The Embers of Heaven (25 page)

“Come home,” Aylun said. “Come on home. They’re all gone. Amais… are you crying?”

“It’s the rain,” Amais lied, smearing at her wet face with the back of an equally wet hand, doing very little good.

“I missed you,” Aylun said unexpectedly, and the brightness in her own eyes was quite definitely not the rain. “I missed you so much…”

Aylun was ten years old. Later, much later, Amais would remember this moment, standing with her arms around her sister in the rain, staring over Aylun’s head at the empty podium where Iloh had been not so long before, waving at the crowds. Aylun had still, at that moment, been a child—inasmuch as either of them, with Vien as their mother, had ever been allowed to be children. But they were all about to be swept up into a time and place, a crisis, with everything they knew about to tear itself apart and remake itself in a new image. In such a moment, when a world was young and newborn, as this rain-washed evening was, nobody in it would be allowed to remain a child for long.

Five

The day after the annunciation of Iloh’s Republic, Amais, driven by an odd premonition of doom, started keeping a journal again—one in which she wrote every day, much as Tai had done. This time, unlike the previous attempt she had made which had not lasted and had morphed into her fictional worlds, she stuck to it—she felt as though this was the only real way to steer a straight course through the chaos of the young republic’s growing pains.

There were many things she had wanted to do once she was back in the city—go to the Temple and talk to Jinlien, find Yingchi as she had promised that she would do and write back to Youmei; go in search of the House of the Silver Moon and the secrets of
jin-shei
that it held. But Iloh had big ideas and even bigger dreams, and it seemed that he could not wait for them to ripen in their own time. The edicts from the top came thick and fast, and Syai struggled to keep up with the changes that were mandated. Amais found herself just another cog in that wheel.

Baba Sung had talked about land reform, but had lacked the power and the means to ever push them through in the manner that he might have wanted; Shenxiao had fudged the issue completely because he knew that his own support depended on the moneyed classes who would have taken it exceedingly amiss if their land had been summarily confiscated and redistributed to the poor peasants who had hitherto toiled on the landlords’ fields. Iloh had no such compunctions. He came from the land; although his own family had been reasonably well off by the standards of the countryside, he had seen enough of the way things really were to take on the idea of land redistribution head first. It had been there, from among the poor and the dispossessed of the hinterlands, that
his
support had come from—and he had a debt to pay. There were those who grumbled—the ones who would have to foot the bill for Iloh’s ideas, but Iloh proved to be remarkably ruthless in dealing with opposition. He demanded honesty, and then he turned around and removed the people whose honesty spoke against him. Those who did side with him he rewarded with power, and they repaid him with utter loyalty. The result of this was the countryside seethed with reform and fundamental transformation, with the gift of land being offered at the cost of an ideological conversion. Huge tracts of land were parceled out to individual peasants to work, but then these were reorganized further—first into small cooperatives of only a few households at a time and with families still occupying their own homes, and then larger communes, with private land ownership to all intents and purposes abolished and land and tools being pooled and jointly owned by dozens of families, hundreds of people.

Loyalty to party and state was emphasized—Iloh’s words, quickly blazoned on everything from big posters hung from every available wall to scrolls pinned to individual lapels, were simply “Serve the people”, and by people he meant everyone. No distinctions were to be made for family, friends, and lovers.

Amais recognized this decree. It was the dream he had spoken of to her, back under the
wangqai
tree—the brotherhood between all the people. In Iloh’s vision, everybody owed the same allegiance to everyone else, be it a complete stranger a mother or father. In the communes, families were split into compounds where women and men lived separately in dormitories, children were cared for in communal crèches, and married couples had their time together carefully doled out hour by hour according to how the commune leaders decided the place should be run. Family ties, for so long the basic fabric of society in Syai, began to unravel.

It may be that one day we will all understand it in the way he means it to be understood,
Amais wrote in her journal, her heart torn by what she saw happening around her, what she heard whispered about in dark corners in marketplaces where people thought they would not be overheard, and her loyalty to the memory she clung to of the Iloh with whom she had felt so breathlessly connected that night under the
wangqai
tree.
It may be that we will all believe it. But that day is not yet, and he does not want to know that…

Iloh had no time for social analysis. Having set in motion the reform of the country, he turned his attention to the cities, and Linh-an, the capital, became the laboratory in which social changes were experimented with and then exported as decrees to the rest of the land. In Iloh’s opinion, individual peasants, left unsupervised, would quickly revert to the old feudal ways of doing things because those established hierarchies were the only way of life they really understood; the city dwellers were fundamentally no different, and required a reeducation from the very bedrock of their existence so that they could be forged into Iloh’s new army who would take his ideas forward. Within the first year of the Republic, Iloh’s thoughts had been gathered together and published in a tiny book, small enough to fit into the pocket of one of those uniforms that everyone now wore. Bound in bright yellow leather; it quickly gained the sobriquet of The Golden Words, and became ubiquitous. These were the words that people were expected to study, to know, to live by.

They included instructions on how to learn, from one’s own mistakes and from others, how to be a better citizen of the Republic.

Serve the people without thought to self
, the Golden Words instructed.
Problems are inevitable, but all problems can be solved if they are properly and correctly understood and analyzed. Failure must not be allowed to exist. If at first you do not succeed, you must apply fresh determination.

In accordance with this dictum, mornings in many work units were devoted to meetings, which sometimes went on for hours, where individuals would stand up and offer up self-criticism of how they had failed to live up to Iloh’s standards. Silence was no defense, because those who would not criticize themselves quickly became the targets of criticism by others.

Vien was bewildered by the new system, and rarely came up to the front of her work group to “struggle” with her failings. She could also not understand the need to guard one’s tongue, because chance utterances or gestures that, however innocuous, could be used to illustrate a particular “transgression,” were now pounced on and trotted out as evidence for an individual’s veering away from the line of Iloh’s Thought.

It fell to Amais to try and deal with the situation. Lixao stayed silent and somehow withdrawn, on this as on most other subjects, and Aylun had sought oblivion in becoming utterly and fanatically devoted to Shou’min Iloh’s word and deed and had in fact turned spy for the state on her own family.

Vien had never thought to conceal any of her past, and now that came back to haunt her.

“She has always thought of herself as an aristocrat,” a co-worker accused in one of the struggle sessions. “Better than everyone. Just because her mother had married an Imperial Prince.”

“An exiled Imperial Prince,” another co-worker chimed in. “She could not even get it right—she’s the product of a marriage between a social climber and someone who had to leave the Empire in order to assert his Imperial stature. What, he couldn’t be royal enough if he had stayed here? He had to go and impress exiles overseas?”

“But I do my work,” Vien had murmured, not even defensively, in simple confusion—she could not wrap her head around the fact that she was being accused of being born to her own parents, as if she could have had any control over that.

Family members were encouraged to attend these criticism sessions, as if learning about the sins of their mothers or brothers or sons would teach the other members of the stricken family valuable lessons; frequently such “lessons” landed in fertile ground, and families themselves were brought in as accusers and judges. It was Aylun, little Aylun, barely eleven, who jumped up in one of her mother’s criticism sessions and cried out,

“I saw her sit on a pile of new-printed pamphlets once!”

“I was tired,” Vien murmured.

“And how was this wrong?” one of the leaders of the criticism circle said, turning to Aylun with a smile that Amais, who was also present at that session, felt stab her in the heart.

“The pamphlets had the picture of Shou’min Iloh on the cover!” Aylun declared passionately.

The people in the circle gasped and murmured, exchanging glances. There was something here—a crowning sin—it wasn’t just that Vien had been observed actually sitting down right on top of Shou’min Iloh’s face, but that was somehow the thing that proved beyond doubt that she was seditious and disloyal. If she hadn’t been so, well, so
Imperial
in her attitudes, if she had really been one of the people, it would never have even occurred to her to sit on such a place.

Amais had her hand at her throat, staring at Aylun in disbelief. Her younger sister’s face was alight with a zealot’s fire, the lips of her fine rosebud mouth, inherited from the very grandmother whose existence was being held against Vien in this circle, parted a little as her breath came in quick excited gasps. She had done her bit for Shou’min Iloh—the upper edge of a well-thumbed copy of the Golden Words showing above the edge of her pocket.

“The family will leave now, please,” the circle leader said, after a moment. “The unit needs to confer on
ximin
Vien’s punishment.”

Aylun stood up and bowed to the circle. “Long live Shou’min Iloh!” she said before turning smartly on her heel and marching out of the room.

Amais, wordless, half astonished and half terrified, followed her sister. In the corridor, Aylun stood waiting beside the door, her arms at her sides like a little soldier. Her hair, which she had recently cropped herself so that it now swung free just brushing the tops of her shoulders, made her oval face with its creamy ivory skin look harsh and somehow both much older than its years and like that of a very young child, one who had failed utterly to comprehend what she had done.

“They might send her to a labor camp,” Amais said.

“If they do that, then that is what is necessary,” said Aylun sturdily.

“Aylun, don’t you realize that would kill her?”

Aylun turned glittering obsidian eyes to her sister. “And what would you rather do,” she demanded, “shelter someone who doesn’t care one whit about what Shou’min Iloh is trying to do?”

“Iloh…” Amais began hotly, and then caught herself as her sister’s eyes widened slightly at the omission of the honorific. Amais allowed herself a moment of bitter reflection—if only Aylun knew just what Iloh had been to Amais—but then corrected herself; there was no point in drawing Aylun’s fire onto her own shortcomings. “Shou’min Iloh is only a man…”

“He is a man we must all try to be like!” Aylun declared.

“We cannot all be like him,” Amais said.

“Those who cannot, make us weaker.”

“She is your
mother
,” Amais whispered.

“Shou’min Iloh is my leader,” Aylun said, without a trace of remorse.

They did nothing to Vien, not that time—she got no more than a sharp censure and a somewhat acerbic instruction to watch where she parked herself when she felt the urge to sit down. But the shadow of it remained over her.

“We will watch you,” her co-workers said. “You must learn to criticize yourself more. You are not better than the rest of us.”

Amais watched them, too, her mother and her sister, and saw the distance between them widen as the water would widen between her father’s boat and the shore when he cast off for a day on the ocean. And she had an awful premonition that, like her father’s boat, Aylun would sail away to some strange destination and never come back to her family.

Amais went back to the Temple in the beginning, often, to talk to Jinlien—but even there the mood had changed, become ominous. It was as though the people in the Temple were always looking over their shoulder these days, wondering which of their companions in the First Circle, or the Second, or even the more exalted Third or Fourth, were there only to keep track of who was at the Temple wasting precious time which could better be spent working for Shou’min Iloh’s dream. Jinlien was distracted in those days, as though fighting some secret battle from whose arena Amais was barred—there were circles within circles in Syai now, and it was very hard to know which ones were safe to speak one’s mind in.

Jinlien did point out, during one visit, a woman who stood out from the rest by the fact that she did not wear exclusively the dark blue or gray drab that seemed to have been adopted by male and female alike in Linh-an in those days.

“That’s one you want to talk to, if you still have plans on seeking out the House of the Silver Moon,” Jinlien had said. “The one with the orange scarf around her head. She’s been coming here for years, she’s one of the administrators of the House, I think.”

“Xuelian?” Amais had said, turning sharply to follow the woman as she passed by with a handful of incense offerings, her  head down and her face partially obscured by the veil of the scarf.