The Embers of Heaven (21 page)

The Street of Red Lanterns

“When you are worst beset by your troubles and weighed down by your life’s burdens—it is in the arms of love that you will find the courage to remember the things you must remember, the strength to abandon the things you must forget, and the wisdom to tell these things from one another.”

The Courtesan’s Journal

One

I must go back to the city.

Amais had told herself that it was this, something that smote her with the force of a command from the Gods themselves, that made her almost vanish from Xinmei’s house on the morning that she had woken to see Iloh asleep under the
wangqai
tree. Xinmei had been astir when Amais had returned to the house, and had been schooled in enough protocol not to ask about the reasons for her guest’s sudden departure—but there was something in her face, something knowing in her eyes, something that was not censure and yet was not approval, that made Amais certain that Xinmei knew precisely what had happened on that hillside at dawn.

It was not that Amais wanted to renounce anything that she had said or done in those pearly pre-dawn hours—indeed, she hugged close the memories that she had made, and knew that they would never fade from her heart—but as suddenly and powerfully as she had been compelled to keep that tryst that had taken her into Iloh’s arms so she was now driven to put distance between them, between two people who had connected on such a deep and fundamental level but whose futures lay on such impossibly different and divergent paths.

She had made a silent vow to him as she had turned to take her last look before she stole away that morning.

I will always be yours, if not always by your side.

But that was then. Reality had started creeping in almost as soon as she had left his powerful presence. Too many people were clamoring for supremacy in Amais’s mind—there was the romantic heroine of a deathless love story, who had cast her lot with the one man to whom she belonged and now had to suffer the consequences; the pragmatic, practical fisherman’s daughter from Elaas, who thought of the whole thing as an impossible dream and chided Amais to face the situation honestly, that it was all a fairy tale; the child that she still was in so many ways, who had suddenly realized that she was adrift in a dangerous and unknown world and who only wanted the comfort of her mother—even such scant comfort as Vien had been able to provide in all the previous crises of Amais’s life. It was that last that won. The uncertainty and the apprehension had been clear in her eyes as she had left Xinmei’s house—and Xinmei would have been less shrewd that she was if she hadn’t noticed them there, but it was hardly her place to detain her guest against her will. So Xinmei let Amais go, and then watched her for a long time from the postern gate with mouth pursed into an expression that was half resignation and half genuine concern. Behind her, the expression on her aged gatekeeper’s face had been much easier to read.
Not a moment too soon did that girl leave this house.

As strongly as she had been driven to leave Linh-an, so now the city called to Amais like a lodestone, a homing beacon—both as the place where she needed to return in order to continue her quest for lost
jin-shei
which she had so vividly glimpsed in Xinmei’s house, and as the only place in Syai that she could think of that was home and safe, that would shelter her against the storms of her life. But going back to the city turned out to be more of a mirage than Amais had realized—because if the Gods had been keeping the war out of her way on her outward journey, they had decided to more than make up for that as she tried to return. The war now faced Amais at every turn, an obstacle, a barrier, a living and breathing enemy from whom it seemed impossible to hide.

On the second day out from the sanctuary of Xinmei’s house, Amais was apprehended by a troop of the Nationalist army and questioned closely as to her intentions in that part of the country. Iloh’s enemies.

Amais had been taken by a two-man patrol of grunts, and taken to a tribunal of the three highest-ranking officers for disposal.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” one of the lieutenants demanded, his eyes cold slits of suspicion.

Amais had offered neither more nor less than the truth. “I am from Linh-an. I came here on a pilgrimage.”

“Not with that accent,” muttered the other lieutenant.

“And where is the rest of your group? A pilgrimage to where?” the first man who had spoken said, seemingly unable to communicate except by means of inquisition.

“I… no group. I came by myself. To Sian Sanqin. I came in search of…”

“Yes?” barked the lieutenant, leaning forward.

“I came to look for jin shei,” Amais whispered.

“What?”

“Women’s stuff,” said the commanding officer, his eyes resting on Amais with a mixture of wariness and calm appraisal.

“I never heard of…” began one of the men, but the commanding officer lifted a hand, cut him off in mid-sentence.

“You wouldn’t have,” he said. It was more than the simple statement of the obvious, that a man would not have known of women’s secrets—it was a judgment, however subtle, of that particular man’s ability to know or understand anything of importance. Amais, having lifted her eyes for a moment, happened to catch the commanding officer’s eyes as his sardonic glance returned to herself from  a swift, impatient flicker towards his truculent lieutenant. They looked at each other for a moment, the soldier and the captive, and then Amais dropped her gaze. The officer said nothing.

“Spy,” the first lieutenant summarized trenchantly.

The other lieutenant had laughed at the same instant, a single dry chuckle, apparently seconding his fellow’s judgment. “A slip of a girl with a foreign accent, wandering around sensitive strategic territory by herself?” he said, after the other man had sat back and crossed his arms, his mind made up. “A likely story. Who’s your contact?”

“Please,” Amais said, “I’m just trying to get home… to my family. To the city.”

“There’s a People’s Army between you and the city,” said the first lieutenant. “How did you hope to get past them? Who’s your contact? What information do you carry?”

It lasted for more than an hour, this interrogation. Amais told them that she knew nobody at all who belonged to the People’s Party—and didn’t lie, quite, because in a very real way it was the Party that belonged to Iloh rather than the other way around. But although she had answered their questions as honestly as she was able, her answers had apparently not been satisfactory enough for them to let her go; neither had they been incriminating enough for them to kill her. So when the commanding officer had had enough of the cat and mouse game that the questioning had turned into, he simply got up and said,

“Bring her.”

 Amais was dragged in their wake as they made their way, heavily armed and full of the desperate courage found in men who already know their cause is lost, to one of the ongoing hotspots of the war.

A battle had been raging for weeks in and around one hapless and deeply strategic village, with skirmishes where victory was alternately tossed from foe to foe as though in a bizarre game of catch. The village was by this time a wasteland of rubble and ghostly burned outlines of what had  once been houses and storage barns and pigsties. It had been overrun by one army or the other on a regular basis, its fields and hillsides won and lost and won again. Amais endured four of these confrontations, growing more and more terrified at every turn, fearing that she would be killed at any moment as she and a handful of other prisoners became too much of a burden for the fighting unit to worry about. Her captors lost no chance to tell her that if she had fallen into the hands of their opponents she would be dead by now.

“They take no prisoners,” one of the men had said, and spat out of the corner of his mouth, with derision, to show his opinion of the guerilla forces his outfit was fighting. Iloh’s men, those; something that Amais could not seem to make herself forget. “They don’t care about the people at all.”

Amais wanted to ask what had happened to the villagers who had once peacefully lived here with no thought except a prayer for a good harvest, but she could not scrape together the voice or the courage to even ask one of her fellow captives, all women except for two young boys who clung hollow-eyed to their mothers’ tattered skirts, if any of them were in fact the remnants of those villagers and how it was that the Nationalists cared for “the people” in a manner that they said Iloh’s armies did not. But her spirit quailed at this sudden explosion of noise and chaos and blood, and she was silent in the face of it all, silent and waiting only to die.

Amais and the other captives had been conscripted occasionally to change dressings and bandages on the wounds of some of the company. She herself had to do it for that commanding officer, once; she tried to keep her head down and her hands from trembling, but all the time she was aware of the eyes that rested upon her as she worked, aware of his gaze as though it had been a physical weight on her skin. He had reached out with his good hand, after she was done, and cupped her chin, lifting her face so that she had to meet his eyes with her own; she had braced herself for what might have followed. It was wartime, after all. People were fodder, one way or another. But he had done no more than that, had said nothing, had merely dropped his hand, sighed, walked away.

On another night not too long after that Amais had woken to the sound of stealthy motion, of grasping fingers groping for any reachable woman in the huddled pile in which they all slept—had known that others were awake, around her, that all were holding their breath and muttering words resembling prayer, asking that this shadow might pass—had heard a smothered gasp as that exploring hand had closed around somebody’s wrist or ankle. And then there was another noise, a startled yelp, a scuffle. Amais had opened her eyes and had seen the commanding officer hauling one of his men off the pile of cowering women by the scruff of his neck

“They are prisoners,” the commanding officer had said, softly but trenchantly. “They are not whores. Truth is the first thing that dies in any war; let not honor follow it.”

“You are no soldier,” Amais had whispered, her voice a bare breath between cracked lips. This was the man who had known what jin shei was, someone who still clung, in small ways, to the kind of honor and high principles that had guided Syai’s ancient society. Someone who pragmatically wore the Nationalist uniform, but underneath it still belonged, perhaps, to the vast and complex Empire that Syai once was.

He heard, turned his head marginally. “I am now,” he said. “If there was another life before this, count that, too, among the casualties.”

His authority held, still; the midnight groping by frustrated and angry soldiers had not been repeated. But even without that prospect hanging over the prisoners’ heads, their captivity and their unwilling participation in this war was a brutal forge for the spirit. There was no trace of the women’s country in any of this. There was no place for softness or gentleness or kindness—as Amais learned the hard way, when on the fourth skirmish the troop she was with lost badly. The captives had long since ceased to be guarded during these encounters, merely dumped in whatever hiding place their current handler thought most convenient and then picked up again when the skirmish was over—there was every confidence that the cowed women were still focused enough on survival not to do anything stupid like actually run into the crossfire to escape, and if they did then it was their own doing and not their captors’ responsibility. That time, the fourth time, the man who came for them was not the Nationalist officer but someone wearing the same kind of uniform that Amais had seen not so long ago in the gardens of Xinmei’s outer courts. Iloh’s man stared at the terrified women with cold eyes that glittered like obsidian; after a long moment he lifted up the gun he was carrying without saying a word and aimed it at the group of dry-eyed captives, too spent even to flinch out of his way.

Perhaps Amais could have taken this as her fate, just as the others had apparently done—but the man had pointed that gun at one of the children, one of the little boys, that had found the sudden strength to turn and whimper, burying his face into his mother’s ragged skirts. Something suddenly woke inside Amais—a  resolve, a strength of heart, a quiet rage. Iloh, the Iloh she had loved with such a purity of spirit, would never have done this.

“The child has done nothing to you,” she said out loud, her voice, so long silent, sounding harsh to her own ears, like the cawing of a crow.

The man looked up at her, narrowing his eyes. “What was that?” he said. “Posh accent—you aren’t from around here. What are you doing with these dregs? Did they send you to spy on us?”

“Spy?” Amais actually found the memory of laughter bubbling to the surface of her mind, laughter that threatened to turn unto hysteria if left unchecked. It had been that word, exactly the same word, that had been leveled at her from the other side when she had been taken. “Spy? Look at us… look at them, for the love of Cahan. They are starving children, they are women too afraid to breathe. Their menfolk are probably dead. Who would they be spying for? And what possible use would any information be, gathered by the likes of them… the likes of us… you are the People’s Party, you say, well, we are the people. What are you going to do with us?”