Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “Over the course of the next three days, still looking for the bloody flower, we found two further beetles. The women hovered about, at the periphery of our vision, but never came close again. God knows what they were eating. We left eventually, spooked, deflated, hungry. Two of the beetles disappeared one night—something scuttled up into our camp and ate them right through the little improvised cage we had built. The third, the plumpest and blackest, lived. On the ship home, it hatched a thousand little maggots. I almost threw them away, they looked so disgusting. Then I discovered the beetle leaked a curious liquid. I touched it, smelled it—tasted it.”

  Smith falls silent, reliving the moment, one finger raised before his face. It is a while before he speaks again.

  “And that’s all, really. I will show you the place on a map, if you like. But I’m afraid your people are dead. They survived their first encounter with Europeans but not the second. It was a disease, I suppose—Sebastian Aschenstaedt’s hunters must have brought it to them. Influenza perhaps, or the measles; something nasty and everyday. Perhaps it did not kill all of them at once but only half. Enough so the village could not recover. I got there ten years after you were taken. Those three women were all that was left.

  “It’s almost funny, isn’t it? We swapped diseases, your people and the white world. They gave us Smoke and we killed them off for it, three hundred years later.”

  He half turns, craning his neck, trying to catch Nil’s eye. There is a perplexed look on his face as though he has only just discovered the moral import of this information, now, in this last phrase of his that came to him as a witticism, as something to say. Nil won’t look at him. Smith, too, soon turns away once more.

  “There is no home for you to return to. By now even those women will be gone.”

  It is just then, as he turns away and says it, that Nil swings and hits him with a brick. It’s not because of what Smith has told him. Nil picked the brick the day before, while Smith was away; deposited it here, close at hand, amongst the clutter of the packing crates. At the time, Nil thought he would be heading west, not north, once it was done; and entertained the hope, half hidden from himself, that the brick might not find use.

  The impact shocks him: the sound of brick on bone. Nor is he prepared for the blood. Smith’s skin has split, near the crown of his head. It looks as though he has been scalped. The next moment, Nil is at Smith’s side, trying to stem the bleeding with the skirt of his own shirt. His throat is thick, his hands clumsy. But, of course, he does not smoke.

  Behind him, a shadow detaches itself from the depths of the warehouse rubble. Five steps and it bends down next to Nil, proffering its handkerchief and placing it on the wound.

  “Here, let me.” Grendel: Nil’s foster father.

  Recruited to help.

  For a moment they play a game of tug-of-war for the privilege of being Smith’s nurse. Then Nil gets a hold of himself and leaves the injured man to his foster father’s care. Two bald men, both smokeless, one ruled by the rationality of money, the other ignorant of love and hate.

  They should get on just fine.

  “Let me bandage this properly and make him up a bed,” says Grendel placidly. “Then I will help you fill up and load the crates.”

  He does just that, and within two hours Nil sits behind the wheel of the motorcar with a dozen crates strapped to its back, each spilling a droning hum that creeps into his pulse.

  “There is another man here,” Nil tells Grendel, to whom he has otherwise hardly spoken. It is an old wound that divides them, his foster mother’s death. Grendel was lukewarm in his grief. It is a failing Nil finds himself unable to forgive.

  “You already told me. The ‘ghost.’ I will be on guard for him.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s him. He’s responsible…He killed my parents. My real parents.”

  “Yes, I heard what Mr. Smith said.” Grendel nods; patience, kindness in his eyes. “Go now, Mowgli. You said you have a friend in need. That you must rescue her. You must not tarry. I will take care of things here.”

  Nil flinches but does not correct the use of his name. Mowgli. Perhaps it is time to own it again.

  As he drives off it is not Grendel’s voice that rings in his ears but Smith’s, saying “boy” to him over and over, a word one uses for one’s servant, never one’s son.

   PIRATES

  [ 1 ]

  Eleanor has hardly stepped on deck when it starts: a strumming in her feet. They are under steam. That itself is a minor miracle. The prison ships are decommissioned steamers; not wrecks, exactly, but ships no longer deemed seaworthy by their owners, a graveyard of broken parts. Some have breaches in their hulls, badly welded, and leak like rusty buckets. Others have been half gutted for parts and no longer have a rudder and propeller; are missing their chimneys and doors and half the bolts. Not one of the ships had a functioning engine.

  Here is the thing, though, about broken-down machines: they all break different parts. By bringing them together in this bay—mooring them side by side—the possibility was created of finding spares for virtually any cog and piston. It is the sort of rubbish heap that would drive mad any respectable engineer. For a tinkerer, by contrast, it is paradise.

  It was a woman who realised it first: Anne-Louise Dalabert, one of the prisoners on the floating prison reserved for her sex. She was, by any reckoning, a remarkable woman, of French nationality, hailing from Marseille. Her father was a shipyard worker who had dreamt of sending his son to university. But his wife was blessed only with daughters. When the youngest was born, and it became obvious there would not be any further children, her father began dressing her only in breeches. Louis, he called her, and spent his nights teaching her—and himself—mathematics. When she turned eighteen he sold all the furniture other than his bed, gave her the money and sent her off to Paris. Five years on and she’d become one of France’s first female naval engineers.

  It proved an empty title, for Anne-Louise could not find work, not in Marseille, not in La Rochelle, not in any of the northern ports. It was not that there were no posts for naval engineers. But when she walked in with her wide hips and cropped locks, the men just looked at her and dismissed her without a glance at her credentials. She found she was hungrier than her father, the simple stevedore, had ever been.

  After the Second Smoke came across the Channel—preceded by some hours by a cloud of rumour very nearly as intoxicating as the real thing—Anne-Louise soon made up her mind to travel to England. She had understood that a revolution had begun that would turn it into a workers’ state. She landed in Dover. Everyone she talked to—men and women with puzzled faces, forever scanning the land for the next Gale—told her to go north. Minetowns was no more than a thought, a dream, back then, but word had travelled. Something was happening in the factories of Manchester and Liverpool, down the mineshafts of County Durham. Anne-Louise wanted to be part of it.

  She never found her revolution. Instead she found work: not up north but in the West Country, where the Second Smoke had made only limited inroads, and industry was continuing apace. The old order held fast but was not picky about who it hired. Some of her class anger left her when she was given a workshop to supervise and an advance on a week’s wages. Coming from France, she was familiar with industrial techniques that had been illegal in Britain on account of the embargo. As such she was highly prized. For the first time since childhood, Anne-Louise ate well.

  Then Renfrew’s star started its slow ascent. In the year he was named Lord Protector, Anne-Louise was apprehended under suspicion of espionage and sedition. She had been making speeches about workers’ pay. The trial was quick, the sentence brisk. The idea of the prison ship was new then: when they rowed her across, there were only three moored on the water, though their stink was already fouling up the bay.

  Once on board, anger ov
erwhelmed her. Anne-Louise lived like an animal for six months, fighting with the other prisoners over food and scraps of clothing. Then a Gale blew in. It intensified the inmates’ anger. But it also revealed other passions. For the first time the prisoners apprehended each other as persons; for the brief spell of half an hour, they knew one another.

  Afterwards, something shifted in Anne-Louise, subtly but comprehensively. She remembered hope. And, watching more and more ships being anchored side by side, she conceived a plan. It took several months to convince the other women to spare a little of their rations, each day, so they could trade and, through trade, escape. Trust was wanting, and more than once their entire stash of put-aside food disappeared, stolen by one of the women who had gorged herself until sick. So they started over. And made contact with the men.

  They used the cover of night for their approach: sent a group of swimmers over to a single ship. They were older women, these first, carrying cudgels between their teeth in case they were attacked.

  The first steps were the hardest, the men full of violence and suspicion. Then they realised they could sell off useless ship parts for good food. An economy sprang into being. Soon more than food was being traded: the sexes hungered for each other. Not all of it was pretty. There were marriages of sorts; two men were clubbed to death for attempting rape; a few of the women sold themselves and shared their profits with the ship. It was, in many ways, how it had been, in the mean streets of Marseille. Anne-Louise revelled in it. Here, under the Lord Protector’s nose, they were creating society, were rutting and trading and manufacturing hope. At night they looked over to the lighted cells of the Silent Keep and bared their naked arses; peed across the railing amongst giggles and Smoke.

  [ 2 ]

  All this Eleanor had learned on her previous trip to the ship. She came that night from the need for finding allies; hoped to win over the desolate and dispossessed by argument and Smoke; had some vague dream, it is true, that one of these ships would carry her away when the time came, if little concrete sense of the practicalities involved.

  What she found, to her surprise, was an escape attempt in waiting. The engine was only days away from being fixed; the women had already organised themselves into a crew and were running practice drills for the day of their escape. What they did not have was fuel. All the wood on board had long been cut into thin logs but would not suffice to put the engines under steam. They needed coal and had no place to get it.

  Eleanor did. She had seen—had held and tidied away into its drawer—the order book her uncle used to authorise provisions for the prisoners. The order slips were sent to the Company clerk in charge of the stockpiles (the state’s own supplies were long exhausted). The clerks, in turn, put together a cart with all the cargo and then handed it over to soldiers charged with its delivery. It was an easy thing to add a special order of coal to the delivery; her uncle was too sick to read over the details before signing. This morning, the clerks had sent out three carts rather than one. It was not their place to question the Lord Protector’s orders, nor was it the soldiers’, who sent a stream of boats across with the provisions and wondered idly at their weight. The provisions were received just as Parliament went into session: Eleanor caught a glimpse of the unloading as she was finishing getting dressed.

  Now she climbs on deck. Anne-Louise rushes to her surrounded by a dozen other women. There is Smoke in the air, light and jubilant. A dozen rowboats are in the water, filled with parliamentarians, fishermen, soldiers. The decks of the other prison ships are packed with haggard men. All are staring over at her as she embraces the captain.

  “Are we ready to sail?”

  Anne-Louise nods. “All we are miss-ing are the skull and the crossbones,” she says, her English elongated, impish, soft. “Where are we ’ead-ing?”

  “North.”

  “Bien.”

  [ 3 ]

  They don’t make it as far as the open sea.

  The Bristol Channel is a narrow V, splitting England from Wales. An “az-crack,” as Anne-Louise puts it cheerfully, softly, unwittingly turning Bristol into Britain’s arsehole. Sailing south as they are, a string of boats seeing them off, the coast recedes on both sides and the waters grow choppier. The tide can be murder out here; it regularly pushes its weight into the river that feeds the narrow bay, reversing its flow. The tide is helping them now, though, is sucking them seawards, where three ships have moved into position to block their way.

  All three are Company vessels: the flags striped red and white, with the Union Jack tucked into one corner. There are cannons aboard two of the ships; their muzzles have been brought into position. A warning shell splits sky then sea. On deck of the nearest ship a row of dark-skinned sailors cock guns in their general direction.

  The third ship is different. Smaller; less obviously, less copiously armed. A pleasure yacht, almost, if somewhat too large for that. Eleanor is not surprised when a rowboat detaches itself and approaches. On board are two rowers and two soldiers, all wearing Smoke masks. The soldiers have attached bayonets to the tops of their rifles; bulky turbans hide their heads. Between them sits a daintier figure. A sunhat, its brim the size of a drinks tray. From underneath, a flash of colour, ginger and gold. The way it flies upon the breeze, the hair is freshly washed.

  As the rowboat draws closer, the sunhat soon discloses a face. Miss Cooper is not wearing her Smoke mask; it dangles fetchingly by a strap from her long white neck, its snout-like filter curling against her chest. Once in hailing distance, Miss Cooper bids the rowers stop. She does not hail them, however, but simply gestures with one gloved hand. It’s an invitation not an order. Given the circumstances it amounts to the same.

  Eleanor won’t heed Anne-Louise’s protests and accepts at once. She unrolls a rope ladder over the railing, then commences on the descent. Near the bottom, a memory rises in her, of stepping into another boat, New York’s coastline in the distance; Smith’s hands helpful on her rump. This time gloved fingers merely brush her wrist to deliver her aboard. This time she is wearing a harness. It used to be an object of humiliation. Of late it has acquired a different feeling, as though she’s grown a carapace or shell. It shields her, protects her, keeps enemies at bay. Down here, in this boat, surrounded by soldiers de-faced by their masks, it feels like she is safe.

  Eleanor does not care to swallow the Smoke that slips out with her smile.

  [ 4 ]

  “So what is this—a gaolbreak or a coup? It rather looks like the latter. You betrayed him, did you? Stole his kingdom right from under his feet. And look what has hatched!” Miss Cooper’s eyes run down Eleanor’s blood- and Soot-stained dress as if it were the latest fashion. “Only I suppose it means your uncle will not pay what he owes me.”

  She turns around to where the Company ships hover under arms.

  “I was going to hand them over to his command today. Shall I send them home? No, I think not. India might test their loyalties now that they have seen the seat of Empire and found it to be tatty. Better to send them north to Renfrew’s lieutenant. He might answer for the debt.”

  Miss Cooper pauses again, studies the prison ship, the string of boats that make up its wake.

  “Give me a good reason not to sink them where they float.”

  Eleanor thinks about it, opens her mouth. Smoke, not words, come pouring out of her. Miss Cooper quivers under it, slips sweets into her mouth. Her soldiers, Smoke-masked, turn to Eleanor with open threat.

  “Stop it right now, your little trick. God, you are intoxicating, though. Minetowns would have made a goddess of you. You might even have dislodged the Council. But alas, Minetowns is not long for this world.” Miss Cooper shrugs as if it had nothing to do with her, picks at the grains of Soot that have landed on her dress. “So where are you heading with this ragtag mob, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “You know where. North. I
will put a stop to your dragon.”

  “Will you now? Then you must have it—Smith’s mystery inoculant. I am told there’s been a delivery.”

  She leans forward and lowers her voice to a stage whisper, as if imparting a secret the help must not hear.

  “India’s in full rebellion, my dear. The Company’s hanging by a thread. I imagine a drug like that will be worth a pretty penny over there just now.”

  Eleanor is incredulous. “But don’t you want to stop it? You said it yourself: Uncle is sick. Your weapon will destroy half the island—perhaps all of it! This is your home.”

  “Home? It was before Charlie and his playmates mucked it all up. Now it will forever reek of mediocrity. I have decided to make a new home.”

  “In money.”

  Miss Cooper’s pretty little face hardens. “Fetch it. I know what it looks like: one large packing crate full of jars. These two gentlemen here will help you. Fetch it or I will drown your little fleet right here in this bay.”

  [ 5 ]

  It takes some doing, lowering the crate down onto the rowboat: a rope has to be found and someone skilled at making knots. Once on board, the thing proves heavy enough to unbalance the little boat: for a mad second Eleanor hopes that it will topple and sink it. But that, surely, would see them sunk, too. The women on the deck of the prison ship are cursing and yelling insults at the two Hindustani soldiers and the “aristo bitch” in the boat below. In truth, though, they are not fighting the exchange. A crate of gold would be a small price for freedom, and there is no reason to believe that the plain wooden box holds anything near as precious as gold.

  Once it is loaded, Miss Cooper waves Eleanor down to her once more.

  “Is that everything? The whole delivery, every last jar? I won’t be cheated. Swear it by your uncle’s life.”