Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [103]
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 ill-fated 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