Читать книгу The Embers of Heaven - Alma Alexander - Страница 14

Iloh and Sihuai were sharing a room at the school before Iloh’s second year there came to a close. Sihuai was a particularly neat and almost obsessively tidy boy. Iloh, by contrast, took up every inch of available – and sometimes even not so available – space. When he worked at his desk it always overflowed with papers, sheets of smudged calligraphy, trails of spilled ink, glue, discarded pens, dog-eared books with sometimes deeply outlandish objects used as bookmarks, and half-eaten meals with remnants of rice that were acquiring the consistency of cement or in the process of giving birth to entirely new and hitherto unknown species of mould. There was even the occasional broken shoe, bent belt-buckle or torn quilted jacket that he had been in the process of repairing, straightening or patching, and which had been simply discarded as a fresh idea occurred to him and he swept all else aside to set it down on paper.

‘For someone who thinks that it’s his fate to save the world,’ Sihuai would mutter in a long-suffering tone of voice as he picked up three of Iloh’s books off his bed or a sheaf of Iloh’s notes from his own immaculately tidy desk, ‘you can’t seem to keep your own nest tidy.’

‘The world needs saving, and how!’ Iloh would reply, with a self-mocking grin. ‘I wasn’t really planning on doing anything about it until after graduation, Sihuai…but if I were to start thinking about cleaning up the universe, sweeping rooms seems an awfully parochial way of going about it.’

They were very different, but they got along well for all that – and they were quickly joined by Tang, who was a sort of bridge between the two of them, himself half Sihuai and half Iloh. He could understand both Sihuai’s aristocratic dignity and Iloh’s down-to-earth zeal with equal pragmatism – and it was he who launched the idea of a shared adventure in the summer of Iloh’s third year at the school.

‘A beggar’s holiday,’ he said. ‘We take nothing except a change of clothes and a towel and a notebook to write a journal in. And we wander where the roads take us, and we live on what we are given by the people we meet.’

‘But what would be the purpose of such a journey?’ Sihuai asked, considering the idea with doubt and not a little distaste.

‘Consider it a test of your ideas,’ Tang said. ‘You and Iloh, you have such different ideas about people. Why not prove which of you is right? And besides – it is a study of power. You know what the old saying is – only a beggar knows what true liberty is. Give a man a chance to live free of obligation or responsibility, and I suspect few would choose even to be emperor, after.’

‘I’m in,’ Iloh said, with his usual immediate and fiery enthusiasm at an idea that caught his imagination.

‘So am I,’ Sihuai said after a hesitation. He was still in two minds, but he could not allow himself to lose face by admitting his misgivings about the propriety of such an adventure to his friends.

The three of them met up at the school’s gate the day classes broke for the summer, dressed in old clothes and comfortable sandals, each carrying a bundle into which were folded the items that Tang had decreed they might bring. They wore their beggar’s garb with a sense of shining pride as they set out – but, inevitably, they were young scholars and they could not quite leave school behind. The discussion about power and the essays that they had written on the subject were still on their minds.

‘Remember the ancient poet – “I did not see those who came before me, and I will not know those who will follow” – a man can only be responsible for the days of his own life,’ Sihuai argued as they walked, their bundles slung jauntily on their shoulders.

‘If a man takes responsibility for others, then that is not true,’ Iloh said. ‘Then he needs to know those who will follow. Look at Shiqai. He held it all in the palm of his hand and then he let it all shatter.’

‘But that was in times of turmoil,’ Tang said.

‘Not so very long ago,’ Iloh replied thoughtfully. ‘It was only a few years before I was born.’

‘The problem is that he tried to make new things with old tools,’ Sihuai said. ‘He was part of the court, and then he went over to Baba Sung and his party when the republic was proclaimed and made the emperor resign, and then he made Baba Sung resign and tried to be emperor himself. And after that, there was none strong enough to be any kind of leader at all – not of the whole country. Even we, here, have a lord who rules with an iron fist over this single province – and raises taxes for himself and not for any government in Linh-an. He took three times the usual annual taxes from my father last year, and there is nothing my father can do about it.’

‘Mine, too,’ Iloh murmured. There had been letters from home. Things were not going well on the ancestral farm.

‘A new force is needed,’ Tang said. ‘Something to change each individual. Something strong enough to pass from one man to another, to spread through the people, like a thought, like a touch of the hand. To make them believe something. Together. And then the power of many people, believing that one thing…under a strong leader.’

‘You are thinking people are like a flock of sheep,’ Sihuai said.

‘But that is right,’ Iloh said. ‘People are a flock of sheep. And a strong leader is like a shepherd.’

‘If sheep are looked after by a shepherd they have already lost their freedom,’ Sihuai said. ‘They are locked in a paddock out of which they cannot move. They are at the shepherd’s mercy and can be moved from one place to another or killed at his whim. They seek safety in numbers and simply obey orders. What, then, is there left to do except eat, work and sleep – and all for someone else’s benefit?’

‘But they are fed and sheltered and cared for,’ Iloh argued. ‘What else do they really need? They cannot all be scholars or philosophers.’

‘Look,’ Tang said, as they passed a cow pasture just in time to see a cowherd armed with a long whip enter the enclosure. The cows, up until then peacefully chewing their cud, got up and began edging away from the whip and its wielder, rolling their eyes. ‘The people are not happy with having a shepherd…’

‘That only means,’ Iloh said trenchantly, ‘that the shepherd is weak and flawed, not that the theory is unsound.’

They travelled on foot, stopping when hunger overtook them to knock on doors of village homes and scattered farmhouses and beg their supper. Sometimes, with a little bit of coin offered in lieu of food, they would go into a cheap roadside teahouse and pay for a large bowl of rice and vegetables or a meat broth which they shared between them. They came to no lasting political agreement but they did not seriously quarrel either – they squabbled about ideas until it got heated but Tang usually defused things by laughing even-handedly at both Sihuai’s frosty injured sulks and Iloh’s eruptions of volcanic temper if things came to such a pass.

It was Tang, too, who helped a girl at a country teahouse where they had broken their travels. They had had a particularly good day, and were flush with coppers they had to get rid of fast under the rules of their journey. Tang laid their bowls down on the table before his friends, and then turned to help the girl with the pitcher. She was smiling, but her gaze was steady and distant, focused somewhere far beyond the three friends.

‘She is blind,’ Tang said conversationally, ‘but she can read faces, you know.’

It was typical that he had been the one to charm the girl, to flirt with her, to gain all kinds of information about her in less than a few minutes’ acquaintance.

‘I heard about that,’ Sihuai said. ‘One of my great-uncles studied this art, many years ago. I still recall the stories they tell about how accurate and precise his predictions were, all on the basis of running his hands over the bones of people’s faces. Can you truly do this?’

‘Yes,’ the girl said with a quiet serenity.

‘Do mine,’ Sihuai said.

‘Oh, young sir!’ she demurred, sweeping her long lashes down on her cheeks. ‘Your voice is so strong and assured. I am certain your future is already known to you…’

‘Here,’ Tang said, folding their last copper into the girl’s hand. ‘It isn’t much but it’s all we have and that means we have paid you a treasure. Can you do all of us?’

For answer she reached out a hand, and Tang guided it to Sihuai’s face. She ran long fingers across his features, and then pulled back. ‘You have the face of a scholar, or a sage,’ she said. ‘You will write many scholarly books, and live far, far away from your home. But it will…it will be exile, of a sort. You will want to come back, but you won’t be able to, because you will be proscribed in the land of your childhood. You will have fame, but no fortune, and little happiness…and you will have many regrets in your life. Sorry. This is not very nice to tell. But that is in your face.’

‘What about me?’ Tang said, thrusting his face forward into her hand and closing his eyes.

‘You are a man who knows how to make friends and keep the peace, although you have no idea of how you do this,’ the girl said, and smiled with what was real warmth and almost affection despite her short acquaintance with her subject. ‘But the friends you make are often only on the surface, and the peace is dearly paid for. You will love a woman who will marry another, and that other man will be your friend, and it won’t be the first woman he gets that you will covet. You will hide your envy well, though. Your abilities will make you valuable to men in power – but they will balance their need of you with their fear of you, and you will need to learn to do the same. Your life will be hard but you will always know how to find the treasure within it…although you might think in the end that you have paid too high a price for it.’

‘You really tell it like it is,’ Tang said. ‘What about Iloh?’

‘Wait, I don’t think…’ Iloh began, but Tang had already grabbed the girl’s hand and laid it on his friend’s face. Her fingertips were feather-light on his cheekbones, on his lips. And then she sat back and gave him a long, thoughtful look.

‘You will become a great man,’ she said, ‘a prince, or a councillor…and if not that, then you will at least lead a band of outlaws from a mountaintop. You have ambition and patience. You know how to hold people in the palm of your hand.’ She hesitated, snatched her hand back, stepped backwards as if she had second thoughts about the rest of her reading. But she had accepted the copper, and she owed it. ‘But you will be stone-hearted,’ she whispered. ‘You would command a hundred thousand deaths, and it would mean nothing to you if that was the price of achieving a cherished goal. You…’ she hesitated again, but took a deep breath and continued, although a faint blush had come onto her cheeks, ‘…you will have many women, but you will truly love only once – and that will be a songbird, a woman whose spirit is free, and one you can never truly have…’

She bit her lip, as though she was regretting her candour now that she had said all that, and then turned around and hurried back the way she had come with the sureness that only a blind person walking a familiar path could understand.

‘Cheerful, isn’t she,’ Iloh said after a moment, staring after her.

The other two ‘beggars’ were still staring at Iloh’s face.

Iloh glared at them. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he growled. ‘It’s all a bunch of superstitious nonsense, anyway. Let’s eat; I for one am starving.’

They went on, later, and spent the rest of the summer climbing hills and crossing valleys, sleeping by streams or in sheds offered by friendly farmers, sharing space with ploughs and shovels and sometimes, memorably, dogs, goats, or wandering pigs. But then summer was over, and they returned to school – and then the years started piling on, faster and faster, and things ran away from them all. Shiqai, the warlord whose rise and fall had been the topic of their discussions that summer, had stolen the vision of the venerated man who had become known throughout the land as Baba Sung – ‘Father Sung’ – the father of a new nation. Shiqai’s death, something that seemed to come at the hands of the Gods themselves extracting payment for his many betrayals, had left a nation leaderless and fragmented, with a thousand petty tyrants leaping up to take his place, plunging the country into nearly a decade of misery and suffering at the hands of mercenary armies who took what they pleased from the people – money, livestock, men for labour and women for pleasure – and were answerable to nobody at all. But now, at last, things were moving again, and Baba Sung had gathered a new vision together – and for the first time since the Sun Emperor had been forced to step down from his throne, Syai found itself emerging from chaos into a semblance of calm and order.

Iloh followed all this with an eager curiosity. Back at the school, in the year following the beggars’ holiday with his friends, he read more and more books in his headmaster’s study – frequently proscribed material that access was granted to only on the basis of the unspoken understanding that its existence was not to be spoken of outside that room, often with Tang or Yanzi at his elbow to discuss the issues raised by what had been read. The whole churning mess of human endeavour as history unfolded – especially the turbulent times that he himself lived in – fascinated him. He had begun to eat, sleep and dream politics; he talked of little else.

‘Baba Sung has all the right ideas,’ he told Yanzi once, as they were both poring over the same broadsheet detailing some recent achievement or atrocity. ‘But he has had no power to make them happen. No real power.’

‘You mean enforce them,’ Yanzi said, with some distaste. ‘And you mean military power.’

It was an old argument between them. Iloh shrugged it off. ‘But don’t you think Baba Sung’s ideas are good? Remember what he said – “The nation was just a sheet of loose sand, not solid like a rock” – the winds of change blow us all every which way and until we start pulling together – all the people – until we start believing in a single truth…’

‘Truth can never be proved,’ Yanzi said. ‘Only suggested.’

‘Well, then, let us suggest a truth!’ Iloh said. ‘Baba Sung himself has said it – there are the three principles that he has written about…’

‘Hush!’ Yanzi said instinctively, glancing around. ‘You only know about those because you read it in the secret things that Father has received. Do not endanger us all by speaking of it yet. Baba Sung and his principles are far away and the warlord’s armies are near.’

‘But I have been thinking about it,’ Iloh began.

She placed a finger on his lips. ‘Keep thinking,’ she said. ‘There will come a time for talking.’

But Iloh was consumed by his own private fires. He had been exposed to Baba Sung’s high but distant political ideals, and they had acted like grit in an oyster, irritating his mind until they began accreting a layer of his own ideas, reinter-pretations, beliefs. By the time he was eighteen years old he was eager to leave the country behind and go to where the events that would shape his country’s history would play themselves out – Linh-an, the capital. The headmaster wrote him a letter of introduction to the librarian at the university in the city, asking if some job could not be found for this student, for whom he had developed both affection and respect. A job was found – a menial one, to be sure, cataloguing the library scripts and books in the back rooms, with pay that was barely enough to scrape rent together in the small compound he shared with four other students, one of whom was his friend Tang. Often meals were barely more than hot water seasoned with a few vegetables or a scrap of meat once in a while. But Iloh did not care about the hardships. He was poor, he was almost always hungry – but he was at the centre, where he wanted to be, where the ideas were.

He came back to the school only once, accompanied by Tang and another student from the university, an emissary from the librarian for whom Iloh worked. The librarian, a canny if covert politician, knew very well that he himself was a marked man, that his ideas – despite being, on the face of it, so very close to Baba Sung’s own catechism – were viewed with deep suspicion by the authorities. He had been branded as a troublemaker years before, and his dossier bristled with terms such as ‘anarchist’ and ‘radical’; the only reason he had been allowed to keep his job at the university library at all had been the authorities’ belief that he could do little harm buried in the library stacks.

But he’d found a way to communicate his dreams and to light a spark in others. It only took a handful of people like Iloh, young and bright and full of fire. If the librarian, the sage in the tower, could not pass his message to the followers who waited to rise for him, his acolytes could. And the message itself was a heady one for free-spirited youth – a new order, a new kind of society, one based on equality and fairness, one where one law held for all. It was Baba Sung’s ideas, distilled and crystallised into a vision – and Baba Sung had not been called a dreamer for nothing.

Iloh was twenty years old. The turning point of his life was just around the corner for him, and he knew it. He was ready. He had volunteered to come, but his mission was a commandment – he had never lost touch with a network of like-minded people with whom he had been friends while at school, and he had returned to enlist them in a new enterprise that would shake their world.

‘There is always a beginning,’ the librarian, Iloh’s erstwhile employer and his political mentor, had said on the eve of Iloh’s departure from Linh-an. His narrow ascetic face was alight, his eyes aglow with determination and zeal. ‘And this is our beginning. I charge you today to take the torch and set the flame to the bonfire that is to come. I cannot go – the authorities know my face and my name and the only reason they have not yet swooped down upon me is because they think they have me pinned here where they can keep an eye on what I do. But you, you are different – you are young, and you are going back to see your friends, and you have the freedom that I lack. Go, with my blessing. Take this out there, to the people.’

‘A People’s Party,’ Iloh had murmured, his eyes alight.

The librarian had been right in that the authorities had not put any obstacles in Iloh’s path as he journeyed back to his old school, contacted old friends, walked once again the streets he had walked as a boy. But he had been wrong about Iloh’s activities going unremarked. The authorities may not have known Iloh personally – he was young and had not had a chance to establish the kind of reputation that would invoke any kind of government dossier for himself – but he was already known, if only around the university, as a young firebrand with new and sometimes dangerous ideas. He had been the library assistant for only a brief while before he had been reassigned elsewhere, but in that while he had forged a firm bond with the old librarian. As a recognised associate of a man whose own government dossier ran to quite a thick file, Iloh’s comings and goings were not hindered, but neither was he left to pursue them unobserved.

‘We are being followed,’ Tang told him on the second day of their stay in their old school. ‘I can see a tail on us, everywhere we go. They note who we meet, who we talk to. They note who we have bought food from. I’ve seen one fellow just after we left with two policemen at his elbows. We can’t talk freely, not here. What are we going to do?’

‘What did you want to talk about that is so secret?’ Yanzi, who was with them, asked.

‘There is…’ Tang began, but Iloh lifted a hand.

‘What?’ Yanzi said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘With my life,’ Iloh said. ‘But I cannot do it with the lives of the people who are with me. Not to one who is not part of it.’

‘But I want to be a part of it,’ Yanzi said.

Iloh glanced back at Tang. ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘We will all – separately, without really hanging together as a group – go on a sightseeing trip. We can rent a boat on the lake, and it will be easy to control who can get on that boat. We can talk freely at last.’

‘If I come,’ Yanzi said, ‘they will only think you are taking a girl out on the lake.’

‘You have a point,’ Iloh replied, with a wolfish grin.

So Yanzi was with Iloh and Tang on the night that they pledged their lives to the new force, under a banner that would be their own vision of Baba Sung’s ideas. The three of them along with a handful of others, all young, all full of plans and ideas and an unshakeable belief that they were building something that would last forever, lighting a flame that would lead the generations that followed straight into paradise.

It was Iloh who wrote the founding declaration, and it was perhaps not grammatically immaculate or calligraphically perfect, but he poured out so much of the poetry that was in his soul onto that piece of parchment that the thing rang with power. Others took the original away, to copy it, to distribute it, to gather others into the fold.

That was the night on which the People’s Party was born, on the altar of which Iloh would lay his heart, his soul, and his life.

And then the wind of time swept through the pages of history, and years tumbled past like fallen leaves in an autumn storm. And the revolution was upon them.