Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [3]
“You do babble so, Genia,” my mother said.
“It’s not babbling,” Eugenia said. “I want to see this country ascend from the mire of poverty and superstition, for us reach for the light of reason . . . ” She caught herself and let her voice trail off.
My aunt was entirely too infatuated with reason, as my mother used to say. She herself viewed rationality as a masculine domain, and occasionally hinted it was not my aunt’s lack of beauty but her excess of imagination that doomed her to spinsterhood. My mother seemed to think it should be a lesson to me—at least, the specter of remaining an old maid only surfaced in conversation when I was willful or spent too much time catching frogs and climbing trees with the renters’ children. Yet my mother did not seem convinced by her own words—or at least, let them be undermined by the obvious and unrepentant love she had for her sister.
We stopped for the night in the small town of Tosno. At least I remembered it as small from a few summers ago, but soon discovered it had increased considerably in size, not in small measure due to a factory that had sprung up at what had once been its outskirts.
“What does it make?” I asked Eugenia as we watched through the windows of the small hotel at tall smokestacks disgorging clouds of sulfurous steam into the evening sky.
“I am not sure,” Eugenia said. “But we can go and find out.”
My mother begged off the expedition, citing fatigue, but Eugenia and I walked down the winding dirt street past wooden cabins comprising most of the town’s residential buildings. The paint on the dwellings’ walls was peeling and discolored, and the acrid air made my eyes water. Even the trees lining the streets were blackened and mostly dead, their branches twisted like pleading fingers reaching for the sky.
The factory was still spitting out smoke and steam when we arrived at its vast doors. I worried that Eugenia, always keenly interested in things that clanged and were made of metal, would drag me inside the horrid building and make me walk across the floors where, surely, rude men swore at each other and operated dangerous-looking machines.
But she never had a chance, because the gates swung open and out came a throng of bearded, half-naked men who shouted excitedly, and pulled on long metallic ropes. There were dozens of them, all straining against thick twisted cables that sang like strings. Eugenia pulled me out of the way and we watched as the factory groaned and opened its doors wider, allowing the men to drag its strange creation forth into the last burnished rays of a setting sun—not quite a ship but a winged golden balloon as large as a three-storied house.
The egg-shaped balloon strained against the containing net. A basket, woven from strips of birch bark, like the lapti on the workers’ feet—dangled under it. Tall wings rose from its sides, bracketing both the balloon and a metal cage containing a chugging smoking engine that clung to the basket like a fungal growth.
“It doesn’t look like it needs an engine,” I whispered to Eugenia.
She shook her head. “Don’t be a fool, Sasha, of course everything needs an engine. How will it be propelled, change direction? A balloon is just the wind’s toy. An airship has its own mind, though this one could be a tad more balanced.”
A few of the men jumped into the dangerously swaying basket, the sweet aroma of birch sap mixing with the noxious smell of sweat and burning peat. The rest let go of some of the ropes, pulling the net off the airship, and the contraption soared. The basket hung lopsided, but this did not deter the men inside it. They operated the iron levers sticking through the bars of the cage that contained the engine, making it chug faster. Other levers lifted and lowered the golden wings allowing the airship to execute slow,