Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Out to sea—sundown painting the horizon; a cloud bank pressing down its lid—a shape detaches itself from the play of current and squall. A ship, more drifting than steering, perilously close to the coast. Around it, like the debris from a shipwreck, a flotilla of smaller vessels: trawlers, sailboats, river punts. Low tide, the sand flat and dark.

  At last the ship runs aground some three hundred yards south and people pour from it like rats from out a flooding basement. A gust catches them, sends long hair flying. Women, a band of women, perhaps fifty strong. They wade through waist-deep waters, skirts glued to their thighs. The one who leads them wears an upper suit of armour. She stands mirrored on the ship’s crude flag.

  “Who is that then?” asks Old Granny Henderson.

  “Eleanor,” answers the Negro.

  All at once his features have smoothened; he has remembered how to smile.

  “There,” Granny Henderson will later tell her Charlie, “that’s the face of a backed-up wench who at long last has taken a good shit.”

   AT DUSK

  [ 1 ]

  It is not a landing then so much as a shipwreck. It wasn’t the engineering that let them down but the scarcity of fuel. They simply ran out and ran aground. There was nothing for it but to walk to shore.

  The water is cold on the skin; their wet skirts heavy once they reach dry land. A hundred campfires up the slope of a gentle hill; still enough daylight left to make out the people thronging towards them. The wind is coming from these people, from the north. Eleanor walks into it. It spreads her Smoke behind her like a cloak. Men and women drop into its shelter, children, too: parliamentarians and fishermen; prisoners; farmers and villagers. As she reaches the first of the fires, the Miners there soon join their march, as do the Angel’s pilgrims. They smell the depth of her, her burning will, her reservoir of Smoke. Even Eleanor’s doubt seems to comfort them, her reluctance, her unwillingness to lead. “It may be,” said Anne-Louise upon climbing down from the ship—said it not without resentment—“it may be, we will follow you to the end of the world.” The end of the world is a Storm of pure hate. Eleanor means to swallow it.

  She is not sure she can.

  Then Balthazar is there, in front of her, and Etta May: blocking her path. Eleanor cannot stop now for greetings or explanations, though her relief, her joy, runs like a shiver from her and on through the crowd, where people hug one another and share smiles, as though it is they who have been reunited with old friends.

  “Eleanor!” Balthazar greets her, and in greeting, tries to stop her in her tracks.

  “It must wait,” she mouths, passing him.

  “Charlie is dead.”

  He points towards a wagon, half a dozen steps adrift from all the many others. Then he, too, is downwind from Eleanor and party to her Smoke. He falls into step, as does Etta May. The direction has veered, some ten degrees. The wagon is now in the centre of her path.

  [ 2 ]

  She climbs up alone. The train of people that has followed her bunches then widens to a crescent. The wagon is its silent centre. Inside, Eleanor finds Livia and Charlie. Livia has exposed his head and is cradling it upon her lap. Bundles of men’s clothes are strewn around her; letters and notes. Charlie’s possessions. Livia must have been digging through them. Perhaps she is looking for a final word. Livia’s Smoke is vile, a thing of hate; echoes the rot. Eleanor reaches to soothe it, but a look from Livia stops her. Livia does not want to be soothed. She looks just like the stories say she does, much more so than Charlie, who is unrecognisable now, except for the hair. Eleanor bends to touch it, then stops herself. She has no right to him. All he did was save her, when she was still a child.

  “I am going now,” Eleanor says. “To the soldiers and the rock.”

  “You will be shot.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I will come, too.”

  Outside, through the canvas flaps of the wagon cover, the crowd catches her wind-borne grief and at once starts to weep. Eleanor turns, descends, walks on.

  It is a weeping army she leads to war.

  [ 3 ]

  Livingstone has not been sleeping. There has been too much to do.

  The cargo ship had trouble docking. It is listing, sinking in the harbour. Its captain is insane. The cargo itself has grown too large for the cargo hatch and has attached itself to the steel of the hull. Welders are needed, but only two of the crew have any idea how to wield a welding torch. They complain of a “ghost,” a “wraith,” living in the hold who has bitten through his chain, and insist on cutting the hull open from the outside. Hot white sparks and the groan of steel on steel: Livingstone is making them work night and day. Birds fly like bats all around, their ceaseless darting making everyone twitchy. A noise in the air that is not quite wingbeats. It’s like the pier has its own pulse.

  The Company ships bearing soldiers bring further uncertainty. A handful of white officers afraid of their own men: Livingstone does not need to taste their Smoke to know as much. Even so, the officers are reluctant to submit to Livingstone’s will despite having written orders to do so, signed very prettily by Lady Ursula Cooper, Vice-President of Exports. Livingstone is too much the upstart, the servant; a man without rank or wealth. Smokeless, even his force can be denied. The officers dawdle over his orders. They treat him like a dog.

  He’s a dog then: a terrier, ragged and fierce. Forever rushing from one man to another, harrying them, pulling at coat-tails, at trouser cuffs, handing out samples of his bark, his bite. Dragging behind himself (a dog holding a leash!) the tied, gagged figure of a child.

  Livingstone has not slept in three full days.

  [ 4 ]

  Along with the cargo and soldiers, the ships have brought news. News from the South, the Keep. Something has gone wrong there. The warships never reached their destination; they were turned back halfway down the Bristol Channel. Renfrew is “indisposed,” Livingstone is told; “deposed,” one of the officers tells him more bluntly. A girl in a corset has been chasing the warships, along with a fleet of rabble. She’s done in her uncle and now she’s here.

  Not a single soldier has been inoculated.

  It is this last part that changes things. Far from crushing Livingstone, it feeds a dream. It is a simple dream, a beautiful dream, of a world engulfed in Storm. He will be the only person to witness it. Only the thought of Smith rankles in him. Smith’s cure may yet sabotage his dream. As such it has to be found and destroyed. Livingstone closes his eyes and sees himself walking a barren earth. He is king of a dead world.

  He alone is saved.

  And thus he does not mind being a terrier; does not mind the end of the world being mired in incompetence, in shouting, insubordination, and delays. Contentment is spreading through him, steady and certain. He is like a man nailing shut all doors and windows. The nails are rusty, the hammer has broken, the hands full of blisters. But no matter what, he will soon be alone, in darkness. There is nothing that can stop him now. The rock is here, the child is here; a crowd has been gathering, and there’s a trickle of people that leads back into the very heart of the North. He has the pyre, the gasoline, the match. The Storm will know its road.

  And so, Livingstone has already won. He does not need the rock out on the pier to set it off; does not need to place it on a cart and drive down the country road, through the throng of those who are afraid, until he stands above the mines. All that is mere aesthetics: making more perfect a moment that will be. Livingstone thinks of the song that they will sing of this in years to come. Then he realises that he is the only one who will ever sing it. It is so beautiful a thought, he shivers under it. His bladder tugs. He pisses pure black in a wide arc off the pier.

  Five steps from him, the hull of the cargo ship at last gapes open like a burst conker. Livingstone buttons himself and gestures for a soldier to operate th
e crane. Another order is carried down the length of the pier and sees the parabolic mirror of the lighthouse come ablaze: it strafes them with its cone, finds first the crane, then the ship with its jagged hole. Two sailors are trying to attach something inside the hole to the large metal hook that swings from a rope leading back to the crane’s arm and from there to the winch system at its base.

  The leash tugs at him. Little Timmy has finally understood something; he’s growing restless. All this time Livingstone has kept him close; tugged the child’s clumsy fingers away from the buckles of the mask; kept his breath away from the rock. At first, he continued to feed the boy with sugar, held his hand. Then came minor tantrums, and the end of Livingstone’s supplies. A leash, tied in a choke hold around the boy’s throat, soon clarified the nature of their bond, as did the string around the boy’s wrists: the child held out his arms, docile and stupid, and even now resists very rarely, trundling along with Livingstone like his shrunk, masked shadow. He’s an imbecile, an idiot. And yet the eyes that stare back at Livingstone through the thick glass of the goggles carry an odd sort of understanding, along with a patience that is nauseating to Livingstone. Sometimes he fancies them both dead and drowned; water pressing against the inside of those goggles, his own movements weighted by the heft of the sea. Sometimes the dead man comes to him, too, and stops behind him out of sight. The rattle of his cough; his lips pursed (Livingstone can see them although his head is turned), planting a kiss right behind Livingstone’s ear.

  In Livingstone’s hands, the leash stirs again and tugs him closer, to where the crane dips its arm down to the ship. Ropes have been wrapped around the cargo: he cannot see it yet, only the ropes extending like fishing lines, ready to be reeled in. There is a battle of inert mass against the clever physics of pulley, rope, and mechanical winch. Then—like a fish from a barrel, thinks Livingstone, like a tooth yanked out upon a thread—the rock bursts through the sundered hull and hangs above the pier. It is studded with sea life and the metal debris of some strange machine. Something rides it, on the far side of the rock, hiding behind its bulk; brings to mind a hermit crab, slinking back into its knotty mollusc shell. The crane groans—how heavy is it, this piece of pure black?—it heaves, shudders, the rope taut and still. Then something snaps. It’s not the rope, but some rivet and crossbar, worn by rust and disuse. All at once the crane starts to bend, right in the middle, crumpling into itself and dipping both the tip of its arm and the cargo beneath the lip of the pier into the cold of the sea.

  Livingstone sees it, tugs at the leash, and orders a hundred soldiers to man the rope and heave.

  [ 5 ]

  When a play is good, thinks Balthazar, at the point of its climax, there is little to choose between an audience and a city mob.

  He is walking in a throng as he thinks it, is rubbing shoulders, sharing breaths; his step aligned with others’. Smoke surrounds him: his own, his peers’. Eleanor’s. He can feel her in every pore of his skin, in the sweat of his neighbour, in the pale, frothy billows that come from the group of children walking just ahead. The crowd lives in it and through it; it is as though they are in the belly of a whale. It should be unbearable, but the whale is kind and (somehow) they belong. Together. It is only later that it will seem like a lie, like despotism, and the touch of others will once again be strange.

  It is hard to estimate how many they are. Three hundred, four hundred? Perhaps it is twice that number. Their movement is slow, almost ritual. It is getting dark now and some people are holding lanterns or torches high above their heads. Some few carry weapons: sticks and clubs mostly, here and there a knife or a rusty old rifle. The hill slopes down towards the harbour with its twin piers. They reach the edge of the town proper: all at once there are cobbles underfoot. The smell of sea rot salts the air.

  Balthazar is taller than most and can see ahead. Down here, in the trough, the harbour basin has become invisible but for the tips of the two lighthouses and the crane that rises near the one that’s lit. Now the crane is being put in motion: it pivots its arm, the rope grows taut, it begins to haul. But there is a wall between the moving crowd and whatever it is hauling: built of rotten boats and timbers; of broken furniture that has stood moulding for ten years; of mattresses so eaten up by rats they seem like skeletons made up of rods and springs. From the hundred gaps within this makeshift barricade point gun rifles, and bayonets.

  Eleanor leads them close until the front of the crowd is pressed against this deadly wall barring access to the harbour. Those behind her do not at once slow their momentum; it pushes the front row closer yet, bellies tempting mounted blades. The wind is still coming from the north; Eleanor’s Smoke belongs to the crowd and not the soldiers. Even if it turned, it would be to no avail: the faces of the turbaned men are hidden by rubber masks; coal filters clean their breaths. The whale may sing, but these men won’t hear its song.

  Balthazar squeezes closer, aware of Etta May shadowing his movements. He sees the children sneak through the gaps in the crowd, drawing towards Eleanor. It puts them on the front lines. Soon their little bodies are pushed up against the guns. Five steps from Eleanor, just as tight against the barricades, Livia stands, spreading her own Smoke. The flavours that come from her carry pain and the promise of revenge: they spread through the crowd like a new idea, leave it uneasy, wavering between emotions; the wind fickle as it rises, half turns, ebbs.

  Balthazar continues pushing forward, wriggling between strangers. Etta May’s bulkier form has trouble following.

  “Where are you going?” she calls to him.

  “To her.” He points to Eleanor, standing in her bride’s dress, bloodied at the hip and cinched under the bulk of the harness. Close to her now, he feels the full weight of her presence; her doubt and burden part of its texture and its force.

  “She does not need us, Balthazar.”

  He half turns, finds Etta May close, her hand slipping into his.

  A shout goes up, not immediately intelligible, and all at once the ranks of soldiers at the barricades thin out as more than half turn to follow whatever order has been barked at them. The Smoke masks may obscure their faces, but there is no mistaking the hasty relief with which they turn and rush away. They don’t want to be standing here, threatening children. Those few who remain look uncertain, forlorn behind the household rubbish that serves them as fortification. Eleanor looks straight at them, steps forward, and wriggles her harnessed body through a tiny gap. A dozen rifles swivel to her, quiver as they observe her progress. For a moment it looks like she will be stuck, become part of the wall. Then she is through. The moment when she might have been shot has passed. Others follow, more forcefully than her, shoving aside what she slipped through, creating a gap within the barricade. The soldiers stand back. Many lower their rifles; a few are absorbed into the throng.

  Balthazar and Etta May are about to follow when they notice a splintering. A single figure, yellow-haired, walking under a dark cloud, slips sideways and finds another way through. She does not join the throng heading down the pier but rather runs across it to where its inner edge meets the harbour water and disappears from view.

  “Livia!”

  Without saying anything else, Etta May begins to follow her. Balthazar, still holding Em’s hand, agrees at once. Whatever it is Eleanor is hoping to achieve, they can have no role in it. It’s down to her talent. Livia, on the other hand, is armed with nothing but her anger. Her, they may be able to help.

  A quick dash carries them across to the far side of the pier. There, a steep flight of steps leads down into the water, the lowest steps blackened by seaweed and tide. Livia is nowhere to be seen.

  “There! She’s swimming.”

  Indeed, just a few yards from them, near invisible in the black water, Balthazar spies Livia’s pale face, upturned, surrounded by the ragged halo of her floating hair. She is on her back and kicking herself along wi
th her legs, her naked toes breaking the surface. Her left arm rises in a backstroke. The right is held rigid and upwards, holding something small and heavy; making sure it does not get wet.

  “Quick,” says Etta May.

  “I cannot swim.”

  This stops Em in her tracks. “You cannot swim? Oh, Balthazar, how come you are so badly equipped for life?”

  Etta May lets go of his hand. She has kicked off her shoes and is ready to go on alone when he stops her.

  “Over there—by the promenade. Rowboats. It’ll be quicker than swimming.”

  A few minutes later, they have run down to the bollards that stud the promenade and commandeered a ten-foot boat. Livia is lost to sight in the shadow of the pier.

  It is Etta May who takes the oars. As it turns out, Balthazar cannot row either.

  [ 6 ]

  The harbour water is cold. The shock of its touch helps cool Livia’s anger. It might be a purely physical reaction: her skin puckers, her mouth clamps shut, her Smoke must squirm through contracted pores. The swimming, too, helps to cool her head, for it is hard work. She has kicked off her shoes but left on most of her clothing. It is tugging at her now, and her right arm is useless to her, her hand thrust up and occupied. She dug through Charlie’s things—found abandoned on top of a hillside—not to find a lover’s note or private diary (though the latter exists and tempted her with its secrets). She dug for what she knew Charlie carried on all his travels, because for all his goodness, Charlie was not a fool. She found the gun was oiled and loaded; no shot had been fired since it was last cleaned. It changed nothing. She knows he has been murdered and she has been told by whom. She is swimming down the length of the pier to shoot the man who killed the one who taught her what it means to love.