Tulgary
22-05-2005, 06:28
The Grand Duchy of Tulgary, once a moderate power in charge of a small empire before military collapse and vassalage to a foreign king, had sat in its own miserable and ignorable cloud of failure for a century. Nobody cared, because the Tulgarians were washed-up.
But today the clouds emanating from the vast, under developed empire-cum-Duchy were less metaphorical and more obviously the result of trauma as smoke menaced the summer in surrounding lands. Foreign satellites happening to pass over the usually uninteresting state were concurrently able to detect a major new hot spot on the ground.
Outside the City of Gospodarstovo, Benivaria, Tulgary, the previous evening
Village 212, like all the rest, had not looked so grand since the days of empire. Days that nobody could remember... nobody save perhaps Grand Duke Felvarosh Pupin, whose one hundred and fourth birthday the nation prepared to celebrate. Even the infamously miserable coalmining villages -like Gospodarstovo 212- were showing a little colour in appreciation of their first day of rest in months unnumbered.
The Grand Duke had never been so popular. He'd sworn to end Tulgary's alliegence to its foreign dominator and to break open the land to the wonders of the wider world, perhaps even to restore Tulgarian imperial pride. Long-suffering workers dreamed of change, but Pupin's declarations and century-refined personality cult made quite sure that they looked to him as its source and not to their own empowerment.
The dirt road through Village 212 was lined by poor quality coal heaped on either side after generations of extraction at the rich Gospodarstovo seam, all the black discharge that was not pure enough for marketing by the company and as such was left to the workers... though they had to pay for the right to pick it up again. Here and there wives swept the road and the paths to their cottages, a laughably futile effort to expel the thick black grime of the village's skin, and all around young children hung quite crude decorations of coloured paper from house to house while crippled old folk looked on. Older children and their fathers, brothers, uncles, and officially able grandfathers trod home with spines a little straighter than ordinary as their noses sucked in air that seemed today a little less acrid and smacked their lips at the thought of the next morning's feast, for which they'd saved so long.
Of course, this suddenly carefree attitude was all a little more than they should have allowed themselves, survivors would say in retrospect, as a couple of kids at it round the back of shaft 3's lift engine -when ordinarily they wouldn't have found the energy after work, knowing that eight hours later they'd be back down in the dark, picking at the seam- had by some accident managed in their youthful excess to quite literally set a fire. Soon, shaft 3 was spitting like a dragon and as flame licked the road towards Village 212, the sooty air itself seemed to burn.
The conflagration had little time for the small and ignoble company village, however, and by morning it had consumed several other designed-for-profit communities and was threatening Gospodarstovo-proper and its several hundred thousand residents, a great many of whom resided still in homes built largely of wood and all of whom depended for fire fighting upon an ill-arranged system of... buckets and hand pumps.
But today the clouds emanating from the vast, under developed empire-cum-Duchy were less metaphorical and more obviously the result of trauma as smoke menaced the summer in surrounding lands. Foreign satellites happening to pass over the usually uninteresting state were concurrently able to detect a major new hot spot on the ground.
Outside the City of Gospodarstovo, Benivaria, Tulgary, the previous evening
Village 212, like all the rest, had not looked so grand since the days of empire. Days that nobody could remember... nobody save perhaps Grand Duke Felvarosh Pupin, whose one hundred and fourth birthday the nation prepared to celebrate. Even the infamously miserable coalmining villages -like Gospodarstovo 212- were showing a little colour in appreciation of their first day of rest in months unnumbered.
The Grand Duke had never been so popular. He'd sworn to end Tulgary's alliegence to its foreign dominator and to break open the land to the wonders of the wider world, perhaps even to restore Tulgarian imperial pride. Long-suffering workers dreamed of change, but Pupin's declarations and century-refined personality cult made quite sure that they looked to him as its source and not to their own empowerment.
The dirt road through Village 212 was lined by poor quality coal heaped on either side after generations of extraction at the rich Gospodarstovo seam, all the black discharge that was not pure enough for marketing by the company and as such was left to the workers... though they had to pay for the right to pick it up again. Here and there wives swept the road and the paths to their cottages, a laughably futile effort to expel the thick black grime of the village's skin, and all around young children hung quite crude decorations of coloured paper from house to house while crippled old folk looked on. Older children and their fathers, brothers, uncles, and officially able grandfathers trod home with spines a little straighter than ordinary as their noses sucked in air that seemed today a little less acrid and smacked their lips at the thought of the next morning's feast, for which they'd saved so long.
Of course, this suddenly carefree attitude was all a little more than they should have allowed themselves, survivors would say in retrospect, as a couple of kids at it round the back of shaft 3's lift engine -when ordinarily they wouldn't have found the energy after work, knowing that eight hours later they'd be back down in the dark, picking at the seam- had by some accident managed in their youthful excess to quite literally set a fire. Soon, shaft 3 was spitting like a dragon and as flame licked the road towards Village 212, the sooty air itself seemed to burn.
The conflagration had little time for the small and ignoble company village, however, and by morning it had consumed several other designed-for-profit communities and was threatening Gospodarstovo-proper and its several hundred thousand residents, a great many of whom resided still in homes built largely of wood and all of whom depended for fire fighting upon an ill-arranged system of... buckets and hand pumps.