Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

‘You are betraying the founder of your own party,’ Iloh said passionately. ‘Do you know what they are saying, out in the country? “The sky is high and Shenxiao is far away.” They used to say that about the emperor. You are no different than that leech on society, and Baba Sung himself said that the Empire had to go.’

‘Even Baba Sung knew better than that,’ Shenxiao said. ‘He too was young once, that is true, and some of his ideas were those of a young man – but he grew up, and he grew wiser. A man who does not in his youth believe that the world needs to be changed is heartless, and has no feelings. But if a man has not learned by the time he is forty that it is impossible to swap an old world for a new one like a lamp on New Year’s Day, that it is only possible to change the shape of the world so that one can find a higher place to stand within it – that man is a brainless idiot.’

Iloh had said nothing out loud, but his eyes, resting on Shenxiao, were eloquent. You are wrong.

They had not met again, face-to-face. The relationship between the two parties continued to deteriorate. On the face of it, Shenxiao’s people, known as the Nationalists, had put an end to the chaos of the warlord years and had placed a central government in power once again, giving the people somewhere to look up to, a familiar situation where right underneath the Gods there was a place for the man the Gods had chosen to lead the nation – and everyone else had only to follow where that chosen man led.

But the Nationalists ruled with force of arms – with war clubs and with guns. Accession to positions of power, promised on the basis of merit alone, quickly devolved into a corrupt system where family or cronies were installed in places where they would be useful to those who wielded real clout. The government that had been Baba Sung’s legacy and which had been welcomed like the sunrise of a new day became endured, then disliked, then distrusted, and finally hated. The rich landowners and the city bankers and businessmen still had their weight behind Shenxiao and his clique. The rest of the people – the peasants in the countryside, the workers in industry and in service, the young intellectuals of the cities – had increasingly begun to put their faith not so much in the People’s Party but in the hands of a young man called Iloh who travelled the country and who spoke to them of equality, and of power, and of peace.

But Shenxiao held the army, the weapons, the metaphorical high ground. When Iloh and his people became too dangerous for Shenxiao to continue to even pretend to work together with them, he manufactured an incident in the city of Chirinaa, where the unions were strong, where the People’s Party was known to be winning the battle for the people’s hearts and souls. Blood flowed in the streets of the city, and Shenxiao made certain that fingers were pointed away from him, straight at Iloh and his ‘shadow cabinet’.

Those of the People’s Party who had still held positions of relative power inside the government machinery of Shenxiao’s party were summarily purged – arrested, imprisoned, executed. The alliance was over. Before the year was out, the People’s Party had gone to ground, and into hiding. Their leaders were marked men, and hunted.

Iloh had been one of them. He had married Yanzi less than a year before, and now, with his wife pregnant with their first child, he had to flee into the hills or face prison – or worse.

Yanzi was adamant that she would stay behind, in the city.

‘You can’t stay down here alone! It’s dangerous! They know who you are, where to find you…’ Iloh had argued, pleaded, begged.

‘What do you think they would do?’ Yanzi said, her voice sweet reason. ‘I am a pregnant woman. If they touched me they would have their own people turn on them – some things are sacred, and if you foul them you are tainted by it forever more. And here I can be of far greater use to you than dangling at your tail with this belly up there in the mountains.’

‘It would be safer in the middle of nowhere than here in the middle of the hornet’s nest. I don’t think you realise how ugly it’s going to get.’

‘Trust me,’ she said, laying her hand over his mouth. ‘I will be better here. I will send word when I can.’

‘Then I will stay,’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Yanzi told him sharply. ‘Your name is on a list of wanted men. You would not last a week in the city – you couldn’t even be with me, you’d have to go into hiding. You’re better off up there in the mountains, leading, than down here skulking in a rat trap.’

He had let her persuade him that she would be all right, that nobody would touch her.

But that was before Iloh had fully emerged as the leader of the leaderless men of the People’s Party up in the pathless hills of the north. Before Shenxiao put a price on his head. Before someone delivered Yanzi and her small son into Shenxiao’s hands. Before Shenxiao broke every rule, and executed Iloh’s wife and child to prove a point – with me or against me, and if against me then no quarter shall be given.

When word of that came, Iloh had asked a single question.

‘How?’

‘They shot them,’ the courier who had brought the news said brokenly. ‘They stood them up against a wall, and a firing squad shot them both. The boy was in her arms.’ He looked up, met Iloh’s eyes, and felt his knees buckle. It was kneeling at Iloh’s feet that he whispered the rest, the answer to the question that Iloh had really been asking. ‘They…it was fast…they didn’t suffer.’

Iloh had turned without another word and walked away into the hills, by himself, his face a battlefield. Nobody dared follow, not even Tang, his closest companion; that grief and guilt had been too heavy, too raw. If they thought they heard a howl from out of the hills, later, a howl that sounded more like a wolf than a man – well, it might have been an animal, after all. Yanzi had been part of the People’s Party from the beginning, she had been there at its birth, she had believed in it no less than anyone else out here – and it had been her choice, after all, to stay behind in the city. But they knew that none of that would weigh with Iloh so much as the fact that he had been her husband, he had been the father to that child, and he had abandoned them to their fate. His choice, in the end; his guilt. Something he would never lay down, for as long as he lived.

When Iloh returned, Tang had uttered a single sentence about the fate of Yanzi, whom he too had loved from afar for many years.

‘You should have taken her with you,’ he told the man who had been Yanzi’s husband.

Iloh had stared at him from eyes that were suddenly darker and colder than Tang remembered them ever having been before. It was as though Shenxiao had killed a part of Iloh’s own humanity when he raised a hand against his family. But he had said nothing. And Tang had bowed his head, having said what he had to say, and had wordlessly taken on himself the task of taking care of Iloh, even after Iloh entered into what they called a ‘revolutionary marriage’ with another girl in the People’s Party, one of the cadres on the run in the hills.

Iloh’s eyes had acquired a strange, hard glitter after the news of Yanzi’s death – the gleam of ice, of cold stone. Not tears, never tears, at least not that anyone else had witnessed. Iloh had not had the luxury of giving in to grief – only, perhaps, the chance to work for revenge.

It was the revolution, and revolution exacted a high price.

A revolution…

The unfinished sentence Iloh had left dangling in the cabin in the hills, on that night years after the revolution had begun, on the eve of its being won, still sat there on the page of his notebook, incomplete, nagging at him. A revolution needed a definition. He knew what it was, he knew in his bones, but somehow the pattern of the words would not form in his head. He tried and discarded a few variants, mouthing them silently, tasting the words he might write on his tongue, finding them wanting. There was something vivid and vital that he needed, something that conveyed the necessity of the overthrow of all gods and monsters.