Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [107]
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.
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