Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

‘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.