Almost overnight, Amais had been abandoned by her father’s mother. She became almost invisible in her father’s house, with her grandmother’s attention wholly focused on her younger sister. Baya-Dan commanded her attendance daily as usual, but now Amais chafed at it, feeling as though she had been traded, one child for another, one granddaughter for each grandmother, forced to choose one of her two worlds and barred from the other.
The first year of Nika’s life passed thus, in tension and frustration. A barrier developed between Vien and Elena, who appeared to consider her granddaughter’s mother merely a necessary evil, basically handing the child over to be nursed and then snatching her back as though prolonged contact with her mother would infect her with an incurable disease. But as that first year passed, it began to become painfully obvious that fate had played a joke on the family.
Amais, the elder, the one who had been abandoned to whatever destiny her Syai heritage might have in store for her, grew into her father’s image, gently made female by the curve of cheek or the slope of delicate shoulder inherited from her mother and with a captivating touch of the exotic. She had her father’s wild black hair, gleaming with blue highlights, curling riotously around her face, setting off those beautiful and almost uncanny eyes – she was a melding of all that was beautiful from her two worlds, as though she had been a work of art that had had two bright and vivid colours mixed on a palette, and emerged with a shade that was unique and all her own. But at least she had that trace of her father’s kin in her.
Nika was all Syai – tawny ivory skin, round eyes with eyelids draped in drowsy epicanthic folds over irises so dark that the pupil of her eyes could barely be seen. She had the rosebud mouth and the small-boned grace of a Syai empress. It was as though Nikos had had nothing to do with her at all. She was, as Dan had said she would be, far more Aylun than she could ever be Nika, the Elaas name sitting almost gracelessly on this tiny, alien person to whom it just did not seem to belong.
But it was this child that held the spirit of Elena’s son. Somehow, she managed to ignore the incongruities in the physical appearance of the children. Vien sometimes smuggled Nika – or Aylun as she always was in her Syai grandmother’s house – out of Elena’s sight for a few hours, and Aylun too would drowse happily in the lilting tones of baya-Dan’s lullabies.
As for Amais, her own education at her Syai grandmother’s hands – and it had become painfully obvious that it was just that, an education, that Amais was being groomed for something – accelerated. Amais and her grandmother were now reading the classics together, accounts of Imperial life in old Syai, ancient poems inscribed in crumbling books carefully put away in wrappings of silk and waterproof oiled cloth, tales of travel and trade set down by generations of exiles, all hoarded and treasured for four hundred years and passed down the centuries from generation to generation until it came down to this – an old woman and a young child who only half-belonged to this lost world.
It was not as though Amais had no interest in the things that she was given to study – some part of her was held rapt and fascinated by it. But there was that other part of her, the same restless spirit that had made her own mother respond to the laughter she heard echoing from beyond the brooding walls of Dan’s house, and there were days that she squirmed and sighed and cast longing glances at the shuttered windows, feeling in her bones that she should be out on the rocky shores of Elaas’s blue seas, scooping out small crabs from their hidey-holes or gathering clams at low tide. It was in that year, aware that Amais’s attention was slipping away, that Dan allowed Amais to actually hold in her hands a set of thirteen small notebooks bound in faded red leather. Amais recognised them: her grandmother had read from those books while she listened, rapt, to the tales of long ago. The diary of a girl who, Dan said, was not much older than Amais herself when she began writing down the days of her life.
‘These belonged to Kito-Tai,’ baya-Dan said, her voice edged very slightly with an odd sort of triumph, watching the many-times-great-granddaughter of the ancient poetess touch the worn covers with light, almost frightened fingers. Amais was wholly here now, completely caught in the moment; the childish games of the Elaas children out on the sunlit shore were not even a memory of temptation. ‘They are yours now. Take care of them – they are very old. They are her journals, and there is a lot of her poetry in there, too. We’ve read some of them already, on the scrolls – but those were transcribed, for sale in the marketplaces. These, in here, are her originals. Written in our own language.’
‘Our own language?’ Amais questioned, looking up. ‘You mean jin-ashu? The women’s tongue?’
‘Yes, and now you know enough of it to be able to read those,’ baya-Dan said, laying a loving and possessive hand over her granddaughter’s where it rested on the red leather of many centuries ago. ‘I have already read some of this to you. But now they are yours, they are my gift to you. They will be here for you, whenever you want them.’
Amais took one of the books at random, opened it, ran her finger reverently down the ancient page that lay revealed. ‘Jin-shei,’ Amais murmured. ‘She was jin-shei to an empress. The empress listened when she talked, and did what she said. And Nhia’s, too, her jin-shei-bao, her heart-sister…and then Nhia became a Blessed Sage and was given a shrine in the Great Temple in Linh-an…’ The latter was catechism; Dan owned a book about the Great Temple, one that described its appearance, its Gods, and detailed biographies of all the emperors and sages whose niches had been dedicated in the Second Circle of the Great Temple. It had been brought over by one of the later waves of immigrants from Syai, and was not quite the age of Kito-Tai’s journals, but it was old enough – sixty or seventy years at least. Amais knew about Nhia because she had been singled out by her grandmother, because they had read her biography together, because she had been mentioned by name in every one of Tai’s journals that resided in the cedar box. Making the leap from Nhia’s status of Tai’s jin-shei-bao to that of Blessed Sage of the Temple, as though the one had naturally followed from the other, however, had been something that Amais had done entirely on her own. Her grandmother might have objected mildly, but before she had a chance to do so Amais fired another distracting question. ‘Baya-Dan…have you ever had a jin-shei-bao?’
‘I was not so fortunate,’ said her grandmother in a tone of noble sorrow.
‘But back in Syai, every woman had them. At least one. Didn’t they?’
‘They still do, I am certain,’ murmured baya-Dan. ‘It is the women’s country, where you could find a sister in a friend, could depend on her, believe in her and in your bond when everything else failed, know that she always stood between you and doom.’
‘Did you ever keep a journal yourself, baya-Dan?’
‘Not quite like this,’ Dan said. ‘She was special, Kito-Tai. She was a poet. She saw every day through a poet’s eyes. She filled a book every year of her life, you know. These are just a handful of her journals. The rest were lost and scattered, or just gone. Four hundred years is a very long life for a book.’
‘Four hundred years…’ Amais breathed, the eyes her grandmother had thought too slanted now quite round with wonder.
‘That is your heritage,’ Dan said. ‘That is what you came from, that stock.’
‘My mother never told me about this,’ Amais said.
Dan allowed herself an inelegant snort. ‘Then it is just as well that you have me,’ she said.
But the passing of the journals seemed to herald a new phase in Dan’s life. Amais had always known her as what she considered to be old – baya-Dan was straight-backed and clean-limbed, but her hands had gnarled with age and her face was seamed with fine lines under the mass of carefully dressed silver hair. After the child she continued