The wing flapped more now, and on the upward swing it lifted enough to allow me a view of the land underneath. I saw trees and the garrison all the way west, a lone pillar of cooking smoke reaching for the sky, and a Buryat village almost underneath us. Dogs barked and children ran, small and black on the ground, and the sound had grown muffled by the roar of my blood in my ears. The treetops of the tallest trees were now below us, and birds flew wing to wing with us.
I was starting to think that maybe we would survive unscathed and it was even possible we were not about to fall out of the sky and shatter into tiny pieces when Kuan Yu, who was clinging to the opposite embrasure, exclaimed in surprise.
I looked over, to see a long road below us — such a long, snow-covered road winding between the trees that it seemed to define the very meaning of “loneliness.” There were three horses and several people on the road — most armed even though they were dressed in civilian tweed coats. Three rode on horseback while the rest walked. One of the riders seemed different from the rest, and I squinted, trying to see the details from a distance. I soon realized he sat with his hands tied behind his back, and his horse was being led by the bridle by one of the walking men with a ready musket.
As the airship passed over them, a few looked up; they were too far away to see their faces, but the bound man on horseback also had a hood or a sack over his face — when he tilted it up, the uniform blue over his face and shoulders was clearly visible against the dirty snow of the road.
“This is Jack,” I whispered.
Lee Bo’s fingers squeezed my shoulder. “Nothing we can do now.”
“But… ”
“I hope he knows you’re on this airship,” Lee Bo said to me. “I’m sure he does. Do you think they could have captured him unless he let them?”
His words were comforting, and yet I knew that Jack was not a god. Even the smartest and the strongest grew tired, even birds feigning injury grew too fatigued or too careless at times. Careless enough to be caught. And he had been running for so long…
The airship tilted and the people in the road disappeared from my view, yet I stared at the white wilderness below, at the trees and the snowdrifts, at the lakes encased in green ice and the black rivers, fissures in the very soul of the world. My fingers grew numb and my face chapped in the quick cutting wind that sliced like a knife, and still I clung to the window frame, as if I could see the people in the road, and Jack, so gangly and alien in his passive pose, his face blocked. I realized I was used to him always being in movement, often explosive and violent. It wasn’t truly him, hands tied, head covered, bound to a horse led by someone. This was not how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to come to China with me… and yet, he left the documents for me, and he was captured empty-handed except for the Dick Turpin penny dreadfuls on his person. This thought made me smile despite the longing and fear I felt.
“I swear to you,” I whispered into the whistling of the wind, the roaring of the engines and the creaking of the airship wings. “I swear I will return for you. I will follow and find you, if that’s the last thing I do.” I glanced at Lee Bo and Kuan Yu engaged in a quiet conversation next to me, and added aloud, “I swear that I will rescue you, Jack Bartram, even if I will have to miss the rest of the school year.” That was as solemn a vow as could be expected out of anyone.
The airship took surprisingly little time to get used to. Within an hour or so, I forgot to panic every time the engine whined or gave one of the choking gasps it seemed inordinately fond of. And after two hours, I whooped with joy when the giant green tear of Lake Baikal swam into view. Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi laughed and cheered, and Lee Bo did a little dance, restrained by our cramped accommodation as well as his own shy nature.
In three hours, I had grown bold enough to ask Lee Bo to show me the engine room. He led me through the narrow passage in the ceiling over the seating area, to the confining hot area where three shirtless men fed coal to the furnace.
“Who is steering?” I asked after I started to sweat under my furs but didn’t feel ready to go back to the seating area.
Lee Bo smiled. “An engineer,” he said. “The controls… are really more witchcraft than science, and it requires an artist and a man of great intuition to direct it. Would you like to see?”
“No.” I swallowed hard, my apprehension returning to haunt me again. “I think we can go back now.”
“It’s not as terrible as you think,” Lee Bo said. “Your friend Kuan Yu had been learning to fly such ships… although he still has not mastered landing them.”
Lee Bo was kind to me. Yet there seemed to be such a different quality to his kindness than Jack’s possessed. Oh, how Jack haunted me! The sight of him, tied to the back of a horse like a common criminal, being transported like that… It wasn’t the disgrace and the falsity of his crime — surely, he would have learned as much from his penny dreadfuls he was so fond of — it was the helplessness that tore at my heart. I did not like to think of Jack as helpless; doubly so (even though it was not flattering for me to admit) because his freedom and his protectiveness ensured my safety. Somehow, I trusted him more with it than even Volzhenko, or Lee Bo who had his own airship… maybe because Lee Bo had his own airship.
We had returned to the narrow benches, and I managed to sleep a little, wedged between soft, fur-lined side of Kuan Yu and the trembling wall of the airship’s hull.
We saw Beijing from the air. It was strange to cross borders like that — before I even knew, we were crossing unfamiliar rivers and snow-bound vast steppes of Mongolia, and then I slept. I woke up in the darkness, an orange conflagration staining the sky sickly ochre; there was nothing but fire below and nothing but black sky above. For a few happy moments, I thought I was still asleep and snuggled deeper into my furs. Kuan Yu cruelly shook me awake, and I sat up, wide-eyed and sick to my stomach.
Arriving in foreign places is disorienting enough on its own; it is harder by the air since there are no check points and no officials ask you to show them your papers, and no landmarks you can recognize in the usual sense of traveling. There’s only the whistling of the wind and the horrible crackling from below. For a moment I believed that we were dead, in hell, in some other punitive dimension of the afterlife.
“This is Beijing,” Kuan Yu told me, as if hearing my panicked thoughts.
“It is Beijing,” Lee Bo echoed, consternation and confusion making his voice thick in his mouth. “I had no idea it would be like this. We have to see what is happening here.”
I had no firsthand experience with wars, but Eugenia’s stories were enough to impart some expectations. “It is always like this,” I answered, and recounted my Aunt’s tales of Moscow burning and Napoleon, the stories passed down of the Tatars before them. How else could it be? There was no war without burning and fire, confused screaming and the thick flakes of ash suspended in the air, lodging themselves into throats and noses. I sneezed and mucus came out ash-black.
Lee Bo climbed into the airship, ostensibly to command landing; I hoped he would make sure we descended somewhere far away from the conflagration. But just a few moments later, the giant ship whined and tilted with its nose down, so that I slid on my bench until I was stopped by the comforting solidity of Kuan Yu.
“Easy there, young soldier,” he told me and smiled. There was sadness in his eyes, in the creases of his eyelids, the smile could not chase away.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I… I forgot that those are your people.”
He looked at me, curious. “Do you mean to say that you experience pain less if it is not inflicted on your countrymen but on someone else?”