Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

It was full dark when the first of the statues, another blackkerchiefed woman, finally moved, let her hands drop helplessly to her sides, let out her breath in a deep sigh that ended in a quiet sob, bowed her head, and walked slowly away from the sea, back to the hushed village. It was as though she broke the stasis. One by one they did the same thing, like a ritual, bowed their heads to the sea, walked away.

Elena was the last to go. Amais had been standing there with her on the wharf for hours, had grown stiff and uncomfortable, but not for anything would she have moved, would she have let go of the hand that clung to her own as though she were the last anchor in a storm-tossed world. But Elena was almost unaware of her. When she too opened her lips a crack and allowed a breath to escape – a sigh that sounded like she was letting her soul out of her body and sending it over the waves to search for her son’s spirit – her hand relaxed for a moment, and it was only then that she looked down and blinked, seeming to have just realised that she was still holding her granddaughter’s hand in her own.

‘Let’s go home, Nana,’ Amais whispered, profoundly sad, not yet fully aware of all that this night would mean to her.

‘Home,’ Elena repeated through cracked lips, as though the word held no meaning.

‘Mama has been alone all afternoon,’ Amais said, her voice taking on a tone of urgency, ‘and the baby…the baby is coming…’

‘The baby,’ Elena repeated again. It seemed as though repeating someone else’s last words was all that she was capable of right then, as if her own mind had ground to a halt, unable to move past this moment, this loss. And then she shook her head once, sharply, as though to clear it from the cobwebs of sleep. ‘The baby,’ she said once more. ‘Yes, you are right. There is the baby.’

They walked back to their house in silence, still holding hands.

There was a light in the window as they approached, a lamp lit by Vien the good wife and left to light the way home for her family. She herself was waiting inside, very pale, her hands folded protectively over her swollen belly.

She knew, long before she saw only Elena and Amais enter the house. She could hear the absence of Nikos’s footsteps, the void which his voice and his laughter would have filled. Her world was emptier for his soul. Her face was stark, her eyes very bright, and when the door closed behind Elena, who had finally let go of Amais’s hand, Vien let out a small whimper and folded over herself as though she had been stabbed in the heart.

The whimper became a moan, something that took all her breath, and it wasn’t until that first spasm had passed that Vien could whisper two words:

‘ The baby…’

There was no time, after that, for going to get the midwife, for going to get any help at all. Vien’s second child, another daughter, was born just before midnight on the same day that her father had died. Elena, who delivered her, held the tiny newborn infant in her arms and stared at the child’s face. It would have been hard to find any resemblance to her son in that bright-red puckered face with its eyes tightly shut and its bud of a mouth opening and shutting like a baby bird’s when demanding sustenance – but Elena was seeing things that only a mother who had just lost a child and been given another in his place could see.

‘Her name is Nika,’ she said softly, and there was no arguing with that. It was the prerogative of the grieving mother, of the grandmother – this child, at least, her daughter-in-law’s culture would not swallow. This was her son’s child, named for him, born to be his substitute. There had been something implacable in her voice.

But baya- Dan was not one to relinquish something she considered hers, not without a fight. This child, as Amais before her, was summoned to the house where the tiny enclave of shadowed Imperial Syai was being preserved in the Elaas sunshine. The second grandmother had looked the babe over, and smiled a small secret smile.

‘This one,’ she prophesied, tracing the contours of the child’s face with one bony finger, ‘is going to look like you, my daughter. Look at those eyes, look at the shape of her face. Her name is Aylun, little cricket.’

‘Her name is Nika,’ Vien said. ‘Elena already named her for her father.’

‘Her name is Aylun,’ Dan repeated firmly. ‘You will see. You will bring this one, too, as you have done with Amais.’

But Elena would have none of that. ‘Not this child,’ she said to Vien when she returned from her visit to her mother, the baby cradled in the crook of her arm. Elena all but snatched the child out of Vien’s arms, inspecting her closely, as though there were traces of the Syai cobwebs still draped on her swaddling clothes or evil spells woven in the air above her small head. ‘This is my Nika, my baby, the child that will carry the spirit of my son. She already has Amais.’

Almost overnight, Amais had been abandoned by her father’s mother. She became almost invisible in her father’s house, with her grandmother’s attention wholly focused on her younger sister. Baya- Dan commanded her attendance daily as usual, but now Amais chafed at it, feeling as though she had been traded, one child for another, one granddaughter for each grandmother, forced to choose one of her two worlds and barred from the other.

The first year of Nika’s life passed thus, in tension and frustration. A barrier developed between Vien and Elena, who appeared to consider her granddaughter’s mother merely a necessary evil, basically handing the child over to be nursed and then snatching her back as though prolonged contact with her mother would infect her with an incurable disease. But as that first year passed, it began to become painfully obvious that fate had played a joke on the family.

Amais, the elder, the one who had been abandoned to whatever destiny her Syai heritage might have in store for her, grew into her father’s image, gently made female by the curve of cheek or the slope of delicate shoulder inherited from her mother and with a captivating touch of the exotic. She had her father’s wild black hair, gleaming with blue highlights, curling riotously around her face, setting off those beautiful and almost uncanny eyes – she was a melding of all that was beautiful from her two worlds, as though she had been a work of art that had had two bright and vivid colours mixed on a palette, and emerged with a shade that was unique and all her own. But at least she had that trace of her father’s kin in her.

Nika was all Syai – tawny ivory skin, round eyes with eyelids draped in drowsy epicanthic folds over irises so dark that the pupil of her eyes could barely be seen. She had the rosebud mouth and the small-boned grace of a Syai empress. It was as though Nikos had had nothing to do with her at all. She was, as Dan had said she would be, far more Aylun than she could ever be Nika, the Elaas name sitting almost gracelessly on this tiny, alien person to whom it just did not seem to belong.

But it was this child that held the spirit of Elena’s son. Somehow, she managed to ignore the incongruities in the physical appearance of the children. Vien sometimes smuggled Nika – or Aylun as she always was in her Syai grandmother’s house – out of Elena’s sight for a few hours, and Aylun too would drowse happily in the lilting tones of baya- Dan’s lullabies.

As for Amais, her own education at her Syai grandmother’s hands – and it had become painfully obvious that it was just that, an education, that Amais was being groomed for something – accelerated. Amais and her grandmother were now reading the classics together, accounts of Imperial life in old Syai, ancient poems inscribed in crumbling books carefully put away in wrappings of silk and waterproof oiled cloth, tales of travel and trade set down by generations of exiles, all hoarded and treasured for four hundred years and passed down the centuries from generation to generation until it came down to this – an old woman and a young child who only half-belonged to this lost world.