The Embers of Heaven
Alma Alexander

When Jill first asked if there was a sequel, I said no – until it became impossible to keep saying that, because I was holding it in my hand.

So this one is for Jill, with my thanks.

Water. They were lost in a world of it, their ship slicing through the silky waters of the open ocean, prow pointed to where the sun rose out of the water every morning. The ocean was smooth, cobalt blue, reflecting only sky. Sometimes there would be porpoises racing the ship or playing in its spreading wake; sometimes, a long way away, something huge and dark broke surface with its fin, blowing spray – but days went by with nothing in the world but sun and sky and sea, and the days were long.

The nights were longer still; quiet, soundless except for the creaking of the ship and the splash and lap of water against the hull. Out on the prow there was a space where ropes were coiled. Empty barrels were tied up in a raft right up near the bow of the ship. It made a good, comfortable nest, and the hiss of parting waters as the ship cleaved through them made for a gentle, soothing lullaby.

It was there that the first dream came to Amais.

Curled up in a comfortable loop of thick twisted rope, she might have believed that the sounds of water lapping against something hard and solid actually came from the sea and the ship she was on – but the sound was wrong for that. It was the sound of water breaking on something stationary, not a travelling ship’s hull. And after that, when she blinked and looked around, it was easy to see that she had left the ship far behind and was in some strange and yet oddly familiar place.

There were two people in the dream, aside from the dreamer herself: a woman and a little girl, holding hands. They had their backs to the dreamer and she could not see their faces. She could not see the woman clearly at all, just the shape of her in silhouette through a translucent parasol which covered her slender body down to her waist. They were both wearing old-fashioned, almost antique gowns, court garb which existed only in paintings and in stories; the little girl wore her long dark hair loose except for a topknot high on her head, held by two black lacquer hairpins. Behind them, steps with a broken wooden hand-railing led down into dirty water splashing against the bottom step. Floating debris bobbed in the water and piled up against the rise of the stair. It was dark, but there was a soft light about, something that resembled the way the sky looked when it was reflecting a huge but distant fire.

That was all. The water, the stairs, the two incongruously clean and elegant women in their rich court gowns, as though waiting for death or for rescue, trapped on a high point while fire and flood raged around them. Just like on the ship – there was water everywhere, but this water was dark and bitter and lifeless and life-taking. It was the aftermath of something, a disaster beyond words. Only a little bit away from the edge of the lowest stair the water was black and opaque and somehow passively threatening, as though it were about to rise, engulf even this last little spot where they clung to survival and safety.

Water, lapping. Water, spilled, insistent, all-enveloping – like a primeval world, the world where the earth had yet to rise from the sea of creation. As though a world was ended…or was about to begin.

The little girl turned her head slightly – just enough to cast a glance back to the spot from where the dreamer watched, hovering like a transparent and incorporeal ghost behind the two figures on the platform at the top of the drowned stairs. The child’s face was obscured by strands of wind-tousled hair, but she had huge dark eyes, enormous in her pale face, glittering with their own light, the light that might have been knowledge, or recognition, or pity.

Then she turned away again, her hair spilling back across her shoulders, falling to where a formal sash was tied in the ceremonial way, so that a long train of it fell over the knot at the back of her waist and flowed down the back of her gown. The train had writing on it, but it was not something that the dreamer could read – at least not here, not now, not in this half-light, not before the rest of the dream was made clear. The little girl held on to the older woman’s free hand with an air that managed to be both terrified and protective at the same time.

The sky was pearl grey, streaked with improbable shades of cinnamon and apricot; the air was alive with breezes that whipped and collided and teased the waters below into an unquiet whispering sound.

It was the end of the world.

It was the beginning.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Excerpt

The Language of Lost Things

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Paper Swords and Iron Butterflies

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The Street of Red Lanterns

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The Golden Rising

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The Embers of Heaven

I almost expected

I have dreamt this

Historical Note

Glossary and Characters

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Alma Alexander

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Language of Lost Things

The old gods dwell in their abandoned temples in your memory – sad places dusty with disuse, with dark altars empty of offerings. But they endure the weight of these with what power they may claim as long as their names are remembered, until the hour in which they are finally and irrevocably forgotten. Then they blow away like dust in the wind, like the cold ashes from the dead altars. On such ashes as this our world is built. In it the footsteps of new gods may one day leave traces of their passing, on their way to their own cold oblivion.

The Book of Old Gods

One

There were only two questions that governed Amais’s existence.

She would wander out of the house, still wearing some esoteric item of Syai clothing her mother, Vien, kept carefully folded away in a wooden chest, or proudly step out to the snickers and astonished stares of her peers with her hair in what she fondly believed was a good rendition of a hairstyle once worn by empresses at the Syai court. Her mother would strip off the offending garments or impatiently tug Amais’s wealth of thick curly hair out of its badly pinned and unruly coils into a semblance of order with a wooden comb, and murmur despairingly,

‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’

But when Amais rebelled at learning the long and ancient history of her ancestral land and her kinfolk, or refused to go hunting for incense or some out-of-season fruit required for sacrifice to the spirits of those ancestors in the small shrine set apart in what was in effect a larger shrine to Syai itself in her mother’s childhood home – citing the fact that none of her friends had to do such outlandish things – the wind would change. Vien’s face would assume an expression of martyred sorrow, and she would ask instead,

‘Do you have to do what everyone else does?’

Perhaps it would have been easier if it hadn’t been for the two grandmothers and the games they played for the souls of their bewildered granddaughters, Amais and, in her turn, Nika.

Vien’s mother, the grandmother Amais knew as baya-Dan, hardly ever set foot outside the door to what, on the outside, was a perfectly ordinary whitewashed little house tucked away at the end of a village street behind what was almost a defensive barrier of ancient olive trees. Inside, its shutters usually closed to keep out the bright sunshine and shroud the rooms within in a permanent twilight, the place might have been transported from a different world. Candles and fragrant incense burned on little altars draped with scarlet silk; scroll paintings and poems written in the long elegant script of jin-ashu, the ancient secret tongue of the women of Syai, hung from the walls. A low table held all the paraphernalia needed for a proper tea ceremony, and it was at her grandmother’s knee that Amais learned how to perform one properly. It was something that seemed to be a fit and useful thing for her to know while she was steeped in the dreamy atmosphere of what baya-Dan insisted on calling the True Country. It all seemed ludicrously silly when Amais stepped over this magic threshold and back into the real world, where the golden sunlight of Elaas glinted off the bluest water in the world and the white walls of the village houses clung to the hillside. But inside, in baya-Dan’s enchanted house, it was the only thing that made any sense.

Baya-Dan had been born in Elaas, as had her own mother, and her mother’s mother before her. Her forebears had lived out their own tranquil lives in the midst of an alien society. They married their own kind, from within the community, with the women keeping ancient traditions alive in the home while the menfolk pursued the work of trade and commerce which had brought their ancestors out from Syai a long time ago – sailing trading ships, keeping ledgers, building fortunes.

But for baya-Dan it had been so much more than that.

When she was no more than sixteen, her path had crossed with the black-sheep scion of the Imperial family – a Third Prince, a ‘spare’ aristocrat from within the core of the Imperial family itself; one who professed to be bored with protocol and the puppet-play of Syai’s ancient Imperial Court and who said he had chosen to leave it all behind and seek his fortune in the world. It was never mentioned that he might have sensed the winds of change that were about to scour his country and his family and had taken whatever steps he could to escape the storm. The young Dan had been reared properly in all required traditions, she was the right age, she was presentable, and her father had put enough aside for a generous dowry. Dan herself had been young enough to be impressed by the fact that she had married an Imperial prince, and she had somehow taken this elevation in status to mean that she was single-handedly and personally responsible for the safekeeping of the traditions of Syai, here in the alien lands so far from her ancestral shores. The conviction had deepened when she had allowed a particular festival and its sacrifices to slide one year, and the very next voyage that her husband had undertaken had been his last. Dan had taken the blame for the storm that had claimed the ship, with the loss of its cargo and all hands. The commercial blow to the family’s fortunes had been considerable, but the personal loss was far more grievous to Dan, who had responded by retiring to a tiny house in a fishing village, on an island far from the commercial hub of the mainland, and withdrawing into her own small world where it was easy to pretend that the world outside – the Elaas of the sunlit seas and laughing, beautiful people – simply did not exist.

Her daughter, Vien, had been kept on a tight leash, intensely protected and guarded, both sheltered and imprisoned deep within the shrine to Syai that her home had become. For her, the world outside was the free air outside a cage. The more Vien’s mother wrapped her in Syai’s soft but bitingly tight trammels of tradition and responsibility, the more she was cocooned in the shadows of her candlelight and incense, the louder the laughter outside her windows in the moonlit nights rang in her own soul.

Her mother had chosen to lead a life far more traditional than even her peers back in the True Country now led. Vien was taught everything that a high-ranking court lady should know. She was taught how to read and write jin-ashu script and the subtle nuances of the women’s language; she memorised imperial lineages dusty with antiquity, learned about the secrets of her gender and her race. Far away from the real Syai, inexorably changing under the weight of its history, Vien learned how to lead a life rooted in fairytale and dream. She was presented with the vanished world of her ancestors as though it had been a living and vital thing, and was asked to accept the reality of things that either no longer existed or were fast fading away. But here on the island, isolated even from such news as filtered through from Syai to the expatriate community on the mainland, it was just as easy to believe that such things as the ancient and sacred sisterhood of jin-shei still governed the relationships of every woman in Syai, and that emperors were chosen on the basis of an empress-heir’s prophetic dreams.

Vien endured this for long, weary years. Her childhood slipped away, fossilized in these ancestral halls. But the world outside was ever louder in calling to her, ever more insistent in its presence – and Vien finally chose to utterly rebel against her suffocating heritage. She became the first of her line since the family had left the shores of Syai, centuries before, to truly step outside of her world.

Somehow, in spite of her sequestered life and sheltered existence, she had managed to make the acquaintance of Nikos. He was three times forbidden to her – he was not of her kind or of her culture; he was a simple fisherman with no fortune; and he was younger than Vien, who was in her early twenties by the time their paths had crossed, by a handful of years.

They were married in the moonlight, in a temple of Nikos’s people, by one of his priests.

Dan had simply disowned her daughter.

Nikos’s widowed mother, Elena, had not been overjoyed either at her new daughter-in-law. But Nikos was her last surviving son, and after a short period of friction Elena had simply concluded that Vien was not so much disrespectful and recalcitrant as genuinely ignorant of any kind of life other than what she had known in her mother’s house. So Elena put aside her pique, and turned instead to teaching Vien how to prepare fresh fish, how to use Elaas herbs in her cooking, how to bake the particular sticky sweets of which Nikos was so fond, and how to erase as much as possible of the sing-song accent with which she – even though she had been born in Elaas – spoke the language of the land outside her mother’s makeshift temple to Syai.

All that changed when Amais was born.

In Dan’s own inimitable and high-handed manner – she had been married to a prince, after all, and had never forgotten that she could claim the title and privileges of an Imperial princess if she so chose – Vien’s mother had sent word that her granddaughter was to be presented to her in her home at a certain auspicious hour.

Elena had snorted in outrage but Vien had rocked her small newborn daughter in her arms, and had dropped her gaze in the face of her mother-in-law’s sharp comments.

‘She is my mother,’ Vien had said, finally. ‘I owe her my respect, at least. And this is her grandchild, after all.’

Elena had thrown her hands up in the air, in the expressive manner of her own culture, in a way that Dan would have considered a vulgar show of emotion in public and could not have ever conceived of doing. ‘Mark my words,’ Elena had said darkly, ‘no good can come of it.’

Vien had offered up the child as she had been commanded, and Dan, holding her granddaughter in her arms after first wrapping her up in a scarlet birth-cloth taken from one of the many cedar chests in her house, had inspected the drowsing child’s features closely.

‘Her skin is too fair, and her eyes are too slanted, like a cat’s…Oh well, I suppose that can’t be helped, under the circumstances,’ Dan said critically. She sniffed, giving the impression that she was holding back from saying far worse. ‘Be that as it may. You will bring her to me every day. For an hour or so, while she is still in swaddling clothes. After…we will see.’

‘Whatever for, Mother?’ Vien said, looking startled and not a little trapped. Perhaps her mother-in-law’s words were coming back to echo in her mind.

‘So that I can start teaching her, of course,’ Dan replied, in a tone of voice that indicated Vien was simple-minded not to know this already. ‘She has unfortunate aspects to her lineage but she was born on an auspicious day. That means that her life will matter. She will be given in abundance, but whether joy or sorrow I cannot tell. It may matter how much she knows of her people and her past when the Gods come knocking at her door asking for her.’

‘Ridiculous,’ Elena had snapped when Vien, a little bewildered, returned to her husband’s house with her daughter in her arms. ‘The child is a helpless baby, not a scion of the Gods. What else did she have to say on the matter, your mother?’

‘She named her,’ Vien said. ‘The child’s name is Amais.’

‘That’s a mouthful,’ Elena said trenchantly.

‘It means “nightingale”,’ Vien added helpfully.

‘Ridiculous,’ Elena said.

But Nikos had, somewhat unexpectedly, taken Dan’s side and had overruled his mother.

‘This is all she has left,’ he told Vien in the darkness of their room at night, with the contested child sleeping the sleep of the innocent in the crib he had made for her with his own hands. ‘Let her have that much. Amais is a beautiful name, and it means a beautiful thing. We can give our daughter that gift.’

So Amais was taken dutifully to her maternal grandmother’s house every day. She seemed content to be there, perhaps lulled by her grandmother’s quiet, melodious lullabies, quite happy to kick her baby heels on the piles of cushions that Dan provided for her. Later, when she started to crawl and then to toddle, Dan placed no restrictions on her activities in the house, merely removing small grasping hands gently from draperies when they looked about ready to come down on the child in a heap. Amais grew up to the sound of her grandmother’s voice, first the songs and then the poetry that was read to her while she listened, rapt, not understanding half the words but happy to be in the circle of baya-Dan’s world. For a while she was too young to know how different her two worlds were, the world of twilight and old protocol where she was a sort of princess-heir wrapped in silks and scarlet, and the world of sunlight and sea where she ran gurgling with childish laughter from foam-tipped waves breaking from a sapphire-coloured sea as they lapped at her round heels.

Amais grew into a chubby, moon-faced toddler with round cheeks and what looked like far too much forehead. Dan had been right – Amais’s fair skin was scorched into angry red blotches if she did not protect it from the sun, and her eyes had not been of the degree of roundness required of a princess of the Imperial blood. But the eyes in question had quickly turned from the guileless blue of babyhood into an improbable shade of golden brown flecked with green, and her hair, the despair and secret pride of both grandmothers, was a serendipitous mix of Vien’s hip-length mane that fell thick and straight like a black waterfall and Nikos’s riotous curls, and framed Amais’s face in huge smooth waves.

On this, both grandmothers were in full agreement.

‘She is not pretty…’ Elena would say thoughtfully, looking on as the toddler laughed up at her father when Nikos would come home from a long day’s work and sweep his small daughter up in his arms.

‘…but one day she will be beautiful,’ Dan would say, across the island in her own exotic house, watching the same toddler explore the texture of some ancient brocade, apparently in completion of the same thought.

‘All I want her to be is happy,’ Vien would sigh to both women.

Elena would smile at that, and spill a reassuring fairytale of how it would be for Amais when she grew up and reached out to claim her place in the world. But Dan was both more pragmatic and more frightening in her response.

‘Beware of too much happiness,’ she had murmured, and had turned away for a moment as if the laughter of her daughter’s child had been a knife in her heart.

Two

Vien was eight and a half months pregnant with her second child, heavy and graceless and swollen with a baby that could have been born at any minute, when Nikos’s boat went out one spring morning. The crew waved goodbye to such family as had gathered to see them off, as they had done hundreds of times before, and left together with a flotilla of other boats exactly the same as theirs, sailing off into the sweet newborn sunshine of a spring dawn glinting on the sapphire seas.

Seven-year-old Amais, who had woken early that morning from uneasy dreams, had been fretful and weepy, and Elena, in order to give heavily pregnant Vien some respite, had taken the child out to see her father off on his day’s fishing.

‘I will catch a mermaid for you, korimou, little darling!’ Nikos called to his daughter as the sea widened between them. ‘Now go home and be good for your mother!’

Amais had clung to that unlikely promise all day. When Elena readied herself to go to the wharf to meet the fishing boats at the end of the day, Amais insisted on going with her, wanting to be right there when her father brought the gift of that mermaid ashore for her.

One by one, the boats came back that night. All of them, except one.

Elena and Amais waited there as the other boats came in, exchanging smiles and the occasional word of congratulation or commiseration with the crews and their families as they straggled in and showed off their catch. But the sun rode lower and lower in the sky, and still Nikos’s boat had not come. Elena grew quieter and quieter, standing there carved like a statue, her eyes fixed on the horizon, her lips moving ever so slightly in what might have been prayer. She already wore the black kerchief of the widow, and was no stranger to sea death. Neither were the others, the family members of the rest of the men on the lost boat, who also waited there on the wharf. They all wore the same expression, which was essentially no expression at all – their faces were stony, as though they were already bracing themselves for the grief that was to come. Amais was too young to completely understand, but her grandmother’s hand on hers had turned into a cold and clutching claw made from marble, and the child’s own heart was beating very fast as the beautiful spring day drew to a close.

The sunset was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful that Amais could ever remember having seen. The sky was streaked with unlikely colours – something that resembled the rich red of the wine they made from the grapes grown on the hillside above the harbour, a deep violet-amethyst shade where the sky began to darken into twilight as the sun went down, and traces of dark gold…the exact shade that Amais had imagined of a mermaid’s hair. Someone, without speaking, without asking, lit a lantern and hung it on an iron hook set into the wharf – a makeshift lighthouse, calling them home, the lost ones, the ones that most of the people on that wharf already knew would not return.

It was full dark when the first of the statues, another blackkerchiefed woman, finally moved, let her hands drop helplessly to her sides, let out her breath in a deep sigh that ended in a quiet sob, bowed her head, and walked slowly away from the sea, back to the hushed village. It was as though she broke the stasis. One by one they did the same thing, like a ritual, bowed their heads to the sea, walked away.

Elena was the last to go. Amais had been standing there with her on the wharf for hours, had grown stiff and uncomfortable, but not for anything would she have moved, would she have let go of the hand that clung to her own as though she were the last anchor in a storm-tossed world. But Elena was almost unaware of her. When she too opened her lips a crack and allowed a breath to escape – a sigh that sounded like she was letting her soul out of her body and sending it over the waves to search for her son’s spirit – her hand relaxed for a moment, and it was only then that she looked down and blinked, seeming to have just realised that she was still holding her granddaughter’s hand in her own.

‘Let’s go home, Nana,’ Amais whispered, profoundly sad, not yet fully aware of all that this night would mean to her.

‘Home,’ Elena repeated through cracked lips, as though the word held no meaning.

‘Mama has been alone all afternoon,’ Amais said, her voice taking on a tone of urgency, ‘and the baby…the baby is coming…’

‘The baby,’ Elena repeated again. It seemed as though repeating someone else’s last words was all that she was capable of right then, as if her own mind had ground to a halt, unable to move past this moment, this loss. And then she shook her head once, sharply, as though to clear it from the cobwebs of sleep. ‘The baby,’ she said once more. ‘Yes, you are right. There is the baby.’

They walked back to their house in silence, still holding hands.

There was a light in the window as they approached, a lamp lit by Vien the good wife and left to light the way home for her family. She herself was waiting inside, very pale, her hands folded protectively over her swollen belly.

She knew, long before she saw only Elena and Amais enter the house. She could hear the absence of Nikos’s footsteps, the void which his voice and his laughter would have filled. Her world was emptier for his soul. Her face was stark, her eyes very bright, and when the door closed behind Elena, who had finally let go of Amais’s hand, Vien let out a small whimper and folded over herself as though she had been stabbed in the heart.

The whimper became a moan, something that took all her breath, and it wasn’t until that first spasm had passed that Vien could whisper two words:

‘The baby…’

There was no time, after that, for going to get the midwife, for going to get any help at all. Vien’s second child, another daughter, was born just before midnight on the same day that her father had died. Elena, who delivered her, held the tiny newborn infant in her arms and stared at the child’s face. It would have been hard to find any resemblance to her son in that bright-red puckered face with its eyes tightly shut and its bud of a mouth opening and shutting like a baby bird’s when demanding sustenance – but Elena was seeing things that only a mother who had just lost a child and been given another in his place could see.

‘Her name is Nika,’ she said softly, and there was no arguing with that. It was the prerogative of the grieving mother, of the grandmother – this child, at least, her daughter-in-law’s culture would not swallow. This was her son’s child, named for him, born to be his substitute. There had been something implacable in her voice.

But baya-Dan was not one to relinquish something she considered hers, not without a fight. This child, as Amais before her, was summoned to the house where the tiny enclave of shadowed Imperial Syai was being preserved in the Elaas sunshine. The second grandmother had looked the babe over, and smiled a small secret smile.

‘This one,’ she prophesied, tracing the contours of the child’s face with one bony finger, ‘is going to look like you, my daughter. Look at those eyes, look at the shape of her face. Her name is Aylun, little cricket.’

‘Her name is Nika,’ Vien said. ‘Elena already named her for her father.’

‘Her name is Aylun,’ Dan repeated firmly. ‘You will see. You will bring this one, too, as you have done with Amais.’

But Elena would have none of that. ‘Not this child,’ she said to Vien when she returned from her visit to her mother, the baby cradled in the crook of her arm. Elena all but snatched the child out of Vien’s arms, inspecting her closely, as though there were traces of the Syai cobwebs still draped on her swaddling clothes or evil spells woven in the air above her small head. ‘This is my Nika, my baby, the child that will carry the spirit of my son. She already has Amais.’

Almost overnight, Amais had been abandoned by her father’s mother. She became almost invisible in her father’s house, with her grandmother’s attention wholly focused on her younger sister. Baya-Dan commanded her attendance daily as usual, but now Amais chafed at it, feeling as though she had been traded, one child for another, one granddaughter for each grandmother, forced to choose one of her two worlds and barred from the other.

The first year of Nika’s life passed thus, in tension and frustration. A barrier developed between Vien and Elena, who appeared to consider her granddaughter’s mother merely a necessary evil, basically handing the child over to be nursed and then snatching her back as though prolonged contact with her mother would infect her with an incurable disease. But as that first year passed, it began to become painfully obvious that fate had played a joke on the family.

Amais, the elder, the one who had been abandoned to whatever destiny her Syai heritage might have in store for her, grew into her father’s image, gently made female by the curve of cheek or the slope of delicate shoulder inherited from her mother and with a captivating touch of the exotic. She had her father’s wild black hair, gleaming with blue highlights, curling riotously around her face, setting off those beautiful and almost uncanny eyes – she was a melding of all that was beautiful from her two worlds, as though she had been a work of art that had had two bright and vivid colours mixed on a palette, and emerged with a shade that was unique and all her own. But at least she had that trace of her father’s kin in her.

Nika was all Syai – tawny ivory skin, round eyes with eyelids draped in drowsy epicanthic folds over irises so dark that the pupil of her eyes could barely be seen. She had the rosebud mouth and the small-boned grace of a Syai empress. It was as though Nikos had had nothing to do with her at all. She was, as Dan had said she would be, far more Aylun than she could ever be Nika, the Elaas name sitting almost gracelessly on this tiny, alien person to whom it just did not seem to belong.

But it was this child that held the spirit of Elena’s son. Somehow, she managed to ignore the incongruities in the physical appearance of the children. Vien sometimes smuggled Nika – or Aylun as she always was in her Syai grandmother’s house – out of Elena’s sight for a few hours, and Aylun too would drowse happily in the lilting tones of baya-Dan’s lullabies.

As for Amais, her own education at her Syai grandmother’s hands – and it had become painfully obvious that it was just that, an education, that Amais was being groomed for something – accelerated. Amais and her grandmother were now reading the classics together, accounts of Imperial life in old Syai, ancient poems inscribed in crumbling books carefully put away in wrappings of silk and waterproof oiled cloth, tales of travel and trade set down by generations of exiles, all hoarded and treasured for four hundred years and passed down the centuries from generation to generation until it came down to this – an old woman and a young child who only half-belonged to this lost world.

It was not as though Amais had no interest in the things that she was given to study – some part of her was held rapt and fascinated by it. But there was that other part of her, the same restless spirit that had made her own mother respond to the laughter she heard echoing from beyond the brooding walls of Dan’s house, and there were days that she squirmed and sighed and cast longing glances at the shuttered windows, feeling in her bones that she should be out on the rocky shores of Elaas’s blue seas, scooping out small crabs from their hidey-holes or gathering clams at low tide. It was in that year, aware that Amais’s attention was slipping away, that Dan allowed Amais to actually hold in her hands a set of thirteen small notebooks bound in faded red leather. Amais recognised them: her grandmother had read from those books while she listened, rapt, to the tales of long ago. The diary of a girl who, Dan said, was not much older than Amais herself when she began writing down the days of her life.

‘These belonged to Kito-Tai,’ baya-Dan said, her voice edged very slightly with an odd sort of triumph, watching the many-times-great-granddaughter of the ancient poetess touch the worn covers with light, almost frightened fingers. Amais was wholly here now, completely caught in the moment; the childish games of the Elaas children out on the sunlit shore were not even a memory of temptation. ‘They are yours now. Take care of them – they are very old. They are her journals, and there is a lot of her poetry in there, too. We’ve read some of them already, on the scrolls – but those were transcribed, for sale in the marketplaces. These, in here, are her originals. Written in our own language.’

‘Our own language?’ Amais questioned, looking up. ‘You mean jin-ashu? The women’s tongue?’

‘Yes, and now you know enough of it to be able to read those,’ baya-Dan said, laying a loving and possessive hand over her granddaughter’s where it rested on the red leather of many centuries ago. ‘I have already read some of this to you. But now they are yours, they are my gift to you. They will be here for you, whenever you want them.’

Amais took one of the books at random, opened it, ran her finger reverently down the ancient page that lay revealed. ‘Jin-shei,’ Amais murmured. ‘She was jin-shei to an empress. The empress listened when she talked, and did what she said. And Nhia’s, too, her jin-shei-bao, her heart-sister…and then Nhia became a Blessed Sage and was given a shrine in the Great Temple in Linh-an…’ The latter was catechism; Dan owned a book about the Great Temple, one that described its appearance, its Gods, and detailed biographies of all the emperors and sages whose niches had been dedicated in the Second Circle of the Great Temple. It had been brought over by one of the later waves of immigrants from Syai, and was not quite the age of Kito-Tai’s journals, but it was old enough – sixty or seventy years at least. Amais knew about Nhia because she had been singled out by her grandmother, because they had read her biography together, because she had been mentioned by name in every one of Tai’s journals that resided in the cedar box. Making the leap from Nhia’s status of Tai’s jin-shei-bao to that of Blessed Sage of the Temple, as though the one had naturally followed from the other, however, had been something that Amais had done entirely on her own. Her grandmother might have objected mildly, but before she had a chance to do so Amais fired another distracting question. ‘Baya-Dan…have you ever had a jin-shei-bao?’

‘I was not so fortunate,’ said her grandmother in a tone of noble sorrow.

‘But back in Syai, every woman had them. At least one. Didn’t they?’

‘They still do, I am certain,’ murmured baya-Dan. ‘It is the women’s country, where you could find a sister in a friend, could depend on her, believe in her and in your bond when everything else failed, know that she always stood between you and doom.’

‘Did you ever keep a journal yourself, baya-Dan?’

‘Not quite like this,’ Dan said. ‘She was special, Kito-Tai. She was a poet. She saw every day through a poet’s eyes. She filled a book every year of her life, you know. These are just a handful of her journals. The rest were lost and scattered, or just gone. Four hundred years is a very long life for a book.’

‘Four hundred years…’ Amais breathed, the eyes her grandmother had thought too slanted now quite round with wonder.

‘That is your heritage,’ Dan said. ‘That is what you came from, that stock.’

‘My mother never told me about this,’ Amais said.

Dan allowed herself an inelegant snort. ‘Then it is just as well that you have me,’ she said.

But the passing of the journals seemed to herald a new phase in Dan’s life. Amais had always known her as what she considered to be old – baya-Dan was straight-backed and clean-limbed, but her hands had gnarled with age and her face was seamed with fine lines under the mass of carefully dressed silver hair. After the child she continued to stubbornly call Aylun was born, baya-Dan seemed to consider her task done, her life well spent. She withdrew even further from the reality that was her world. Elaas, the bright sunlight and the sapphire sea and the vines of ancient vineyards twisted with venerable age at least as respectable as Dan’s own, all that simply ceased to exist for her at all. If Vien didn’t come by to make sure she ate – and that the food was prepared properly according to Dan’s own high standards of the lost world of Syai as best as could be managed – the old woman would be just as likely to spend the time in a sort of waking dream, drifting through the days with her eyes wide open but her gaze bent more on the ephemeral glories of her past than on the physical surroundings of her current existence.

Elena had almost forbidden her treasured younger granddaughter to go to what she had taken to calling ‘that woman’s little palace’ when Vien brought the news that Dan was dying, and wanted to say farewell to her grandchildren. The words ‘Good riddance!’ were hovering on the tip of Elena’s tongue, but they remained unspoken. In some ways the two old women were far more alike than they realised or might have wanted to know. Both had a reverence for the circle of life, for those who went before, and for those who came after. Nika, whatever Elena might have wished, was of Dan’s blood, and Elena could not find it in herself to forbid the child to go and receive the dying blessing of her mother’s mother. She watched the three walking away from the house – Amais running ahead to pluck some flowering weed by the roadside to present to her grandmother upon arrival, Vien holding Nika’s still toddler-chubby little hand – and had a sudden vivid premonition that she might not be seeing this for very long, this remnant of family that was hers, this shadow of her lost son.

She almost called them back, ran to snatch little Nika up in her arms, demand that the child renounce her divided blood, that she become her own laughing little boy all over again. But perhaps it was already too late for that.

Vien had brought the toddler into the shadowy room where Dan now lay under the embroidered coverlets on her bed. Sensitive to the solemn mood of the occasion, Nika approached her grandmother’s bed when given a light push by her mother, and Dan lifted a hand over the child’s head, letting it flutter down on her silky dark hair for a moment.

‘My little cricket,’ she whispered. ‘You were born in such an hour…I wish your life could have been easier…but you and I will meet in Cahan one day. May you have light and grace all your days.’ She allowed her hand to stroke Nika’s hair, and then sighed. ‘Send me your sister.’

Vien snaked out an arm and whisked an almost hypnotised Nika, who would always be Aylun in this place, out of the way. Amais stepped into the space so vacated, and this time Dan’s hand was not light, offered no stroking. She reached out and closed her fingers around Amais’s wrist, stared into her eyes with a gaze that was suddenly too full of power and passion to belong to a dying woman.

‘Take the journals,’ she said. ‘They are for you. You are the last of Kito-Tai’s line. Take the journals, and don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.’ Her eyes fluttered, closed, all passion suddenly spent, as though she had been filled by some external spirit which had now left her. ‘Or your own…’ she whispered, releasing Amais’s hand.

Amais turned her head, alarmed, and sought her mother with a gaze that was almost frightened. ‘Mother…’

‘Watch your sister,’ Vien said in a whisper. She pulled Amais free of the dying woman’s bedside, planting a swift kiss of reassurance on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘Wait for me in the sitting room. Go.’

Amais took Aylun into the other room and gave her one of baya-Dan’s shawls to play with – she didn’t think her grandmother would mind. For her own part, she went to the chest where she knew that Tai’s journals were kept. She knelt on the floor beside it for the longest time, her mind curiously blank, and then opened the lid and carefully took out the small pile of red notebooks that were her legacy. They sat there in her lap, in apparent innocence – but they had changed for Amais. Before, they had been a fascinating if somewhat distant link to her ancestry and her past. Now they were heavy with portent. It was as though Amais had been charged with something by her grandmother on her deathbed, and these journals were the only way to find out just exactly what it was that she had accepted as her life’s work. Her grandmother had not exactly asked Amais to promise anything, and Amais hadn’t exactly given her word, but it had been implicit in that last conversation.

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own…

When Vien came out to gather her children up, her eyes were red and swollen.

‘Baya-Dan…?’ Amais asked, her voice quavering just a little.

‘She is gone, Amais-ban. She is gone.’

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own. Those words her grandmother had uttered out loud. But now, as Amais remembered them, it seemed to her that there had been another phrase, unspoken, ephemeral, ghostly, hovering in the air and settling lightly in Amais’s mind and memory: Or mine.

Or mine…

But was it Dan’s name she had wanted made immortal…or that of the strange spirit that had possessed her just before death came to claim her?

‘Come on,’ Vien said, holding out her hand. ‘There’s things I need to do now. Let’s go home.’

Amais got up obediently, gathering up the thirteen precious notebooks, wrapping them up in a secure little parcel and hugging them to her chest all the way back to Elena’s house. Somewhere in between those two places, the shrine to Syai where baya-Dan’s spirit now lived and the cheerful green-shuttered house that her still-living grandmother inhabited, walking in the sunshine of Elaas with the treasure of Syai clasped close to her heart, suspended in the empty air between two worlds, Amais realised for the first time in her life that she was no longer sure just where ‘home’ was or how her heart was supposed to find her way there.

Three

Amais kept her head down and herself out of the way in the months that followed, months in which everyone around her seemed fractious, annoyed, or outright furious at things that hovered just outside her comprehension. Vien let down her hair and donned the traditional Syai mourning attire for her mother, which led to Elena making somewhat acid comments about the propriety of wearing so much white with her mother newly dead and her husband not a year in his grave. Vien cast her eyes down and took the barbed remarks in pious silence, her hands folded before her in gracious eastern position, suddenly prominently and obviously alien in the house where she had tried so hard to fit in and where she had once been wholly accepted.

Amais had been dressed in like manner, and the small knot of village children who were her companions had been curious and blunt, as children often were.

‘That’s what we wear in mourning,’ Amais had explained, plucking at her white dress with nervous fingers. Out here in the Elaas sunshine, in the bright light of Elaas customs, the white garb did seem outlandish and strange.

‘So your people are happy when someone dies?’ her friend Ennea asked. ‘White is a colour of joy, you wear it when you marry, not when you die.’

‘But back in Syai…’

‘Is that where you’re really from?’ asked Dia, the school-teacher’s daughter, a slightly higher social caste than the rest of them and generally given to passing on oracular pronouncements from her exalted parent as though they were edicts handed down from the Gods on their mountain. ‘My papa says that blood will tell.’

‘I was born here,’ Amais said fiercely. ‘I am from here!’

‘But your mother wore black like she should when your father died,’ said Ennea, with a child’s utter disregard for tact or feelings, intent on pursuing some fascinating nugget of information and oblivious to all else.

‘That was different,’ said Amais, conscious of a sharp pain as the scab over that older wound, unhealed yet, cracked a little to allow a trickle of pain like heart’s-blood to escape. ‘My father was of Elaas, and…’

‘But so is your grandmother,’ another girl, Evania, pointed out. ‘My grandmother says she was born on the mainland, in the city, before she came to live out here – but she was born here. So she was of Elaas, too.’

Amais remembered the silk-swathed rooms of her grandmother’s house, the scrolls of poetry in a foreign tongue, the scent of alien incense.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said carefully, too young to analyse the thing completely, aware that she could not defend it in the face of the practical questions of her playmates because they simply could not understand it.

‘My mother says you’re strange,’ Ennea said.

But she had still been willing to stay Amais’s friend and companion for all that, and no more was said on the matter, at least for the time being.

Dan had been cremated, on Vien’s insistence and with considerable trouble – since the body had had to be removed from the island in order for this to be accomplished, and getting the necessary permits was not a totally straightforward matter. In this, the established Syai community in Elaas stepped in to offer a helping hand – and that might have compensated for much, being welcomed back into her own world after choosing to step out of it for Nikos’s sake. But the relations between Vien and her own people remained formal and a little cool. It was as though Amais’s dilemmas were projected onto her mother, written much larger than those plaguing her own small self. Amais was still a child, and therefore obliged only to obey the instructions of those older and wiser than her – but Vien was an adult, with an adult’s decisions to make. Decisions that would affect not only her own life but those of the people who depended on her – her two daughters.

And it soon became apparent that there was yet another voice, perhaps the most forceful of all, that guided Vien’s choices – the insistent ghost of her mother.

When Vien first said the word ‘home’ and meant something other than the small cottage by the sea where she lived with Elena and the children, Amais almost missed it – but there was something in Vien’s face, a soft and yet steely determination that frightened her into paying much closer attention.

The wind of change started blowing quite softly, nearly imperceptibly.

‘I must take Mother home.’

That had been the innocuous sentence that let the first breath of moving air into the cold, stagnant little house, which was thus demoted, without ceremony, into a temporary dwelling. No longer the ‘home’ that Amais had known – the only home that she had ever known.

Elena did miss it, that first time. She simply ignored it, like she ignored so many things in those days. She ignored Vien’s views on how her younger daughter should be dressed, fed, disciplined. She ignored Vien’s older daughter altogether. She tried hard to ignore Vien’s white clothes and the white ribbon she wore woven into that incongruous glossy smooth black hair that now hung long and loose down Vien’s back.

But it quickly became too big to ignore. Mysterious people with inscrutable faces and round dark eyes came to call on Vien at Elena’s cottage, treating Elena herself with scrupulously correct if icy politeness. Vien herself would disappear for several days at a time to the mainland, her only word on her absence that she had ‘arrangements’ to make. When she returned to the island after her final visit to the mainland, she carried something in a large envelope, clutched to her breast as though the contents were more precious than jewels.

That time even Elena had to notice.

‘What do you have there?’ she asked in the voice she now customarily used with Vien when she spoke to her at all, clipped and brusque, as though she had judged her daughter-in-law of some crime and found her unforgivably guilty.

‘Tickets,’ Vien said. ‘We’re going home, the three of us and Mother. Back to Syai.’

Everyone looked up at that, Amais in stark astonishment and Elena with something indefinable that was equal parts fury and fear.

‘It’s a long, wasted journey for a baby to make,’ Elena said at last after a moment of silence, riding her emotions on a tight rein. ‘Really, Vien. Your mother lived on these shores all of her life. She can hardly object to being buried in those hills now.’

‘Did she?’ Vien questioned softly, and Amais began to pay much closer attention. This was starting to sound a lot like the frustrating conversations she had had with her friends out at the rock pools, dressed in her inconvenient white ‘mourning’ garb. ‘I don’t think she ever quite lived here. Not really.’

‘She was born here,’ Elena snapped. ‘As far as I know, she never set foot in Syai.’

‘Her body, no,’ Vien said. ‘But her spirit…I do not think her spirit ever left Syai. She was half a woman all of her days, yearning back to the things that made her who she was. She deserves to rest there, in peace at last.’

‘Syai is a long way to take the child to a funeral,’ Elena said crisply.

Amais bowed her head to hide the sudden tears that welled in her eyes. There was only one child in Elena’s mind, and it was not herself.

Her little sister, untroubled by all this, slept in her crib, oblivious to the conflict around her and about her. She would never know, Amais thought. She was too young for any of this to have meaning. She had never known her father, could never remember him.

‘It is a long way, yes,’ Vien said, and lifted her head, meeting her mother-in-law’s eyes. ‘But it isn’t just a funeral that we would go for, Mother-in-law. We go…to stay.’

Elena’s eyes widened for a moment, in pure shock that she could not hide, and then narrowed again and hardened until they were chips of obsidian in her set face.

‘I forbid it,’ she said, dropping each word like a pebble. Amais could almost hear them rattle as they rolled around on the floor at the women’s feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ Vien said, ‘but you cannot. It is not your place.’

‘This is my son’s child,’ Elena said, crossing the room and snatching up the sleeping toddler out of her crib. Nika woke up abruptly, knuckled her eyes with her hands and began to whimper softly as though Elena’s hands were clutching claws locked around her, holding on tight.

‘It is my child,’ Vien said. ‘And here she would always be wangmei, just like…just like I was.’

‘What are you talking about? What is that? She is my son’s daughter, the last thing of his that I have on this earth. She is no wing…whatever that is.’

‘Wangmei,’ Vien repeated patiently, standing her ground. ‘It means “stranger of the body”, an outsider, someone who obviously does not belong in a community. Someone different. Look at her and tell me how she will fit in here in a few years’ time, when she’s grown enough to want playmates, friends.’

‘Amais never had a problem,’ Elena said defensively, bringing her other granddaughter into the discussion for the first time, but only out of desperation, sacrificing her as a pawn to keep her claim on the younger, the precious one, the now openly wailing toddler in her arms. Amais’s eyes were wide, her mouth parted, her heart beating painfully fast.

‘Amais, korimou…’ Vien said, letting a quick and strangely soft glance rest on her oldest for a moment. She had used the word Amais’s father had called her – it was hard to tell whether she had done it deliberately or instinctively, but either way it suddenly sounded strange to Amais, coming from her mother’s lips. ‘Would you let your grandmother and I talk alone? I’ll come and find you in a few moments.’

‘But, Mother…’

‘Please, Amais-ban. It is important.’

Amais slipped off the chair where she had been perched trying very hard to be invisible and dragged herself outside with unwilling obedience. But this concerned her – this was her life they were discussing in there! – so she didn’t go far. She merely turned the corner and crouched underneath the window. It was shuttered against the sun, but beyond the shutters the window was open and it was not hard to eaves-drop on the conversation within.

‘Amais is just as much wangmei as anyone,’ Vien said as the door closed after her daughter. ‘But Aylun…’

‘Nika,’ said Elena fiercely.

‘Aylun – for that is the name she takes with her to Syai, not Nika,’ Vien countered. ‘She could be Nika only here, in this house, in your heart. But she can still be saved, Elena. She can have one world to choose from and she will never know different. Amais…it is already too late for Amais. She is already of two worlds, and will always be torn between them. My mother is probably to blame for that. Perhaps I was, too, for letting her take my child, so young, so malleable – but Amais is already lost here, in this place, because she already knows who she is, who her ancestors were. She is more than wangmei here, she is always going to be xeimei, stranger of the heart, someone who might well have the sense of belonging to this community but who will never be a real part of it. Just like I never really was.’

Amais suddenly felt hot tears welling in her eyes. She will take me away…

‘You were,’ Elena whispered fiercely, rocking her Nika in her arms. ‘You were. When you chose to be.’

‘Amais would have chosen to be, in these last months,’ Vien said, and tears stood in her eyes. ‘Why have you not let her, Elena?’

‘No,’ Elena said, and for the first time her voice broke, brittle with the weight of too much sorrow. ‘Don’t take her away from me, Vien.’

‘You have already done that,’ Vien said. ‘I don’t have to do anything – you have already pushed Amais away yourself.’

‘Not Amais. This one. Go, if you have to – take your child – but leave me Nika. Nika has my son’s eyes. She…’

‘Elena,’ Vien said quietly, ‘she does not. Amais does. Nika is Aylun – she has my mother’s face, her hair, her eyes, her mouth. She will never be Nikos, Elena. She can’t be.’

Elena stared at her, shaking her head minutely, as though she found her words incomprehensible, as if Vien had suddenly started speaking in the language of her ancestors. Which she had, in a way. This had been the first time she had ever used a word of that language in her mother-in-law’s house, and it seemed almost ironic that the words she used meant ‘stranger’.

‘Excuse me,’ Vien said, her voice floating out of the shuttered window, quietly filled with the calm serenity of one who had fought hard battles but who had finally won a war that had been raging for a long time in her soul. ‘I think I had better go and find Amais now, and talk to her.’

Amais, under the window, uncoiled like a whip and raced across the rocky slope behind the house, down the path that led to the cove. She knew the track, every stone and rut and bump on it, and she fled surefooted along the familiar route, around the first curve and out of sight of the house before her mother had had a chance to turn around and open the door.

She wasn’t even aware that the tears that had gathered in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks until she came to a stop at the bottom of the path, leaping down onto the shallow beach of boulder and coarse sand, and had to wipe the back of her hand across her eyes in order to clear her blurred vision. It was only then that her mouth opened like a wound and she sobbed out loud, her whole body shaking with an unexpected and bottomless grief.

The ocean glittered in the sunlight, sparking memories, bringing out things that it was suddenly a white pain to think about. Amais covered her mouth with both hands, as though that could keep the memory from coming, as though she could simply banish it back down into the repository from which it had been called – but it was too late, already too late for that.

She had gone out in a small sailing boat with her father when she was maybe four or five years old, something that she thought of as her first real clear memory. She had already been able to swim like a fish, and there was no fear there – but the women in the household had put up a fight nonetheless and part of the joy of that memory was the way that her father had cut through the whole brouhaha with a simple, ‘She’ll be with me.’ And she was, that was exactly what she was – they were out there together, father and daughter, the white sail furled and the boat bobbing on the sapphire waters with the two of them ducking and diving around it and each other in the warm sea. She had giggled with pure childhood joy, and shrieked with laughter when her father splashed her from behind the boat or dived under to tickle her feet as she kicked out in the water.

That alone would have been enough to hold the magic of the memory, but there had been more.

They had been joined in their games, quite suddenly and with startling gentleness, by three dolphins who came to investigate the noise and stayed to play. They did spectacular leaps and flips, dived back into the water, swam underneath their two human companions and around them, occasionally lifting their heads out of the water to gaze upon them with luminous, intelligent eyes. Amais dived under with them, fearless, and could hear the echo of their sounds in the water. They’d bob their heads to the surface, and so would she, and they’d nod at her as though in approval and utter small chattering noises. They came close enough for her to touch them and she did, running her small hands down the length of the huge animals, almost twice her size. She had finally taken courage and stopped in mid-caress, wrapping her arms around one dolphin’s dorsal fin. It seemed to understand her intentions immediately, squirmed gently until she sat on its back with her feet dangling on either side, and then took off, cleaving the surface cleanly and leaving a white foamy wake behind. Amais was first too startled and then far too enchanted to be in any way afraid. By the time the dolphin circled back to where his companions and Amais’s father waited, she kissed her ocean steed squarely on the nose, which he gave every impression of enjoying, and turned to her father, treading water, her face one huge exhilarated grin.

‘Did you see me? Did you see me ride him?’

‘I saw you,’ Nikos said, his own face wearing an expression of matching joy.

And then they were suddenly gone, the dolphins, as though they had never been there at all, as though they had been just a dream.

‘I hoped they would come,’ Nikos had said, after he’d helped to hoist her back into the boat and had raised the sail for home. ‘I wanted you to meet them. They’re my friends, they often follow the boat; sometimes they will even lead it to where the best fish are. The littlest one is a baby. He was born last calving season, nearly grown now but I remember him when he was quite small, maybe only a few days old. They brought him, you see, they brought him for us to meet. I promised them I would show them my own child one day, when I had a chance.’

‘Thank you, Papa!’ Amais had exclaimed, her face still one huge grin after her experience.

Nikos had reached out and ruffled her wet hair. ‘They’re your friends too, now. They always will be. They never forget. You must never forget them, either.’

‘I won’t,’ she had promised.

She had promised.

But she had also promised baya-Dan something else, something quite different.

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.

She owed other debts, to long-gone ancestors, to people who had walked this earth centuries before her, and who had never seen a dolphin leap from the sea.

She wished that she didn’t feel as though keeping one of those promises meant inevitably and permanently breaking the other.

Four

Aylun was asleep when the family boarded the small boat that would take them to the mainland, carried in her mother’s arms. The bigger pieces of their luggage had been loaded already; the travellers perched on a couple of battered trunks in the midst of the boat, a number of smaller packages at their feet. Vien also wore a bag slung crosswise on her body, strap on one shoulder and the bag itself resting on the hip on which she was not balancing her sleeping toddler. In that bag were the most precious of the things they had brought with them – Dan’s ashes in a small bronze urn, what there was of Dan’s gold and valuables that was small enough to be carried by hand and that could be exchanged for the things they would need on their journey, tickets for the various conveyances that would take them all the way back to the shores of Syai, and necessities for Aylun’s immediate needs.

Amais carried a similar bag. No concessions had been made for her size and on her the thing looked enormous, overwhelming, threatening to make her buckle under its weight. In hers she carried whatever her mother required but could not fit into her own luggage, as well as the thirteen precious red journals that had been left to her by Dan and – smuggled in as a last-minute sentimental impulse but already starting to be a subject for second thoughts – a couple of pebbles from the cove where her father had taken her to swim with wild dolphins.

The family’s break with the island seemed to be complete. Elena had not come to see them off at the wharf, and neither had any of Amais’s erstwhile bosom friends and companions. Those people who did happen to be there as Vien and her daughters departed seemed reluctant to meet their eyes, to look at them, even to acknowledge that they saw them. Many found something to be busy with, keeping their heads down. Only a couple of women offered a wan half-smile, and one or two children, probably too young to know better, waved goodbye as the boat carrying Vien and the girls pushed off from the dock.

Vien kept her back to the shore, clutching Aylun, occasionally patting the bag she carried with one hand as though to make sure it was still there. It was Amais who sat facing the island they were abandoning, and it was only Amais who saw Elena finally come running all the way down the wharf and then back again to shore, taking an awkward, stumbling leap off it onto the pebbled beach, her customary headscarf clutched in one twisted hand revealing black hair streaked liberally with grey and falling in untidy strands about her face and neck. She was calling something, but either they were already too far to hear clearly or else her voice was very weak – it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Vien sat with her back straight, without turning her head. She must have heard that voice, must have recognised it, but she gave no reaction to it at all, and Amais could see nothing on her mother’s face except a glint in her eye that might have been either determination or a concealed tear. But Amais, for her part, could not find it in herself to leave without a word, without a thought – even though she had been the despised and ignored one ever since her father had died and her sister had been born to take his place in Elena’s heart. Amais had never forgotten the early years and the fact that her father’s mother did love her, long ago, once upon a time. And Elena was the last link with that other world, the world with her father and his dolphins, the world where she had suddenly been put on trial and declared a stranger.

With a final glance at her mother, half guilty and half defiant, Amais lifted both hands and waved back to the grandmother she was losing, waved back hard, as though that single simple motion alone could convey all that now would never be said.

Elena had stopped stock-still as Amais’s hands came up, and for the longest moment she stood frozen, immobilised by this farewell. And then she lifted one of her own hands, very slowly, and allowed the black kerchief she carried to be stirred by the breeze. They waved to each other, in silence, grandmother and granddaughter, for as long as they could see one another, until the boat slipped around a promontory and turned towards the mainland and blotted out the small beach and the woman standing alone upon it, with the memory of Amais’s childhood dissolving in the white sea foam as waves lapped and whispered at her feet.

Everything was bigger on the mainland. It was the first time Amais, nine years old, had seen a human dwelling bigger than anything to be found in the village in which she had grown up, and where she had known every face, from the newest babies with eyes barely opened to the world to the wizened ancient widows who sat in the sun outside their houses and blinked at the cerulean Elaas sky all day, counting clouds like sheep. Amais watched round-eyed as the bigger pieces of their baggage were hauled onto the shoulders of burly men naked to the waist, burned bronze by the sun under which they toiled, and carried onto the larger ship on which they would continue their journey. She watched other passengers stream on board, people wearing strange clothes, the men in buttoned-down jackets and patent leather shoes and the women wearing white gloves and large lace-and-ribbon-trimmed hats that cast their features into alluring half-shadow. She thought they were all beautiful.

But their own accommodation was not shared with the beautiful people – Vien and her daughters had a tiny cramped inside cabin with no view and no air, just four bunks stuffed into the smallest space into which they could possibly fit and a platform that served as both table and nightstand screwed firmly to the wall in between them. The only other fixtures were a cubbyhole that was supposed to serve as a closet, into which one of their smaller trunks that still didn’t quite fit inside had been crammed, and a small porcelain basin in one corner. They were to share a bathroom and toilet with five similar cabins that surrounded them.

Amais surveyed all this as she paused in the doorway, and her expression must have betrayed something of her appalled dismay, because Vien, pushing in behind her with the toddler she carried, now waking and fretful in her arms, clicked her tongue at her eldest daughter and schooled her face into a stern expression.

‘We probably could have done better, yes,’ she said, answering an unspoken question. ‘But it’s a lot more expensive, and our means are limited right now. We must save our gold for when we get home – we will need it there. Besides, it’s ours – we don’t even have to share that fourth bunk with some stranger. There’s more room than you think.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ Amais murmured obediently, but her heart quailed at the prospect of spending weeks, possibly months – she had no idea how long the journey was going to take – in this claustrophobic space.

‘You can take the top bunk,’ Vien said, inspecting the accommodations. ‘Aylun cannot sleep up there, and I must be where I can attend to her at night if I need to, so the two of us will sleep in the lower bunks. Now, help me sort this stuff out so that we have room to move. Some of it can go in the other top bunk, the one you aren’t using; it will give us a bit of space.’

‘May I go and see the ship, Mother?’ Amais asked, anxious to escape the confines of the cabin, grasping at whatever excuse she could muster.

‘Later,’ Vien said implacably.

So Amais spent the best part of an hour soothing her fractious sister and playing finger-games with her, sorting out the stuff in the trunk and hauling out things her mother considered necessities so that they could be better accessed atop the free upper bunk, and then squashing the trunk in as best it would go between the basin stand and the foot of one of the lower bunks, allowing free space to stand up and turn around in the midst of the cabin. She had not even noticed that the ship had actually started to move until her mother, satisfied with the arrangements in the cabin as best they could be made, took Aylun in her arms again and told Amais to lead the way up to the deck.

They were already a couple of ship-lengths away from the shore. A crowd of people stood shouting and waving, and the railings on that side of the ship were thronged by passengers who were waving back. Vien, with nobody to bid farewell to, simply turned her back on them and took her children to the opposite side of the ship, where there were fewer people and the view of the sunlit sea was unimpeded.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Over there, somewhere, is Syai. We’re on our way. We’re going home.’

But it was her father’s dolphins that Amais searched for in the waters that quickly turned from sapphire to deep cobalt blue, her father’s dolphins and her father’s spirit, wanting to say her farewells to them, wanting to assure them that she could not bid them goodbye because a part of her would never leave them. She thought she saw a silver fin break the surface of the water, once, a long way away – but she could not be sure, and, although she stayed at the railings for a long time after her mother grew bored and a little seasick and retired below with Aylun, she did not see the fin again.

And the sun rode across the cloudless sky, and dipped towards the horizon, and then beneath it; and the quiet stars came out; and the first day was over. Already Amais was alone and adrift upon the open sea; the land of her birth was lost behind her, the land of her ancestors only a secret promise far away in the night.

The shipboard days followed one another, monotonous and long, marked by persistent bouts of seasickness on the part of Vien and Aylun. Amais was apparently her father’s daughter in more than one sense – she was remarkably unaffected, having got her sea legs within hours of boarding the big ship, and when she wasn’t tending to her prostrate mother and sister she spent her time exploring. Frequently she was gently but firmly steered away from areas of special sensitivity or specific salons on the top deck which were exclusively reserved for the passengers travelling in spacious outside cabins with portholes, out of which one could see the sea and the sky. Amais didn’t care, really – she hadn’t wanted to join the ship’s aristocracy, only to see the places they had claimed. Denied those, she found other spots that she made her own. One of her particular favourites – and one from which she would probably have been evicted had she been observed – was the very point of the ship’s prow, where huge ropes and the anchor chain were coiled and stowed. The place, once rearranged just a little for her convenience, made a comfortable nest for Amais. On several occasions, when her family had been particularly violently ill and the cabin smelled overwhelmingly of sick, she had even escaped and slept out here in the open air, lulled by the hiss and lap of the ship’s prow cleaving the waters beneath her. She’d take her journals out there with her, Tai’s journals, and pore over them, immersing herself in Tai’s world, deliberately turning her back on the sea and the dolphins and the call of her father’s blood. Those were in the past, for now. There were things she needed to know, for her future.

She was troubled by dreams out there on that prow, she who had always slept soundly and deeply, and – as far as she had ever been aware – dreamlessly. If she had ever dreamed before, she had never remembered the dreams when she woke. But now she did, and they came thick and fast, and some were of the lost past and some were simply dreams, unknown, unexplainable, impossible to interpret or understand without context, which, as yet, she completely lacked. Sometimes there was nothing but voices – her grandmother’s, for instance, reading some familiar passage from a poem or a genealogical line, or uttering those last words of hers that were so much a binding laid on Amais by a dying woman; or an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s, calling, I’m lost, I’m lost, come and find me, come and set me free…There were weird dreams of almost frightening focus, sometimes a single phrase or even a single word written on scarlet pennants in gold calligraphy, things she could not quite read but knew were written in jin-ashu, the women’s tongue her grandmother had taught her, and that they were very important, if only she could get close enough to see them clearly and understand them. And sometimes there were dreams that were almost complete stories in and of themselves – she dreamed of strange skies, as though something far away, something vast and distant, was on fire. Once she woke from a vivid dream where she stood under such skies with a child, a little girl, both of them dressed in a manner described by Tai in her journals, their hair in courtly style, standing on a shattered piece of stairwell with only a shattered city around her – and she thought she knew what was burning then, but that didn’t seem quite right either.

It was then that she started keeping her own journal, not meticulously and neatly and every day like Tai had done all her life, but haphazardly, whenever the mood took her, using a half-filled notebook she had found abandoned on the deck after one of the beautiful people from the forbidden salon had passed that way. She had not believed that the precious notebook, with all those inviting blank pages waiting to be filled, had been simply dumped – and she had spent an entire morning stalking it, wandering around that part of the deck, waiting for somebody, anybody, to come and claim it. Nobody had done so, and Amais decided that the Gods of Syai must have sent her this gift, and took the notebook with a completely clear conscience. She wrote her journal half in the language of Elaas, which was the language of her father and her childhood, and half in graceful but oddly formed and unsteady characters of jin-ashu. Amais had been taught how to read the women’s tongue, but the calligraphy of it, writing it herself, was something that baya-Dan had only begun to teach her in earnest a few years back. She was quickly beginning to realise that she had barely scratched the surface of jin-ashu, that there were so many more layers there than she had believed. She was using Tai’s journals partly as inspiration and partly as a manual to teach herself more of the secret language, forcing herself to write it using the coarse lead of a broken pencil instead of the delicate brush and ink in which the characters ought to have been inscribed, finding it hard work but in general quite pleased with her progress.

But the journal proved to be a stepping stone for something quite different. She soon found that she was not as comfortable in the journal format as her ancestress had been. She started writing down her thoughts as long poems. Initially they were pastiche, no more than clumsy copies of the classical poems her grandmother had read to her and those she found in the pages of Tai’s books, but even to her own untutored eye they improved with daily practice until she was quite proud of what she could do with the old and glowing words of the classical high language that had been her grandmother’s gift to her. The poetry, however, turned out to be another stepping stone, to something else again. She started writing down stories, casting her own dreams into fiction, writing about her hopes and fears and expectations as though they were happening to someone removed from herself, finding it easier to conquer and understand them that way.

The notebook she had found on deck soon ran out of room to write in, thickly covered with what was a remarkably good calligraphy for having been produced by someone of Amais’s age, without proper implements, and with the added constraint of having to be smaller and smaller as the space to write in grew more and more cramped and valuable. One of the ship’s officers found her sitting cross-legged in the sun one morning, squinting morosely at her notebook, trying to find a margin she had not yet written in.

‘Hey,’ the man had said in a friendly manner, smiling at the picture of the intense little girl bent over her words. ‘Much too nice a day for that long face. Looks like that’s pretty much all your book will take – what are you doing, writing a diary? Could you use another of those?’

It was impolite to answer in the affirmative; one never asked for gifts. But Amais looked down at her notebook, and then up at the officer, and nodded mutely.

‘Then I will see you get one. There are plenty of notebooks in the back of the storage cabinet. I’ll see what I can dig out.’

‘Thank you, sei,’ Amais said, using the old form of address. The officer wasn’t even one of the higher ones, hardly a ‘lord’. But he was offering a precious thing. That entitled him.

He didn’t understand the honour, naturally, and merely smiled as he tipped his cap at her. ‘I’ll find you,’ he said.

And he did. He came up with two partly filled and discarded notebooks and – the greatest treasure of all – a completely blank notebook of substantial proportions, bound in thin leather.

‘The captain’s log is far more boring than what you might want to use it for,’ he said.

‘This is the captain’s book?’ Amais demanded, too impressed to be polite.

‘Yours now,’ the officer said. ‘He’ll only think they forgot to load his usual quota. You’d better keep it out of sight, though. You know.’ And he had winked at her in a conspiratorial manner.

She didn’t know whether to believe him – taking one of the notebooks destined for the official log of the ship’s journey sounded entirely too outrageous, but she did it anyway, keeping the book hidden even from her mother, no small achievement given their cramped and untidy cabin.

Vien and the girls changed ships after they crossed the big inland sea, and loaded themselves into another even bigger vessel sailing east, all the way to the Syai port of Chirinaa, familiar to both Vien and Amais only as a lost city of legend. On the first night of this, the last leg of their journey, Vien felt well enough to leave Aylun sleeping in the even more cramped cabin, if that were possible, than the one in which they had travelled on the first ship, and joined her older daughter on deck.

It was evening, and the sea breezes were cool. Vien wrapped her shawl tighter around her and leaned her elbows on the railing to look down into the water below.

‘Soon,’ she said to Amais. ‘Soon we will be there.’

‘What will we do there, Mother?’

‘I will make proper arrangements for your grandmother,’ Vien said. ‘That is the first thing that I will do.’

‘But where will we live?’

Vien hesitated. Just a little. ‘I don’t know yet, Amais-ban. But we will see how it is when we get there. All will be well.’

Amais tilted her head to the side, and regarded her mother with a sudden chill, a touch of fear. There had been a light in Vien’s face just then, something that spoke of an exile’s homecoming, a glow of joyous expectation which might not have been wholly unexpected in one of what baya-Dan had called li-san, the lost generations, the ones who went away, who left Syai behind. But that joy was drifting, ephemeral, rootless. Amais could quite clearly see her mother on this journey, see her wrapped completely in its expectations, its visions, its dreams. She could not, hard as she tried, imagine Vien at the journey’s end, could not see what Vien planned to do with Syai when its soil was firm under her feet. Their lives seemed confined to the limbo of the ship, with quiet waters all around them, an eternal voyage fated never to end.

She did not know what scared her worse – the knowledge that her mother had no real idea of what to do next, or the nebulous thoughts that were forming in her own mind, a still shapeless and formless thing, something that had been born of her dreams and of the promise she had made baya-Dan on her deathbed. Something that was waiting in Syai for her hand to be laid upon it. Something that was for her alone, that nobody else in this world would be able to do.

Five

The port in Elaas where they had boarded their first ship had been a city, and Amais had thought it huge and full of people. The port across the Inner Sea where they had boarded their second ship had been even larger – a busy, exotic place that smelled strange across the waters a full day before they had caught sight of land – but Amais had not really had the chance or the inclination to explore it in the rush of changing ships, transferring luggage, finding a place to lay their heads, securing their cabin. They had been on their way almost before Amais had really had a chance to feel solid ground under her feet once more. The only thing left in her as she had climbed on deck to watch the ship leaving this ephemeral shore behind it was a faint regret that she hadn’t had a chance to pay more attention to a place she was not likely to come back to.

But that passed. The transit port had not been either kind of home for Amais, and she had been too stretched between future and past to have time to feel anything that didn’t have roots in either fear or impatience. She wanted to see Syai now, the Syai of her grandmother’s tales, of the old poems, of Tai’s journals – the glittering place where she thought she could find what she needed to glue together the mismatched halves of her spirit into something that resembled a whole. The captain’s purloined notebook filled with stories, fairytales describing a world with ancient sages stepping down from their temple niches and walking the city offering blessings, with glittering empresses who were sisters-of-the-heart to little girls who sold fish in the marketplace and the great adventures they had together, with Imperial Guard phalanxes dressed in black and wielding magic daggers. It was a world woven from Tai’s journals, from baya-Dan’s stories, from Amais’s own imagination – something she now anticipated with a feverish desire, waiting to step into those stories herself, become part of them and let them become a part of her.

When the ship’s notices, pasted on the public notice-boards every day, finally started announcing their imminent arrival in Chirinaa, Amais was already exhausted with expectations, building the place up in her mind into a city whose walls would shine with gold, its streets paved with rubies, full of people dressed in bright silks and women whose hair dripped with jewels, with opulent teahouses on every corner serving fragrant mountain tea in white porcelain teapots painted with cranes and hummingbirds.

The reality was quite different – at least the reality that the ship disgorged the small family into on the quay. There might well have been ruby paving stones somewhere, but not here – not out in the busy working harbour, teeming with barrels, boxes wrapped in massive chains and secured with even larger double-lock puzzle padlocks, scraps of torn oilcloth and tarpaulin underfoot, vats that smelled achingly familiar with whiffs of new-caught fish and salty brine clinging to their sides, sloshing open tanks that contained heaving crabs and lobsters, bales bound with thick ropes, and, everywhere in between this chaos and confusion, scuttling and quick-moving no-man’s wharf-cats, and bare-chested and bronze-skinned dockworkers with shaved heads and hooded eyes. The place smelled of coal dust, of sweating bodies, of all the various scents, both pleasant and evil, of the ocean. There was even a very, very faint whiff of something oily and rotten, a miasma that was a reminder of the wide marshes that lay not too far away to the west of the city.

Vien shepherded her older daughter onto the dock, carrying her younger on her hip as she had done when they had departed Elaas in what now seemed to Amais to have been another age of the world, and then stood there surrounded with the luggage that had been unloaded at her feet, hesitating, unsure of what to do next.

‘We should find an inn or a hostel or something,’ Amais said at last, after a long silence.

‘Yes,’ Vien agreed, her tone conveying simple concurrence and a total loss as to how to start looking for such a place. The labourers hefting their loads passed back and forth, parting to flow around Vien and her daughters as though they were a rock in a stream. Some might have turned their heads marginally to glance at the solitary woman and the two children, apparently waiting for something that never came, but most simply ignored them other than as an acknowledged obstacle in their path.

Amais scanned the buildings beyond the wharf. Even to her young and inexperienced eyes they did not look promising at all. Some were no more than padlocked storage facilities, with their windows securely covered by wooden shutters. Others, those that had actual people going in and out of them, seemed to be evenly divided between two types. One consisted of a string of busy offices where men ducked in with bulging bags and armfuls of paperwork, re-emerging with sour faces and tight lips that betokened either their having sucked on a particularly sour lemon or having just paid large sums of money to people they considered undeserving for ‘services’ they resented being obliged to buy. The other, which she could smell all the way across the wharf, had quite different purposes, and the people coming out of these places wore expressions that, if not ecstatic at their lot in life, were at the very least tolerably content with it for the duration of the panacea doled out by rice wine or sorghum ale.

There was nothing visible that would remotely do for lodgings, and from what Amais could overhear from the conversations going on all around her, the language that was spoken here was different from the one she thought she knew, the one she had thought would be spoken by all of Syai – a different dialect, a different accent. It sounded harsh and foreign and she found herself close to tears of pure frustration and helplessness even while her mind was collecting these sounds and smells and images, sorting them, cataloguing them, filing them smartly away for future reference, for future stories. There were lots of stories here. Amais could feel them all around her, rubbing against her ankles like friendly cats, ducking into alleys just out of her line of sight and inviting her to follow.

But those were for later. Those were for when she was fed and housed. And Vien…

‘Nixi mei ma?’ The voice was soft, almost too soft to be heard over the hubbub of the harbour. Both Amais and Vien turned their heads, sure they had heard something but not certain of what. Their eyes met those of the man who had spoken, wiry and barely tall enough to be eye-level with Vien. He bowed to them, having got their attention, presenting them with a brief glimpse of a beaded round cap that fitted snugly around his head, and then straightened again, smiling.

Amais scratched around in her brain for the meaning of the words he had just uttered, and came up, incongruously perhaps, with, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘No,’ she said helplessly, slanting the words in what she thought might be comprehensible to the local speaker, staring at the man. ‘Thank you,’ she added, after a moment, and bowed back in the manner that he had done. It seemed to be called for, just basic politeness.

His eyes glittered as he offered a small smile. When he spoke again, it was slowly, enunciating his words, and Amais found she had little trouble understanding him.

‘I apologise for intruding,’ the man said, ‘but I think that you are strangers in the city. Might you be looking for a place to stay tonight?’

Vien still looked a little confused. Amais glanced at her and translated. Vien blinked several times, quickly.

‘But who is he?’ she asked Amais, in the high-court language of old Syai that she had been taught by her mother.

The man obviously understood, because he bowed again, this time directly to Vien. ‘Beautiful lady,’ he said, in heavily accented but compatible dialect, ‘my sister runs an inn not ten minutes from here by pedicab. It is safe, cheap – might I interest you in lodging there with her tonight?’

Amais found her heart thumping painfully, her eyes darting from the smiling tout to her apparently frozen mother. Aylun, in her mother’s arms, was obviously being clutched at ferociously, but had caught the mood of the moment and didn’t do more than let out a small soft whimper.

‘We have to sleep somewhere, Mother,’ Amais said, in the language of Elaas, something she knew that the man would not understand. His expression didn’t change as she spoke, but she saw his glance sharpen as he tried to interpret her words.

‘But how do I know we can trust him?’ Vien said, thankfully in the same language. Amais had not been at all sure that she would take the hint. ‘I mean, he could be anybody, taking us anywhere…I don’t know this city…’

‘We have to stay somewhere,’ Amais repeated.

‘Do you think we should take the chance?’

Aylun whimpered again, a little more loudly. Vien bent her head over her toddler to hush her, and Amais bit her lip.

‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ she said.

She did not tell her mother, not ever, that she had heard the man give instructions to the lead pedicab that would convey them all to the inn at which they were to stay – and then, a few minutes into the ride, having watched the three lost returning souls staring around them with round eyes and open mouths since he had loaded them and their luggage into the pedicabs, change his instructions. At the very least she had thought she understood, ‘No. Not the other place. Go to…’ and what followed was incomprehensible, perhaps an address. Either way, it would have been imperceptible if she hadn’t been paying attention. But the pedicabs suddenly turned away from the warren of steadily narrowing dirt streets into which they had been heading and emerged onto a busier thoroughfare, a still narrow but cobbled road in decent repair, choked with pedestrians, pedicabs, bicycles, horses, donkey-pulled carts, the occasional antiquated rickety-looking sedan chair that looked more affectation than a comfortable or even convenient form of transportation, sherbet and sweetmeat vendors, and children who appeared to be selling or giving out printed sheets of paper and who were darting in and out of the traffic in a manner that made Amais clutch the edges of her seat in fear for their lives. A couple of times she thought she saw a woman dressed in the silks she had originally envisaged, but the women in question were not out in the street exactly, but hovered in certain doorways, or were in the process of sashaying up narrow stairs that led into mysterious shadows of upstairs parlours.

A sharp bark by the leading pedicab operator brought them all to a halt outside a shabby hostelry. Vien paid the pedicabs, and then offered a handful of what she had been given in change to the man who had brought them here, and again it was only Amais who really paid attention to the reaction that the money produced. His face washed with ephemeral expressions of surprise, delight, and perhaps a faint tinge of regret. She knew that her mother had offered too much, that the man might have wondered how much more she had on her, if it wouldn’t have been more lucrative to have delivered them to the first place he had had in mind, after all, and not to the one where they now found themselves, shabby and threadbare and with the turquoise paint peeling off the pillars outside the front door, but looking quite respectable for all that.

The proprietress, a hatchet-faced woman with a mouth that appeared to have forgotten how to smile if it had ever known it, showed them to a single small room on the third floor of this establishment – but after the cramped cabins on the ships the place looked like a palace to Amais. They would each have a pallet of their own, without the need to climb swaying ladders when ready for bed, with actual room to move between them. The windows were shuttered; the landlady crossed to them and flung the shutters open, letting in light, air, and all the smells of the city.

‘There is a teahouse around the corner,’ she said to Vien, ‘if you want dinner. Rent is a week in advance.’

Vien dutifully counted out the rent money in gold – the only currency she actually had on her – and the landlady left with a raised eyebrow but without another word. Amais had the uncomfortable feeling that once again her mother had doled out too much. It was hard with gold – she made a mental note to find out if any of it could be exchanged for local money that could be better figured out.

Vien deposited Aylun on the nearest bed, and sank down beside her.

‘I don’t think I can go anywhere tonight. I need to rest, I need to think.’

‘Aylun will be hungry.’

‘I know,’ said Vien, rummaging in her bag for more gold. ‘Go to this teahouse. Bring us back something to eat.’

Amais opened her mouth to say something, and then changed her mind, taking the coins her mother had thrust into her hand and turning away. She closed the door very gently behind her, as though she feared that a slam might wake her mother up – for that was exactly what Vien was, dreamy, almost sleepwalking, buckling under the weight of this place and its impressions and all that it meant – and the memories that crowded around incongruously of a different life somewhere far away which now seemed no more than one of Amais’s stories. Amais knew all this because she fought against the same shock herself. Part of her was whispering, Welcome home. The other part wanted nothing so much right at that moment than to hear her father’s deep voice utter, in a language unknown in this strange land, words that would have made her instantly feel cocooned in the security and the power of his love: ‘She is with me.’

Vien ventured out of her room only on the third day, and did not go far. The streets seemed to frighten her a little, and she looked lost and unhappy. She tried for days – she would take the urn with the ashes of her mother, as though that was a talisman against some unspeakable horror that awaited her in the city and which she was pitifully unable to understand, and venture forth with a clear intention of visiting the Chirinaa Temple and taking care of this, the most sacred and – as she had thought – the most pressing of the things she had sworn to do when she returned to Syai. But she never made it to any Temple. She avoided Temples as though she were afraid of them, of what she might find there. Chirinaa had been so very different from what Vien had thought it would be. Not that she had ever had any clear expectations, but the reality had been coldly inimical to all of the ones she might have begun to shape in her mind, and Vien instinctively shied from having this last illusion destroyed. What if the Temple was nothing like she expected? What if there too she was so inept, so inexperienced, so utterly lost? What if she did or said the wrong thing and her mother’s spirit remained forever denied rest?

Amais had immersed herself in the world of Tai’s journals and her own stories and had come to her own conclusions. She was watching her mother; she was watching the city, so different from the Imperial Syai she thought she knew, the one she had believed utterly that she would enter when she stepped onto the shores of Chirinaa. Instead of that, she found herself in an unquiet city seething with sulky rebellion and sometimes overt outrage – a city which had been one of the anvils on which Syai’s revolutions had been forged over years and centuries, a city whose streets had run with blood as one side or another labelled some other group as dangerous and unleashed calamity upon them. It was a city that had risen in rebellion more than once, most recently, according to the street talk that Amais overheard, for a young man called Iloh, whose name was proscribed but was somehow whispered by every shadow. It was a city in which that particular rising had been bloodily and ruthlessly suppressed by the man in Syai’s high seat, General Shenxiao. There was no grace here, no calm nobility of an ancient court, no rich and exotic heritage – nothing, in fact, of what Amais and her sister had been brought here expecting to find. Only bloodshed, only austerity, only fear.

All of this connected, somehow, and the answer to their difficulties became blindingly obvious to Amais.

‘We don’t belong here, Mother. That’s why you won’t even think about leaving baya-Dan here. We aren’t from Chirinaa. We are…we are from Linh-an. We aren’t home after all, Mother. We aren’t home yet.’

Six

On such small things do fates turn.

There were three sons on the small farm in the fertile hills of the province of Syai known as Hian. Tradition said that one would be educated to take care of the ledgers and the accounting, one would work the land, and one would be responsible for the household and his aging parents, when the time came for them to be taken care of.

Tradition sent the eldest of the three sons, Iloh, into the tiny school in the village below, trudging down the hillside and joining a handful of other small boys in a classroom barely big enough to hold their growing bodies and way too small to confine their boisterous spirits. Every boy, inevitably, had his own interests and concerns – and in some of the pupils the enthusiasm was simply for doing the minimum expected of them and then escaping back into the glories of the real world, hiking into the hills to pick the sweet berries or trap small animals out in the woods. Iloh was one of the few whose passions were kindled for a different thing – for the power of the word.

The boys were taught simple, basic things – how to count, and enough of the hacha-ashu script to be able to produce a coherent sentence in clumsy calligraphy and to read at the very least the simple folk renditions of tales and songs that had been copied out onto scrolls and parchments and notebooks. But Iloh saw more, wanted more, and he was one of the few to whom the teacher showed the school’s real treasures – a couple of scrolls of parchment with classical poetry inscribed on them, works of art in themselves, the calligraphy flowing and perfect and the ink unfaded over the years. Those, and a handful of books, mostly novels, printed on cheap paper with ink that sometimes smudged if you ran your finger over the page too fast. But to Iloh, both the magnificent scrolls and the cheap paperback books were equally valuable. Perhaps the latter even more so than the former, because the novels were written in a language closer to the contemporary vernacular than the poems, and were thus easier to understand.

‘You might want to continue your education,’ Iloh’s teacher had told him when he was eight years old. ‘There are other schools, better schools, bigger schools.’

‘Perhaps Father might allow me,’ Iloh said, but without conviction. His father was a patriarch of the ancient kind, autocratic, indifferent to all except his own will. Iloh had quickly got the idea that the education he received was not for his own sake, but the farm’s, the family’s, and that there would be no indulgences.

But even that small hope had vanished absolutely in the year that Iloh turned nine. A widowed sister of his father’s had returned to her family home from a neighbouring province in the spring of that year with her own small son after the death of her husband. Iloh’s father had taken them in, no questions asked – they were family, and there was nothing more to be said on the matter. But the three-year-old boy, Iloh’s little cousin, arrived sallow, sickly, and coughing a lot. Before his fourth birthday came around, he was dead. Less than six months after that, so was his mother. And before her body was cold in its grave, it became obvious that she had left a deadly legacy behind. She and her son had not died of a broken heart, mourning her lost husband. They had died of a disease.

The disease, however, had not died with them.

In the autumn of that year, Iloh’s middle brother, Guan, began to cough and then to waste away. His mother removed him from the rest of the family and stuffed up the gaps in the windows and doors of his room with rags, so that the evil disease could not come out and claim anybody else. Guan fought valiantly for months, isolated and lonely in his convalescent cell, but even his mother’s devoted nursing did not save him. He was just over six years old when the final stages of the illness set in, starting to cough blood into the handkerchiefs his mother left by his bed.

The convalescent’s father had initially vetoed the doctor being summoned to the house, because such visits cost a lot of money. He had suggested to his wife that they pack up Guan and take him to the doctor’s rooms in the village themselves.

‘He will not live through it,’ Guan’s mother had said, and had begged, pleaded, for the doctor to be allowed to come. The patriarch finally succumbed, and sent his oldest son to fetch the doctor from the village. Iloh had gone, his mother’s desperate pleading voice echoing in his ears – but it had been a different voice, a sort of strange premonition, that made him pause beside the corner of his schoolhouse, three houses away from the doctor’s home, and stand with his hand on the dirty wall, palm flat against it, oddly convinced that he was somehow saying farewell to the place.

It had seemed to be only an instant, a stolen moment in time, but it might have made all the difference in the world if Iloh had not stopped by the schoolhouse. By the time he got to the doctor’s he was told that the healer had just gone out. Desperately asking for his destination so that he could follow him, Iloh was told curtly that the doctor was not an errant goat to be fetched from pasture, and to sit outside the house and wait for his return.

The doctor had taken an hour and a half to come back – from, as it turned out, a birthing in the aftermath of which the new father, a wealthy landlord who already had four daughters but whose first son this had been, had kept him aside for a small celebration. He was not drunk – precisely – but there was definitely a brightness in his eye and a looseness to his step that showed that he was not wholly sober either. Iloh had jumped up from his seat on the bench outside the back door and had waylaid the doctor as he approached his house – and had been rewarded with a small, almost disinterested frown.

‘I don’t really have time to do a house call,’ the doctor said.

‘But you just came from one,’ Iloh replied.

‘That’s different. They promised me a suckling pig to be delivered in time for the festival days.’

Iloh thought quickly. ‘My father has none to spare. But he could give a chicken…’

The doctor shook his head imperceptibly, and made as if to pass.

‘Two chickens!’ Iloh said desperately, heedless of promising such largesse in his father’s name. ‘Three, if you make him well!’

‘Chickens,’ the doctor said with an edge of annoyance. ‘Everyone gives chickens. What am I to do with more chickens, boy? You can’t afford to pay my fee.’

‘Please, sir,’ Iloh whispered, ‘it’s my brother.’

‘I’m sorry, lad, but I need to get some sleep…’ the doctor began.

Iloh drew himself up to his full height – which was not much at nine, but he was certainly tall for his age and had promise of more height to come. In any event, the expression on his face made it seem as though he had several extra inches on him.

‘My brother is dying!’ he said. ‘And if I have to drag you all the way, you are coming to see him, tonight. My father sent me to fetch you, and I am not going back without you!’

For a moment, the doctor – taller and wider than his diminutive opponent – actually seemed to shrink in Iloh’s presence, but then he reminded himself that this small person that threatened him was a nine-year-old child and had no real power over him.

‘Sorry, lad,’ he said. ‘Bring coin, tomorrow. No chickens. Better still, bring the patient and we can see what can be done for him. But not tonight. Out of my way.’

He left Iloh standing there in the path with a hot coal of frustrated fury in his belly and eyes burning with something that was almost loathing. The boy actually went back to the house and banged open-palmed on the door, calling for the doctor to come out, but he was ignored and after a while he made his way back home, empty-handed and coldly angry, smouldering with the beginnings of an idea that would one day shape his whole existence. To each according to his needs and from each according to his ability – my brother needed, and could not pay a suckling pig and was therefore not a priority. The world is not a fair place.

They tried to take Guan down to the doctor the next day, as the doctor had demanded, but by the time they got to the village from their farm, the boy was dead.

Guan’s little sister, Leihong, was next. Despite her mother’s efforts to isolate her from her sick brother, she succumbed to the disease three days before her second birthday. That left the youngest son, Rubai, and the eldest, Iloh.

And, just like that, Iloh’s schooldays were over.

If it had not been for his father’s act of charity towards the widowed sister and her child, everything would have gone according to the original plans – but now the farm itself was in jeopardy, the family’s very livelihood. Rubai was four, far too young to do any but the most rudimentary chores – and, even if he had been older, his mother had begun guarding him like a dragon, protecting him from every little thing that could bring him harm. Iloh was all that was left. His father’s edict was pragmatic and uncompromising. The urgent need for an extra hand at the farm outweighed the potential future requirement for an educated farm manager.

The village teacher actually wept when Iloh came in to say goodbye.

‘Of all the boys, why you?’ the teacher said. ‘You had the will and the energy and the enthusiasm. All the rest…they would not even miss it. But you…’ He had been holding a couple of the novels that Iloh had been particularly fond of, and which he had borrowed from the teacher – for perhaps the fifth time – and which he had come here principally to return, since he would not have the opportunity to give them back to the lender any time soon. But the teacher seemed to have other ideas, because he suddenly put the two shabby books back into Iloh’s hands and closed the boy’s rigid fingers around them. ‘No,’ the teacher said, ‘you keep them. In your hands they are a far greater treasure than they would ever be in mine. And if you ever have the chance…’

‘Thank you!’ breathed Iloh, staring down at the books as though he had been given gold. He would have loved one of the beautiful old poems, too, but he was practical enough to realise that he could not care for that as it should be cared for. He was grateful for what he was given.

The two books were all he had by way of reading matter. Very quickly he learned both books by heart, but he clung to them with a fanatical zeal, and read them and re-read them constantly. The stories were fiction, but both were based on some tenuous historical facts, and it was easy for Iloh to think of them as though they were real history, that the events they depicted really happened. One of them was a tale of ten thousand brigands, no more than a collection of episodic stories – but the other, a tale of an ancient kingdom of his own land, powerfully gripped his imagination. He was learning lessons from the tattered novel that its creator had never dreamed he had placed in there.

Iloh grew taller still as the next few years dragged by in endless farming chores, and so did his little brother. Some of Iloh’s lighter chores around the house evolved to be his brother’s duties before he had turned seven. That meant that greater duties, and field work, the tending of the rice paddies and the narrow sorghum fields cut into the hillsides, began to fall to Iloh.

One of the most important and perhaps the most onerous of the chores was the constant need for fertiliser – and fertiliser was no more than farm muck, the manure of the family’s few animals and the nightsoil of the family themselves. By the time he turned twelve, Iloh was charged with carrying balanced buckets of this ‘fertiliser’ from its origins in the house and the farmyard to the paddy fields. It was hard, backbreaking work, and Iloh escaped from it into his own head, letting his body tread the well-worn paths it knew well while his mind roamed across the landscapes of his imagination, dwelling in the worlds of his novels, extrapolating his reality and weaving it with fiction and wondering what kind of a world that would make – even putting together tenuous poetical lines of his own while he shovelled the farm manure in the rice paddies.

The work was necessary, and Iloh understood this – but still he would often snatch a break from it, laying the wooden yoke he carried on his shoulders, on whose ends the two manure buckets were balanced, by the well-beaten path he trod between the house and the fields, and sneaking off into the welcoming shade of an ancient willow tree that trailed concealing tendrils on several crumbling tombstones belonging to forgotten ancestors, long scoured bare of any identifying marks by the years of exposure to the elements. The tombstones were strategically scattered in a way that concealed Iloh from anyone taking the path to the paddy fields. They provided the boy with a solitary and secret place to which he could retire and snatch the time to read a few pages of his precious books, which he always carried in a pouch at his waist, and he would escape for a few moments from the drudgery of his daily life into the glittering world of the history that never was.

The fact that his pair of malodorous buckets, abandoned by the side of the path, would be a telling clue to his whereabouts had not even occurred to him – but it was thus that his father, who had noted his son’s frequent absences, discovered him happily poring over one of his beloved books.

‘And do you think that the work will do itself?’ Iloh’s father demanded.

‘But I have already carried some fertiliser to the fields this morning,’ Iloh said, looking up, still half-lost in his other world, only barely registering his father’s fury.

‘How many? How many have you done?’

‘Four, I think. Or perhaps even six. I don’t recall.’

‘And who is supposed to recall? I cannot stand over you every moment of every day. You are nearly twelve years old. You are practically a man. It should be your responsibility to take care of this job that you have been given to do! Four buckets! Pah! That is barely enough for a quarter of that field!’

‘But the house is so far from the field, Father,’ Iloh said, still dreamily.

‘So I should move the house to the paddy fields so that it is more convenient for you?’ his father demanded.

Iloh blinked several times, closed his book, and rose to his feet. Already he was as tall as his father, and showed signs of growing even taller – but somehow his father still managed to give the impression that he was talking down to the boy from a great height, the height of patriarchal authority. ‘So how many buckets should I bring?’ Iloh asked, his voice clipped and precise.

‘I don’t know! Ten buckets! Sixteen!’ his father said, transported beyond the realm of the reasonable to the extremes of the ideal.

Without another word Iloh bowed his head a scrupulously measured fraction that denoted just enough of the respect due to a father from a son and not an ounce more. He stowed his book back into his pouch, and walked past his father without a backward look, to hoist his yoke and its two empty buckets onto his shoulders and head towards the farmhouse. Somehow curiously deflated, his son’s immediate obedient response having taken the wind out of his sails, Iloh’s father followed him out of the shelter of the old willow, shaking his head.

Towards the end of the day, with the sun already low and golden and almost ready to vanish behind the hills, Iloh was missed again. This time the father knew precisely where to look – and that was exactly where he found his wayward son, reading the same book he had been reading that morning.

‘Once already I have spoken to you, and here I find you back again wasting your time!’ his father shouted, standing before his son with his feet planted wide on the earth of his ancestors, his arms akimbo.

Iloh lifted his head, a lank strand of his straight black hair falling over his face. ‘You said I should do my chores before enjoying my reading, Father,’ he said quietly. ‘I have done them.’

‘What? What have you done?’

‘Those sixteen buckets of fertiliser. They are at the paddy,’ Iloh said. ‘You can go and count them if you don’t believe me.’

His father stared at him for a moment without a word, and then turned on his heel and stalked off down the path in the direction of the paddy field. He had nebulously intended to go there and catch the boy out in a flat lie – because the sixteen buckets he had named would have been a good day’s work for a grown man twice Iloh’s age. But instead he could only stand and stare at the field’s edge as it became obvious that Iloh had spoken no more than the truth. It was also revealed as to how he had done it. The yoke used to carry the buckets had been left beside the field, perhaps as an unspoken but pointed comment – Iloh had rigged the yoke to carry four buckets instead of the usual two. He must have staggered under the load on the narrow path from the farmhouse to the field, the heavy buckets dragging barely above the ground; his shoulders must have been purple with bruises, his back must have been screaming from the strain. But there was enough strength left in his arms to hold the book he loved. For that, he would have moved mountains.

No more was said about the reading of books behind the ancestral tomb.

Seven

Perhaps it was his father’s new silence on the matter of his reading habits that put the idea in Iloh’s head, or perhaps it was the echo of the conversation he had once had with his village teacher.

Or perhaps it was the arrival in the household of a quiet woman carrying a small child in her arms, the widow of a man who had owned the fields abutting those belonging to Iloh’s father, a man who appeared to have died from the same disease that had claimed Iloh’s aunt and his cousin and his two siblings. The land had been for sale. Iloh’s father lost no time in offering to buy it, with money he raised on loan. Part of the price was that he care for the widow and her baby, and so she moved into his house, and, in the time-honoured way of old Syai, she became his concubine.

It was another mouth to feed, but there was also more land with which to do so. More land meant more work. It became obvious that it was more work than Iloh’s father could do, even with both his sons. He parcelled out a section of his newly gained land and rented it out to another family, in exchange for a third of their harvest.

The concubine changed everything. She was young enough to be fertile, and in the year that Iloh turned thirteen the concubine produced a child, half-sister to Iloh, named Yingchi. A new woman was in the house, with a new baby, a child fathered by the family patriarch and therefore with its own place in the family hierarchy. The little girl was a concubine’s child and tradition said that such children called the primary wife ‘mother’ – but this was a little girl who was not Iloh’s mother’s child, and whose cries and gurgles reminded the woman constantly of her own lost daughter. It made her sad-eyed and melancholy as she drifted about the place, mistress of the house in name but barely able to bring herself to care about anything at all any more. Rubai, the cherished and protected second son, was also lost to her – he was growing up fast, fast enough to start being assigned farming chores and able to acquit himself well in doing them.

Iloh was fiercely intelligent, aching for knowledge and understanding, and aware that he was never going to find them with his feet in the oozing mud of the paddy fields or bent over the grain with a harvesting sickle in his hand.

He simply announced to his father one morning that he was going away to school.

‘There is a new school,’ he said, ‘in the city. The village schoolmaster tells me that they will take boarders. I will go there, and start from the beginning.’

‘And who do you think will pay for such schooling?’ his father said. ‘I barely have enough money to scrape by as it is. And besides, you are too old. Look at you, strapping lad that you are. You practically have to shave in the mornings. Are you telling me that you will go into the same classroom as seven-year-old children? And endure it?’

‘If that is what it takes then that is what I will do,’ Iloh said. ‘And do not worry about the money. I will manage somehow.’

‘And what am I to do for help on the farm?’ his father said. ‘Rubai is too young to replace you, and a labourer costs money I don’t have.’

‘I will study,’ Iloh said, ‘and I will work. When I have money, I will send it.’

‘And when you do not have money you will starve, and so will we,’ his father prophesied morosely.

His father complained and protested right up until the morning that Iloh packed up to leave his home for the school in the city. He took no more than his precious books, a change of clothes, and two pairs of new shoes that his mother, rousing herself out of her lethargy long enough to ensure her eldest son was at least well-shod on his journey, had made for him. She also handed him a package of sweet cakes for his journey, and managed a smile for him as he bade her farewell. She had not made the cakes. It had been the concubine who had done that – the silent woman who had taken over the running of the household when the primary wife abdicated responsibility. But she had no claim on the son that was leaving, and she had merely done what she had conceived to be her duty. As he left the house she had said nothing, waiting silently in the shadows as he passed by.

But Yingchi, Iloh’s little half-sister, apparently could not allow him to leave without her blessing. She was lying on her back in a makeshift crib and raised both her chubby arms as Iloh passed, her hands spread out like a pair of small fat starfish as she waved them about. Iloh paused, glanced down at the child, who chose that moment to offer a guileless and completely endearing toothless smile, baring her pink gums at him so widely that her eyes were practically screwed closed by the breadth of her grin.

Iloh reached out and offered a finger to one of those hands, betrayed into an answering smile. The starfish fingers closed around his finger, tightly, and Yingchi opened her eyes just a little, staring at him gravely, her lips still curved in an echo of the smile that had riveted her brother.

‘You take care of things here,’ he said to this tiny scrap of a sister. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

She gurgled at him, and a bubble of baby drool formed in the corner of her mouth. He gently disengaged his finger and wiped her face, stood staring at her for another long moment, and then turned and walked away without looking back.

Iloh could not afford a conveyance to take him to the city, so he slung his bundle over his shoulder and walked – every step of the way. It was a long and lonely journey; nearly four days passed before he could glimpse the outskirts of his destination, and it took another day to find his way in an unfamiliar warren of streets, asking directions of strangers who would shrug their shoulders and pass him by or point him to wrong addresses or dead-ends – but he finally found himself at the gate of the school he had chosen towards the end of that fifth day, a grubby, ragged boy with hungry eyes.

‘I have come to learn,’ he said to a gatekeeper who came to ask his business.

‘How old are you?’ the gatekeeper said, after a pause, looking him up and down.

‘Twelve,’ said Iloh. It was a lie, but not a huge one; being thought younger than he was might increase his chances of being accepted, and yet he could not shave too many years off his true age and be believed. Not with his height; not with a face that was fast losing the round curves of childhood, revealing the features that would belong to the grown man who was emerging from that chrysalis.

Some of the other pupils were clustered just inside the gate, sniggering and pointing. Iloh tried to ignore them, holding his chin high.

‘You’re too old,’ the gatekeeper said after a moment, dismissing the new ‘pupil’, and turned to go back inside.

‘That is not your decision to make!’ Iloh said, desperation making him insolent and discourteous. ‘I have come a long way…and I would like to speak to a teacher, or the headmaster!’

‘The headmaster is busy,’ the gatekeeper said archly. ‘He cannot see just any riffraff who walks in from the street.’

‘And what riffraff would that be?’ a serenely commanding voice interrupted.

The gatekeeper flinched, and then turned with a deep bow. ‘I did not know you were there, Excellency.’

‘I am where the will of heaven wishes me to be,’ said the second voice. Its owner emerged from the shadows of the school’s gate, miraculously emptied of sneering schoolboys. The voice had seemed entirely too strong and powerful to belong to the almost frail-looking white-haired gentleman, his back unbent by his years, his hands decorously tucked into the wide sleeves of the scholar’s robe that he wore. His eyes were a dark slate-grey, luminous and serene; but Iloh did not have that much chance to observe any more than this. He bowed immediately, very low, and kept his head down until he heard that voice speak again. ‘Do I understand you come seeking tuition, boy?’

‘Sir…yes, please, sir. I want to learn.’

‘And what is it that you wish to learn here, son?’

Iloh looked up at that, his own eyes blazing. ‘I will take,’ he said, ‘whatever knowledge you are willing to give me.’

One of the headmaster’s bushy white eyebrows rose a fraction. ‘Oh? Tell me, if you had a cabbage, a rabbit and a stoat, no cage, a boat that only holds you and a single one of those things, and a raging river to cross and only the boat to do it with, how would you ferry your three treasures across and have them all safe at the end of the day?’

Iloh had heard that one before – the reply would be to make the trip over with the rabbit, to return alone, to fetch the stoat over, take the rabbit back, take the cabbage over, return alone, bring over the rabbit – but that would take too long, and so he simply cut through it.

‘I would sell the stoat and the rabbit at market on this side of the river, for the fur, and I’d make sure I got a good price,’ he said. ‘I’d eat the cabbage for my supper. Then I’d cross the river in my boat, sell the boat on the other side, and buy myself a stoat, a rabbit and a cabbage. You said the three treasures – you didn’t say I had to keep the boat.’

The headmaster laughed. ‘I think you had better come inside, young man.’

It might have been Iloh’s obvious thirst for learning, his penchant for creative thinking, the glimpse that the headmaster got of an empty chalice aching to be filled. It might have been the fact that one of the pupils in the school, Sihuai, was serendipitously from Iloh’s own village – a few years older than Iloh himself, he had shared the same tiny village schoolhouse for a short while before Iloh was snatched from it to work his father’s land, and vouched for his erstwhile younger colleague. It might have been simply the fact that Iloh said he would pay for his education in whatever way he could, including, farmer’s son that he was, tending the school gardens. Whatever it was, after nearly two hours of being interrogated on his future plans and subtly tested for his abilities, the headmaster’s verdict was positive. Iloh was in.

It was nearly a year before Iloh went back home again, a gruelling and sometimes soul-destroying year in which he started from the bottom, in a class of eight-year-olds, and found himself wanting in the most basic skills compared to these boys. They teased him mercilessly, knowing that he could not retaliate, knowing that anything he did to them in return would draw harsh official censure, him being so much bigger and stronger than them. It was a year that almost made Iloh doubt his choice to come here, doubt his very need to learn. But it was also a year that built his character, his spirit, his mind. When he did finally return to his boyhood home for a visit, he was wearing the invisible cloak of a young scholar, and the villagers deferred to it. Even the old doctor – now somehow shrunken and made impotent by Iloh’s new and broader vision of the world – gave him a small bow when they passed in the village street. Sihuai had been back before him, and had talked of him. People knew who Iloh was, and respected him.

He never forgot that first homecoming.

After that first hard, horrible year, Iloh showed such rapid progress and such promise that the headmaster promoted him. His calligraphy would always be crude, because he had first learned it that way, but Iloh’s essays showed that he was a thinker, even a poet. They began to be posted up on the walls of the classroom, examples for other students, an achievement which Iloh was vividly proud of. He still had few friends, but a surprising one turned out to be none other than Sihuai, who was the scion of a scholarly family and therefore, in the class-conscious society of Syai, vastly Iloh’s social superior. Sihuai was another student whose essays found pride of place on classroom walls – but his refined and elegant calligraphy made them far more of a pleasure to look at than Iloh’s attempts, and it was partly that that sent Iloh to his schoolmate, humbly begging for help to better his writing skills. From those small beginnings an unlikely friendship bloomed, with the two boys – nearly of an age and with a shared love of the hills and valleys where they had grown up in their own separate spheres – finding many things to talk about.

Sihuai was one of a small set of boys who were regularly invited into the headmaster’s own home for lessons and discussions on the classics and history. It was a combination of Iloh’s losing his temper with one of his younger classmates while insisting that the version of events portrayed in his treasured novels was in fact actual history and not just a dramatic rehash of what really happened, and his friendship with Sihuai – who had been aware of that particular event and had spoken of it to the headmaster – that resulted in Iloh’s invitation to join the headmaster’s circle. There, his misconceptions were gently dealt with. He was given other books to read, true histories, biographical works on great leaders of past centuries, and then he was invited to talk about them with his companions in the headmaster’s office.

‘Histories were written by people who had power,’ Iloh said once, in that circle.

‘Histories always are,’ the headmaster said. ‘Histories are written after battles are over, by those victorious in those battles. There are other versions of history, known only to the losers. We might never hear anything about those at all. But what do you mean by power?’

‘Money,’ one of the other pupils said.

‘Yes, rich people are respected and honoured,’ said another.

‘No matter how unworthy they might be,’ Iloh said darkly.

‘But there are other kinds of power,’ murmured the headmaster.

‘Military,’ said a pupil.

‘But that is bad,’ said the headmaster’s daughter, Yanzi, who was a part of these study sessions. Two years older than Iloh, she was a willowy teenager with lustrous black hair and huge bright eyes, and there wasn’t a boy in the school who wasn’t half in love with her from the first time he laid eyes on her. ‘That means that the way to have power over people is simply to have a bigger bludgeon.’

‘Power you can buy is bad,’ Iloh said thoughtfully. ‘It is political power that is good.’

‘But political power is worse than all the others!’ Yanzi objected. ‘Because it already contains both money power and military power. It is impossible for anyone to get political power, or to hold on to it, without having either that bludgeon or the money to pay for someone else wielding it on your behalf.’

‘Power corrupts,’ Sihuai said. ‘You can see that everywhere.’

‘Of course it does,’ Iloh said. ‘That is its nature. But power is a tool, and needs to be applied properly. In the history that we are learning, in the books that we are reading, it is a tool that is often misused – but it is power and circumstances that dictate that. The power itself is not necessarily a bad thing, just the way it is wielded. And nowhere in the books does it say that giving a man the power to make change is bad in itself – it’s just that when…’

‘Of course not,’ Sihuai interrupted. ‘The people who wrote those books were the winners, and the winners do not write histories that put themselves in a bad light.’

‘One of the ancient emperors,’ the headmaster said, cupping his hands together serenely and interrupting the squabble without raising his voice, ‘was helped to change the Mandate of Heaven and overthrow an old dynasty before establishing his own. Within a year of ascending the throne, he had had most of his erstwhile friends and allies killed or exiled. Why do you think he did this?’

Iloh gave the headmaster a long look of blank incomprehension. ‘Those people knew the way to a throne,’ he said, sounding almost astonished at the fact that this needed to be said at all. ‘If he had not done so, the new emperor’s throne would never have been secure.’

‘You do not think he was a bad man to have done this?’

‘It was the only thing he could have done,’ Iloh said.

‘He had gained power,’ one of the other pupils, a sallow-faced boy named Tang, said slowly. ‘And he could not afford to let those others go free. Power can be lost as easily as it can be gained. All it takes is a single betrayal…’

‘Power corrupts,’ Yanzi said, her eyes cast down.

‘Corrupts what?’ the headmaster asked.

‘Principles,’ Yanzi said. ‘Ideals. Character. Power changes people.’

‘Wait,’ said Sihuai, ‘wasn’t that the Phoenix Emperor? Didn’t he turn aside a famine? He gave from his own table, shared the Imperial reserves of grain when the country starved. He saved a lot of people.’

‘But at what cost?’ Yanzi said, her voice passionate. ‘The principles…’

‘High principles carry too high a price if people are starving,’ Iloh said. ‘The emperor did away with the threats that could have been a danger to his rule. He then…ruled. If he was a good ruler…if he fed a starving people…how then could this be bad?’

‘He bought the people,’ Yanzi said obstinately. ‘They kiss the hand that feeds them, no matter how black the heart that rules it.’

‘When people have nothing in the food bowl,’ Iloh said, ‘they are unlikely to think about morality. They do what they need to do. And power is given to those who are not afraid to use it.’

A silence descended at those words. It took Iloh a moment, and every ounce of the strength of his developing convictions, to lift his head and meet the eyes of everyone else in that class – ending with Yanzi herself, who did not hold his gaze long before letting her own luminous eyes fall back to rest on the gracefully folded hands in her lap.

‘Very interesting,’ the headmaster said, throwing the words into the silence like pebbles into a still pond. ‘I would like you all to write an essay on the use of power, please. By the end of the week. You may all go now.’

Iloh, his blood still stirred in the aftermath of the discussion, hesitated briefly at the door of the headmaster’s study and turned once, briefly, to look back. He had just a glimpse of Yanzi standing there in the middle of the room, looking straight back at him, with eyes that were steady, sad, and perhaps a little afraid.

Eight

Iloh and Sihuai were sharing a room at the school before Iloh’s second year there came to a close. Sihuai was a particularly neat and almost obsessively tidy boy. Iloh, by contrast, took up every inch of available – and sometimes even not so available – space. When he worked at his desk it always overflowed with papers, sheets of smudged calligraphy, trails of spilled ink, glue, discarded pens, dog-eared books with sometimes deeply outlandish objects used as bookmarks, and half-eaten meals with remnants of rice that were acquiring the consistency of cement or in the process of giving birth to entirely new and hitherto unknown species of mould. There was even the occasional broken shoe, bent belt-buckle or torn quilted jacket that he had been in the process of repairing, straightening or patching, and which had been simply discarded as a fresh idea occurred to him and he swept all else aside to set it down on paper.

‘For someone who thinks that it’s his fate to save the world,’ Sihuai would mutter in a long-suffering tone of voice as he picked up three of Iloh’s books off his bed or a sheaf of Iloh’s notes from his own immaculately tidy desk, ‘you can’t seem to keep your own nest tidy.’

‘The world needs saving, and how!’ Iloh would reply, with a self-mocking grin. ‘I wasn’t really planning on doing anything about it until after graduation, Sihuai…but if I were to start thinking about cleaning up the universe, sweeping rooms seems an awfully parochial way of going about it.’

They were very different, but they got along well for all that – and they were quickly joined by Tang, who was a sort of bridge between the two of them, himself half Sihuai and half Iloh. He could understand both Sihuai’s aristocratic dignity and Iloh’s down-to-earth zeal with equal pragmatism – and it was he who launched the idea of a shared adventure in the summer of Iloh’s third year at the school.

‘A beggar’s holiday,’ he said. ‘We take nothing except a change of clothes and a towel and a notebook to write a journal in. And we wander where the roads take us, and we live on what we are given by the people we meet.’

‘But what would be the purpose of such a journey?’ Sihuai asked, considering the idea with doubt and not a little distaste.

‘Consider it a test of your ideas,’ Tang said. ‘You and Iloh, you have such different ideas about people. Why not prove which of you is right? And besides – it is a study of power. You know what the old saying is – only a beggar knows what true liberty is. Give a man a chance to live free of obligation or responsibility, and I suspect few would choose even to be emperor, after.’

‘I’m in,’ Iloh said, with his usual immediate and fiery enthusiasm at an idea that caught his imagination.

‘So am I,’ Sihuai said after a hesitation. He was still in two minds, but he could not allow himself to lose face by admitting his misgivings about the propriety of such an adventure to his friends.

The three of them met up at the school’s gate the day classes broke for the summer, dressed in old clothes and comfortable sandals, each carrying a bundle into which were folded the items that Tang had decreed they might bring. They wore their beggar’s garb with a sense of shining pride as they set out – but, inevitably, they were young scholars and they could not quite leave school behind. The discussion about power and the essays that they had written on the subject were still on their minds.

‘Remember the ancient poet – “I did not see those who came before me, and I will not know those who will follow” – a man can only be responsible for the days of his own life,’ Sihuai argued as they walked, their bundles slung jauntily on their shoulders.

‘If a man takes responsibility for others, then that is not true,’ Iloh said. ‘Then he needs to know those who will follow. Look at Shiqai. He held it all in the palm of his hand and then he let it all shatter.’

‘But that was in times of turmoil,’ Tang said.

‘Not so very long ago,’ Iloh replied thoughtfully. ‘It was only a few years before I was born.’

‘The problem is that he tried to make new things with old tools,’ Sihuai said. ‘He was part of the court, and then he went over to Baba Sung and his party when the republic was proclaimed and made the emperor resign, and then he made Baba Sung resign and tried to be emperor himself. And after that, there was none strong enough to be any kind of leader at all – not of the whole country. Even we, here, have a lord who rules with an iron fist over this single province – and raises taxes for himself and not for any government in Linh-an. He took three times the usual annual taxes from my father last year, and there is nothing my father can do about it.’

‘Mine, too,’ Iloh murmured. There had been letters from home. Things were not going well on the ancestral farm.

‘A new force is needed,’ Tang said. ‘Something to change each individual. Something strong enough to pass from one man to another, to spread through the people, like a thought, like a touch of the hand. To make them believe something. Together. And then the power of many people, believing that one thing…under a strong leader.’

‘You are thinking people are like a flock of sheep,’ Sihuai said.

‘But that is right,’ Iloh said. ‘People are a flock of sheep. And a strong leader is like a shepherd.’

‘If sheep are looked after by a shepherd they have already lost their freedom,’ Sihuai said. ‘They are locked in a paddock out of which they cannot move. They are at the shepherd’s mercy and can be moved from one place to another or killed at his whim. They seek safety in numbers and simply obey orders. What, then, is there left to do except eat, work and sleep – and all for someone else’s benefit?’

‘But they are fed and sheltered and cared for,’ Iloh argued. ‘What else do they really need? They cannot all be scholars or philosophers.’

‘Look,’ Tang said, as they passed a cow pasture just in time to see a cowherd armed with a long whip enter the enclosure. The cows, up until then peacefully chewing their cud, got up and began edging away from the whip and its wielder, rolling their eyes. ‘The people are not happy with having a shepherd…’

‘That only means,’ Iloh said trenchantly, ‘that the shepherd is weak and flawed, not that the theory is unsound.’

They travelled on foot, stopping when hunger overtook them to knock on doors of village homes and scattered farmhouses and beg their supper. Sometimes, with a little bit of coin offered in lieu of food, they would go into a cheap roadside teahouse and pay for a large bowl of rice and vegetables or a meat broth which they shared between them. They came to no lasting political agreement but they did not seriously quarrel either – they squabbled about ideas until it got heated but Tang usually defused things by laughing even-handedly at both Sihuai’s frosty injured sulks and Iloh’s eruptions of volcanic temper if things came to such a pass.

It was Tang, too, who helped a girl at a country teahouse where they had broken their travels. They had had a particularly good day, and were flush with coppers they had to get rid of fast under the rules of their journey. Tang laid their bowls down on the table before his friends, and then turned to help the girl with the pitcher. She was smiling, but her gaze was steady and distant, focused somewhere far beyond the three friends.

‘She is blind,’ Tang said conversationally, ‘but she can read faces, you know.’

It was typical that he had been the one to charm the girl, to flirt with her, to gain all kinds of information about her in less than a few minutes’ acquaintance.

‘I heard about that,’ Sihuai said. ‘One of my great-uncles studied this art, many years ago. I still recall the stories they tell about how accurate and precise his predictions were, all on the basis of running his hands over the bones of people’s faces. Can you truly do this?’

‘Yes,’ the girl said with a quiet serenity.

‘Do mine,’ Sihuai said.

‘Oh, young sir!’ she demurred, sweeping her long lashes down on her cheeks. ‘Your voice is so strong and assured. I am certain your future is already known to you…’

‘Here,’ Tang said, folding their last copper into the girl’s hand. ‘It isn’t much but it’s all we have and that means we have paid you a treasure. Can you do all of us?’

For answer she reached out a hand, and Tang guided it to Sihuai’s face. She ran long fingers across his features, and then pulled back. ‘You have the face of a scholar, or a sage,’ she said. ‘You will write many scholarly books, and live far, far away from your home. But it will…it will be exile, of a sort. You will want to come back, but you won’t be able to, because you will be proscribed in the land of your childhood. You will have fame, but no fortune, and little happiness…and you will have many regrets in your life. Sorry. This is not very nice to tell. But that is in your face.’

‘What about me?’ Tang said, thrusting his face forward into her hand and closing his eyes.

‘You are a man who knows how to make friends and keep the peace, although you have no idea of how you do this,’ the girl said, and smiled with what was real warmth and almost affection despite her short acquaintance with her subject. ‘But the friends you make are often only on the surface, and the peace is dearly paid for. You will love a woman who will marry another, and that other man will be your friend, and it won’t be the first woman he gets that you will covet. You will hide your envy well, though. Your abilities will make you valuable to men in power – but they will balance their need of you with their fear of you, and you will need to learn to do the same. Your life will be hard but you will always know how to find the treasure within it…although you might think in the end that you have paid too high a price for it.’

‘You really tell it like it is,’ Tang said. ‘What about Iloh?’

‘Wait, I don’t think…’ Iloh began, but Tang had already grabbed the girl’s hand and laid it on his friend’s face. Her fingertips were feather-light on his cheekbones, on his lips. And then she sat back and gave him a long, thoughtful look.

‘You will become a great man,’ she said, ‘a prince, or a councillor…and if not that, then you will at least lead a band of outlaws from a mountaintop. You have ambition and patience. You know how to hold people in the palm of your hand.’ She hesitated, snatched her hand back, stepped backwards as if she had second thoughts about the rest of her reading. But she had accepted the copper, and she owed it. ‘But you will be stone-hearted,’ she whispered. ‘You would command a hundred thousand deaths, and it would mean nothing to you if that was the price of achieving a cherished goal. You…’ she hesitated again, but took a deep breath and continued, although a faint blush had come onto her cheeks, ‘…you will have many women, but you will truly love only once – and that will be a songbird, a woman whose spirit is free, and one you can never truly have…’

She bit her lip, as though she was regretting her candour now that she had said all that, and then turned around and hurried back the way she had come with the sureness that only a blind person walking a familiar path could understand.

‘Cheerful, isn’t she,’ Iloh said after a moment, staring after her.

The other two ‘beggars’ were still staring at Iloh’s face.

Iloh glared at them. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he growled. ‘It’s all a bunch of superstitious nonsense, anyway. Let’s eat; I for one am starving.’

They went on, later, and spent the rest of the summer climbing hills and crossing valleys, sleeping by streams or in sheds offered by friendly farmers, sharing space with ploughs and shovels and sometimes, memorably, dogs, goats, or wandering pigs. But then summer was over, and they returned to school – and then the years started piling on, faster and faster, and things ran away from them all. Shiqai, the warlord whose rise and fall had been the topic of their discussions that summer, had stolen the vision of the venerated man who had become known throughout the land as Baba Sung – ‘Father Sung’ – the father of a new nation. Shiqai’s death, something that seemed to come at the hands of the Gods themselves extracting payment for his many betrayals, had left a nation leaderless and fragmented, with a thousand petty tyrants leaping up to take his place, plunging the country into nearly a decade of misery and suffering at the hands of mercenary armies who took what they pleased from the people – money, livestock, men for labour and women for pleasure – and were answerable to nobody at all. But now, at last, things were moving again, and Baba Sung had gathered a new vision together – and for the first time since the Sun Emperor had been forced to step down from his throne, Syai found itself emerging from chaos into a semblance of calm and order.

Iloh followed all this with an eager curiosity. Back at the school, in the year following the beggars’ holiday with his friends, he read more and more books in his headmaster’s study – frequently proscribed material that access was granted to only on the basis of the unspoken understanding that its existence was not to be spoken of outside that room, often with Tang or Yanzi at his elbow to discuss the issues raised by what had been read. The whole churning mess of human endeavour as history unfolded – especially the turbulent times that he himself lived in – fascinated him. He had begun to eat, sleep and dream politics; he talked of little else.

‘Baba Sung has all the right ideas,’ he told Yanzi once, as they were both poring over the same broadsheet detailing some recent achievement or atrocity. ‘But he has had no power to make them happen. No real power.’

‘You mean enforce them,’ Yanzi said, with some distaste. ‘And you mean military power.’

It was an old argument between them. Iloh shrugged it off. ‘But don’t you think Baba Sung’s ideas are good? Remember what he said – “The nation was just a sheet of loose sand, not solid like a rock” – the winds of change blow us all every which way and until we start pulling together – all the people – until we start believing in a single truth…’

‘Truth can never be proved,’ Yanzi said. ‘Only suggested.’

‘Well, then, let us suggest a truth!’ Iloh said. ‘Baba Sung himself has said it – there are the three principles that he has written about…’

‘Hush!’ Yanzi said instinctively, glancing around. ‘You only know about those because you read it in the secret things that Father has received. Do not endanger us all by speaking of it yet. Baba Sung and his principles are far away and the warlord’s armies are near.’

‘But I have been thinking about it,’ Iloh began.

She placed a finger on his lips. ‘Keep thinking,’ she said. ‘There will come a time for talking.’

But Iloh was consumed by his own private fires. He had been exposed to Baba Sung’s high but distant political ideals, and they had acted like grit in an oyster, irritating his mind until they began accreting a layer of his own ideas, reinter-pretations, beliefs. By the time he was eighteen years old he was eager to leave the country behind and go to where the events that would shape his country’s history would play themselves out – Linh-an, the capital. The headmaster wrote him a letter of introduction to the librarian at the university in the city, asking if some job could not be found for this student, for whom he had developed both affection and respect. A job was found – a menial one, to be sure, cataloguing the library scripts and books in the back rooms, with pay that was barely enough to scrape rent together in the small compound he shared with four other students, one of whom was his friend Tang. Often meals were barely more than hot water seasoned with a few vegetables or a scrap of meat once in a while. But Iloh did not care about the hardships. He was poor, he was almost always hungry – but he was at the centre, where he wanted to be, where the ideas were.

He came back to the school only once, accompanied by Tang and another student from the university, an emissary from the librarian for whom Iloh worked. The librarian, a canny if covert politician, knew very well that he himself was a marked man, that his ideas – despite being, on the face of it, so very close to Baba Sung’s own catechism – were viewed with deep suspicion by the authorities. He had been branded as a troublemaker years before, and his dossier bristled with terms such as ‘anarchist’ and ‘radical’; the only reason he had been allowed to keep his job at the university library at all had been the authorities’ belief that he could do little harm buried in the library stacks.

But he’d found a way to communicate his dreams and to light a spark in others. It only took a handful of people like Iloh, young and bright and full of fire. If the librarian, the sage in the tower, could not pass his message to the followers who waited to rise for him, his acolytes could. And the message itself was a heady one for free-spirited youth – a new order, a new kind of society, one based on equality and fairness, one where one law held for all. It was Baba Sung’s ideas, distilled and crystallised into a vision – and Baba Sung had not been called a dreamer for nothing.

Iloh was twenty years old. The turning point of his life was just around the corner for him, and he knew it. He was ready. He had volunteered to come, but his mission was a commandment – he had never lost touch with a network of like-minded people with whom he had been friends while at school, and he had returned to enlist them in a new enterprise that would shake their world.

‘There is always a beginning,’ the librarian, Iloh’s erstwhile employer and his political mentor, had said on the eve of Iloh’s departure from Linh-an. His narrow ascetic face was alight, his eyes aglow with determination and zeal. ‘And this is our beginning. I charge you today to take the torch and set the flame to the bonfire that is to come. I cannot go – the authorities know my face and my name and the only reason they have not yet swooped down upon me is because they think they have me pinned here where they can keep an eye on what I do. But you, you are different – you are young, and you are going back to see your friends, and you have the freedom that I lack. Go, with my blessing. Take this out there, to the people.’

‘A People’s Party,’ Iloh had murmured, his eyes alight.

The librarian had been right in that the authorities had not put any obstacles in Iloh’s path as he journeyed back to his old school, contacted old friends, walked once again the streets he had walked as a boy. But he had been wrong about Iloh’s activities going unremarked. The authorities may not have known Iloh personally – he was young and had not had a chance to establish the kind of reputation that would invoke any kind of government dossier for himself – but he was already known, if only around the university, as a young firebrand with new and sometimes dangerous ideas. He had been the library assistant for only a brief while before he had been reassigned elsewhere, but in that while he had forged a firm bond with the old librarian. As a recognised associate of a man whose own government dossier ran to quite a thick file, Iloh’s comings and goings were not hindered, but neither was he left to pursue them unobserved.

‘We are being followed,’ Tang told him on the second day of their stay in their old school. ‘I can see a tail on us, everywhere we go. They note who we meet, who we talk to. They note who we have bought food from. I’ve seen one fellow just after we left with two policemen at his elbows. We can’t talk freely, not here. What are we going to do?’

‘What did you want to talk about that is so secret?’ Yanzi, who was with them, asked.

‘There is…’ Tang began, but Iloh lifted a hand.

‘What?’ Yanzi said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘With my life,’ Iloh said. ‘But I cannot do it with the lives of the people who are with me. Not to one who is not part of it.’

‘But I want to be a part of it,’ Yanzi said.

Iloh glanced back at Tang. ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘We will all – separately, without really hanging together as a group – go on a sightseeing trip. We can rent a boat on the lake, and it will be easy to control who can get on that boat. We can talk freely at last.’

‘If I come,’ Yanzi said, ‘they will only think you are taking a girl out on the lake.’

‘You have a point,’ Iloh replied, with a wolfish grin.

So Yanzi was with Iloh and Tang on the night that they pledged their lives to the new force, under a banner that would be their own vision of Baba Sung’s ideas. The three of them along with a handful of others, all young, all full of plans and ideas and an unshakeable belief that they were building something that would last forever, lighting a flame that would lead the generations that followed straight into paradise.

It was Iloh who wrote the founding declaration, and it was perhaps not grammatically immaculate or calligraphically perfect, but he poured out so much of the poetry that was in his soul onto that piece of parchment that the thing rang with power. Others took the original away, to copy it, to distribute it, to gather others into the fold.

That was the night on which the People’s Party was born, on the altar of which Iloh would lay his heart, his soul, and his life.

And then the wind of time swept through the pages of history, and years tumbled past like fallen leaves in an autumn storm. And the revolution was upon them.

Nine

‘Gaichi mei!’ Iloh swore violently as he snatched his feet back from where he had been resting them against the warmth of the stove. They actually smoked. He stomped on the packed earthen floor of the hut, putting out the burning leather, wincing a little as the dance jarred seared feet. The stool he had been sitting on overturned from the violence of his motion, and the battered notebook he had been writing in fell from his lap and landed upside-down on the floor. He reached to rescue it and then lifted his feet one by one for an inspection, ruefully contemplating the soles of his shoes.

Two holes, charred on the edges and still smouldering from where the hot stove had burned through, gaped in his soles. His toes, visible through the gap, smarted; there would probably be blisters there before long.

The door of the hut opened with a little too much force and Tang peered inside, his gaze sharp and suspicious above the scarf that wrapped his entire face from the eyes down. Outside, it was snowing.

‘It was nothing,’ Iloh said, in response to the unspoken question.

‘It was something,’ Tang replied, his words muffled through the scarf. ‘I distinctly heard you, right through the closed door. I brought you something to eat, Iloh – you have to eat, you are flesh and blood like the rest of us even if you can’t admit that to yourself. When was it you last slept? What happened just now?’

By way of reply, Iloh lifted a foot and displayed one ruined shoe.

Tang stepped inside, nudged the ill-fitting door shut with his hip, and put the bowl he carried in both hands onto the nearest horizontal surface before unwrapping his nose and mouth and displaying what might have been an intimidating scowl. But he was Tang, and Iloh was Iloh, and they had too many years between them. The scowl twitched, one eyebrow went up, Tang’s mouth quirked at the corners, and before long he could not help laughing out loud, a short sharp bark of a laugh that had as much wry resignation in it as humour.

‘I suppose you’re going to want new boots,’ Tang said.

‘Just patch these, as best you can,’ Iloh replied. ‘I have no need of luxury, only the bare necessities. I can even live with the…’

‘The practical answer to that is that there is going to be a foot of snow outside by the morning, and it’s likely to stay there until spring,’ Tang interrupted. ‘If you intend on leaving this place before the thaw I don’t think that even you will want to do it barefoot. Eat the beans. They will get cold.’

‘In a minute,’ Iloh said, gesturing with the notebook. ‘I need to get this…’

‘Now,’ Tang replied, straightening up and crossing his arms in a belligerent manner. ‘Right now, while I’m watching. Just so that I know you have done it and not simply forgotten about it again like last time. Do you have any idea how much disrespect you are showing to Shao by simply wasting these hard-come-by meals?’

Iloh looked duly chastened. ‘Give me the bowl,’ he said, laying aside the notebook.

Tang picked the food bowl up and passed it into Iloh’s hand with a satisfied nod. ‘And after you eat,’ he continued, pursuing his advantage, ‘you’re going to sleep. Two days, it’s been.’

Iloh glanced at him over the rim of the bowl. His eyes were filled with the affection of one old friend for another, but also with the kind of determination that Tang, resigned, recognised at once as being futile to struggle against. His shoulders drooped.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘At least eat. If I were ximin Chen, you might listen…’

‘My wife,’ said Iloh mildly, ‘does not nag me. It is not her sole task to see to my needs. She is my companion and my comrade. And yours, Tang. She is part of the revolution.’

‘As we all are,’ Tang retorted. ‘But revolution or no, somebody’s got to do it. Give me your shoes.’

Iloh obediently eased the burned-through shoes off his feet without relinquishing the bowl of beans. In spite of himself, he had been hungry; something that he would never have admitted or gone in hunt of sustenance to assuage, but the simply prepared beans tasted like a festival feast. He was scraping the bowl clean even before he had eased the second shoe off his heel with his other foot, clad only in a none-too-clean and now very definitely holed sock.

Tang sighed.

‘There’ll be a pair of socks in it too, when I come back. Iloh, I wish you would sleep. You could carry an entire company’s gear in the bags under your eyes.’

Iloh shrugged. ‘These lean days,’ he said, ‘that would not be hard to accomplish.’

‘Iloh…’

‘Yes,’ Iloh said impatiently, ‘yes, yes, yes. I cannot carry the revolution alone. You have no idea how much I am relying on the people. But there are some things…’

Tang was shaking his head, but there was a wry and admiring smile playing about his thin-lipped mouth. ‘I don’t know why that is true,’ he said, ‘but it is true nonetheless. Your words matter. The people will rally to the flag when the time comes, but they will come because you have called them. The right words and the right time, and there is magic made, right before your eyes…’

‘So, then,’ Iloh said.

‘So,’ Tang agreed. Without wasting further words, he stomped out of the hut hugging the empty bowl and a pair of still faintly smouldering shoes.

Iloh bent to retrieve his notebook and his writing implements and settled back down before the stove. Flipping back a few pages, he tried to recapture his train of thought.

A revolution is not a dance party, or a silk painting, or a comfortable chair, or pretty embroidery. A revolution is not pleasant like a summer’s day. A revolution cannot by its very definition be kind, gentle, courteous, magnanimous. A revolution…

He had stopped there, mid-sentence, when his feet had caught fire. Like much of what he wrote, things that were copied and printed and passed out to the cadres and the soldiers and the people in the fields and the factories and the villages and towns, it was homespun wisdom – he was one of them, after all, a man of the people, born in the countryside with a family that was moderately well-off by the standards of the times, but which, like most people in Syai did sooner or later, knew what it meant to be on the edge of hunger.

He stared at his own words. What was revolution, really? He had been born into an era which fairly crackled with it, one wave after another, a society constantly in its death-throes …or was it just trying to be properly born…? Iloh did not, in theory, believe in the Gods of his ancestors or in the heaven they were supposed to inhabit, but there were times he could see those Gods looking sceptically at the newborn nation that emerged gasping for breath, again and again, and waving their immortal hands over that hardwon life with a celestial pronouncement that the thing was not good enough, throw it back, start again. He had read about it in the books and pamphlets that he had devoured when he had become a young man with hot blood surging in his veins, when he had begun to think, as all young men do, about changing the world – he had read about it happening elsewhere, and how other peoples and nations had risen to take their own destiny into their hands. And he had felt some of it on his own skin, when he was a child, when he was a youth. But there had been many like him, back then – children born into times of struggle and blood. Many who knew all about it, who could testify to it by their own scars. But not that many who were able or willing to reach out and grasp the nettle, to take the choice away from those capricious Gods, to build a nation in the image of mortal man, in the name of mortal man.

That revolution.

The revolution that changed everything, that changed the very nature of the sky that arched above the world, the sky that would deliver the rain to nourish crops in the fields and no longer be sanctuary for the distant and removed deities who cared nothing for the people so long as the temples were swept, the incense lit and sweet, the offerings properly presented. And under that sky, men would be the same, with equal rights, equal privileges, no matter how much incense they burned to the forgotten Gods.

There was a phrase that was the guiding idea for everything that Iloh had dreamed about, had founded, created, or set in motion. It had been there with him from the very beginning, from the day he had been turned away by the village doctor because his dying brother had not been wealthy enough to rate a visit from the healer, from the night on the lake that he and Tang and Yanzi and a handful of other firebrands had been guided into something strong and new, a banner to unite a nation under. It had been a mantra, an incantation, a guiding light. Now he scribbled it down in the margin of his book, to remind himself, to re-inspire himself:

To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.

That had been the principle of the thing. Iloh had not stopped thinking of people as a flock of sheep that needed a shepherd’s hand to guide them – but it would be a different kind of shepherd. It would have to be one of the sheep themselves, raised to the high place. One of the people.

Baba Sung had learned his lesson from the first time he had tried to wage revolution – and the next time he had a warlord of his own to wage his battles. Shenxiao was a skullfaced, whippet-thin man who dreamed, ate, lived and breathed army. Shenxiao and Baba Sung, together, might have been a formidable force – but Baba Sung had burned his candle at both ends and it became tragically clear that his race was run. He died a relatively young man, perished on the burning flame of his own bright spirit, leaving behind a legacy that took root in the popular mind: be a nation again.

And it seemed that it might have been possible. But as with every prophet there were always many who came in his footsteps ready to interpret his words. Shenxiao was one. Iloh, although still very young, was another. For a while they had worked together, yoked under that last will and testament of the founder of the Republic. But then Shenxiao made a sharp turn to the right, the People’s Party reacted by veering to the left, the traces broke and the alliance died hard.

In the beginning, the People’s Party was small, and led by the young and the inexperienced, advised by a handful of older intellectuals who shared their ideals. But it was the youth and the vigour of it that swept it to power, its principles proselytised as only the young and idealistic could do, and the party’s numbers swelled from hundreds to thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. With its plain principles, pure from the well of idealism and not yet tainted by the thin poison of politics, it quickly attracted a membership that ranged from university students and office workers to the stevedores and factory workers and tillers of soil. There appeared to be something of value in the party’s manifesto to a plethora of different kinds of people, giving the seal of its name an odd authenticity. The People’s Party quickly became a force to be reckoned with.

Iloh was one of many, in the beginning – a group of young cadres who had been given tasks instrumental to the birth of the People’s Party. In a handful of short years the many were whittled down to a few, and Iloh, inevitably, was among them – even if he had not played a pivotal role in the founding of the Party, his passion and his dedication to his chosen cause would have set him apart. The first time he met General Shenxiao face to face, he was no more than a Party secretary – one of a delegation, keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut and learning the ropes. The second time, Iloh had been given a place at the discussion table – still a junior, but one who had been tapped for rapid advancement. The third time, some three years later and with an unbroken and unblemished record of service at government level under his belt, he was the delegation leader, in command, no longer just a silent participant.

‘It was Baba Sung’s own idea,’ he said at one of the meetings on that third occasion, when the topic of discussion had been land reform. ‘But equal distribution of land does not have strings. You are still pandering to the land-owners, and the workers at the very bottom, who work their way to an early grave, still get nothing except perhaps a tiny reduction in taxes – and even that is only on paper, and if their landlord wants to ignore it he can.’

‘You are young,’ Shenxiao said, his lips parting in a thin, skeletal smile. ‘You have still to understand why we sit here today. Baba Sung never said that land should be taken from those who have worked so hard to gain it…’

‘Their ancestors might have worked hard,’ Iloh said. ‘For many the land is simply inherited, a part of their patrimony, something they feel entitled to. Whether or not it’s justifiable.’

‘…and summarily handed over to the barefoot peasant who has done nothing to deserve it except exist,’ Shenxiao finished, as though Iloh had not spoken at all.

‘But you say in public that the barefoot peasant will get that land,’ Iloh said. ‘You promise this.’

‘Yes, and so long as the promise hangs there, all golden and shining like a riddle-lantern at Lantern Festival, everything is peaceful and calm. If they can guess the riddle they can have the land, but in the meantime let those who know what to do with it have a hand in controlling it. We need a lot of people fed – that happens when there are large fields and large harvests. Not when every small landgrubber plants a few stalks of wheat for himself.’

‘You are betraying the founder of your own party,’ Iloh said passionately. ‘Do you know what they are saying, out in the country? “The sky is high and Shenxiao is far away.” They used to say that about the emperor. You are no different than that leech on society, and Baba Sung himself said that the Empire had to go.’

‘Even Baba Sung knew better than that,’ Shenxiao said. ‘He too was young once, that is true, and some of his ideas were those of a young man – but he grew up, and he grew wiser. A man who does not in his youth believe that the world needs to be changed is heartless, and has no feelings. But if a man has not learned by the time he is forty that it is impossible to swap an old world for a new one like a lamp on New Year’s Day, that it is only possible to change the shape of the world so that one can find a higher place to stand within it – that man is a brainless idiot.’

Iloh had said nothing out loud, but his eyes, resting on Shenxiao, were eloquent. You are wrong.

They had not met again, face-to-face. The relationship between the two parties continued to deteriorate. On the face of it, Shenxiao’s people, known as the Nationalists, had put an end to the chaos of the warlord years and had placed a central government in power once again, giving the people somewhere to look up to, a familiar situation where right underneath the Gods there was a place for the man the Gods had chosen to lead the nation – and everyone else had only to follow where that chosen man led.

But the Nationalists ruled with force of arms – with war clubs and with guns. Accession to positions of power, promised on the basis of merit alone, quickly devolved into a corrupt system where family or cronies were installed in places where they would be useful to those who wielded real clout. The government that had been Baba Sung’s legacy and which had been welcomed like the sunrise of a new day became endured, then disliked, then distrusted, and finally hated. The rich landowners and the city bankers and businessmen still had their weight behind Shenxiao and his clique. The rest of the people – the peasants in the countryside, the workers in industry and in service, the young intellectuals of the cities – had increasingly begun to put their faith not so much in the People’s Party but in the hands of a young man called Iloh who travelled the country and who spoke to them of equality, and of power, and of peace.

But Shenxiao held the army, the weapons, the metaphorical high ground. When Iloh and his people became too dangerous for Shenxiao to continue to even pretend to work together with them, he manufactured an incident in the city of Chirinaa, where the unions were strong, where the People’s Party was known to be winning the battle for the people’s hearts and souls. Blood flowed in the streets of the city, and Shenxiao made certain that fingers were pointed away from him, straight at Iloh and his ‘shadow cabinet’.

Those of the People’s Party who had still held positions of relative power inside the government machinery of Shenxiao’s party were summarily purged – arrested, imprisoned, executed. The alliance was over. Before the year was out, the People’s Party had gone to ground, and into hiding. Their leaders were marked men, and hunted.

Iloh had been one of them. He had married Yanzi less than a year before, and now, with his wife pregnant with their first child, he had to flee into the hills or face prison – or worse.

Yanzi was adamant that she would stay behind, in the city.

‘You can’t stay down here alone! It’s dangerous! They know who you are, where to find you…’ Iloh had argued, pleaded, begged.

‘What do you think they would do?’ Yanzi said, her voice sweet reason. ‘I am a pregnant woman. If they touched me they would have their own people turn on them – some things are sacred, and if you foul them you are tainted by it forever more. And here I can be of far greater use to you than dangling at your tail with this belly up there in the mountains.’

‘It would be safer in the middle of nowhere than here in the middle of the hornet’s nest. I don’t think you realise how ugly it’s going to get.’

‘Trust me,’ she said, laying her hand over his mouth. ‘I will be better here. I will send word when I can.’

‘Then I will stay,’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Yanzi told him sharply. ‘Your name is on a list of wanted men. You would not last a week in the city – you couldn’t even be with me, you’d have to go into hiding. You’re better off up there in the mountains, leading, than down here skulking in a rat trap.’

He had let her persuade him that she would be all right, that nobody would touch her.

But that was before Iloh had fully emerged as the leader of the leaderless men of the People’s Party up in the pathless hills of the north. Before Shenxiao put a price on his head. Before someone delivered Yanzi and her small son into Shenxiao’s hands. Before Shenxiao broke every rule, and executed Iloh’s wife and child to prove a point – with me or against me, and if against me then no quarter shall be given.

When word of that came, Iloh had asked a single question.

‘How?’

‘They shot them,’ the courier who had brought the news said brokenly. ‘They stood them up against a wall, and a firing squad shot them both. The boy was in her arms.’ He looked up, met Iloh’s eyes, and felt his knees buckle. It was kneeling at Iloh’s feet that he whispered the rest, the answer to the question that Iloh had really been asking. ‘They…it was fast…they didn’t suffer.’

Iloh had turned without another word and walked away into the hills, by himself, his face a battlefield. Nobody dared follow, not even Tang, his closest companion; that grief and guilt had been too heavy, too raw. If they thought they heard a howl from out of the hills, later, a howl that sounded more like a wolf than a man – well, it might have been an animal, after all. Yanzi had been part of the People’s Party from the beginning, she had been there at its birth, she had believed in it no less than anyone else out here – and it had been her choice, after all, to stay behind in the city. But they knew that none of that would weigh with Iloh so much as the fact that he had been her husband, he had been the father to that child, and he had abandoned them to their fate. His choice, in the end; his guilt. Something he would never lay down, for as long as he lived.

When Iloh returned, Tang had uttered a single sentence about the fate of Yanzi, whom he too had loved from afar for many years.

‘You should have taken her with you,’ he told the man who had been Yanzi’s husband.

Iloh had stared at him from eyes that were suddenly darker and colder than Tang remembered them ever having been before. It was as though Shenxiao had killed a part of Iloh’s own humanity when he raised a hand against his family. But he had said nothing. And Tang had bowed his head, having said what he had to say, and had wordlessly taken on himself the task of taking care of Iloh, even after Iloh entered into what they called a ‘revolutionary marriage’ with another girl in the People’s Party, one of the cadres on the run in the hills.

Iloh’s eyes had acquired a strange, hard glitter after the news of Yanzi’s death – the gleam of ice, of cold stone. Not tears, never tears, at least not that anyone else had witnessed. Iloh had not had the luxury of giving in to grief – only, perhaps, the chance to work for revenge.

It was the revolution, and revolution exacted a high price.

A revolution…

The unfinished sentence Iloh had left dangling in the cabin in the hills, on that night years after the revolution had begun, on the eve of its being won, still sat there on the page of his notebook, incomplete, nagging at him. A revolution needed a definition. He knew what it was, he knew in his bones, but somehow the pattern of the words would not form in his head. He tried and discarded a few variants, mouthing them silently, tasting the words he might write on his tongue, finding them wanting. There was something vivid and vital that he needed, something that conveyed the necessity of the overthrow of all gods and monsters.

It was…it would be…

A revolution is an act of violence, he wrote at last, by which the new overthrows the old, where the oppressed throws off the oppressor, by which all men are made equal in one another’s sight.

It was not perfect, but it would have to do.

Iloh was suddenly surprised by a huge yawn that Tang would have pounced on had he been there to witness it. He got up and stretched, hearing his joints pop as he did so, reflecting wryly on the side-effects that waging revolution could have on a man. He was thirty-two years old and sometimes, in his fifth winter of exile, his bones ached with the arthritis of a greybeard three times that age.

Iloh crossed over to the door and eased it open a crack. It was still snowing outside, and few things moved in the white silence in the space between the huts – one or two muffled shapes hurried somewhere with an air of urgency that probably had less to do with the errand they were on than a desire to be under a roof again with the possibility of a hot stove to thaw out frozen feet and hands. None of them noticed Iloh, or the thin ribbon of yellow light that spilled from the open door.

It was these people, in the name of all the people in the plains down below and in the walled cities of the old empire, who had rallied to a dream of a new world, who had helped to raise the flag of Iloh’s vision. The few, in the name of the many. The few who had endured so much.

But soon it would be over – soon…The mandate was changing in Syai. The skirmishes that Iloh’s army had fought with the Nationalists who held the reins of power had turned into battles, and the battles had begun turning into victories. More and more of the enemy were throwing down their arms – or, better, crossing the great divide and coming to lay their allegiance at Iloh’s feet. Too much was going wrong down there, too fast; their generals had been too complacent, too rushed, too afraid. They had committed everything to this one final push, and it was failing. Thousands of men, perhaps tens of thousands, had paid with their lives, but now the prize was near, and Iloh could see the things he had dreamed of, the things he had made others believe with a fervour bordering on fanaticism, starting to take shape before his eyes. This bitter winter of exile, this was the last. He knew that. He could sense it in the wind…

He shivered, suddenly – the wind he had invoked in his thoughts had reached through the door he had been holding open to touch him with icy fingers. He had seen enough. This day, he had done enough. Tang was right – it was time to sleep.

And yet it was a different Tang that he was hearing, the voice echoing in his mind that of a more innocent time, a time when everything had still been possible and the price had not yet been exacted. Iloh remembered, through a mist of memory, a night when he and Tang had sat by the fire and quoted poetry at each other, the scurrilous and the sublime, the mocking and the prophetic.

‘“Oh, but it will be a brave new dance when the music starts to play”,’ Tang had quoted.

‘But what music will it be?’ Iloh had asked. ‘Will we even know it for music?’

‘We will know it,’ Tang said. ‘We will write it!’

‘But who will be asked to play it?’ Iloh had persisted, in a strange, introspective mood that night. It was as though he had been handed a shallow bowl of water, and saw in the mirror of its still surface a vision of the years that were to come. ‘Who will be asked to pay for it? What ancient part of ourselves will we have to give up in order to be granted the music of this new world…?’

Iloh shook his head, clearing his mind of the memories, and retired to the pile of thin quilts on the pallet he used for a bed. He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hand. As almost always when he started drifting off into sleep but now stirred into a particular fury by the memories he picked over, questions rose like a flock of disturbed crows and darkened his thoughts with a blackness of fluttering wings. Could I have done it differently? Could I have done it better? Will it be worth all this struggle and sacrifice in the end? Is it worth the lives that have been spent to buy it? What have we lost, that we might gain this? Who will speak the language of the lost things? This thing that we have bled for, fought to give life and breath to, will it live, thrive, grow strong…?

And then, as usual, he would answer himself, just before he sighed and surrendered to deeper slumber.

The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?

The light was somehow very wrong. The image that shimmered before her eyes was a memory, a recognisable memory, but it had a golden wash over it, a light that suggested something ethereal, something that had never quite happened, or was still to come…the light of dream.

Amais could see the two little girls clearly: herself and her sister, sitting with what they believed to be studied adult elegance and yet still managing to be, endearingly and obviously, thirteen and six years old, sometime in their second year in Linh-an. They wore what they imagined grown-up high society ladies would wear to such an occasion, which in the children’s case meant a hodge-podge of discarded garments from Mama’s closets dressed up with scraps of silk and a heap of cheap bazaar jewellery piled on every available limb. The style of dress was somewhat eclectic, because Amais at least remembered the women of Elaas very well, and more particularly recalled the paintings and the ancient statuary depicting the old goddesses of that land and their elegant draped gowns. She had also never forgotten her brief glimpses of more exotic women; veiled women who had travelled on the same ships as them. Of course they – particularly Amais, the elder, but also Aylun who had been told the same tales – were well aware of the sartorial traditions of their own culural legacy, those rooted in the fairytales of Imperial past. In play, they used whatever element of these cultures happened to please them at any given moment. Amais always set the stage, spinning one of her fictions and snaring her younger sister into the charms of ‘might-have-been’ and ‘once-upon-a-time’. Although Aylun used to copy her almost precisely, she had quickly started rebelling and using her own ideas.

This particular dream-party was a specific occasion. Amais remembered it well. It had been one of the first times that Aylun had asserted her independence and had insisted on putting together her own costume. Amais recalled the smooth slide of her mother’s red satin robe as its too-long sleeves whispered past her own bony, childish wrists, and the weight of the ropes of fake gold coins, bazaar treasures, that she wore over her hair. Aylun wore a strange mixture of a half-veil covering the lower part of her face – which she finally discarded because she had to keep pushing it aside in order to sip her tea – and something that she fondly imagined passed as a classical Elaas gown, a bedsheet in its former existence, wrapped around her chubby frame and tied at the waist with a daringly purloined belt which their mother still regularly wore and which was not really sanctioned as playgarb.

They were bent over a low table with a child-sized teapot filled with cold mint tea brewed for them by their mother who indulged them every time they announced one of their tea ceremonies. It was Aylun’s turn to be hostess; she was pouring the tea into tiny cups, one for her, one for her sister, a third (as they knew was protocol for any real tea ceremony) for fragrance alone, so that the guests at the tea ceremony might inhale the scent of the carefully selected tea variety offered to them, enhancing the experience with the use of all the senses.

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