Heart of Iron

Chapter 15

The Buryat village loomed between the trees, a small cluster of low octagonal wooden houses, a strange russified species of nomadic yurts. The tall spruces, their palmate branches weighed down by the snow, shielded the pointed roofs covered with more snow. The nearest roof showed traces of dried grass — I suspected that in the summer this grass was alive and green, a sure sign the yurt hadn’t been moved in many years. The rest of the village similarly retained the illusion of nomadic mobility but with walls that had sunk into the ground and grown roots.

At first, I thought the yellow glow came from some sort of lanterns left outside, but as we pulled closer, I saw that the doors stood open and light emitted from the inside of these yurt-houses. Smoke rose from the tops of most, and the air smelled like wood smoke. My hair and furs and the Trubkozub hat I wore low on my forehead became saturated with the smell instantly. I noted with irritation that I would likely smell like a campfire for weeks to come.

Volzhenko rubbed the horses dry, as the Chinese furriers and I danced from one foot to the other and clapped our mittens together. Only when he was satisfied with the horses’ condition and content they were unlikely to catch some insidious form of consumption, did he let us move to the nearest yurt, which was bigger than the rest, and boasted an especially thick and straight pillar of smoke coming from the hole in its roof. I guessed it was inhabited by… I realized then that I had no idea what Buryats had for authority, but assumed it wouldn’t be a superior officer or an emperor, two authorities I was familiar with.

Volzhenko knocked on the wooden wall, close to the doorway opening. Inside, I could see the central room covered with a bright carpet. A hole in the carpet allowed a view of a fire pit dug in what seemed to be bare dirt. Over the fire in the hole there was an iron rack, where a copper kettle bubbled away.

Volzhenko grinned and winked at me. “That would be tea,” he said.

“Who lives here?” I whispered.

“The shaman,” he said. “When we cross over the Baikal, you’ll see more Buddhist Buryats closer to Mongolia, but here they were christened but reverted to their pagan ways.” He shrugged. “What can you do?”

“Accumulate experiences,” I answered with more acidity than I felt.

The man who came to the door looked short in stature but wide in girth, and his tanned placid face seemed a mere background for his very bright and very black eyes that looked at us with great curiosity. He looked past Volzhenko and myself to Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi, grinned, and said something in the language I didn’t understand. Judging by the enthusiastic response from Kuan Yu, it was some form of Chinese, although it sounded different from his usual speech.

Volzhenko tired of waiting, and pushed past the small round man into the yurt. I hesitated, not wanting to be impolite, but the small shaman caught himself and ushered us all inside. My eyes watered from the smoke — most of it managed to escape through the hole in the roof, but enough of it lingered inside to cause some discomfort.

“Sit down,” he said to me in good Russian. “Have some tea with me.”

I sat down and looked around to distract myself from the unpleasant thought of larded tea. The walls of the yurt rose and cupped above us, in a surprisingly smooth and elegant curve that reminded me of the sweep of the St. Isaac’s Cathedral dome.

The yurt was clean and spacious; one corner of it was separated from the rest of the central area by a partition made of green bamboo, pounded flat and woven into a curtain. Along the walls, there were sable pelts tied together in multi-pawed bunches, and small statues interspersed with tall lacquered baskets. There were dried herbs and mushrooms hanging along the walls, and, most mysteriously, despite the wide open door, the interior of the yurt was warm and cozy enough for its owner to wear nothing but a thick quilted robe. All his warmer clothes were piled up on what seemed to be a bed by the wall opposite of the entrance.

Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi, still immersed in a discussion as lively as it was incomprehensible, settled next to me, by the fire and the bubbling kettle. The pine and spruce branches glowed a menacing red in the fire pit, and our host tossed in a few more, needles still green and attached, to liven up the flames. The spruce needles hissed and caught fire, crackling, exhaling great clouds of resinous smoke that smelled like Christmas. It occurred to me that I had missed Christmas, probably asleep on the train somewhere. It was so hard to keep track of days in a place so vast and so distant.

The host, apparently in no hurry to inquire about our business, poured tea into tin mugs, covered in an elaborate filigree of smudged soot. The tea was boiling hot, and devoid of flavor other than butter that left an unpleasant film on my lips. But the liquid made my head swim and gave my nerves a bit of a jolt.

“Drink carefully,” Volzhenko whispered. “It’ll keep you up all night — this brew is strong; they boil it for hours, you know.”

“I didn’t,” I hissed back. “You could’ve told me earlier.”

“Then you wouldn’t have drunk it.” Volzhenko laughed softly.

“Probably not.”

“You see my point.”

I was about to suggest a glaring flaw in his argument, when the small shaman held up his hand. “What do you want?” he spoke to me directly, and under his piercing black eyes I stammered and burned my lips on the edge of the tin mug.

“I’m looking for the Chinese engineers,” I said. “And possibly an Englishman who was looking for them yesterday.”

He nodded a few times. “There are Chinese here,” he said.

Kuan Yu elbowed Liu Zhi and grinned, the two of them apparently apprised of everything the shaman knew.

The shaman continued, “Yes, there are a few Chinese here, but fur traders, mostly. Did you say you wanted engineers?”

“Yes,” I said. “Inventors, tinkers, anyone who works with mechanical things.”

His face stretched in a sly, wide smile. “Oh. I think I know what you want. You want a factory.”

Now, one thing I wasn’t quite expecting here was a factory. It seemed too distant from everything, too remote — what could they possibly be making here? I supposed whatever materials were needed could be brought in by the freight trains, but still… I realized my face betrayed my doubt because the shaman laughed, leaning back, his elbows almost touching the floor behind him. “There are places between empires where they cannot reach, which are too distant or unimportant to pay attention to. And this is where hidden life thrives, concealed from the powerful eyes but known to those who are curious enough to notice such things.”

“What is built at the factory?” I asked. My only familiarity with such establishments was limited to that distant day in Tosno, where we saw that awkward flying machine go up lopsidedly. Belatedly, I felt a pang of guilt that I had never bothered to find out whether the freedmen we saw that day lived, after the contraption crashed somewhere in the peat fields.

It came like an echo from the past, an answer to some question I asked what felt like many years ago, in a different place, a different life, back when I was a proper girl. “Airships,” Kuan Yu answered. “For Taiping Tianguo. Just don’t tell anyone.”

I looked over at Volzhenko, who clearly was a greater danger to secrecy than my modest person. He grinned back, and I remembered his attitude about accumulating experiences and decided that he was not very likely to tattle. “May we see the factory?” I asked politely.

The shaman nodded. “Just finish your tea,” he said.

Somewhere between the disgusting tea and the piling back into the sleigh it occurred to me that none of us had asked the shaman about our supposed mission: the whereabouts of the horses or the Englishman who had disrupted the soldiers’ lives at the fort. I wondered, though, if agents of Nightingale were still pursuing me… or Jack. If they were following Jack, they would find the factory… unless, of course, Jack had not gone there.

I sat in the sleigh, my heart in my mouth, finally understanding the reason and the nature of Jack’s strange behavior: our separation and his notes, his promises to meet me and his reluctance to do so. I now doubted he would be at the factory he had sent me to.

It was the behavior of a steppe bird, the one that faked injury when a predator stalked her nest, and ran, dragging her wing behind her, refusing to fly and hopping ever so awkwardly, luring the enemy away from her nest and yet never wandering far enough away to lose the sight of it.

I bit my lip until tears beaded my eyelashes and froze, a string of pearls that refracted the light of the low sun just brushing the treetops of the forest. I smelled the fire pits of the village and the frozen spruce sap, and felt foolish and ungrateful as I thought of Jack who struggled and risked so much to keep Nightingale’s attention on himself, not me. I only hoped the detour to the factory would yield its purpose soon, and that I would have enough smarts and the presence of mind to use this opportunity. After all, we were so close to China, I could almost taste it.

The shaman had explained the way to Kuan Yu. He now sat in the front, next to Volzhenko who refused to surrender the reins, and pointed the way. The road was slight but well packed, and the horses’ hooves rang on it as if they were wearing glass shoes.

“There should be a turnoff soon,” said Kuan Yu, and pointed. “Over there, by that log, I think.”

“That is no log,” Volzhenko answered and pulled on the reins, stopping the horses short of a dark heap marking the side path.

We got out of the sleigh. The horses, who already knew what lay there, snorted and neighed. The lively one in the center even got to his hind legs and danced, the whites of his eyes flashing wild.

The dark heap was a dead horse, already frozen solid, its mane all icicles and matted hair, its eye reflecting the treetops — filmed over, opaque as a cataract. Snow had been dug up by the thrashing of its front legs and the deep furrows crossed the beginning of the path, obscuring it while simultaneously marking it. A small spray of blood from the beast’s mouth marked the snow in front of its muzzle, but we did not see any further injury — until we circled the body and saw that the horse was not merely swaybacked but that its back dipped and rose again at a sharp angle. Its spine was broken, I realized with a pang. The poor thing died a horrible slow and thrashing death as it flailed and struggled to regain its feet and failed.

“That was done intentionally,” Volzhenko said. “What terrible bastards. Who’d do something like that to an animal?”

I had my ideas but remained quiet, and I hoped that the rest of my companions wouldn’t notice a deep depression in the snow, near where the faint path turned between two closely growing spruces. It looked like an ordinary hole in the snow, brought about by a falling tree or a jumping deer, but I knew that if I looked closely I would find boot prints — the same boot that used the back of the poor horse as a springboard, the boot that pushed off with enough force to break its back.

As Volzhenko clucked his tongue and circled the dead animal, examining the uneven bumps of broken bones stretching its skin in small, gruesome tents, I looked for the traces of Jack’s possible pursuers. There were a few hoof prints clustered about the stiff-legged corpse, which then continued down the road. At first I wondered at how they managed to miss the small side path, but then realized that there were more footprints running down the main road — gigantic strides that could only be Jack’s. Like a bird leading away and then doubling up on his own footprints, to confuse the predators.

“Well, no saving this horse now,” Volzhenko said. “We’ll tell Kurashov to send some men to collect it — it ought to be good for dinner.”

We helped him to push aside the dead horse and climbed back into the sleigh. We started down the narrow winding path, and I kept looking for other traces of Jack’s passage. I prayed he would be waiting for us at the end of the trail.

The next depression created by Jack’s leaps lay in the shadow between several spruces, and I would’ve missed it if I had not been looking for it. The path was a paltry sleigh track, two troughs winding between the silent, snow-covered spruces. It looked like a path that would lead to the kingdom of Morozko or some other imaginary place in a childish tale dealing with winter and frozen palaces and snow-covered woods. Nothing in those tales ever took place east of the Ural Mountains, and I thought of how even our fairy tales valiantly maintained the European gestalt of our national psyche.

Another hole in the snow, this time two-booted, with a spread-out hand print next to it, as if Jack had lost his footing; beside it — a few broken branches, some snow shaken loose in a small mound. I smiled to myself, already forgetting the dead horse at the beginning of the trail, and thinking instead of seeing Jack again. I did miss him, no matter how difficult I found it to return his feelings.

I missed my letter (confession) too. I missed the clarity granted to me by laying my thoughts and feelings down in a straight line — straight like the locomotive tracks, brilliant under the sunlight — instead of meandering as they tended to do when trapped inside my mind, going round and round, looping like this forest path, barely wide enough to allow the passage of the sleigh. Sometimes we moved so close to the trees that they dumped handfuls of snow on our heads, stuffing it down our collars.

If there were further traces of Jack’s passage, they were too far from the road to see, or perhaps I was too lost in my recursive self-reflection — as my mother used to say, it is a bad habit of mine. In any case, when I looked up expecting to see nothing but trees, the forest opened up and the horses stopped and shied at the sight of a surprisingly large building built of logs and metal, squatting in the middle of a scorched, blackened clearing devoid of snow and life. The clearing smelled like fire and rust, and I tasted copper on the back of my throat.

The sleigh could go no farther and we dismounted and walked across the strange, dead crunch of sand scorched with such a hot fire that it felt bereft of life — maybe the surface of the sun would feel this way. Even though it had taken us no longer than half a minute to cross from the edge of this ghastly clearing to the door of the factory building, it felt much longer — a sense of desolation gripped my throat and made me take quick, shallow breaths. This place was not natural, and it seemed especially incongruous in such wild surroundings; it would’ve been more tolerable in a city. It was then that I fully grasped the destructive powers of mankind, its ability to alter its environment to a shocking, ruinous degree. The realization made me lightheaded.

We knocked on the double doors, twice as tall as Volzhenko and wide enough to let our horses and sleigh through. There was no answer but a steady, low growling coming from inside and the rhythmic thumping and metallic clashing that served as a counterpoint to it. Volzhenko and I traded a look while Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi just shrugged at each other. Kuan Yu was the one who finally pushed open the gigantic door. It opened with a slow, weighty swing, and we peered cautiously inside.

I consider myself a person virtuous within reason, and as such do not expect to ever visit the depths of Hell and any of its rumored circles; but the moment I entered the factory, I felt I certainly had gained some notion of the experience.

The smell of sulfur was as thick as the hissing steam rising from gigantic vats filled with what looked like molten iron and water poured over it from buckets fetched by sweating coolies, dressed only in the lightest of linen pants and sleeveless shirts. I realized the vats each had a distinct shape, and recognized them as molds containing various parts of some large and alien mechanical contraption.

The feeling of desolation that had gripped me outside of the factory did not let go even though the factory teemed with people and shouts in both Chinese and Russian. There were men pulling ropes, and things hoisted in the air; there were complex membranous wings that reminded me of both dragons and dragonflies, and there were wooden hulls of junks. There was an abundance of life and inventive genius all around me, and yet all I could think of was the scorched ground and the dead horse outside.

Finally, one of the coolies noticed us — or rather, Kuan Yu, who seemed to have taken charge of our small expedition, shouted something loud. The coolie replied, and I studied his uncovered head, long hair, and beard. They exchanged animated sentences, and Liu Zhi joined in.

Volzhenko leaned closer, his mouth so close to my ear that I felt the moisture in his breath. “I keep wanting to learn Chinese, but there’s never time or motivation. I wish I could understand what they are barking about.”

“Talking,” I said, and moved away. “They are talking.”

Volzhenko laughed. “What’s came over you?”

I just shrugged and watched two workers stretching animal skins, scrubbed and tanned, over the skeleton of hollow metallic tubes. It seemed to be too small for a proper airship wing, so I pegged it for a rudder.

There was no point in telling Volzhenko that I didn’t like him calling Chinese speech barking because I disliked the emperor referring to my aunt’s anger as hysterics, or my professors calling female students overwrought and irrational. I did not think that Volzhenko was a bad man, but I had no doubt that if I were to try and explain myself, he would tell me that he was just joking. It seemed better to say I didn’t like something without any explanation, and let him come up with rationales he could trust for himself.

Finally, some sort of agreement was reached between Kuan Yu and his new acquaintance, and the coolie grinned at me, showing his teeth, some of which were conspicuously missing. “You,” he said to me. “Are you the hussar we were told about, named Menshov?”

“Possibly,” I answered, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “Who told you? The Englishman who was here earlier? Is he still here?”

The man shook his head, grinning. “No Englishman. My foreman. He told me to bring you right over to him. You’ll come, won’t you? Bring your friends.”

Suitably intrigued, we followed him across the uneven wooden then concrete floor and along a long row of cooling iron parts, some of which were shaped like cups or bells, while others had more elaborate protuberances, like suns and stars drawn by small children or folk painters.

“Do you know who that foreman is?” Volzhenko whispered as soon as he caught up to me.

I shook my head. “I am curious though.”

“Got many Chinese friends?”

“A few, only they are all in China, or so I think. He may know of me through my aunt. She has connections with officials and bureaucrats most everywhere.”

“They all seem to be Chinese here. Or Buryat.”

I smiled and hastened my step to catch up to the coolie who was walking quite fast. “I’m sure we won’t have to wait long for the solution of the mystery.”

The factory floor sloped down toward a trough that carried off the water and refuse dissolved in or floating on it. We had to jump over the revolting green and brown stream flecked with unclean foam. On the other side, the floor sloped upwards, and we had to circumvent a half-assembled ship, that looked half like a Chinese war junk, half like the illfated airship I had seen at Tosno. I wondered if the factory managed to build anything operational.

Volzhenko thought the same, apparently: he nudged me in the ribs and asked in a stage whisper, “Do you think maybe Prince Nicholas had a point about the Chinese? They seem to be readying an invasion under our very noses.”

I frowned, even though the same worry crossed my mind, but I chased it away quickly. “Nonsense,” I whispered back, just as loudly as Volzhenko. “Prince Nicholas cannot possibly be right about anything.”

Volzhenko snickered. “I see what you mean,” he said. “Touché.”

Behind the airships, there were stacks of both ingots and thin sheets of metal, and piles of bleached linen, animal hides, and anthracite — everything, it seemed, this factory could need, amassed in inspired disarray. Finally, we arrived at a warren of what I supposed were offices— small enclosures built of canvas and wood directly against the outside wall of the factory.

The coolie shouted something in which I recognized my name into the center of the labyrinth and then sauntered off, unconcerned about the outcome. Soon we heard quick, light steps, and a man in traditional Han robes emerged from the lackluster offices, very much like a beautiful butterfly exiting its drab cocoon, unashamed of its humble beginning.

The foreman, like everyone here, had long hair falling over his young face. I clasped my hands over my mouth as I recognized him. “Lee Bo!”

He peered at me, puzzled at first. His forehead furrowed but soon smoothed over as — between my short hair and my raggedy mustache — he deciphered my features. “Sasha,” he breathed. “I’ll be damned.”

“You know each other?” Volzhenko said.

“We went to the university together,” I said quickly in my most masculine voice and rounded my eyes at Lee Bo.

“Indeed.” Lee Bo. “Before Mr. Menshov joined the hussars, it seems.”

I smiled gratefully. “And what about you? I thought you went back to China!”

“I did,” Lee Bo said. “Chiang Tse and I both did. But I was needed here. Taiping Tianguo is concerned about Russia allying with Britain, and with keeping the Qing as far from our factories as we can. So we came to Siberia — you could build an entire city here, and no one would ever know.”

“Is Chiang Tse well?” I blurted out before I could bite my tongue. I felt myself blush and quickly added, “Have you seen the Englishman who helped us that night at the club?”

“Why, yes to both,” Lee Bo said. He leaned against the makeshift office wall with reckless disregard as its integrity was threatened by even his slight frame. “Jack was just here — he left something for you.”

“He’s not here now?” I said, disappointed as well as relieved upon hearing good news about Chiang Tse.

“No. He had to go meet some people. He did leave you a package.”

We proceeded to Lee Bo’s office — a little kennel crowded with a drafting table and cylinder desk, filled almost to capacity with folded diagrams and broken models of wings and wooden propellers. There were feathers and crumbled pine needles crunching underfoot, and a small pile of plant parts on the cylinder desk. I saw sycamore and maple seeds, and smiled — I remembered Lee Bo talking once about taking inspiration from nature, and was glad to see that he looked to it in his airship design. At least, I assumed the maple seeds with their membranous, leathery wings were the inspiration for the hand-carved propeller sitting next to them.

Lee Bo went to work shifting papers and mumbling to himself in Chinese. I was curious to see him like that — until now, I knew him as one of the cohesive group of Chinese students, a soft spoken man who was rarely seen apart from Chiang Tse. Now, he was a confident engineer whose training in physics served him well. I was proud to know him, even though the sense of pride was somewhat muffled by a million questions and worries that weighed on my heart.

He found an envelope addressed in Jack’s hand, and proffered it to me. “Take it,” he said. “I was glad to meet Jack — glad to thank him for helping us that night back in St. Petersburg. And now, I have a chance to thank you — without your intervention, I would not be here today. I am glad to have this opportunity to return the favor. Jack said he could not transfer these papers to you before because you were being watched, and he hoped the pursuit has been diverted enough so you can continue your journey with everything you need.”

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.”