Читать книгу The Embers of Heaven - Alma Alexander - Страница 15

‘Gaichi mei!’ Iloh swore violently as he snatched his feet back from where he had been resting them against the warmth of the stove. They actually smoked. He stomped on the packed earthen floor of the hut, putting out the burning leather, wincing a little as the dance jarred seared feet. The stool he had been sitting on overturned from the violence of his motion, and the battered notebook he had been writing in fell from his lap and landed upside-down on the floor. He reached to rescue it and then lifted his feet one by one for an inspection, ruefully contemplating the soles of his shoes.

Two holes, charred on the edges and still smouldering from where the hot stove had burned through, gaped in his soles. His toes, visible through the gap, smarted; there would probably be blisters there before long.

The door of the hut opened with a little too much force and Tang peered inside, his gaze sharp and suspicious above the scarf that wrapped his entire face from the eyes down. Outside, it was snowing.

‘It was nothing,’ Iloh said, in response to the unspoken question.

‘It was something,’ Tang replied, his words muffled through the scarf. ‘I distinctly heard you, right through the closed door. I brought you something to eat, Iloh – you have to eat, you are flesh and blood like the rest of us even if you can’t admit that to yourself. When was it you last slept? What happened just now?’

By way of reply, Iloh lifted a foot and displayed one ruined shoe.

Tang stepped inside, nudged the ill-fitting door shut with his hip, and put the bowl he carried in both hands onto the nearest horizontal surface before unwrapping his nose and mouth and displaying what might have been an intimidating scowl. But he was Tang, and Iloh was Iloh, and they had too many years between them. The scowl twitched, one eyebrow went up, Tang’s mouth quirked at the corners, and before long he could not help laughing out loud, a short sharp bark of a laugh that had as much wry resignation in it as humour.

‘I suppose you’re going to want new boots,’ Tang said.

‘Just patch these, as best you can,’ Iloh replied. ‘I have no need of luxury, only the bare necessities. I can even live with the…’

‘The practical answer to that is that there is going to be a foot of snow outside by the morning, and it’s likely to stay there until spring,’ Tang interrupted. ‘If you intend on leaving this place before the thaw I don’t think that even you will want to do it barefoot. Eat the beans. They will get cold.’

‘In a minute,’ Iloh said, gesturing with the notebook. ‘I need to get this…’

‘Now,’ Tang replied, straightening up and crossing his arms in a belligerent manner. ‘Right now, while I’m watching. Just so that I know you have done it and not simply forgotten about it again like last time. Do you have any idea how much disrespect you are showing to Shao by simply wasting these hard-come-by meals?’

Iloh looked duly chastened. ‘Give me the bowl,’ he said, laying aside the notebook.

Tang picked the food bowl up and passed it into Iloh’s hand with a satisfied nod. ‘And after you eat,’ he continued, pursuing his advantage, ‘you’re going to sleep. Two days, it’s been.’

Iloh glanced at him over the rim of the bowl. His eyes were filled with the affection of one old friend for another, but also with the kind of determination that Tang, resigned, recognised at once as being futile to struggle against. His shoulders drooped.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘At least eat. If I were ximin Chen, you might listen…’

‘My wife,’ said Iloh mildly, ‘does not nag me. It is not her sole task to see to my needs. She is my companion and my comrade. And yours, Tang. She is part of the revolution.’

‘As we all are,’ Tang retorted. ‘But revolution or no, somebody’s got to do it. Give me your shoes.’

Iloh obediently eased the burned-through shoes off his feet without relinquishing the bowl of beans. In spite of himself, he had been hungry; something that he would never have admitted or gone in hunt of sustenance to assuage, but the simply prepared beans tasted like a festival feast. He was scraping the bowl clean even before he had eased the second shoe off his heel with his other foot, clad only in a none-too-clean and now very definitely holed sock.

Tang sighed.

‘There’ll be a pair of socks in it too, when I come back. Iloh, I wish you would sleep. You could carry an entire company’s gear in the bags under your eyes.’

Iloh shrugged. ‘These lean days,’ he said, ‘that would not be hard to accomplish.’

‘Iloh…’

‘Yes,’ Iloh said impatiently, ‘yes, yes, yes. I cannot carry the revolution alone. You have no idea how much I am relying on the people. But there are some things…’

Tang was shaking his head, but there was a wry and admiring smile playing about his thin-lipped mouth. ‘I don’t know why that is true,’ he said, ‘but it is true nonetheless. Your words matter. The people will rally to the flag when the time comes, but they will come because you have called them. The right words and the right time, and there is magic made, right before your eyes…’

‘So, then,’ Iloh said.

‘So,’ Tang agreed. Without wasting further words, he stomped out of the hut hugging the empty bowl and a pair of still faintly smouldering shoes.

Iloh bent to retrieve his notebook and his writing implements and settled back down before the stove. Flipping back a few pages, he tried to recapture his train of thought.

A revolution is not a dance party, or a silk painting, or a comfortable chair, or pretty embroidery. A revolution is not pleasant like a summer’s day. A revolution cannot by its very definition be kind, gentle, courteous, magnanimous. A revolution…

He had stopped there, mid-sentence, when his feet had caught fire. Like much of what he wrote, things that were copied and printed and passed out to the cadres and the soldiers and the people in the fields and the factories and the villages and towns, it was homespun wisdom – he was one of them, after all, a man of the people, born in the countryside with a family that was moderately well-off by the standards of the times, but which, like most people in Syai did sooner or later, knew what it meant to be on the edge of hunger.

He stared at his own words. What was revolution, really? He had been born into an era which fairly crackled with it, one wave after another, a society constantly in its death-throes …or was it just trying to be properly born…? Iloh did not, in theory, believe in the Gods of his ancestors or in the heaven they were supposed to inhabit, but there were times he could see those Gods looking sceptically at the newborn nation that emerged gasping for breath, again and again, and waving their immortal hands over that hardwon life with a celestial pronouncement that the thing was not good enough, throw it back, start again. He had read about it in the books and pamphlets that he had devoured when he had become a young man with hot blood surging in his veins, when he had begun to think, as all young men do, about changing the world – he had read about it happening elsewhere, and how other peoples and nations had risen to take their own destiny into their hands. And he had felt some of it on his own skin, when he was a child, when he was a youth. But there had been many like him, back then – children born into times of struggle and blood. Many who knew all about it, who could testify to it by their own scars. But not that many who were able or willing to reach out and grasp the nettle, to take the choice away from those capricious Gods, to build a nation in the image of mortal man, in the name of mortal man.

That revolution.

The revolution that changed everything, that changed the very nature of the sky that arched above the world, the sky that would deliver the rain to nourish crops in the fields and no longer be sanctuary for the distant and removed deities who cared nothing for the people so long as the temples were swept, the incense lit and sweet, the offerings properly presented. And under that sky, men would be the same, with equal rights, equal privileges, no matter how much incense they burned to the forgotten Gods.

There was a phrase that was the guiding idea for everything that Iloh had dreamed about, had founded, created, or set in motion. It had been there with him from the very beginning, from the day he had been turned away by the village doctor because his dying brother had not been wealthy enough to rate a visit from the healer, from the night on the lake that he and Tang and Yanzi and a handful of other firebrands had been guided into something strong and new, a banner to unite a nation under. It had been a mantra, an incantation, a guiding light. Now he scribbled it down in the margin of his book, to remind himself, to re-inspire himself:

To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.

That had been the principle of the thing. Iloh had not stopped thinking of people as a flock of sheep that needed a shepherd’s hand to guide them – but it would be a different kind of shepherd. It would have to be one of the sheep themselves, raised to the high place. One of the people.

Baba Sung had learned his lesson from the first time he had tried to wage revolution – and the next time he had a warlord of his own to wage his battles. Shenxiao was a skullfaced, whippet-thin man who dreamed, ate, lived and breathed army. Shenxiao and Baba Sung, together, might have been a formidable force – but Baba Sung had burned his candle at both ends and it became tragically clear that his race was run. He died a relatively young man, perished on the burning flame of his own bright spirit, leaving behind a legacy that took root in the popular mind: be a nation again.

And it seemed that it might have been possible. But as with every prophet there were always many who came in his footsteps ready to interpret his words. Shenxiao was one. Iloh, although still very young, was another. For a while they had worked together, yoked under that last will and testament of the founder of the Republic. But then Shenxiao made a sharp turn to the right, the People’s Party reacted by veering to the left, the traces broke and the alliance died hard.

In the beginning, the People’s Party was small, and led by the young and the inexperienced, advised by a handful of older intellectuals who shared their ideals. But it was the youth and the vigour of it that swept it to power, its principles proselytised as only the young and idealistic could do, and the party’s numbers swelled from hundreds to thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. With its plain principles, pure from the well of idealism and not yet tainted by the thin poison of politics, it quickly attracted a membership that ranged from university students and office workers to the stevedores and factory workers and tillers of soil. There appeared to be something of value in the party’s manifesto to a plethora of different kinds of people, giving the seal of its name an odd authenticity. The People’s Party quickly became a force to be reckoned with.

Iloh was one of many, in the beginning – a group of young cadres who had been given tasks instrumental to the birth of the People’s Party. In a handful of short years the many were whittled down to a few, and Iloh, inevitably, was among them – even if he had not played a pivotal role in the founding of the Party, his passion and his dedication to his chosen cause would have set him apart. The first time he met General Shenxiao face to face, he was no more than a Party secretary – one of a delegation, keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut and learning the ropes. The second time, Iloh had been given a place at the discussion table – still a junior, but one who had been tapped for rapid advancement. The third time, some three years later and with an unbroken and unblemished record of service at government level under his belt, he was the delegation leader, in command, no longer just a silent participant.

‘It was Baba Sung’s own idea,’ he said at one of the meetings on that third occasion, when the topic of discussion had been land reform. ‘But equal distribution of land does not have strings. You are still pandering to the land-owners, and the workers at the very bottom, who work their way to an early grave, still get nothing except perhaps a tiny reduction in taxes – and even that is only on paper, and if their landlord wants to ignore it he can.’

‘You are young,’ Shenxiao said, his lips parting in a thin, skeletal smile. ‘You have still to understand why we sit here today. Baba Sung never said that land should be taken from those who have worked so hard to gain it…’

‘Their ancestors might have worked hard,’ Iloh said. ‘For many the land is simply inherited, a part of their patrimony, something they feel entitled to. Whether or not it’s justifiable.’

‘…and summarily handed over to the barefoot peasant who has done nothing to deserve it except exist,’ Shenxiao finished, as though Iloh had not spoken at all.

‘But you say in public that the barefoot peasant will get that land,’ Iloh said. ‘You promise this.’

‘Yes, and so long as the promise hangs there, all golden and shining like a riddle-lantern at Lantern Festival, everything is peaceful and calm. If they can guess the riddle they can have the land, but in the meantime let those who know what to do with it have a hand in controlling it. We need a lot of people fed – that happens when there are large fields and large harvests. Not when every small landgrubber plants a few stalks of wheat for himself.’

‘You are betraying the founder of your own party,’ Iloh said passionately. ‘Do you know what they are saying, out in the country? “The sky is high and Shenxiao is far away.” They used to say that about the emperor. You are no different than that leech on society, and Baba Sung himself said that the Empire had to go.’

‘Even Baba Sung knew better than that,’ Shenxiao said. ‘He too was young once, that is true, and some of his ideas were those of a young man – but he grew up, and he grew wiser. A man who does not in his youth believe that the world needs to be changed is heartless, and has no feelings. But if a man has not learned by the time he is forty that it is impossible to swap an old world for a new one like a lamp on New Year’s Day, that it is only possible to change the shape of the world so that one can find a higher place to stand within it – that man is a brainless idiot.’

Iloh had said nothing out loud, but his eyes, resting on Shenxiao, were eloquent. You are wrong.

They had not met again, face-to-face. The relationship between the two parties continued to deteriorate. On the face of it, Shenxiao’s people, known as the Nationalists, had put an end to the chaos of the warlord years and had placed a central government in power once again, giving the people somewhere to look up to, a familiar situation where right underneath the Gods there was a place for the man the Gods had chosen to lead the nation – and everyone else had only to follow where that chosen man led.

But the Nationalists ruled with force of arms – with war clubs and with guns. Accession to positions of power, promised on the basis of merit alone, quickly devolved into a corrupt system where family or cronies were installed in places where they would be useful to those who wielded real clout. The government that had been Baba Sung’s legacy and which had been welcomed like the sunrise of a new day became endured, then disliked, then distrusted, and finally hated. The rich landowners and the city bankers and businessmen still had their weight behind Shenxiao and his clique. The rest of the people – the peasants in the countryside, the workers in industry and in service, the young intellectuals of the cities – had increasingly begun to put their faith not so much in the People’s Party but in the hands of a young man called Iloh who travelled the country and who spoke to them of equality, and of power, and of peace.

But Shenxiao held the army, the weapons, the metaphorical high ground. When Iloh and his people became too dangerous for Shenxiao to continue to even pretend to work together with them, he manufactured an incident in the city of Chirinaa, where the unions were strong, where the People’s Party was known to be winning the battle for the people’s hearts and souls. Blood flowed in the streets of the city, and Shenxiao made certain that fingers were pointed away from him, straight at Iloh and his ‘shadow cabinet’.

Those of the People’s Party who had still held positions of relative power inside the government machinery of Shenxiao’s party were summarily purged – arrested, imprisoned, executed. The alliance was over. Before the year was out, the People’s Party had gone to ground, and into hiding. Their leaders were marked men, and hunted.

Iloh had been one of them. He had married Yanzi less than a year before, and now, with his wife pregnant with their first child, he had to flee into the hills or face prison – or worse.

Yanzi was adamant that she would stay behind, in the city.

‘You can’t stay down here alone! It’s dangerous! They know who you are, where to find you…’ Iloh had argued, pleaded, begged.

‘What do you think they would do?’ Yanzi said, her voice sweet reason. ‘I am a pregnant woman. If they touched me they would have their own people turn on them – some things are sacred, and if you foul them you are tainted by it forever more. And here I can be of far greater use to you than dangling at your tail with this belly up there in the mountains.’

‘It would be safer in the middle of nowhere than here in the middle of the hornet’s nest. I don’t think you realise how ugly it’s going to get.’

‘Trust me,’ she said, laying her hand over his mouth. ‘I will be better here. I will send word when I can.’

‘Then I will stay,’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Yanzi told him sharply. ‘Your name is on a list of wanted men. You would not last a week in the city – you couldn’t even be with me, you’d have to go into hiding. You’re better off up there in the mountains, leading, than down here skulking in a rat trap.’

He had let her persuade him that she would be all right, that nobody would touch her.

But that was before Iloh had fully emerged as the leader of the leaderless men of the People’s Party up in the pathless hills of the north. Before Shenxiao put a price on his head. Before someone delivered Yanzi and her small son into Shenxiao’s hands. Before Shenxiao broke every rule, and executed Iloh’s wife and child to prove a point – with me or against me, and if against me then no quarter shall be given.

When word of that came, Iloh had asked a single question.

‘How?’

‘They shot them,’ the courier who had brought the news said brokenly. ‘They stood them up against a wall, and a firing squad shot them both. The boy was in her arms.’ He looked up, met Iloh’s eyes, and felt his knees buckle. It was kneeling at Iloh’s feet that he whispered the rest, the answer to the question that Iloh had really been asking. ‘They…it was fast…they didn’t suffer.’

Iloh had turned without another word and walked away into the hills, by himself, his face a battlefield. Nobody dared follow, not even Tang, his closest companion; that grief and guilt had been too heavy, too raw. If they thought they heard a howl from out of the hills, later, a howl that sounded more like a wolf than a man – well, it might have been an animal, after all. Yanzi had been part of the People’s Party from the beginning, she had been there at its birth, she had believed in it no less than anyone else out here – and it had been her choice, after all, to stay behind in the city. But they knew that none of that would weigh with Iloh so much as the fact that he had been her husband, he had been the father to that child, and he had abandoned them to their fate. His choice, in the end; his guilt. Something he would never lay down, for as long as he lived.

When Iloh returned, Tang had uttered a single sentence about the fate of Yanzi, whom he too had loved from afar for many years.

‘You should have taken her with you,’ he told the man who had been Yanzi’s husband.

Iloh had stared at him from eyes that were suddenly darker and colder than Tang remembered them ever having been before. It was as though Shenxiao had killed a part of Iloh’s own humanity when he raised a hand against his family. But he had said nothing. And Tang had bowed his head, having said what he had to say, and had wordlessly taken on himself the task of taking care of Iloh, even after Iloh entered into what they called a ‘revolutionary marriage’ with another girl in the People’s Party, one of the cadres on the run in the hills.

Iloh’s eyes had acquired a strange, hard glitter after the news of Yanzi’s death – the gleam of ice, of cold stone. Not tears, never tears, at least not that anyone else had witnessed. Iloh had not had the luxury of giving in to grief – only, perhaps, the chance to work for revenge.

It was the revolution, and revolution exacted a high price.

A revolution…

The unfinished sentence Iloh had left dangling in the cabin in the hills, on that night years after the revolution had begun, on the eve of its being won, still sat there on the page of his notebook, incomplete, nagging at him. A revolution needed a definition. He knew what it was, he knew in his bones, but somehow the pattern of the words would not form in his head. He tried and discarded a few variants, mouthing them silently, tasting the words he might write on his tongue, finding them wanting. There was something vivid and vital that he needed, something that conveyed the necessity of the overthrow of all gods and monsters.

It was…it would be…

A revolution is an act of violence, he wrote at last, by which the new overthrows the old, where the oppressed throws off the oppressor, by which all men are made equal in one another’s sight.

It was not perfect, but it would have to do.

Iloh was suddenly surprised by a huge yawn that Tang would have pounced on had he been there to witness it. He got up and stretched, hearing his joints pop as he did so, reflecting wryly on the side-effects that waging revolution could have on a man. He was thirty-two years old and sometimes, in his fifth winter of exile, his bones ached with the arthritis of a greybeard three times that age.

Iloh crossed over to the door and eased it open a crack. It was still snowing outside, and few things moved in the white silence in the space between the huts – one or two muffled shapes hurried somewhere with an air of urgency that probably had less to do with the errand they were on than a desire to be under a roof again with the possibility of a hot stove to thaw out frozen feet and hands. None of them noticed Iloh, or the thin ribbon of yellow light that spilled from the open door.

It was these people, in the name of all the people in the plains down below and in the walled cities of the old empire, who had rallied to a dream of a new world, who had helped to raise the flag of Iloh’s vision. The few, in the name of the many. The few who had endured so much.

But soon it would be over – soon…The mandate was changing in Syai. The skirmishes that Iloh’s army had fought with the Nationalists who held the reins of power had turned into battles, and the battles had begun turning into victories. More and more of the enemy were throwing down their arms – or, better, crossing the great divide and coming to lay their allegiance at Iloh’s feet. Too much was going wrong down there, too fast; their generals had been too complacent, too rushed, too afraid. They had committed everything to this one final push, and it was failing. Thousands of men, perhaps tens of thousands, had paid with their lives, but now the prize was near, and Iloh could see the things he had dreamed of, the things he had made others believe with a fervour bordering on fanaticism, starting to take shape before his eyes. This bitter winter of exile, this was the last. He knew that. He could sense it in the wind…

He shivered, suddenly – the wind he had invoked in his thoughts had reached through the door he had been holding open to touch him with icy fingers. He had seen enough. This day, he had done enough. Tang was right – it was time to sleep.

And yet it was a different Tang that he was hearing, the voice echoing in his mind that of a more innocent time, a time when everything had still been possible and the price had not yet been exacted. Iloh remembered, through a mist of memory, a night when he and Tang had sat by the fire and quoted poetry at each other, the scurrilous and the sublime, the mocking and the prophetic.

‘“Oh, but it will be a brave new dance when the music starts to play”,’ Tang had quoted.

‘But what music will it be?’ Iloh had asked. ‘Will we even know it for music?’

‘We will know it,’ Tang said. ‘We will write it!’

‘But who will be asked to play it?’ Iloh had persisted, in a strange, introspective mood that night. It was as though he had been handed a shallow bowl of water, and saw in the mirror of its still surface a vision of the years that were to come. ‘Who will be asked to pay for it? What ancient part of ourselves will we have to give up in order to be granted the music of this new world…?’

Iloh shook his head, clearing his mind of the memories, and retired to the pile of thin quilts on the pallet he used for a bed. He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hand. As almost always when he started drifting off into sleep but now stirred into a particular fury by the memories he picked over, questions rose like a flock of disturbed crows and darkened his thoughts with a blackness of fluttering wings. Could I have done it differently? Could I have done it better? Will it be worth all this struggle and sacrifice in the end? Is it worth the lives that have been spent to buy it? What have we lost, that we might gain this? Who will speak the language of the lost things? This thing that we have bled for, fought to give life and breath to, will it live, thrive, grow strong…?

And then, as usual, he would answer himself, just before he sighed and surrendered to deeper slumber.

The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?

The light was somehow very wrong. The image that shimmered before her eyes was a memory, a recognisable memory, but it had a golden wash over it, a light that suggested something ethereal, something that had never quite happened, or was still to come…the light of dream.

Amais could see the two little girls clearly: herself and her sister, sitting with what they believed to be studied adult elegance and yet still managing to be, endearingly and obviously, thirteen and six years old, sometime in their second year in Linh-an. They wore what they imagined grown-up high society ladies would wear to such an occasion, which in the children’s case meant a hodge-podge of discarded garments from Mama’s closets dressed up with scraps of silk and a heap of cheap bazaar jewellery piled on every available limb. The style of dress was somewhat eclectic, because Amais at least remembered the women of Elaas very well, and more particularly recalled the paintings and the ancient statuary depicting the old goddesses of that land and their elegant draped gowns. She had also never forgotten her brief glimpses of more exotic women; veiled women who had travelled on the same ships as them. Of course they – particularly Amais, the elder, but also Aylun who had been told the same tales – were well aware of the sartorial traditions of their own culural legacy, those rooted in the fairytales of Imperial past. In play, they used whatever element of these cultures happened to please them at any given moment. Amais always set the stage, spinning one of her fictions and snaring her younger sister into the charms of ‘might-have-been’ and ‘once-upon-a-time’. Although Aylun used to copy her almost precisely, she had quickly started rebelling and using her own ideas.

This particular dream-party was a specific occasion. Amais remembered it well. It had been one of the first times that Aylun had asserted her independence and had insisted on putting together her own costume. Amais recalled the smooth slide of her mother’s red satin robe as its too-long sleeves whispered past her own bony, childish wrists, and the weight of the ropes of fake gold coins, bazaar treasures, that she wore over her hair. Aylun wore a strange mixture of a half-veil covering the lower part of her face – which she finally discarded because she had to keep pushing it aside in order to sip her tea – and something that she fondly imagined passed as a classical Elaas gown, a bedsheet in its former existence, wrapped around her chubby frame and tied at the waist with a daringly purloined belt which their mother still regularly wore and which was not really sanctioned as playgarb.

They were bent over a low table with a child-sized teapot filled with cold mint tea brewed for them by their mother who indulged them every time they announced one of their tea ceremonies. It was Aylun’s turn to be hostess; she was pouring the tea into tiny cups, one for her, one for her sister, a third (as they knew was protocol for any real tea ceremony) for fragrance alone, so that the guests at the tea ceremony might inhale the scent of the carefully selected tea variety offered to them, enhancing the experience with the use of all the senses.