Free The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander Page B

and coldly angry, smoldering with the beginnings of an idea that would one day shape his whole existence. To each according to his needs and from each according to his ability—my brother needed, and could not pay a suckling pig and was therefore not a priority. The world is not a fair place.
     
    They tried to take Guan down to the doctor the next day, as the doctor had demanded, but by the time they got down to the village from their farm, the boy was dead.
     
    Guan’s little sister, Leihong, was next—despite her mother’s efforts to isolate her from her sick brother, she succumbed to the disease three days before her second birthday. That left the youngest son, Rubai, and the eldest, Iloh.
     
    And, just like that, Iloh’s schooldays were over.
     
    If it had not been for his father’s act of charity towards the widowed sister and her child, everything would have gone according to the original plans—but now the farm itself was in jeopardy, the family’s very livelihood. Rubai was four, far too young to do any but the most rudimentary chores—and, even if he had been older, his mother had begun guarding him like a dragon, protecting him from every little thing that could bring him harm. Iloh was all that was left. His father’s edict was pragmatic, and uncompromising. The urgent immediate need for an extra hand at the farm outweighed the potential future requirement for an educated farm manager.
     
    The village teacher actually wept when Iloh came in to say good-bye.
     
    “Of all the boys, why you?” the teacher said. “You had the will and the energy and the enthusiasm. All the rest… they would not even miss it. But you…” He had been holding a couple of the novels that Iloh had been particularly fond of, and which he had borrowed from the teacher—for perhaps the fifth time—and which he had come here, principally, to return since he would not have the opportunity to give them back to the lender any time soon. But the teacher had other ideas, because he suddenly put the two shabby books back into Iloh’s hands and closed the boy’s rigid fingers around them. “No,” the teacher said, “you keep them. In your hands they are a far greater treasure than they would ever be in mine. And if you ever have the chance…”
     
    “Thank you!” breathed Iloh, staring down at the books as though he had been given gold. He would have loved one of the beautiful old poems, too, but he was practical enough to realize that he could not care for that as it should be cared for. He was grateful for what he was given.
     
    The two books were all he had to read. He learned both books by heart, but he clung to them with a fanatical zeal, and read them and re-read them. The stories were fiction, but both were based on some tenuous historical facts, and it was easy for Iloh to think of them as though they were real history, that the events they depicted really happened. One of them was a tale of ten thousand brigands, no more than a collection of episodic stories—but the other, a tale of an ancient kingdom of his own land, powerfully gripped his imagination. He was learning from the tattered novel lessons which its creator had never dreamed he had placed in there.
     
    Iloh grew taller still as the next few years dragged by in endless farming chores, and so did his little brother; some of Iloh’s lighter chores around the house became his brother’s duties before he had turned seven. That meant that greater duties, field work, the tending of the rice paddies and the narrow sorghum fields cut into the hillsides, fell to Iloh.
     
    One of the most important and perhaps the most onerous of the chores was the constant need for fertilizer—and fertilizer was no more than farm muck, the manure of the family’s few animals and the nightsoil of the family themselves. By the time he turned twelve Iloh was charged with carrying balanced buckets of this ‘fertilizer’ from its origins in the house and the farmyard to