The Embers of Heaven. Alma Alexander

Sung’s ideas are good? Remember what he said – “The nation was just a sheet of loose sand, not solid like a rock” – the winds of change blow us all every which way and until we start pulling together – all the people – until we start believing in a single truth…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       Nine

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