Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

‘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.