The door of the hut opened with a little too much force and Tang peered inside, his gaze sharp and suspicious above the scarf that wrapped his entire face from the eyes down. Outside, it was snowing.
‘It was nothing,’ Iloh said, in response to the unspoken question.
‘It was something,’ Tang replied, his words muffled through the scarf. ‘I distinctly heard you, right through the closed door. I brought you something to eat, Iloh – you have to eat, you are flesh and blood like the rest of us even if you can’t admit that to yourself. When was it you last slept? What happened just now?’
By way of reply, Iloh lifted a foot and displayed one ruined shoe.
Tang stepped inside, nudged the ill-fitting door shut with his hip, and put the bowl he carried in both hands onto the nearest horizontal surface before unwrapping his nose and mouth and displaying what might have been an intimidating scowl. But he was Tang, and Iloh was Iloh, and they had too many years between them. The scowl twitched, one eyebrow went up, Tang’s mouth quirked at the corners, and before long he could not help laughing out loud, a short sharp bark of a laugh that had as much wry resignation in it as humour.
‘I suppose you’re going to want new boots,’ Tang said.
‘Just patch these, as best you can,’ Iloh replied. ‘I have no need of luxury, only the bare necessities. I can even live with the…’
‘The practical answer to that is that there is going to be a foot of snow outside by the morning, and it’s likely to stay there until spring,’ Tang interrupted. ‘If you intend on leaving this place before the thaw I don’t think that even you will want to do it barefoot. Eat the beans. They will get cold.’
‘In a minute,’ Iloh said, gesturing with the notebook. ‘I need to get this…’
‘Now,’ Tang replied, straightening up and crossing his arms in a belligerent manner. ‘Right now, while I’m watching. Just so that I know you have done it and not simply forgotten about it again like last time. Do you have any idea how much disrespect you are showing to Shao by simply wasting these hard-come-by meals?’
Iloh looked duly chastened. ‘Give me the bowl,’ he said, laying aside the notebook.
Tang picked the food bowl up and passed it into Iloh’s hand with a satisfied nod. ‘And after you eat,’ he continued, pursuing his advantage, ‘you’re going to sleep. Two days, it’s been.’
Iloh glanced at him over the rim of the bowl. His eyes were filled with the affection of one old friend for another, but also with the kind of determination that Tang, resigned, recognised at once as being futile to struggle against. His shoulders drooped.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘At least eat. If I were ximin Chen, you might listen…’
‘My wife,’ said Iloh mildly, ‘does not nag me. It is not her sole task to see to my needs. She is my companion and my comrade. And yours, Tang. She is part of the revolution.’
‘As we all are,’ Tang retorted. ‘But revolution or no, somebody’s got to do it. Give me your shoes.’
Iloh obediently eased the burned-through shoes off his feet without relinquishing the bowl of beans. In spite of himself, he had been hungry; something that he would never have admitted or gone in hunt of sustenance to assuage, but the simply prepared beans tasted like a festival feast. He was scraping the bowl clean even before he had eased the second shoe off his heel with his other foot, clad only in a none-too-clean and now very definitely holed sock.
Tang sighed.
‘There’ll be a pair of socks in it too, when I come back. Iloh, I wish you would sleep. You could carry an entire company’s gear in the bags under your eyes.’
Iloh shrugged. ‘These lean days,’ he said, ‘that would not be hard to accomplish.’
‘Iloh…’
‘Yes,’ Iloh said impatiently, ‘yes, yes, yes. I cannot carry the revolution alone. You have no idea how much I am relying on the people. But there are some things…’
Tang was shaking his head, but there was a wry and admiring smile playing about his thin-lipped mouth. ‘I don’t know why that is true,’ he said, ‘but it is true nonetheless. Your words matter. The people will rally to the flag when the time comes, but they will come because you have called them. The right words and the right time, and there is magic made, right before your eyes…’
‘So, then,’ Iloh said.
‘So,’ Tang agreed. Without wasting further words, he stomped out of the hut hugging the empty bowl and a pair of still faintly smouldering shoes.
Iloh bent to retrieve his notebook and his writing implements and settled back down before the stove. Flipping back a few pages, he tried to recapture his train of thought.
A revolution is not a dance party, or a silk painting, or a comfortable chair, or pretty embroidery. A revolution is not pleasant like a summer’s day. A revolution cannot by its very definition be kind, gentle, courteous, magnanimous. A revolution…
He had stopped there, mid-sentence, when his feet had caught fire. Like much of what he wrote, things that were copied and printed and passed out to the cadres and the soldiers and the people in the fields and the factories and the villages and towns, it was homespun wisdom – he was one of them, after all, a man of the people, born in the countryside with a family that was moderately well-off by the standards of the times, but which, like most people in Syai did sooner or later, knew what it meant to be on the edge of hunger.
He stared at his own words. What was revolution, really? He had been born into an era which fairly crackled with it, one wave after another, a society constantly in its death-throes …or was it just trying to be properly born…? Iloh did not, in theory, believe in the Gods of his ancestors or in the heaven they were supposed to inhabit, but there were times he could see those Gods looking sceptically at the newborn nation that emerged gasping for breath, again and again, and waving their immortal hands over that hardwon life with a celestial pronouncement that the thing was not good enough, throw it back, start again. He had read about it in the books and pamphlets that he had devoured when he had become a young man with hot blood surging in his veins, when he had begun to think, as all young men do, about changing the world – he had read about it happening elsewhere, and how other peoples and nations had risen to take their own destiny into their hands. And he had felt some of it on his own skin, when he was a child, when he was a youth. But there had been many like him, back then – children born into times of struggle and blood. Many who knew all about it, who could testify to it by their own scars. But not that many who were able or willing to reach out and grasp the nettle, to take the choice away from those capricious Gods, to build a nation in the image of mortal man, in the name of mortal man.
That revolution.
The revolution that changed everything, that changed the very nature of the sky that arched above the world, the sky that would deliver the rain to nourish crops in the fields and no longer be sanctuary for the distant and removed deities who cared nothing for the people so long as the temples were swept, the incense lit and sweet, the offerings properly presented. And under that sky, men would be the same, with equal rights, equal privileges, no matter how much incense they burned to the forgotten Gods.
There was a phrase that was the guiding idea for everything that Iloh had dreamed about, had founded, created, or set in motion. It had been there with him from the very beginning, from the day he had been turned away by the village doctor because his dying brother had not been wealthy enough to rate a visit from the healer, from the night on the lake that he and Tang and Yanzi and a handful of other firebrands had been guided into something strong and new, a banner to unite a nation under. It had been a mantra, an incantation, a guiding light. Now he scribbled it down in the margin of his book,