Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

‘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.

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.