Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

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.

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.