Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “And still Tulkinghorne refused to stay. To my surprise it was Wyatt who formulated a compromise. Since we were only a few miles to the valley, we would carry Hounslow to its edge. There, I would have leisure to sketch the area and visually document my companions’ ascent from below, while at the same time looking after Hounslow’s needs. I was tempted to object—I was by far the stronger climber than Tulkinghorne and would be missed on the mountainside—but a look from Percy shut me up.

  “It took us two or three hours to reach the great plateau encircled by a wall of ice and rock. It was a broken, barren landscape, full of puddles of water and giant boulders, a rubble field of the gods. Ahead stood the giant that had roused Percy’s imagination. Up close, the mountain’s sheer size was overwhelming. I saw at once that it would be near impossible to summit it: its ridge lines were too long and broken to offer a plausible route. The air was so thin even down there in the valley that it felt like we were breathing through straws, laboriously sucking at oxygen that was not there. Up high, the body would simply begin to die.

  “There was a more direct route up. Flowing down the face of the mountain like a great white road was the icy tongue of a glacier. Ahead, on the plateau, one could see where its blunt end had displaced earth and rock: it had churned the earth and was cleaving it, inch by inch, through the sheer weight of its frozen motion. Avalanche lines marked the glacier’s flanks, where great cornices of snow had broken off the rock above and showered down. Near the peak, the glacier seemed to fold itself under a massive, sickle-shaped ridge, like a tear tucked into its duct, grown plump and pendulous with its slow grief.

  “Percy, Wyatt, and Tulkinghorne left me the next morning. A climb like the one they had in mind takes weeks of preparation: the area needs to be scouted, various routes assessed; the lower portions of the route have to be secured with ropes. But a sort of madness had taken hold of my companions, a greed for some measure of success, which led them to disregard the most elementary rules of mountaineering. Time was running out. Soon the monsoon snows would clog up the pass we had traversed and strand us here. The only plausible route was the glacier, though it meant gambling against the risk of avalanche. In the morning light, the glacial tongue looked dull and devoid of contours, a blank within the landscape, like a spot of blindness in your vision that grows larger the closer you approach.

  “The three friends headed towards it like condemned men rushing to their fate, each man walking for himself, his chin tucked, head bowed down against the wind. I watched them all morning. At my feet, Hounslow lay delirious, now quiet and shut-in, now raving in his high, melodic voice. I offered him food but he would not eat. From the way he moved I wondered whether he was paralysed in his left arm and leg. At dusk, I dragged him into my tent and hugged him like a wife, trying to warm him while he twitched and jabbered through the night.

  “They started climbing early the next morning. I could see them quite clearly, though by now they were little more than specks of colour against the glacier’s great white void. At times, their progress seemed steady, even rapid. Then some topographical feature, invisible at this distance, would stop them in their tracks for hours, before their steady progress resumed. At nightfall, I saw them put up their tent. A light flickered—they will have tried to melt some snow, so they could drink—carving them out of the gloom: three figures, a scrap of fabric like a lampshade, the shoal of ice upon which they seemed adrift, ahead and above, castaways on an ocean of night.

  “The next morning, clouds sat low in the valley, hiding the mountain. When they finally lifted, I could not immediately see the climbers. I had not heard any avalanches or ice falls—the noise would have been deafening—so I assumed they were simply hidden by a fold within the rock. It was only when the angle of the late-afternoon sun turned the glacier into pure clear ice that I saw something I could not at once make sense of. High up, in that transparent frozen river, there hung a gossamer thread of something dark, leading from the surface down inside the glacier like a broken vein. Was it a flaw within the ice? A rope dangling deep into a crevasse? A frozen trail of blood? The last thought seemed so outlandish that I dismissed it at once. Nonetheless, the story of the goddess’s sick womb rose up in me unbidden and took some effort to suppress. Then the sun dropped behind the mountains at my back and the glacier transformed once more into a dull white blank. That night, no light illuminated the mountainside. Whatever shoal my companions had drifted on had sunk.

  “By the start of the third day, it was clear to me that all three of them were dead. There was no sign of them on the mountain. My thoughts turned to the practical problem of how I would manage to carry Hounslow to safety. I considered turning my backpack into a sort of harness in which the sick man could sit but at once realised that I would quite simply not manage. My options were simple. I could either stay with him and hope for a partial recovery, or abandon him to death.

  “It is odd and perhaps telling that in the two days that followed my every thought was dedicated to this decision rather than to the death of three men who, for a long time, had been to me something very close to friends. Perhaps I shut out any grief from the necessity of staying focussed on the task of survival. Or perhaps I felt a certain satisfaction at the accident that had befallen the three men, for I had been sorely slighted in my pride. I cannot be sure. What I do know is that I lingered. Hounslow, I was certain, would not recover. But somehow I could not accept this and waited by his side, forcing water on him every few hours and trying to feed him soup. An unpleasant smell was rising from him at this point, as of rotting fruit. I held my nose and nursed him and told myself that I must let him go.

  “On the morning of the sixth day since our arrival in the valley, I was finally willing to leave. As I surveyed the cirque of mountains one last time, I saw a figure traversing the valley, already halfway between the glacier and myself. It walked unsteadily but with determined step; would stop and kneel at the puddles of black water dotting the landscape and lower its face to drink only to rise again and stumble on. I set off at once to meet whoever it was, not so much overjoyed as awed by his appearance, but lost sight of him in the boulder-strewn land. After two or three hours, I gave it up and returned to my camp, only to find that the figure, too, had almost reached it.

  “I was unsurprised to see that it was Percy. Perhaps I had recognised his gait, or some detail of his clothing; perhaps I simply had a superstitious faith in his superiority over the other men. I ran towards him, my arms spread out in an unconscious gesture of embrace. Percy walked with a rucksack heavy on his back; his face was frostbitten and dark. His own arms did not rise towards me—perhaps he was too tired—and his broken lips shaped no greeting. We walked side by side back into camp. There, I made tea and gave him some of the dried meat we had been living on. He ate and drank greedily, then crawled into my tent to sleep.

  “ ‘Wyatt?’ I asked him, though I already knew the answer. ‘Tulkinghorne?’

  “Percy paused, his legs still outside, the rest of him in the gloom of the tent. After a minute or more—long enough that I thought he had fallen asleep—his snort of laughter reached me, made ugly by the dryness of his mouth and throat.

  “ ‘Three men went up the mountain, Singh. Only one came down.’

  “I noticed that he had taken his rucksack with him into the tent and lay with his arms wrapped awkwardly around it.

  “We spent one more day in the valley, so that Percy could regain some modicum of strength. He barely spoke to me all day and grew attentive to my own prattle only once, when I explained to him my anxiety about Hounslow. Now that there were two of us, we might be able to get him out, but it would mean abandoning virtually all of our gear and taking nothing along other than some food and water. Percy did not interrupt me, but once I had finished, he said simply: ‘We will leave him behind.’

  “ ‘We cannot,’ I protested. Then, surprising myself by the strength of my fee
ling: ‘I won’t.’

  “This time Percy did not reply. I made preparations, throwing away all that was nonessential of my gear and eyeing curiously the bag that Percy had kept close to him ever since returning. It wasn’t as bulky as it had been when he set off up the mountain but seemed to contain some considerable weight. It was inconceivable that in his state he would be able to carry both this bag and help me with Hounslow, for whom I had constructed a stretcher from tent fabric and poles.

  “The problem had resolved itself by morning. Hounslow was dead. It was I who found him: not in his tent, but some fifteen steps beyond it, though he had long since lost the ability to walk. His skin and clothes were covered in fine yellow Soot. There was something about the position of the body—the outstretched arms, the tucked-up legs—as well as bruising on his cheek and neck that suggested violence. Of course it was possible that he had crawled there then experienced some sort of seizure, and thrashed around in such a manner as to injure himself before passing out and dying. But the marks in the dust around him implied a body that had been dragged. What shocked me most, I suppose, was not the thought that Percy had murdered his boyhood friend but that he placed so little value on my opinion that he had not bothered to mask his tracks more effectively.

  “We did not bury Hounslow, nor did I confront Percy. Was it fear that restrained me, or the servility that had been bred into me from the day I was born? Englishmen don’t smoke. Indeed I could find no spot on Percy’s clothing. Perhaps he had done his deed naked, or fortified by sweets. Perhaps Hounslow’s dying anguish simply roused no passion in him at all. That morning, at any rate, he simply shouldered his heavy rucksack and bid me take the lead. I obliged and led him back across the already snow-mired pass. He remained weak from his ordeal but kept pace well enough. Now and again I caught him watching me, weighing me up. I wondered then whether he still had his pistol, or whether he had lost it during the ascent.

  “Ten days or so later, we recrossed the border into India. This time there was no brass band to greet us. Percy commandeered horses the moment we came across our first military patrol, and asked directions to the closest town with a train stop and a telegraph line. We spoke little throughout this period. The generous, sensitive leader of men I had once known and deeply admired was quite gone. He had been replaced by a haughty, nervous, calculating man who observed me like I was an insect. But perhaps it was I who had changed and not him; it was as though my entire upbringing was slowly being cut away from me like a skin I had outgrown. Soon now, it would be time for me to moult.

  “In Gorakhpur, on the afternoon before he was to take a specially commissioned train first to Lucknow then on to Bombay, Percy asked me to meet with him early the next day, so he could bid me good-bye and ‘settle up with me for my loyal service.’ I understood at once that he wished to murder me. That night, I noticed a guard outside my door. It wasn’t a regular serviceman or sepoy, but rather a fellow guest in civilian clothing whose manner and language suggested a harmless Muslim trader in horses—had it not been for the way he left his own door ajar and monitored each of my movements.

  “Unsurprised by any of this, growing angrier, more jaded by the hour, I waited until midnight before approaching the little window I had made a show of opening hours before. My guard did not monitor it, for there was a sheer fifteen-foot drop outside, and another man stationed at street level. But it was not the street to which I headed but the roof. A man without my climbing experience would have stood no chance at all. I, however, leapt up the wall of the house like a goat, slippery though it was from the constant rains. Once arrived, I ran from roof to roof until the rooflines got so low that I could reach the ground with the smallest of hops.

  “I left the town long before our dawn meeting and headed not home but to a village in the southern Punjab where I had distant relatives. There, in the poverty and grime of my great-aunt’s yard, my rebirth was completed and the revolutionary born. I listened to the stories of the villagers, about the grandfathers executed in the Great Mutiny, and the mothers and sisters who died in British segregation camps during the Pune plague epidemic, died of shame, that is, having been strip-searched in their own homes and carted off like animals. There, too, I found a little library of secret texts and read the theories of Marx and Herder, of Bakunin, Tilak, and Kaka Baptista. For a while, I even changed my name.

  “Then the news came to us, of a great change across the ocean, of Britain going up in Smoke. We missed the moment to rise then: we waited and we blinked, and when our eyes were open again, the Empire was back, only its titles and leaders had changed. The Company owned us; religion and caste divided us; illiteracy and ignorance condemned us to be slaves.

  “As for Percy, I heard nothing further. He sailed to England, I assumed, hugging his rucksack and whatever it was he’d carried down the mountain. From the way he cradled it, you might have thought he carried down a lover or a friend.

  “I can only hope that he is dead.”

  LETTER FROM MARIE MCMURTRY, FORMERLY COOK AT HOLTBY HOUSE, NORTH YORKSHIRE, THE ERSTWHILE WINTER RESIDENCE OF THE PERCY FAMILY. OCTOBER 1908.

  Holtby House, the ninth of October.

  Dear Miss,

  I opened your letter which was addresst to the Relatives of Mr. Philip Percy. No Relatives live here now. Their house has been ceased by Law and it is now home to twenty families, all honest faulk. The others said don’t answer the letter, but with your currier waiting for answer and offring money I see no harm in it. I was the cook when the Percys still lived here, before. Young Mr. Philip returned here from travels just before the 2nd Smoke. He was mighty changed. We servents were not allowed to speak to him because he was melankly. When the Smoke came, he hung himself by his Necktie. That is all I know. I hope your currier will now give me the coins he promised.

  Yours faithfully,

  Marie McMurtry

  Holtby House

  [Postscript is Soot-smudged and illegible.]

   GLACIER

  [ 1 ]

  Mr. Singh does not finish telling Thomas the story of the first expedition until the morning they see the mountains for the first time. He rations it out deliberately, retracing its outlines over and over again, filling in details, correcting little slips of memory, so that the story, too, becomes a kind of companion, slow of foot and somewhat lumbering, relaxing into itself only in the evenings, when camp has been made. Whenever Thomas wants to rush it along, Singh simply ignores him. The two have developed a comfort with one another that is not to be confused with friendship. Singh distrusts Englishmen, not so much temperamentally as by profession. Since the day of their meeting, they have not shared any Smoke.

  Their progress is steady. First, they travel by train across the Bihari border, then by bicycle across the great plain of the poppy plantations. This year’s crop is coming into bloom; soon their seedpods will be bled, their latex processed. The fields stretch out in slender pools like winter lochs, black to the eye. In between this web of dark pools lie vast stretches of yellowed wasteland, marking previous years’ fields. The poppy leeches the ground and leaves it barren. The plain is slowly being turned to dust. The great processing plants to which the spring harvest will be shipped lie many hundred miles to the south, factory fortresses under constant guard. Up here, the fields are patrolled by platoons of Company soldiers. They move from village to village, requisitioning food and board, restless and ravenous like itinerant kings.

  As much as it is possible, the two cyclists keep well away from the fields. Even so they cannot avoid scrutiny altogether and, halfway across the plain, they are confronted by a mounted platoon of sepoys, guns strapped to their shoulders. The one white man amongst them, the officer, is a boy of nineteen with fat, sunburned cheeks and a moustache like the curl of a pen. Thomas talks to him only, ignoring his dust-plastered men, and watches the young officer’s manner change no sooner have they exchanged their “how
do you dos.” The Company man inquires politely after their identities and purpose of travel, then quickly shifts to small talk.

  “Do you require an escort?” he asks when they have exhausted the weather (“infernally hot”), the deficiencies of the local beer (“like spinsters’ piss”), and the disgusting lack of “turn” in the Lucknow wicket that rewards fast bowling over finesse. “Or horses, perhaps?”

  “It shan’t be necessary, thank you. The bicycles are easier to take along on the train.”

  The officer lingers a moment longer, flustered by his inability to find the right parting words—heartfelt but not overly emotional, and appropriate to the witnessing ears of his subalterns—then simply shakes Thomas’s hand and remounts. As the soldiers move out of sight, Singh lets out a nervous laugh.

  “Thomas-ji! I thought we were done for, I really did. No travel papers, no reason to be here, so close to the fields, and your face paint dripping down your cheek. But he did not even want to see your passport! All you had to say was ‘Company business; no grave secret here but a little sensitive all the same.’ He simply took your word for it!”

  Thomas’s reply is terse. “It’s how I said it. My whole country is built on this, placing a man the moment he opens his mouth.”