Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “The thing you are planning, Uncle—you mustn’t do it.”

  He stiffens under the words, gets water down his windpipe, coughs as helplessly as a child. It would be easy to murder him now; she might be able to smother him with his own pillow. He shoves the glass at her while she stands nursing this thought. He rises weakly but only gets as far as the edge of the bed, sits doubled over like an old man, his feet looking for his slippers. But when he speaks his voice is terrible and firm.

  “So you have figured it all out, my little niece!” He coughs again, spits on the ground, halts her when she moves to wipe it up. “I have no choice. The world needs a lesson before it will listen to duty.” He looks up at her, searches her face. “Don’t think you can stop it. It’s already in motion. Like the blade of the guillotine, already released. Or is it that you are afraid? Don’t be. You know Smith has a drug, a kind of vaccine. I expect it will be here soon. You will be the first to be injected. It will make you safe.”

  Tears spring into her eyes: at his insanity; at his twisted righteousness; at the care for her that runs through his words. She reaches for her harness, renews her diet of pain.

  “Then you are not planning on injecting yourself, Uncle.”

  Renfrew does not answer. So long is the pause that she begins to think he has fallen in a stupor: bent forward on the edge of his thin-mattressed bed, staring at the gob of spit between his naked feet.

  “Did you know we found the King?” he says all at once, as though it answers her question. “Two years ago. I don’t know if you remember: when the Queen died, shortly after the Second Smoke broke out, the crown prince went missing; they crowned him in absentia. Rumour said he was surprised to find he was no better than his valet and changed clothes with him on the spot. There were all sorts of silly stories: that he went to the colonies. That he helped found Minetowns, anonymously, and worked as a bricklayer. That he had gone mad.”

  Renfrew laughs, a disconcerting sound, like a parrot mimicking human speech and emotion.

  “But we found him. He had returned to one of the Crown’s estates and lived off all the tinned food left in one of the cellars—he’d even grown quite fat. I thought we could use him, to legitimise the government, appease the royalists. But he was such a consummate fool! ‘Let’s make peace with Minetowns,’ he said. ‘Let’s embrace the Smoke.’ ‘The whole world will hold hands,’ et cetera, et cetera. He was worse than useless. A liability.

  “Then some people got wind of our find. Soon there were rumours flying about. We had to act and quickly. Once you start thinking about it, there was only one course of action. Livingstone would have done it for me. He volunteered. But sometimes, a leader must…But it wasn’t that. You see, something in me wanted to hold that gun.”

  He looks up at Eleanor, a pained, self-mocking expression in his lips; cocks his thumb and index finger like a child playing soldier and considers the weight of this imaginary weapon in his fist.

  “Two shots, at the base of the skull. He cried while I did it, and shat his breeches. I did not smoke, not until two nights later, and then only in my dreams. Livingstone had to scrub the walls.”

  He drops the “gun,” rises at last, wipes away the spit with the heel of his foot.

  “It is the last time I showed.”

  Eleanor walks over to him, touches his shoulder with both pity and revulsion. “You don’t want to be saved, Uncle.”

  He shakes off her touch. “I hate the Smoke. It’s stronger than us. We must learn again to fear it.”

  Yet looking at him she knows he is already afraid.

  [ 3 ]

  Late that night, when Renfrew is in his bed, awake in the darkness (he has told Eleanor he no longer sleeps), and Lady Naylor presumably in hers, tucked into her blanket of pure down and reading some French romance she had sent from abroad, Eleanor Renfrew steals out of the Keep with the help of a guard. She has not bribed the guard, nor beguiled him, nor yet become his friend. Instead she has made a frightening discovery: that people are willing to follow her command. It is not that the man is simple enough to think she is on her uncle’s business. She herself carries authority. It’s her Smoke perhaps, sensed and potent even when it’s shut away; or the story of the Storm. Her elevation courtesy of her uncle plays some part in it, too. She is the girl who sits in Parliament. The girl in white. When she asks the guard to unlock the door he does not hesitate.

  The night is overcast, dark. She has been waiting for such a night. There is some little light from the Keep itself, from the curtainless windows and bare electric bulbs. It illuminates the path, the beach, the pier. The sea by contrast lies flat and black. The rowboat is where she has arranged for it to be, visible only when she is almost upon it; the two men aboard nervous but also keen to be of service. She notes with displeasure that they are heavily armed.

  “Leave the guns here,” she instructs, and the soldiers obey with only the slightest hesitation. They are violating direct orders; risking their lives. With them it was necessary to be more than an odd girl sanctified by story. She took off her harness, her garments, there in that little guard hut of theirs, once she had asked them to avert their eyes. Then, naked, covered only by a blanket she had stolen from a spare room and staring at their broad backs while they stood defying their instinct to turn and sneak a peek, she spoke to them in Smoke. It spoilt their clothes. It is just as well that Renfrew’s army doesn’t own uniforms. Later she washed in their tin basin, using the piece of lye soap Miss Cooper had gifted her, and slipped again into her clothes and steel-and-leather shell.

  Now, too, she is wearing the harness like a snail carries its shelter. As oars split the calm waters, she once again peels out of it, slips off her clothes and wriggles into the shift she had begged the soldiers find for her. Sea-damp on her naked skin: she feels exposed, ashamed; alive, too, and not without a sense of sensual expectation. “Smoke is copulation,” her uncle said to her recently, on one of the evenings when his body hurts and he grows fond of lecture. “We should look for it not in the livers but the loins.” Smoke is sex; is prayer; is sin, or truth; is the raw and ugly of your blood. Three hundred years, an army of scholars, revolutionaries, moralists—and still everybody tries to stick a collar on it, leash it to their purpose.

  One of the soldiers, the oarsman, pulls her out of contemplation. They have entered the perpetual haze that surrounds the prison ships. As he speaks, he stills his oars.

  “Are you certain about this, ma’am? These people are criminals, savages. If they weren’t when we put them on board, they sure are now.”

  She does not answer at once, imbibes the haze and tastes it.

  “I am certain,” she says. “That one over there. The women’s ship. Draw close and hook in the ladder, then wait for me down here.”

   ROCK

  [ 1 ]

  Deep in the earth of Minetowns, in a portion of the mine now long abandoned, in a room whose flawed and brittle coal seam was judged too much trouble to exploit, Livia Naylor sits staring at a piece of rock.

  She sits on a dairy stool that she has brought here for such occasions; a miner’s safety lamp for company, the light more blue than white. The rock itself is the size of a pumpkin and surprisingly light—Francis carried it here without much effort. She assumes that it was bigger before; that the Storm it fed ate away at its substance. It looks like coal, almost, but more crystalline. Dull, velvet black. Sometimes, when she sits here, she convinces herself that she can hear its pulse.

  But Livia is not here for the rock. She merely needs a place to think. She has come here often, these past weeks, and more often yet since Charlie left. There is nobody who knows about this place; nobody who can disturb her or catch her in her tears. When the sheer walls of Ekklesia become too public; when the thought of sky above becomes an encumbrance rather than a pleasure; when councillors and Concerned Members of The
Public haunt her looking for support and guidance, she comes here to bury herself with her grief. What she is grieving, Livia would be hard-pressed to say. I am like a girl who hides herself deep in the cellar, then cries over being lonely. The thought is followed by a hard, self-mocking laugh, her mother’s. At least there’s nobody here to catch her turning old and gaunt of heart.

  [ 2 ]

  “Here you are! I’ve been looking all over.”

  Nobody: Francis. The only initiate to her secret. How easy it is to treat those closest to us as though they were air.

  He’s walked softly down the mineshaft, has walked in darkness like the union men of old: not from any wish to surprise her but from a delicacy of feeling that is at the root of their long friendship. Francis does not like to impose. Now this squeamishness annoys her.

  “What?”

  “A letter for you.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “It’s from the South. From Eleanor Renfrew. The Lord Protector’s little saint.”

  She accepts the square of smoothed-out paper, notes its size and how crumpled it looks. “How did it get here?”

  “Pigeon. It was brought to me by a man who confesses he has long served as your mother’s mailman.”

  “My mother’s! So she’s in this, too. Have you read it?”

  “Yes. I could not find you and needed to know if it was urgent. It’s a warning and a request to enter into communication. Renfrew’s starting a war. We will need to speak to the Council.”

  Francis summarises the letter’s contents to her even as she reads. It almost makes her smile. He used to be so quiet. When they first met, he hardly spoke a word. “The Silent Miner”; soon the leader of the union, one of the architects of Minetowns. It took a lot of talk to build a city. “The Silent Gobshite,” someone soon dubbed him. A young man, this “someone.” Young men will say just about anything, just to prove they dare.

  Livia is twenty-seven now and is starting to feel terribly old.

  “It confirms some of the things we have been thinking. About the Indian ship and the rock. It’s a weapon. A new rock is on its way; bigger and more potent. Eleanor writes that a Gale will spark it. But it appears Renfrew is considering another way. What Charlie told us about the Angel—Renfrew knows it, too.” Francis pauses, stares at the rock. “Imagine if a Gale had caught us when we carried that thing here. We would have done Renfrew’s work for him.”

  “I’d guessed it,” says Livia. “Renfrew’s plan—I’d guessed it all along. Do you know how? Ever since we found the rock, I have been hatching the same plan. Send the rock down to him somehow, right into his fortress. Hope for something to spark it at just the right moment—like it did on that ship. It’s monstrous, of course, but that’s not what stopped me. Too risky: that’s what it came down to. And yet I could not leave it there, sunk in the sea. It’s funny how if you find a bomb you can’t help but bring it home. No, not you. I. You were against it.”

  “What about this cure she mentions? The inoculant?”

  “Ah yes, Renfrew’s trump card. He’s found a way to light the world on fire again and watch it burn unsinged. It must confirm him in his sense that he’s elect.”

  Francis nods, turns to leave, beckons for her to come along. “We must hurry, Livia. We need to send somebody to warn the Angel. And to stop this agent of Renfrew’s.”

  “A messenger? Or an assassin?” She smiles at Francis’s horror at the word, then stops him short in his response. “I will go. Today, this very hour.”

  Immediately Francis tells her that she can’t. “It’s impossible, Livia. People will hear and follow you. These are difficult times. Even now there are demonstrations, rumours that we are holding Charlie prisoner. The Council is being ignored, people say it’s undemocratic. Every day people are leaving, for one reason or another, and half the factories are well below their production targets. If you go now—there may not be a Minetowns left for Renfrew to destroy.”

  “And still I will go.” She looks over at him, summons that voice that she thinks of as her mother’s, well shaped and superior and exquisitely cold. “Say it, Francis: I am a spoilt aristocrat. You always knew I would grow sick of this one day, pretending I was something else. Now the day has come.”

  But Francis won’t hear of it; reaches for her wrists and holds them tight as though wishing to restrain her; whispers platitudes right in her face. “Don’t go, Minetowns needs you.” But his real meaning is not in his words but in his Smoke: blue and mauve, tinted by her safety light, expressive in his rich, moist curls. In the coal that surrounds them, Livia cannot smell or parse it. There is no need. She has long known that Francis loves her; knows that his wife knows it, too, and that Francis will never act upon his yearning: that his mute, one-sided love is just one more corner of confusion and complexity in a life already far too complex for her tastes.

  “You should assemble the Council and read the letter to them.” She extricates herself from Francis’s grasp and begins to leave. Something stops her. A sound.

  Francis’s Smoke has reached the rock. It is humming in response.

  They stand and listen to its song.

  “What is it?” Francis asks once it has died down. “A plant? An animal?”

  “I don’t know, Francis. It’s something we have no word for. Not yet.”

   NURSERY

  [ 1 ]

  A new sound can be heard in London.

  True, west of the city’s geographical centre, in Westminster or Covent Garden, one would have to have sharp ears indeed to pick it up. Here, quiet rules in the abandoned squares where feral tabbies hunt amongst the roots of sycamores, with only breeze and leafy rustle for a soundscape (if one discounts the caws of squabbling crows).

  But move east along the river’s curl and there it begins, so softly at first that only a bat’s or an owl’s superior hearing can pick it up and parse it. Picture it: the tilting of two thin-skinned ears (vein-threaded, Gothic-arched, fur-haloed), or else the smooth, neck-twisting swivel of a soft-feathered head whose sulphur-yellow eyes rest all too round within that pancake of a face; then the flat, inscrutable stillness of animal contemplation. The bat refuses to be drawn. It does not lack for food: the summer’s wet and warm, the midges make rich pickings all along the riverbank. The owl, however (hypothetical to this tale and hence compliant to its needs), overrules its sated stomach. Why? Curiosity. It is not just cats that are subject to its itch. How else to shed extraneous lives that have grown to be a burden?

  The bird stirs. It stands for a moment on the edge of the hole that serves as its nesting ground, high up amongst the brick of an old factory smokestack, and—like a diver, a suicide—it lets itself fall. Within a yard of dead-drop, it has unfolded those wings that until then seemed like a solid part of its puffed-up, rotund body. Feathers spread and catch the air. The owl banks, gains height; flies east along the dark flow of the river. The moon is bright enough to furnish it with shadow. Rodents cower. A sharp-eyed fox, confused, pounces at the passing shade. Nearby, a mangy pack of dogs, as daft as they are hungry, let sound their inane barks.

  The owl is heading for the docks. It is a wasteland, this, a barren desert, though all the same a flock of birds has picked it for a home and makes a living off the stringy parasitic lichen—indistinguishable from its host by all but botanist and sharp-beaked passerine—that is threaded through the Soot as mould runs through some pungent types of cheese. They are airborne now, these birds, swoop swallow-quick towards the owl, moving from dispersal to density like a hand forming a fist.

  The owl halts, midflight, in defiance of that skinflint, physics: stands nailed into the wind, wings cocked, talons sprouting from its feathery culottes; ignores the dance of not-quite-swallows; listens for the siren song that called it forth. It’s not much of a song, one must hasten to add, and certainly devoid of any
melody: more like a cricket’s strum or a fingernail’s ceaseless picking at a drum skin, relentless—nay, demented—in its constancy. The sound is loud now, loud enough, perhaps, to be apprehended by a human ear; rings out above this ghost town that was once a bustling hub of international commerce, a place of work, tax, trade.

  There are no humans to be seen.

  The owl begins to circle, triangulating sound. Its face is a parabola collecting vibrations; its ears topographers. Within moments it has picked out the building that is the source of the low buzzing. A warehouse, richly painted in dull Soot, its gate closed but its many-paned windows studded with holes. They will serve as entries for our feathered burglar.

  And enter it does, not in graceful flight but folded up into itself, stepping stiff-legged from outer window ledge to inner sill like a rheumy seaman wrapped for warmth into his coat, careful not to snag it on the jagged pieces of the broken pane. Inside, a simpler entrance at once suggests itself, for roof and wall are torn towards the far end of the building. It’s not a hole so much as a cleft that runs from the foundation all the way into the roofline, there to gape up at the sky. The song, deafening now to the shy bird’s ear, issues from the base of this cut. There used to be an office there, at the back of the building, separated from the warehouse proper by an internal wall. The wall is half fallen, the office full of its debris. What remains in one corner is an iron staircase—narrow, round—to the cellars underneath. The staircase, the cellar, the song: to the bird’s avian brain they seem as one. It is the earth itself that’s calling it, twisted metal for a tongue.