Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  One of their rescuers—a man wearing oilskins and a woollen hat—asks them how it is that they survived. Balthazar notes the accent despite himself, the compression of vowels, that odd songlike intonation, the hint of a roll about the r. Liverpool. More than anything else it tells him they have arrived. England. Miners’ Country. Well north of Renfrew’s lands.

  He tells the man that when the Storm overtook the ship, the players climbed into the lifeboats and strung them out on ropes behind the main bulk of the ship in order to contain infection. A person a boat: they each met the Storm in isolation.

  Private little hells.

  They tied themselves to the seats with crafty knots that enraged fingers would not easily unpick to curb the impulse for self-destruction; sat, life jackets bulky against their chests, waiting for the wall of black.

  Half the boats flipped or sank and, anyway, there weren’t enough to go around. Those whom they had locked into their cabins drowned when the ship ran ashore and split its hull upon a rock. The machinist, God bless him, had barricaded himself in the engine room and continued shovelling coal. He kept the ship going: not fast enough to outrun the Storm but fast enough to hurl it ashore. He, too, will have drowned.

  The man listens to Balthazar for a minute or two, then walks off. He is too busy to indulge in story. There is work to be done elsewhere on this rocky beach. They are salvaging the ship itself, not looking for survivors so much as keen to strip it for its iron, its generators and engine, the fine brass fittings and the goods within its hold. The hull is too far split to give any hope that it will ever sail again; and thus welders swarm it, cutting off pieces and loading them onto a fleet of trawlers. Everything they touch is covered in an oily blanket of Soot, sticky and cloying like coagulated milk. Seagulls swoop, looking for pickings, and get caught in this tar-skin; they scream their seagull screams and have to be cut out or killed to restore peace.

  Those men who finish their shift return to shore tired, stomping through the black foam clogging up the shoreline in their knee-high boots. And as they unpack their lunch boxes and flasks, they curse the South as though it was Parliament that had belched north all this darkness with the express purpose of soiling their beaches and spoiling their fishing grounds; of drowning all the herring in their filth. The next moment—in the same breath almost, not quite crossing themselves, but touching the temple and the tip of one ear, the food as yet untasted—they whisper a quick blessing.

  We thank the Smoke.

  It almost makes Balthazar laugh.

  [ 2 ]

  They feed them meat broth and bread. The broth is thin and the bread stale. Minetowns remain poor, it appears; half the people there were hungry last time Balthazar went. The Miners chat with Ada a little, for bloodied or not, the girl’s pretty; to Geoffrey, who looks like one of them and can speak the blunt, hard language of a workingman. Balthazar they avoid, though they are polite enough. Here they are, a mining people with a hundred years of darkness in their blood, building a secular religion out of Smoke: hesitant around a Negro.

  They’ll crap their pants when they figure out he is a lass.

  They remain on the beach, within three miles of where the players spilled onto the shore. Riders have arrived, from the “capital,” as they proudly say. Members of the Workers’ Council. They have abolished all titles, live without king or priest or minister, stand, as Balthazar has heard them say, “strong and equal before the Smoke.” And yet a wave of awe goes through the crowd when it is passed around that it is Livia who has arrived, Livia and Francis Mosley, the mining foreman’s son who became one of the architects of their republic. Balthazar throngs with the rest of them to catch a glimpse of his heroes and sees them from afar: she, short and scrawny, but with a sense of bearing that resides in the cool high tilt of head and chin; he, moustachioed and soft-eyed, an ornamental smudge of Soot spilling out of his cap, down his temple and ear, the so-called Mark of Thomas.

  They fend off the crowd, move through it, towards the carcass of the ship; can be seen questioning the man who organised the salvage effort. At another time, Balthazar would not hesitate and follow them down onto the dirty beach, for a chance to question and study those who are the subject of his plays. Above all her: Livia, Smoke’s Mother Mary, the apex of his Trinity. But he is tired and his breathing hurts: one of his ribs, it may be broken; his plays and notes are drowned and lost; half his players dead; his theatre in tatters—and all that comes to him, all that jumps into his head, are the witless songs and dirty stories that cast her lewdly as cog and pivot of her dual lovers’ needs and make orgies of that adolescent feast of love. It’s the pornographic version of the Trinity, and there’s not a schoolboy in Britain who cannot sketch one of its constellations.

  So he sits down again, having sprung up in that moment of excitement that greeted their arrival; huddles in his blanket and sits there listless till a stranger tells him it is time to move. Where? Inland. This is Gale country. The people here are eager to get back to town.

  As for the two riders, they have already left, taking some men along and heading down the coast.

  [ 3 ]

  A girl stops them three or four hours into their march. She is a preacher, it seems, sent out to spread her holy writ. A bird, some kind of swallow, sits on her shoulder, then flies up and circles, lands on a shrub and chirps away, beholden to its human friend. Saint Francis had the knack, they say. The girl is dressed in friar’s rags.

  She does not have much of a voice. How could she? She is skinny as a twig, thirteen years old, half frozen in the drizzle. Balthazar hears the people around him mutter as they slow and round her like a rock.

  “How do they live?” one says. “They do not work, they seek no shelter. What on earth do they eat?”

  “Some say each other!”

  “Poor thing, look how cold she is. Not one of ours, though. And Lord knows we have enough mouths to feed.”

  The crowd’s mutters almost drown her out. But then, as the comments die down, her thin litany makes itself heard by sheer persistence.

  “We are Smoke-borne,” she says, or rather chants, the smile tainted by scurvy. “We walk the hills, we chase the Gales. All hail the Angel of the North.”

  Balthazar watches a figure leave the crowd and slip a crust of bread into the girl’s hand. He, too, digs through his pockets but finds that he has eaten all he was given. The girl accepts the handout and turns around to go God knows where. Something medieval clings to her, otherworldly, as though she were a sprite or fairy stranded in this age of steamboats and the telephone. Balthazar watches her until someone takes his arm and gently pulls him along. It is Etta May.

  “That girl is starving,” he protests, as if it were she who is withholding the child’s food.

  “She does not want our help,” Etta May says, and her voice, American, southern, and kind, saves him somehow, delivers Balthazar from the horrors of the Storm so that for the first time since landing he seems to feel his skin and feet and knows that he is cold and sad and full of fear before his Smoke.

  “One of the Miners told me that there is a movement,” Etta May carries on, “with some sort of leader, far in the north. Mostly children, no older than ten, eleven, twelve.”

  “A religion?”

  “Something like that.” She looks behind her where the girl can be seen trudging off. “You need a new notebook, Balthazar. You’ll want to put her in a play.”

  But the thought of scripting Smoke frightens him, and so he turns away and quickly trudges on.

  [ 4 ]

  The news reaches them just as they are entering Minetowns. Balthazar cannot say whether it comes from the city ahead and arrived by telephone or telegraph, or whether riders bring it from the open country at their side. A second ship, they hear, was caught in the Storm. Unlike the players’ vessel, it was pushed south and was salvaged by the pret
ender’s government. Here, too, there were survivors. The image of Eleanor, stiff-backed and awkward, flashes through Balthazar, but he at once suppresses it and consigns her to the place he keeps his dead. It is too much to hope.

  All the same, there is a special timbre to the news, a pitch of excitement in the manner it runs through the column of returning men and mules and wagons that remains unexplained until an hour later, when the players have been lodged in a cramped little cottage in Toptown that has been standing empty since its family “upped and left.”

  “Left where?”

  “South. He was gentry. Came here looking for ‘freedom,’ he said, far away from the fetters of his noble birth. Six whole years he worked the coalface, took a wife and all, ate bread in the fat months and starved in the lean, happy as a pig in shit. Then they had young ’uns, a daughter and a son. It’s the son that changed his mind, that chubby little ’eir. Now he’s back in his manor house, I expect, poring over the fam’ly tree and teaching the little ones which fork goes with the game and which with the cheese. Good riddance, eh?”

  The tall, matronly woman explaining this to Balthazar snorts and breathes a twist of Smoke into his face to underline her words: scorn and amusement, finely mixed.

  “Here are some blankets, pet, here some tallow candles, and here’s a bucket of coal. Toilet’s out in the yard, just follow the smell. If you hear the watchtower bell, head for the shaft over there. Or else you can sit tight and brave it. Some do.”

  “The Gales have been light then?”

  “Some light, some salty, but nothing very dark.” She shrugs. “You do wonder sometimes. What’s the point of revolution if we’re going to hide from it like moles?”

  Balthazar watches her leave, then runs out after her, into the muddy street. The cottages stand shoulder to shoulder, like a wall.

  “We heard there was news,” he calls to her. “About a second ship.”

  “Why yes,” she laughs, “the great miracle! It spreads fast, don’t it? I expect they’re already busy drawing a picture, for our Illustrated News. ‘The Girl Who Calmed the Blackest Storm.’ Soothed the waves, turned water to wine then walked on it, Hosanna and Hail Charlie. She’ll have a ripped, wet blouse and long, flowing hair.

  “For a godless people,” she adds, scratching her rump through the many layers of skirt she is wearing, “we are awful keen on our saints.”

  It is how Balthazar learns that Eleanor has survived.

  [ 5 ]

  Toptown.

  There had been a city between these hills before, squalid and vice-ridden, a cluster of mines and textile mills, and a great ironworks into which young lads were sent to grow old and mean in half the time conventionally allotted to such alchemy; a paper mill, too, stinking up the valley and choking the river fish in its refuse. The Second Smoke emptied the city and sent its workers into the hills and fields: first for bacchanalia best enjoyed in a pastoral setting; later in the desperate search for food. But they came back, organised themselves, and seized the factories from their erstwhile owners—in the name of the people. Minetowns was born: an entity somewhere between an ideal, a city-state, and a political movement. Self-determined, nonhierarchical, communal. Governed by that mysterious entity, the Consensus of Smoke—and by the bureaucrats who sprouted from its soil like mushrooms. A dysfunctional sort of place, no doubt, but no more so than any other polity you care to name. Filled with story and song, much of it newly composed and rather coarse.

  Build it and they will come. And come they did. The working classes first of all, drifting here from Liverpool, Sheffield, and Manchester; from Newcastle, Grimsby, Scunthorpe, and Hull. Londoners, too, walking tall, made proud by the knowledge that the revolution started with them, down in the Big Smoke, that greatest of all ratholes, and bringing with them the joys of their rhyming slang.

  People from other walks of life soon followed these workers, many of them displaced from the South, some running from the Second Smoke, others chasing it like lovers. By the time they arrived all were sworn converts to its truth—apart from the cadgers, that is, and the curious, and the many spies who were sent to them by Parliament only to be sniffed out by the rotten flavour of their Smokes.

  And so the city grew. At first the existing housing stock was filled. It remains distinctive by the square grey stones used in its construction; stones mined from these very hills, blending into the colour of the land. Then a brickworks was opened and added bright, glazed scarlet to the city’s hues. Unlike the natural stone, Soot was found to cling to brick with a rain-defying obstinacy that soon turned the houses reddish black. And thus they stand, some ten or twenty thousand terraced houses, cheek to jowl in tidy rows, their front doors opening straight unto their living rooms, trailing lean rectangles of yard at their narrow backs.

  There would have been space in the valley, initially at least, to build houses standing by themselves, four solid walls and a little square of fenced garden to separate them off. But the Miners do not believe in separation: one is to share one’s Smoke—or at any rate one’s noise, which drifts unhindered through the thin dividing walls. Isolation is frowned upon; it reeks of the old ways, of secrecy and social ambition; of “having lost the run of oneself,” as the many Irish in town like to put it in their brogue.

  Or so the Miners say in public. In the privacy of their homes many are known to close their windows and lock their doors to ensure some separation from their neighbours. “Smoke softly,” a saying goes, and “Not every fart needs to be shared.” The tension between public mores and private inclination is a well-known topos and the subject of much local humour. Say what you want about the Miners, but they are always game for a laugh.

  “Miners”—the word has stuck though coal is no longer the main business in town and only a small proportion of citizens are employed in its harvest. The old ironworks has long reopened and great smelting cauldrons can be seen steaming in its yard; it is now ringed by a slew of factories dedicated to the shaping of steel into machinery, engines, tools, and guns. The textile mills are spinning wool again and there are farmers grazing sheep up on the hills; and families of fishermen whose fathers and sons—and some daughters, too, for the Miners have some fresh ideas in this respect—toil on trawlers off the coast and return but once in eight days, to spend Smokeday under their own roofs.

  Climbing the hills that ring the city, one can see its whole layout: the factories not separate, but rising right out of the midst of residential housing and bordering on shops, schools, and a dozen tiny commons, populated by communal goats and pigs, semiferal and living off the city’s trash. Concentration, density, is everything: the Miners huddle together as though for warmth. Dotted around the city, clearly visible by the latticed towers that straddle them, are the mineshafts. Some are there to access still-profitable coalfaces, and shifts of workers can be seen making their way to them three times a day. Others are mere transport hubs to the city beneath their feet. Toptown is but the peak of the iceberg: if not by size then by significance. Downtown remains a mystery to Balthazar: he has been to Minetowns before, has brought his theatre here and performed several pieces for the workers to good acclaim. But he has yet to be granted permission to enter down below. He is not a citizen, you see, nor is he grown from worker stock. Minetowns knows no hierarchy, but it would be foolish to think everyone is worth the same. He is a stranger, an out-of-towner; has not toiled or yet been tasted, and there are limits to the welcome for those who don’t belong.

  [ 6 ]

  Etta May was right: Balthazar needs a new notebook. Not to commence upon a project—he is not ready for that yet. The Storm remains potent in his blood and feeds a quiet terror about shaping Smoke upon a stage. But he is unused to living with thoughts and observations resounding in his mind without the relief afforded by placing them upon the page. It’s why other people marry: for companionship, for dialogue, to be heard and recor
ded, to talk themselves out. Balthazar has no taste for matrimony. Hence: a notebook. Bound virgin paper he can spoil.

  Acquiring this notebook puts him to considerable trouble. He has lost his money and anyway much of the economy is run through an opaque system of vouchers and goods stamps, or is conducted by direct exchange. The Workers’ Council has issued him and the other survivors of the wreck—six players, two sailors, and a handful of other passengers—food stamps. But it might be construed as an insult to Minetowns’ hospitality were he to trade these away. And so Balthazar goes looking for someone willing to exchange paper for some hours of his labour. He does so furtively, for there is a man living here in Toptown he is not keen to meet: a business acquaintance whose goods Balthazar no longer desires and at any rate cannot afford. A man trading in Gales.

  It takes Balthazar several days of looking. His players are no help to him. Etta May is lending a hand at the communal kitchen and is as cheerful as ever, her only complaint the absence of spices in the civic larder. Ada has taken up with a blacksmith’s apprentice, handsome as the devil and engaged for “civil marriage” to another woman who is already said to be sharpening her knives. Meister Lukas remains haunted by the version of himself he met during the Storm: he is not sleeping and barely eating, refuses to leave the bed. Geoffrey and David, too, remain unnerved and idle: they mope about the street in search of alcohol in a manner that predicts trouble. Greta Sylvana, meanwhile, has disappeared and is rumoured to have left for the South on a stolen mule. This last item of news surprises Balthazar less than the sudden encounter with Sashinka, the players’ cat, whom he finds stretched out upon his bed one evening, belly up and legs akimbo, the long fur of its stomach matted with Soot.