The Embers of Heaven (20 page)

She retired to her room after a while, unable to bear even the thought of being that close to him, a courtyard away, divided only by a gate in a thin wall, both of them bareheaded under the same summer sky. Xinmei had her dinner sent in to her, together with a courteous note expressing Xinmei’s hopes that Amais should feel better soon. Night came, and with it a restlessness the likes of which Amais had never known; she tossed and turned, unable to find comfort, snatching fragments of fitful sleep and waking again with a start to stare with wide, bleak eyes into the empty shadows in the corners of her room. She finally gave up as the night was beginning to fade into the first pale light of dawn, and rose from her bed, putting on the same light peasant garb that she had worn on her previous foray into the countryside. She had seen where the old retainer had left the keys to the little postern, and now she crept there in the pre-dawn half-light, took the postern key off the ring, unlocked the postern door with hands that did not seem to belong to her at all, and slipped outside. She hesitated for a moment—it was, at best, rude to unlock a locked door in a house not her own and leave it unsecured behind her, but if she locked it and kept the key she would effectively be locking in the inhabitants, which seemed worse. However, given the uncertain times, she decided to err on the side of caution and locked the postern behind her, pocketing the key.

The little cemetery seemed a lot farther away than she remembered, and the land a lot more brooding and stark under the gray glow in the sky that faded out colors and cast everything as either shadow or light. But there were other things there, too—a sense of helpless excitement, something that was halfway between fear and exhilaration. And, once again, that thing that her grandmother had called
yuan
. It was without a trace of surprise that she rounded the final corner of the path and saw that someone was already at the ancient cemetery, waiting.

Iloh was as aware of her as she was of him, apparently, because his head turned sharply in her direction even as she paused at the foot of the hill. They stood looking at one another for a long, silent moment, and then he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper.

“I hoped you would come.”

“Why did you not tell me who you were?” Amais asked, her own voice very low. They spoke as though there were spies in the long grass, in the leaf-concealed branches of the tree above them, behind or even below the sagging gravestones at their backs. “Why were you doing farmyard chores at all… you, here, in this place which is not your own?”

“I sometimes do a chore or two for the peasants on whose land my people are quartered,” he said. “It reminds me of who I am, of where I came from—these are people who could be my own family. I spent my childhood working the earth with my two hands. It gives me roots; it ties me to the land. And if I had told you who I was… you would have done one of two things. You would have recoiled from me, or you would have bowed to me. I find that most people do one or another these days, as soon as I name myself. And you… you were just so beautiful and so passionate and so wise, sitting there in the sunlight with your hair blowing free… perhaps I should have said something. But I was selfish. I wanted a few moments in which I was not the man that you would have expected of the one named Iloh. I was simply… me.”

She appeared to have taken the few steps that had been required to close the space between them, and now stood less than a pace away from him, looking at him mutely with those improbable and astonishing eyes. Iloh found himself reaching out for her with a gesture of pure instinct, his fingers finding a strand of curling hair, twining themselves into it. They stared at each other, devouring one another’s faces with their eyes, frozen by this moment, unable to do anything other than ache for things that appeared both irrevocably beyond their reach and painfully, vividly inevitable.

“Iloh,” she said softly, tasting the name.

His fingers tightened as she spoke, and then his hand followed the fall of her hair, dropped to her shoulder, rested there lightly.

“And what is
your
name,” he said, “now that you know mine?”

She nearly gave him her travel alias—Mai—but something changed it in her mouth, and she gave him the truth. “Amais,” she said.

He sucked in his breath sharply at that, as though he had been struck, and then, astonishingly, laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh; there was something harsh in it.

“Amais,” he repeated. “Nightingale. Oh, by all that’s holy in this world.”

“What is it?” she said, a little alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“Many years ago,” Iloh said, “a blind girl read my face and forecast my destiny. Most of what she told me has come to pass exactly as she said. And one of the things she said was that I would love truly only one woman my whole life and that she would be a songbird, a free spirit, and someone I could never truly have… And I thought…” He paused, bit his lip, looked down—and then pulled his shoulders back, drawing himself to to his full height, lifting his eyes to meet hers squarely. “There is something you should know,” he said, his voice suddenly changing, becoming rather more matter-of-fact. “I am married. To a woman who is an artist—an actress—a woman whom I wholly and utterly believed at the time to be the soul mate that had been forecast for me. A woman whose stage name is Niaomai.”

“
Songbird
,” Amais translated softly.

“Yes, my Nightingale,” Iloh said. “I should have waited. I should have known that you would come.”

The first shafts of true dawn had begun to creep over the hills, and glittered strangely in Amais’s eyes as she reached out to lay her own hand lightly over Iloh’s where it still rested on her shoulder.

“But I am here now,” she said.

With a sound that was almost a groan his hand tightened on her shoulder, and then moved to the back of her neck, down her spine, coming to rest on the small of her back and drawing her inexorably towards him. He burrowed his face into the mass of curly hair, nuzzled first the side of her neck and then the hollow of her throat, where a wild pulse beat in time with her heart, as she gave herself to the embrace, molding her body to his.

Iloh slept, after, under the silver-leaf tree—slept as though exhausted, or released. Amais did not. Instead, she watched him sleep as dawn broke and the sun began to climb into the summer sky—and then, finally, she carefully extricated herself from where she was lying with his arm around her and quietly dressed again, running her fingers through her tangled hair to give it some semblance of order and decorum. When she walked away from him, her bare feet made no sound on the soft grass, but he stirred in his sleep and sighed as though he knew she was leaving.

She turned around to look back, once, and it was as though she was watching something she had seen long ago in a dream. There was a single blossom in the silver-leaf tree that she could have sworn had not been there before, a golden flower, huge and bright, blooming right above where Iloh lay. Even as Amais watched the golden petals began to fall. One came to rest on his face, on his brow, like a crown bestowed upon a king. One landed softly on his mouth and stayed there for barely a moment until his next exhaled breath made it skitter to the side and then fall away—but it had landed there, the portent of a king’s eloquence. And a third had come to rest where one of his hands lay cupped over his heart, nestling into his palm—gold into the hands of a king.

It was only then that Amais recognized the tree.

She had seen it first in a dream that had come to her at Sian Sanqin, the dream that drove her from the Temple’s tranquility back into the seething and churning real world and its wars and upheavals. But she had not known what it was, what it signified, until she had found mention of it in the letters from Xinmei’s box that she had been reading for two days now. It was the
wangqai
tree, the heirloom of Xinmei’s family, the tree that bloomed only when a new Emperor was crowned in Syai, a signal that a new concubine needed to be prepared and sent to the royal bed—and then with only a single flower. It was an announcement, a warning, a sign.

There was a man asleep under it now, covered with the petals from that one heraldic blossom.

A new Emperor for Syai.

The journal looked old, worn, its leather covers faded with age from what had once been a vibrant red to a sort of dusty purplish shade, the color of dead rose petals. The ghost who was Amais-the-dreamer was looking at this mysterious yet disturbingly familiar object as though over someone’s shoulder—it was that young woman from her dream again, holding the red book in almost reverent hands, gazing at pages thickly covered with a graceful brush-and-ink script.

It had been a different world, back when these characters were inked onto the paper. A different time. A time of grace and gentleness, and subtle power that never really spoke its name but flowed like smoke into every crack and crevice of society, setting brick and mortar and heart and spirit, giving strength.

“
So long ago,” the young woman who held the book whispered. “So long ago. So fragile. So easy to forget.”

“
Oh, no,” said the other voice from this dream-world, the little girl, who turned out to be sitting on cushions at the young woman’s feet, a stack of red-covered books much like the journal her companion was holding piled around her. “Nothing is ever really forgotten, you know. Time is a heavy thing, like ashes, like snow; things just get buried in it, and by it. But then the ashes are swept away to make room for a new fire, and the snow melts in the spring, and there it is, the thing you buried, and it looks not a day older than when it was left there although a thousand years may have passed.”

“
But I can only read some of this,” the young woman said, lifting her head, tearing her eyes away from the writing in the book.

“
That only means,” said the child at her feet tranquilly, “that there is still enough snow or ashes upon it for you not to be able to see it clearly yet.”

And she bent over her own task, something quite different from reading ancient script—she had a lap-board cradled across her knees where she sat cross-legged on her cushions, and the lap-board was covered by a piece of aged vellum paper, golden yellow and with the ragged edges that spoke of its having been lovingly hand-made. She held a pen, one with a flat metal nib usually used for calligraphy, but she was drawing something with it instead of writing. She had only just begun her task, and the shape taking form on the paper was still no more than a few bold straight lines, a mere ghost of itself.

“
What are you doing?” asked Amais-and-her-alter-ego.

The child bent over her task, dipping the pen into a leather inkwell, drawing another careful, purposeful line.

“
You will see,” the small artist said, “when it is time.”

The young woman turned her attention back to the journal.

“
This is poetry,” she said. “I don’t know this one. I’ve never seen this journal.”

“
Can you read it?”

“
I think so,” said the young woman carefully, and pointed her index finger at the lines she was perusing, following them while she pieced together their meaning, her finger hovering just above the precious page. “I think it says… ‘Dreams are strong, when they are given leave to fly, when they are given wings… dreams have never lived or breathed, and yet they are amongst the most immortal things…”

“
My poetry never rhymes,” the little girl said, without lifting her eyes off her drawing.

“
Your poetry…?” repeated the other, nonplussed. “This is ancient, more ancient than you can know—but you’re right in one thing, in that era poems were pieces of exquisite verbal embroidery, they didn’t need rhyme or meter to make them perfect.”

“
Nothing is perfect,” the little girl said, “not the way you mean, nothing can be that perfect. Things can be almost flawless, but they belong in their time and their age and what was thought without a blemish a moment ago or a hundred years ago is mottled with faults if you look at it again with a different pair of eyes. Dreams and ideas change, as the world changes. That poem was never in that journal—you just wrote it, made it from the words that are on the page and the thoughts that are in your own mind and the feelings in your heart. That’s the way of poetry. You can never read it twice and have it be the same.”

“
So young, and such a philosopher…?” the young woman said, with a raised eyebrow and a smile.

“
I remember,” the little girl said, looking up briefly before her eyes dropped down again, “being young.”

The glimpse of that single short glance made Amais-the-dreamer shiver suddenly, because the eyes in that childish face were the eyes of a woman who carried the weight of worlds in her soul.

“
There,” said the child, breaking that thought before it led to a conclusion, “I am done. Look.”

What lay on the page, depicted in heart-stopping detail with only a few essential strokes and yet with a presence so powerful that it stood out in three dimensions from the paper, was a sword. It was an old-fashioned blade, one that might have been used in the armies of an Emperor from half a millennium before—but its edge held its wicked gleam there in the drawing, and it was easy to feel it slicing, chopping, cleaving, going through bone and sinew and flowing with blood.

The young woman reached for it, instinctively, and her fingers scrabbled for a moment on the paper; it was drawn well enough for the simple fact that she could not touch it to bring a startled small gasp to her lips.

“
What does it mean?” the young woman whispered, because this was a dream, and in dreams things always meant something, carried messages and significance and an otherness that belonged to worlds where every word was a prophecy and every prophecy was true.

“
Look again,” the child said, offering up the pen she had used, wooden handle first.

The young woman took it automatically, staring at it, and then did a double take as she realized that the metal nib with which the drawing had been made was no longer at the end of the wooden grip. Only a stub remained, something eerie and half-melted, where the nib had been joined to the pen.

The sword’s blade in the drawing gleamed with a light not its own.

“
It
is
real,” the young woman whispered. “You made it, out of this thing. It’s real, you turned the pen into the sword…”

“
And yet you cannot hold it,” the child murmured. “It remains but a paper sword upon a painted page.”

“
But I can feel it,” the young woman said. “I can feel the cold of it when I touch it.”

“
The pen could make the sword,” the child said, “but never could the sword make the pen.” She blew on the drawing gently, to dry it, and then removed the paper on which the sword rested from its board backing and offered it up to her companion with both hands. “Here, you keep that, and remember that the pen vanquished the blade, remember that when the time comes for you to believe it.”

“
There will come such a time?” the young woman said, and tears stood in her eyes and in the eyes of Amais-the-ghost behind her, tears for which she could offer no reason or explanation, tears that were tribute to a pain yet to come.

“
Times like that,” the little girl said, her voice a deep well of love and sympathy, “will always come.”

She raised her hand, then, and something came to alight on it, like a trained hawk to its mistress. Except that this was no hawk—it was a butterfly, huge and yet somehow weightless, ethereal, its wings opening and closing gently as though moved by breath. It gleamed in the half-light of the dream with the gleam that should never have been—its wings were made of iron and copper and gold, razor-edged, glowing. The little girl on whose wrist it rested gazed upon the creature for a long moment, and then lifted her arm, flinging the creature into the sky. It flapped its huge wings and was gone, swallowed by the mists; so was the child; so was the young woman; everything was gone, except the golden mists and a voice that spoke out of it, like a prophecy.

“
Poetry is remembered long after slogans are dust and ashes, dead offerings on the altars of lost gods. In the hour of destiny, remember the strength in fragile things.”