Heart of Iron (29 page)

“It’s addressed to Sasha Menshov,” the young man said.

Kurashov yielded the missive without argument, and he and the rotmistr watched me intently as I read, as if they expected the contents to appear, by some literary osmosis, on my forehead.

“My dearest friend,” Jack wrote.

“I hope this letter reaches you. I hope my appearance has created enough of a stir to circulate rumors and to attract your perspicacious attention. I also hope that the commander here will be good enough to pass this letter along, and that my pursuers will not intercept it: it is quite a bit of hope.

“For the fear that it might never reach you, I will be brief and remind you of the night we first met. I certainly hope you would keep the same company, and, moreover, appreciate their inventive spirit. The rest, I leave with the Providence, and hope it will be enough.”

I folded the cryptic letter, and looked around the table.

“Well?” the rotmistr said.

“This may seem odd to ask,” I said, “but is there a place nearby where Chinese engineers gather?”

Captain Kurashov did not seem surprised. “There’s a Chinese settlement near the Buryat village,” he said. “Furriers, but there may be engineers too. If you want to get there, you may want to hire a caribou or a dog sled, but caribou would be easier if you’re used to horses. I assume you will be looking for our horses or them men who took them?”

I slept in the barracks — simple rooms smelling of pine, with narrow wooden benches which were about as comfortable as the ones in the train. I was so used to sleeping on wooden benches that beds seemed a half-remembered and puzzling extravagance, a nice conceit but something that had little to do with me. When I stretched out on my bench and closed my eyes, the barracks thudded and swayed with the steady rocking movement of the train; I imagined a lonesome whistle, and fell asleep right away.

Volzhenko shook me awake what seemed like moments later. The dark barrack was filled with dozens of soldiers’ bodies, their sour smell and uneven snoring. “Wake up,” Volzhenko said. “It’s six in the morning, and we’d better get moving if we want to get to the Buryat village.”

“Are Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi coming with us?” I asked and sat up, rubbing my eyes with both fists, the grit of sleep grinding into my swollen eyelids that wanted only to close and get some more sleep.

“Yes,” Volzhenko said. “Kurashov found us a sleigh and three horses, and it shouldn’t take us more than an hour to get there. Are you sure that this is where we should be going?”

“Somewhat,” I said. “In any case, I guess I’ll have a chance to try that Buryat tea you were so eager to share.”

Volzhenko’s teeth flashed in the dusk. “I told you that it was an interesting experience, not necessarily a pleasant one.”

“You’re just mad that you fell for it and now you want everyone else to do the same.” I rolled out of the bed, and cringed when my bare feet hit the frozen floor with an uncalled for thud. “It’s cold here.”

“The sort of thing you would expect in the middle of winter in Siberia,” Volzhenko said amiably. “Put your furs on, you’ll feel better.”

I collected my jacket and the coat from the foot of the bed where they were folded for safekeeping as well as providing additional warmth for my feet, and put them on. I could’ve used a clean shirt, but Volzhenko standing next to me deterred me from putting one on. The reverse corset felt unpleasantly mushy, as if it was welding itself to my skin, becoming some porous and smelly flesh. I only sighed and hoped that I would be able to detach it when time came for me to become a girl again.

The sleigh and horses, covered with felt blankets, waited by the stable adjacent to our barracks. Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi, barely visible in the gray morning light, outlined against the long blue snowdrifts hopped from one foot to the other, their hands stuffed in their sleeves. By mute consent, Volzhenko took the reins, and the rest of us piled in the back of the sleigh. There were blankets and felt spreads, and Kuan Yu offered me a flask filled with hot and sweet tea. Thus equipped, I felt prepared for the trip to the Buryat village, and only hoped my interpretation of Jack’s note was correct. Finally, I had time to sit and think about the meaning of it as well as the tremendous leap of faith he had taken leaving his note — a mere trifle, so easily lost — in the wake of his destructive appearance. Of him staging the distraction — so much like his old self in that — to attract my attention. Such dramatics, however, also seemed excessive.

Volzhenko steered the horses along the narrow road, packed snow hard as a pavement. A sliver of the sun curved over the black treetops on the horizon and the three horses neighed in unison, as if greeting the new day with jubilation it did not, in my opinion, warrant. I sat back and waited for the trees to open up, showing us the village.

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.