Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [110]
I licked my lips, tasting ash and blood and metal. I then touched my nose: it was not broken, so I attributed the bleeding to the sudden change in altitude.
We tumbled out onto a flat patch of dirty snow and scraped sand. I grabbed a handful of snow, not caring how filthy, and pressed it to the bridge of my nose to stop the bleeding. Throughout, I kept a death hold on my satchel, not letting it go more of a second nature by now than trying to not get hurt. I wondered to myself if any dedication to any endeavor required simply letting go of the fear of death. I decided to finish that thought at a better time, or at least when finishing it would not make me shake and cry with fear.
Lee Bo and the men from the engine compartment, along with a tall, broad-shouldered Buryat (probably the engineer) joined us, and our small group had a brief but animated discussion what to do next.
“We need to find some officials,” I said in English.
One of the coolies snorted. “And I would prefer to keep as far away as possible from any officials. Why do you think you’re more important than us?”
Lee Bo raised a pacifying hand the moment he saw the look on my face—I supposed it was not pretty, with all the blood and the matted mustache. “You are free to go,” he said to the men. “As long as you know what you’re doing. We, however, need to think of the fates of countries, not just of our own hides.”
“That was too harsh,” Kuan Yu said, but Lee Bo paid him no mind.
Lee Bo waved his hand rather imperiously, and explained that everyone could do whatever he wanted, he really did not care one way or another, but he had to get me to a Taiping official and he would rather do that than stand around arguing.
After that, Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi followed us. The coolies and the engineer turned away from the burning city. I hoped they would be safe. We walked toward the orange light burning up half the sky.
We came to a large, sprawling aggregate of campfires and tents, overturned carts and oxen that lowed at our approach and then fell asleep again. I assumed that it was an encampment of the attacking Taipings, and puzzled at what we were doing here—I wanted officials, not generals. Then it occurred to me that if they were successful, generals would likely be in control of Beijing. This is why Lee Bo decided to stop there instead of going to any of the more distant and southern provinces. I sighed and followed, hoping that the Taiping generals would not be too vicious.
Despite the presence of Kuan Yu, Liu Zhi and Lee Bo, things got very confusing very quickly. Even though the Taipings wore their hair long—or at least they were supposed to—quite a few of them were new enough to still have it short, and some, who just joined, still had their queues. The men with these varied haircuts slept around the fires, while others sat, awake, talking or eating.
To my surprise, there were a few women among them, none of who looked like camp followers—they laughed and talked among themselves, and one of them, a girl of maybe sixteen, stood by one of the larger fires, leaning on a musket that seemed to be as tall as she. I stopped for a bit to smell the snow and the char, and the warm musk of human skin, and to look at the girl, at her dark face and the black crescents of eyebrows mirroring the eyes below them, and the reverse curve of her mouth. I envied that girl because she was not wearing man’s clothing—as far as I could tell, she did not have to.
However, there didn’t seem to be any generals in sight, and soon we ventured closer to the burning city, to the open area outside the city wall, where ash fell like snow. I tried to keep my eyes on the walls and the buildings beyond them, afraid to look at the ground lest I discove dead bodies. But there was only softness of ash under my feet, and the supportive hand of Lee Bo on my elbow.
We walked in circles from one campfire to the next, and I had to rely on Lee Bo to ask questions; Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi joined