Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [102]
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 light-headed.
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