand in a gesture of self-defense.

“Truce!” he said. “Women hold up half the sky—they have always been our equals! I have never said otherwise! But before, in ancient times, they never stepped up to stand beside their menfolk…”

“And now you think you have lured them out into the light?” I said.

“I don’t think, I know,” Iloh said. “I have seen women—no more than girls, some of them—fighting beside me in the wars, I’ve seen them stepping up to the machines in the factories…”

“All you have done is made them take on the responsibilities of both sexes,” I said.

“They are free to do what they choose,” Iloh said, “finally, after decades, centuries, of repression and the utter unquestioning attitudes that they belonged in the rear, in the dark, always second, always afraid.”

“You have never understood a woman, then,” I flung at him, a challenge. “In the Empire that was, the Emperor was chosen by a woman—it was the daughter of the Emperor who inherited the throne, not his son. It was a woman’s wisdom that guided. She taught her children things that children now never learn, because in your world they are raised by strangers, in creches where their mothers deposit them before hurrying off to their important jobs in the factories, in the government. And little by little that wisdom and tradition dies.”

“But they are now equal,” Iloh said.

Iloh’s world. The place where all human beings were equal, all were brothers and sisters.

I argued bitterly against that too-simplistic idea, as always—I might have been one of very few people, possibly the only one, to tell Shou’min Iloh flatly and to his face that he was talking nonsense. To me, the power that was jin-shei was partly rooted in the fact that it was a choice freely made and freely accepted, a choice with rights and responsibilities attached, where Iloh’s version of the bonds of brotherhood existed by default, by the mere virtue of having been born a human instead of a cow or a dog or growing into a willow tree. But he held to his own, and finally I gave him a wry smile.