“I’ll send a dog sled to pick you up in the morning.”
Chapter 16
And just like that, everything was resolved and decided. Volzhenko and I would report to Kurashov about the dead horse in the snow, and apologize for not finding the others or any of the alleged English culprits. Volzhenko promised to say nothing of the factory, after I swore to him its existence would be no detriment to anyone.
The hussar confessed he felt a little guilty about not telling Kurashov there was an entire Chinese airship factory right under his nose.
“Don’t be too concerned,” I told him on our sleigh ride back to the garrison. “How would you hide something like this? It’s like an awl in a sack. Lee Bo indicated Kurashov simply prefers not to know. He stays away and minds his own business.”
“I always find it puzzling,” Volzhenko said. “People who choose not to know.”
I shrugged. “Only God knows what a man’s limits are. This is why I pray for the souls of suicides.”
Volzhenko smiled. “You do? You’re a strange one, Menshov.” He let the reins in his hands hang loose, and the horses slowed to an easy trot. “And you have friends everywhere — we go to the middle of Siberia, find a secret factory, and its foreman is a friend of yours?”
“I was led here,” I said.
Volzhenko gave me a long sideways look. “Maybe so. Still, I do find it interesting. And you’re telling me you’re going to China on an airship?”
“Yes. A trial run.”
He looked unsure whether he should laugh or not, and Kuan Yu interjected, “He is serious.”
“They are coming too.” I gestured toward Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi.
Volzhenko nodded a few times, thinking deeply. “I suppose the rotmistr will want to know where you went.”
“You’ll tell him we found other travel arrangements; that the Buryats offered us dogsleds and trailblazers and translators, and dogs are less conspicuous than trains.”
“You won’t tell him yourself?”
“I suspect he may already understand more than you think, my friend.” The rotmistr had, from the beginning of our acquaintance, seemed most accepting of my continually extraordinary journey and done nothing to hinder me, only aid. Why he had so providentially taken me under his wing, I did not know, but was grateful he had.
“He knows you’re on some secret assignment, but he would probably like to give you his best,” Volzhenko said.
I sighed. “Tell him I’m sorry. And that I’m very grateful.”
We continued in silence. The stars came out, showing in the jagged holes of black, torn from the fuzzy spatulate outlines of treetops, with gray wisps of clouds curling around them like my own breath curled around my face below. It was cold but still. It occurred to me that it was one of those moments when time stopped mattering: I could have ridden like this forever, or perhaps I had been or would be at some future date, but the trees and the silence and the pronounced absence of wind, the sense of being between — between Europe and Asia, train and airship, between different friends — compounded the feeling of being so very alone in the night, lost in the world in a place where one could be neither recovered nor missed. I thought of crying and imagined my dry frozen tears falling on the bottom of the sleigh like glass beads, and smiled instead. Melancholy could be sweet, if one only allowed oneself to enjoy it. We arrived at the garrison by the time the moon, globular and distended, tarnished like silver, struggled over the treetops and the clouds and looked over the fence, into the garrison, at its dirty snow and soft blue shadows of the stables. There was yellow light in the windows, but I knew that I would go inside quietly, pack my things and leave without saying goodbye.
We departed early the next morning. Lee Bo’s dogsled, driven by a sleepy Buryat, waited for us before anyone in the garrison awoke. Kuan Yu, Liu Zhi, and I left quietly. Volzhenko was the only one to see us off. As we said goodbye, he embraced me, shyly but fiercely, and my heart panged at the thought of how many friends I left, with little hope of ever seeing them again. I was pensive and silent the entire ride back to the factory.
The airship waited for us, and the sight of its membranous wings, basking in long slanted rays of morning sun made my ennui disappear. The wings trembled a little with vibrations of the entire hull, and I heard the engine roar and hiss inside the giant beast.
Most of the ship’s interior was taken up by the engine — as large as that of a locomotive, with a blazing furnace separated from the wood paneling with long strips of copper. Adjacent to the engine room, there was an enclosure filled with anthracite, and many barrels of water. There was a rudder in the back of the hull, and a few levers that rotated it lazily to the right or to the left.
With all the machinery and supplies necessary to run it, and people who were responsible for feeding the furnace — constantly shoveling the anthracite into the blazing furnace maw — there was barely any space for passengers. Our seating and quarters were just a small gondola furnished with two hard narrow benches, so we had to sit sideways, facing each other. There was barely enough space for four.
Lee Bo seemed not at all discouraged by the seating limitations of his craft. “It’s cramped and it will get cold,” he said. “So prepare all your furs and blankets.”
“I thought these things were supposed to have balloons,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not in this weather — too cold. Plus, they are unreliable, slow, awkward. This is an entirely new design; it will be improved with time, I am certain, but it is quite a bit more efficient than the balloon ones, if I may say so myself.”
“It seems so… bulky,” I said.
“It only looks heavy and lumbering,” Lee Bo reassured me for the tenth time, after we were finally seated in the belly of the roaring creature. “But it is quite agile, I swear to you.” With these words he disappeared to take one last look at the engine and all the other flying instruments.
“I hope it is not as agile as he claims,” Liu Zhi whispered. “In fact, I hope it never gets off the ground at all — otherwise, we have a long fall before us.”
Kuan Yu nodded in sympathy, and the three of us huddled close together, abandoning all ambitions of looking dignified.
Lee Bo soon joined us in the gondola that, in addition to being cramped, was beginning to feel downright fragile. “It’s very safe,” he said again. “We’ll be in Beijing in no time.”
I sat up straighter, and stopped clinging to Kuan Yu for a moment. “I thought we were going to Nanjing?”
“I received news that one of Hong’s generals is in Beijing now; just the man you need to see. There’s still fighting there, and there are airships of other types all over the place,” Lee Bo said carelessly. “We won’t stand out.”
I was about to point out I was not interested in risking the dangers of warfare or the perils of capture or being mistaken for a spy and would overall prefer a much more modest means of arrival to a safer destination, but then something whined horribly, and there was rhythmic thudding and roaring of flames. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the shuddering of the floor under my feet. At that point, I forgot I was supposed to maintain an appearance of masculine strength and grabbed Lee Bo’s elbow.
“Do not worry.” He touched my shoulder in careful encouragement.
The contraption started sliding on the snow, its propellers whining louder and angrier. Through the narrow windows, I could see only one membranous wing going up and down in a slow stiff flap, but then the movement grew faster and the noise became deafening. I was ready to forget all attempts at dignity and just fall to the floor and beg to be let off this horrible thing, when — with one final thundering roar and crash of a broken tree — the airship let go of the earth underneath it and took to the sky.