The Embers of Heaven Read Free Page A

from draperies when they looked about ready to come down on the child in a heap. Amais grew up to the sound of her grandmother’s voice, first the songs and then the poetry that was read to her while she listened, rapt, not understanding half the words but happy to be in the circle of baya -Dan’s world. For a while, she was too young to know how different her two worlds were, the world of twilight and old protocol where she was a sort of princess-heir wrapped in silks and scarlet, and the world of sunlight and sea where she ran gurgling with childish laughter while running from foam-tipped waves breaking from a sapphire-colored sea as they lapped at her round heels.
     
    Amais grew into a chubby, moon-faced toddler with round cheeks and what looked like far too much forehead. Dan had been right—Amais’s fair skin was scorched into angry red blotches if she did not protect it from the sun, and her eyes had not been of the degree of roundness required of a princess of the imperial blood. But the eyes in question had quickly turned from the guileless blue of babyhood into an improbable shade of golden brown flecked with green, and her hair, the despair and secret pride of both grandmothers, was a serendipitous mix of Vien’s hip-length mane that fell thick and straight like a black waterfall and Nikos’s riotous curls, and framed Amais’s face in huge smooth waves.
     
    On this, both grandmothers were in full agreement.
     
    “She is not pretty…” Elena would say thoughtfully, looking on as the toddler laughed up at her father when Nikos would come home from a long day’s work and sweep his small daughter up in his arms.
     
    “…but  one day she will be beautiful,” Dan would say, across the island in her own exotic house, watching the same toddler explore the texture of some ancient brocade, apparently in completion of the same thought.
     
    “All I want her to be is happy,” Vien would sigh, to both women.
     
    Elena would smile at that, and spill a reassuring fairy tale of how it would be for Amais when she grew up and reached out to claim her place in the world. But Dan was both more pragmatic and more frightening in her response.
     
    “Beware of too much happiness,” she had murmured, and had turned away for a moment as if the laughter of her daughter’s child had been a knife in her heart.
     

Two
     
    Vien was eight and a half months pregnant with her second child, heavy and graceless and swollen with a baby that could have been born at any minute, when Nikos’s boat went out one spring morning. The crew waved goodbye to such family as had gathered to see them off, as they had done hundreds of times before, and left together with a flotilla of other boats just exactly the same as theirs, sailing off into the sweet newborn sunshine of a spring dawn glinting on the sapphire seas.
     
    Seven-year-old Amais, who had woken early that morning from uneasy dreams, had been fretful and weepy, and Elena, in order to give heavily pregnant Vien some respite, had taken the child out to see her father off on his day’s fishing.
     
    “I will catch a mermaid for you, korimou, little darling!” Nikos called to his daughter as the sea widened between them. “Now go home and be good for your mother!”
     
    Amais had clung to that unlikely promise all day. When Elena readied herself to go to the wharf to meet the fishing boats at the end of the day, Amais insisted on going with her, wanting to be right there when her father brought the gift of that mermaid ashore for her.
     
    One by one, the boats came drifting back that night.
     
    Elena and Amais waited there as the boats came in, exchanging smiles and the occasional word of congratulation or commiseration with the crews and their families as they straggled in and showed off their catch. But the sun rode lower and lower in the sky, and still Nikos’s boat still had not returned. Elena grew quieter and quieter, standing carved like a statue, her eyes fixed