Heart of Iron by Ekaterina Sedia

Author:Ekaterina Sedia
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, novel
ISBN: 9781607013099
Publisher: PRIME BOOKS
Published: 2011-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

I woke up when the sun was high in the sky. Even with my eyes closed I could feel the air outside had a mature, late-morning quality rather than the slanted, insistent early morning light that prodded at one’s eyelids, forcing them open. I stretched before my eyes opened, and felt a warm breeze on my cheek—a barest whisper of air sliding against skin, tugging gently at the fine hairs of my carefully trimmed temples. I glanced between my eyelids, opening them just wide enough to sneak a peek. In a halo of distorted light, I saw Jack’s face, leaning so close to mine and peering so intently, it was as if he was trying to read his fortune in the veins of my eyelids, in the creases of my lips.

He sighed again, his breath like a slow caress at the ridge of my jawline; I opened my eyes, slowly, to give him time to move away.

He did not. “Good morning,” he whispered, his soft, gravelly voice rumbling with recent sleep and great fatigue.

“Morning,” I said. I had to pull myself back with my elbows, so that I could sit up without my forehead smashing his high arched nose. “You seem troubled with thought.”

“That I am.” He sat on the edge of my seat, leaning on both his arms, his palms planted on either side of my legs. He was too close, and his proximity was constraining enough that I had to fight a mild panic. If he were to try and kiss me, there would be little I could do to avoid it, save for a hearty slap in the face. “Can you talk?”

“Sure.” I pulled up my knees to my chest, circumventing the arch of his arms, and felt immediately better as soon as my feet touched the floor. “What do you want to talk about?”

“My past,” he said. “Remember what I was telling you about Canton?”

Jack stayed with the rest of the Englishmen in the English factory—or, as the Chinese called it, hong. From what he described, it seemed more a vast complex of apartments, stores and secondary buildings than a place where anything was manufactured; every western nation represented in Canton was in control of one such sprawling building, surrounded by shallow gardens and allocated to the outside of the city walls. They were not allowed to house women, and the merchants who made homes there kept their families at Macao, where the Portuguese opium addict Jack had befriended came from. The two of them often took long walks by the port and around the city perimeter, all the while arguing about religion.

Jack was bored, and he used his time to learn the local Chinese dialect in addition to the pidgin they all used to communicate with half-naked coolies at the docks and the shopkeepers who hung signs in Chinese and English, undeterred from trade by neither imperial edicts and threats of death nor apparently latent patriotism. They always had good advice on bribing the officials.

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