The Embers of Heaven. Alma Alexander

then, as usual, he would answer himself, just before he sighed and surrendered to deeper slumber.

       The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?

       The light was somehow very wrong. The image that shimmered before her eyes was a memory, a recognisable memory, but it had a golden wash over it, a light that suggested something ethereal, something that had never quite happened, or was still to come…the light of dream.

       Amais could see the two little girls clearly: herself and her sister, sitting with what they believed to be studied adult elegance and yet still managing to be, endearingly and obviously, thirteen and six years old, sometime in their second year in Linh-an. They wore what they imagined grown-up high society ladies would wear to such an occasion, which in the children’s case meant a hodge-podge of discarded garments from Mama’s closets dressed up with scraps of silk and a heap of cheap bazaar jewellery piled on every available limb. The style of dress was somewhat eclectic, because Amais at least remembered the women of Elaas very well, and more particularly recalled the paintings and the ancient statuary depicting the old goddesses of that land and their elegant draped gowns. She had also never forgotten her brief glimpses of more exotic women; veiled women who had travelled on the same ships as them. Of course they – particularly Amais, the elder, but also Aylun who had been told the same tales – were well aware of the sartorial traditions of their own culural legacy, those rooted in the fairytales of Imperial past. In play, they used whatever element of these cultures happened to please them at any given moment. Amais always set the stage, spinning one of her fictions and snaring her younger sister into the charms of ‘might-have-been’ and ‘once-upon-a-time’. Although Aylun used to copy her almost precisely, she had quickly started rebelling and using her own ideas.

       This particular dream-party was a specific occasion. Amais remembered it well. It had been one of the first times that Aylun had asserted her independence and had insisted on putting together her own costume. Amais recalled the smooth slide of her mother’s red satin robe as its too-long sleeves whispered past her own bony, childish wrists, and the weight of the ropes of fake gold coins, bazaar treasures, that she wore over her hair. Aylun wore a strange mixture of a half-veil covering the lower part of her face – which she finally discarded because she had to keep pushing it aside in order to sip her tea – and something that she fondly imagined passed as a classical Elaas gown, a bedsheet in its former existence, wrapped around her chubby frame and tied at the waist with a daringly purloined belt which their mother still regularly wore and which was not really sanctioned as playgarb.

       They were bent over a low table with a child-sized teapot filled with cold mint tea brewed for them by their mother who indulged them every time they announced one of their tea ceremonies. It was Aylun’s turn to be hostess; she was pouring the tea into tiny cups, one for her, one for her sister, a third (as they knew was protocol for any real tea ceremony) for fragrance alone, so that the guests at the tea ceremony might inhale the scent of the carefully selected tea variety offered to them, enhancing the experience with the use of all the senses.