Heart of Iron

Chapter 14

I wondered occasionally whether I had fallen asleep and dreamed this entire journey, if I would wake up back in St. Petersburg — or even in Trubetskoye, and discover that the last year of my life was just a dream brought on by a too late and too filling meal. I could hope, couldn’t I?

Not that I was unhappy, but I felt so detached from everything I had ever known. I drifted among the strange people and occurrences, missed my mother and my aunt, and still moved inexorably east, along the narrow steel tracks that pierced the heart of my country like a shining needle piercing the thorax of a butterfly.

Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi made fast friends with the hussars. Here, without the compartments, we all shared the same living space, and it felt like a gypsy encampment where people moved from bench to bench, forming temporary alliances and knots of conversations and laughter and card games. We consumed ridiculous amounts of pickled herring and pot stickers and wine; the rotmistr made sure that we were well stocked with food and drink, since the military trains did not bother with a restaurant carriage — or many other amenities. Besides the engineer and the freedmen feeding coal to the insatiable maw of the locomotive, coal that powered its terrible blazing heart, it was just the hussars, two Chinese fur traders, and I.

Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi had fulfilled the requirements of their professed occupation, and bought a goodly portion of Trubkozub’s inventory, as well as bartered several bolts of white and blue silk. I had made a mental note not to leave China before acquiring several miles worth of this smooth, shimmering material in pale blue for my mother, and a few bolts of black for Eugenia. Both would surely enjoy it.

Krasnoyarsk used to be a frontier town, Cornet Volzhenko who seemed to consider himself my friend now, told me. It was built to guard the eastern reaches of the empire back in the seventeenth century, and now it had retained some of its old forts. “All wood,” Volzhenko said as he sipped wine from his tin mug, his legs stretched across the aisle between our benches, and his large boots propped comfortably next to me. “Nothing really modern there. There’s a garrison though, all Cossacks, I think.”

“That’s good,” I said. “What are they doing there?”

Volzhenko shrugged. “Guarding the border, I suppose.”

“They are not near the border.”

“Somewhat near.”

“Not near enough to guard it.”

Volzhenko smiled. I noticed he looked particularly young when he grinned like that — lopsided, showing a chipped canine tooth on the left side of his mouth, his faintly freckled nose wrinkling. I frowned, thinking that if there was to be a war, Volzhenko would certainly be sent to fight and likely to die. Eugenia’s words floated back in my memory — her lamentations for her brother who was killed in the previous war, the helpless cry of those who were left alive and had to carry the burden of remembering the dead. “I’m sure if there’s a war with China, the Krasnoyarsk garrison will be there in spades. When we get there, I’ll take you to one of the Buryat teahouses — I swear, their tea is the strangest thing I had ever seen. They make it with lard.”

“That doesn’t sound like something I would want to try.”

Volzhenko laughed, slapped his knee for emphasis. “You have to. For the experience, see? It’s not as awful as it sounds.”

“Right.”

“Well, it is pretty awful,” Volzhenko admitted. “But you have to have experiences like this, you know.” He removed his feet from my bench and leaned forward, elbows in his knees. “This is one thing I believe. You know how Father in church, how he always tells you about your soul, and how he’s always yapping about soul this and soul that?”

I nodded. “I know, although I haven’t been to church in a while.”

“No matter, you remember. And how they always make it sound like your soul is something you always have, how you get it when you’re still in your mother’s belly and have it till you die, and how it is always the same and unchanged?”

“That’s the long and the short of it, yes.”

“But I think they are wrong, and I don’t care if they say it’s heretical and such. I think that we are born only with a capacity for the soul, and the things we experience and learn and think about, this is what makes the soul up — the layers of everything. I heard there was that Father, a priest in Moscow who wanted to take a picture of God, so he bought this contraption for taking daguerreotypes, and took pictures of everything — his room, trees, streets, birds, just everything around him. And he took them all on the same plate, because he hoped that all these images one on top of each other, all of them translucent, would make a portrait of God.”

“Did it work?”

He laughed and ruffled his hair, his hand traveling a familiar path from the back of his neck to his forehead. “I don’t know; I doubt it. But I think it works with us — we, people, we are just cameras, and every image, everything we see and experience becomes us, becomes our soul, all of them layered and translucent… ” His voice trailed off as his gaze grew remote, directed at something far away, beyond the walls of the train carriage.

“That’s beautiful,” I whispered, entranced by the delicate elegance of his heresy. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher.”

“I took a course at the seminary in Moscow,” he said. “The rotmistr, bless him, persuaded me when I was still young enough to listen that one didn’t have to serve God by repeating the most trivial babblings of his most unimaginative servants.” Like the rotmistr, Volzhenko possessed the valuable gift of changing his diction to suit circumstance. I was starting to feel I was in a den of shape-shifters of a most peculiar kind — those who changed from simple and uneducated bumpkins to sophisticated gentlemen in a wink of an eye.

“It’s hard to imagine you a priest,” I said.

He nodded. “I was going to join the black clergy too — to become a monk. White, the parish priests, are too well fed and too content with their wives and children and being pillars of the community. The monks at least have a greater purpose than keeping their belly full. Monks… one could become an archimandrite. But yes, higher purpose is what I wanted.”

“None higher that the cavalry,” I said.

“You said a mouthful there, Menshov. Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look.”

“Look who’s talking.”

He laughed. “Fair enough. What I learned in the seminary — that was all nothing. I really started to develop true understanding when I started listening to the rotmistr.”

“I know. He is your teacher, prophet, and God.”

Volzhenko did not laugh but grew serious instead. “You need to talk to him more, maybe you’ll understand what a great man he is.”

The rotmistr towered two benches over, so we took our wine and migrated to sit next to him, disrupting his whispered and, by all appearances, emotional discussion with Petrovsky. If the rotmistr was indeed a messiah, he couldn’t have wished for more dedicated disciples than his cornets.

“Sit with us, you two,” he addressed us when we approached. “I was just telling the dolt here why I joined the military.”

“The Napoleonic war?” I guessed. “Lost your father in it?”

“This, my young poruchik, is all coincidental although not wrong,” he replied. “But the real reason is that unless you die with a weapon in your hand — and what is a better way to ensure such manner of death than joining the military? — you cannot reach Valhalla.”

“Valhalla,” I repeated. The rotmistr appeared to be one of those rare individuals who managed to combine a perfectly traditional upbringing with unexpected paganism of the school that greatly exaggerated the nobility and acumen of our Scandinavian neighbors, but I was at least willing to give the rotmistr a chance to talk about his unorthodoxies, since we had a few hours until arrival to Krasnoyarsk.

“Valhalla,” the rotmistr said and sobered up visibly. “Not because of what you think, Menshov — not just weapons or the flying wenches… whatever they are called.”

“Valkyrie,” Petrovsky offered in a reverential tone, his eyes glistening. I guessed that he harbored some ideas of his own as well.

“Right,” the Rotmistr said, nodding. He pulled a wine bottle from under the bench where it fit for easy storage, and topped off the mugs of both cornets. He handed the bottle with the leftovers to me, and I guessed that I was to drink directly from it. “But flying wenches or no, this is not why. You know that in the great hall, in Odin’s hall — and Odin is the one who takes the warriors fallen in battle — they drink and then they fight, and whoever falls in that battle wakes up whole again, so he can drink and fight and die again. In Valhalla, it’s not like heaven, where you get to stay alive forever and play some lute or harp… there, the world is destroyed every day, and then rebuilt anew, so nothing is ever old, ever stale.”

I took a cautious sip of the wine. “But everyone gets resurrected and they’re still the same.”

The rotmistr wagged his thick, calloused finger at me, dirt around his fingernail black as gunpowder, and I suspected that it had become incorporated into his skin and could never be washed out. “No one is the same after resurrection. Read the classics, Menshov. Cannot step twice in the same river, and everything changes even if you go away from home for a week. What do you think happens to everything, to the world, if you daily destroy and rebuild it? It changes, because nothing can ever be recreated perfectly.”

“So what do you want with it?” I asked, wine making me bolder. “You want to be killed and resurrected too?”

He shook his head, sly. “No no. I’d sit in the corner and watch and take notes, on how everything becomes different from day to day to day. I would keep track of all the small alterations, of all the tiny fault lines and cracks that appear from one resurrection to the next. And I will be there when everything finally crumbles to dust.”

“What will happen then?”

“Ragnarok,” he said. “When the new world will be made from scratch instead of rebuilding an old one again and again, from a broken mold that wasn’t that great to begin with.”

“You want an apocalypse?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Aren’t you even listening to me, lad? Apocalypse means that the world ends and we all go live in the clouds with harps, or in the eternal flames with pitchforks as the case may be. No, what I want is a new, better world, and the only way to make it happen is to go to Valhalla, and to go there I need to die with a weapon in my hand. Believe me, I’ve given it a lot of thought, and Ragnarok seems like the only way to a new world rather than a mere destruction of the old one.”

I suppose I could think the rotmistr was simply insane, raving mad, and yet charismatic enough to attract two youthful and foolish cornets as followers. But talking to Kuan Yu had prepared me for such things. When he talked about Hong Xiuquan, it seemed rather immaterial whether he was insane or not, and whether Hong was indeed Jesus’ younger brother. In some situations — and most of those seemed to deal with religion, I had noticed — sanity seemed a meaningless concept, and one had to ask whether such convictions would harm the world or make it better. It was difficult to decide that about either the rotmistr or Hong Xiuquan; although I had no doubt both meant well, and this was more than I could say about almost everyone else.

By the time we had reached Krasnoyarsk, I had developed a feeling that I was still at the university, so many lectures about philosophy and religion I was subjected to. I rather enjoyed the experience, and between the rotmistr and his disciples and Kuan Yu, who was also quite given to theological speculation, my mind swelled with ideas. Kuan Yu too seemed enthralled by the rotmistr’s stories of Odin and the entire choosing of the slain process. Kuan Yu managed to tie it in with his thoughts on Kuan Ti and a variety of goddesses he claimed to honor — deities I was hearing about for the first time. I liked the goddess of the sea best, because she was the one in charge of all waters and oceans, and in my own oblique way, without betraying much of my thoughts to myself, I decided she would be the one looking over Hong Kong and other port cities, and — by extension — after Chiang Tse.

The rotmistr and the cornets in turns argued with and listened to Kuan Yu, and I could sense their minds turning and absorbing new gods, turning them this way and that, fitting them into their view of the world.

“And what about you, poruchik?” the rotmistr asked me when we were about two hours away from Krasnoyarsk. “What do you think of this whole God balderdash?”

I shrugged, my attention riveted to the black tunnel of fir forest we sped through, to the glistening of the diamond dust in the still air — I could tell, with some mysterious sixth sense, that it was very cold outside, colder than Novonikolaevsk, cold enough for birds to freeze in their flight and fall out of the sky like small feathered stones. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m Orthodox, as I was brought up, and I do wish I had more opportunities to go to mass and to light a candle for my father’s soul.”

The rotmistr grinned from his seat across from mine. “You were brought up one way, and you never questioned it?”

“No,” I said. “Why would I? There was never any reason — I guess I do not find myself trapped in a carriage full of amateur theologians often enough.”

That made him laugh. “So you believe in the clouds and the souls and all that.”

“I suppose.” I looked away from the black-and-white landscape streaming past the window, regretful to be dragged into yet another argument I had no particular desire for. “I do not believe that questioning everything is necessarily a virtue.”

“So you prefer obedience.”

“No, but sometimes it is easier to follow a simple path rather than guessing everything about it. You question so much, it is a miracle you manage to get yourself dressed in the morning.”

“I have a batman for that,” the Rotmistr answered but grinned. “However, I see your point. Only God ought to be more important than getting dressed.”

“To you maybe,” I answered icily. “I take my attire quite seriously, and when I’m not in uniform, I assure you I’m quite a stylish dresser.”

The cornets laughed and the rotmistr smiled into his mustache and dropped the subject. The train whistled and steamed and whined, and pulled into the station an hour later.

We found the garrison in a state of disarray and alarm. It was a small one, protected by a palisade of pointed thick logs aimed at the sky like spears. Behind the palisade, there were a few wooden barracks, a training ground, stables and a kitchen, and officers’ quarters. All of the buildings and the snow-covered training ground, its snowy surface broken by chaotic chains of footprints, indicative of panic rather than proper military maneuvers, were surrounded by bearded soldiers, many only half dressed, some armed. All looked startled and kept calling to each other trying to see what had happened.

A few horses bounded across the training ground, almost up to their bellies in powdery snow, kicking up white fountains as they strained against the resistant substance. The horses whinnied and thrashed, silly animals that they were, firmly convinced the stuff holding their legs meant them harm and that they had to fight for their very lives. A tall bay gelding lost its footing and skidded, landing hard on its flank. I hoped it was not injured.

The rotmistr, the cornets and I, all of us bundled in our yards of furs, stood just inside the gates, surveying the mass confusion. “What’s going on?” I said, succumbing to the apparent need of repeated demands for information that ruled the garrison.

“Let’s find out.” The rotmistr moved ahead with the confident but lopsided strides of his slightly bowed legs; the cornets and I followed like oversized, fur-clad ducklings.

The rotmistr approached a man dressed in a pelisse and dragoon uniform jacket decorated with a few medals and officer’s epaulettes; he would had cut a lot more impressive figure of he wore his britches rather than the bottoms of his under flannels tucked in his shining, spurred boots. “Excuse me,” the rotmistr said. “What’s the trouble? I have a trainload of hussars here, and we will be more than happy to assist you if you only tell me what’s going on and what’s to be done.”

The man’s eyes cast about wildly, as if he had just woke from a terrifying dream. “The English,” he rasped. “We were attacked by the English, leaping over the fence, stealing horses… one of my men tried to apprehend the trespassers, and he had his musket torn out of his hands, and its barrel tied into a knot. He says, the man who did it did it with his bare hands. Tied solid iron into a knot.”

“How many were there?” I asked, my heart fluttering with excitement and relief. One thing about Jack, he could rarely be confused with anyone else.

The man shrugged, distraught. “There was the one who ambushed the man guarding the stables… and then there was shouting, and they grabbed horses… no one expected an attack, not here, not in the middle of the winter.”

“I understand,” the rotmistr said, his voice even, soothing.

By the time the terrified horses were caught and put back into their stables (adjacent to the barracks for warmth) and the soldiers had regained their composure and disentangled themselves from the horses’ tack and each other’s muskets, the sun had almost set, and we were led to the officers’ quarters — a grand name for a log cabin divided into three apartments, each with a small bedroom and a sitting room, plus a common kitchen and a dining room with a long rough pine table. The table looked as if it was waiting for an opportunity to stuff someone’s unsuspecting palm full of splinters. Paisley drapes struggled valiantly to disguise the room’s rough-hewn severity, but failed miserably.

We waited for two batmen, both Cossacks, to prepare the table for dinner. It was barely afternoon, and yet the sky had grown dark and star studded— fat yellow stars, spreading like wiggly-legged spiders over the royal blue of the sky, not the pale, cold white pinpricks one saw in St. Petersburg.

The moon was also out — large and peach-colored, with a few spots that looked like decay. It hung outside of the officers’ dining room window as if eager to eavesdrop on our conversation. It was quiet now, with an occasional sharp bark of an Arctic fox or some other small predator, cold and hungry and ecstatic to be alive, to feel the steam of its blood coalescing against the solid cold of the night.

The garrison’s commander, Captain Kurashov, told us the story again over dinner. He had calmed down, and for a while I wondered why a real soldier would be so distraught about the theft of a horse or two, even if it was accompanied by the appearance of Spring Heeled Jack. Surprise must have had something to do with it; but it also seemed the source of his unhappiness was internal — brought about by his disappointment at his own inability to deal with a sudden unpredictable situation. It was the sadness of a man who had been tested and found himself lacking.

I wished I could offer words of comfort, but at the time my mind was preoccupied with Jack’s whereabouts as well as those of Dame Nightingale and her contingent of agents. Anything that did not get me closer to the answer grated on my nerves.

“You have to know where they might have gone,” I blurted out half way through the dinner, interrupting the soothing speech Rotmistr Ivankov had been delivering. “I mean, there are not that many places here, are there?”

Captain Kurashov gave me a mournful, lingering look. “It is a small town,” he said. “There’s a Buryat village nearby, but in this cold the horses won’t get far, even if they are well cared for. I do not know if the man who took them, or the rest of the English, would know how to handle such fragile animals in the Siberian winter. They are not locals.”

I supposed I should’ve felt bad for the horses, but my focus allowed no distractions. “So they couldn’t have gotten far. When can your men go after them?”

The captain’s face folded into an accordion of surprise and concern. “Should we go after them?”

“Of course,” I said. “If you don’t, rumors will spread. You don’t want to become known as a cowardly garrison, do you? Word does get around.”

He scowled at me. “Don’t talk nonsense, young man. I am forty-two, and your stupid challenges are not going to work. If you want to go and look and bring our horses back, then please be my guest; we will appreciate it. We, however, need to assess the damage and investigate how that man got over the fence.”

“You said he jumped.”

He scratched his chin, thoughtful. “A few of my soldiers swear that this is exactly what happened. And yet, he must have used some device — a trampoline, or a spring of some sort, or spring-loaded stilts… ” His forehead furrowed, and I could see the brain of the poor captain working as hard as his jaws, grinding down a piece of rye bread. “He would’ve used something like that, wouldn’t he?”

“I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure he was quite ready for the Spring Heeled Jack exposition. “But I thank you — tomorrow morning we’ll look for your horses… I hope it doesn’t snow tonight.”

There was a loud pounding on the door, and the Cossack batman let in a small, shivering boy of perhaps fourteen, in a uniform that was criminally large for him. He was black-haired and his eyes had a curious almond shape, as if he had more than a small portion of Chinese or Buryat blood in him. Whatever the mix of his blood, it was not keeping him warm enough as he stood in the middle of the dining room, squinting and blinking at the light of the kerosene lamps, apparently oblivious to our presence.

“Well?” Kurashov nudged.

The boy startled, then fell back into a military stance and saluted his captain. “Sir,” he said. “You better come and look. They found something in the stables.”

The something the young man was referring to turned out to be a piece of paper, folded over so many times it was ready to fall apart at the seams. The paper was also soaked with melted slush, and bore a distinct hoof print. Still, I recognized Jack’s handwriting.

“It’s addressed to Sasha Menshov,” the young man said.

Kurashov yielded the missive without argument, and he and the rotmistr watched me intently as I read, as if they expected the contents to appear, by some literary osmosis, on my forehead.

“My dearest friend,” Jack wrote.

“I hope this letter reaches you. I hope my appearance has created enough of a stir to circulate rumors and to attract your perspicacious attention. I also hope that the commander here will be good enough to pass this letter along, and that my pursuers will not intercept it: it is quite a bit of hope.

“For the fear that it might never reach you, I will be brief and remind you of the night we first met. I certainly hope you would keep the same company, and, moreover, appreciate their inventive spirit. The rest, I leave with the Providence, and hope it will be enough.”

I folded the cryptic letter, and looked around the table.

“Well?” the rotmistr said.

“This may seem odd to ask,” I said, “but is there a place nearby where Chinese engineers gather?”

Captain Kurashov did not seem surprised. “There’s a Chinese settlement near the Buryat village,” he said. “Furriers, but there may be engineers too. If you want to get there, you may want to hire a caribou or a dog sled, but caribou would be easier if you’re used to horses. I assume you will be looking for our horses or them men who took them?”

I slept in the barracks — simple rooms smelling of pine, with narrow wooden benches which were about as comfortable as the ones in the train. I was so used to sleeping on wooden benches that beds seemed a half-remembered and puzzling extravagance, a nice conceit but something that had little to do with me. When I stretched out on my bench and closed my eyes, the barracks thudded and swayed with the steady rocking movement of the train; I imagined a lonesome whistle, and fell asleep right away.

Volzhenko shook me awake what seemed like moments later. The dark barrack was filled with dozens of soldiers’ bodies, their sour smell and uneven snoring. “Wake up,” Volzhenko said. “It’s six in the morning, and we’d better get moving if we want to get to the Buryat village.”

“Are Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi coming with us?” I asked and sat up, rubbing my eyes with both fists, the grit of sleep grinding into my swollen eyelids that wanted only to close and get some more sleep.

“Yes,” Volzhenko said. “Kurashov found us a sleigh and three horses, and it shouldn’t take us more than an hour to get there. Are you sure that this is where we should be going?”

“Somewhat,” I said. “In any case, I guess I’ll have a chance to try that Buryat tea you were so eager to share.”

Volzhenko’s teeth flashed in the dusk. “I told you that it was an interesting experience, not necessarily a pleasant one.”

“You’re just mad that you fell for it and now you want everyone else to do the same.” I rolled out of the bed, and cringed when my bare feet hit the frozen floor with an uncalled for thud. “It’s cold here.”

“The sort of thing you would expect in the middle of winter in Siberia,” Volzhenko said amiably. “Put your furs on, you’ll feel better.”

I collected my jacket and the coat from the foot of the bed where they were folded for safekeeping as well as providing additional warmth for my feet, and put them on. I could’ve used a clean shirt, but Volzhenko standing next to me deterred me from putting one on. The reverse corset felt unpleasantly mushy, as if it was welding itself to my skin, becoming some porous and smelly flesh. I only sighed and hoped that I would be able to detach it when time came for me to become a girl again.

The sleigh and horses, covered with felt blankets, waited by the stable adjacent to our barracks. Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi, barely visible in the gray morning light, outlined against the long blue snowdrifts hopped from one foot to the other, their hands stuffed in their sleeves. By mute consent, Volzhenko took the reins, and the rest of us piled in the back of the sleigh. There were blankets and felt spreads, and Kuan Yu offered me a flask filled with hot and sweet tea. Thus equipped, I felt prepared for the trip to the Buryat village, and only hoped my interpretation of Jack’s note was correct. Finally, I had time to sit and think about the meaning of it as well as the tremendous leap of faith he had taken leaving his note — a mere trifle, so easily lost — in the wake of his destructive appearance. Of him staging the distraction — so much like his old self in that — to attract my attention. Such dramatics, however, also seemed excessive.

Volzhenko steered the horses along the narrow road, packed snow hard as a pavement. A sliver of the sun curved over the black treetops on the horizon and the three horses neighed in unison, as if greeting the new day with jubilation it did not, in my opinion, warrant. I sat back and waited for the trees to open up, showing us the village.