The Embers of Heaven (13 page)

Three

Lixao was nearly thirteen years older than Vien, a widower for many years. If asked about his work at the University library, which happened rather less often than he would have liked or thought appropriate, he would give an impression of being the head librarian himself, an indispensable part of the library’s workings, without whom the place would grind to a complete chaotic halt. In fact, he was no more than one of the four archivists in the library, answering to several senior officials at least three levels of authority above his head. But he was the supervisor of a clutch of copyists, one of whom was Vien.

It would have been hard to pinpoint a specific time at which they first became aware of one another as more than a superior and a lowly employee. Lixao might well have been interested in someone as a potential concubine rather than a wife—he was sufficiently of the old school to consider that as a real possibility—but times were changing. Concubinage might have still flourished behind closed doors, in existing arrangements, but it was considered increasingly inappropriate to initiate such a liaison with a woman, especially one who had been married before and was already a mother. So Lixao, once he found his eye caught by his new copyist, had courted her in the traditional manner with a view to marriage—and Vien, lost, lovely Vien, who had been struggling to find her place in a world that had turned harsh and alien on her, surrendered with joy to the idea of belonging to someone again, of having someone who would be obliged to take care of her.

She did not consult her daughters. She did not feel it necessary. Lixao had asked
her
to marry him, not the children—they were merely baggage that came along with the deal. He himself had children, after all—a son and two daughters, all grown and with families of their own—and they were not consulted either. When introduced to their father’s new wife, Lixao’s children were polite but indifferent.

Vien’s daughters were another story.

Aylun was now nine years old, a precocious and beautiful child, but she had been allowed to run wild, to grow up under such discipline as her older sister had been able to provide. She had been taken from Elena’s early influence, and the entire world of Elaas, when she had been almost too young to remember it. She knew of its existence, and she sometimes talked about the journey that had brought her from there to Syai with an air of one who was claiming it for a real memory—but even that was doubtful, and might have just been a cobbled-together version manufactured from the things that Amais had told her. Aylun had grown up in a world where no adult had really had taken charge of her, and she had come to accept the existence of such a world as her due. When Lixao came into her life, he tried to assert a father’s authority over her, attempting to mete out discipline over what he saw as transgressions and childish tantrums. The only result of that was that Aylun became sullen, rebellious, and—because Vien, as a dutiful wife, always took Lixao’s part—estranged from both her stepfather and her mother.

For Amais, it was quite different.

She had known her father, and had idolized him. For her, Lixao could never be anything other than a counterfeit copy of a shining original, the figure of legend who had taught the young Amais to swim, who had taken her to play with wild dolphins, who had been a titanic pillar of strength and of unquestioning love. If Nikos had ever disciplined her harshly, she had forgotten it. The word ‘father’ had a specific meaning for her, and it was not associated in any way with Lixao’s prematurely lined face, short-sighted dark eyes behind round spectacles, and primly pursed thin-lipped mouth. He wanted both Vien’s girls to address him as Father—Aylun, although she avoided addressing him at all if she had any choice in the matter, complied, if sulkily, but Amais refused. She was sixteen years old, nearly adult, and Lixao could hardly exact obedience by corporal punishment; he tried stern reprimands, but neither those nor Vien’s tearful requests brought any results. Amais was very polite, adhering to every point of protocol required of her except that one. When she had occasion to speak to her mother’s new husband she found ways of doing so without invoking any form of direct address at all.

Aylun was too young and far too caught up in her own rebellion to talk this over with in any meaningful way; Vien had happily allowed herself to be subsumed by her new position in life—someone’s wife again, sure of her status, secure in the fact that someone else was dealing with the practical aspects of day-to-day living. She had even been provided with a maidservant, hitherto part of Lixao’s bachelor establishment, who had been retained to cook and clean in the new domestic set-up. Amais fled to the only person in Linh-an to whom she could pour out her troubles, the only person who would listen to her problems and who might give advice for seeking solutions.

The Great Temple had become a sanctuary for Amais, a place where she could pretend that the old days were real again and all around her. There was a vast and brooding magnificence about the Temple; it was no longer a young and vibrant thing but it wore its centuries with grace, like a Dowager Empress, and if the air trapped in its Circles sometimes felt stuffy and stagnant, unstirred by any breath of change for many years, it was also loaded with the comforting and familiar scents and sounds that made it easier to bear the contemporary dramas that flourished outside these venerable walls. As Jinlien’s friend, Amais had gained access to some of the inner gardens of the Temple, largely unchanged since Tai’s time; she had witnessed the leaves turn and fall in the autumn, and had seen peach and cherry trees, descendants or replacements of those that might have blossomed for Tai centuries before,  burst into extravagant bloom in springtime. She had been allowed to tag along as Jinlien did basic Temple housekeeping tasks, like feeding the giant golden carp that moved sluggishly in the ponds and pools of the Third Circle gardens, or lovingly restoring the shrines of the quiet and holy Fourth Circle after supplicants had completed their devotions back to the quiet tranquility and perfect order that the next worshipper would expect to find there, or even helping with the clusters of incense burners at the three gates to the Fourth Circle—no two alike, crafted from copper and gold and ground rubies, glowing in improbable shimmery shades of red and gold, speckled with crimson and dark green.

The burners had their own rituals and customs, requiring a composed and serene frame of mind; somehow Jinlien contrived to have Amais helping with the burners whenever she turned up at the Temple particularly agitated about something, using the age-old Temple procedures to soothe and calm a distressed supplicant coming to seek peace and fulfillment at the feet of the Gods themselves.

“They are in your hands,” Jinlien said, handing a dull bronze pot full of smoldering embers to Amais. “There must always be a fire in the heart of the incense burners. These, as you see them, have not been allowed to cool for almost a thousand years.”

“What happens if you let it go out?” Amais asked, distracted from her own problems by the grandeur of a legacy that had kept the earthly fires burning for almost a millennium with little embers of heaven.

Jinlien had dug around the fine incense ashes that filled the burners with a tiny ivory-handled spade and had extracted the old ember she was replacing into a brass pot of her own, nodding to Amais to insert a fresh one into the cavity provided, burying it lightly with more ash, laying a curl of new incense on the surface.

“You’re carrying it,” Jinlien said as she worked, indicating the brass pot in Amais’s hand with a nod. “When they go out, their light dies. They turn into dead dull things, like your ember pot.”

“But it’s full of embers,” Amais said. “Shouldn’t there be enough warmth to rekindle it?”

“They never come back to life,” Jinlien said. “If the fire is allowed to die, the incense burner dies—and it cannot be revived. These have not cooled since they came out of the fires in which they were born; no amount of embers can replace that first spark of life once it’s gone. Once a burner is cold, it is dead, good for nothing—its only value as a container in which new embers are brought to these, their living brothers and sisters.”

“So these were incense burners too? Just like those ones?” Amais asked, inspecting her ember pot with something like astonishment. There didn’t seem to be anything in common between the plain bronze bowl she carried and the wonderful glowing things she was tending.

“Yes,” Jinlien said, “once upon a time. But their embers were allowed to cool, to die, and the burner died with it.”

“What happens to the one who allows that to happen?” Amais said, lifting round eyes to her friend’s face.

“The sight of the dead burner,” Jinlien said quietly, “has often been considered punishment enough. It’s like a murderer being made to spend the rest of his life sharing the same house with the corpse of the person he had killed.”

After being entrusted with something like this, it seemed churlish to carp too much about the iniquities of a fleeting mortal life whose troubles were to the incense burners as the lifespan of a gnat, flashing past, gone and forgotten almost before they had vanished. The incense burners’ message to Amais, with Jinlien as proxy, seemed to be a soothing litany of calm and serenity, a glimpse of the true Way, a chance to place these temporary annoyances in context and to realize that they would not last forever.

But it was Jinlien herself, independently of the incense burners and aware of Amais’s continuing interest in the vanishing
jin-ashu
language of the women of Syai, who had inadvertently set into motion events she could not possibly have foreseen when she encouraged Amais to use her new stepfather as a connection to the library, with its dusty back rooms filled to the rafters with unarchived and esoteric books and scrolls some of which could well have proved to be remnants of the thoughts and prayers of the women who had lived in the lost women’s country of Syai from many centuries ago.

The first time that Amais approached Lixao to discuss the matter, it was in general terms—she had merely asked, without going into details, about uncatalogd material in the library.

“There are rooms of it,” Lixao said. “We could probably put those rooms to better use—but nobody knows if anything really valuable is lying at the bottom of those stacks. So they are left alone. Of course, it is not for me to say, but if it were up to me the matter would have been dealt with properly years ago. Yes, yes, there are rooms of uncatalogd material.”

“Perhaps I could help with sorting it out?” Amais suggested hopefully.

“It needs trained hands,” Lixao said. “We can’t let children do that kind of work. How would you
know
if something was important?”

It was entirely possible that he had never meant to sound supercilious or dismissive, but that was what Amais heard—a patronizing pat on the head and an unspoken
Go away, little girl, and don’t bother me now
. Quick-tempered, passionate and far more precocious than Lixao gave her credit for, Amais bit off the retort that came bubbling to her lips and retreated, for her mother’s sake. But she tried again, some time later, after she had had a chance to cool down, and that time Lixao finally picked up on her earnestness.

“What is that you hope to find there?” he asked in a perplexed manner, obviously trying to mentally thumb through the library holdings and discover why a sixteen-year-old girl would be so keen to bury herself in ancient dusty papers.

Amais had thrown caution to the winds and offered up the truth. “I think there may be
jin-ashu
writings in there somewhere,” she said. “I would like to find them, and read them, and learn the language all over again, from its roots, from the hands of the women who knew it from the cradle. And perhaps help other women learn it too.”

“
Jin-ashu
?” Lixao echoed. “The women’s language? Stuff and nonsense. Why would the University library hold on to recipes and letters about infants’ birthday parties?”

“It was not recipes and birthday parties!” Amais retorted, finally letting her temper get the better of her. “Women wrote histories in that language. Poetry.”

“Poetry? What kind of poetry would that be? If it’s poetry that you’re interested in, we have that—we have many scrolls of classical poetry, beautiful work… except I don’t know if they’d let a child…”

“I am not a child!” Amais flared. “Tell me, do you have any of Kito-Tai’s poetry?”

“Of course,” Lixao said. “I think we do, that is. The name is familiar.”

“Well, those poems were written in
jin-ashu
,” Amais said. “They were written in
jin-ashu
first, in the women’s language, long before any man laid eyes on them.”

“Ridiculous,” Lixao said. “Kito-Tai is a classical poet.”

“A woman who happened to be a poet. Do you have this one?” Amais had copied out an early version of one of Tai’s poems that she had found in one of her later journals, a delicate work about life and love and spring, and now she threw that manuscript down before Lixao. He reached out to pick it up by one corner, adjusting his glasses with one hand, and scanned the first few lines; then he frowned, adjusted his glasses further, picked up the paper with both hands, and read the whole poem.