Heart of Iron (36 page)

Chiang Tse mused. “They will have to change trains at St. Petersburg and Moscow. I think we can intercept them in either of those cities.”

“But what can we do to make them let Jack go? He is under English law, and I don’t think we have legal grounds to interfere.”

Chiang Tse pursed his lips. “Nothing the emperor could do?”

I shook my head. “I doubt he would intervene, especially now. We might have to rescue him ourselves — by force if necessary.”

“Or perhaps we could negotiate.”

Aunt Eugenia turned then. “With what are you planning to negotiate, Chiang Tse?”

“With whatever I can,” he said very earnestly. “The man saved my life, and he made sure that Sasha arrived in Beijing safely. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to see him to freedom and safety.”

I nodded that I agreed — and yet, every time I thought of Jack’s devotion, of the consideration and fondness he showed me, I became more and more concerned. It did not make sense, but I was starting to fear him — after all, he was superhumanly strong and agile, and he was not the man one would want to upset. I hoped that Chiang Tse’s diplomacy would be enough not only to save Jack, but to protect us from his displeasure if he ever were to be upset with us.

It was with no small amount of apprehension that I realized that some people made excellent allies but terrible enemies.

Travel by air was a lot less interesting than by train, once one got used to the idea of being up in the sky, as high as the birds flew. The windows revealed nothing but patches of sky and clouds. The usual rules of conduct felt irrelevant as well — at least, neither Aunt Eugenia nor Chiang Tse’s retinue offered any criticism of his propensity to hold my hand, and no one even batted an eye when we whispered and laughed like conspiratorial children. On solid ground, Chiang Tse was reserved and often cold; in the sky he seemed younger, as if relieved from the weight of his responsibility.

The engineer guiding the airship had agreed to follow the railroad tracks below. Every now and then we wandered over to the engine room where the furnaces — red-hot, hissing, and spitting — blazed like the pits of hell. The thick round panes of glass in the belly of the engine room allowed a distorted and bleak view of what was below, and we tried to guess the landmarks we were passing over. We named rivers as they shimmered below our feet, and we pointed the dark tracks of the railroad. At night, we pressed our cheeks against the windows and tried to see the stars above.

We saw the train below in the morning. We were mere hours away from Moscow, and I quickly counted on my fingers to make sure that the time worked out. I did it several times, until I had no doubt left the train below was the one likely to contain Jack and the Englishmen who captured him.

“I think Jack is on that train,” I told Chiang Tse.

He squinted through the thick, greenish glass on the floor of the engine room. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll intercept them in Moscow.”

“Can you land the airship there?”

“I don’t know. Let me talk to the engineer.”

I followed him into the metal passageway, a narrow vaulted tube that connected the engine room to the engineer’s cabin, where the brass levers that operated the airship’s wings and rudder bristled from the walls like quills of some metallic porcupine turned inside out by some great misfortune. The engineer, a stocky Taiping with thick hair all the way down to shoulders nodded at us.

“Tang Wei,” Chiang Tse addressed the engineer. “Do you see the train tracks below? Did you notice a train we passed a while back?”

Tang Wei nodded, and adjusted a knob to his left, making the airship tilt slightly right. “I saw it,” he said. “You want me to follow?”

“You do not have to follow,” Chiang Tse said. “But if we could meet the people on that train just as they disembark, and if we could do it discreetly… ”

“We can do that,” Tang Wei said. “I’ll just need a station and a field. And maybe a town — we need more coal anyway. We are running quite low.”

I wondered what the airship looked like from the ground; I wondered if people on the train noticed us, hovering so doggedly above them — or at the very least, saw our shadow on the ground and wondered at its shape. The airship had decreased its speed, and now matched that of the locomotive below us.

The train soon came to a halt at some deserted unnamed station, too inconsequential to stop at unless explicit orders were given or passengers present. Tang Wei made the airship circle above the station as we clung to the windows of the control room, which were both thinner and clearer than the ones in the engine room.

I looked through the windows as a chain of small black figures spilled out onto the snow, and Chiang Tse pointed them to Tang Wei. “Can you get to them?”

“Easy,” Tang Wei said. “Nothing but fields here.”

As the airship tilted toward the ground and descended, swooping lower and lower with every turn, the details of the procession below us resolved and grew clear. I saw Jack first: they had him in stocks, and I am ashamed to admit I felt a small prickling of relief. He was my friend, I reminded myself, there was no reason for me to fear him and certainly no reason to feel happy that his wrists were enclosed in a solid block of wood with his large, knobby fists protruding above it like two ugly growths on a tree trunk. It must have been hard to walk like this in the dead of the winter, when the wind howled and the ice dust in the air stung one’s cheeks and eyes like powdered glass.

His ankles were held together by a similar contraption — he moved very slowly and awkwardly, as the wooden block and the heavy chain winding about his ankles allowed him only a slow shuffle with steps no longer than a couple of inches. I wondered if he could still leap, if he could push the earth away from him with both of his feet, if his strength would be enough to let him soar even with such an awkward start.

Or maybe his legs were strong enough to displace the entire planet from its orbit, and for a moment I imagined Jack getting angry and hurling Earth into the dark cold recesses of dead space, away from the life-giving sun… I shook my head at such a foolish fantasy, and went to the passenger area, to wake up Eugenia and to notify her that a small-scale conflict with Britain was upon us and likely unavoidable.

They headed down the snow-covered trail leading away from the station — it was almost like Trubetskoye, like so many small anonymous villages that curled up within a mile of the station, all their roads leading to the nearest depot like the spokes on the wheel. A few more years, and my entire country would be like this — circles of hamlets surrounding the beating hearts of the stations, the rectangular wooden platform by the shining rails signifying progress.

The airship touched the ground lightly, like a butterfly landing on a flower; its wings, still flapping, raised clouds of snow, obscuring for a short while the English. They did not try to run — I didn’t suppose they would, with no other nearby cover than snow-covered platform. The locomotive had already departed, whistling its low forlorn note at a distance. And one’s will to escape would surely be somewhat sapped by the sight of a giant metal airship, painted as a dragon, descending from the sky.

I walked next to Chiang Tse and Kuan Yu, their flanking shoulders giving me strength and courage, with the rest of Chiang Tse’s retinue following closely behind, their swords drawn.

I was a little surprised to see Dame Nightingale — she was dressed in a long gray coat of the same cut and fabric as those of the men around her. Only her tall, laced boots with a small but noticeable heel bore any traces of femininity. I almost asked her where she had purchased them, before remembering myself.

“You,” she said in my direction. She did not sneer, exactly, but her voice was icy with contempt. The snow under her feet crunched, betraying her otherwise imperceptible shifting. “You don’t have to wear those boy’s clothes anymore — they don’t hide you that well.”

“Neither do yours.”

She smiled then. “It’s for convenience.”

“You’re just copying me.” I felt a small stirring of satisfaction warming my cheeks when I saw her flinch.

Dame Nightingale shook her head and smiled. “You can flatter yourself with whatever interesting ideas you have, but the truth is that Mr. Bartram here is a British citizen and is subject to the British crown, and your barbarian thugs can not help you.” She clucked her tongue, her long eyelashes casting a blue shadow over her porcelain-white face, spared even by the frost. “Really, Sasha — you should know better than attempt anything so foolish.”

“And yet you got off the train,” I said.

“We decided to choose less predictable mode of transportation,” she said. “Trains are nice, but the very fact that they run on schedule makes it difficult to work in an element of surprise — as you yourself must’ve noticed.”

I nodded. Despite my better judgment, I couldn’t help but feel a deep kinship with this tall woman, straight and strong as a pillar. I could even see her as a friend, should she have chosen a different occupation. “I’ve read your letters,” I said. Half-confession, half-desire to hurt, I wasn’t sure.

Her face turned scarlet — the color spread from her right cheek, as if I had slapped her. “And I’ve read yours,” she said through her teeth. “That fool”—a toss of her head indicated Jack—“had it on him. At least, now he knows that he was leaping and dancing for your amusement to little effect.” She turned away from me, to speak directly to Jack who was surrounded by a tight circle of men wearing gray coats and round hats. “How does it feel, hmm? You make a funny puppet, Jack — so long and gangly and silly looking. Surely, this girl had a good a laugh at your expense.”

It was my turn to flush deep crimson. This was not going in the direction I had hoped, and yet I found strength to meet Jack’s gaze.

He looked gaunter, longer, and his eyes had a haunted look about them, no doubt helped by the deep shadow of the stubble and the hollowed appearance of his temples. He looked back at me, his eyes dull and his face unmoving; then again, his chin was resting on top of a solid and likely frozen block of wood and his bare hands were blue from cold, so he would probably look miserable even if his heart wasn’t broken.

He licked his lips a few times, as if getting ready to speak.

“Careful,” I whispered. “If you wet your lips too much, they’ll chap.”

He smiled then, his lips cracking and blood seeping through the tiny fissures, slow as water under ice. “Too late for that,” he said. “I didn’t read your letter — I found it and I kept it to give back, and she was the one who read it and told me.”

“That was an appalling thing to do,” I told Nightingale. I’d have to explain the nonsense about letters to Chiang Tse at some point, but now was not the time for it.

She sneered in earnest then. “And what you did was right?”

“I read your letters for my country’s good and for the sake of peace, not some petty revenge,” I said. “Really, Dame Nightingale. I am disappointed in you.”

She jerked her shoulder in an exaggerated shrug. “Well then. Do you want to scold me some more, or can we continue? We are on a diplomatic mission.”

“Until Constantine expels you all as spies.”

“Until then. In any case, Mr. Bartram is one of us, and he will have to travel abroad with his countrymen. I’m afraid there simply isn’t much you can do about it, little girl.”

This was too much, the last insult was the nudge I needed to suddenly feel all the fatigue and fear and anger I had been denying myself during this journey; the dam that had been holding my feelings at bay — constructed from pure stubbornness and desperation — finally burst in a starry flash of red. I felt my hands closing into fists and my legs propelling me toward Nightingale even as my shoulder drew back and my arm swung in a wide arc, like that of a drunk and a lowlife. The anger felt delicious.

A sensation of metallic cold on my forehead jolted me back to my senses and I held back my fist, which was only inches away from Nightingale’s face. I saw the mother-of-pearl handle of Nightingale’s tiny pistol in great detail, down to tiny cracks cobwebbing one of the larger panels, and felt acutely its barrel pressing against my brow, cutting a cruel red circle into my skin. My anger could not find release and pounded inside me, like a wave on some oceanic shore, my impotent rage that could not even find a simple relief accessible to any tavern brawler. How I wished then to break that beautiful, haughty face, and the impossibility of doing so boiled in my eyes and spilled as tears.

“Well,” Nightingale said then. “Will you behave now?”

Out of the corner of my tearing eye I could see her left hand rise and motion to her entourage to stand by. “Yes,” I whispered. I had to struggle to meet Jack’s gaze, and shook my head ever so slightly. I saw his fists tensing too, and had no doubt that he could shatter his stocks if I gave a signal; surely he was strong enough. Only he would never endanger us — at least, that was what I was hoping for.

Jack gave a slightest nod that he understood, and I took a very slow step back, eager to end the contact between my flesh and Nightingale’s pistol. My forehead burned where the steel had touched it.

“There is nothing you can do,” Dame Nightingale said simply, and let her pistol arm hang limply along her side. “You are outnumbered, and your friend Bartram here knows as well as I do that if he tries any of his tricks, I will not hesitate to shoot you and your barbarians.”

“Unless we can bargain.” My mind, still clouded with anger, was starting to clear and to cast about for possible solutions.

Chiang Tse, quiet until then, stepped closer to me and whispered, “What do you mean?”

“The ship,” I whispered back. “Surely, you have more.”

“But… ” he started.

Nightingale looked at him, bored. “Dear boy,” she said. “Don’t worry. She doesn’t know what she speaks of. You have nothing we want. Rather, nothing we do not have.”