Short Story: World Conflagration

The morning of 13 July

The morning of 13 July in 1704 dawned a little differently all over the world and yet always in the signs of its time. Fresh breezes blew here and there as the Little Ice Age raged in Europe and maybe it was one of the harbingers, a bitterly cold finger touching the land, like dipping your big toe into the water of a lake to feel if it was warm enough.

Yes, it was a morning of its time and if you listened carefully, you could hear the thundering of muskets and the roar of battle from distant Tartu in Livonia, for the Russians had been storming the city since the night and the Swedes, already on the losing side, were putting up fierce resistance. It was just one episode in the Great Northern War and hope alone, indeed miracles in themselves, did not yet exist at this time. So it was not a good morning for the people of Tartu and only the Russian generals smiled to themselves, believing that the pillars of smoke rejecting the first light of day were a good sign.

They would never see the sun again.

Stanislaus I, on the other hand, woke up somewhere at some time, where and when and how, whether he was alone or in company, was irrelevant. Even the fact that he had been elected King of Poland the day before – a fact that he looked upon with both satisfaction and unease – would soon be of no significance.

Many things lost their significance that morning.

Merchants in the markets haggling over pennies and shillings. Farmers complaining about their hard lot. Large ships entering Amsterdam with goods from overseas, the captains already realising that in the distant future it would probably be the harbour of London that they preferred. Oh yes, a fortnight ago there was another bloodbath, at Schellenberg, where the Grand Alliance, of which there have been countless in history and all of which are sacred and sworn to be unbreakable, won a crushing victory against the Bavarians and French in the War of the Spanish Succession. The war would have lasted another ten years if the rules had been different.

But the rules were the way they were.

If you look at the history of mankind up to that day, 13 July 1704, morning had only just dawned on people’s understanding – after a pitch-black night in which only a few stars had gradually appeared, until a few became many and the sky looked more and more like a shimmering mosaic. But this morning was still balmy. Fresh, you snuggled into your coat, rubbed your hands together for warmth and felt that fear in your stomach because you didn’t know what was yet to come.

Useful things had been invented. The microscope, with which you could see the smallest things and time was now always in your pocket, while the power of heat and steam in mines pumped the water out of the tunnels. Yes, the mind. That was the great gift. And so it was the light of knowledge that you experienced, that you recognised, that you understood.

The world is the way it is because there are set rules.

Rules that could be fathomed, such as gravity. The mind sharpened and when the first minds realised what it meant to fathom the rules and understand the mechanics of this world, humanity was already like a stone rolling down a slope and gaining speed. First tumbling, then rolling, kicking up dust, throwing small pebbles into the air and taking them with it, the stone plunged into the depths.

It was dark there.

Unknown.

And when the stone hit a rock, dug into the slope, when splinters broke off and it cracked and banged, startling the animals nearby, everything changed. For the rock was the earth, a centre of mass in the cosmos, and the seams of the rules that made this point coherent with everything began to tear.

What does that mean?

How do you describe the indescribable?

Does the ant understand what is happening when it stands on the bank of a crossing river? Or does the beetle see the malicious spirit of a human being behind the sole of the boot that will crush it?

No.

And so it was with what was to come on 13 July 1704.

Starblind

It came in from all directions, the unknown, the devastating, and those who saw it, who only saw but did not feel the heat because they were many miles away from the knife that cut into the world itself, were later called starblind.

A million stars had fallen to earth and in their panic at this unfamiliar world, they ran across the globe and flashed like lightning in the horizontal, according to the starblind, whose eyes had been blinded by the face of the unknown.

Cities like Tartu disappeared in this flash of light, in this blink of the cosmic, and with it all the animals and humans in its path, as well as all the plants and trees, and as the lightning reverberated with an ear-splitting thunder, that shattered eardrums and windows for a hundred miles around, the world was on fire – not just in Tartu, not just in Livonia and the path that stretched across the furthest reaches of Europe into the Caspian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

There was a lot of lightning.

How many?

Who knows.

What does it mean when every number gives the same result?

The world conflagration had begun, colouring continents in a hellish red, even if it hadn’t hit them all. Livonia was no more. The Crimea was gone. The Great Lakes in North America were boiling and in the Far East a centuries-old wall was suddenly split in two. In the Arabian Desert there were now glowing hot areas of shimmering glass, while Lima, South America, found itself encircled by flames.

Forests were ablaze, as if the trees were suddenly made of fire instead of wood, and cities were consumed in gigantic columns of smoke, as if all bricks and beams, stones and mortar were destined to ascend to the highest celestial circles.

All over the world, people heard the roar of the spreading flames and those who could, those who were unlucky, fled to the coast and gasped as they looked out to sea, over which lay a desolate sky. In Amsterdam, for example, people ran out onto the streets, the windows of all the houses covered with clinking shards of pavement like a carpet that crunched under their soles.

There was naked panic on every face.

In the town halls, only helplessness at the reports of light, fire and the end of the world.

Only a few sailors in the harbour noticed that the water was exceptionally calm. Death took its time. It wasn’t always a flash of lightning, a blink of an eye, a slash with an axe and off came the head. No. He also liked to take his time and he deserved it, because death came with the first living being and only left with the last. So it took a few hours and the water, on whose surface dead fish gathered, their eyes turned accusingly towards the sky, withdrew.

Amsterdam disappeared.

Many other cities along the coast had already done so and many more would follow. A tsunami swept over dykes as if they were branches in a riverbed and made its way inland. Occasionally it met with blazing walls of flame that reached to the horizon, wrestling with the dancing fire for supremacy in a battle of hissing vapour. Once iconic landscapes, like a painting of God, have been reduced beyond recognition to a primordial state from the early days of the world.

A landscape of bare earth and ash, over which storms of sparks swept like gales and the rivers and lakes in it were acidic and bubbling, killing everything that came near them.

And in between, the people.

Old and young, women and men in tattered clothes walking on the remains of civilisation, a narrow ridge of dirty cobblestones and rubble. Falling away on both sides in hunger and violence, despair and rage. And yet all was not over, for the earth was truly large and the world conflagration did not care what or whom it burnt, just as a hurricane did not care which tree withstood it and which did not.

Not every forest went up in flames.

Not every town disappeared in a firestorm.

People were like rats, and even in a ruin a rat could still find many cosy places where the wind did not pass through. Some cities remained untouched, shining symbols of human creativity, although darkened under an increasingly gloomy sky. Cities such as Constantinople and Florence, Samarkand and Baghdad, Shanghai and Timbuktu, as well as small villages and towns, sometimes sheltered in valleys and on mountain slopes, defied the devastating catastrophe. The earth was large and the people themselves rather small, but they were spread over every nook and cranny, so it took more than that to destroy them all in one single blast.

Especially if it had been an untargeted blast.

The fires raged for days, then weeks and finally months and the sky appeared as if God had tipped an inkwell over the blue. The streaks of ash ran down the horizon and all light and warmth came only from the seas of flames and storms of embers that gave men and women an ashen countenance. So the wandering homeless huddled around campfires, wrapped in rags so that barely a patch of skin was visible. Their ears could no longer hear the roaring. The howling of wind and storm, their eyes red with smouldering sparks in the air that stung their irises like shards of glass.

Homeless.

That meant being rejected.

And some cursed the lucky ones who had entrenched themselves behind city walls and in valleys, hungry but safe and sheltered. Perhaps it was those curses that turned ashes into dirty snow that pacified the burning world and transformed the roaring into a deadly silence. A pillow pressed over the mouth of a dying man.

The ash years

And so the ash years began.

A cold as bitter and icy as death itself set in. Being homeless now meant that you were truly damned. Home was suddenly the place you were chained to, because people pointed their fingers at the vagrants and said: ‘You’re not from here and you have no right to be here! The fire will always catch up with you, they said. Because if you lost your house in the world’s conflagration, then it had also seized your fate and, now that there was no longer a sea of flames to provide light and warmth, it dragged you down to your death in the cold.

Decades passed.

What was there to report?

A veil hung over the earth and people couldn’t see fifty paces. How were they supposed to know what was going on in the world? Plenty of violence, one would say. Especially in the cities, which suddenly became prisons and where food quickly became rare. In Bohemia, in Prague to be precise, someone was thrown out of the window again and perhaps it was lucky that the effects were limited to the city and the unfortunate man who broke his neck. In Russia, the cities sank under masses of snow – Moscow, the white city, they said now. Others called it the silent city, because the wood was out, the coal had long been burnt and anyone wandering through the streets, the Kremlin always in view, saw nothing and no one. Not a man. Not a woman. Not a child. Not even cats or dogs.

All the inhabitants of the city seemed to have come to an agreement.

Because if you looked through the broken windows, if you tore the boards off the doors and entered a house, you would find them, the people of Moscow. Sitting on chairs. Lying in beds. Their skin pale, their faces rigid, their eyes closed. Moscow, the sleeping city, they said, Moscow, the city which never wakes.

In Bristol, England, a scholar with stiff fingers, half-frozen in his laboratory near High Cross, was investigating an unusual phenomenon – even though there were more than enough of them these days. He had handed in a week’s worth of daily rations, tokens issued by the self-appointed Lord Governor of Bristol, for which, if you stood on your feet for a few hours, you got a watery fish soup.

A pebble.

As white as an angel’s down.

Quite heavy for its small size, at least one and a half ounces.

A stone from Lowland, Dundee the traveller had told him. Because there, near Dundee, there was no snow and every flake that fell from the sky melted on the angel-white stones there, where the Scottish settlement of Dundee had once been. Sometimes it was blazing hot, so that the soles of your boots boiled when you walked over them and sweat ran from every pore.

But this pebble on the table, barely bigger than a fingernail, was only slightly warm.

Not as cold as it should be, but warm … No, by God, even in this endless winter you couldn’t call it warm. And since the scholar, whose name would be forgotten because he died in thirteen months in an ambush on his journey to Liverpool, kept order in his laboratory, he placed another Dundee, which he had acquired with the other one, on the table next to the other one.

Then he tidied up a bit.

The vials in that cupboard, adding to his notes and occasionally scratching his head, his hair long since fallen out with worry and lack. The days of the ash years were of a short nature, from morning to afternoon a little sunlight through the veil of ash, fog and dust, nothing more. It soon became gloomy in the laboratory and as the scholar leaned back, almost tipping over because his chair only had three legs – he had burnt one of them in the fireplace years ago in dire need – something caught his eye.

The two Dundees had a dull glow.

He rubbed his eyes uncertainly.

Indeed they were.

And as he stepped closer, he realised that the stones had become warmer.

Theodor Isaac Ballington was one of many who noticed these stones. They were called dundees in Great Britain, Engelweiß in German and in Kyoto the mysterious stones were already being placed in iron bowls to warm the house. It was a great discovery in small steps and everywhere it was a little different, while the ash years passed in blissful silence and isolation, as each person, each place and each community was the whole world in itself.

The world afterwards

When the veil began to lift.

When the first rays of sunlight hesitantly and tentatively touched the ground, as if the light was afraid of how the earth might have changed in all this time, the isolation also faded. So it took only a few years for the Sacrum Imperium to rise on Aventinus in blinded Rome and for the British to set sail to reclaim what had once been their aspiring empire and for the Khmer to rise over Annam far from the Occident.

Thus thunder and storm cleansed the world and the last remnants of the ashes of a scorched world were washed from the sky in heavy rains. But not everything could be cleansed. Memorials remained, indeed they pulsated, imposing their existence on the world. Deserts of embers and ashes. Places of the unfortunate dead, places of the endlessness of a lifeless world whose scorching breath chased across the earth, setting forests on fire and plunging people to their doom.

At the same time, there were these stones.

Yes, that Isaac somebody, who had been slain. He and a hundred other men and women had begun to fathom the Dundees – although there wasn’t much to figure out because it was beyond understanding. The more stones were thrown onto the pile, the hotter and more glowing they became, until they no longer just emitted an ashy odour, but filled their surroundings with a thick smoke.

The resulting heat was truly enormous and murderous.

And it didn’t take long for someone to remember the steam engines that used to pump out the water in the mine tunnels. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, it was said in London, soon to be the largest city in the world, we are experiencing an industrial revolution and the French and Iberians understood things a little differently, the industrialisation also arrived there, but the revolution was emphasised a little too much.

Three royal heads rolled off the scaffold.

While the first ships glided out of the shipyards in Bristol, not afloat … No, where we are going, dear gentlemen, the shipyard owner explained to the investors, we don’t need water. Driven by glowing engines and roaring turbines, the monsters made of wood, iron and steel floated on air cushions over land and sea alike.

A sign to God and all the gods.

Look, we humans can change the world ourselves.

And while the era of heat-driven machines dawned everywhere, what had only just begun with the world conflagration continued. A creeping process, local and inconspicuous, normal for a society that was already steeped in superstition and misguided science.