Читать книгу The Embers of Heaven - Alma Alexander - Страница 10

Aylun was asleep when the family boarded the small boat that would take them to the mainland, carried in her mother’s arms. The bigger pieces of their luggage had been loaded already; the travellers perched on a couple of battered trunks in the midst of the boat, a number of smaller packages at their feet. Vien also wore a bag slung crosswise on her body, strap on one shoulder and the bag itself resting on the hip on which she was not balancing her sleeping toddler. In that bag were the most precious of the things they had brought with them – Dan’s ashes in a small bronze urn, what there was of Dan’s gold and valuables that was small enough to be carried by hand and that could be exchanged for the things they would need on their journey, tickets for the various conveyances that would take them all the way back to the shores of Syai, and necessities for Aylun’s immediate needs.

Amais carried a similar bag. No concessions had been made for her size and on her the thing looked enormous, overwhelming, threatening to make her buckle under its weight. In hers she carried whatever her mother required but could not fit into her own luggage, as well as the thirteen precious red journals that had been left to her by Dan and – smuggled in as a last-minute sentimental impulse but already starting to be a subject for second thoughts – a couple of pebbles from the cove where her father had taken her to swim with wild dolphins.

The family’s break with the island seemed to be complete. Elena had not come to see them off at the wharf, and neither had any of Amais’s erstwhile bosom friends and companions. Those people who did happen to be there as Vien and her daughters departed seemed reluctant to meet their eyes, to look at them, even to acknowledge that they saw them. Many found something to be busy with, keeping their heads down. Only a couple of women offered a wan half-smile, and one or two children, probably too young to know better, waved goodbye as the boat carrying Vien and the girls pushed off from the dock.

Vien kept her back to the shore, clutching Aylun, occasionally patting the bag she carried with one hand as though to make sure it was still there. It was Amais who sat facing the island they were abandoning, and it was only Amais who saw Elena finally come running all the way down the wharf and then back again to shore, taking an awkward, stumbling leap off it onto the pebbled beach, her customary headscarf clutched in one twisted hand revealing black hair streaked liberally with grey and falling in untidy strands about her face and neck. She was calling something, but either they were already too far to hear clearly or else her voice was very weak – it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Vien sat with her back straight, without turning her head. She must have heard that voice, must have recognised it, but she gave no reaction to it at all, and Amais could see nothing on her mother’s face except a glint in her eye that might have been either determination or a concealed tear. But Amais, for her part, could not find it in herself to leave without a word, without a thought – even though she had been the despised and ignored one ever since her father had died and her sister had been born to take his place in Elena’s heart. Amais had never forgotten the early years and the fact that her father’s mother did love her, long ago, once upon a time. And Elena was the last link with that other world, the world with her father and his dolphins, the world where she had suddenly been put on trial and declared a stranger.

With a final glance at her mother, half guilty and half defiant, Amais lifted both hands and waved back to the grandmother she was losing, waved back hard, as though that single simple motion alone could convey all that now would never be said.

Elena had stopped stock-still as Amais’s hands came up, and for the longest moment she stood frozen, immobilised by this farewell. And then she lifted one of her own hands, very slowly, and allowed the black kerchief she carried to be stirred by the breeze. They waved to each other, in silence, grandmother and granddaughter, for as long as they could see one another, until the boat slipped around a promontory and turned towards the mainland and blotted out the small beach and the woman standing alone upon it, with the memory of Amais’s childhood dissolving in the white sea foam as waves lapped and whispered at her feet.

Everything was bigger on the mainland. It was the first time Amais, nine years old, had seen a human dwelling bigger than anything to be found in the village in which she had grown up, and where she had known every face, from the newest babies with eyes barely opened to the world to the wizened ancient widows who sat in the sun outside their houses and blinked at the cerulean Elaas sky all day, counting clouds like sheep. Amais watched round-eyed as the bigger pieces of their baggage were hauled onto the shoulders of burly men naked to the waist, burned bronze by the sun under which they toiled, and carried onto the larger ship on which they would continue their journey. She watched other passengers stream on board, people wearing strange clothes, the men in buttoned-down jackets and patent leather shoes and the women wearing white gloves and large lace-and-ribbon-trimmed hats that cast their features into alluring half-shadow. She thought they were all beautiful.

But their own accommodation was not shared with the beautiful people – Vien and her daughters had a tiny cramped inside cabin with no view and no air, just four bunks stuffed into the smallest space into which they could possibly fit and a platform that served as both table and nightstand screwed firmly to the wall in between them. The only other fixtures were a cubbyhole that was supposed to serve as a closet, into which one of their smaller trunks that still didn’t quite fit inside had been crammed, and a small porcelain basin in one corner. They were to share a bathroom and toilet with five similar cabins that surrounded them.

Amais surveyed all this as she paused in the doorway, and her expression must have betrayed something of her appalled dismay, because Vien, pushing in behind her with the toddler she carried, now waking and fretful in her arms, clicked her tongue at her eldest daughter and schooled her face into a stern expression.

‘We probably could have done better, yes,’ she said, answering an unspoken question. ‘But it’s a lot more expensive, and our means are limited right now. We must save our gold for when we get home – we will need it there. Besides, it’s ours – we don’t even have to share that fourth bunk with some stranger. There’s more room than you think.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ Amais murmured obediently, but her heart quailed at the prospect of spending weeks, possibly months – she had no idea how long the journey was going to take – in this claustrophobic space.

‘You can take the top bunk,’ Vien said, inspecting the accommodations. ‘Aylun cannot sleep up there, and I must be where I can attend to her at night if I need to, so the two of us will sleep in the lower bunks. Now, help me sort this stuff out so that we have room to move. Some of it can go in the other top bunk, the one you aren’t using; it will give us a bit of space.’

‘May I go and see the ship, Mother?’ Amais asked, anxious to escape the confines of the cabin, grasping at whatever excuse she could muster.

‘Later,’ Vien said implacably.

So Amais spent the best part of an hour soothing her fractious sister and playing finger-games with her, sorting out the stuff in the trunk and hauling out things her mother considered necessities so that they could be better accessed atop the free upper bunk, and then squashing the trunk in as best it would go between the basin stand and the foot of one of the lower bunks, allowing free space to stand up and turn around in the midst of the cabin. She had not even noticed that the ship had actually started to move until her mother, satisfied with the arrangements in the cabin as best they could be made, took Aylun in her arms again and told Amais to lead the way up to the deck.

They were already a couple of ship-lengths away from the shore. A crowd of people stood shouting and waving, and the railings on that side of the ship were thronged by passengers who were waving back. Vien, with nobody to bid farewell to, simply turned her back on them and took her children to the opposite side of the ship, where there were fewer people and the view of the sunlit sea was unimpeded.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Over there, somewhere, is Syai. We’re on our way. We’re going home.’

But it was her father’s dolphins that Amais searched for in the waters that quickly turned from sapphire to deep cobalt blue, her father’s dolphins and her father’s spirit, wanting to say her farewells to them, wanting to assure them that she could not bid them goodbye because a part of her would never leave them. She thought she saw a silver fin break the surface of the water, once, a long way away – but she could not be sure, and, although she stayed at the railings for a long time after her mother grew bored and a little seasick and retired below with Aylun, she did not see the fin again.

And the sun rode across the cloudless sky, and dipped towards the horizon, and then beneath it; and the quiet stars came out; and the first day was over. Already Amais was alone and adrift upon the open sea; the land of her birth was lost behind her, the land of her ancestors only a secret promise far away in the night.

The shipboard days followed one another, monotonous and long, marked by persistent bouts of seasickness on the part of Vien and Aylun. Amais was apparently her father’s daughter in more than one sense – she was remarkably unaffected, having got her sea legs within hours of boarding the big ship, and when she wasn’t tending to her prostrate mother and sister she spent her time exploring. Frequently she was gently but firmly steered away from areas of special sensitivity or specific salons on the top deck which were exclusively reserved for the passengers travelling in spacious outside cabins with portholes, out of which one could see the sea and the sky. Amais didn’t care, really – she hadn’t wanted to join the ship’s aristocracy, only to see the places they had claimed. Denied those, she found other spots that she made her own. One of her particular favourites – and one from which she would probably have been evicted had she been observed – was the very point of the ship’s prow, where huge ropes and the anchor chain were coiled and stowed. The place, once rearranged just a little for her convenience, made a comfortable nest for Amais. On several occasions, when her family had been particularly violently ill and the cabin smelled overwhelmingly of sick, she had even escaped and slept out here in the open air, lulled by the hiss and lap of the ship’s prow cleaving the waters beneath her. She’d take her journals out there with her, Tai’s journals, and pore over them, immersing herself in Tai’s world, deliberately turning her back on the sea and the dolphins and the call of her father’s blood. Those were in the past, for now. There were things she needed to know, for her future.

She was troubled by dreams out there on that prow, she who had always slept soundly and deeply, and – as far as she had ever been aware – dreamlessly. If she had ever dreamed before, she had never remembered the dreams when she woke. But now she did, and they came thick and fast, and some were of the lost past and some were simply dreams, unknown, unexplainable, impossible to interpret or understand without context, which, as yet, she completely lacked. Sometimes there was nothing but voices – her grandmother’s, for instance, reading some familiar passage from a poem or a genealogical line, or uttering those last words of hers that were so much a binding laid on Amais by a dying woman; or an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s, calling, I’m lost, I’m lost, come and find me, come and set me free…There were weird dreams of almost frightening focus, sometimes a single phrase or even a single word written on scarlet pennants in gold calligraphy, things she could not quite read but knew were written in jin-ashu, the women’s tongue her grandmother had taught her, and that they were very important, if only she could get close enough to see them clearly and understand them. And sometimes there were dreams that were almost complete stories in and of themselves – she dreamed of strange skies, as though something far away, something vast and distant, was on fire. Once she woke from a vivid dream where she stood under such skies with a child, a little girl, both of them dressed in a manner described by Tai in her journals, their hair in courtly style, standing on a shattered piece of stairwell with only a shattered city around her – and she thought she knew what was burning then, but that didn’t seem quite right either.

It was then that she started keeping her own journal, not meticulously and neatly and every day like Tai had done all her life, but haphazardly, whenever the mood took her, using a half-filled notebook she had found abandoned on the deck after one of the beautiful people from the forbidden salon had passed that way. She had not believed that the precious notebook, with all those inviting blank pages waiting to be filled, had been simply dumped – and she had spent an entire morning stalking it, wandering around that part of the deck, waiting for somebody, anybody, to come and claim it. Nobody had done so, and Amais decided that the Gods of Syai must have sent her this gift, and took the notebook with a completely clear conscience. She wrote her journal half in the language of Elaas, which was the language of her father and her childhood, and half in graceful but oddly formed and unsteady characters of jin-ashu. Amais had been taught how to read the women’s tongue, but the calligraphy of it, writing it herself, was something that baya-Dan had only begun to teach her in earnest a few years back. She was quickly beginning to realise that she had barely scratched the surface of jin-ashu, that there were so many more layers there than she had believed. She was using Tai’s journals partly as inspiration and partly as a manual to teach herself more of the secret language, forcing herself to write it using the coarse lead of a broken pencil instead of the delicate brush and ink in which the characters ought to have been inscribed, finding it hard work but in general quite pleased with her progress.

But the journal proved to be a stepping stone for something quite different. She soon found that she was not as comfortable in the journal format as her ancestress had been. She started writing down her thoughts as long poems. Initially they were pastiche, no more than clumsy copies of the classical poems her grandmother had read to her and those she found in the pages of Tai’s books, but even to her own untutored eye they improved with daily practice until she was quite proud of what she could do with the old and glowing words of the classical high language that had been her grandmother’s gift to her. The poetry, however, turned out to be another stepping stone, to something else again. She started writing down stories, casting her own dreams into fiction, writing about her hopes and fears and expectations as though they were happening to someone removed from herself, finding it easier to conquer and understand them that way.

The notebook she had found on deck soon ran out of room to write in, thickly covered with what was a remarkably good calligraphy for having been produced by someone of Amais’s age, without proper implements, and with the added constraint of having to be smaller and smaller as the space to write in grew more and more cramped and valuable. One of the ship’s officers found her sitting cross-legged in the sun one morning, squinting morosely at her notebook, trying to find a margin she had not yet written in.

‘Hey,’ the man had said in a friendly manner, smiling at the picture of the intense little girl bent over her words. ‘Much too nice a day for that long face. Looks like that’s pretty much all your book will take – what are you doing, writing a diary? Could you use another of those?’

It was impolite to answer in the affirmative; one never asked for gifts. But Amais looked down at her notebook, and then up at the officer, and nodded mutely.

‘Then I will see you get one. There are plenty of notebooks in the back of the storage cabinet. I’ll see what I can dig out.’

‘Thank you, sei,’ Amais said, using the old form of address. The officer wasn’t even one of the higher ones, hardly a ‘lord’. But he was offering a precious thing. That entitled him.

He didn’t understand the honour, naturally, and merely smiled as he tipped his cap at her. ‘I’ll find you,’ he said.

And he did. He came up with two partly filled and discarded notebooks and – the greatest treasure of all – a completely blank notebook of substantial proportions, bound in thin leather.

‘The captain’s log is far more boring than what you might want to use it for,’ he said.

‘This is the captain’s book?’ Amais demanded, too impressed to be polite.

‘Yours now,’ the officer said. ‘He’ll only think they forgot to load his usual quota. You’d better keep it out of sight, though. You know.’ And he had winked at her in a conspiratorial manner.

She didn’t know whether to believe him – taking one of the notebooks destined for the official log of the ship’s journey sounded entirely too outrageous, but she did it anyway, keeping the book hidden even from her mother, no small achievement given their cramped and untidy cabin.

Vien and the girls changed ships after they crossed the big inland sea, and loaded themselves into another even bigger vessel sailing east, all the way to the Syai port of Chirinaa, familiar to both Vien and Amais only as a lost city of legend. On the first night of this, the last leg of their journey, Vien felt well enough to leave Aylun sleeping in the even more cramped cabin, if that were possible, than the one in which they had travelled on the first ship, and joined her older daughter on deck.

It was evening, and the sea breezes were cool. Vien wrapped her shawl tighter around her and leaned her elbows on the railing to look down into the water below.

‘Soon,’ she said to Amais. ‘Soon we will be there.’

‘What will we do there, Mother?’

‘I will make proper arrangements for your grandmother,’ Vien said. ‘That is the first thing that I will do.’

‘But where will we live?’

Vien hesitated. Just a little. ‘I don’t know yet, Amais-ban. But we will see how it is when we get there. All will be well.’

Amais tilted her head to the side, and regarded her mother with a sudden chill, a touch of fear. There had been a light in Vien’s face just then, something that spoke of an exile’s homecoming, a glow of joyous expectation which might not have been wholly unexpected in one of what baya-Dan had called li-san, the lost generations, the ones who went away, who left Syai behind. But that joy was drifting, ephemeral, rootless. Amais could quite clearly see her mother on this journey, see her wrapped completely in its expectations, its visions, its dreams. She could not, hard as she tried, imagine Vien at the journey’s end, could not see what Vien planned to do with Syai when its soil was firm under her feet. Their lives seemed confined to the limbo of the ship, with quiet waters all around them, an eternal voyage fated never to end.

She did not know what scared her worse – the knowledge that her mother had no real idea of what to do next, or the nebulous thoughts that were forming in her own mind, a still shapeless and formless thing, something that had been born of her dreams and of the promise she had made baya-Dan on her deathbed. Something that was waiting in Syai for her hand to be laid upon it. Something that was for her alone, that nobody else in this world would be able to do.