Kitabı oku: «The Embers of Heaven»
The Embers of Heaven
Alma Alexander
When Jill first asked if there was a sequel, I said no – until it became impossible to keep saying that, because I was holding it in my hand.
So this one is for Jill, with my thanks.
Water. They were lost in a world of it, their ship slicing through the silky waters of the open ocean, prow pointed to where the sun rose out of the water every morning. The ocean was smooth, cobalt blue, reflecting only sky. Sometimes there would be porpoises racing the ship or playing in its spreading wake; sometimes, a long way away, something huge and dark broke surface with its fin, blowing spray – but days went by with nothing in the world but sun and sky and sea, and the days were long.
The nights were longer still; quiet, soundless except for the creaking of the ship and the splash and lap of water against the hull. Out on the prow there was a space where ropes were coiled. Empty barrels were tied up in a raft right up near the bow of the ship. It made a good, comfortable nest, and the hiss of parting waters as the ship cleaved through them made for a gentle, soothing lullaby.
It was there that the first dream came to Amais.
Curled up in a comfortable loop of thick twisted rope, she might have believed that the sounds of water lapping against something hard and solid actually came from the sea and the ship she was on – but the sound was wrong for that. It was the sound of water breaking on something stationary, not a travelling ship’s hull. And after that, when she blinked and looked around, it was easy to see that she had left the ship far behind and was in some strange and yet oddly familiar place.
There were two people in the dream, aside from the dreamer herself: a woman and a little girl, holding hands. They had their backs to the dreamer and she could not see their faces. She could not see the woman clearly at all, just the shape of her in silhouette through a translucent parasol which covered her slender body down to her waist. They were both wearing old-fashioned, almost antique gowns, court garb which existed only in paintings and in stories; the little girl wore her long dark hair loose except for a topknot high on her head, held by two black lacquer hairpins. Behind them, steps with a broken wooden hand-railing led down into dirty water splashing against the bottom step. Floating debris bobbed in the water and piled up against the rise of the stair. It was dark, but there was a soft light about, something that resembled the way the sky looked when it was reflecting a huge but distant fire.
That was all. The water, the stairs, the two incongruously clean and elegant women in their rich court gowns, as though waiting for death or for rescue, trapped on a high point while fire and flood raged around them. Just like on the ship – there was water everywhere, but this water was dark and bitter and lifeless and life-taking. It was the aftermath of something, a disaster beyond words. Only a little bit away from the edge of the lowest stair the water was black and opaque and somehow passively threatening, as though it were about to rise, engulf even this last little spot where they clung to survival and safety.
Water, lapping. Water, spilled, insistent, all-enveloping – like a primeval world, the world where the earth had yet to rise from the sea of creation. As though a world was ended…or was about to begin.
The little girl turned her head slightly – just enough to cast a glance back to the spot from where the dreamer watched, hovering like a transparent and incorporeal ghost behind the two figures on the platform at the top of the drowned stairs. The child’s face was obscured by strands of wind-tousled hair, but she had huge dark eyes, enormous in her pale face, glittering with their own light, the light that might have been knowledge, or recognition, or pity.
Then she turned away again, her hair spilling back across her shoulders, falling to where a formal sash was tied in the ceremonial way, so that a long train of it fell over the knot at the back of her waist and flowed down the back of her gown. The train had writing on it, but it was not something that the dreamer could read – at least not here, not now, not in this half-light, not before the rest of the dream was made clear. The little girl held on to the older woman’s free hand with an air that managed to be both terrified and protective at the same time.
The sky was pearl grey, streaked with improbable shades of cinnamon and apricot; the air was alive with breezes that whipped and collided and teased the waters below into an unquiet whispering sound.
It was the end of the world.
It was the beginning.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Excerpt
The Language of Lost Things
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Paper Swords and Iron Butterflies
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
The Street of Red Lanterns
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
The Golden Rising
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
The Embers of Heaven
I almost expected
I have dreamt this
Historical Note
Glossary and Characters
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Alma Alexander
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Language of Lost Things
The old gods dwell in their abandoned temples in your memory – sad places dusty with disuse, with dark altars empty of offerings. But they endure the weight of these with what power they may claim as long as their names are remembered, until the hour in which they are finally and irrevocably forgotten. Then they blow away like dust in the wind, like the cold ashes from the dead altars. On such ashes as this our world is built. In it the footsteps of new gods may one day leave traces of their passing, on their way to their own cold oblivion.
The Book of Old Gods
One
There were only two questions that governed Amais’s existence.
She would wander out of the house, still wearing some esoteric item of Syai clothing her mother, Vien, kept carefully folded away in a wooden chest, or proudly step out to the snickers and astonished stares of her peers with her hair in what she fondly believed was a good rendition of a hairstyle once worn by empresses at the Syai court. Her mother would strip off the offending garments or impatiently tug Amais’s wealth of thick curly hair out of its badly pinned and unruly coils into a semblance of order with a wooden comb, and murmur despairingly,
‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’
But when Amais rebelled at learning the long and ancient history of her ancestral land and her kinfolk, or refused to go hunting for incense or some out-of-season fruit required for sacrifice to the spirits of those ancestors in the small shrine set apart in what was in effect a larger shrine to Syai itself in her mother’s childhood home – citing the fact that none of her friends had to do such outlandish things – the wind would change. Vien’s face would assume an expression of martyred sorrow, and she would ask instead,
‘Do you have to do what everyone else does?’
Perhaps it would have been easier if it hadn’t been for the two grandmothers and the games they played for the souls of their bewildered granddaughters, Amais and, in her turn, Nika.
Vien’s mother, the grandmother Amais knew as baya-Dan, hardly ever set foot outside the door to what, on the outside, was a perfectly ordinary whitewashed little house tucked away at the end of a village street behind what was almost a defensive barrier of ancient olive trees. Inside, its shutters usually closed to keep out the bright sunshine and shroud the rooms within in a permanent twilight, the place might have been transported from a different world. Candles and fragrant incense burned on little altars draped with scarlet silk; scroll paintings and poems written in the long elegant script of jin-ashu, the ancient secret tongue of the women of Syai, hung from the walls. A low table held all the paraphernalia needed for a proper tea ceremony, and it was at her grandmother’s knee that Amais learned how to perform one properly. It was something that seemed to be a fit and useful thing for her to know while she was steeped in the dreamy atmosphere of what baya-Dan insisted on calling the True Country. It all seemed ludicrously silly when Amais stepped over this magic threshold and back into the real world, where the golden sunlight of Elaas glinted off the bluest water in the world and the white walls of the village houses clung to the hillside. But inside, in baya-Dan’s enchanted house, it was the only thing that made any sense.
Baya-Dan had been born in Elaas, as had her own mother, and her mother’s mother before her. Her forebears had lived out their own tranquil lives in the midst of an alien society. They married their own kind, from within the community, with the women keeping ancient traditions alive in the home while the menfolk pursued the work of trade and commerce which had brought their ancestors out from Syai a long time ago – sailing trading ships, keeping ledgers, building fortunes.
But for baya-Dan it had been so much more than that.
When she was no more than sixteen, her path had crossed with the black-sheep scion of the Imperial family – a Third Prince, a ‘spare’ aristocrat from within the core of the Imperial family itself; one who professed to be bored with protocol and the puppet-play of Syai’s ancient Imperial Court and who said he had chosen to leave it all behind and seek his fortune in the world. It was never mentioned that he might have sensed the winds of change that were about to scour his country and his family and had taken whatever steps he could to escape the storm. The young Dan had been reared properly in all required traditions, she was the right age, she was presentable, and her father had put enough aside for a generous dowry. Dan herself had been young enough to be impressed by the fact that she had married an Imperial prince, and she had somehow taken this elevation in status to mean that she was single-handedly and personally responsible for the safekeeping of the traditions of Syai, here in the alien lands so far from her ancestral shores. The conviction had deepened when she had allowed a particular festival and its sacrifices to slide one year, and the very next voyage that her husband had undertaken had been his last. Dan had taken the blame for the storm that had claimed the ship, with the loss of its cargo and all hands. The commercial blow to the family’s fortunes had been considerable, but the personal loss was far more grievous to Dan, who had responded by retiring to a tiny house in a fishing village, on an island far from the commercial hub of the mainland, and withdrawing into her own small world where it was easy to pretend that the world outside – the Elaas of the sunlit seas and laughing, beautiful people – simply did not exist.
Her daughter, Vien, had been kept on a tight leash, intensely protected and guarded, both sheltered and imprisoned deep within the shrine to Syai that her home had become. For her, the world outside was the free air outside a cage. The more Vien’s mother wrapped her in Syai’s soft but bitingly tight trammels of tradition and responsibility, the more she was cocooned in the shadows of her candlelight and incense, the louder the laughter outside her windows in the moonlit nights rang in her own soul.
Her mother had chosen to lead a life far more traditional than even her peers back in the True Country now led. Vien was taught everything that a high-ranking court lady should know. She was taught how to read and write jin-ashu script and the subtle nuances of the women’s language; she memorised imperial lineages dusty with antiquity, learned about the secrets of her gender and her race. Far away from the real Syai, inexorably changing under the weight of its history, Vien learned how to lead a life rooted in fairytale and dream. She was presented with the vanished world of her ancestors as though it had been a living and vital thing, and was asked to accept the reality of things that either no longer existed or were fast fading away. But here on the island, isolated even from such news as filtered through from Syai to the expatriate community on the mainland, it was just as easy to believe that such things as the ancient and sacred sisterhood of jin-shei still governed the relationships of every woman in Syai, and that emperors were chosen on the basis of an empress-heir’s prophetic dreams.
Vien endured this for long, weary years. Her childhood slipped away, fossilized in these ancestral halls. But the world outside was ever louder in calling to her, ever more insistent in its presence – and Vien finally chose to utterly rebel against her suffocating heritage. She became the first of her line since the family had left the shores of Syai, centuries before, to truly step outside of her world.
Somehow, in spite of her sequestered life and sheltered existence, she had managed to make the acquaintance of Nikos. He was three times forbidden to her – he was not of her kind or of her culture; he was a simple fisherman with no fortune; and he was younger than Vien, who was in her early twenties by the time their paths had crossed, by a handful of years.
They were married in the moonlight, in a temple of Nikos’s people, by one of his priests.
Dan had simply disowned her daughter.
Nikos’s widowed mother, Elena, had not been overjoyed either at her new daughter-in-law. But Nikos was her last surviving son, and after a short period of friction Elena had simply concluded that Vien was not so much disrespectful and recalcitrant as genuinely ignorant of any kind of life other than what she had known in her mother’s house. So Elena put aside her pique, and turned instead to teaching Vien how to prepare fresh fish, how to use Elaas herbs in her cooking, how to bake the particular sticky sweets of which Nikos was so fond, and how to erase as much as possible of the sing-song accent with which she – even though she had been born in Elaas – spoke the language of the land outside her mother’s makeshift temple to Syai.
All that changed when Amais was born.
In Dan’s own inimitable and high-handed manner – she had been married to a prince, after all, and had never forgotten that she could claim the title and privileges of an Imperial princess if she so chose – Vien’s mother had sent word that her granddaughter was to be presented to her in her home at a certain auspicious hour.
Elena had snorted in outrage but Vien had rocked her small newborn daughter in her arms, and had dropped her gaze in the face of her mother-in-law’s sharp comments.
‘She is my mother,’ Vien had said, finally. ‘I owe her my respect, at least. And this is her grandchild, after all.’
Elena had thrown her hands up in the air, in the expressive manner of her own culture, in a way that Dan would have considered a vulgar show of emotion in public and could not have ever conceived of doing. ‘Mark my words,’ Elena had said darkly, ‘no good can come of it.’
Vien had offered up the child as she had been commanded, and Dan, holding her granddaughter in her arms after first wrapping her up in a scarlet birth-cloth taken from one of the many cedar chests in her house, had inspected the drowsing child’s features closely.
‘Her skin is too fair, and her eyes are too slanted, like a cat’s…Oh well, I suppose that can’t be helped, under the circumstances,’ Dan said critically. She sniffed, giving the impression that she was holding back from saying far worse. ‘Be that as it may. You will bring her to me every day. For an hour or so, while she is still in swaddling clothes. After…we will see.’
‘Whatever for, Mother?’ Vien said, looking startled and not a little trapped. Perhaps her mother-in-law’s words were coming back to echo in her mind.
‘So that I can start teaching her, of course,’ Dan replied, in a tone of voice that indicated Vien was simple-minded not to know this already. ‘She has unfortunate aspects to her lineage but she was born on an auspicious day. That means that her life will matter. She will be given in abundance, but whether joy or sorrow I cannot tell. It may matter how much she knows of her people and her past when the Gods come knocking at her door asking for her.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Elena had snapped when Vien, a little bewildered, returned to her husband’s house with her daughter in her arms. ‘The child is a helpless baby, not a scion of the Gods. What else did she have to say on the matter, your mother?’
‘She named her,’ Vien said. ‘The child’s name is Amais.’
‘That’s a mouthful,’ Elena said trenchantly.
‘It means “nightingale”,’ Vien added helpfully.
‘Ridiculous,’ Elena said.
But Nikos had, somewhat unexpectedly, taken Dan’s side and had overruled his mother.
‘This is all she has left,’ he told Vien in the darkness of their room at night, with the contested child sleeping the sleep of the innocent in the crib he had made for her with his own hands. ‘Let her have that much. Amais is a beautiful name, and it means a beautiful thing. We can give our daughter that gift.’
So Amais was taken dutifully to her maternal grandmother’s house every day. She seemed content to be there, perhaps lulled by her grandmother’s quiet, melodious lullabies, quite happy to kick her baby heels on the piles of cushions that Dan provided for her. Later, when she started to crawl and then to toddle, Dan placed no restrictions on her activities in the house, merely removing small grasping hands gently from draperies when they looked about ready to come down on the child in a heap. Amais grew up to the sound of her grandmother’s voice, first the songs and then the poetry that was read to her while she listened, rapt, not understanding half the words but happy to be in the circle of baya-Dan’s world. For a while she was too young to know how different her two worlds were, the world of twilight and old protocol where she was a sort of princess-heir wrapped in silks and scarlet, and the world of sunlight and sea where she ran gurgling with childish laughter from foam-tipped waves breaking from a sapphire-coloured sea as they lapped at her round heels.
Amais grew into a chubby, moon-faced toddler with round cheeks and what looked like far too much forehead. Dan had been right – Amais’s fair skin was scorched into angry red blotches if she did not protect it from the sun, and her eyes had not been of the degree of roundness required of a princess of the Imperial blood. But the eyes in question had quickly turned from the guileless blue of babyhood into an improbable shade of golden brown flecked with green, and her hair, the despair and secret pride of both grandmothers, was a serendipitous mix of Vien’s hip-length mane that fell thick and straight like a black waterfall and Nikos’s riotous curls, and framed Amais’s face in huge smooth waves.
On this, both grandmothers were in full agreement.
‘She is not pretty…’ Elena would say thoughtfully, looking on as the toddler laughed up at her father when Nikos would come home from a long day’s work and sweep his small daughter up in his arms.
‘…but one day she will be beautiful,’ Dan would say, across the island in her own exotic house, watching the same toddler explore the texture of some ancient brocade, apparently in completion of the same thought.
‘All I want her to be is happy,’ Vien would sigh to both women.
Elena would smile at that, and spill a reassuring fairytale of how it would be for Amais when she grew up and reached out to claim her place in the world. But Dan was both more pragmatic and more frightening in her response.
‘Beware of too much happiness,’ she had murmured, and had turned away for a moment as if the laughter of her daughter’s child had been a knife in her heart.
Two
Vien was eight and a half months pregnant with her second child, heavy and graceless and swollen with a baby that could have been born at any minute, when Nikos’s boat went out one spring morning. The crew waved goodbye to such family as had gathered to see them off, as they had done hundreds of times before, and left together with a flotilla of other boats exactly the same as theirs, sailing off into the sweet newborn sunshine of a spring dawn glinting on the sapphire seas.
Seven-year-old Amais, who had woken early that morning from uneasy dreams, had been fretful and weepy, and Elena, in order to give heavily pregnant Vien some respite, had taken the child out to see her father off on his day’s fishing.
‘I will catch a mermaid for you, korimou, little darling!’ Nikos called to his daughter as the sea widened between them. ‘Now go home and be good for your mother!’
Amais had clung to that unlikely promise all day. When Elena readied herself to go to the wharf to meet the fishing boats at the end of the day, Amais insisted on going with her, wanting to be right there when her father brought the gift of that mermaid ashore for her.
One by one, the boats came back that night. All of them, except one.
Elena and Amais waited there as the other boats came in, exchanging smiles and the occasional word of congratulation or commiseration with the crews and their families as they straggled in and showed off their catch. But the sun rode lower and lower in the sky, and still Nikos’s boat had not come. Elena grew quieter and quieter, standing there carved like a statue, her eyes fixed on the horizon, her lips moving ever so slightly in what might have been prayer. She already wore the black kerchief of the widow, and was no stranger to sea death. Neither were the others, the family members of the rest of the men on the lost boat, who also waited there on the wharf. They all wore the same expression, which was essentially no expression at all – their faces were stony, as though they were already bracing themselves for the grief that was to come. Amais was too young to completely understand, but her grandmother’s hand on hers had turned into a cold and clutching claw made from marble, and the child’s own heart was beating very fast as the beautiful spring day drew to a close.
The sunset was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful that Amais could ever remember having seen. The sky was streaked with unlikely colours – something that resembled the rich red of the wine they made from the grapes grown on the hillside above the harbour, a deep violet-amethyst shade where the sky began to darken into twilight as the sun went down, and traces of dark gold…the exact shade that Amais had imagined of a mermaid’s hair. Someone, without speaking, without asking, lit a lantern and hung it on an iron hook set into the wharf – a makeshift lighthouse, calling them home, the lost ones, the ones that most of the people on that wharf already knew would not return.
It was full dark when the first of the statues, another blackkerchiefed woman, finally moved, let her hands drop helplessly to her sides, let out her breath in a deep sigh that ended in a quiet sob, bowed her head, and walked slowly away from the sea, back to the hushed village. It was as though she broke the stasis. One by one they did the same thing, like a ritual, bowed their heads to the sea, walked away.
Elena was the last to go. Amais had been standing there with her on the wharf for hours, had grown stiff and uncomfortable, but not for anything would she have moved, would she have let go of the hand that clung to her own as though she were the last anchor in a storm-tossed world. But Elena was almost unaware of her. When she too opened her lips a crack and allowed a breath to escape – a sigh that sounded like she was letting her soul out of her body and sending it over the waves to search for her son’s spirit – her hand relaxed for a moment, and it was only then that she looked down and blinked, seeming to have just realised that she was still holding her granddaughter’s hand in her own.
‘Let’s go home, Nana,’ Amais whispered, profoundly sad, not yet fully aware of all that this night would mean to her.
‘Home,’ Elena repeated through cracked lips, as though the word held no meaning.
‘Mama has been alone all afternoon,’ Amais said, her voice taking on a tone of urgency, ‘and the baby…the baby is coming…’
‘The baby,’ Elena repeated again. It seemed as though repeating someone else’s last words was all that she was capable of right then, as if her own mind had ground to a halt, unable to move past this moment, this loss. And then she shook her head once, sharply, as though to clear it from the cobwebs of sleep. ‘The baby,’ she said once more. ‘Yes, you are right. There is the baby.’
They walked back to their house in silence, still holding hands.
There was a light in the window as they approached, a lamp lit by Vien the good wife and left to light the way home for her family. She herself was waiting inside, very pale, her hands folded protectively over her swollen belly.
She knew, long before she saw only Elena and Amais enter the house. She could hear the absence of Nikos’s footsteps, the void which his voice and his laughter would have filled. Her world was emptier for his soul. Her face was stark, her eyes very bright, and when the door closed behind Elena, who had finally let go of Amais’s hand, Vien let out a small whimper and folded over herself as though she had been stabbed in the heart.
The whimper became a moan, something that took all her breath, and it wasn’t until that first spasm had passed that Vien could whisper two words:
‘The baby…’
There was no time, after that, for going to get the midwife, for going to get any help at all. Vien’s second child, another daughter, was born just before midnight on the same day that her father had died. Elena, who delivered her, held the tiny newborn infant in her arms and stared at the child’s face. It would have been hard to find any resemblance to her son in that bright-red puckered face with its eyes tightly shut and its bud of a mouth opening and shutting like a baby bird’s when demanding sustenance – but Elena was seeing things that only a mother who had just lost a child and been given another in his place could see.
‘Her name is Nika,’ she said softly, and there was no arguing with that. It was the prerogative of the grieving mother, of the grandmother – this child, at least, her daughter-in-law’s culture would not swallow. This was her son’s child, named for him, born to be his substitute. There had been something implacable in her voice.
But baya-Dan was not one to relinquish something she considered hers, not without a fight. This child, as Amais before her, was summoned to the house where the tiny enclave of shadowed Imperial Syai was being preserved in the Elaas sunshine. The second grandmother had looked the babe over, and smiled a small secret smile.
‘This one,’ she prophesied, tracing the contours of the child’s face with one bony finger, ‘is going to look like you, my daughter. Look at those eyes, look at the shape of her face. Her name is Aylun, little cricket.’
‘Her name is Nika,’ Vien said. ‘Elena already named her for her father.’
‘Her name is Aylun,’ Dan repeated firmly. ‘You will see. You will bring this one, too, as you have done with Amais.’
But Elena would have none of that. ‘Not this child,’ she said to Vien when she returned from her visit to her mother, the baby cradled in the crook of her arm. Elena all but snatched the child out of Vien’s arms, inspecting her closely, as though there were traces of the Syai cobwebs still draped on her swaddling clothes or evil spells woven in the air above her small head. ‘This is my Nika, my baby, the child that will carry the spirit of my son. She already has Amais.’
Almost overnight, Amais had been abandoned by her father’s mother. She became almost invisible in her father’s house, with her grandmother’s attention wholly focused on her younger sister. Baya-Dan commanded her attendance daily as usual, but now Amais chafed at it, feeling as though she had been traded, one child for another, one granddaughter for each grandmother, forced to choose one of her two worlds and barred from the other.
The first year of Nika’s life passed thus, in tension and frustration. A barrier developed between Vien and Elena, who appeared to consider her granddaughter’s mother merely a necessary evil, basically handing the child over to be nursed and then snatching her back as though prolonged contact with her mother would infect her with an incurable disease. But as that first year passed, it began to become painfully obvious that fate had played a joke on the family.
Amais, the elder, the one who had been abandoned to whatever destiny her Syai heritage might have in store for her, grew into her father’s image, gently made female by the curve of cheek or the slope of delicate shoulder inherited from her mother and with a captivating touch of the exotic. She had her father’s wild black hair, gleaming with blue highlights, curling riotously around her face, setting off those beautiful and almost uncanny eyes – she was a melding of all that was beautiful from her two worlds, as though she had been a work of art that had had two bright and vivid colours mixed on a palette, and emerged with a shade that was unique and all her own. But at least she had that trace of her father’s kin in her.
Nika was all Syai – tawny ivory skin, round eyes with eyelids draped in drowsy epicanthic folds over irises so dark that the pupil of her eyes could barely be seen. She had the rosebud mouth and the small-boned grace of a Syai empress. It was as though Nikos had had nothing to do with her at all. She was, as Dan had said she would be, far more Aylun than she could ever be Nika, the Elaas name sitting almost gracelessly on this tiny, alien person to whom it just did not seem to belong.
But it was this child that held the spirit of Elena’s son. Somehow, she managed to ignore the incongruities in the physical appearance of the children. Vien sometimes smuggled Nika – or Aylun as she always was in her Syai grandmother’s house – out of Elena’s sight for a few hours, and Aylun too would drowse happily in the lilting tones of baya-Dan’s lullabies.
As for Amais, her own education at her Syai grandmother’s hands – and it had become painfully obvious that it was just that, an education, that Amais was being groomed for something – accelerated. Amais and her grandmother were now reading the classics together, accounts of Imperial life in old Syai, ancient poems inscribed in crumbling books carefully put away in wrappings of silk and waterproof oiled cloth, tales of travel and trade set down by generations of exiles, all hoarded and treasured for four hundred years and passed down the centuries from generation to generation until it came down to this – an old woman and a young child who only half-belonged to this lost world.
It was not as though Amais had no interest in the things that she was given to study – some part of her was held rapt and fascinated by it. But there was that other part of her, the same restless spirit that had made her own mother respond to the laughter she heard echoing from beyond the brooding walls of Dan’s house, and there were days that she squirmed and sighed and cast longing glances at the shuttered windows, feeling in her bones that she should be out on the rocky shores of Elaas’s blue seas, scooping out small crabs from their hidey-holes or gathering clams at low tide. It was in that year, aware that Amais’s attention was slipping away, that Dan allowed Amais to actually hold in her hands a set of thirteen small notebooks bound in faded red leather. Amais recognised them: her grandmother had read from those books while she listened, rapt, to the tales of long ago. The diary of a girl who, Dan said, was not much older than Amais herself when she began writing down the days of her life.
‘These belonged to Kito-Tai,’ baya-Dan said, her voice edged very slightly with an odd sort of triumph, watching the many-times-great-granddaughter of the ancient poetess touch the worn covers with light, almost frightened fingers. Amais was wholly here now, completely caught in the moment; the childish games of the Elaas children out on the sunlit shore were not even a memory of temptation. ‘They are yours now. Take care of them – they are very old. They are her journals, and there is a lot of her poetry in there, too. We’ve read some of them already, on the scrolls – but those were transcribed, for sale in the marketplaces. These, in here, are her originals. Written in our own language.’
‘Our own language?’ Amais questioned, looking up. ‘You mean jin-ashu? The women’s tongue?’
‘Yes, and now you know enough of it to be able to read those,’ baya-Dan said, laying a loving and possessive hand over her granddaughter’s where it rested on the red leather of many centuries ago. ‘I have already read some of this to you. But now they are yours, they are my gift to you. They will be here for you, whenever you want them.’
Amais took one of the books at random, opened it, ran her finger reverently down the ancient page that lay revealed. ‘Jin-shei,’ Amais murmured. ‘She was jin-shei to an empress. The empress listened when she talked, and did what she said. And Nhia’s, too, her jin-shei-bao, her heart-sister…and then Nhia became a Blessed Sage and was given a shrine in the Great Temple in Linh-an…’ The latter was catechism; Dan owned a book about the Great Temple, one that described its appearance, its Gods, and detailed biographies of all the emperors and sages whose niches had been dedicated in the Second Circle of the Great Temple. It had been brought over by one of the later waves of immigrants from Syai, and was not quite the age of Kito-Tai’s journals, but it was old enough – sixty or seventy years at least. Amais knew about Nhia because she had been singled out by her grandmother, because they had read her biography together, because she had been mentioned by name in every one of Tai’s journals that resided in the cedar box. Making the leap from Nhia’s status of Tai’s jin-shei-bao to that of Blessed Sage of the Temple, as though the one had naturally followed from the other, however, had been something that Amais had done entirely on her own. Her grandmother might have objected mildly, but before she had a chance to do so Amais fired another distracting question. ‘Baya-Dan…have you ever had a jin-shei-bao?’
‘I was not so fortunate,’ said her grandmother in a tone of noble sorrow.
‘But back in Syai, every woman had them. At least one. Didn’t they?’
‘They still do, I am certain,’ murmured baya-Dan. ‘It is the women’s country, where you could find a sister in a friend, could depend on her, believe in her and in your bond when everything else failed, know that she always stood between you and doom.’
‘Did you ever keep a journal yourself, baya-Dan?’
‘Not quite like this,’ Dan said. ‘She was special, Kito-Tai. She was a poet. She saw every day through a poet’s eyes. She filled a book every year of her life, you know. These are just a handful of her journals. The rest were lost and scattered, or just gone. Four hundred years is a very long life for a book.’
‘Four hundred years…’ Amais breathed, the eyes her grandmother had thought too slanted now quite round with wonder.
‘That is your heritage,’ Dan said. ‘That is what you came from, that stock.’
‘My mother never told me about this,’ Amais said.
Dan allowed herself an inelegant snort. ‘Then it is just as well that you have me,’ she said.
But the passing of the journals seemed to herald a new phase in Dan’s life. Amais had always known her as what she considered to be old – baya-Dan was straight-backed and clean-limbed, but her hands had gnarled with age and her face was seamed with fine lines under the mass of carefully dressed silver hair. After the child she continued to stubbornly call Aylun was born, baya-Dan seemed to consider her task done, her life well spent. She withdrew even further from the reality that was her world. Elaas, the bright sunlight and the sapphire sea and the vines of ancient vineyards twisted with venerable age at least as respectable as Dan’s own, all that simply ceased to exist for her at all. If Vien didn’t come by to make sure she ate – and that the food was prepared properly according to Dan’s own high standards of the lost world of Syai as best as could be managed – the old woman would be just as likely to spend the time in a sort of waking dream, drifting through the days with her eyes wide open but her gaze bent more on the ephemeral glories of her past than on the physical surroundings of her current existence.
Elena had almost forbidden her treasured younger granddaughter to go to what she had taken to calling ‘that woman’s little palace’ when Vien brought the news that Dan was dying, and wanted to say farewell to her grandchildren. The words ‘Good riddance!’ were hovering on the tip of Elena’s tongue, but they remained unspoken. In some ways the two old women were far more alike than they realised or might have wanted to know. Both had a reverence for the circle of life, for those who went before, and for those who came after. Nika, whatever Elena might have wished, was of Dan’s blood, and Elena could not find it in herself to forbid the child to go and receive the dying blessing of her mother’s mother. She watched the three walking away from the house – Amais running ahead to pluck some flowering weed by the roadside to present to her grandmother upon arrival, Vien holding Nika’s still toddler-chubby little hand – and had a sudden vivid premonition that she might not be seeing this for very long, this remnant of family that was hers, this shadow of her lost son.
She almost called them back, ran to snatch little Nika up in her arms, demand that the child renounce her divided blood, that she become her own laughing little boy all over again. But perhaps it was already too late for that.
Vien had brought the toddler into the shadowy room where Dan now lay under the embroidered coverlets on her bed. Sensitive to the solemn mood of the occasion, Nika approached her grandmother’s bed when given a light push by her mother, and Dan lifted a hand over the child’s head, letting it flutter down on her silky dark hair for a moment.
‘My little cricket,’ she whispered. ‘You were born in such an hour…I wish your life could have been easier…but you and I will meet in Cahan one day. May you have light and grace all your days.’ She allowed her hand to stroke Nika’s hair, and then sighed. ‘Send me your sister.’
Vien snaked out an arm and whisked an almost hypnotised Nika, who would always be Aylun in this place, out of the way. Amais stepped into the space so vacated, and this time Dan’s hand was not light, offered no stroking. She reached out and closed her fingers around Amais’s wrist, stared into her eyes with a gaze that was suddenly too full of power and passion to belong to a dying woman.
‘Take the journals,’ she said. ‘They are for you. You are the last of Kito-Tai’s line. Take the journals, and don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.’ Her eyes fluttered, closed, all passion suddenly spent, as though she had been filled by some external spirit which had now left her. ‘Or your own…’ she whispered, releasing Amais’s hand.
Amais turned her head, alarmed, and sought her mother with a gaze that was almost frightened. ‘Mother…’
‘Watch your sister,’ Vien said in a whisper. She pulled Amais free of the dying woman’s bedside, planting a swift kiss of reassurance on the top of her daughter’s head. ‘Wait for me in the sitting room. Go.’
Amais took Aylun into the other room and gave her one of baya-Dan’s shawls to play with – she didn’t think her grandmother would mind. For her own part, she went to the chest where she knew that Tai’s journals were kept. She knelt on the floor beside it for the longest time, her mind curiously blank, and then opened the lid and carefully took out the small pile of red notebooks that were her legacy. They sat there in her lap, in apparent innocence – but they had changed for Amais. Before, they had been a fascinating if somewhat distant link to her ancestry and her past. Now they were heavy with portent. It was as though Amais had been charged with something by her grandmother on her deathbed, and these journals were the only way to find out just exactly what it was that she had accepted as her life’s work. Her grandmother had not exactly asked Amais to promise anything, and Amais hadn’t exactly given her word, but it had been implicit in that last conversation.
Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own…
When Vien came out to gather her children up, her eyes were red and swollen.
‘Baya-Dan…?’ Amais asked, her voice quavering just a little.
‘She is gone, Amais-ban. She is gone.’
Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own. Those words her grandmother had uttered out loud. But now, as Amais remembered them, it seemed to her that there had been another phrase, unspoken, ephemeral, ghostly, hovering in the air and settling lightly in Amais’s mind and memory: Or mine.
Or mine…
But was it Dan’s name she had wanted made immortal…or that of the strange spirit that had possessed her just before death came to claim her?
‘Come on,’ Vien said, holding out her hand. ‘There’s things I need to do now. Let’s go home.’
Amais got up obediently, gathering up the thirteen precious notebooks, wrapping them up in a secure little parcel and hugging them to her chest all the way back to Elena’s house. Somewhere in between those two places, the shrine to Syai where baya-Dan’s spirit now lived and the cheerful green-shuttered house that her still-living grandmother inhabited, walking in the sunshine of Elaas with the treasure of Syai clasped close to her heart, suspended in the empty air between two worlds, Amais realised for the first time in her life that she was no longer sure just where ‘home’ was or how her heart was supposed to find her way there.
Three
Amais kept her head down and herself out of the way in the months that followed, months in which everyone around her seemed fractious, annoyed, or outright furious at things that hovered just outside her comprehension. Vien let down her hair and donned the traditional Syai mourning attire for her mother, which led to Elena making somewhat acid comments about the propriety of wearing so much white with her mother newly dead and her husband not a year in his grave. Vien cast her eyes down and took the barbed remarks in pious silence, her hands folded before her in gracious eastern position, suddenly prominently and obviously alien in the house where she had tried so hard to fit in and where she had once been wholly accepted.
Amais had been dressed in like manner, and the small knot of village children who were her companions had been curious and blunt, as children often were.
‘That’s what we wear in mourning,’ Amais had explained, plucking at her white dress with nervous fingers. Out here in the Elaas sunshine, in the bright light of Elaas customs, the white garb did seem outlandish and strange.
‘So your people are happy when someone dies?’ her friend Ennea asked. ‘White is a colour of joy, you wear it when you marry, not when you die.’
‘But back in Syai…’
‘Is that where you’re really from?’ asked Dia, the school-teacher’s daughter, a slightly higher social caste than the rest of them and generally given to passing on oracular pronouncements from her exalted parent as though they were edicts handed down from the Gods on their mountain. ‘My papa says that blood will tell.’
‘I was born here,’ Amais said fiercely. ‘I am from here!’
‘But your mother wore black like she should when your father died,’ said Ennea, with a child’s utter disregard for tact or feelings, intent on pursuing some fascinating nugget of information and oblivious to all else.
‘That was different,’ said Amais, conscious of a sharp pain as the scab over that older wound, unhealed yet, cracked a little to allow a trickle of pain like heart’s-blood to escape. ‘My father was of Elaas, and…’
‘But so is your grandmother,’ another girl, Evania, pointed out. ‘My grandmother says she was born on the mainland, in the city, before she came to live out here – but she was born here. So she was of Elaas, too.’
Amais remembered the silk-swathed rooms of her grandmother’s house, the scrolls of poetry in a foreign tongue, the scent of alien incense.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said carefully, too young to analyse the thing completely, aware that she could not defend it in the face of the practical questions of her playmates because they simply could not understand it.
‘My mother says you’re strange,’ Ennea said.
But she had still been willing to stay Amais’s friend and companion for all that, and no more was said on the matter, at least for the time being.
Dan had been cremated, on Vien’s insistence and with considerable trouble – since the body had had to be removed from the island in order for this to be accomplished, and getting the necessary permits was not a totally straightforward matter. In this, the established Syai community in Elaas stepped in to offer a helping hand – and that might have compensated for much, being welcomed back into her own world after choosing to step out of it for Nikos’s sake. But the relations between Vien and her own people remained formal and a little cool. It was as though Amais’s dilemmas were projected onto her mother, written much larger than those plaguing her own small self. Amais was still a child, and therefore obliged only to obey the instructions of those older and wiser than her – but Vien was an adult, with an adult’s decisions to make. Decisions that would affect not only her own life but those of the people who depended on her – her two daughters.
And it soon became apparent that there was yet another voice, perhaps the most forceful of all, that guided Vien’s choices – the insistent ghost of her mother.
When Vien first said the word ‘home’ and meant something other than the small cottage by the sea where she lived with Elena and the children, Amais almost missed it – but there was something in Vien’s face, a soft and yet steely determination that frightened her into paying much closer attention.
The wind of change started blowing quite softly, nearly imperceptibly.
‘I must take Mother home.’
That had been the innocuous sentence that let the first breath of moving air into the cold, stagnant little house, which was thus demoted, without ceremony, into a temporary dwelling. No longer the ‘home’ that Amais had known – the only home that she had ever known.
Elena did miss it, that first time. She simply ignored it, like she ignored so many things in those days. She ignored Vien’s views on how her younger daughter should be dressed, fed, disciplined. She ignored Vien’s older daughter altogether. She tried hard to ignore Vien’s white clothes and the white ribbon she wore woven into that incongruous glossy smooth black hair that now hung long and loose down Vien’s back.
But it quickly became too big to ignore. Mysterious people with inscrutable faces and round dark eyes came to call on Vien at Elena’s cottage, treating Elena herself with scrupulously correct if icy politeness. Vien herself would disappear for several days at a time to the mainland, her only word on her absence that she had ‘arrangements’ to make. When she returned to the island after her final visit to the mainland, she carried something in a large envelope, clutched to her breast as though the contents were more precious than jewels.
That time even Elena had to notice.
‘What do you have there?’ she asked in the voice she now customarily used with Vien when she spoke to her at all, clipped and brusque, as though she had judged her daughter-in-law of some crime and found her unforgivably guilty.
‘Tickets,’ Vien said. ‘We’re going home, the three of us and Mother. Back to Syai.’
Everyone looked up at that, Amais in stark astonishment and Elena with something indefinable that was equal parts fury and fear.
‘It’s a long, wasted journey for a baby to make,’ Elena said at last after a moment of silence, riding her emotions on a tight rein. ‘Really, Vien. Your mother lived on these shores all of her life. She can hardly object to being buried in those hills now.’
‘Did she?’ Vien questioned softly, and Amais began to pay much closer attention. This was starting to sound a lot like the frustrating conversations she had had with her friends out at the rock pools, dressed in her inconvenient white ‘mourning’ garb. ‘I don’t think she ever quite lived here. Not really.’
‘She was born here,’ Elena snapped. ‘As far as I know, she never set foot in Syai.’
‘Her body, no,’ Vien said. ‘But her spirit…I do not think her spirit ever left Syai. She was half a woman all of her days, yearning back to the things that made her who she was. She deserves to rest there, in peace at last.’
‘Syai is a long way to take the child to a funeral,’ Elena said crisply.
Amais bowed her head to hide the sudden tears that welled in her eyes. There was only one child in Elena’s mind, and it was not herself.
Her little sister, untroubled by all this, slept in her crib, oblivious to the conflict around her and about her. She would never know, Amais thought. She was too young for any of this to have meaning. She had never known her father, could never remember him.
‘It is a long way, yes,’ Vien said, and lifted her head, meeting her mother-in-law’s eyes. ‘But it isn’t just a funeral that we would go for, Mother-in-law. We go…to stay.’
Elena’s eyes widened for a moment, in pure shock that she could not hide, and then narrowed again and hardened until they were chips of obsidian in her set face.
‘I forbid it,’ she said, dropping each word like a pebble. Amais could almost hear them rattle as they rolled around on the floor at the women’s feet.
‘I’m sorry,’ Vien said, ‘but you cannot. It is not your place.’
‘This is my son’s child,’ Elena said, crossing the room and snatching up the sleeping toddler out of her crib. Nika woke up abruptly, knuckled her eyes with her hands and began to whimper softly as though Elena’s hands were clutching claws locked around her, holding on tight.
‘It is my child,’ Vien said. ‘And here she would always be wangmei, just like…just like I was.’
‘What are you talking about? What is that? She is my son’s daughter, the last thing of his that I have on this earth. She is no wing…whatever that is.’
‘Wangmei,’ Vien repeated patiently, standing her ground. ‘It means “stranger of the body”, an outsider, someone who obviously does not belong in a community. Someone different. Look at her and tell me how she will fit in here in a few years’ time, when she’s grown enough to want playmates, friends.’
‘Amais never had a problem,’ Elena said defensively, bringing her other granddaughter into the discussion for the first time, but only out of desperation, sacrificing her as a pawn to keep her claim on the younger, the precious one, the now openly wailing toddler in her arms. Amais’s eyes were wide, her mouth parted, her heart beating painfully fast.
‘Amais, korimou…’ Vien said, letting a quick and strangely soft glance rest on her oldest for a moment. She had used the word Amais’s father had called her – it was hard to tell whether she had done it deliberately or instinctively, but either way it suddenly sounded strange to Amais, coming from her mother’s lips. ‘Would you let your grandmother and I talk alone? I’ll come and find you in a few moments.’
‘But, Mother…’
‘Please, Amais-ban. It is important.’
Amais slipped off the chair where she had been perched trying very hard to be invisible and dragged herself outside with unwilling obedience. But this concerned her – this was her life they were discussing in there! – so she didn’t go far. She merely turned the corner and crouched underneath the window. It was shuttered against the sun, but beyond the shutters the window was open and it was not hard to eaves-drop on the conversation within.
‘Amais is just as much wangmei as anyone,’ Vien said as the door closed after her daughter. ‘But Aylun…’
‘Nika,’ said Elena fiercely.
‘Aylun – for that is the name she takes with her to Syai, not Nika,’ Vien countered. ‘She could be Nika only here, in this house, in your heart. But she can still be saved, Elena. She can have one world to choose from and she will never know different. Amais…it is already too late for Amais. She is already of two worlds, and will always be torn between them. My mother is probably to blame for that. Perhaps I was, too, for letting her take my child, so young, so malleable – but Amais is already lost here, in this place, because she already knows who she is, who her ancestors were. She is more than wangmei here, she is always going to be xeimei, stranger of the heart, someone who might well have the sense of belonging to this community but who will never be a real part of it. Just like I never really was.’
Amais suddenly felt hot tears welling in her eyes. She will take me away…
‘You were,’ Elena whispered fiercely, rocking her Nika in her arms. ‘You were. When you chose to be.’
‘Amais would have chosen to be, in these last months,’ Vien said, and tears stood in her eyes. ‘Why have you not let her, Elena?’
‘No,’ Elena said, and for the first time her voice broke, brittle with the weight of too much sorrow. ‘Don’t take her away from me, Vien.’
‘You have already done that,’ Vien said. ‘I don’t have to do anything – you have already pushed Amais away yourself.’
‘Not Amais. This one. Go, if you have to – take your child – but leave me Nika. Nika has my son’s eyes. She…’
‘Elena,’ Vien said quietly, ‘she does not. Amais does. Nika is Aylun – she has my mother’s face, her hair, her eyes, her mouth. She will never be Nikos, Elena. She can’t be.’
Elena stared at her, shaking her head minutely, as though she found her words incomprehensible, as if Vien had suddenly started speaking in the language of her ancestors. Which she had, in a way. This had been the first time she had ever used a word of that language in her mother-in-law’s house, and it seemed almost ironic that the words she used meant ‘stranger’.
‘Excuse me,’ Vien said, her voice floating out of the shuttered window, quietly filled with the calm serenity of one who had fought hard battles but who had finally won a war that had been raging for a long time in her soul. ‘I think I had better go and find Amais now, and talk to her.’
Amais, under the window, uncoiled like a whip and raced across the rocky slope behind the house, down the path that led to the cove. She knew the track, every stone and rut and bump on it, and she fled surefooted along the familiar route, around the first curve and out of sight of the house before her mother had had a chance to turn around and open the door.
She wasn’t even aware that the tears that had gathered in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks until she came to a stop at the bottom of the path, leaping down onto the shallow beach of boulder and coarse sand, and had to wipe the back of her hand across her eyes in order to clear her blurred vision. It was only then that her mouth opened like a wound and she sobbed out loud, her whole body shaking with an unexpected and bottomless grief.
The ocean glittered in the sunlight, sparking memories, bringing out things that it was suddenly a white pain to think about. Amais covered her mouth with both hands, as though that could keep the memory from coming, as though she could simply banish it back down into the repository from which it had been called – but it was too late, already too late for that.
She had gone out in a small sailing boat with her father when she was maybe four or five years old, something that she thought of as her first real clear memory. She had already been able to swim like a fish, and there was no fear there – but the women in the household had put up a fight nonetheless and part of the joy of that memory was the way that her father had cut through the whole brouhaha with a simple, ‘She’ll be with me.’ And she was, that was exactly what she was – they were out there together, father and daughter, the white sail furled and the boat bobbing on the sapphire waters with the two of them ducking and diving around it and each other in the warm sea. She had giggled with pure childhood joy, and shrieked with laughter when her father splashed her from behind the boat or dived under to tickle her feet as she kicked out in the water.
That alone would have been enough to hold the magic of the memory, but there had been more.
They had been joined in their games, quite suddenly and with startling gentleness, by three dolphins who came to investigate the noise and stayed to play. They did spectacular leaps and flips, dived back into the water, swam underneath their two human companions and around them, occasionally lifting their heads out of the water to gaze upon them with luminous, intelligent eyes. Amais dived under with them, fearless, and could hear the echo of their sounds in the water. They’d bob their heads to the surface, and so would she, and they’d nod at her as though in approval and utter small chattering noises. They came close enough for her to touch them and she did, running her small hands down the length of the huge animals, almost twice her size. She had finally taken courage and stopped in mid-caress, wrapping her arms around one dolphin’s dorsal fin. It seemed to understand her intentions immediately, squirmed gently until she sat on its back with her feet dangling on either side, and then took off, cleaving the surface cleanly and leaving a white foamy wake behind. Amais was first too startled and then far too enchanted to be in any way afraid. By the time the dolphin circled back to where his companions and Amais’s father waited, she kissed her ocean steed squarely on the nose, which he gave every impression of enjoying, and turned to her father, treading water, her face one huge exhilarated grin.
‘Did you see me? Did you see me ride him?’
‘I saw you,’ Nikos said, his own face wearing an expression of matching joy.
And then they were suddenly gone, the dolphins, as though they had never been there at all, as though they had been just a dream.
‘I hoped they would come,’ Nikos had said, after he’d helped to hoist her back into the boat and had raised the sail for home. ‘I wanted you to meet them. They’re my friends, they often follow the boat; sometimes they will even lead it to where the best fish are. The littlest one is a baby. He was born last calving season, nearly grown now but I remember him when he was quite small, maybe only a few days old. They brought him, you see, they brought him for us to meet. I promised them I would show them my own child one day, when I had a chance.’
‘Thank you, Papa!’ Amais had exclaimed, her face still one huge grin after her experience.
Nikos had reached out and ruffled her wet hair. ‘They’re your friends too, now. They always will be. They never forget. You must never forget them, either.’
‘I won’t,’ she had promised.
She had promised.
But she had also promised baya-Dan something else, something quite different.
Don’t let her name be forgotten. Or your own.
She owed other debts, to long-gone ancestors, to people who had walked this earth centuries before her, and who had never seen a dolphin leap from the sea.
She wished that she didn’t feel as though keeping one of those promises meant inevitably and permanently breaking the other.
Four
Aylun was asleep when the family boarded the small boat that would take them to the mainland, carried in her mother’s arms. The bigger pieces of their luggage had been loaded already; the travellers perched on a couple of battered trunks in the midst of the boat, a number of smaller packages at their feet. Vien also wore a bag slung crosswise on her body, strap on one shoulder and the bag itself resting on the hip on which she was not balancing her sleeping toddler. In that bag were the most precious of the things they had brought with them – Dan’s ashes in a small bronze urn, what there was of Dan’s gold and valuables that was small enough to be carried by hand and that could be exchanged for the things they would need on their journey, tickets for the various conveyances that would take them all the way back to the shores of Syai, and necessities for Aylun’s immediate needs.
Amais carried a similar bag. No concessions had been made for her size and on her the thing looked enormous, overwhelming, threatening to make her buckle under its weight. In hers she carried whatever her mother required but could not fit into her own luggage, as well as the thirteen precious red journals that had been left to her by Dan and – smuggled in as a last-minute sentimental impulse but already starting to be a subject for second thoughts – a couple of pebbles from the cove where her father had taken her to swim with wild dolphins.
The family’s break with the island seemed to be complete. Elena had not come to see them off at the wharf, and neither had any of Amais’s erstwhile bosom friends and companions. Those people who did happen to be there as Vien and her daughters departed seemed reluctant to meet their eyes, to look at them, even to acknowledge that they saw them. Many found something to be busy with, keeping their heads down. Only a couple of women offered a wan half-smile, and one or two children, probably too young to know better, waved goodbye as the boat carrying Vien and the girls pushed off from the dock.
Vien kept her back to the shore, clutching Aylun, occasionally patting the bag she carried with one hand as though to make sure it was still there. It was Amais who sat facing the island they were abandoning, and it was only Amais who saw Elena finally come running all the way down the wharf and then back again to shore, taking an awkward, stumbling leap off it onto the pebbled beach, her customary headscarf clutched in one twisted hand revealing black hair streaked liberally with grey and falling in untidy strands about her face and neck. She was calling something, but either they were already too far to hear clearly or else her voice was very weak – it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Vien sat with her back straight, without turning her head. She must have heard that voice, must have recognised it, but she gave no reaction to it at all, and Amais could see nothing on her mother’s face except a glint in her eye that might have been either determination or a concealed tear. But Amais, for her part, could not find it in herself to leave without a word, without a thought – even though she had been the despised and ignored one ever since her father had died and her sister had been born to take his place in Elena’s heart. Amais had never forgotten the early years and the fact that her father’s mother did love her, long ago, once upon a time. And Elena was the last link with that other world, the world with her father and his dolphins, the world where she had suddenly been put on trial and declared a stranger.
With a final glance at her mother, half guilty and half defiant, Amais lifted both hands and waved back to the grandmother she was losing, waved back hard, as though that single simple motion alone could convey all that now would never be said.
Elena had stopped stock-still as Amais’s hands came up, and for the longest moment she stood frozen, immobilised by this farewell. And then she lifted one of her own hands, very slowly, and allowed the black kerchief she carried to be stirred by the breeze. They waved to each other, in silence, grandmother and granddaughter, for as long as they could see one another, until the boat slipped around a promontory and turned towards the mainland and blotted out the small beach and the woman standing alone upon it, with the memory of Amais’s childhood dissolving in the white sea foam as waves lapped and whispered at her feet.
Everything was bigger on the mainland. It was the first time Amais, nine years old, had seen a human dwelling bigger than anything to be found in the village in which she had grown up, and where she had known every face, from the newest babies with eyes barely opened to the world to the wizened ancient widows who sat in the sun outside their houses and blinked at the cerulean Elaas sky all day, counting clouds like sheep. Amais watched round-eyed as the bigger pieces of their baggage were hauled onto the shoulders of burly men naked to the waist, burned bronze by the sun under which they toiled, and carried onto the larger ship on which they would continue their journey. She watched other passengers stream on board, people wearing strange clothes, the men in buttoned-down jackets and patent leather shoes and the women wearing white gloves and large lace-and-ribbon-trimmed hats that cast their features into alluring half-shadow. She thought they were all beautiful.
But their own accommodation was not shared with the beautiful people – Vien and her daughters had a tiny cramped inside cabin with no view and no air, just four bunks stuffed into the smallest space into which they could possibly fit and a platform that served as both table and nightstand screwed firmly to the wall in between them. The only other fixtures were a cubbyhole that was supposed to serve as a closet, into which one of their smaller trunks that still didn’t quite fit inside had been crammed, and a small porcelain basin in one corner. They were to share a bathroom and toilet with five similar cabins that surrounded them.
Amais surveyed all this as she paused in the doorway, and her expression must have betrayed something of her appalled dismay, because Vien, pushing in behind her with the toddler she carried, now waking and fretful in her arms, clicked her tongue at her eldest daughter and schooled her face into a stern expression.
‘We probably could have done better, yes,’ she said, answering an unspoken question. ‘But it’s a lot more expensive, and our means are limited right now. We must save our gold for when we get home – we will need it there. Besides, it’s ours – we don’t even have to share that fourth bunk with some stranger. There’s more room than you think.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ Amais murmured obediently, but her heart quailed at the prospect of spending weeks, possibly months – she had no idea how long the journey was going to take – in this claustrophobic space.
‘You can take the top bunk,’ Vien said, inspecting the accommodations. ‘Aylun cannot sleep up there, and I must be where I can attend to her at night if I need to, so the two of us will sleep in the lower bunks. Now, help me sort this stuff out so that we have room to move. Some of it can go in the other top bunk, the one you aren’t using; it will give us a bit of space.’
‘May I go and see the ship, Mother?’ Amais asked, anxious to escape the confines of the cabin, grasping at whatever excuse she could muster.
‘Later,’ Vien said implacably.
So Amais spent the best part of an hour soothing her fractious sister and playing finger-games with her, sorting out the stuff in the trunk and hauling out things her mother considered necessities so that they could be better accessed atop the free upper bunk, and then squashing the trunk in as best it would go between the basin stand and the foot of one of the lower bunks, allowing free space to stand up and turn around in the midst of the cabin. She had not even noticed that the ship had actually started to move until her mother, satisfied with the arrangements in the cabin as best they could be made, took Aylun in her arms again and told Amais to lead the way up to the deck.
They were already a couple of ship-lengths away from the shore. A crowd of people stood shouting and waving, and the railings on that side of the ship were thronged by passengers who were waving back. Vien, with nobody to bid farewell to, simply turned her back on them and took her children to the opposite side of the ship, where there were fewer people and the view of the sunlit sea was unimpeded.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Over there, somewhere, is Syai. We’re on our way. We’re going home.’
But it was her father’s dolphins that Amais searched for in the waters that quickly turned from sapphire to deep cobalt blue, her father’s dolphins and her father’s spirit, wanting to say her farewells to them, wanting to assure them that she could not bid them goodbye because a part of her would never leave them. She thought she saw a silver fin break the surface of the water, once, a long way away – but she could not be sure, and, although she stayed at the railings for a long time after her mother grew bored and a little seasick and retired below with Aylun, she did not see the fin again.
And the sun rode across the cloudless sky, and dipped towards the horizon, and then beneath it; and the quiet stars came out; and the first day was over. Already Amais was alone and adrift upon the open sea; the land of her birth was lost behind her, the land of her ancestors only a secret promise far away in the night.
The shipboard days followed one another, monotonous and long, marked by persistent bouts of seasickness on the part of Vien and Aylun. Amais was apparently her father’s daughter in more than one sense – she was remarkably unaffected, having got her sea legs within hours of boarding the big ship, and when she wasn’t tending to her prostrate mother and sister she spent her time exploring. Frequently she was gently but firmly steered away from areas of special sensitivity or specific salons on the top deck which were exclusively reserved for the passengers travelling in spacious outside cabins with portholes, out of which one could see the sea and the sky. Amais didn’t care, really – she hadn’t wanted to join the ship’s aristocracy, only to see the places they had claimed. Denied those, she found other spots that she made her own. One of her particular favourites – and one from which she would probably have been evicted had she been observed – was the very point of the ship’s prow, where huge ropes and the anchor chain were coiled and stowed. The place, once rearranged just a little for her convenience, made a comfortable nest for Amais. On several occasions, when her family had been particularly violently ill and the cabin smelled overwhelmingly of sick, she had even escaped and slept out here in the open air, lulled by the hiss and lap of the ship’s prow cleaving the waters beneath her. She’d take her journals out there with her, Tai’s journals, and pore over them, immersing herself in Tai’s world, deliberately turning her back on the sea and the dolphins and the call of her father’s blood. Those were in the past, for now. There were things she needed to know, for her future.
She was troubled by dreams out there on that prow, she who had always slept soundly and deeply, and – as far as she had ever been aware – dreamlessly. If she had ever dreamed before, she had never remembered the dreams when she woke. But now she did, and they came thick and fast, and some were of the lost past and some were simply dreams, unknown, unexplainable, impossible to interpret or understand without context, which, as yet, she completely lacked. Sometimes there was nothing but voices – her grandmother’s, for instance, reading some familiar passage from a poem or a genealogical line, or uttering those last words of hers that were so much a binding laid on Amais by a dying woman; or an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s, calling, I’m lost, I’m lost, come and find me, come and set me free…There were weird dreams of almost frightening focus, sometimes a single phrase or even a single word written on scarlet pennants in gold calligraphy, things she could not quite read but knew were written in jin-ashu, the women’s tongue her grandmother had taught her, and that they were very important, if only she could get close enough to see them clearly and understand them. And sometimes there were dreams that were almost complete stories in and of themselves – she dreamed of strange skies, as though something far away, something vast and distant, was on fire. Once she woke from a vivid dream where she stood under such skies with a child, a little girl, both of them dressed in a manner described by Tai in her journals, their hair in courtly style, standing on a shattered piece of stairwell with only a shattered city around her – and she thought she knew what was burning then, but that didn’t seem quite right either.
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