Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

It was not as though Amais had no interest in the things that she was given to study – some part of her was held rapt and fascinated by it. But there was that other part of her, the same restless spirit that had made her own mother respond to the laughter she heard echoing from beyond the brooding walls of Dan’s house, and there were days that she squirmed and sighed and cast longing glances at the shuttered windows, feeling in her bones that she should be out on the rocky shores of Elaas’s blue seas, scooping out small crabs from their hidey-holes or gathering clams at low tide. It was in that year, aware that Amais’s attention was slipping away, that Dan allowed Amais to actually hold in her hands a set of thirteen small notebooks bound in faded red leather. Amais recognised them: her grandmother had read from those books while she listened, rapt, to the tales of long ago. The diary of a girl who, Dan said, was not much older than Amais herself when she began writing down the days of her life.

‘These belonged to Kito-Tai,’ baya- Dan said, her voice edged very slightly with an odd sort of triumph, watching the many-times-great-granddaughter of the ancient poetess touch the worn covers with light, almost frightened fingers. Amais was wholly here now, completely caught in the moment; the childish games of the Elaas children out on the sunlit shore were not even a memory of temptation. ‘They are yours now. Take care of them – they are very old. They are her journals, and there is a lot of her poetry in there, too. We’ve read some of them already, on the scrolls – but those were transcribed, for sale in the marketplaces. These, in here, are her originals. Written in our own language.’

‘Our own language?’ Amais questioned, looking up. ‘You mean jin-ashu ? The women’s tongue?’

‘Yes, and now you know enough of it to be able to read those,’ baya- Dan said, laying a loving and possessive hand over her granddaughter’s where it rested on the red leather of many centuries ago. ‘I have already read some of this to you. But now they are yours, they are my gift to you. They will be here for you, whenever you want them.’

Amais took one of the books at random, opened it, ran her finger reverently down the ancient page that lay revealed. ‘ Jin-shei ,’ Amais murmured. ‘She was jin-shei to an empress. The empress listened when she talked, and did what she said. And Nhia’s, too, her jin-shei-bao , her heart-sister…and then Nhia became a Blessed Sage and was given a shrine in the Great Temple in Linh-an…’ The latter was catechism; Dan owned a book about the Great Temple, one that described its appearance, its Gods, and detailed biographies of all the emperors and sages whose niches had been dedicated in the Second Circle of the Great Temple. It had been brought over by one of the later waves of immigrants from Syai, and was not quite the age of Kito-Tai’s journals, but it was old enough – sixty or seventy years at least. Amais knew about Nhia because she had been singled out by her grandmother, because they had read her biography together, because she had been mentioned by name in every one of Tai’s journals that resided in the cedar box. Making the leap from Nhia’s status of Tai’s jin-shei-bao to that of Blessed Sage of the Temple, as though the one had naturally followed from the other, however, had been something that Amais had done entirely on her own. Her grandmother might have objected mildly, but before she had a chance to do so Amais fired another distracting question. ‘ Baya- Dan…have you ever had a jin-shei-bao ?’

‘I was not so fortunate,’ said her grandmother in a tone of noble sorrow.

‘But back in Syai, every woman had them. At least one. Didn’t they?’

‘They still do, I am certain,’ murmured baya- Dan. ‘It is the women’s country, where you could find a sister in a friend, could depend on her, believe in her and in your bond when everything else failed, know that she always stood between you and doom.’

‘Did you ever keep a journal yourself, baya- Dan?’

‘Not quite like this,’ Dan said. ‘She was special, Kito-Tai. She was a poet. She saw every day through a poet’s eyes. She filled a book every year of her life, you know. These are just a handful of her journals. The rest were lost and scattered, or just gone. Four hundred years is a very long life for a book.’

‘Four hundred years…’ Amais breathed, the eyes her grandmother had thought too slanted now quite round with wonder.

‘That is your heritage,’ Dan said. ‘That is what you came from, that stock.’

‘My mother never told me about this,’ Amais said.

Dan allowed herself an inelegant snort. ‘Then it is just as well that you have me,’ she said.

But the passing of the journals seemed to herald a new phase in Dan’s life. Amais had always known her as what she considered to be old – baya- Dan was straight-backed and clean-limbed, but her hands had gnarled with age and her face was seamed with fine lines under the mass of carefully dressed silver hair. After the child she continued to stubbornly call Aylun was born, baya- Dan seemed to consider her task done, her life well spent. She withdrew even further from the reality that was her world. Elaas, the bright sunlight and the sapphire sea and the vines of ancient vineyards twisted with venerable age at least as respectable as Dan’s own, all that simply ceased to exist for her at all. If Vien didn’t come by to make sure she ate – and that the food was prepared properly according to Dan’s own high standards of the lost world of Syai as best as could be managed – the old woman would be just as likely to spend the time in a sort of waking dream, drifting through the days with her eyes wide open but her gaze bent more on the ephemeral glories of her past than on the physical surroundings of her current existence.

Elena had almost forbidden her treasured younger granddaughter to go to what she had taken to calling ‘that woman’s little palace’ when Vien brought the news that Dan was dying, and wanted to say farewell to her grandchildren. The words ‘Good riddance!’ were hovering on the tip of Elena’s tongue, but they remained unspoken. In some ways the two old women were far more alike than they realised or might have wanted to know. Both had a reverence for the circle of life, for those who went before, and for those who came after. Nika, whatever Elena might have wished, was of Dan’s blood, and Elena could not find it in herself to forbid the child to go and receive the dying blessing of her mother’s mother. She watched the three walking away from the house – Amais running ahead to pluck some flowering weed by the roadside to present to her grandmother upon arrival, Vien holding Nika’s still toddler-chubby little hand – and had a sudden vivid premonition that she might not be seeing this for very long, this remnant of family that was hers, this shadow of her lost son.

She almost called them back, ran to snatch little Nika up in her arms, demand that the child renounce her divided blood, that she become her own laughing little boy all over again. But perhaps it was already too late for that.

Vien had brought the toddler into the shadowy room where Dan now lay under the embroidered coverlets on her bed. Sensitive to the solemn mood of the occasion, Nika approached her grandmother’s bed when given a light push by her mother, and Dan lifted a hand over the child’s head, letting it flutter down on her silky dark hair for a moment.

‘My little cricket,’ she whispered. ‘You were born in such an hour…I wish your life could have been easier…but you and I will meet in Cahan one day. May you have light and grace all your days.’ She allowed her hand to stroke Nika’s hair, and then sighed. ‘Send me your sister.’