Heart of Iron (32 page)

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.

The morning came, bleak and stiff with cold, tasting of ash and burning paint. I stretched and remembered where I was — sleeping in the snow, swaddled in my furs, which, although still comfortable, were beginning to smell of all the unsavory things we had encountered recently. I tried not to breathe in too deep as I sat up.

The true scale of devastation was mercifully hidden by the morning dusk and the curling of fog — or was it smoke? — that tendriled between the campfires, close to the trampled, black snow. I stretched and stood up, looking around. Our airship was not visible in the distance, but the stone walls of Beijing seemed just a few hundred yards away. Last night’s fire seemed to have died down.

Lee Bo stood next to me, his hand with dirty and broken fingernails lightly resting on my shoulder. When I squinted my eyes just so, I could see every crease and every speck of dirt rubbed so deep into his olive skin. “What do we do now?

“The assistant general, one Feng Yunshan, and some of his army are inside the city,” Lee Bo said. “The Qing have surrendered, or at least this is what everyone here thinks.”