In some dreams, I was ten again. Feliks and I ran through the mine. He roared and pretended to explode, and I chased him.
‘The Smok has a friend now,’ he said to me, touching the cracked rock in the dragon egg cavern.
And he was right. We were both dragons now, naughty boys roaring through the mine as men slept. We poked holes in the brine gutters so water leaked out, broke stalactites from the roof and pretended they were teeth, and blew in Władysław’s ears as he carved through the night. I knew Feliks was still dead. He could only exist in my imagination. And yet, our mischief marked the mine.
They died soon after Feliks. All of them. Dorota. Mother. Father. A fire in the bakery, like dragon’s breath, ripped through the house while I was out. I saw their bodies pulled from our home while it was still on fire. They were only partially burned, a mercy, I was told. They likely suffocated from the smoke. A kinder death than burning. A kinder death than starving.
Play and mischief were dead to me. I never opened the History again. Yet I couldn’t help but take it and the toy dragon with me as I found a new home in the mine. Though the History had hummed before, a painful reminder, it had never tempted me to play like this, not until work on the lower caverns began. Though sometimes I thought of Dorota as I conducted my mischief, it was always Feliks, the brother who made me Serafin, who seemed to follow me.
Of course, the thing about a child’s mischief is that it becomes quite macabre and sinister when in the realm of adults. Dragons, ghosts, things moving on their own. No one knew this as play between brothers, as a man reaching out to the memory of his dead sibling. Lolek certainly didn’t. It took just a few more scratches in the walls for him to throw his pole at Jozef’s feet and leave for good.
Within days, we had a new penitent. Jakub, his name was, and he was only twelve. Ulryk was annoyed. He was charged with training the dim boy.
‘Idiot, how many times do I have to tell you? Go back and wet your clothes. Do your hair and shoes too, and hurry back,’ Ulryk snapped at him.
The boy scratched his head. ‘I don’t like being damp. It’s uncomfortable.’
‘It’s not as uncomfortable as burning alive, let me tell you. It’s the only reason my body isn’t as ugly as my face. Now go and wet your clothes, or so help me God!’
The boy sulked off.
‘I’ve told Jozef we can’t rely on him. He’s reckless. He’ll get us all killed,’ Ulryk complained at one of our late-night gatherings in the chapel. He kept glancing at us to check that we too were outraged, as he worked on a cross that had been recovered from the collapsed chapel.
‘He’s only been here a week,’ Władysław said absently, chipping away at his Kinga statue.
‘A week too long!’
‘Maybe the Smok will eat him for you,’ I said.
Władysław chuckled but Ulryk wasn’t amused.
‘It’s that dragon that lost us our head penitent.’
‘The Smok owes you then,’ Władysław said. ‘Leave the boy near the eggs.’
Ulryk smacked his chisel hard and chipped a shard of salt from the cross.
‘Lord Almighty!’ Władysław exclaimed.
‘Sorry!’ Ulryk crossed himself and bowed to the cross. He held his tools out to me. ‘My nerves are shot. Can you take over?’
I just looked at him from where I sat. Władysław glared at him too.
‘Oh,’ Ulryk said. He sat next to me and slapped me on the knee. ‘So shot I thought grumpy old Serafin was one of God’s children.’
‘We are all God’s children,’ Władysław said tersely.
There was silence for a moment.
‘Anyway, pray for me, lads,’ Ulryk said. ‘I don’t care who you pray to, whether it’s God, Yahweh or the bloody Smok. I need all the help I can get.’
Władysław promised he would, but I didn’t. I hadn’t prayed since Feliks died. For all the things that happened next, I wish I had.
The next day there was an explosion.
I felt it before the others. It was a buzzing in my head that steadily grew, distinct from the History’s hum. The horses bucked and ran on the horse mill, trying to get away. The rumbling started. In my head, it was like pieces of my brain broke apart and dissolved. Salt showered down on us.
I quickly sank my mischief into the mine and felt corridors collapsing. I heard penitents scream as they fell onto the jagged rock beneath them. I saw fire.
The shaking stopped and men rushed past me holding buckets of brine. The chaos was remarkably quiet. As rescuers descended, they didn’t say a word. We all listened for those telltale creaks.
I snapped at my stablehands to retrieve the horses. I ran to the mill and placed my hand on the closest horse, using my mischief to calm her. The boys came from all directions, moving quickly to put the horses back in the stables. I tried to send my calming energy out.
Men streamed between the caverns, water sloshing as they ran. Quickly, I took one of the mares down to the brine lake where men were frantically filling buckets.
As I went back and forth between the lake and the cavern carting water, I listened to the wordless action below. There were pops and whooshes, and the occasional scream.
Something stank. There was too much methane to risk lighting any lanterns. The men below worked only to the light of the fire they were trying to put out.
It took three hours to extinguish the flames. Now the rescuers, empty buckets or heavy stretchers in hand, were in need of rescuing. They traipsed slowly through the tunnels below, completely blind. I sat on the ground, tired from hauling around drums of water, and put my head in my hands. I could see them in my mind, like ants crawling closely together. I reached out my mischief and called to them.
Straight ahead, then right here, yes, now straight.
They started going the right way. I kept calling out.
Left, step over the debris, and straight. Keep going. Over the rocks, raise the stretchers high. Keep going, brothers, keep going.
There were still two men trapped below, their heartbeats pulsing beyond where the fire and collapse had occurred. One of them was Ulryk’s, slow and laboured. The other was Jakub’s, frantic like a rabbit. I tried to ignore them while I focused on the thirty or so men lumbering through the dark towards the main cavern.
There’s another collapse to your right. Walk past carefully. There’s heavy debris on the ground. Climb over. Abandon the stretchers. Carry the men over.
A heartbeat in the group fluttered and failed. They still laboured to climb over the fallen rocks with him. I wondered if they knew he was dead.
Light from the main cavern must have touched their eyes. The men who cleared the debris sped up, moving with purpose. They turned around a corner without me telling them and streamed into the main tunnel between the two caverns.
I opened my eyes as they flooded out, all bloodied, burned and covered in soot. Jozef stood by the tunnel’s opening, his eyes jumping to each face, taking a mental inventory of the living and the dead. Bodies were brought up, burned, some missing limbs, some alive, some dead.
The doctors rushed forward. I stood off to the side, watching from the shadows.
Władysław was the last to emerge, cradling a man with burns all over his body. He took him straight to a doctor, and then looked around.
‘Where’s Ulryk?’
They ignored him, attending to the injured or staring blankly through him, as if their brain was trying to catch up to the question. Finally, he stared into the darkness from where he’d come. Tears streaked his soot-blackened face.
‘Lead him out, Skarbnik,’ he whispered.
Ulryk and Jakub couldn’t move. They seemed suspended in the salt below, like their bodies were part of the rock. I tried to call to them, giving directions. This frightened Jakub more. His heart fluttered so madly I feared it might burst. They couldn’t follow Skarbnik’s commands. Perhaps they’d broken their legs. Perhaps their backs.
Jozef dismissed any talk of a rescue
party. There was too much methane to light a lantern and we couldn’t search for men in the dark.
But I didn’t need a lantern. I could see everything. I knew where they were.
No one noticed as I entered the tunnel that descended into the caverns and corridors below. I was quickly enveloped by darkness. I glanced back and locked eyes with Władysław. I wondered if he saw me. He looked as though he was searching. I winked and smiled, confident he couldn’t see a thing, and then made my way down.
There was debris everywhere. Abandoned shoes and pickaxes rested alongside fallen slabs of rock. As I went towards Ulryk, past collapsed corridors and blackened wood supports, the air became heavier.
I entered a cavern with cauliflower formations sprouting from every surface. Smoke had flooded this place, turning the white salt black. The air tasted burnt. Ulryk’s strangled breathing, which rasped around the chamber, quickened.
‘Who’s there?’
I found him. His left foot was twisted. His skin was burnt, a screaming, blistered red with parts that yellowed and shone. He was dusted in fragments of salt, and his right hand was bloodied from having dragged his body along the ground in an attempt to get out. He stared into the darkness, his wide eyes going straight through me.
‘It’s Serafin,’ I said.
I crouched down and touched him lightly on the shoulder. He jumped.
‘I can’t see you.’
‘There’s too much methane to light a lantern. We have to go back through the dark.’
‘I can’t … how can you see?’
‘I have dragon eyes. I see in the dark.’
He paused, clearly afraid. I thought he might even refuse my help. But then he grasped at me with his right hand. ‘Okay, Smok, off we go.’
Every step was a battle. Ulryk couldn’t put any weight on his left foot, so he hopped on his right, grunting with every movement. His blisters ruptured and oozed. We stopped often. I tried carrying him.
‘You’re too heavy. Keep hopping,’ I said as we cleared another pile of debris.
‘I’m a rabbit now, am I?’
‘Yes, and best get a move on, or the Smok will catch you.’
I don’t know how long it took for us to inch our way up through the collapsed corridors but finally, we saw light.
‘Not long now,’ I said. We climbed up to the main tunnel. As we emerged from the darkness, men rushed forward to take Ulryk from me. Some of them looked at me with suspicion. I just turned around and went back down the tunnel.
Jakub wasn’t far from where I found Ulryk. There were a few tunnels branching out from above the blackened cavern, and one of them was partially caved in. I squeezed through a crack between collapsed support beams and salt blocks. Everything was burnt here.
Jakub shouted out. ‘Who’s there?’
‘A rescuer, Serafin. Ulryk’s friend,’ I called back.
I rounded a corner and found the boy, burnt and cut all over. His right leg was trapped under a rock.
‘Help me, please!’
I hauled the rock off his foot. He let out a strangled cry, and then held his arms out like a child begging for his mother. I tried pulling him to his feet, but he wasn’t even able to stand on his good leg. So I just picked him up.
‘We need light!’ he cried.
I started walking with him in my arms. ‘We can’t have any lanterns. There’s too much gas down here.’
His head darted around frantically. ‘But it’s black!’
‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘I can see.’
‘God, I’m blind!’
‘No, you’re fine. We’ll get to some light in a minute.’
He was still looking around as we came to the collapsed corridor.
‘There’s a collapse here. There’s just a small gap between the rock and the broken supports. It’s not big enough for me to carry you through, so you need to hop on your other leg and squeeze through. I’ll hold your hand. Just be very careful, the supports have been damaged. Try not to touch anything.’
‘I need to see!’ he cried as I positioned him beside the gap.
‘You don’t need to see, I have you.’
He wept as he battled through the gap. As he cleared it, he fell face first on the ground. He let out a feeble cry.
‘It’s alright,’ I reassured him from the other side. ‘You’ve cleared the hardest obstacle. I can carry you the rest of the way.’
‘I need to see!’ he cried. He felt around on the ground next to him. I began to make my way through the gap, carefully avoiding the beams which looked even more splintered than when I first came through.
‘It’s alright,’ I said to him and myself.
But the boy was terrified. He grabbed at anything he could find. A penitent’s pole, a shoe, a pickaxe. Then his hand fell on a tiny metal box sealed shut. He flicked off the lid and felt inside.
‘Matches!’ he gasped.
‘No, Jakub –’
He struck the match. The tiny flame burst as it caught the air.
A sudden, piercing heat seared through my very being as I was swallowed by the explosion.
And yet, my soul ripped free.
Somehow, as I was blown apart and burnt to ash, a part of me soared defiantly out, flying through the tunnel, riding the explosion, bursting into the main cavern and yelling, ‘RUN!’
I saw them all – Władysław, Ulryk, Jozef and the rest – and somehow they saw me. I roared with the fire that surged out. I lived as I died in it.
Then, as the smoke ventilated through the shafts in the main cavern, as the men rushed once again to the brine lakes, I began to recede. I couldn’t follow them. Like a heavy fog, I sank. The fire raged, but they’d been warned with enough time to escape the worst of it. A darkness crept into me. I drifted back to the ash that was once my body, to the walls and the floors I’d worked, to the salt.
The fire raged for a month. All the while, my soul slept like a hibernating dragon. After the fire was extinguished and the men returned, their voices stirred me from my slumber. I came and went, my consciousness dispersed among the salt, bleeding out occasionally like brine. I witnessed the men carve a cross into the horse mill in my memory. Władysław was annoyed.
‘Do you really think that’s appropriate?’
They looked at him, dumbstruck.
Over the following nights, I rested in the air around him as he added the tiniest embellishment to Princess Kinga’s already ornate dress. , followed by the outline of a dragon’s head breathing a single flame. It was so small, hidden in the hem of her skirt, that it was barely perceptible.
But I saw it. The Hebrew. The dragon. Here lies Serafin. I wondered where Władysław had seen it, who he’d asked. I saw the effort, the searching, that went into this marker. When he finished, and touched it with such kindness and sorrow, I began to fade. The world went out of focus, but I knew I’d be back again, every time there was a fire, an explosion, an avalanche.
I couldn’t save Feliks. But I could save them.
I’d always be there.
Jessie
There’s nothing in the whole of WA about the Wieliczka Salt Mine. NOTHING. The librarians at Guildford couldn’t even find one book. I told Kay to ask Neil to do some searching for me. She said she did but he couldn’t find anything. I don’t believe her because Neil can find books on anything.
I do some googling and find many pictures of the mine’s statues and chapels. They mined salt up until 2007, though ‘commercial mining’ stopped in 1996, which is ages ago. People can visit and see all the statues. Sometimes they even have concerts and weddings down there. I also find some books online. I write them out in my neatest handwriting and present them to the librarian at Guildford.
‘I would like these please.’
The librarian looks at my list.
‘These are tourist guides. We don’t have things like this.’
‘Yes, you do,’ I say, and point towards the blue books about countries. The book on Poland had a
section about Krakow and the salt mine, but it was very small.
The librarian smiles. ‘Those are Lonely Planet guides. What you’ve got on your list are guides you’d buy at an attraction, like a souvenir.’
‘Can I request them?’
‘No, dear, you can’t request books that aren’t in public library stock.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘We don’t have them at any of our libraries.’
‘You didn’t even check.’
The librarian sighs. ‘Okay,’ she says. She types for two seconds and then says, ‘Sorry, there really is nothing. Remember, we searched for books on the mine a few days ago. I bet you can do some great internet research. Or you can read some books about Poland, oh, like that one you’ve got in your hand. Well done!’
‘Why can’t you order these? I found them on the computer!’
Kay comes over and says, ‘Keep your voice down.’
‘She’s not even looking properly!’ I yell.
‘Don’t be so rude,’ Kay says. Then she looks up and says, ‘I’m so sorry,’ to the librarian. That makes me even madder.
‘You’re a bad librarian! You didn’t even try!’ I yell at her.
I throw the Poland book and storm out of the library. Kay runs after me and grabs me by the arm.
‘Ow!’
‘That was unacceptable! You don’t treat people like that, especially when they’re trying to help you!’
I try to tug my arm free but Kay grips it really tight.
‘You’re hurting me!’
‘Go and apologise now!’
‘NO!’
Kay snatches my bag and pulls me back to the library. She dumps all the books I renewed, the ones about codices and Alexander and Mulan, in the returns shoot, and then drags me back home. I scream at her the whole way. I tell her to let go, she’s hurting me and I hate her. No one does anything, even the lady walking her dog. She just looks away.
Kay finally lets go of me when we get home. ‘Go to your room!’
‘You’re not the boss of me! You’re not Mum!’
‘Well, Mum’s dead, so go to your fucking room!’
The History of Mischief Page 12
