Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “But something has changed. Smith, I suppose, and this talk of a ‘cure’—I have heard the rumours, of course. Your arrival, too, the way you weathered the Storm. And then Renfrew is mad: you have said as much yourself. Hence Britain will burn, my dear. Either your uncle figures out how to start Gales and then lights the fire just where he wants it, or else a Gale will set the weapon off, sooner or later, quite by chance. I never dreamt how unstable it might be.

  “And so I’m leaving. There’s a whole world out there and half of it has never even heard of the Second Smoke. China is just getting an appetite for sweets and cigarettes. The India rubber trade out of South America is booming, and there are diamond mines in Africa that are just waiting to be dug up. Forget the Coopers of Somerset! What’s a little plot of dirt if you can own the world?” Miss Cooper smiles at her own grandiloquence. “Of course, all this is just a story. There is no dragon, just a silly old rock.”

  She rises from the bed, walks slowly to the door, runs her fingers over the handle.

  “All the same, there is a price for the story, Eleanor. I want reports. Everything your uncle says and does. Come by after breakfast each day. And in here, please take that dreaded thing off your back. We can talk dresses and hairstyles. And if you are good, I will even snatch you away with me, somewhere where Smoke is still Smoke, and servants are servants, and the sun always shines. Now wouldn’t you just love that?”

  [ 4 ]

  Once she has been dismissed by Miss Cooper, Eleanor goes about her daily chores. She visits her uncle, tidies his room, bathes and dresses the hole in his stomach that has never quite healed. After that he takes time to further her education: a lecture on ancient history, some Greek and Latin declensions, then a conversation about a book of physics he has had her read. Next, Renfrew has her copy out some letters in her formal, large-lettered hand (his own is shaky these days, a nasty, slanted scrawl). “I am his nurse, his secretary, his student,” Eleanor has explained to Lady Naylor. “I’m the new Livingstone.”

  “You are his Christ,” Lady Naylor had answered. “How is it you don’t know he wants to nail you to his cross?”

  When she has completed the copying, they typically go for their afternoon walk, or attend a parliamentary session together, a hush falling over the room upon their entrance. The Lord Protector and his ward: they are a unit now, in the eyes of the world. Recently a young man has been invited up to Renfrew’s study to make sketches for their portrait. Elsewhere in the Keep, Eleanor has caught glimpses of fops old and young wearing stylised harnesses over their dinner jackets like outsized waistcoats. Subjugation is the fashion; carries the promise of a country disciplined and standing tall.

  Today, however, Renfrew and Eleanor eschew Parliament and keep their walk short. The portrait artist does not make an appearance. Her uncle is ornery. His stomach is troubling him. He is impatient for news. “Where is Smith?” he barks at the servant who is in charge of the pigeons that bring his twice-daily mail and who would be put to death if he dared read the crumpled missives.

  “I am running out of time!” Renfrew complains to Eleanor later, pinch-faced, running a fever.

  “Hush, Uncle,” she says, and changes his dressing. “The wound is suppurating again. You really must rest.”

  Later that evening, once he has dismissed her and locked himself in, she leaves the Keep by the western gate and walks down to the little pier, to stare at the prison ships anchored in the bay. When a guard comes out of the little guard hut, she accepts his offer of a cup of tea and sits with him and his comrades, who stare at her in awe while she makes small talk in her awkward, abrupt way.

  I am making friends of them, she thinks, and am treating them as equals, so I can make tools of them when the time comes.

   ICEBOX

  [ 1 ]

  “There, beta, eat. No, don’t speak, otherwise I must be fetching the hood. Are you liking it, is it toothsome? I asked the cook not to make it too spicy. It is for the prisoner, I tell him, his stomach cannot digest the spicy food. The cook, he tells me that he has food left over that he prepared for the other sahibs, it is very bland, he says, your Englishman will like it. But I say no, moong daal is better for him, he has suffered much and has a tender stomach. He is not ready for English meat. And here, drink some water. Go on, finish the bowl. It is important to drink. Are you needing the potty? No? We will leave the hood off for now, what do you say? Only don’t speak, beta, the orders are very strict.”

  The old servant looking after Thomas likes to play the fool. He does so from habit, perhaps, as a mode of dealing with the sahibs; and from self-protection (one cannot hold responsible a fool). Two times a day, he comes to bring food and empty the chamber pot. It was he who, the evening after Singh’s visit, found the torn piece of sacking that had served as a hood. Despite his constant reminders that Thomas must not speak—as though his words were spells that might entrance the servant into doing something bad—the old man has not replaced the hood; it is possible he has not reported the torn sacking to those who sail the ship. And sail it they do: the ship left harbour that very night. The shiver of the engine; the roll of the open ocean, so different from the subtle swell of port—they have started to grow into Thomas’s body, are assimilating it into their rhythms, until one day the stillness of land will have become an alien thing, a disquiet to the blood. Land: England. Home. He’ll be returning with a present. The ice machine gurgles half a yard beyond the reach of his chain.

  Something about Thomas has changed these past few days since they have left Bombay. His food, though it retains the medicinal note of sweet, is no longer laced with opiates. His body is missing it: a fever has spread, along with nausea; there’s an ache in his bones. But his head is working again for the first time since that nightmare journey down the mountain. They kept him masked and blindfolded so thoroughly that it was only when they put him in the first of his Bombay prisons that he learned for sure he was no longer blind. Now Thomas is chained, is filthy, is mollycoddled by a servant.

  But at last he is awake.

  [ 2 ]

  He has nighttime visitors. The first time he wakes to them, he immediately asks himself if there have been other visitors before. The old man must have led them here: he is keeping them at a distance and whispering at them in one of India’s many tongues. The men with him are merchant sailors not soldiers: their clothes say as much. They ask a few questions of the servant. Mostly they stare.

  Thomas rises where he lies. This makes the old man nervous; he appeals to him with a look and puts his finger to his lips. Thomas obeys—he owes him this, at least, and at any rate he is not sure he can tell the men anything they don’t already know. Chances are they have little English. They stare at the curio that is this living, breathing incarnation from some peasant story. Thomas lifts his chin into the lamplight so they can see more clearly the outline of his mark.

  More men come the following night, and some repeat visitors the third. Thomas waits for them; there are other hours when he can sleep. One of the men, to the old servant’s agitation, squats down within reach of Thomas’s chain. He stares at him and winks—something, Thomas thinks, he must have seen Englishmen do because it looks too studied to be part of his normal repertoire of facial gestures. Is it mere idleness, the showing off of a new trick? Or does it have a purpose? Thomas winks back. This satisfies the man. He rises quickly while the old servant jabbers at his back. The next night there are no visitors, nor the night after. It does not matter. Bombay has risen. Singh must have had help when he came aboard the ship.

  Thomas puts his hopes in that wink.

  [ 3 ]

  Three days later (Thomas counts them by his meals), there is a commotion on the ship. Few noises reach here, down in the hold, but even so he can make out faint shouts and sudden running across the ceiling above him. Minutes later, he hears the whip-crack of a single shot. More run
ning, more shouts, then a silence followed by three further shots, spaced out at tidy intervals that bring to mind an execution.

  Then nothing.

  Into the quiet that follows the commotion, the icebox emits a sudden grunt. A hiss of gas follows, the stench of ammonium, the groan of steel. Underneath it is another sound that Thomas was aware of while doused with laudanum but has since dismissed as raving. The tap of a fingertip on a taut drumskin. Now he hears it again and tells himself it is nothing but his pulse.

  [ 4 ]

  The old man will no longer talk to him. When Thomas bombards him with questions, he picks up the piece of cloth he has threatened to use on him as a hood or gag. If he comes close, thinks Thomas, it would be an easy thing to overpower him. What then, however? The man holds no value to the captain; he has no keys, and anyway, Thomas’s chains are soldered on, not locked.

  Thomas falls silent and accepts the bowl of daal.

  That evening, he notices a slick black condensation seeping from the corner of the icebox. Near the bottom, a metal seam has split, and its lips bulge outwards, curling away from that which they contain.

  [ 5 ]

  Thomas dreams. Charlie is there, Livia. Julius as he was after Grendel shot him, a brittle carapace of Soot. In his dream they put him in an ice machine, then hear him knocking at its inside walls. Charlie stoppers his ears. Livia pulls him down to sit with her on top of the box, the knocking rising up into their thighs like an evil, carnal pulse. She kisses him, greedily, her mouth in his mouth. When she leans back her tongue is long and black but for a yellow mark right at its tip.

  He leaps up from his blanket and falls over his chain. The sound echoes in the empty hold. On his gums there is the bitter taste of Smoke the sweets in his blood were unable to suppress.

  He lies in darkness and strokes the gaps between his toes.

  When the servant finally comes and brings light, Thomas sees that a growth of lichen covers the icebox in a dense black fuzz. The metal is distended in places, bulging. Where box meets floor, a single tendril of the growth probes outwards, like the first crack in a sheet of ice. It points sideways, away from Thomas. All the same, he suddenly feels looked for, hunted. He scoots away from it, as far as the chain will allow.

  “You must tell the captain,” Thomas appeals to the servant. “The machine is broken. The rock is growing. Tell him there were mushrooms on that mountain! Tell him to come and see for himself.”

  The old man shushes him, first gently, then threatening him with hood and gag. But Thomas can see that he is shaken: not by the words so much as the sight of that black fungus. Before he leaves through the hatch at the far end of the hold, he turns to Thomas once more with his light shaking in his fist and says very quietly, “There was a mutiny some days ago. They shot three men. But I was loyal to my duty. It was I who warned the first mate.”

  Thomas looks back at him, aware of the question in the other man’s gaze. “Did you know they would shoot them?”

  The old man does not answer. What else does one do with mutineers?

  It is not for Thomas to grant pardon. “You made your choice,” he says. “Now I ask you to make another one.”

  [ 6 ]

  The next day a different man comes to look after him. He seems disturbed to find Thomas unmasked, and does not react to any questions. The food is placed down and shoved near Thomas with a long-poled gaff hook, the chamber pot retrieved in the same manner. That day, the ship hits a storm and is tossed between waves. Seawater must pour over the deck high above Thomas’s head, because after a few hours some little quantity has found its way into the hold through some flaw in the main hatch. With every new lurch, Thomas slides across the slick metal floor, working hard not to be swept towards the ice machine. In the end, he holds on to the chain’s anchor point, wrapping the chain around his arms. He stays there until the storm relents and the servant brings again his light. The rock’s fungal tendrils are everywhere now; one jagged shoot reaches close to Thomas’s thigh. He recoils from it, smells the stench of sea rot filling the whole hold.

  “Leave the light,” he yells at the sailor.

  To his surprise, the man does: far out of reach, near the doorway, he screws it into a designated place where it flickers away the hours.

  The way the light throws Thomas’s shadow, it merges with the hulk of ice machine and rock.

  [ 7 ]

  That night, he hears again that strange drumming in his blood. The fungus has reached the anchor point of the chain and is now working its way up towards him, link by link. On the icebox itself, a colony of tiny barnacles has taken residence, slick and black and adorned by a fine yellow stripe. A curl of fear escapes Thomas—he’s been fasting, unable to keep down his sweet-laced food—and drifts towards the rock. Deep in his pulse, the rock appears to hum its answer.

  “You are dreaming,” Thomas mutters at the rock, in full consciousness that the thought is but a road to madness. For the first time in days he approaches the ice machine and finds that, bulging as it is, its sidewalls buckled in a dozen places, its valves and pipes sticking out like bristles at odd angles, he can now touch it. His hand reaches out but curls itself into a fist before it can make contact.

  That night he dreams again of Livia and Charlie: Soot-faced, yellow anger in their eyes. They fight, or maybe they fuck, and when he wakes he finds that he is sobbing and a sea-slick black fungus has grown into the shallow wound cut by the manacle that connects his ankle to the now weed-heavy chain.

  “Leave me alone,” he shouts, but what good is it, speaking to a rock?

   BIRDS

  [ 1 ]

  London looks different from up on high. The river is a curl of molten lead, its banks embroidered with Soot. In places—a river bend, a stagnant eddy—this Soot sparkles in rings of mineral colour like a petrified oil slick, violet, sulphur yellow, or rust red. Mostly it is mud-dark. The buildings, too, are marked by Soot to a height of twenty or twenty-five feet: a tide mark that runs across streets and courtyards, takes in churches, public buildings, hovels alike. The streets themselves stand empty. Where cobbled, grass and weeds have rutted them; where unpaved, they have been swallowed up by yellow shrub. Desert plants, that’s what they seem like, these hardy, sickly-looking weeds that contrive to suck nutrition from the sooty soil. Here and there a patch of wildflowers has colonised a street, a yard, a patch of roof, and dyed it vivid like a stain. The only trees are the sycamores of ancient city squares, their roots anchored deep in better soil. These have spread their branches and stand triumphant in full leaf; have flung their young into the street, where saplings vie with cobbles and dream of turning city into wood. Foxes, wild dogs, feral cats live amongst the buildings and the sycamores’ roots. They feed on the mice that breed in Soot-choked cellars. In the high grass crickets play their scratchy violins. To the east, above Limehouse and the docklands, the sky is thick with swooping birds; a haze on the horizon where one dares suspect the sea.

  Of people, there are only limited signs. To the north, a few courtyards where cultivation has been attempted and tomato stalks stand staked and stunted in haphazard rows. To the west, a little tribe of London natives bastes a spitted badger in their rough-dug fire pit. South, on a bend of the river, a group of fishermen works the thigh-deep mud, digs up crayfish, cockles, barbed-faced bottom feeders whose very flesh carries the tang of Soot. But mostly the city stands empty. London’s factories are closed, its people fled, whole neighbourhoods burned down to charred facades. Those who come soon learn that it is tough work squeezing food from out the broken city. What wealth there was, what food, has long been looted and consumed.

  Nil knows all this as well as anyone: has spent his childhood fishing for eels amongst the river reeds, and stuffing them into a sack where they would knot and seethe until back home Grendel’s knife would sheer off their heads (and even then their en-slimed tails wo
uld whip and curl within the sink). Nil has carried buckets from a well—a half mile there, a half mile back—to water spuds that came out dry and wrinkled, riddled by blight; has kept chickens that laid dun-shelled, blood-yolked eggs; and one hungry winter freed the dog he was tasked to kill and butcher, and served a meal of boiled nettles in its stead. It was then, too, that he first learned to pick locks, for the London of his childhood still held many a locked door: in factory offices and counting houses; on cabinets and post-office strongboxes; in hidden-away apartments kept by rich folk who used to come to London for sin and play.

  “You are thinking about the past, aren’t you? Over there, where you keep looking. Is that your old neighbourhood?”

  Smith’s voice: intruding gently on the view. They are standing side by side on this rooftop made of pigeon-fouled tiles; the afternoon sun hot on their backs, sending their shadow across the precipice of the building. The Company man is holding binoculars, while Nil is in charge of the photographs and the map.

  “Is he still there? Your foster father, I mean. If you like we can go and look.”

  Nil does not reply but studies the pictures.

  “We are still too far west,” he decides at length, “and too far from the river. There”—here he points to another building about a quarter mile from them that he knows to have once been a hotel—“we should climb up there and try again.”