Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

‘We are being followed,’ Tang told him on the second day of their stay in their old school. ‘I can see a tail on us, everywhere we go. They note who we meet, who we talk to. They note who we have bought food from. I’ve seen one fellow just after we left with two policemen at his elbows. We can’t talk freely, not here. What are we going to do?’

‘What did you want to talk about that is so secret?’ Yanzi, who was with them, asked.

‘There is…’ Tang began, but Iloh lifted a hand.

‘What?’ Yanzi said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘With my life,’ Iloh said. ‘But I cannot do it with the lives of the people who are with me. Not to one who is not part of it.’

‘But I want to be a part of it,’ Yanzi said.

Iloh glanced back at Tang. ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘We will all – separately, without really hanging together as a group – go on a sightseeing trip. We can rent a boat on the lake, and it will be easy to control who can get on that boat. We can talk freely at last.’

‘If I come,’ Yanzi said, ‘they will only think you are taking a girl out on the lake.’

‘You have a point,’ Iloh replied, with a wolfish grin.

So Yanzi was with Iloh and Tang on the night that they pledged their lives to the new force, under a banner that would be their own vision of Baba Sung’s ideas. The three of them along with a handful of others, all young, all full of plans and ideas and an unshakeable belief that they were building something that would last forever, lighting a flame that would lead the generations that followed straight into paradise.

It was Iloh who wrote the founding declaration, and it was perhaps not grammatically immaculate or calligraphically perfect, but he poured out so much of the poetry that was in his soul onto that piece of parchment that the thing rang with power. Others took the original away, to copy it, to distribute it, to gather others into the fold.

That was the night on which the People’s Party was born, on the altar of which Iloh would lay his heart, his soul, and his life.

And then the wind of time swept through the pages of history, and years tumbled past like fallen leaves in an autumn storm. And the revolution was upon them.

‘ Gaichi mei! ’ Iloh swore violently as he snatched his feet back from where he had been resting them against the warmth of the stove. They actually smoked. He stomped on the packed earthen floor of the hut, putting out the burning leather, wincing a little as the dance jarred seared feet. The stool he had been sitting on overturned from the violence of his motion, and the battered notebook he had been writing in fell from his lap and landed upside-down on the floor. He reached to rescue it and then lifted his feet one by one for an inspection, ruefully contemplating the soles of his shoes.

Two holes, charred on the edges and still smouldering from where the hot stove had burned through, gaped in his soles. His toes, visible through the gap, smarted; there would probably be blisters there before long.

The door of the hut opened with a little too much force and Tang peered inside, his gaze sharp and suspicious above the scarf that wrapped his entire face from the eyes down. Outside, it was snowing.

‘It was nothing,’ Iloh said, in response to the unspoken question.

‘It was something,’ Tang replied, his words muffled through the scarf. ‘I distinctly heard you, right through the closed door. I brought you something to eat, Iloh – you have to eat, you are flesh and blood like the rest of us even if you can’t admit that to yourself. When was it you last slept? What happened just now?’

By way of reply, Iloh lifted a foot and displayed one ruined shoe.

Tang stepped inside, nudged the ill-fitting door shut with his hip, and put the bowl he carried in both hands onto the nearest horizontal surface before unwrapping his nose and mouth and displaying what might have been an intimidating scowl. But he was Tang, and Iloh was Iloh, and they had too many years between them. The scowl twitched, one eyebrow went up, Tang’s mouth quirked at the corners, and before long he could not help laughing out loud, a short sharp bark of a laugh that had as much wry resignation in it as humour.

‘I suppose you’re going to want new boots,’ Tang said.

‘Just patch these, as best you can,’ Iloh replied. ‘I have no need of luxury, only the bare necessities. I can even live with the…’

‘The practical answer to that is that there is going to be a foot of snow outside by the morning, and it’s likely to stay there until spring,’ Tang interrupted. ‘If you intend on leaving this place before the thaw I don’t think that even you will want to do it barefoot. Eat the beans. They will get cold.’

‘In a minute,’ Iloh said, gesturing with the notebook. ‘I need to get this…’

‘Now,’ Tang replied, straightening up and crossing his arms in a belligerent manner. ‘Right now, while I’m watching. Just so that I know you have done it and not simply forgotten about it again like last time. Do you have any idea how much disrespect you are showing to Shao by simply wasting these hard-come-by meals?’

Iloh looked duly chastened. ‘Give me the bowl,’ he said, laying aside the notebook.

Tang picked the food bowl up and passed it into Iloh’s hand with a satisfied nod. ‘And after you eat,’ he continued, pursuing his advantage, ‘you’re going to sleep. Two days, it’s been.’

Iloh glanced at him over the rim of the bowl. His eyes were filled with the affection of one old friend for another, but also with the kind of determination that Tang, resigned, recognised at once as being futile to struggle against. His shoulders drooped.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘At least eat. If I were ximin Chen, you might listen…’

‘My wife,’ said Iloh mildly, ‘does not nag me. It is not her sole task to see to my needs. She is my companion and my comrade. And yours, Tang. She is part of the revolution.’

‘As we all are,’ Tang retorted. ‘But revolution or no, somebody’s got to do it. Give me your shoes.’

Iloh obediently eased the burned-through shoes off his feet without relinquishing the bowl of beans. In spite of himself, he had been hungry; something that he would never have admitted or gone in hunt of sustenance to assuage, but the simply prepared beans tasted like a festival feast. He was scraping the bowl clean even before he had eased the second shoe off his heel with his other foot, clad only in a none-too-clean and now very definitely holed sock.

Tang sighed.

‘There’ll be a pair of socks in it too, when I come back. Iloh, I wish you would sleep. You could carry an entire company’s gear in the bags under your eyes.’

Iloh shrugged. ‘These lean days,’ he said, ‘that would not be hard to accomplish.’

‘Iloh…’

‘Yes,’ Iloh said impatiently, ‘yes, yes, yes. I cannot carry the revolution alone. You have no idea how much I am relying on the people. But there are some things…’

Tang was shaking his head, but there was a wry and admiring smile playing about his thin-lipped mouth. ‘I don’t know why that is true,’ he said, ‘but it is true nonetheless. Your words matter. The people will rally to the flag when the time comes, but they will come because you have called them. The right words and the right time, and there is magic made, right before your eyes…’

‘So, then,’ Iloh said.

‘So,’ Tang agreed. Without wasting further words, he stomped out of the hut hugging the empty bowl and a pair of still faintly smouldering shoes.

Iloh bent to retrieve his notebook and his writing implements and settled back down before the stove. Flipping back a few pages, he tried to recapture his train of thought.