The Angry-Sackmen had two main interests in life: selling things and fighting.  Their success in combining these was really quite impressive.  They could fight other tribes, steal all their stuff and then sell it back to them; fight other tribes because they wouldn’t buy the Angry-Sackmen’s stuff and even sell weapons to other tribes then fight them in order to get the weapons back again.  This was called making the planet a safer place.

Unfortunately, since the Angry-Sackmen lived on an island, all this selling and fighting needed a lot of big boats, and by the time of Good Queen Bus, who had a particular grudge against the nearby Spangles* the forests on the island were looking somewhat bald.  The rich therefore decided that the black stuff, which was now known as Cole, wasn’t so utterly infra dig after all, so long as it was only the servants who actually had to touch it.

Over the next few centuries, quite a lot changed for the Angry-Sackmen.  They found lots of new ways to make stuff and kill things (mainly other Muttons, but they also liked to find species that looked in danger of dying out and make quite sure of it).  Many of these new techniques had actually been used by other tribes for thousands of years, but because they lived in different parts of the planet and weren’t quite so keen on selling and fighting, the new ideas hadn’t reached the Angry-Sackmen before. Or sometimes the other Muttons had told the Angry-Sackmen all about their discoveries but the Angry-Sackmen hadn’t listened.  (The stories say that this was because the other Muttons had different coloured skins or  different names for their Divine Being, but I don’t expect you to believe anything quite as preposterous as that.  There must have been some rational reason that’s been lost in the translation. )

One of the things that the other Muttons had known about for hundreds of years was Cole, and how useful it could be, not only for keeping their homes warm but also for heating up metal to make things. It took the Angry-Sackmen a while to grasp the idea, but once they did, they certainly made up for lost time.

The interesting thing about Cole was that it was old; really, really old, far older than the Muttons themselves.  It had once, long ago, been simply masses of individual plants, but over hundreds of millions of years, covered with water and mud, the plants had  transformed themselves into this extraordinary rock.  You might expect that the Muttons, once they realized this, would have been stunned by the antiquity of Cole compared to their own short history, overawed by its power and potential and fascinated by the series of miracles that had brought it about.

Nah.  They just wanted to get it out of the ground and burned up as quickly as possible.  This didn’t always prove that easy.  To get hold of good quality Cole, the Muttons had to dig deep pits in their planet and go down with primitive tools to chop it out.  It was a dangerous business, with poisonous gases, tunnels ever likely to collapse, unexpected fires and underground watercourses ready to flood the mines and drown the Muttons working there.  It was in trying to suck this water out of the mines that the Muttons first used their latest invention: the Stee Men Djinn.

(click to see the Stee Men Djinn in action)

The jolly wheeze with the Stee Men Djinn, from the point of view of mine-owning Muttons, was that not only did it dry their pits, but it required lots and lots of Cole to keep it going.  Within a few years the Muttons were using the Djinn for everything; in their big boats, in self-powered coaches that ran on rails, and most of all in machines that could make more and more stuff to sell.  It  could make every dream come true; at least for the rich Muttons, the ones who owned the factories and travelled first class on the railways and steamships.  For the others, those sweating down in the mines and suffocating in the ceaseless factories, things weren’t quite so jolly.  But it was all Progress, and only the muddiest of sheep would bleat a complaint.  The Angry-Sackmen, despite being such a tiny island,  led the way in adoration of the Djinn; during what they called their nineteenth century they burned nearly half of all the Cole used anywhere on the planet.

*Her idea of a jolly dare was to send her boyfriends out to steal the Spangles’ stuff-laden boats. If they did it nicely, she made them into Knits; if not they were known as P’rats and forced to converse with parrots and drink quantities of rum quite in excess of the government’s recommended levels.