The Embers of Heaven. Alma Alexander

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