The Embers of Heaven (42 page)

“
They let you go?”

She shook her head. “They quit guarding us. It’s different. Some stayed, even—it’s home, now, after everything… but I wanted to… I needed to come back. It’s been so long… so long…”

We left them together, mother and daughter; there was too much there that was for the two of them alone. But, later, when the tears she had brought to shed in her mother’s arms were done, Yingchi sought me out.

“
Xuelian said to me that she would tell you, also, where the treasure of the House of the Silver Moon lies. Did she?”

“
Yes,” I said. “And what it should be used for. I have not touched it—not yet. There had been no means to use it in the manner that she had wished, and… and I’m afraid I grew to like my cocoon too much. I am guilty of that. Will you help me? You know these women, you know where to deliver that silver…”

“
I went back to Linh-an first, to try and find you,” Yingchi said. “But you were long gone by the time I got there. All I could find out was that your sister was dead…”

The words, so bluntly uttered, were a stab in the heart; I made a small sound of pain. She heard, stopped, stared at me.

“
I am sorry,” she said, her voice very gentle. “I thought you must have already heard. Oh, but I did not mean to come back here meaning to bring pain…”

The image of Aylun’s face swam into my mind, the sweet face of the child she had been before… before everything. Before she had so fiercely embraced Iloh’s dream, before that had put blood on her hands. The little girl who had once had a different name, in a different land. I spared a moment to wonder if she would have still been alive if she had remained Nika, if she had remained Elena’s favorite granddaughter, if she had never left Elaas.

“
How?” I managed to ask. “Do you know?”

“
Suicide,” Yingchi said, almost unwillingly, but now that she had uttered those words out loud there was no real point in withholding other pertinent information. “Less than six months after… after the Emperor. You know she was involved with that, she was there that night. Xuelian said you knew.”

“
Yes. She told me. Right before they… they… what became of Xuelian?”

“
I don’t know,” Yingchi said in a small voice and tears glittered in her eyes. “And I would give much to be able to tell you. She… meant a great deal to me.”

“
And to me,” I whispered. “I was there, when they took her. One of them broke her Emperor’s comb, right in front of her eyes; I saw it happen. He might as well have torn the living heart from her breast.”

We shared that, at least—this sorrow, this wound of this wanton, vicious death.

And then Yingchi looked at me again, and her expression was more enigmatic. “She told me, also, about… who the father had been to your unborn child, that time I nursed you back in the House,” she said. “I don’t know if you have heard, but Iloh… doesn’t look well. I was in the city when he gave one of his broadcasts—and I grant you I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in person for too many years to be wholly certain of this, but I think I could hear it in his voice.”

That name… that name woke things in me, things I thought I had lulled to sleep in the past few years. Xuan was enough… should have been enough…But Iloh’s name alone still had the power to move me. My hands had twisted together into a tight knot, without my even having been aware of it. I relaxed them with a conscious command.

“
Hear what?” I asked.

“
The hopelessness,” Yingchi said. “And I think that is the only disease for which I know of no cure.” She hesitated, would not meet my eyes. “Except… maybe…”

She wanted me to go back, to try and mend the things that were broken. She did not ask, not directly, but the thing hung there between us, left unspoken, left for me to make up my mind—and I was not sure that I could do this, that I was strong enough to do this, that I could pay the price of taking that healing that Yingchi wanted of me back to that place where pain dwelled—I had not seen Iloh since that last searing time, and I did not know if I ever would again. Not because I didn’t want to. More, perhaps, because I wanted to do it far too much—and now there was Xuan, who trusted me, whom I also loved.

But it was Yingchi’s coming, Yingchi’s words, that precipitated one of what I had learned to recognize as my guidance dreams.

<>

I remembered the place I found myself in that dream—the people wood, the place where I had seen the spirits of people growing as living trees, but this time, at least at first, I appeared to be quite alone here—that little girl who always accompanied me, the child who had led me in these strange journeys of spirit and mind, was not with me. Or at least she was not in person; it was her voice, however, that hung in a whisper under the trembling leaves of the people trees: “Follow…”

The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, but after a while I became aware that there was a small figure standing by one of the trees—another child, perhaps, younger than the little girl in my other dreams had been. As soon as it knew that it had been seen, the child turned and slipped away into the shadows under the trees, and my instructions became clear. I ducked under the low branches that had been this new guide’s concealment and stepped into the wood.

At first the child I was following appeared to want to escape from me, because it moved fast, and almost stealthily, and once or twice I even thought I had lost it completely—but every time that happened I realized that it had stopped a little way in front, half-turned in my direction, waiting for me. So intent was I on keeping that elusive forest sprite of a child in my sights that I had simply ceased to notice my surroundings—right until the moment I stepped out into a clearing. In the middle of the clearing, a tiny sapling grew—two pale green leaves, shaped a little like a heart, were all it had had the strength to unfurl. Within it, floating in an ethereal golden-green light—the filtered light of the sun through a forest canopy—I could glimpse the shape of a very young but perfectly formed embryo, its eyes closed, and two tiny hands curled into small fists before its face.

Bent over this sapling, carefully watering around its roots, was a man.

A man whom I knew, whom I would know anywhere. The man to whom Yingchi wanted me to return. The man whose child—just like that unborn baby sleeping in its young tree, oh just like it!—I might easily have borne after the last time we had met on the empty country road.

“
No,” said a small voice right beside me, “that child would have been me.”

The man by the sapling straightened. I looked into Iloh’s dark eyes, fell into them, my head spinning from a sudden and yet not unexpected shaft of something that was equal parts pain and joy. And then he was gone, vanished, reabsorbed into the fabric of the dream—except that, when I turned around to respond to the words that had just been addressed to me, I met those eyes again, in the face of the child I had followed through the woods to this place.

“
Who are you?”

“
I am you, and I am him. I am what might have been born had you not drank of the bitter herbs.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. “I am sorry,” I whispered. It was the only thing I could say,  the only thing I could think.

“
It was not my time,” the child said gravely. It was extremely difficult to pinpoint that sprite’s gender—its glossy black hair swung just below its ears, parted in the middle, and its features were formed of equal parts a boy’s firmness and a girl’s fragile vulnerability. Its mouth was still full and dewy with childhood, but its eyes… its eyes were the eyes of the never-born and of the often-born, full of a sad strange wisdom that touched me deeply in places I had not known existed inside me. Yes, it was mine—I could sense it, I could feel it, I had a mother’s urge to reach out and gather it into my arms and croon lullabies into that soft dark hair falling around its face. I had not known that I yearned for a child, but in this moment I knew that yearning in full measure—and the child knew, understood, gazed at me with pity and affection and a quiet knowledge reflected in those eyes.

Iloh’s eyes.

“
Oh, Cahan,” I whispered, beginning to understand.

“
You cannot have them,” my unborn son/daughter said to me, with the weight of prophecy. “You cannot have children before that child, the one child, the child that this land will need—the child that only you and he can make. It was not to be me—but there…” It lifted a hand, pointed to where the embryo hung in its cocoon of light—except that it was no longer asleep, and as I looked into the sapling I met another pair of never-born/often-born eyes, gazing straight into mine. “There,” the other child said. “There, my sister waits.”

<>

And I knew, when I woke from that dream, with all those voices still echoing in my mind, that the road ahead would be strewn with hard choices. In order to fulfill the pledge I had made to Syai, I would have to betray someone who loved me and trusted me. Perhaps more than one.

The women’s country. She was a woman too, my Syai, but she could not do what needed to be done, not without the living, breathing body of her jin-shei-bao—and the thing that was being asked of me was asked in the name of the vow which I had taken in the ruined Temple in the rain.

<>

It was spring when I returned to Linh-an.

Oh, how smoothly I had layered my story for all the people who must never know the real purpose behind my journey, for all the people who knew it all too well! Yingchi said nothing when I explained my reasons for going back; Xuan insisted on coming with me. My heart already bleeding from every treacherous lie I told him wrapped in a tissue-thin layer of truth, I let him come as far as the last train stop before the city. Somehow—and maybe it was those insistent and increasingly demanding voices which I carried that gave me the words I needed—I won the right to go into the city itself alone.

“
I have to carry a sword out,” I said to him—for that was my excuse, my reason, my sudden desire to go back. It was to retrieve those treasures that we had once hidden for each other, in a time when there were no reasons for secrets and lies between us, a time when we were innocent strangers to one another. “They would certainly stop you, if you tried to carry it out—and, if necessary, I know a secret way out of the city and they will never find me.”

“
But if it is a secret way then I too could use it and escape undetected,” he had protested. “You are not safe in Linh-an by yourself, on false papers—remember how you were once eager to leave before they got their hands on you?”

“
You, too, and if they get us they get us both,” I said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I know a safe place where nobody will think of looking for me.”

That much was true. Thank Cahan he didn’t think to ask me why I had not chosen to go to that safe place two years before, when we had fled the city to escape the howling furies of the Golden Rising.

He let me go, in the end. I will never forget, till the day I die, the completely open, trusting, honest look with which he bade me farewell when I left for the city the next day—because I carried it with me through what was one of Linh-an’s last surviving gates like a wound.

The city had already begun to change, by then—too many of the remembrance arches in the streets, once marble and carved or painted wood, were already gone. That had started back when I was still there—ostensibly they got in the way of modern transport, and slowed the modernization of the city—but somehow their loss made the streets look grimier, dirtier, more commonplace, more naked. It was certainly reducing the splendor of the Imperial city to the ranks of its less exalted inhabitants—but I could not find it in my heart to find approval for it. The heart had gone out of the city, the magic of it all. Like too many things that seemed good ideas at the time, this was turning out to be destruction for destruction’s sake, just putting a stamp on the city, claiming it for the plain and workaday Republic from the grandeur and the magnificence of an Empire.

I had been sent here—by a vow, by a dream, in order to conceive a child. I had no idea if any of this wild vision would even succeed. I had not thought it out further than this—I would come to where Iloh was, and then I would see what happened. But what would happen if I did no more than lurk in the teeming city outside the gates of Iloh’s guarded compound would be precisely nothing—and then everything would be wasted, all the treachery which the road back to Linh-an had been paved with, all the pain.