Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

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.

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.