Chapter 6

After the dragoon officer’s words, Jildiz expected Orengrad to be a sinkhole of anger and hate directed at her, but if it was, she did not encounter very much of it that first day.

To be sure, there were a few people hissing at her and giving her unfriendly stares, but really, they weren’t spending more than a day here before going on to the Suslikov lands, and it would have been too much to hope that people would greet her with open arms. Even in Muskograd she was the subject of unfriendly stares.

The next day they rode out to the Suslikov estates, and whatever Jildiz had been expecting, this was not it.

At the rough centre of the estates, as was customary, was a large house belonging to the Suslikovs themselves, surrounded by the wooden izbas of the family’s serfs. The one- or two-room houses looked particularly ramshackle beside the sprawling Suslikov mansion, and the smoke belching from multiple tall chimneys gave the place a look more like a Muskovian manufactory than the large farmhouse she had been expecting.

After she thought, though, Jildiz adjusted her expectations. Yevgeny was Orousska’s foremost steam pioneer. Of course his family lands would be more industrial than most.

They arrived at the front door, rang the bell and waited. After a few minutes a clanking, ticking sound from within approached. The door opened and Jildiz started involuntarily at the strange sight that met her eyes.

At about eye level a brass-bound leather bellows pumped regularly, attached to a steel frame around the torso of a hunched-over, too-tall human figure. Below the frame, long brass and steel legs extended to the floor, having too many joints and in the wrong places like those of a cricket. Several brass gears jutted out from behind the figure’s torso, and one of his eyes was either covered or replaced by an arrangement of multiple lenses such as a jeweller might wear.

The human part was dressed well, in what looked like a blue woollen coat, a white silk shirt and a cravat in pale silver-grey, but his skin was very pale and his hair and beard were wild and unkempt. Together with the mechanical parts of him, the effect was very unsettling.

The figure peered out and sniffed dismissively. “Horses? Biologicals?” he said in a peevish squeak. “How quaint. Yevgeny, are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

“Gennady, I assure you I am quite well. The railway only goes as far as Nizhnov, which you’d know if you ever left the estates. You keep both the Suslikov steamwagons here in Orengrad, so we had to make the rest of the journey the old way.”

“Still haven’t finished that mechanical horse, then?” the strange part-man shook his head. “Dear me, brother mine, you’re slipping!”

“Oh, it works,” Yevgeny countered. “It just weighs as much as a full-grown indrik and tends to sink into the ground. And it has to be controlled the whole time; a flesh-and-blood horse will steer itself up to a point and has an instinct that works with the rider. A machine does not.”

“Yes, and controlling a legged vehicle is not that simple,” the machine-man Gennady replied sulkily, shifting position on his own spindly metal legs. “I still think you should have-“

“Brother!” Yevgeny cut him off. “Standing on the doorstep is not the place for this conversation!”. He turned to Jildiz. “Jildiz, this is my little brother Gennady Borissovich. Bratishka, I’ve acquired a new assistant. Jildiz is a little untrained, but I think she shows promise.”

Jildiz now found herself the target of Boyar Yevgeny’s uncanny brother’s inspection. He stalked forward on those long, insectlike legs, examining her closely through multiple lenses.

“A barbarian?” he muttered. “And a woman at that? Now I know you have taken leave of your senses! Girl!” he addressed her sharply. “What’s the ratio between boiler size and the useable work capacity of an engine?”

Jildiz looked helplessly at Yevgeny. In the months she had been with him he had begun her education in the mysteries of steam power, but he had never mentioned anything like this!

“Uhhh,” she temporised.

“There isn’t a simple relationship between boiler size and the capacity for work of an engine, and you know it!” Yevgeny cut in. “Why not, Jildiz?”

“Work capacity is derived from a combination of factors,” she said. This she did know! “Size of the boiler, diameter of the pistons, amount of steam getting to them… Even diameter of the drive wheel, I would suppose,”

“She’ll do,” Gennady nodded curtly. “Though I question your taste. Women usually belong in boiler rooms the way rats belong in kitchens!”

“Don’t mind my little brother,” Yevgeny said. “His retrograde attitude notwithstanding, he’s one of the foremost machinists of the Empire. Better than me, some days!”

“Most days!”

Jildiz looked up at Gennady’s uncanny form. “Yevgeny agha,” she said, using the Alash honorific for an older or otherwise superior-status man, “Your brother he might be, but I have trouble thinking of anyone so tall as a little anything!”

Yevgeny smiled. Gennady looked from one to the other. “You always were unreasonably soft,” he complained, but said no more.

A serf girl led Jildiz to a small room tucked in close to the furnaces, indicating without words that it was to be her sleeping quarters. The girl looked like a typical Orousski serf, brown haired and blue eyed with the pale skin of a native Europaen. After the strangeness of the half-mechanical boyar with his elongated, insectlike brass legs, she was reassuringly normal, yet there seemed go be something a bit odd about her. She made no conversation while guiding Jildiz through the house, didn’t even speak when showing her the room.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” Jildiz tried to tell her. “I’m no higher in status than you are. My name is Jildiz. Can we be friends? What’s your name?”

The girl, who looked to be about her own age, just shook her head. Maybe she couldn’t talk?

“Can you speak?” Jildiz asked her, but the girl was already retreating out of the room. Jildiz sighed. A girl her own age to talk to would have been nice, even if she wasn’t an Alash. One couldn’t have everything.

The same girl returned later to bring her to Boyar Yevgeny and his brother, taking her through the boiler rooms to a steamworks and mechanical laboratory like yet unlike the one they had left behind in Muskograd.

The same collection of half-built devices littered the surroundings. The same arcane sketches and blueprints were strewn through the chaos. The same brass gearwheels spun and intermeshed. But Boyar Gennady’s creative domain ticked and whirred where Yevgeny’s chuffed and whistled, and the few recogniseable steam engines she could see were tiny, delicate things that looked like toys. She frowned. What could you run from an engine that little? She doubted those slender pistons could even turn a potter’s wheel. And there were several small metal things moving around on overhead rails, like toy locomotives but without any sign of steam.

She craned her neck to look as another one went past, noting a single broad wheel in front and two narrow wheels behind, and a troughlike body containing a pile of what looked like written messages in the middle. Whatever propelled it wasn’t steam; there was no place for an engine.

“Admiring my clockwork message carriages, girl?” Gennady’s odd squeak of a voice said from somewhere in front of her. Jildiz started. Engrossed in the mechanical wonders, the sudden question made her jump. Gennady chuckled, a sound that seemed to humanise the bizarre machine-man in a way nothing else had, and continued, “You see, my esteemed older brother is interested in steam engines to do big jobs like propelling a sleigh or drawing a plough. All very good, yes, but as he has discovered with his mechanical horse,” here he gave a sardonic smile, “steam engines weigh a great deal and their fuel and water weighs even more. Whereas my mechanical horse, once it is completed, will weigh less than a biological one and go just as fast!”

“How?” Jildiz asked, amazed.

“Clockworks,” Yevgeny said dismissively, appearing at her elbow. “What he’s not telling you is that his clockwork horse can go less than a quarter of a verst before its spring winds down, whereas my steam horse, now that it is completed, will keep going for most of a day! Oh, clockworks have their uses,” he said, waving a hand airily at Gennady’s scowl, “either in very short-ranged applications or else in very low-powered ones, but for power and endurance you have to have more power than a coiled spring can hold.”

“That’s all you know, brother mine!” Gennady said. “I-“

But then he clamped his mouth shut, as if he had been on the verge of letting out a secret. And no amount of Yevgeny’s cajoling would make him speak.