Alma Alexander - The Embers of Heaven

Vien snaked out an arm and whisked an almost hypnotised Nika, who would always be Aylun in this place, out of the way. Amais stepped into the space so vacated, and this time Dan’s hand was not light, offered no stroking. She reached out and closed her fingers around Amais’s wrist, stared into her eyes with a gaze that was suddenly too full of power and passion to belong to a dying woman.

‘Take the journals,’ she said. ‘They are for you. You are the last of Kito-Tai’s line. Take the journals, and don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.’ Her eyes fluttered, closed, all passion suddenly spent, as though she had been filled by some external spirit which had now left her. ‘Or your own…’ she whispered, releasing Amais’s hand.

Amais turned her head, alarmed, and sought her mother with a gaze that was almost frightened. ‘Mother…’

‘Watch your sister,’ Vien said in a whisper. She pulled Amais free of the dying woman’s bedside, planting a swift kiss of reassurance on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘Wait for me in the sitting room. Go.’

Amais took Aylun into the other room and gave her one of baya- Dan’s shawls to play with – she didn’t think her grandmother would mind. For her own part, she went to the chest where she knew that Tai’s journals were kept. She knelt on the floor beside it for the longest time, her mind curiously blank, and then opened the lid and carefully took out the small pile of red notebooks that were her legacy. They sat there in her lap, in apparent innocence – but they had changed for Amais. Before, they had been a fascinating if somewhat distant link to her ancestry and her past. Now they were heavy with portent. It was as though Amais had been charged with something by her grandmother on her deathbed, and these journals were the only way to find out just exactly what it was that she had accepted as her life’s work. Her grandmother had not exactly asked Amais to promise anything, and Amais hadn’t exactly given her word, but it had been implicit in that last conversation.

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own…

When Vien came out to gather her children up, her eyes were red and swollen.

‘ Baya- Dan…?’ Amais asked, her voice quavering just a little.

‘She is gone, Amais- ban. She is gone.’

Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own. Those words her grandmother had uttered out loud. But now, as Amais remembered them, it seemed to her that there had been another phrase, unspoken, ephemeral, ghostly, hovering in the air and settling lightly in Amais’s mind and memory: Or mine.

Or mine…

But was it Dan’s name she had wanted made immortal…or that of the strange spirit that had possessed her just before death came to claim her?

‘Come on,’ Vien said, holding out her hand. ‘There’s things I need to do now. Let’s go home.’

Amais got up obediently, gathering up the thirteen precious notebooks, wrapping them up in a secure little parcel and hugging them to her chest all the way back to Elena’s house. Somewhere in between those two places, the shrine to Syai where baya- Dan’s spirit now lived and the cheerful green-shuttered house that her still-living grandmother inhabited, walking in the sunshine of Elaas with the treasure of Syai clasped close to her heart, suspended in the empty air between two worlds, Amais realised for the first time in her life that she was no longer sure just where ‘home’ was or how her heart was supposed to find her way there.

Amais kept her head down and herself out of the way in the months that followed, months in which everyone around her seemed fractious, annoyed, or outright furious at things that hovered just outside her comprehension. Vien let down her hair and donned the traditional Syai mourning attire for her mother, which led to Elena making somewhat acid comments about the propriety of wearing so much white with her mother newly dead and her husband not a year in his grave. Vien cast her eyes down and took the barbed remarks in pious silence, her hands folded before her in gracious eastern position, suddenly prominently and obviously alien in the house where she had tried so hard to fit in and where she had once been wholly accepted.

Amais had been dressed in like manner, and the small knot of village children who were her companions had been curious and blunt, as children often were.

‘That’s what we wear in mourning,’ Amais had explained, plucking at her white dress with nervous fingers. Out here in the Elaas sunshine, in the bright light of Elaas customs, the white garb did seem outlandish and strange.

‘So your people are happy when someone dies?’ her friend Ennea asked. ‘White is a colour of joy, you wear it when you marry, not when you die.’

‘But back in Syai…’

‘Is that where you’re really from?’ asked Dia, the school-teacher’s daughter, a slightly higher social caste than the rest of them and generally given to passing on oracular pronouncements from her exalted parent as though they were edicts handed down from the Gods on their mountain. ‘My papa says that blood will tell.’

‘I was born here,’ Amais said fiercely. ‘I am from here!’

‘But your mother wore black like she should when your father died,’ said Ennea, with a child’s utter disregard for tact or feelings, intent on pursuing some fascinating nugget of information and oblivious to all else.

‘That was different,’ said Amais, conscious of a sharp pain as the scab over that older wound, unhealed yet, cracked a little to allow a trickle of pain like heart’s-blood to escape. ‘My father was of Elaas, and…’

‘But so is your grandmother,’ another girl, Evania, pointed out. ‘ My grandmother says she was born on the mainland, in the city, before she came to live out here – but she was born here. So she was of Elaas, too.’

Amais remembered the silk-swathed rooms of her grandmother’s house, the scrolls of poetry in a foreign tongue, the scent of alien incense.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said carefully, too young to analyse the thing completely, aware that she could not defend it in the face of the practical questions of her playmates because they simply could not understand it.

‘My mother says you’re strange,’ Ennea said.

But she had still been willing to stay Amais’s friend and companion for all that, and no more was said on the matter, at least for the time being.

Dan had been cremated, on Vien’s insistence and with considerable trouble – since the body had had to be removed from the island in order for this to be accomplished, and getting the necessary permits was not a totally straightforward matter. In this, the established Syai community in Elaas stepped in to offer a helping hand – and that might have compensated for much, being welcomed back into her own world after choosing to step out of it for Nikos’s sake. But the relations between Vien and her own people remained formal and a little cool. It was as though Amais’s dilemmas were projected onto her mother, written much larger than those plaguing her own small self. Amais was still a child, and therefore obliged only to obey the instructions of those older and wiser than her – but Vien was an adult, with an adult’s decisions to make. Decisions that would affect not only her own life but those of the people who depended on her – her two daughters.

And it soon became apparent that there was yet another voice, perhaps the most forceful of all, that guided Vien’s choices – the insistent ghost of her mother.

When Vien first said the word ‘home’ and meant something other than the small cottage by the sea where she lived with Elena and the children, Amais almost missed it – but there was something in Vien’s face, a soft and yet steely determination that frightened her into paying much closer attention.