‘Trust me,’ she said, laying her hand over his mouth. ‘I will be better here. I will send word when I can.’
‘Then I will stay,’ he said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Yanzi told him sharply. ‘Your name is on a list of wanted men. You would not last a week in the city – you couldn’t even be with me, you’d have to go into hiding. You’re better off up there in the mountains, leading, than down here skulking in a rat trap.’
He had let her persuade him that she would be all right, that nobody would touch her.
But that was before Iloh had fully emerged as the leader of the leaderless men of the People’s Party up in the pathless hills of the north. Before Shenxiao put a price on his head. Before someone delivered Yanzi and her small son into Shenxiao’s hands. Before Shenxiao broke every rule, and executed Iloh’s wife and child to prove a point – with me or against me, and if against me then no quarter shall be given.
When word of that came, Iloh had asked a single question.
‘How?’
‘They shot them,’ the courier who had brought the news said brokenly. ‘They stood them up against a wall, and a firing squad shot them both. The boy was in her arms.’ He looked up, met Iloh’s eyes, and felt his knees buckle. It was kneeling at Iloh’s feet that he whispered the rest, the answer to the question that Iloh had really been asking. ‘They…it was fast…they didn’t suffer.’
Iloh had turned without another word and walked away into the hills, by himself, his face a battlefield. Nobody dared follow, not even Tang, his closest companion; that grief and guilt had been too heavy, too raw. If they thought they heard a howl from out of the hills, later, a howl that sounded more like a wolf than a man – well, it might have been an animal, after all. Yanzi had been part of the People’s Party from the beginning, she had been there at its birth, she had believed in it no less than anyone else out here – and it had been her choice, after all, to stay behind in the city. But they knew that none of that would weigh with Iloh so much as the fact that he had been her husband, he had been the father to that child, and he had abandoned them to their fate. His choice, in the end; his guilt. Something he would never lay down, for as long as he lived.
When Iloh returned, Tang had uttered a single sentence about the fate of Yanzi, whom he too had loved from afar for many years.
‘You should have taken her with you,’ he told the man who had been Yanzi’s husband.
Iloh had stared at him from eyes that were suddenly darker and colder than Tang remembered them ever having been before. It was as though Shenxiao had killed a part of Iloh’s own humanity when he raised a hand against his family. But he had said nothing. And Tang had bowed his head, having said what he had to say, and had wordlessly taken on himself the task of taking care of Iloh, even after Iloh entered into what they called a ‘revolutionary marriage’ with another girl in the People’s Party, one of the cadres on the run in the hills.
Iloh’s eyes had acquired a strange, hard glitter after the news of Yanzi’s death – the gleam of ice, of cold stone. Not tears, never tears, at least not that anyone else had witnessed. Iloh had not had the luxury of giving in to grief – only, perhaps, the chance to work for revenge.
It was the revolution, and revolution exacted a high price.
A revolution…
The unfinished sentence Iloh had left dangling in the cabin in the hills, on that night years after the revolution had begun, on the eve of its being won, still sat there on the page of his notebook, incomplete, nagging at him. A revolution needed a definition. He knew what it was, he knew in his bones, but somehow the pattern of the words would not form in his head. He tried and discarded a few variants, mouthing them silently, tasting the words he might write on his tongue, finding them wanting. There was something vivid and vital that he needed, something that conveyed the necessity of the overthrow of all gods and monsters.
It was…it would be…
A revolution is an act of violence, he wrote at last, by which the new overthrows the old, where the oppressed throws off the oppressor, by which all men are made equal in one another’s sight.
It was not perfect, but it would have to do.
Iloh was suddenly surprised by a huge yawn that Tang would have pounced on had he been there to witness it. He got up and stretched, hearing his joints pop as he did so, reflecting wryly on the side-effects that waging revolution could have on a man. He was thirty-two years old and sometimes, in his fifth winter of exile, his bones ached with the arthritis of a greybeard three times that age.
Iloh crossed over to the door and eased it open a crack. It was still snowing outside, and few things moved in the white silence in the space between the huts – one or two muffled shapes hurried somewhere with an air of urgency that probably had less to do with the errand they were on than a desire to be under a roof again with the possibility of a hot stove to thaw out frozen feet and hands. None of them noticed Iloh, or the thin ribbon of yellow light that spilled from the open door.
It was these people, in the name of all the people in the plains down below and in the walled cities of the old empire, who had rallied to a dream of a new world, who had helped to raise the flag of Iloh’s vision. The few, in the name of the many. The few who had endured so much.
But soon it would be over – soon…The mandate was changing in Syai. The skirmishes that Iloh’s army had fought with the Nationalists who held the reins of power had turned into battles, and the battles had begun turning into victories. More and more of the enemy were throwing down their arms – or, better, crossing the great divide and coming to lay their allegiance at Iloh’s feet. Too much was going wrong down there, too fast; their generals had been too complacent, too rushed, too afraid. They had committed everything to this one final push, and it was failing. Thousands of men, perhaps tens of thousands, had paid with their lives, but now the prize was near, and Iloh could see the things he had dreamed of, the things he had made others believe with a fervour bordering on fanaticism, starting to take shape before his eyes. This bitter winter of exile, this was the last. He knew that. He could sense it in the wind…
He shivered, suddenly – the wind he had invoked in his thoughts had reached through the door he had been holding open to touch him with icy fingers. He had seen enough. This day, he had done enough. Tang was right – it was time to sleep.
And yet it was a different Tang that he was hearing, the voice echoing in his mind that of a more innocent time, a time when everything had still been possible and the price had not yet been exacted. Iloh remembered, through a mist of memory, a night when he and Tang had sat by the fire and quoted poetry at each other, the scurrilous and the sublime, the mocking and the prophetic.
‘“Oh, but it will be a brave new dance when the music starts to play”,’ Tang had quoted.
‘But what music will it be?’ Iloh had asked. ‘Will we even know it for music?’
‘We will know it,’ Tang said. ‘We will write it!’
‘But who will be asked to play it?’ Iloh had persisted, in a strange, introspective mood that night. It was as though he had been handed a shallow bowl of water, and saw in the mirror of its still surface a vision of the years that were to come. ‘Who will be asked to pay for it? What ancient part of ourselves will we have to give up in order to be granted the music of this new world…?’
Iloh shook his head, clearing his mind of the memories, and retired to the pile of thin quilts on the pallet he used for a bed. He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hand. As almost always when he started drifting off into sleep but now stirred into a particular fury by the memories he picked over, questions rose like a flock of disturbed crows and darkened his thoughts with a blackness of fluttering wings. Could I have done it differently? Could I have done it better? Will it be worth all this struggle and sacrifice