“No further,” she said. “There, that arch is still standing. At least you’ll be out of the rain.”
“Amais…”
“I will be all right,” she said. “I promise.”
He reached out for her, helplessly, but she slipped out of his arms and walked away with quick light steps, her way illuminated by the lightning.
It was gone, the great sacred building that she had known—melted into chaos, retaining no trace of the shape or form that she recalled. She realized that she must have crossed the Fourth Circle only when she found herself in the remnants of the gardens of the inner court—and even that, the lightning showed her, was a shattered mess of churned sand and ashes, littered with shapes that might have been fallen trees, piles of masonry, charred bodies. Amais finally got her bearings when she saw one of the ancient willows which she knew had been shading one of the entrance gates. It was still standing, but it had obviously burned, and it creaked and groaned now in the driving wind and rain. Underneath it, revealed by another blinding lightning flash, Amais saw a snapped dagger, with its point gone but a couple of fingers’ width of the blade remaining in the hilt.
She picked her way across to the tree, knelt beside it with one hand on a miraculously unburned patch of bark, reached out for the broken knife with the other.
She was foreign-born, her blood mixed with that of a foreign people; she knew that, understood that, accepted that. Perhaps it had been that trace of foreignness in her that had both kept her from understanding before this moment what Syai would ask of her, and now, when the hour had come, understanding it with a clarity that only an objective outsider looking in could possibly recognize. Perhaps it had been that foreignness that had allowed her to see beyond the old traditions, to bring an ancient glory out into the light of a new day in a guise entirely new and unlooked for. Kneeling there on Syai’s earth, her face turned up to the water from heaven, one hand resting on wood scarred by fire and the other on the broken steel of the dagger, she was one with the elements of her ancient kin, as purely and wholly a part of Syai as it was possible for a mortal woman to be. She was spirit, she was its spirit, she was what Xuelian had seen in her eyes and called Syai’s soul.
Xuelian had also said something else—had always referred to Syai as ‘she’.
And there they were, the mortal woman and her immortal land, both wounded needing each other.
There had, after all, been only one choice to make.
Amais folded her hand around the hilt of the broken dagger, dug with it into the rain-soft sand at her feet, hollowing out a narrow, shallow trench. She dropped the dagger into it, laid her hand across it so that her palm was on the metal and her fingers dug into the dirt on the sides of the hole, let the currents of the land course through her from her toes to the crown of her head, across her from the fingertip of one little finger to the fingertip of the other—earth, water, fire, metal, wood and spirit.
And spoke the ancient vow into the storm—just two words—softly, because her land didn’t need her to shout to be heard.
“
Jin-shei
.”
There were shadows. Deep shadows.
The woods were thick and dense—there was little undergrowth, but the trees grew close together, sometimes so close that Amais had to slip between them sideways, scraping the backs of her hands and her cheek and getting her hair caught and tangled in the low-growing twigs and branches.
There were trees. Everywhere she looked.
And then she looked harder, and they weren’t trees at all.
Every tree, every trunk, every bole—if she peered past the illusion of bark and bough, she could glimpse what was inside—faces, fingers, eyes sometimes closed and sometimes open and glittering and frighteningly aware and staring straight back at her through the veil of their illusion.
The forest started thinning a little just as she became aware of what it really was—people, it was all people!—and younger trees started appearing, and saplings, and mere sprouts of soft stems and one or two leaves trembling on top. And if Amais looked into those, they contained children—teenage boys with their hands in fists at their sides, little girls with their hair in braids, toddlers sucking their thumbs, babies with downy heads curled up asleep… even, in those barely sprouted plants, things that might have been in the process of becoming babies, tiny translucent pink things with dark alien eyes floating in a rosy glow like a halo, their perfectly formed but impossibly small hands held up near a face wearing an expression of dreamy serenity.
Amais stopped, carefully, watching where she placed her feet so that she would not hurt any living thing that might have curled near them, and simply stared.
“
Where am I?” she whispered.
She had not meant to speak out loud; this was a question that swirled in her mind, fluttered around the sleeping people in their trees, trembled for long curious moments at each plant before going on to the next.
“
Where it all begins,” a voice said in reply. Amais could not see the speaker, but she recognized the voice—it was that of the little girl with whom she had always shared these dreams.
“
But… how… why…?”
“
How? That I cannot tell you. That is something that lies between heaven and earth, and it is not for such as us to pick at. Why? Because there are people who need to understand. And you are one of the few who do. Come with me.”
“
Where are you?” Amais asked, turning her head, trying to place the direction from which the voice had come. She could see no movement out there, no life except the sleeping people in their trees.
The response to her question was a lilting laugh. “Oh, I am out there somewhere. So are you. Each of us is planted out here in our time. Just follow.”
“
Follow what?”
“
Follow the edge of the wood. Come. You need to see. You need to know.”
Amais turned to obey, and trod on something hard and round. She snatched her bare foot back as though the thing had scalded her, with a sinking heart, peering downwards to make sure she had not inadvertently crushed some baby in its sapling cocoon, but all she could see was a tiny round bead on the ground by the side of her foot. She bent to pick it up.
It was the yearwood bead that the little girl had given her, long ago, another dream away.
The yearwood bead from which… an entire forest had grown.
Amais closed her hand around the bead. “I think I begin to understand,” she whispered.
“
Not yet,” the voice of the little girl said. “Not yet. Come. Come and see.”
Slowly, carefully, Amais threaded her way through the child-wood at the edge of the forest that was people, her hand tightly clasping the bead that had been, perhaps, the physical incarnation of her own spirit. The trees and the saplings and the tiny little barely budded plants eventually started petering out, the gaps between them bigger and bigger, bare ground showing between. Bare ground that was dust blowing in the breeze that stirred the leaves and raised tiny dust devils on the ground. All too soon the plants were gone, except for sedge grasses lifeless with any life other than their own tenacious souls, and the plain that stretched out before Amais was huge, and empty, and parched.
For some reason the sight made her want to cry, and she clung to her own bead all the more tightly—for if she lost it, if she lost herself, in this desert, she would never gain the living lands again.
“
Why did you bring me here?” she asked the empty trembling air around her.
“
Because everything has an end,” the voice of the little girl said, and it sounded muffled, somehow, as though dust had got into it and started seeping into its cracks and crevices, choking it, damping down its ringing clarity into the mere memory of itself. “But not every end is an ending. Watch, now—look over there, over to the side. Back on the edge.”
Amais turned an obedient gaze where she was bid, and saw a man walking past a piece of the people-wood. He paced it out, and the plants at his feet were in a grid, planted with precise and meticulous care into rows and columns, regimented, obstinate, applying external order to the primeval chaos. He carried a watering can, and poured exactly the same amount of nourishing water into the roots of every plant, and they all grew almost identical—same height, same form, same shape. The man snipped with a pair of gardening shears at any errant branches, coaxing the plant back into a schooled and educated shape. The plants were flourishing, it could not be said that they lacked care, but several of them had a distinct air of yearning and melancholy, as though they wanted the freedom to cast out branches in whatever direction they wanted and knew that any attempt to do so would be met by the shears.
The man looked awfully familiar—someone Amais knew, or would know—time was fluid here, and it was hard to tell the future from the past. But he kept his head down and his focus on his work, and since she could not see the whole of his face at any given moment it was hard to be certain.
“
What is he doing?” she asked instead, watching curiously as the gardener went about his work.
“
Taking care of his own,” the voice of the little girl said. “Look at that in his hand. That is not a watering can that he used to scoop out water from some pond or fountain. Look closely—the can is his hand, the can is himself, he is watering those plants, those people, with what is inside him.”
“
And they flourish,” Amais said. “It is good.”
“
They flourish for a moment, for a year, for a decade, for a century,” the voice said. “And then the time of the gardener is over. Sometimes he finds another who comes in his place, another watering can at the ready, and the plants begin to drink again of a different soul, and they might thrive or they might wither. It is hard to say. But that kind of garden… lasts a lifetime. Or a generation. No longer.”
“
And what happens then?”
“
Sometimes, this,” the voice said, and it was obvious that it meant the desert at their backs where nothing living grew. “Some people are the living water that feeds others, and they are rich and nourishing, and their folk grow hardy and grow strong. But then they are gone. Other people…”
Something rolled against Amais’s foot, and she looked down. It was a yearwood bead, much like her own, but weathered, ancient, its carvings almost scoured by the sands of time. Instinctively she bent to pick it up, and passed it into the palm of the hand which held her own, and began playing with the two beads between her fingers… for just an instant. In a moment she became aware she held only one, as she had held before—her own. But it was different—edged with the age of the other one. Before she had a chance to comment, two more beads rolled towards her and came to rest at her feet. She collected them to, in a silence that was full of wonder, and cupped her hands around them all—and soon they were only one again, her own. And while her bead absorbed its fellows, she felt her own mind and spirit bloom with the souls and memories of those whose beads they had been.
And then they came to her, from all directions, and piled at her feet, buried her feet up to their insteps, then their ankles, then higher. Amais crouched down and buried her hands in the beads, and felt them all come to her, into her, felt her own yearwood bead gently take them and wrap them into itself and felt her spirit expand to take all the others that came asking admittance.
“
Some people are gardeners for a season,” said the voice that she had followed, and the little girl was finally there, standing a few steps away, her hands tucked into her wide sleeves, wearing a small smile that was almost sad. “Others are born to be the memory of the land, of its people—not for a season, but for always. It is not an easy thing to be, but I think you are starting to know what you need to do.”
The souls of her people, the bones of the land that had made her, came into Amais and found the empty places within her which had been waiting to be filled for so long. She was weeping, although she did not know exactly why, but her hands were open in the mass of beads at her feet, and her soul was open to the voices of the people who had come to her, and her body was rooted through the soles of her feet of the land that was her home.
She was smaller than the tiniest of the embryos in the woods behind her, waiting to be born.
She was bigger than the largest tree in the forest, bigger than the mountains, bigger than the sky.
She was nothing. She was everything. She was love and memory and dream, and life.