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.