Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

A revolution is not a dance party, or a silk painting, or a comfortable chair, or pretty embroidery. A revolution is not pleasant like a summer’s day. A revolution cannot by its very definition be kind, gentle, courteous, magnanimous. A revolution…

He had stopped there, mid-sentence, when his feet had caught fire. Like much of what he wrote, things that were copied and printed and passed out to the cadres and the soldiers and the people in the fields and the factories and the villages and towns, it was homespun wisdom – he was one of them, after all, a man of the people, born in the countryside with a family that was moderately well-off by the standards of the times, but which, like most people in Syai did sooner or later, knew what it meant to be on the edge of hunger.

He stared at his own words. What was revolution, really? He had been born into an era which fairly crackled with it, one wave after another, a society constantly in its death-throes …or was it just trying to be properly born…? Iloh did not, in theory, believe in the Gods of his ancestors or in the heaven they were supposed to inhabit, but there were times he could see those Gods looking sceptically at the newborn nation that emerged gasping for breath, again and again, and waving their immortal hands over that hardwon life with a celestial pronouncement that the thing was not good enough, throw it back, start again. He had read about it in the books and pamphlets that he had devoured when he had become a young man with hot blood surging in his veins, when he had begun to think, as all young men do, about changing the world – he had read about it happening elsewhere, and how other peoples and nations had risen to take their own destiny into their hands. And he had felt some of it on his own skin, when he was a child, when he was a youth. But there had been many like him, back then – children born into times of struggle and blood. Many who knew all about it, who could testify to it by their own scars. But not that many who were able or willing to reach out and grasp the nettle, to take the choice away from those capricious Gods, to build a nation in the image of mortal man, in the name of mortal man.

That revolution.

The revolution that changed everything, that changed the very nature of the sky that arched above the world, the sky that would deliver the rain to nourish crops in the fields and no longer be sanctuary for the distant and removed deities who cared nothing for the people so long as the temples were swept, the incense lit and sweet, the offerings properly presented. And under that sky, men would be the same, with equal rights, equal privileges, no matter how much incense they burned to the forgotten Gods.

There was a phrase that was the guiding idea for everything that Iloh had dreamed about, had founded, created, or set in motion. It had been there with him from the very beginning, from the day he had been turned away by the village doctor because his dying brother had not been wealthy enough to rate a visit from the healer, from the night on the lake that he and Tang and Yanzi and a handful of other firebrands had been guided into something strong and new, a banner to unite a nation under. It had been a mantra, an incantation, a guiding light. Now he scribbled it down in the margin of his book, to remind himself, to re-inspire himself:

To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.

That had been the principle of the thing. Iloh had not stopped thinking of people as a flock of sheep that needed a shepherd’s hand to guide them – but it would be a different kind of shepherd. It would have to be one of the sheep themselves, raised to the high place. One of the people.

Baba Sung had learned his lesson from the first time he had tried to wage revolution – and the next time he had a warlord of his own to wage his battles. Shenxiao was a skullfaced, whippet-thin man who dreamed, ate, lived and breathed army. Shenxiao and Baba Sung, together, might have been a formidable force – but Baba Sung had burned his candle at both ends and it became tragically clear that his race was run. He died a relatively young man, perished on the burning flame of his own bright spirit, leaving behind a legacy that took root in the popular mind: be a nation again.

And it seemed that it might have been possible. But as with every prophet there were always many who came in his footsteps ready to interpret his words. Shenxiao was one. Iloh, although still very young, was another. For a while they had worked together, yoked under that last will and testament of the founder of the Republic. But then Shenxiao made a sharp turn to the right, the People’s Party reacted by veering to the left, the traces broke and the alliance died hard.

In the beginning, the People’s Party was small, and led by the young and the inexperienced, advised by a handful of older intellectuals who shared their ideals. But it was the youth and the vigour of it that swept it to power, its principles proselytised as only the young and idealistic could do, and the party’s numbers swelled from hundreds to thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. With its plain principles, pure from the well of idealism and not yet tainted by the thin poison of politics, it quickly attracted a membership that ranged from university students and office workers to the stevedores and factory workers and tillers of soil. There appeared to be something of value in the party’s manifesto to a plethora of different kinds of people, giving the seal of its name an odd authenticity. The People’s Party quickly became a force to be reckoned with.

Iloh was one of many, in the beginning – a group of young cadres who had been given tasks instrumental to the birth of the People’s Party. In a handful of short years the many were whittled down to a few, and Iloh, inevitably, was among them – even if he had not played a pivotal role in the founding of the Party, his passion and his dedication to his chosen cause would have set him apart. The first time he met General Shenxiao face to face, he was no more than a Party secretary – one of a delegation, keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut and learning the ropes. The second time, Iloh had been given a place at the discussion table – still a junior, but one who had been tapped for rapid advancement. The third time, some three years later and with an unbroken and unblemished record of service at government level under his belt, he was the delegation leader, in command, no longer just a silent participant.

‘It was Baba Sung’s own idea,’ he said at one of the meetings on that third occasion, when the topic of discussion had been land reform. ‘But equal distribution of land does not have strings. You are still pandering to the land-owners, and the workers at the very bottom, who work their way to an early grave, still get nothing except perhaps a tiny reduction in taxes – and even that is only on paper, and if their landlord wants to ignore it he can.’

‘You are young,’ Shenxiao said, his lips parting in a thin, skeletal smile. ‘You have still to understand why we sit here today. Baba Sung never said that land should be taken from those who have worked so hard to gain it…’

‘Their ancestors might have worked hard,’ Iloh said. ‘For many the land is simply inherited, a part of their patrimony, something they feel entitled to. Whether or not it’s justifiable.’

‘…and summarily handed over to the barefoot peasant who has done nothing to deserve it except exist,’ Shenxiao finished, as though Iloh had not spoken at all.

‘But you say in public that the barefoot peasant will get that land,’ Iloh said. ‘You promise this.’

‘Yes, and so long as the promise hangs there, all golden and shining like a riddle-lantern at Lantern Festival, everything is peaceful and calm. If they can guess the riddle they can have the land, but in the meantime let those who know what to do with it have a hand in controlling it. We need a lot of people fed – that happens when there are large fields and large harvests. Not when every small landgrubber plants a few stalks of wheat for himself.’