Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [109]
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?”
“Everyone does,” I said. “Otherwise, wars would not be possible—if we felt the pain of others like our own, no one would ever retaliate.”
“I see your point,” he said. “War then is just a failure of imagination.”
“Exactly.” I looked at the flames that grew larger as we descended and then fell away as the airship tilted.
It landed with a heavy thud, and my jaws clunked together with enough force to chip a tooth.
“Not enough snow for smooth landing,” Kuan Yu guessed. “The fire melted it off.”
The airship tilted and screeched, and then spun half a turn before almost rolling over and finally, finally stopping. I took huge panicked breaths, too terrified at first to realize my mouth tasted like ash, that ash and cinders ground between my teeth; my lips bled and their blood mixed with that seeping out of my nose. That would require a mustache change.
“You look a fright,