The Embers of Heaven

‘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.

Eight

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…’