Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “So you made it,” Balthazar murmurs gently. “I did not see you on the beach and thought you drowned.”

  He spends the night lying wedged between the wall and the edge of the bed, disinclined to shift the cat and somehow irrationally afraid it will abandon him. But in the morning, it is still there, toying with a mouse it has caught but seems uninterested in eating.

  On the fourth day in Toptown, Balthazar finally gets his chance to acquire some paper when one of the neighbours requires help unblocking the sewage pipe connecting his outhouse to the civic grid. The man—a greengrocer—has some old order books he is willing to trade. They spend the whole day standing shoulder to shoulder, shovelling first dirt then shit. As they finish up and cart the last of the mud and excrement away, the greengrocer tells him a joke made up half of words and half of Smoke that has Balthazar still laughing when he returns home and finds, in place of the cat, a lad of fourteen or fifteen, ordering him in a rehearsed little speech to make himself available on the morrow, to present himself to the Workers’ Council. The boy is shy and nervous and unable to provide any details. All he has to add to the message, twice repeated, is “We thank the Smoke,” before running back out into the street.

  It does not matter. The Workers’ Council, in the morning.

  Balthazar is going down into the coal.

  [ 7 ]

  They send a pretty young thing to fetch him, what Geoffrey or David might fondly call a “skirt.” She arrives in an odd assemblage of heavy workman’s boots and riding trousers bulging loosely at the thighs but clinging tightly to the rump; a collarless shirt spotted with coal dust and Soot; a hunting cap that spills her fiery hair; and a schoolboyish leather satchel strapped to her narrow back. It’s the face that is pleasing: a full mouth and freckles; large, red-lashed eyes; an upturned nose that gives her a guileless air.

  The Miners are fond of hand-shaking and so Balthazar extends his, only to have it seized and the young woman link herself into his elbow.

  “Miss—?” he inquires.

  “Teddy,” she says, firmly and naturally, in the accent of someone well born. “This is Minetowns. We use first names here.”

  “Teddy,” he smiles, charmed despite his natural gruffness. “From Theodora?”

  “Ursula. Ursus, see. Latin for ‘bear.’ Hence: Teddy. A family joke.”

  She walks while she chatters, leading him through the puddle-strewn street as though they are promenading, calling out greetings to some of the Miners around.

  “Have you been in the elevators before?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, it’s a thrill! Only I hope you haven’t eaten yet. Some people find it upsetting. For the stomach. No, you haven’t? Marvellous! We can find something for you down below.”

  Within minutes they have arrived at a mineshaft and hear the whirring of the wheel high above, then see the hole spit up a cage.

  “I have gone down a thousand times, but it still gives me goose bumps. You see, he described it to me, their own journey down. Fugitives, in the middle of the night! Listening to the singing of that wire. He is most particular about that sound! Like a knife on a stone, he always says, but somehow pretty, too.”

  She pauses, looks up into Balthazar’s puzzled face.

  “He,” she laughs. “Charlie—my brother. He must have told me the story a hundred times.”

  [ 8 ]

  If the purpose of their trip is to present him to the Workers’ Council, they appear to be in no great hurry. Rather young Miss Cooper seems intent on showing off the place and giving him a tour. They exit the cage on the very first level and enter a warren of buttressed tunnels. Everything is brightly lit by electric lights; some of the tunnel walls have been bricked and even plastered, others remain lined by raw stone. There are tracks for a train system and a network of internal elevators; a bustle of people here, rushing from one place to another; a moist stillness there, water running down the walls.

  In places the tunnels widen into pockets of space, low-ceilinged and segmented by a dozen metal pillars. Their purpose is varied: one will be filled with mining equipment, carts, and pit ponies, the next will feature shopping stalls selling anything from cold cuts to underwear. There are barbers and knife sharpeners, cobblers and a haberdashery; a pub filled with people drinking pints and playing cards; a coffeehouse in which a poet-singer stands drunkenly upon a table, declaiming his coarse verse. Above it all sounds the wheeze of the ventilation system, congested and regular like an asthmatic’s snore.

  True to her word, Miss Cooper stops at one of the stalls and acquires some sandwiches—cheese and sour pickle—which they eat perching on some packing crates and wash down with two pints of murky ale. The young woman sits unselfconsciously, her legs crossed in front of her, and eats with great relish. It is only her hands—the way she holds the sandwich between three fingers of each hand with her little fingers stretched out taut—that betray that she was bred for a different sort of luncheon. Balthazar notes it and commits it to memory so he can transfer it to his notebook later on.

  “Come,” she says, drinking the last of her ale. “Let’s carry on. Oh, it’s such a joy to share all this with you—an artist! But look, I am quite tipsy now, you better hold me by the hand.”

  And then, in a sweet-scented whisper, close to his ear:

  “Is it true what some people say? That you are a woman really, dressed up as a man? Well, I would never have guessed! Of course, there are many here who do the same. Cut their hair and all! But then they still put a little Soot in their lashes and wear their caps just so.” She laughs, pouts her lips, lays a hand upon his shoulder. “Still, things are changing fast. We do have women on the Council now. Equality, they say. There was a declaration! Man is a universal creature. We Miners recognise no sex. We even voted on it and it carried in the Smoke! But you just ask the women who it is that cleans the house when they get home. No, don’t laugh, it’s not funny, though maybe it is! But quick now, the Council will be waiting and there’s one more thing I must show you, it’s ever so wonderful. Don’t worry, it isn’t far.”

  [ 9 ]

  Despite this announcement, it turns out to be a long walk, following a series of tunnels big enough to accommodate a whole mob of people but curiously deserted at this hour of the day. They take some ramps and stairs, always leading up. Balthazar has the feeling that they must be near the surface and have moved beyond the limits of the upper town, perhaps as far as the hills. There are a number of underground apartments in this area, Miss Cooper explains, still in the same breathless, confidential way. Some have their own light shafts: systems of mirrors, trapping the sun and whisking it down into lush living rooms.

  “For Council members,” she confides, “though officially they are given out by lot.”

  She shrugs, unfazed by this evidence of corruption; drags him on, leading him by his hand like a dawdling child.

  They arrive. She makes him close his eyes before they enter, and so the first he knows of the place is the smell of fresh air, dropping down from above. She leads him on, reprimanding him whenever he is tempted to risk a squint. A large, unbroken space, the floor hard and smooth underfoot. A feeling stirs in Balthazar, familiar from a thousand rehearsals, of walking out onto a stage. But this stage is slanting downwards, very gently, as though for drainage. It is like walking in a giant tub.

  It takes some thirty steps before it levels off.

  “Here we are,” Miss Cooper—Teddy—says at last. “Ekklesia. Is it not the most wonderful place on earth?”

  Balthazar opens his eyes. It’s a giant bowl, carved into the rock and opening above into a natural valley, so steep-sided as to form a funnel straight into the earth. The sun sits on one of the hillcrests, high above; a circle of sky overhead; the eerie feeling of being trapped deep within a giant well. Here, at the bottom, the space is the size of a village
square and more or less round. The floor slants towards the centre. At the periphery, stalls have been erected, consisting of little more than wooden footboards and iron frames that are sunk into the rock: fifteen, twenty levels, each new circle several feet higher than the last. He imagines these stalls packed with people. Along with the floor space at the bottom, the bowl may be big enough to accommodate the adult population of the town.

  “Ekklesia? From the Greek, I suppose. You hold meetings here?”

  “Meetings, announcements, sport. It’s where we achieve Consensus, a few times each year.”

  It takes him a moment to wrest meaning from this awkward little phrase.

  “You mean you smoke down here?” he asks, unbelieving. “The whole bloody town? That’s insane.”

  She laughs, snatches the hand that she has only just released, tugs at it.

  “I knew you would love it. But come. The Council meets not far from here. They will be wondering where you are.”

  Before they have taken more than a half dozen steps, she stops once more, digs in her little satchel, which has rested unmolested on her back all this time as though its main function were for its straps to accentuate her breasts, and produces a small brown paper parcel.

  “Here. They won’t let me come into the chamber with you and I have been meaning to give you this. It’s a rarity, you know. It has only been out a week and it is entirely sold out!”

  [ 10 ]

  And so Balthazar enters the meeting chamber of the Workers’ Council distracted, clutching the little parcel whose wrapper he has ripped open on the short walk from the public meeting hall to this murky, low-ceilinged room deeper underground. It’s a book, bound in thick cardboard, unadorned on the outside. He has not had time to open its covers.

  Miss Cooper delivered him to the door but did not enter. She has no status in the Council. And so he stands alone, like a priest before his congregation, or a culprit before a court: rows of benches starting some five steps from him and forming a three-rowed U, its mouth open towards him. Everything about the room is dim and somehow squalid: the ceiling very low and buttressed not by metal struts but crooked pieces of timber; the benches themselves roughly tailored and evidently uncomfortable. The only light is provided by the Council Members’ mining lamps, the traditional safety design, burning in low blue flames. There are gaps amongst the seats, but even so there must be fifty people in the room, filling it with their heat and slowly fouling the air.

  Balthazar, the theatre man, understands at once the symbolism of this stage set; understands that everything—the squalor, the lamps, the sheer coal walls that will bind any Smoke before it can infect—is a reference and reenactment of that first meeting room, where the miners forged a secret union and learned to speak up for their rights: there, in some other hole deep in the ground in Nottinghamshire, far to the south.

  A man rises. He is seated at the back, Balthazar notes, near the centre of the U. The Mark of Thomas sits dark on his weather-beaten face: at his temple and the tip of the ear.

  “Thy name?” he asks, flat Yorkshire vowels and all the gruffness of a factory foreman. “For th’ record.”

  “Balthazar Black.”

  “Tha have been summoned to give witness about the storm that sank thy ship. Art tha willing?”

  Balthazar hesitates. He is a director not a player and as such resentful of being asked to perform. Besides, he is not sure he is ready for it yet. Putting words to the Storm. It is the first step towards staging it.

  “I will write you a report,” he hazards. “Then you can ask me questions about details.”

  This causes a titter, of irritation if not outrage.

  “We do not accept written testimony in this chamber. Only the living word speaks true.”

  “Well, ask then,” Balthazar snaps back, then immediately regrets his tone. He is a guest here and dependent on the goodwill of this Council. The book in his hand suddenly feels awkward, as out of place as a hunting crop or crucifix, and he slips it quickly in the pocket of his coat.

  [ 11 ]

  And so Balthazar recounts the coming of the Storm. He starts slowly, haltingly, sulkily; knows he is speaking too low; is interrupted by shouts to “speak up, friend,” “put your back into it.” Before long, the story begins to absorb him and brings back moments, sights, he has suppressed. Smoke soon pours out of him, at first thinly, like watery gruel, then in a sudden billow from the white palms of his hands, and he smells in himself the frightened old woman he has never wanted to be. A council member stands up at this point, dips his hands into a bucket standing to one side; throws some coal dust into his Smoke before it can reach the benches, then quickly disperses it with a handheld fan, aware of the dangers of explosion.

  The man has reason to dip his hands twice more before the tale is finished.

  When he is done, the Council sits in silence for a moment. Then a young man rises from one of the benches on Balthazar’s left. He wears no Mark of Thomas; rather his whole face is blacked out with coal dust and Soot, and a leather cap is covering his head.

  “Thanking you for your tale, brother,” he says, and says it somehow sneeringly, the voice full of superiority and distrust. “You say it was a Storm, a Black Storm, that found you out on the sea. But we all know that that’s impossible. Black Storms are the propaganda of the South. Now I’m not calling you a liar, brother—I understand you are a theatre man and that a bit of embellishment is part of the trade. But why not say it was a Gale, blowing out to sea, that had picked up a little filth along the way? After all, here you are, in one piece and survived.”

  A murmur follows these words: of approval from the other black-faced men surrounding him, of anger at the other bend of the U, to Balthazar’s right, where shirts tend to be cleaner and are at times adorned with collars; where hats and caps have been taken off and faces are scrubbed and lightly painted with the Mark.

  The same old Yorkshire backbencher who started the proceedings quiets both sides by hammering his fist against the bench.

  “Let him answer the question. ’Tis fair.”

  Balthazar faces them. He can read doubt in half the room. They must have reports of what the hull looked like, caked in Soot. But even so. Ten years of living with emotional weather have impressed on them its rules. Gales turn dark when they ignite violence within people and spread it down the line; turn darker yet when they dig out from the soil—from the depths of a disused well, from a place of execution or an old battlefield—deposits of black Soot accumulated there and quicken it into fresh life. Some Gales bring lust and orgy; drunken joy and folly. Some bring pub brawls, knife fights, and self-loathing. But even these can be withstood and moderated; can be soothed by a happy Smoker just as they are darkened by one raging or abused.

  The Black Storm was nothing like that.

  “It ate us,” Balthazar says now. “We ran away and missed the bulk of it and still it ate us. It was pure rage. Like something injected in your blood; taking possession. An anger so total it seemed to belong to someone else.” He turns to the young Council member on his left. “I’d hate to think my friends were killed by propaganda from the South.”

  There is much murmur to his response, and further questions, but Balthazar is increasingly monosyllabic in his answers, is tired, hollow, spent. It is as though he has relived it. Perhaps it means that he is free to shed its memory; cut it out of his flesh and remand it to his notes.

  Soon after, he is dismissed. As he leaves, the Miners all reach for their lamps and douse them. They will debate his interview in darkness.

  [ 12 ]

  He expects Miss Cooper to be waiting for him outside but instead finds a child of eight or nine, rather shy, who in a tongue-tied sort of way asks him to follow. They walk a fair bit, Balthazar slow now, and unable to get any answers out of the child, other than that her “Pa” wants to
see him. At last they arrive at a door and enter without knocking into a family apartment full of noise and cooking smells. It must be one of the luxury apartments Miss Cooper talked about, for there is natural light in the room leaking from a hole in the ceiling, along with the scent of rain. Four further children are running around, playing train, with the eldest the engine, and the youngest toddling at the back. Toys litter the ground; there is a sofa made up as a bed, a dining table, a door to another room.

  “Pa! ’E’s here,” his guide yells at this door without bothering to walk near it. A moment later Francis Mosley steps into the room, closely followed by Livia. The smell of boiling turnips follows them.

  Balthazar saw them on the day of the rescue, but he was cold then and they were far away. Up close, he is handsome, if careworn; is tall and rangy, thick brown moustaches framing his mouth. Livia looks even smaller than on the beach, the plain clothes hanging off her skinny frame. What beauty she has resides in her hair and fine-boned features: elfin running to gaunt. There is no Mark on her temple and her skin is scrupulously scrubbed.

  Francis greets him with a handshake; Livia with a nod. Neither invites him to sit.

  “You spoke to the Council,” she says at last. Even more so than Miss Cooper’s, her voice is pure aristocrat. It has the effect of making the room look tiny and poor.

  “Yes, they grilled me.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to repeat yourself. I had someone taking notes for me.”

  She lets the words sink in, her disregard for the chamber’s interdiction on written records, then walks over to a chair and sits down, straight-backed and prim. The two men remain standing.