Читать книгу The Embers of Heaven - Alma Alexander - Страница 13

Perhaps it was his father’s new silence on the matter of his reading habits that put the idea in Iloh’s head, or perhaps it was the echo of the conversation he had once had with his village teacher.

Or perhaps it was the arrival in the household of a quiet woman carrying a small child in her arms, the widow of a man who had owned the fields abutting those belonging to Iloh’s father, a man who appeared to have died from the same disease that had claimed Iloh’s aunt and his cousin and his two siblings. The land had been for sale. Iloh’s father lost no time in offering to buy it, with money he raised on loan. Part of the price was that he care for the widow and her baby, and so she moved into his house, and, in the time-honoured way of old Syai, she became his concubine.

It was another mouth to feed, but there was also more land with which to do so. More land meant more work. It became obvious that it was more work than Iloh’s father could do, even with both his sons. He parcelled out a section of his newly gained land and rented it out to another family, in exchange for a third of their harvest.

The concubine changed everything. She was young enough to be fertile, and in the year that Iloh turned thirteen the concubine produced a child, half-sister to Iloh, named Yingchi. A new woman was in the house, with a new baby, a child fathered by the family patriarch and therefore with its own place in the family hierarchy. The little girl was a concubine’s child and tradition said that such children called the primary wife ‘mother’ – but this was a little girl who was not Iloh’s mother’s child, and whose cries and gurgles reminded the woman constantly of her own lost daughter. It made her sad-eyed and melancholy as she drifted about the place, mistress of the house in name but barely able to bring herself to care about anything at all any more. Rubai, the cherished and protected second son, was also lost to her – he was growing up fast, fast enough to start being assigned farming chores and able to acquit himself well in doing them.

Iloh was fiercely intelligent, aching for knowledge and understanding, and aware that he was never going to find them with his feet in the oozing mud of the paddy fields or bent over the grain with a harvesting sickle in his hand.

He simply announced to his father one morning that he was going away to school.

‘There is a new school,’ he said, ‘in the city. The village schoolmaster tells me that they will take boarders. I will go there, and start from the beginning.’

‘And who do you think will pay for such schooling?’ his father said. ‘I barely have enough money to scrape by as it is. And besides, you are too old. Look at you, strapping lad that you are. You practically have to shave in the mornings. Are you telling me that you will go into the same classroom as seven-year-old children? And endure it?’

‘If that is what it takes then that is what I will do,’ Iloh said. ‘And do not worry about the money. I will manage somehow.’

‘And what am I to do for help on the farm?’ his father said. ‘Rubai is too young to replace you, and a labourer costs money I don’t have.’

‘I will study,’ Iloh said, ‘and I will work. When I have money, I will send it.’

‘And when you do not have money you will starve, and so will we,’ his father prophesied morosely.

His father complained and protested right up until the morning that Iloh packed up to leave his home for the school in the city. He took no more than his precious books, a change of clothes, and two pairs of new shoes that his mother, rousing herself out of her lethargy long enough to ensure her eldest son was at least well-shod on his journey, had made for him. She also handed him a package of sweet cakes for his journey, and managed a smile for him as he bade her farewell. She had not made the cakes. It had been the concubine who had done that – the silent woman who had taken over the running of the household when the primary wife abdicated responsibility. But she had no claim on the son that was leaving, and she had merely done what she had conceived to be her duty. As he left the house she had said nothing, waiting silently in the shadows as he passed by.

But Yingchi, Iloh’s little half-sister, apparently could not allow him to leave without her blessing. She was lying on her back in a makeshift crib and raised both her chubby arms as Iloh passed, her hands spread out like a pair of small fat starfish as she waved them about. Iloh paused, glanced down at the child, who chose that moment to offer a guileless and completely endearing toothless smile, baring her pink gums at him so widely that her eyes were practically screwed closed by the breadth of her grin.

Iloh reached out and offered a finger to one of those hands, betrayed into an answering smile. The starfish fingers closed around his finger, tightly, and Yingchi opened her eyes just a little, staring at him gravely, her lips still curved in an echo of the smile that had riveted her brother.

‘You take care of things here,’ he said to this tiny scrap of a sister. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

She gurgled at him, and a bubble of baby drool formed in the corner of her mouth. He gently disengaged his finger and wiped her face, stood staring at her for another long moment, and then turned and walked away without looking back.

Iloh could not afford a conveyance to take him to the city, so he slung his bundle over his shoulder and walked – every step of the way. It was a long and lonely journey; nearly four days passed before he could glimpse the outskirts of his destination, and it took another day to find his way in an unfamiliar warren of streets, asking directions of strangers who would shrug their shoulders and pass him by or point him to wrong addresses or dead-ends – but he finally found himself at the gate of the school he had chosen towards the end of that fifth day, a grubby, ragged boy with hungry eyes.

‘I have come to learn,’ he said to a gatekeeper who came to ask his business.

‘How old are you?’ the gatekeeper said, after a pause, looking him up and down.

‘Twelve,’ said Iloh. It was a lie, but not a huge one; being thought younger than he was might increase his chances of being accepted, and yet he could not shave too many years off his true age and be believed. Not with his height; not with a face that was fast losing the round curves of childhood, revealing the features that would belong to the grown man who was emerging from that chrysalis.

Some of the other pupils were clustered just inside the gate, sniggering and pointing. Iloh tried to ignore them, holding his chin high.

‘You’re too old,’ the gatekeeper said after a moment, dismissing the new ‘pupil’, and turned to go back inside.

‘That is not your decision to make!’ Iloh said, desperation making him insolent and discourteous. ‘I have come a long way…and I would like to speak to a teacher, or the headmaster!’

‘The headmaster is busy,’ the gatekeeper said archly. ‘He cannot see just any riffraff who walks in from the street.’

‘And what riffraff would that be?’ a serenely commanding voice interrupted.

The gatekeeper flinched, and then turned with a deep bow. ‘I did not know you were there, Excellency.’

‘I am where the will of heaven wishes me to be,’ said the second voice. Its owner emerged from the shadows of the school’s gate, miraculously emptied of sneering schoolboys. The voice had seemed entirely too strong and powerful to belong to the almost frail-looking white-haired gentleman, his back unbent by his years, his hands decorously tucked into the wide sleeves of the scholar’s robe that he wore. His eyes were a dark slate-grey, luminous and serene; but Iloh did not have that much chance to observe any more than this. He bowed immediately, very low, and kept his head down until he heard that voice speak again. ‘Do I understand you come seeking tuition, boy?’

‘Sir…yes, please, sir. I want to learn.’

‘And what is it that you wish to learn here, son?’

Iloh looked up at that, his own eyes blazing. ‘I will take,’ he said, ‘whatever knowledge you are willing to give me.’

One of the headmaster’s bushy white eyebrows rose a fraction. ‘Oh? Tell me, if you had a cabbage, a rabbit and a stoat, no cage, a boat that only holds you and a single one of those things, and a raging river to cross and only the boat to do it with, how would you ferry your three treasures across and have them all safe at the end of the day?’

Iloh had heard that one before – the reply would be to make the trip over with the rabbit, to return alone, to fetch the stoat over, take the rabbit back, take the cabbage over, return alone, bring over the rabbit – but that would take too long, and so he simply cut through it.

‘I would sell the stoat and the rabbit at market on this side of the river, for the fur, and I’d make sure I got a good price,’ he said. ‘I’d eat the cabbage for my supper. Then I’d cross the river in my boat, sell the boat on the other side, and buy myself a stoat, a rabbit and a cabbage. You said the three treasures – you didn’t say I had to keep the boat.’

The headmaster laughed. ‘I think you had better come inside, young man.’

It might have been Iloh’s obvious thirst for learning, his penchant for creative thinking, the glimpse that the headmaster got of an empty chalice aching to be filled. It might have been the fact that one of the pupils in the school, Sihuai, was serendipitously from Iloh’s own village – a few years older than Iloh himself, he had shared the same tiny village schoolhouse for a short while before Iloh was snatched from it to work his father’s land, and vouched for his erstwhile younger colleague. It might have been simply the fact that Iloh said he would pay for his education in whatever way he could, including, farmer’s son that he was, tending the school gardens. Whatever it was, after nearly two hours of being interrogated on his future plans and subtly tested for his abilities, the headmaster’s verdict was positive. Iloh was in.

It was nearly a year before Iloh went back home again, a gruelling and sometimes soul-destroying year in which he started from the bottom, in a class of eight-year-olds, and found himself wanting in the most basic skills compared to these boys. They teased him mercilessly, knowing that he could not retaliate, knowing that anything he did to them in return would draw harsh official censure, him being so much bigger and stronger than them. It was a year that almost made Iloh doubt his choice to come here, doubt his very need to learn. But it was also a year that built his character, his spirit, his mind. When he did finally return to his boyhood home for a visit, he was wearing the invisible cloak of a young scholar, and the villagers deferred to it. Even the old doctor – now somehow shrunken and made impotent by Iloh’s new and broader vision of the world – gave him a small bow when they passed in the village street. Sihuai had been back before him, and had talked of him. People knew who Iloh was, and respected him.

He never forgot that first homecoming.

After that first hard, horrible year, Iloh showed such rapid progress and such promise that the headmaster promoted him. His calligraphy would always be crude, because he had first learned it that way, but Iloh’s essays showed that he was a thinker, even a poet. They began to be posted up on the walls of the classroom, examples for other students, an achievement which Iloh was vividly proud of. He still had few friends, but a surprising one turned out to be none other than Sihuai, who was the scion of a scholarly family and therefore, in the class-conscious society of Syai, vastly Iloh’s social superior. Sihuai was another student whose essays found pride of place on classroom walls – but his refined and elegant calligraphy made them far more of a pleasure to look at than Iloh’s attempts, and it was partly that that sent Iloh to his schoolmate, humbly begging for help to better his writing skills. From those small beginnings an unlikely friendship bloomed, with the two boys – nearly of an age and with a shared love of the hills and valleys where they had grown up in their own separate spheres – finding many things to talk about.

Sihuai was one of a small set of boys who were regularly invited into the headmaster’s own home for lessons and discussions on the classics and history. It was a combination of Iloh’s losing his temper with one of his younger classmates while insisting that the version of events portrayed in his treasured novels was in fact actual history and not just a dramatic rehash of what really happened, and his friendship with Sihuai – who had been aware of that particular event and had spoken of it to the headmaster – that resulted in Iloh’s invitation to join the headmaster’s circle. There, his misconceptions were gently dealt with. He was given other books to read, true histories, biographical works on great leaders of past centuries, and then he was invited to talk about them with his companions in the headmaster’s office.

‘Histories were written by people who had power,’ Iloh said once, in that circle.

‘Histories always are,’ the headmaster said. ‘Histories are written after battles are over, by those victorious in those battles. There are other versions of history, known only to the losers. We might never hear anything about those at all. But what do you mean by power?’

‘Money,’ one of the other pupils said.

‘Yes, rich people are respected and honoured,’ said another.

‘No matter how unworthy they might be,’ Iloh said darkly.

‘But there are other kinds of power,’ murmured the headmaster.

‘Military,’ said a pupil.

‘But that is bad,’ said the headmaster’s daughter, Yanzi, who was a part of these study sessions. Two years older than Iloh, she was a willowy teenager with lustrous black hair and huge bright eyes, and there wasn’t a boy in the school who wasn’t half in love with her from the first time he laid eyes on her. ‘That means that the way to have power over people is simply to have a bigger bludgeon.’

‘Power you can buy is bad,’ Iloh said thoughtfully. ‘It is political power that is good.’

‘But political power is worse than all the others!’ Yanzi objected. ‘Because it already contains both money power and military power. It is impossible for anyone to get political power, or to hold on to it, without having either that bludgeon or the money to pay for someone else wielding it on your behalf.’

‘Power corrupts,’ Sihuai said. ‘You can see that everywhere.’

‘Of course it does,’ Iloh said. ‘That is its nature. But power is a tool, and needs to be applied properly. In the history that we are learning, in the books that we are reading, it is a tool that is often misused – but it is power and circumstances that dictate that. The power itself is not necessarily a bad thing, just the way it is wielded. And nowhere in the books does it say that giving a man the power to make change is bad in itself – it’s just that when…’

‘Of course not,’ Sihuai interrupted. ‘The people who wrote those books were the winners, and the winners do not write histories that put themselves in a bad light.’

‘One of the ancient emperors,’ the headmaster said, cupping his hands together serenely and interrupting the squabble without raising his voice, ‘was helped to change the Mandate of Heaven and overthrow an old dynasty before establishing his own. Within a year of ascending the throne, he had had most of his erstwhile friends and allies killed or exiled. Why do you think he did this?’

Iloh gave the headmaster a long look of blank incomprehension. ‘Those people knew the way to a throne,’ he said, sounding almost astonished at the fact that this needed to be said at all. ‘If he had not done so, the new emperor’s throne would never have been secure.’

‘You do not think he was a bad man to have done this?’

‘It was the only thing he could have done,’ Iloh said.

‘He had gained power,’ one of the other pupils, a sallow-faced boy named Tang, said slowly. ‘And he could not afford to let those others go free. Power can be lost as easily as it can be gained. All it takes is a single betrayal…’

‘Power corrupts,’ Yanzi said, her eyes cast down.

‘Corrupts what?’ the headmaster asked.

‘Principles,’ Yanzi said. ‘Ideals. Character. Power changes people.’

‘Wait,’ said Sihuai, ‘wasn’t that the Phoenix Emperor? Didn’t he turn aside a famine? He gave from his own table, shared the Imperial reserves of grain when the country starved. He saved a lot of people.’

‘But at what cost?’ Yanzi said, her voice passionate. ‘The principles…’

‘High principles carry too high a price if people are starving,’ Iloh said. ‘The emperor did away with the threats that could have been a danger to his rule. He then…ruled. If he was a good ruler…if he fed a starving people…how then could this be bad?’

‘He bought the people,’ Yanzi said obstinately. ‘They kiss the hand that feeds them, no matter how black the heart that rules it.’

‘When people have nothing in the food bowl,’ Iloh said, ‘they are unlikely to think about morality. They do what they need to do. And power is given to those who are not afraid to use it.’

A silence descended at those words. It took Iloh a moment, and every ounce of the strength of his developing convictions, to lift his head and meet the eyes of everyone else in that class – ending with Yanzi herself, who did not hold his gaze long before letting her own luminous eyes fall back to rest on the gracefully folded hands in her lap.

‘Very interesting,’ the headmaster said, throwing the words into the silence like pebbles into a still pond. ‘I would like you all to write an essay on the use of power, please. By the end of the week. You may all go now.’

Iloh, his blood still stirred in the aftermath of the discussion, hesitated briefly at the door of the headmaster’s study and turned once, briefly, to look back. He had just a glimpse of Yanzi standing there in the middle of the room, looking straight back at him, with eyes that were steady, sad, and perhaps a little afraid.