Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [111]
“Let’s stop,” I told Lee Bo after a while. “I’m tired—it’s like trekking through the purgatory.”
“You want to rest?” he asked.
I nodded at Kuan Yu.
We settled at the nearest fire. A few men gave me sideways looks and Lee Bo explained they were not used to foreigners to begin with, and suspicious of them after the Opium War. I nodded that I understood, but doubted I was cutting an intimidating figure with my blood-smeared face and constant yawning.
Lee Bo engaged some of the soldiers in conversation, and since I did not understand their words, I listened to the broken rhythm of their speech and studied their appearance in the uneven firelight. They all seemed not soldiers but peasants, with their long clothes made of unbleached rough fabric and shoes that were barely anything more elaborate than foot wrappings made of the same cloth as the rest of their attire. Their long unbraided hair and dark faces gave them a wild and untamed appearance, and for a while I thought of my dead papa who I hardly even remembered. I thought of his uprising and of how much more dignified it was—uniformed officers and well fed, well-cared for horses, their formations and their gracious riding into Senate Square, the cannons, the marching soldiers . . .
The men around the fire seemed a mob to me, as indistinct from one another as the freedmen in the factories of St. Petersburg, as the peasants who worked Eugenia’s fields. I did not mention it to Lee Bo, of course, but they looked not like masters of destiny but its toys, tossed about in the waves of circumstance. And yet, I could not help but think about them in the same way I thought about my father and his co-conspirators, and I found my brain’s insistence on finding this unlikely kinship quite irritating.
The droning of the voices soon made my eyelids fall closed, and I let the memory of the airship’s whining drown out the rest of the sounds. I dreamed of falling and then I dreamed of being my dead Uncle Pavel, miraculously alive in 1825, when he (I) rode into Senate Square side by side with Lee Bo, both of us dressed as Chinese peasants and holding our sabers high, high enough to reflect the rising sun and the orange glow of the burning city that stood unknowable and phantasmagoric in my dream.
Chapter 17
The morning came, bleak and stiff with cold, tasting of ash and burning paint. I stretched and remembered where I was—sleeping in the snow, swaddled in my furs, which, although still comfortable, were beginning to smell of all the unsavory things we had encountered recently. I tried not to breathe in too deep as I sat up.
The true scale of devastation was mercifully hidden by the morning dusk and the curling of fog—or was it smoke?—that tendriled between the campfires, close to the trampled, black snow. I stretched and stood up, looking around. Our airship was not visible in the distance, but the stone walls of Beijing seemed just a few hundred yards away. Last night’s fire seemed to have died down.
Lee Bo stood next to me, his hand with dirty and broken fingernails lightly resting on my shoulder. When I squinted my eyes just so, I could see every crease and every speck of dirt rubbed so deep into his olive skin. “What do we do now?
“The assistant general, one Feng Yunshan, and some of his army are inside the city,” Lee Bo said. “The Qing have surrendered, or at least this is what everyone here thinks.”
“So it is possible there’s still fighting in the city.”
“Everything is possible.” Lee Bo shrugged. “However, if you want to speak to the Assistant General Feng, this might be a good opportunity to do so. If the Taipings solidify their position over the Qing, the alliance with your country may not seem as necessary as now, when everything is still teetering on the edge.”
I sighed. The political maneuvering was starting to wear on me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that if it were up to me, I would never leave the comfort of St. Petersburg or Trubetskoye