The Embers of Heaven (5 page)

But the journal proved to be a stepping stone for something quite different. She soon found that she was not as comfortable in the journal format as her ancestress had been. She started writing down her thoughts as long poems. Initially they were pastiche, no more than clumsy copies of the classical poems her grandmother had read to her and those she found in the pages of Tai’s books, but even to her own untutored eye they improved with daily practice until she was quite proud with what she could do with the old and glowing words of the classical high language that had been her grandmother’s gift to her. The poetry, however, turned out to be another stepping stone, to something else again. She started writing down stories, casting her own dreams into fiction, writing about her hopes and fears and expectations as though they were happening to someone removed from herself, finding it easier to conquer them and understand them that way.

The notebook she had found on deck soon ran out of room to write in, thickly covered with what was a remarkably good calligraphy for having been produced by someone of Amais’s age, without proper implements, and with the added constraint of having to be smaller and smaller as the space to write in grew more and more cramped and valuable. One of the ship’s officers found her sitting cross-legged in the sun one morning, squinting morosely at her notebook, trying to find a margin she had not yet written in.

“Hey,” the man had said in a friendly manner, smiling at the picture of the intense little girl bent over her words. “Much too nice a day for that long face. Looks like that’s pretty much all that your book will take—what are you doing, writing a diary? Could you use another of those?”

It was impolite to answer in the affirmative; one never asked for gifts. But Amais looked down at her notebook, and then up at the officer, and nodded mutely.

“Then I will see you get one. There are plenty of notebooks in the back of the storage cabinet. I’ll see what I can dig out.”

“Thank you,
sei
,” Amais said, using the old form of address. The officer wasn’t even one of the higher ones, hardly a ‘lord’. But he was offering a precious thing. That entitled him.

He didn’t understand the honor, naturally, and merely smiled as he tipped his cap at her. “I’ll find you,” he said.

And he did. He came up with two partly filled and discarded notebooks and—greatest treasure of all—a completely blank notebook of substantial proportions, bound in thin leather.

“The captain’s log is far more boring than what you might want to use it for,” he said.

“This is the captain’s book?” Amais demanded, too impressed to be polite.

“Yours now,” the officer said. “He’ll only think they forgot to load his usual quota. You’d better keep it out of sight, though. You know.” And he had winked at her in a conspiratorial manner.

She didn’t know whether to believe him—taking one of the notebooks destined for the official log of the ship’s journey sounded entirely too outrageous, and might well have been a story invented to create a connection between the giver of the gift and its recipient. But she did it anyway, keeping the book hidden even from her mother, no small achievement given their cramped and untidy cabin.

Vien and the girls changed ships after they crossed the big inland sea on the far shores of which Elaas lay, and loaded themselves into another, even bigger vessel sailing east, all the way to the Syai port of Chirinaa, familiar to both Vien and Amais only as a lost city of legend. On the first night of this, the last leg of their journey, Vien felt well enough to leave Aylun sleeping in the even more cramped cabin, if that were possible, than the one in which they had traveled on the first ship, and join her older daughter on deck.

It was evening, and the sea breezes were cool. Vien wrapped her shawl tighter around her and leaned her elbows on the railing, leaning out to look down into the water below.

“Soon,” she said to Amais. “Soon we will be there.”

“What will we do there, Mother?”

“I will make proper arrangements for your grandmother,” Vien said. “That is the first thing that I will do.”

“But where will we live?”

Vien hesitated. Just a little. “I don’t know yet, Amais-
ban
. But we will see how it is when we get there. All will be well.”

Amais tilted her head to the side, and regarded her mother with a sudden chill, a touch of fear. There had been a light in Vien’s face just then, something that spoke of an exile’s homecoming, of a glow of joyous expectation which might not have been wholly unexpected in one of what
baya-
Dan had called
li-san
, the lost generations, the ones who went away, who left Syai behind. But that joy was drifting, ephemeral, rootless. Amais could quite clearly see her mother on this journey, see her wrapped completely in its expectations, its visions, its dreams. She could not, hard as she tried, imagine Vien at the journey’s end, could not see what Vien planned to do with Syai when its soil was firm under her feet. Their lives seemed confined to the limbo of the ship, with quiet waters all around them, an eternal voyage fated never to end.

She did not know what scared her worse—the knowledge that her mother had no idea what to do next, or the nebulous thoughts that were forming in her own mind, a still shapeless and formless thing, something that had been born of her nebulous dreams and of the promise she had made
baya-
Dan on her deathbed. Something that was waiting in Syai for her hand to be laid upon it. Something that was for her alone, that nobody else in this world would be able to do.

Five

Amais had thought the port in Elaas where they had boarded their first ship had been huge and full of people. The port across the Inner Sea where they had boarded their second ship was even larger—a busy, exotic place that smelled strange across the waters a full day before they had caught sight of land—but Amais did not have the chance or the inclination to explore it in the rush of changing ships. They had been on their way almost before Amais had really had a chance to feel solid ground under her feet once more; as she watched while on deck as the ship left this ephemeral shore behind, she held a faint regret that she hadn’t had a chance to pay more attention to a place she was unlikely to return.

But that passed; the transit port had not been either kind of home for Amais, and she had been too stretched between future and past to have time to feel anything that didn’t have roots in either fear or impatience. She wanted to see Syai now, the Syai of her grandmother’s tales, of the old poems, of Tai’s journals—the glittering place where she thought she could find what she needed to glue together the mismatched halves of her spirit into something that resembled a whole. The captain’s purloined notebook filled with stories of ancient sages stepping down from their Temple niches and walking the city offering blessings—stories of glittering Empresses who were sisters-of-the-heart to little girls who sold fish in the marketplace, and the great adventures they had together —stories of Imperial Guard phalanxes dressed in black and wielding magic daggers. It was a world woven from Tai’s journals, from
baya-
Dan’s stories, from Amais’s own imagination—something she now anticipated with a feverish desire, waiting to step into those stories herself, become part of them and let them become a part of her.

When the ship’s notices, pasted on the public boards every day, finally announced their arrival in Chirinaa, Amais was already exhausted with expectations, building the place up in her mind into a city whose walls would shine with gold, its streets paved with rubies, full of people dressed in bright silks and women whose hair dripped with jewels, with opulent tea houses on every corner serving fragrant mountain tea in white porcelain teapots painted with cranes and hummingbirds.

The reality was quite different—at least the reality that the ship disgorged the small family into on the quay. There might well have been ruby paving stones somewhere, but not here—not out in the busy working harbor, teeming with barrels, boxes wrapped in massive chains and secured with even more massive double-lock puzzle padlocks, scraps of torn oilcloth and tarpaulin underfoot, vats that smelled achingly familiar with whiffs of new-caught fish and salty brine clinging to their sides, sloshing open tanks that contained heaving crabs and lobsters, bales bound with thick ropes, and, everywhere in between this chaos and confusion, scuttling and quick-moving no-man’s wharf-cats, and bare-chested and bronze-skinned dockworkers with shaved heads and hooded eyes. The place smelled of coal dust, of sweating bodies, of all the various scents, both pleasant and evil, of the ocean. There was even a faint whiff of something oily and rotten, a miasma that was a reminder of the wide marshes that lay not too far away to the city’s west.

Vien shepherded her older daughter onto the dock, carrying her younger on her hip as she had done when they had departed Elaas in what now seemed to Amais to have been another age, and then stood surrounded by luggage, hesitating, unsure of what to do next.

“We should find an inn or a hostel or something,” Amais said, after a long silence.

“Yes,” Vien agreed, her tone conveying simple agreement and a total loss as to how to start looking for such a place. The laborers hefting their loads passed back and forth, parting to flow around Vien and her daughters as though they were a rock in a stream. Some might have turned their head marginally to glance at the solitary woman and the two children, waiting for something that never came, but most simply ignored them.

Amais scanned the buildings beyond the wharf. Even to her young and inexperienced eyes they did not look promising at all. Some were no more than padlocked storage facilities, with their windows securely covered by wooden shutters. Others, those that had actual people going in and out of them, were divided between two types. One consisted of a string of busy offices where men ducked in with bulging bags and armfuls of paperwork, re-emerging with sour faces and tight lips that betokened either their having sucked on a particularly sour lemon or having just paid large sums of money to people they considered undeserving for ‘services’ they resented being obliged to buy. The other, which she could smell all the way across the wharf, had quite different purposes and the people coming out of these wore expressions that, if not ecstatic at their lot in life, were at the very least tolerably content with it for the duration of the panacea doled out by rice wine or sorghum ale.

Amais saw no apparent lodgings and what she could overhear from the conversations going on all around her the language that was spoken here was different from the one she thought she knew, the one she had thought would be spoken by all of Syai—a different dialect, a different accent, it sounded harsh and foreign and she found herself close to tears of pure frustration and helplessness even while her mind was collecting these sounds and smells and images, sorting them, cataloguing them, filing them smartly away for future reference, for future stories. There were lots of stories here. Amais could feel them all around her, rubbing against her ankles like friendly cats, ducking into alleys just out of her line of sight and inviting her to follow.

But those were for later. Those were for when she was fed and housed. And Vien…

“
Nixi mei ma
?” The voice was soft, almost too soft to be heard over the hubbub of the harbor. Both Amais and Vien turned their heads, sure they had heard something but not certain of what. Their eyes met those of the man who had spoken, wiry and barely tall enough to be eye-level with Vien. He bowed to them, having got their attention, presenting them with a brief glimpse of a beaded round cap that fitted snugly around his head, and then straightened again, smiling.

Amais scratched around in her brain for the meaning of the words he had just uttered and came up, incongruously perhaps, with ‘Have you eaten?’

“No,” she said helplessly, slanting the words in what she thought might be comprehensible to the local speaker, staring at the man. “Thank you,” she added, after a moment, and bowed back in the manner that he had done. It seemed to be called for, just basic politeness.

His eyes glittered as he offered a small smile. When he spoke again, it was slowly, enunciating his words, and Amais found she had little trouble understanding him.

“I apologize,” the man said, “for intruding, but I think that you are strangers in the city. Might you be looking for a place to stay tonight?”

Vien still looked a little confused. Amais glanced at her quickly, and ‘translated’. Vien blinked several times, quickly.

“But who is he?” she asked Amais, in the high court language of old Syai that she had been taught by her mother.

The man obviously understood, because he bowed again, this time directly to Vien. “Beautiful lady,” he said, in heavily accented but compatible dialect, “my sister runs an inn not ten minutes from here by pedicab. It is safe, cheap, might I interest you in lodging there with her tonight?”

Amais found her heart thumping painfully, her eyes darting from the smiling tout to her apparently frozen mother. Aylun, in her mother’s arms, was obviously being clutched at ferociously, but had caught the mood of the moment and didn’t do more than let out a small soft whimper.

“We have to sleep somewhere, Mother,” Amais said, in the language of Elaas, something she knew that the man would not understand. His expression didn’t change as she spoke but she saw his glance sharpen as he tried to interpret her words.

“But how do I know we can trust him?” Vien said, thankfully in the same language. Amais had not been at all sure that she would take the hint. “I mean, he could be anybody, taking us anywhere… I don’t know this city…”

“We have to stay somewhere,” Amais repeated.

“Do you think we should take the chance?”

Aylun whimpered again, a little more loudly. Vien bent her head over her toddler to hush her, and Amais bit her lip.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

She did not tell her mother, not ever, that she had heard the man give instructions to the lead pedicab that would convey them all to the inn at which they were to stay—and then, a few minutes into the ride, having watched the three lost returning souls staring around them with round eyes and open mouths since he had loaded them and their luggage into the pedicabs, change his instructions. At the very least she had thought she understood, “No. Not the other place. Go to…” and what followed was incomprehensible, perhaps an address. Either way, it would have been imperceptible if she hadn’t been paying attention. But the pedicabs suddenly turned away from the warren of steadily narrowing dirt streets into which they had been heading and emerged onto a busier thoroughfare, a still narrow but cobbled road in decent repair, choked with pedestrians, pedicabs, bicycles, horses, donkey-pulled carts, the occasional antiquated rickety-looking sedan chair that looked more affectation than a comfortable or even convenient form of transportation, sherbet and sweetmeat vendors and children who appeared to be selling or giving out printed sheets of paper and who were darting in and out of the traffic in a manner that made Amais clutch the edges of her seat in fear for their lives. A couple of times she thought she saw a woman dressed in the silks she had originally envisaged, but the women in question were not out in the street, exactly, but hovered in certain doorways, or were in the process of sashaying up narrow stairs that led into mysterious shadows of upstairs parlors.

A sharp bark by the leading pedicab operator brought them all to a halt outside a shabby hostelry. Vien paid the pedicabs, and then offered a handful of what she had been given in change to the man who had brought them here, and again it was only Amais who really paid attention to the reaction that the money produced—his face washed with ephemeral expressions of surprise, delight, and perhaps a faint tinge of regret. She knew that her mother had offered too much, that the man might have wondered how much more she had on her, if it wouldn’t have been more lucrative to have delivered them to the first place he had had in mind, after all—and not to the one where they now found themselves, shabby and threadbare and with the turquoise paint peeling off the pillars outside the front door but looking quite respectable for all that.

The proprietress, a hatchet-faced woman with a mouth that appeared to have forgotten how to smile if it had ever known it, showed them to a single small room on the third floor of this establishment—but after the cramped cabins on the ships the place looked like a palace to Amais. They would each have a pallet of their own, without the need to climb swaying ladders when ready for bed, with actual room to move between them. The windows were shuttered; the landlady crossed to them and flung the shutters open, letting it light, air, and all the smells of the city.

“There is a tea house around the corner,” she said to Vien, “if you want dinner. Rent is a week in advance.”

Vien dutifully counted out the rent money in gold—the only currency she actually had on her—and the landlady left with a raised eyebrow but without another word. Amais had the uncomfortable feeling that once again her mother had doled out too much. It was hard, with gold—she made a mental note to find out if any of it could be exchanged for local money that could be better figured out.

Vien deposited Aylun down on the nearest bed, and sank down beside her.

“I don’t think I can go anywhere tonight. I need to rest, I need to think.”

“Aylun will be hungry.”

“I know,” said Vien, rummaging in her bag for more gold. “Go to this teahouse. Bring us back something to eat.”

Amais opened her mouth to say something, and then changed her mind, taking the coins her mother had thrust into her hand and turning away. She closed the door very gently behind her, as though she feared that a slam might wake her mother up—for that was exactly what Vien was, dreamy, almost sleepwalking, buckling under the weight of this place and its impressions and all that it meant—and the memories that crowded around incongruously of a different life somewhere far away which now seemed no more than one of Amais’s stories. Amais knew all this because she fought against the same shock herself. Part of her was whispering,
Welcome home
. The other part wanted nothing so much right at that moment than to hear her father’s deep voice utter, in a language unknown in this strange land, words that would have made her instantly feel cocooned in the security and the power of his love: “She is with me.”

Vien ventured out of her room only on the third day, and had not gone far. The streets seemed to frighten her a little, and she looked lost and unhappy. She tried for days—she would take the urn with the ashes of her mother, as though that was a talisman against some unspeakable horror that awaited her in the city and which she was pitifully unable to understand, and venture forth with a clear intention of visiting the Chirinaa Temple and taking care of this, the most sacred and—as she had thought—the most pressing of the things she had sworn to do when she returned to Syai. But she never made it to any Temple. She avoided Temples as though she was afraid of them, of what she might find there. Chirinaa had been so very different from what Vien had thought it would be—not that she had ever had any clear expectations, but the reality had been coldly inimical to all of the ones that she might have begun to shape in her mind—that Vien instinctively shied from having this last illusion destroyed. What if the Temple she chose was nothing like she expected? What if there too she was so inept, so inexperienced, so utterly lost? What if she did or said the wrong thing and her mother’s spirit remained forever denied rest?