The Embers of Heaven (18 page)

“I am grateful,” Amais whispered.

“It is the least I can do in payment of the debt I incurred when I asked what I had to ask of her,” Xinmei said.

“What happened to Xuelian?” Amais asked. That girl’s fate, substitute for her sister in an Emperor’s bed, had not failed to make an impression on her, over and above the story of
jin-shei
that had followed in the wake of those events.

“She fulfilled all her duties,” Xinmei said, “and far better than I might have done, perhaps. There are letters that she wrote home, also—would you like to see those? They are, after all, part of the story.”

“
Jin-ashu
?” Amais queried softly.

“Of course,” Xinmei said. “That was our language. Tonight, you are my guest here. Tomorrow I will have the letters brought to you. You are welcome to stay in my house for as long as you need to.” She rose gracefully to her feet. “
Fang wodai fang nimen
,” she said softly. “My house is your house. Be welcome in my home… in the name of lost
jin-shei
.”

Eight

The same aged retainer who had admitted Amais into the inner sanctuary of the lady Xinmei on her arrival brought her a carved wooden box the next morning and handed it to her in silence with a small bow. If his pursed lips were to be any indication, he strongly disapproved of any of these ‘family’ things being handed out to just anybody simply because they had thought to turn up at the gate and ask. Amais could only guess at how he felt towards the invaders in the outer courts, and how his gnarled hands must itch to usher every last one of the troops quartered in this house out of the gate, lock the doors behind them, and fumigate the quarters they had fouled by their presence in the ancient halls.

But she spared him little further thought. She had been offered the services of a bathhouse by another aged crone of a female servitor, who escorted her into the facilities and provided her with a cake of homemade soap and a somewhat faded but still resplendent linen towel. Thankful at the opportunity, Amais luxuriated at the chance to get clean, even soaping and rinsing her long hair. She put on a pair of simple country cotton trousers, like a peasant hoyden, a short-sleeved tunic top, and coiled her damp hair under a large conical woven straw hat such as the fieldworkers had worn on the day she had arrived at the farmhouse. Despite the harsh reminder that the country was at war around her, despite the slightly ominous presence of dozens of uniformed men and women with cold eyes and lethal weapons with which to enforce their orders however unpalatable they might turn out to be, despite the traces of tragedy which was waiting for her in the letters she had been handed to read—Amais felt young and free and vivid, and, in the manner of exuberant youth particularly when it found itself in the shadow of danger, invulnerable. She decided on pure impulse that she would leave the farmhouse and find some pretty spot in the surrounding countryside where she could sit and read Xinmei’s letter hoard at her leisure.

Behind the inner courts was a small postern gate hidden by the giant cedar in the corner, and the old doorman, after its existence had been wrung from him, took her there jangling a handful of keys with every appearance of being resigned as to whether this guest of his mistress’s came to bodily harm out there. It was all there in the square set of those lean shoulders—
if she wants to risk her neck by gallivanting across the fields it’s no concern of mine
. There might have been a brief impulse to snatch at the family letters—if the guest wanted to venture out there she was welcome, but she should leave the family treasures behind—but it was scotched. There were too many years here; too many years of obedience and loyalty. The mistress had given the letters; he did not do it willingly or with a good grace but he was a servant, and therefore had to accept that the mistress knew best.

Released from the gilded cage of the farmhouse, Amais made her way along a narrow path bordered by long grass until she came to a gentle hillside, a long, low slope dominated by a gigantic yet gracefully symmetrical tree of a kind she did not recognize and, at its foot and in its shade, the remnants of an ancient family graveyard with headstones so old that some of them had almost completely sunk into the ground, following the bodies and the ashes of those whose resting places they marked. These old family plots were commonplace in Syai, and if properly planned, facing in the correct directions and on suitable ground, they were remarkably free of ghosts or lingering spirits. There was merely a feeling of peace here, of being at one with the past and the ancestors who had inhabited it, precisely the kind of atmosphere that would go perfectly with the letters Amais had come here to read.

It seemed to be deserted. Down-slope, a way away and to the left of her, a handful of people worked in a distant field, but there was no human presence here. Her only companions were the breeze that stirred the long grass by the wayside and the silvery leaves of the old tree, and birdsong coming from somewhere beyond the hill.

Amais took off her hat and shook her damp hair out, letting it fall about her shoulders and dry naturally in the sun and the summer breeze. She found a spot where a fold in the ground and a couple of old gravestones leaning towards one another made a perfect comfortable cradle, sat down with a small contented sigh, and, offering a small prayer to those who rested in this place, nestled her back against the stones, and hauled out the box and its letters.

They had been sorted by date and carefully wrapped into individual silk parcels with
jin-ashu
script on the silk indicating the nature and the dates of the letters within. On one of these another note had been pinned, with a single line of calligraphy—Xinmei’s hand, Amais supposed. It simply said,
These are the ones you want to see
.

They were the letters between Xinmei and her
jin-shei-bao
sister, whose name, as Amais only found out now, was Lianqin. Xinmei’s impassioned letter was there, the one in which she had begged Lianqin in the name of
jin-shei
to take her place in the Temple, but it was Lianqin’s reply that riveted Amais’s attention:

If you ask a bird to give up hope of the sky so that another might feel the wind on its wings, if you ask a man to give up his sight so that another might see, if you ask a peach blossom not to bloom so that its fellow on the branch might greet the bee and receive the blessings that allow it to turn, in the Gods’ own time, into the peach—all of these things might seem hard to do, but if you ask any of them in the name of something that is bigger than they or you or I,  then it can be done, anything can be done. If you ask me in the name of the vow that binds us, I will give you my space in the sky, my share of the light, I will let you be the blossom that bears the peach. I will climb the mountain and find the Gods that wait for me there and I will make that place the one where I was meant to be in this life and on this earth before Cahan calls me home. And I will learn to understand the blessings that the Gods choose to bestow upon me.

Amais was so engrossed in this that it was some time before she became aware that she was being watched. When she finally tore her eyes away from the page, she found that she had to blink several times to clear the blur of tears from her vision—and then found herself staring into the eyes of a bare-footed man perhaps in his early thirties, dressed in simple peasant garb with a red kerchief around his neck, a barrel-sized pail on the ground at his feet as he stood looking at her with a slight smile on his face.

Amais’s heart lurched, but it was not with fear. There was something in that smile that made her throat suddenly close, her breath coming in shallow little gasps through her parted lips.

They looked at one another for a long moment, and then Amais gathered what shreds of dignity she could and straightened, closing her mouth and tilting her head in a quizzical manner.

“Is there something you wanted?” she inquired, politely enough, pushing one unruly coil of almost-dry curly hair behind her ear.

“Ah… no,” the man said. His voice was pleasant, but not cultured; this was no etiolated aristocrat, the richness of the loamy earth of Syai was in his tone and his pronunciation. “It’s just… you reminded me somewhat of me. A very long time ago. Even the place…” He indicated the tilted gravestones with an economical nod of his head. “When I was a boy, I used to escape to just such a spot as this, except that my tree was an ancient, twisted old willow. It was sanctuary, me and my books. And my father coming down upon me in the wrath of the righteous, chivvying me to do my chores. It’s been a long time since I have thought of those days, but seeing you there…I do apologize if I startled you.” His smile broadened slightly, and he offered her a small courteous bow—and suddenly he was something else than Amais had thought that he was. That bow was no sharecropper’s gesture, but something civilized and full of hidden protocol, learned in halls and chambers of power; it was something that would have been worthy in
baya-
Dan’s shadowy rooms, Imperial Princess in exile that she was.

“And what was it,” Amais asked after a moment, “that you were reading?”

“I owned two books at the time,” her companion said. “If it wasn’t one, then it was the other. I don’t recall, any more. It’s been wrapped in the shed skin of too many years, and put away deep.”

“You’re a poet,” Amais said, in reluctant admiration.

He offered another light bow, this time of acknowledgment. “It has been said of me,” he said. “It is not all I am.”

“Are you of these lands?”

“No. My home—and my willow tree—are far from here. It’s been many years since I’ve been back there, and it will probably be more years before I return. Times are difficult right now… but better times are coming.”

“You know this? For certain?”

“Better times are always coming,” he said, and this time the smile was an outright grin. “And you? Your looks alone make you a stranger in this place, to say nothing of that wonderful accent.”

“I am a visitor,” Amais said carefully, folding away Lianqin’s letter. “I am staying for a few days… with lady Xinmei, at the big house.”

“Ah,” he said noncommittally, nodding his head. “Then would you permit me, lady Xinmei’s guest, to rest from my work a while here amongst these stones and ask for your company?”

His eyes had come to rest on Amais’s bare feet, and she suddenly blushed violent pink, drawing her feet up and curling them under her.

“I… have no objection,” she said faintly.

He casually hoisted up the barrel he had been carrying as though it weighed nothing at all, although Amais could clearly hear liquid slopping in it and see that it was more than two thirds full of water, and placed it out of harm’s way by one of the gravestones. The strength it took to lift that thing must have been phenomenal; Amais, just from her one quick glance, was quite certain that she herself would not be able to shift it at all. Apparently quite unaware of the feat he accomplished, her companion selected another gravestone, right under the silver-leaved tree, and settled against it with a sigh.

The day was pure summer, warm and languid and full of contentment and a sense of being safe, secure, as though there was nothing wrong with the world and never would be, as though sorrow were a stranger and never an orphan or a widow had trod upon this blessed soil on which the two of them sat with a summer breeze stirring their hair, as though never an unhappy thought could cross the mind of any being who now drew breath and life. It was two people wrapped in summer and, somehow, in one another, their very presence in this place completing each other’s existence.

Baya-
Dan had had a word for something like this. Once, a long time ago, when Amais had been no more than a small child,
baya-
Dan had spoken about
yuan
, relationships that were meant to be, people who were meant to meet, who
had
to meet, who would unwittingly change the circumstances of the world they lived in just so that their path might cross with the path of this other person with whom they were born to share the same breath, the same light, the same summer’s day.

They might have known one another for a century, or a thousand years, these two people who had only just met in an abandoned family graveyard which housed kin belonging to neither of them. Neutral ground.

Amais felt a strange, huge peace unfolding inside her, a great pool of quiet deep water beside which her spirit sighed and subsided in pure surrender.

“And what are you reading?” her companion asked. It was an oddly intimate question, for one who had not even asked her name—but then, names seemed oddly superfluous here. They already knew each other’s names, or they did not need to know them. It was a simple, complicated thing…

“Letters,” she said. “From long ago. Letters from one
jin-shei-bao
to another.”

“Ah,” he said. “Women’s secrets.”

“They matter,” Amais said, rousing slightly. His tone had implied a gentle mockery of her reading material.

“Of course they matter,” he said, his expression serious again, almost apologetic. “But we were two worlds, once, the men and the women of Syai. I would like to think that we are past that now, that we are all a part of something bigger than that, that we are all people and not just who our gender mandates we have to be. I would like to think that there is no more need for secret brotherhoods or sisterhoods, now that all people are brother and sister to one another.”

“You think that is true? Of our world?” Amais said, turning a surprised gaze on him.

“Maybe not just yet,” he conceded. “But that is the world I want to see. A world where all would look out for the good of the one, and one would do what is necessary for the good of all—and it would not matter at all if the one was a man or a woman so long as it was a human being.”

“It is a good dream,” Amais said.