* * *
Elena pulled on her hat, shrugged into her coat, stormed out of the boxcar. She hurried towards the raised road through the marshes.
She scrutinized every lump of snow-laden grass, the dark maw of every puddle, her heart racing beneath her woolen coat, wondering where Nina could have possibly gone. She hoped Nina hadn’t ventured out to try to find papers and a passport herself. She hoped her sister hadn’t done anything foolish. She hoped she would return and the two of them could strike out across the snowy plains, run far away from the blackened gold tower of the house behind the hill, far away from bullet holes in necks and the demented dark firebird inside Elena.
She crossed the thick ice of the frozen river that ringed the city on the west side, and slipped and slid halfway up the bluff on the river’s far bank. She peered over the bluff at the kremlin’s squat black guard towers and the plains around the city. Long black coats flapped around the base of the towers: guards, bayonets glinting.
Elena waited behind the bluff as the sun rose and descended in a small arc on the horizon.
As the gloaming fell on the kremlin, two figures detached from the cadre of guards by the tower and hurried along the southern road. Elena trudged down the river, tripping over lumps in the thick ice. She reached the southern road and hid in the rustling frozen reeds of the marshes, waiting for the two figures.
As they drew near, their faces resolved from shadow. One of them was the soldier who had saved them from the guards on the gate.
The other was Nina.
Elena forced dry cold air into her lungs and began to put the puzzle pieces together: Nina’s disappearance the night before. Her endless requests to go to the city. The fact that she had known his name.
Elena leapt out of the marsh. Nina shrank back, and the soldier drew his gun.
“No, stop, that’s my sister,” Nina said, as Elena whipped the gun-cuff out of her pocket.
“I know.” Aleksandr pointed the gun at her, and she raised the gun-cuff.
Nina’s head swiveled between Aleksandr and Elena. “Lena, listen to me. Aleksandr has obtained false passports, papers, train tickets to Berlin, for us.”
Nina, in the arms of a Red Army soldier. Elena felt her feathers spreading. “How long have you been sneaking around with him?”
“No, no, no, don’t become stubborn and contrary. I love him.” Nina cocked her head towards Aleksandr as though his reaction was all that mattered anymore, as though she spoke and breathed only for him.
Elena didn’t doubt that Nina believed she loved this soldier. But she swiveled towards Aleksandr, who lowered his gun slightly but tightened his jaw beneath his plough and hammer cap.
“How do I know these passports and papers are valid?” she said. If Aleksandr wanted a pretext to lure both Nina and Elena into the hands of border guards, this was the perfect opportunity.
“He loves me, Lena.”
Elena flared her frozen nostrils and thought of their chances. Nina may love him, but life’s not a novel where a soldier falls in love with you and puts you on a train to a new life. He might be plotting to betray us. “Why did you join the Red Army? Were you conscripted?”
“I volunteered,” Aleksandr raised his chin. “I never knew my father. He was shot by Cossacks on Bloody Sunday when I was a boy, and they sent me to an orphanage. I wanted to destroy the people that did that to me.”
So he hated nobles for the same reason that she hated peasants. “In that case, how am I supposed to trust—”
“Nina is an innocent, and you are her sister.” Aleksandr squeezed Nina’s hand. “They’re hunting you. You must leave as soon as possible. Tonight.”
Elena looked away from Nina’s reproachful pout. She thought of a nation of created monsters, destroying each other, and reminded herself of her resolution to flee.
“Very well,” she said, not taking her eyes off Aleksandr. “We’ll go with you.”
Her boots crunched through the snow as she followed Nina and Aleksandr towards the boxcar. The burned tower rose before them on the other side of the hill, silhouetted against the moon’s glow.
“I don’t like you sneaking around behind my back,” Elena said. “Has this been happening since autumn? How did you even meet him?”
“In the market, when you were sick, I—”
“Shh.” Aleksandr held up a hand, frowning. “What’s that sound?”
The whine of an engine, the roar of a muffler, and yellow headlights arced over the marshes.
Aleksandr leapt around Nina and stepped in front of Elena.
An automobile roared around the bend in the road, tires skidding on the snow. Before it even stopped, doors swung open and three figures with guns swarmed around them, hands yanking up Nina’s coat-sleeves to expose her wrists, snatching at Elena’s coat, twisting her arm so the revolver-cuff flew into the snow.
“The noble sisters,” wheezed the man who had seized Elena. It was Gleb, the guard from the gate, wearing the uniform of one of the special forces troops from Petrograd. Elena snarled, twisting, and her scalp screamed as Gleb seized her bun and twisted her hair.
“What is the meaning of this?” Aleksandr said, low and cold.
“What is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of you taking one of these sisters out of the city without turning her over to the border guards?”
Aleksandr jerked Nina away from the two soldiers who held her, wrapped his hand around her forearm as though he might protect her forever with that simple gesture.
Something fell inside Elena. She had been wrong. The love this man felt for her sister had nothing to do with passports or aristocracy or power.
Am I so broken that I can’t even believe in love anymore?
“I’ll handle this,” Aleksandr was shouting.
“You think so, do you?” Gleb said.
“I’m ordering—”
“You don’t give orders anymore. I report to Petrograd now. So who orders who?”
Silence. Elena raked her feathers through the air, hoping to slice Gleb’s leg with them.
Then Gleb flung her aside. The snow rushed towards her and she rolled onto her back.
Gleb faced Aleksandr, drawing his revolver, as Elena snatched the revolver-cuff out of the snow.
“You’ve been fucking this noble girl and your head’s gone up your ass,” Gleb said. The two men who had grabbed Nina straightened their revolvers.
“I just said, I will handle—” Aleksandr said.
“You’re a traitor, to the Revolution.”
Elena locked her finger around the revolver-cuff’s trigger and aimed it at Gleb. The recoil hit her in the chest—
But Gleb spun, roaring, positioning his revolver, and she realized she had missed—the revolver-cuff never works as well when it’s not on your wrist—and she ducked into the frozen marsh-grass. I will spit on his boots as he shoots me.
An explosion, and Gleb stumbled, dropping his gun, and Elena gasped breath. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Aleksandr shove Nina towards Elena. Nina’s ringlets flew, and her nostrils flared, and her stained blue coat billowed behind her.
More gunshots rocked the raised road.
Screams, and heavy footfalls, and someone gathered her up, seized her beneath the elbows and began to drag her away.
Aleksandr’s face, sweat dripping from his hairline, eyes wild, loomed next to her. He was dragging her down the road towards the boxcar.
“Where’s Nina?”
“Don’t look back.”
But Elena looked: there, among the prostrate black-coated soldiers, blue lying on the bluish snow, ringlets spilled around her, a spreading puddle of blood and oil—
Gleb roared behind them. Aleksandr aimed a shot over his shoulder and Gleb howled and fell.
“Keep running,” Aleksandr said, but all Elena wanted to do was run, run until her burning chest exploded, run until she could no longer run anymore, run until she could arrive at a time before, when her house was whole and she
could sit at a table with Mother and Father and Nina, Nina, her poem of a sister who now—
Elena stumbled and rolled, skidding off the road into the brittle ice of the marshes, her boot crunching into a freezing puddle, snowflakes sticking under her collar. Aleksander knelt beside her, shoulders stooped.
“You must still leave,” he said. “You must. Think of what she wanted.”
Elena raised her head. Aleksandr’s eyes were glazed with tears.
“She said she wanted to go someplace that smelled like flowers,” he said. “To have her accoutrement removed and forget everything that happened to her here. And, and she wanted you to go too. She said she was afraid for you.”
Elena cradled the revolver-cuff, crouched in the whispering frozen reeds of the marshes.
Could she cross the border from Russia into a new life of dried roses and Sunday promenades, after letting some physician remove her tail and opera glasses? Could she forget that she had once had a mother and a father and a sister, forget that monsters had taken them from her, forget that a monster had grown inside her too?
Could she ever allow it all to fade away?
That’s what Nina would have wanted.
But she felt her tail flex, feathers grinding on feathers, and she knew: something had broken inside of her forever, no matter if she never saw Russia again.
“Elena, please, she would have wanted—”
“My tail is just as much a part of me as her lungs were.” Elena leapt up, on her tiptoes, looming above him so he shrank away.
She slapped the revolver-cuff over her left wrist. She clenched her teeth as the metal rods curled over her forearm, scraping off her arm hair and digging in, reaching down to her bone. The wood settled against her skin and the trigger fitted into place just above her wrist-bone.
She shouldered around Aleksandr and marched towards the boxcar. She pushed inside, tore Nina’s shawls off her bunk, rummaged through the carpetbag and pulled out Father’s book of maps of Novgorod. She marked corners of the marshes where she could hide with her revolver-cuff and ambush soldiers, parts of the kremlin wall where she could throw homemade explosives, anywhere she could go to destroy the people who had killed Mother, Father, Nina, who had taken away everything, who had created the dark avenging firebird that could never stop fighting.
The Little Begum
Indrapramit Das
Bina looked at the metal bones covering her worn and stunted limbs, cold against her legs and feet, lovingly layering the scars of her disease. These new hands and feet were heavy, lead and steel woven with leather straps onto the outside of her body. She had watched her sister Rani make them with fire and scrap, bending the pieces with hammer and heat, her second-hand British goggles flickering with the light of the workshop’s tiny forge, sparks flying off her skin as if she were invincible. Bina did not feel invincible wearing them, these skeletal gloves and boots. They trapped her already strength-less arms and legs, weighed them down till she felt more helpless that she’d ever been, especially with Rani standing over her, ten years older, so much life in her limbs.
* * *
“When the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s dearest wife Mumtaz died giving birth to their fourteenth child, his grief was so all-consuming he could barely think, let alone rule an empire. So he decided he would build a monument to his grief, to honour the woman who had been so important to him.”
“The Taj Mahal!” said Bina. She knew some history from her time in the boarding houses, and the stories Rani told her. She let Rani go on.
“That’s right. Shah Jahan gathered the best craftsmen, the best metalworkers,”
“Like you!” said Bina. Rani smiled and nodded.
“…and the best engineers in his realm, and they built a monument, a metal being to house and guard his wife’s body. The Taj Mahal was the greatest automaton ever built—over 300 feet tall, plated in ivory, its massive limbs inlaid with lapiz lazuli and onyx and other precious stones, its contours cleverly crafted to look like a palatial tomb when it crouched at rest like a man folded on his knees with his head to Mecca, the spiked tanks on its back raised to the sky like graceful white minarets. To look upon the Taj Mahal walking along the banks of the Yamuna and across the water lapping its metal ankles as if the broad river were a little stream, was to see the impossible.
And that’s because it was impossible. That metal and ivory giant couldn’t walk, not even with the most powerful and intricate steam engines and hydraulics built by the empire’s best engineers. It would topple and crash before taking a single step. No, it needed a pilot who had the gift of telekinetic thought, to lift its every component, to give it a human soul to go along with the machinery.”
Like me, Bina didn’t say. She realized why her sister was telling her this story.
“Shah Jahan tried piloting it himself. He failed. Very few, after all, are born with the talent of telekinesis, a truth the Emperor did not learn easily. But he did learn it eventually. After scouring the Empire with recruiters, he found, perhaps aptly, that Gauharara Begum, the final daughter Mumtaz had left him with, was the one he was looking for, when one day she lifted an elephant into the air and gently put it down just by looking at it. She was eight at the time, like you. So with teary eyes Shah Jahan asked his little daughter Gauharara if she would pilot the walking palace that guarded her mother’s remains within its chest. Gauharara said that she would be honoured.”
“And so she did. She was carried by the Emperor’s guards through the winding tunnels of the vast being, past its engines and gears and pipes, past the chamber in its heart that held Gauharara’s mother, past its tanks, and she was placed in its head, in a soft cavern of quilted walls. The little Begum made the Taj Mahal walk, looking out of its filigreed eyes to the empire her father ruled, once with the help of her mother. Gauharara Begum took the huge metal and ivory beast across the land, with the aid of a faithful crew that ran its engines. The Empire celebrated this wonder amongst them striding in the distance, colourful pennants like hair lashing behind it, breathing steam.
But before long Shah Jahan’s third son, Aurangzeb, ordered that the giant never be piloted again, because it was blasphemous to create such automatons, that this lifeless walking idol was a mockery of Allah. Aurangzeb had his father and his beloved Gauharara put under house arrest at the Red Fort in Agra, and after a war of succession with his brothers, became the next Mughal Emperor in a sweeping victory. Shah Jahan died imprisoned, and Gauharara died many years later of old age. Aurangzeb was a devout, efficient Emperor, but oversaw the last years of the Mughal Empire that was. The Emperors that followed led it to its decline, and eventually, they were easily defeated by the British Empire with their airships and tanks. Perhaps if the Mughals had made more automatons to rid the Taj of its solitude, and kept them walking, they’d have kept this land too. They could have thrown airships from the sky, and crushed tanks under their feet. The Taj Mahal never walked again, folding into its rest by the banks of the Yamuna, where to this day its empty tanks gleam like minarets on the horizon, its scalp and shoulders shorn of pennants.”
Bina nodded, looking straight at her sister’s grease and oil covered face glimmering in the candlelight, at her coarse tattooed hands between her knees. She smiled. Somewhere in the slum, a stray dog barked.
“I know why you told me that story,” Bina said. She wondered if their mother or their father had taught Rani to tell that story. Or both.
“Of course you do. You’re a clever girl,” Rani said.
“You told it really well. But it’s just really sad,” Bina murmured.
“One day,” her sister said, putting her warm palm on Bina’s cheek. “You’re going to see the Taj Mahal at rest by the banks of the Yamuna. You’re going to walk, walk with me, and we’ll get out of here and go north to see it. Understand?”
Bina shook her head. As if to check, she tried moving her stick-like legs. They barely complied, distant, far-off limbs attached to her body through some unfathomabl
e fog that cut off her brain from their worn-out nerves. “We’re in a slum. We can’t get good doctors like the babus and the sahibs. I’m not going to walk. You should stop saying that I will.”
Rani knew not to insist any further. She looked ashamed, which hurt Bina. But she was angry, and didn’t say anything. Rani blew out the candle next to the mat and pulled the blanket over Bina, kissing her on the forehead.
* * *
“Do you remember, Bina, years ago, the first time I told you the story of the Taj Mahal? What I said to you?” Rani asked.
Bina’s eyes welled up before she could stop herself. Her legs, weak and immobile and worn away to skin and bones by her sickness, remained that way under the exoskeletal harness her sister had spent hours and days making. All those days, and Bina had thought it was just another project repairing parts for the British and the babus with their various steam-powered machines.
“Am I going to hop in the Taj Mahal and make it walk again? Is that what you want me to do?” Even as Bina asked these questions, she felt her voice rising. She was horrified that she was shouting at her sister after everything she had done for her, but she was.
She couldn’t see her sister’s reaction through the tears. “No, Bina,” she laughed, obviously letting her little sister cry without drawing attention to it. “No. But there’s a reason we’re all here in this slum, a reason that the British laws don’t allow telekinesis for people like us, for everyone who isn’t white. There’s a reason Aurangzeb, ambitious, devout Aurangzeb, was terrified by his father’s creation, and his sister’s power. There was a time a little girl made a giant walk. Even if that’s not true, even if it was a whole army of telekinetics who made the Taj Mahal walk, that’s an impossible feat. It’s a miracle. Now I’ve seen you lift the pots and pans with your telekinesis, Bina. I’ve seen you lift the scrap in my workshop. If you can lift those, you can lift these. They’re the same. You’re good at it. I know it. You’re getting big. You know, you know this. I hate to say this. I can’t carry you forever. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
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