The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander Page A

and then he went over to Baba Sung and his party when the republic was proclaimed and made the Emperor resign, and then he made Baba Sung resign and tried to be Emperor himself. And after that, there was none strong enough to be any kind of leader at all—not of the whole country. Even we, here, have a lord who rules with an iron fist over this single province—and raises taxes for himself and not for any government in Linh-an. He took three times the usual annual taxes from my father last year, and there is nothing my father can do about it.”
     
    “Mine, too,” Iloh murmured. There had been letters from home. Things were not going well on the ancestral farm.
     
    “A new force is needed,” Tang said. “Something to change each individual. Something strong enough to pass from one man to another, to spread through the people, like a thought, like a touch of the hand. Something to make them believe something. Together. And then the power of many people, believing that one thing... under a strong leader.”
     
    “You are thinking people are like a flock of sheep,” Sihuai said.
     
    “But that is right,” Iloh said. “People are a flock of sheep. And a strong leader is like a shepherd.”
     
    “If sheep are looked after by a shepherd they have already lost their freedom,” Sihuai said. “They are locked in a paddock out of which they cannot move. They are at the shepherd’s mercy and can be moved from one place to another or killed at his whim. They seek safety in numbers and simply obey orders. What, then, is there left to do except eat, work and sleep—and all for someone else’s benefit?”
     
    “But they are fed and sheltered and cared for,” Iloh said. “What else do they really need? They cannot all be scholars or philosophers.”
     
    “Look,” Tang said, as they passed a cow pasture just in time to see a cowherd armed with a long whip enter the enclosure and the cows, up until then peacefully chewing their cud, got up and began edging away from the whip and its wielder, rolling their eyes. “The people are not happy with having a shepherd…”
     
    “That only means,” Iloh said trenchantly, “that the shepherd is weak and flawed, not that the theory is unsound.”
     
    They traveled on foot, stopping when hunger overtook them to knock on doors of village homes and scattered farmhouses and beg their supper. Sometimes, with a little bit of coin offered in lieu of food, they would go into a cheap roadside tea house and pay for a large bowl of rice and vegetables or a meat broth which they shared between them. They came to no lasting political agreement but they did not seriously quarrel either—they squabbled about ideas until things got heated but Tang usually defused things by laughing even-handedly at both Sihuai’s frosty injured sulks and Iloh’s eruptions of volcanic temper if things came to such a pass.
     
    It was Tang, too, who helped a girl at a country tea house where they had broken their travels. It seemed ostentatious, on the surface, because he carried almost everything that they had ordered for their meal, leaving her to cradle a pitcher of weak ale in her arms—it was outrageously extravagant for a trio of ‘beggars’, but they had had a particularly good day, and were flush with coppers they had to get rid of fast under the rules of their journey. Tang laid the bowls down on the table before his friends, and then turned to help the girl with the pitcher. She was smiling, but her gaze was steady and distant, focused somewhere far beyond the three friends.
     
    “She is blind,” Tang said conversationally, “but she can read faces, you know.”
     
    It was typical that he had been the one to charm the girl, to flirt with her, to gain all kinds of information about her on less than a few minutes’ acquaintance.
     
    “I heard about that,” Sihuai said. “One of my great-uncles studied this art, many years ago. I still recall the stories they tell about how