Heart of Iron (31 page)

I opened the envelope with trembling fingers, and glimpsed the pale blue ink with a sigh of relief, felt the crinkling of the tracing paper under my fingers. The diagrams of submarines and faded letters all neatly collated, all the proof that I would need to convince the Taiping leaders… if I were to go to the Taipings. I breathed deep, savoring the smell of dry papers and the trace of lilac perfume wafting off Nightingale’s papers, a ghost of her fearsome presence.

“Lee Bo,” I said. “I need to talk to you, in private if possible.”

Volzhenko muttered something under his breath.

I touched his sleeve. “Think of it as an experience in being unimportant.”

He couldn’t help but laugh, and waved me on. “Go ahead, Menshov. I only hope that I’ll find out what this cloak and dagger is all about.”

Lee Bo grinned then. “Whatever it is, I do not think it is about starting another war.”

I shook my head and waited for my friend to leave the office. It was strange, feeling my trust in someone who had shown me nothing but friendship, so suddenly lacking. But I couldn’t risk it, couldn’t risk questions and secrets. I told myself that it was for his own protection and felt a little better. I only had enough trust left for a single person.

It took me a few minutes to explain the reason for our travels to Lee Bo. He listened, straight-faced, never betraying any surprise. I showed him Wong Jun’s letter, and only then did he frown. “Are you seeking an alliance with the Manchu?”

I shrugged. “I do not want to. But if Taiping Tianguo is just a short-lived government, if you think it will fall before long… ”

“Taiping forces have taken Beijing recently,” he answered. “Wong Jun is a good man and a friend, and his letter will help you if you ever encounter any Qing officials. But why make an alliance with a power that is on the verge of falling?”

“I just want to do the right thing,” I answered, and felt very tired. I looked around for a place to sit, but there seemed to be no space for a human form in this kingdom of fragile models. “Do you think Taiping Tianguo will want an alliance with Russia?”

He opened his arms, as if embracing the factory from the inside. “Of course we would. We would like to be here legally, without having to rely on the willing blindness of that garrison. I hope Jack did not stir them up to too much action.”

“They seem to want to stay as far away from the Buryats as possible.”

Lee Bo nodded and folded his arms across his chest, thinking. “I will escort you to China myself,” he said, “will take you to Hong himself if that’s what it takes. I will make sure that the Manchu never bother you. You bring Russian support to the Taiping State. This way, we both avoid interference from the British, and the Qing will fall for the lack of support.”

“I would like that,” I said. “Will we go to Beijing?”

“Nanjing,” Lee Bo said. “Beijing is still chaotic. Remember, Nanjing is the capital. It’s much further south, in the province of Jiangsu.”

“Is there a railroad?” I asked. “How much longer will it take? I would like to get back to St. Petersburg before the third quarter is over, you know.”

Lee Bo laughed. “Who needs railroads when you can have wings?” he said and spread his arms, fluttering his wide sleeves, making me think for a moment he could fly like a bird.

Then I remembered the airships. “Do you mean…?”

“Yes!” Lee Bo laughed. “I’ve been dying for a trial run, and this is an excellent opportunity.”

“A trial run?”

“Don’t be a coward, Sasha,” Lee Bo said, still laughing. “Besides, you’ll get to meet some of the new Governor-Generals Hong Xiuquan has been appointing. How exciting it is to see the formation of a new state!”

“Rather exciting,” I conceded. “But really, I don’t want to meet any officials, I want to make Hong Xiuquan promise to send a diplomatic mission to the Emperor Constantine, and then go home.”

“Fair enough.” Lee Bo still laughed. “Although I promise you that one of those governors would give his right arm to meet you.”

I shook my head. “Very well. I will have to go back to the garrison to pack, but I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“I’ll send a dog sled to pick you up in the morning.”

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…