Heart of Iron

Chapter 16

And just like that, everything was resolved and decided. Volzhenko and I would report to Kurashov about the dead horse in the snow, and apologize for not finding the others or any of the alleged English culprits. Volzhenko promised to say nothing of the factory, after I swore to him its existence would be no detriment to anyone.

The hussar confessed he felt a little guilty about not telling Kurashov there was an entire Chinese airship factory right under his nose.

“Don’t be too concerned,” I told him on our sleigh ride back to the garrison. “How would you hide something like this? It’s like an awl in a sack. Lee Bo indicated Kurashov simply prefers not to know. He stays away and minds his own business.”

“I always find it puzzling,” Volzhenko said. “People who choose not to know.”

I shrugged. “Only God knows what a man’s limits are. This is why I pray for the souls of suicides.”

Volzhenko smiled. “You do? You’re a strange one, Menshov.” He let the reins in his hands hang loose, and the horses slowed to an easy trot. “And you have friends everywhere — we go to the middle of Siberia, find a secret factory, and its foreman is a friend of yours?”

“I was led here,” I said.

Volzhenko gave me a long sideways look. “Maybe so. Still, I do find it interesting. And you’re telling me you’re going to China on an airship?”

“Yes. A trial run.”

He looked unsure whether he should laugh or not, and Kuan Yu interjected, “He is serious.”

“They are coming too.” I gestured toward Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi.

Volzhenko nodded a few times, thinking deeply. “I suppose the rotmistr will want to know where you went.”

“You’ll tell him we found other travel arrangements; that the Buryats offered us dogsleds and trailblazers and translators, and dogs are less conspicuous than trains.”

“You won’t tell him yourself?”

“I suspect he may already understand more than you think, my friend.” The rotmistr had, from the beginning of our acquaintance, seemed most accepting of my continually extraordinary journey and done nothing to hinder me, only aid. Why he had so providentially taken me under his wing, I did not know, but was grateful he had.

“He knows you’re on some secret assignment, but he would probably like to give you his best,” Volzhenko said.

I sighed. “Tell him I’m sorry. And that I’m very grateful.”

We continued in silence. The stars came out, showing in the jagged holes of black, torn from the fuzzy spatulate outlines of treetops, with gray wisps of clouds curling around them like my own breath curled around my face below. It was cold but still. It occurred to me that it was one of those moments when time stopped mattering: I could have ridden like this forever, or perhaps I had been or would be at some future date, but the trees and the silence and the pronounced absence of wind, the sense of being between — between Europe and Asia, train and airship, between different friends — compounded the feeling of being so very alone in the night, lost in the world in a place where one could be neither recovered nor missed. I thought of crying and imagined my dry frozen tears falling on the bottom of the sleigh like glass beads, and smiled instead. Melancholy could be sweet, if one only allowed oneself to enjoy it. We arrived at the garrison by the time the moon, globular and distended, tarnished like silver, struggled over the treetops and the clouds and looked over the fence, into the garrison, at its dirty snow and soft blue shadows of the stables. There was yellow light in the windows, but I knew that I would go inside quietly, pack my things and leave without saying goodbye.

We departed early the next morning. Lee Bo’s dogsled, driven by a sleepy Buryat, waited for us before anyone in the garrison awoke. Kuan Yu, Liu Zhi, and I left quietly. Volzhenko was the only one to see us off. As we said goodbye, he embraced me, shyly but fiercely, and my heart panged at the thought of how many friends I left, with little hope of ever seeing them again. I was pensive and silent the entire ride back to the factory.

The airship waited for us, and the sight of its membranous wings, basking in long slanted rays of morning sun made my ennui disappear. The wings trembled a little with vibrations of the entire hull, and I heard the engine roar and hiss inside the giant beast.

Most of the ship’s interior was taken up by the engine — as large as that of a locomotive, with a blazing furnace separated from the wood paneling with long strips of copper. Adjacent to the engine room, there was an enclosure filled with anthracite, and many barrels of water. There was a rudder in the back of the hull, and a few levers that rotated it lazily to the right or to the left.

With all the machinery and supplies necessary to run it, and people who were responsible for feeding the furnace — constantly shoveling the anthracite into the blazing furnace maw — there was barely any space for passengers. Our seating and quarters were just a small gondola furnished with two hard narrow benches, so we had to sit sideways, facing each other. There was barely enough space for four.

Lee Bo seemed not at all discouraged by the seating limitations of his craft. “It’s cramped and it will get cold,” he said. “So prepare all your furs and blankets.”

“I thought these things were supposed to have balloons,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not in this weather — too cold. Plus, they are unreliable, slow, awkward. This is an entirely new design; it will be improved with time, I am certain, but it is quite a bit more efficient than the balloon ones, if I may say so myself.”

“It seems so… bulky,” I said.

“It only looks heavy and lumbering,” Lee Bo reassured me for the tenth time, after we were finally seated in the belly of the roaring creature. “But it is quite agile, I swear to you.” With these words he disappeared to take one last look at the engine and all the other flying instruments.

“I hope it is not as agile as he claims,” Liu Zhi whispered. “In fact, I hope it never gets off the ground at all — otherwise, we have a long fall before us.”

Kuan Yu nodded in sympathy, and the three of us huddled close together, abandoning all ambitions of looking dignified.

Lee Bo soon joined us in the gondola that, in addition to being cramped, was beginning to feel downright fragile. “It’s very safe,” he said again. “We’ll be in Beijing in no time.”

I sat up straighter, and stopped clinging to Kuan Yu for a moment. “I thought we were going to Nanjing?”

“I received news that one of Hong’s generals is in Beijing now; just the man you need to see. There’s still fighting there, and there are airships of other types all over the place,” Lee Bo said carelessly. “We won’t stand out.”

I was about to point out I was not interested in risking the dangers of warfare or the perils of capture or being mistaken for a spy and would overall prefer a much more modest means of arrival to a safer destination, but then something whined horribly, and there was rhythmic thudding and roaring of flames. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the shuddering of the floor under my feet. At that point, I forgot I was supposed to maintain an appearance of masculine strength and grabbed Lee Bo’s elbow.

“Do not worry.” He touched my shoulder in careful encouragement.

The contraption started sliding on the snow, its propellers whining louder and angrier. Through the narrow windows, I could see only one membranous wing going up and down in a slow stiff flap, but then the movement grew faster and the noise became deafening. I was ready to forget all attempts at dignity and just fall to the floor and beg to be let off this horrible thing, when — with one final thundering roar and crash of a broken tree — the airship let go of the earth underneath it and took to the sky.

The wing flapped more now, and on the upward swing it lifted enough to allow me a view of the land underneath. I saw trees and the garrison all the way west, a lone pillar of cooking smoke reaching for the sky, and a Buryat village almost underneath us. Dogs barked and children ran, small and black on the ground, and the sound had grown muffled by the roar of my blood in my ears. The treetops of the tallest trees were now below us, and birds flew wing to wing with us.

I was starting to think that maybe we would survive unscathed and it was even possible we were not about to fall out of the sky and shatter into tiny pieces when Kuan Yu, who was clinging to the opposite embrasure, exclaimed in surprise.

I looked over, to see a long road below us — such a long, snow-covered road winding between the trees that it seemed to define the very meaning of “loneliness.” There were three horses and several people on the road — most armed even though they were dressed in civilian tweed coats. Three rode on horseback while the rest walked. One of the riders seemed different from the rest, and I squinted, trying to see the details from a distance. I soon realized he sat with his hands tied behind his back, and his horse was being led by the bridle by one of the walking men with a ready musket.

As the airship passed over them, a few looked up; they were too far away to see their faces, but the bound man on horseback also had a hood or a sack over his face — when he tilted it up, the uniform blue over his face and shoulders was clearly visible against the dirty snow of the road.

“This is Jack,” I whispered.

Lee Bo’s fingers squeezed my shoulder. “Nothing we can do now.”

“But… ”

“I hope he knows you’re on this airship,” Lee Bo said to me. “I’m sure he does. Do you think they could have captured him unless he let them?”

His words were comforting, and yet I knew that Jack was not a god. Even the smartest and the strongest grew tired, even birds feigning injury grew too fatigued or too careless at times. Careless enough to be caught. And he had been running for so long…

The airship tilted and the people in the road disappeared from my view, yet I stared at the white wilderness below, at the trees and the snowdrifts, at the lakes encased in green ice and the black rivers, fissures in the very soul of the world. My fingers grew numb and my face chapped in the quick cutting wind that sliced like a knife, and still I clung to the window frame, as if I could see the people in the road, and Jack, so gangly and alien in his passive pose, his face blocked. I realized I was used to him always being in movement, often explosive and violent. It wasn’t truly him, hands tied, head covered, bound to a horse led by someone. This was not how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to come to China with me… and yet, he left the documents for me, and he was captured empty-handed except for the Dick Turpin penny dreadfuls on his person. This thought made me smile despite the longing and fear I felt.

“I swear to you,” I whispered into the whistling of the wind, the roaring of the engines and the creaking of the airship wings. “I swear I will return for you. I will follow and find you, if that’s the last thing I do.” I glanced at Lee Bo and Kuan Yu engaged in a quiet conversation next to me, and added aloud, “I swear that I will rescue you, Jack Bartram, even if I will have to miss the rest of the school year.” That was as solemn a vow as could be expected out of anyone.

The airship took surprisingly little time to get used to. Within an hour or so, I forgot to panic every time the engine whined or gave one of the choking gasps it seemed inordinately fond of. And after two hours, I whooped with joy when the giant green tear of Lake Baikal swam into view. Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi laughed and cheered, and Lee Bo did a little dance, restrained by our cramped accommodation as well as his own shy nature.

In three hours, I had grown bold enough to ask Lee Bo to show me the engine room. He led me through the narrow passage in the ceiling over the seating area, to the confining hot area where three shirtless men fed coal to the furnace.

“Who is steering?” I asked after I started to sweat under my furs but didn’t feel ready to go back to the seating area.

Lee Bo smiled. “An engineer,” he said. “The controls… are really more witchcraft than science, and it requires an artist and a man of great intuition to direct it. Would you like to see?”

“No.” I swallowed hard, my apprehension returning to haunt me again. “I think we can go back now.”

“It’s not as terrible as you think,” Lee Bo said. “Your friend Kuan Yu had been learning to fly such ships… although he still has not mastered landing them.”

Lee Bo was kind to me. Yet there seemed to be such a different quality to his kindness than Jack’s possessed. Oh, how Jack haunted me! The sight of him, tied to the back of a horse like a common criminal, being transported like that… It wasn’t the disgrace and the falsity of his crime — surely, he would have learned as much from his penny dreadfuls he was so fond of — it was the helplessness that tore at my heart. I did not like to think of Jack as helpless; doubly so (even though it was not flattering for me to admit) because his freedom and his protectiveness ensured my safety. Somehow, I trusted him more with it than even Volzhenko, or Lee Bo who had his own airship… maybe because Lee Bo had his own airship.

We had returned to the narrow benches, and I managed to sleep a little, wedged between soft, fur-lined side of Kuan Yu and the trembling wall of the airship’s hull.

We saw Beijing from the air. It was strange to cross borders like that — before I even knew, we were crossing unfamiliar rivers and snow-bound vast steppes of Mongolia, and then I slept. I woke up in the darkness, an orange conflagration staining the sky sickly ochre; there was nothing but fire below and nothing but black sky above. For a few happy moments, I thought I was still asleep and snuggled deeper into my furs. Kuan Yu cruelly shook me awake, and I sat up, wide-eyed and sick to my stomach.

Arriving in foreign places is disorienting enough on its own; it is harder by the air since there are no check points and no officials ask you to show them your papers, and no landmarks you can recognize in the usual sense of traveling. There’s only the whistling of the wind and the horrible crackling from below. For a moment I believed that we were dead, in hell, in some other punitive dimension of the afterlife.

“This is Beijing,” Kuan Yu told me, as if hearing my panicked thoughts.

“It is Beijing,” Lee Bo echoed, consternation and confusion making his voice thick in his mouth. “I had no idea it would be like this. We have to see what is happening here.”

I had no firsthand experience with wars, but Eugenia’s stories were enough to impart some expectations. “It is always like this,” I answered, and recounted my Aunt’s tales of Moscow burning and Napoleon, the stories passed down of the Tatars before them. How else could it be? There was no war without burning and fire, confused screaming and the thick flakes of ash suspended in the air, lodging themselves into throats and noses. I sneezed and mucus came out ash-black.

Lee Bo climbed into the airship, ostensibly to command landing; I hoped he would make sure we descended somewhere far away from the conflagration. But just a few moments later, the giant ship whined and tilted with its nose down, so that I slid on my bench until I was stopped by the comforting solidity of Kuan Yu.

“Easy there, young soldier,” he told me and smiled. There was sadness in his eyes, in the creases of his eyelids, the smile could not chase away.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I… I forgot that those are your people.”

He looked at me, curious. “Do you mean to say that you experience pain less if it is not inflicted on your countrymen but on someone else?”

“Everyone does,” I said. “Otherwise, wars would not be possible — if we felt the pain of others like our own, no one would ever retaliate.”

“I see your point,” he said. “War then is just a failure of imagination.”

“Exactly.” I looked at the flames that grew larger as we descended and then fell away as the airship tilted.

It landed with a heavy thud, and my jaws clunked together with enough force to chip a tooth.

“Not enough snow for smooth landing,” Kuan Yu guessed. “The fire melted it off.”

The airship tilted and screeched, and then spun half a turn before almost rolling over and finally, finally stopping. I took huge panicked breaths, too terrified at first to realize my mouth tasted like ash, that ash and cinders ground between my teeth; my lips bled and their blood mixed with that seeping out of my nose. That would require a mustache change.

“You look a fright,” Liu Zhi informed me as soon as the three of us disentangled ourselves from each other and stood on shaky legs.

I licked my lips, tasting ash and blood and metal. I then touched my nose: it was not broken, so I attributed the bleeding to the sudden change in altitude.

We tumbled out onto a flat patch of dirty snow and scraped sand. I grabbed a handful of snow, not caring how filthy, and pressed it to the bridge of my nose to stop the bleeding. Throughout, I kept a death hold on my satchel, not letting it go more of a second nature by now than trying to not get hurt. I wondered to myself if any dedication to any endeavor required simply letting go of the fear of death. I decided to finish that thought at a better time, or at least when finishing it would not make me shake and cry with fear.

Lee Bo and the men from the engine compartment, along with a tall, broad-shouldered Buryat (probably the engineer) joined us, and our small group had a brief but animated discussion what to do next.

“We need to find some officials,” I said in English.

One of the coolies snorted. “And I would prefer to keep as far away as possible from any officials. Why do you think you’re more important than us?”

Lee Bo raised a pacifying hand the moment he saw the look on my face — I supposed it was not pretty, with all the blood and the matted mustache. “You are free to go,” he said to the men. “As long as you know what you’re doing. We, however, need to think of the fates of countries, not just of our own hides.”

“That was too harsh,” Kuan Yu said, but Lee Bo paid him no mind.

Lee Bo waved his hand rather imperiously, and explained that everyone could do whatever he wanted, he really did not care one way or another, but he had to get me to a Taiping official and he would rather do that than stand around arguing.

After that, Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi followed us. The coolies and the engineer turned away from the burning city. I hoped they would be safe. We walked toward the orange light burning up half the sky.

We came to a large, sprawling aggregate of campfires and tents, overturned carts and oxen that lowed at our approach and then fell asleep again. I assumed that it was an encampment of the attacking Taipings, and puzzled at what we were doing here — I wanted officials, not generals. Then it occurred to me that if they were successful, generals would likely be in control of Beijing. This is why Lee Bo decided to stop there instead of going to any of the more distant and southern provinces. I sighed and followed, hoping that the Taiping generals would not be too vicious.

Despite the presence of Kuan Yu, Liu Zhi and Lee Bo, things got very confusing very quickly. Even though the Taipings wore their hair long — or at least they were supposed to — quite a few of them were new enough to still have it short, and some, who just joined, still had their queues. The men with these varied haircuts slept around the fires, while others sat, awake, talking or eating.

To my surprise, there were a few women among them, none of who looked like camp followers — they laughed and talked among themselves, and one of them, a girl of maybe sixteen, stood by one of the larger fires, leaning on a musket that seemed to be as tall as she. I stopped for a bit to smell the snow and the char, and the warm musk of human skin, and to look at the girl, at her dark face and the black crescents of eyebrows mirroring the eyes below them, and the reverse curve of her mouth. I envied that girl because she was not wearing man’s clothing — as far as I could tell, she did not have to.

However, there didn’t seem to be any generals in sight, and soon we ventured closer to the burning city, to the open area outside the city wall, where ash fell like snow. I tried to keep my eyes on the walls and the buildings beyond them, afraid to look at the ground lest I discove dead bodies. But there was only softness of ash under my feet, and the supportive hand of Lee Bo on my elbow.

We walked in circles from one campfire to the next, and I had to rely on Lee Bo to ask questions; Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi joined his conversations sometimes, but remained silent otherwise, and it occurred to me that they were tired.

“Let’s stop,” I told Lee Bo after a while. “I’m tired — it’s like trekking through the purgatory.”

“You want to rest?” he asked.

I nodded at Kuan Yu.

We settled at the nearest fire. A few men gave me sideways looks and Lee Bo explained they were not used to foreigners to begin with, and suspicious of them after the Opium War. I nodded that I understood, but doubted I was cutting an intimidating figure with my blood-smeared face and constant yawning.

Lee Bo engaged some of the soldiers in conversation, and since I did not understand their words, I listened to the broken rhythm of their speech and studied their appearance in the uneven firelight. They all seemed not soldiers but peasants, with their long clothes made of unbleached rough fabric and shoes that were barely anything more elaborate than foot wrappings made of the same cloth as the rest of their attire. Their long unbraided hair and dark faces gave them a wild and untamed appearance, and for a while I thought of my dead papa who I hardly even remembered. I thought of his uprising and of how much more dignified it was — uniformed officers and well fed, well-cared for horses, their formations and their gracious riding into Senate Square, the cannons, the marching soldiers…

The men around the fire seemed a mob to me, as indistinct from one another as the freedmen in the factories of St. Petersburg, as the peasants who worked Eugenia’s fields. I did not mention it to Lee Bo, of course, but they looked not like masters of destiny but its toys, tossed about in the waves of circumstance. And yet, I could not help but think about them in the same way I thought about my father and his co-conspirators, and I found my brain’s insistence on finding this unlikely kinship quite irritating.

The droning of the voices soon made my eyelids fall closed, and I let the memory of the airship’s whining drown out the rest of the sounds. I dreamed of falling and then I dreamed of being my dead Uncle Pavel, miraculously alive in 1825, when he (I) rode into Senate Square side by side with Lee Bo, both of us dressed as Chinese peasants and holding our sabers high, high enough to reflect the rising sun and the orange glow of the burning city that stood unknowable and phantasmagoric in my dream.