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The history of Ambergris, for our purposes, begins with the legendary exploits of the whaler-cum-pirate Cappan John Manzikert¹,²,³, who, in the Year of Fire—so called for the catastrophic volcanic activity in the Southern Hemisphere that season—led his fleet of 30 whaling ships up the Moth River Delta into the River Moth proper. Although not the first reported incursion of Aan whaling clans into the region, it is the first incursion of any importance.

Manzikert’s purpose was to escape the wrath of his clansman Michael Brueghel, who had decimated Manzikert’s once-proud 100-ship fleet off the coast of the Isle of Aandalay. Brueghel meant to finish off Manzikert for good, and so pursued him some 40 miles upriver, near the current port of Stockton, before finally giving up the chase. The reason for this conflict between potential allies is unclear—our historical sources are few and often inaccurate; indeed, one of the most infuriating aspects of early Ambergrisian history is the regularity with which truth and legend pursue separate courses—but the result is clear: in late summer of the Year of Fire, Manzikert found himself a full 70 miles upriver, at the place where the Moth forms an inverted “L” before straightening out both north and south. Here, for the first time, he found that the fresh water flowing south had completely cleansed the salt water seeping north.⁴

Manzikert anchored his ships at the joint of the “L,” which formed a natural harbor, at dusk of the day of their arrival. The banks were covered in a lush undergrowth very familiar to the Aan, as it would have approximated the vegetation of their own native southern islands.⁵ They had, encouragingly enough, seen no signs of possibly hostile habitation, but could not muster the energy, as dusk approached, to launch an expedition. However, that night the watchmen on the ships were startled to see the lights of campfires clearly visible through the trees and, as more than one keen-eared whaler noticed, the sound of a high and distant chanting. Manzikert immediately ordered a military force to land under cover of darkness, but the Truffidian monk Samuel Tonsure persuaded him to rescind the order and await the dawn.

Tonsure—who, following his capture from Nicea (near the mouth of the Moth River Delta), had persuaded the Cappan to convert to Truffidianism and thus gained influence over him—plays a major role, perhaps the major role, in our understanding of Ambergris’s early history.⁶ It is from Tonsure that most histories descend—both from the discredited (and incomplete) Biography of John Manzikert I of Aan and Ambergris,⁷ obviously written to please the Cappan, and from his secret journal, which he kept on his person at all times and which we may assume Manzikert never saw since otherwise he would have had Tonsure put to death.

The journal contains a most intricate account of Manzikert, his exploits, and subsequent events. That this journal appeared (or, rather, reappeared) under somewhat dubious circumstances should not detract from its overall validity, and does not explain the derision directed at it from certain quarters, possibly because the name “Samuel Tonsure” sounds like a joke to a few small-minded scholars. It certainly was not a joke to Samuel Tonsure.⁸

At daybreak, Manzikert ordered the boats lowered and with 100 men, including Tonsure, set off on a reconnaissance mission to the shore. It must have been a somewhat ridiculous sight, for as Tonsure writes of Manzikert, a man possessed of a cruel and mercurial temper, “he must occupy one boat himself, save for the oarsman, such a large man was he and the boat beneath him a child’s toy.”⁹ Here, as Manzikert is rowed toward the site of the city he will found, it is appropriate to quote in full Tonsure’s famous appraisal of the Cappan:

I myself marveled at the man; for nature had combined in his person all the qualities necessary for a military commander. He stood at the height of almost seven feet, so that to look at him men would tilt back their heads as if toward the top of a hill or a high mountain. Possessed of startling blue eyes and furrowed brows, his countenance was neither gentle nor pleasing, but put one in mind of a tempest; his voice was like thunder and his hands seemed made for tearing down walls or for smashing doors of bronze. He could spring like a lion and his frown was terrible. Those who saw him for the first time discovered that every description that they had heard of him was an understatement.¹⁰

Alas, the Cappan possessed no corresponding wisdom or quality of mercy. Tonsure obviously feared his master’s mood on this occasion, for he tried to persuade Manzikert to remain onboard his flagship and allow the more reasonable of his lieutenants—perhaps even his son John Manzikert II,¹¹ who would one day govern his people brilliantly—to lead the landing party, but Manzikert, Truffidian though he was, would have none of it. The Cappan also actively encouraged his wife, Sophia, to accompany them. Unfortunately, Tonsure tells us little about Sophia Manzikert in either the biography or the journal (her own biography has not survived), but from the little we do know Tonsure’s description of her husband might fit her equally well; the two often waxed romantic on the pleasures of being able to pillage together.

And so, Manzikert, Sophia, Tonsure, and the Cappan’s men landed on the site of what would soon be Ambergris. At the moment, however, it was occupied by a people Tonsure christened “gray caps,” known today as “mushroom dwellers.”

Tonsure reports that they had advanced hardly a hundred paces into the underbrush before they came upon the first inhabitant, standing outside of his “rounded and domed single-story house, built low to the ground and seamless, from which issued a road made of smooth, shiny stones cleverly mortared together.” The building might have once served as a sentinel post, but was now used as living quarters.

Clearly Tonsure found the building more impressive than the native standing outside of it, for he spends three pages on its every minute detail and gives us only this short paragraph on the building’s inhabitant:

Stout and short, he came only to the Cappan’s shoulder: swathed from head to foot in a gray cloak that covered his tunic and trousers, these made from lighter gray swatches of animal skin stitched together. Upon his head lay a hat the color of an Oliphaunt’s skin: a tall, wide contrivance that covered his face from the sun. His features, what could be seen of them, were thick, sallow, innocent of knowledge. When the Cappan inquired as to the nature and name of the place, this unattractive creature could not answer except in a series of clicks, grunts, and whistles that appeared to imitate the song of the cricket and locust. It could not be considered speech or language. It was, as with insects, a warning or curious sound, devoid of other meaning.¹²

We can take a farcical delight from imagining the scene: the giant leaning down to communicate with the dwarf, the dwarf speaking a language so subtle and sophisticated that it has resisted translation to the present day, while the giant spits out a series of crude consonants and vowels that must have seemed to the gray cap a sudden bout of apoplexy.

Manzikert found the gray cap repellent, resembling as it did, he is quoted as saying, “both child and mushroom,”¹³ and if not for his fear of retaliation from a presumed ruling body of unknown strength, the Cappan would have run the native through with his sword. Instead, he left the gray cap to its incomprehensible vigil, still clicking and whistling to their backs,¹⁴ and proceeded along the silvery road until they reached the city.

Although Tonsure has, criminally, neglected to provide us with the reactions of Manzikert and Sophia upon their first glimpse of the city proper—and, from the monk’s description of aqueducts, almost certainly the future site of Albumuth Boulevard—we can imagine that they were as impressed as Tonsure himself, who wrote:

The buildings visible beyond the increasingly scanty tree cover were decorated throughout by golden stars, like the very vault of heaven, but whereas heaven has its stars only at intervals, here the surfaces were entirely covered with gold, issuing forth from the center in a never-ending stream. Surrounding the main building were other, smaller buildings, themselves surrounded completely or in part by cloisters. Structures of breathtaking complexity stretched as far as the eye could see. Then came a second circle of buildings, larger than the first, with lawns covered in mushrooms of every possible size and color—from gigantic growths as large as the Oliphaunt¹⁵ to delicate, glassy nodules no larger than a child’s fingernail. These mushrooms—red capped and blue capped, their undersides dusted with streaks of silver or emerald or obsidian—gave off spores of the most varied and remarkable fragrances, while the gray caps themselves tended their charges with, in this one instance, admirable delicacy and loving concern …¹⁶ There were also fountains which filled basins of water; gardens, some of them hanging, full of exotic mosses, lichens, and ferns, others sloping down to the level ground; and a bath of pure gold that was beautiful beyond description.¹⁷

We can only imagine the slavering delight of Manzikert and his wife upon seeing all that gold; unfortunately, as they would soon find out, much of the “gold” covering the buildings was actually a living organism similar to lichen that the gray caps had trained to create decorative patterns; not only was it not gold, it wasn’t even edible.

Nonetheless, Manzikert and his men began to explore the city. The most elemental details about the buildings they ignored, instead remarking upon the abundance of tame rats as large as cats,¹⁸ the plethora of exotic birds, and, of course, the large quantities of fungus, which the gray caps appeared to harvest, eat, and store against future famine.¹⁹

While Manzikert explores, I shall pass the time by relating a few facts about the city. According to the scant gray cap records that have been found and, if not translated, then haltingly understood, they called the city “Cinsorium,” although the meaning of the word has been lost, or, more accurately, never been found. It is estimated by those who have studied the ruins lying beneath Ambergris²⁰ that at one time Cinsorium could have housed 250,000 souls, making it among the largest of all ancient cities. Cinsorium also boasted highly advanced plumbing and water distribution systems that would be the envy of many a city today.²¹

However, at the time Manzikert stumbled upon Cinsorium, Tonsure argued, it was well past its glory years. He based this conclusion on rather shaky evidence: the “undeniable decadence” of its inhabitants. Surely Tonsure is prejudicial beyond reason, for the city appeared fully functional—the high domed buildings in sparkling good repair, the streets swept constantly, the amphitheaters looking as if they might, within minutes, play host to innumerable entertainments.

Tonsure ignored these signs of a healthy culture, perhaps fearing to admit that an almost certainly heretical people might be superior. Instead, he argued, in the biography especially, but also in his journal, that the current inhabitants—numbering no more, he estimates, than 700—had no claim to any greatness once possessed by their ancestors, for they were “clearly the last generations of a dying race,” unable to understand the processes of the city, unable to work its machines, unable to farm, “reduced to hunting and gathering.”²² Their watch fires scorched the interiors of great halls, whole clans wetly bickering with one another within a territory marked by the walls of a single building. They did not a one of them, according to Tonsure, comprehend the legacy of their heritage.

Tonsure’s greatest argument for the gray caps’ degeneracy may also be his weakest. That first day, Manzikert and Sophia entered what the monk described as a library, a structure “more immense than all but the most revered ecclesiastical institutions I have studied within.” The shelves of this library had rotted away before the onslaught of a startling profusion of small dark purple mushrooms with white stems. The books, made from palm frond pulp in a process lost to us, had all spilled out upon the main floor—thousands of books, many ornately engraved with strange letters²³ and overlaid by the now familiar golden lichen. The use the current gray caps had made of these books was as firewood, for as Manzikert watched in disbelief, gray caps came and went, collecting the books and condemning them to their cooking fires.

Did Tonsure correctly interpret what he saw in the “library”? I think not, and have published my doubts in a monograph entitled “An Argument for the Gray Caps and Against the Evidence of Tonsure’s Eyes.”²⁴ I believe the “library” was actually a place for religious worship, the “books” prayer rolls. Prayer rolls in some cultures, particularly in the far Occident, are consigned to the flames in a holy ritual. The “shelves” were rotted wooden planks specifically inserted into the walls to foster the growth of the special purple mushrooms, which grew nowhere else in Cinsorium and may well have had religious significance.²⁵ Another clue lay in the large, mushroom-shaped stone erected just beyond the library’s front steps, since determined to have been an altar.

Sophia chose this moment to remark upon what she termed the “primitivism” of the natives, chiding her husband for his “cowardice.” Faced with such a rebuke, Manzikert became more aggressive and free of any moral restraints. Fortunately, it took several days for this new attitude to manifest itself, during which time Manzikert moved more and more of his people off the ships and onto the lip of the bay, where he commenced building docks. He also appropriated several of the round, squat structures on the fringes as living quarters, evicting the native inhabitants who, burbling to themselves, complacently walked into the city proper.

Not only were Manzikert’s clan members glad to stretch their legs, but the land that awaited them proved, upon exploration, to be ideal. Abundant springs and natural aquifers fed off the Moth, while game, from pigs to deer to a flightless bird called a “grout,” provided an ample food source. The curve of the river accentuated the breeze that blew from the west, generally cooling the savage climate, and with the breeze came birds, swallows in particular, to swoop down at dusk and devour the vast clouds of insects that hovered over the water.

Tonsure spent these five or six days wandering the city, which he still found a marvel. He had, he wrote in his journal, “squandered” much of his early life in the realm of the Kalif, where architectural marvels crowded every city, but never had he seen anything like Cinsorium.²⁶ First of all, the city had no corners, only curves. Its architects had built circles within circles, domes within domes, and circles within domes. Tonsure found the effect soothing to the eye, and more importantly to the spirit: “This lack of edges, of conflicting lines, makes of the mind a plateau both serene and calm.” The possible truth of this observation has been confirmed by modern-day architects who, on review of the reconstructed blueprint of Cinsorium, have described it as the structural equivalent of a tuning fork, a vibration in the soul.

Just as delightful were the huge, festive mosaics lining the walls, most of which depicted battles or mushroom harvesting, while a few consisted of abstract shiftings of red and black; these last gave Tonsure as much unease as the lack of corners had given him comfort, although again he could not say why. The mosaics were made from lichen and fungus skillfully placed and trained to achieve the desired effect. Sometimes fruits, vegetables, or seeds were also used to form decorative patterns—cauliflower to depict a sheeplike creature called the “lunger,” for example—with the gray caps replacing these weekly. If Tonsure can be believed, one mosaic used the eggs of a native thrush to depict the eyes of a gray cap; when the eggs hatched, the eyes appeared to be opening.

The library yielded the most magnificent of Tonsure’s discoveries: a mechanized golden tree, its branches festooned with intricate jeweled shrikes and parrots, while on the circular dais by which it moved equally intricate deer, stalked by lions, pawed the golden ground. By use of a winding key, the birds would burst simultaneously into song while the lions roared beneath them. The gray caps maintained it in perfect working condition, but had no appreciation for its beauty, as if they “were themselves clockwork parts in some vast machine, fated to retrace the same movements year after year.”

Yet, as Tonsure’s appreciation for the city grew, so too did his loathing of its inhabitants. Runts, he calls them—cripples. In their ignorance of the beauty of their own city, he wrote (in the biography), they “had become unfit to rule over it, or even to live within its boundaries.” Their “pallor, the sickly moistness of their skin, even the rheumy discharge from their eyes,” all pointed to the “abomination of their existence, mocking the memory of what they once had been.”²⁷

Why the normally tolerant Tonsure came to espouse such ideas we may never know; certainly, there is none of the element of pity that marks his journal comments about Manzikert, whom he calls “a seething mass of emotions, a pincushion of feelings who would surely be locked away if he were not already a leader of men.” Although Tonsure’s disparaging comments in his journal seem overwrought, similar comments in the biography are easily attributed to Manzikert himself, for if the monk reviled the natives, the Cappan hated them with an intensity that can have no rational explanation. Tonsure records that whenever Manzikert had cause to walk through the city, he would casually murder any gray cap in his path. Perhaps even more chilling, other gray caps in the vicinity ignored such unprovoked murder, and the mortally wounded themselves expired without a struggle.²⁸

At the end of the first week, Manzikert and Sophia held a festival not only to celebrate the completion of the docks, but also “this new beginning as dwellers on the land.” Due to its timing, this celebration must be considered the forerunner of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid.²⁹ During the festivities, Manzikert christened the new settlement “Ambergris,” after the “most secret and valuable part of the whale”³⁰—over Sophia’s objections, who, predictably enough, wanted to call the settlement “Sophia.”

The next morning, Manzikert, groggy from grog the night before, got up to relieve himself and, about to do so beside one of the gray caps’ round dwellings, noticed on the wall a small, flesh-colored lichen that bore a striking resemblance to the Lepress Saint Kristina of Malfour, a major icon in the Truffidian religion. Menacing the Saint was a lichen that looked uncannily like a gray cap. Manzikert fell into a religious rage, gathered his people and told them of his vision. In the biography, Tonsure dutifully reports the jubilant reaction of Manzikert’s men upon learning they were going to war because of a maliciously shaped fungus,³¹ but neglects to mention this reaction in his journal, presumably out of shame.³²

Late in the afternoon, Sophia and Tonsure at his side, Cappan Manzikert I of Aan and Ambergris led a force of 200 men into the city. The sun, Tonsure writes, shone blood red, and the streets of Cinsorium soon reflected red independent of the sun, for at Manzikert’s order, his men began to slaughter the gray caps. It was a horribly mute affair. The gray caps offered no resistance, but only stared up at their attackers as they were cut down.³³ Perhaps if they had resisted, Manzikert might have shown them mercy, but their silence, their utter willingness to die rather than fight back, infuriated the Cappan, and the massacre continued unabated until dusk. By this time “the newly christened city had become indistinguishable from a charnel house, so much blood had been spilled upon the streets; the smell of the slaughter gathered in the humid air, and the blood itself clung to us like sweat.” The bodies were so numerous that they had to be stacked in piles so that Manzikert and his men could navigate the streets back to the docks.

Except that Manzikert, as the sunset finally bled into night and his men lit their torches, did not return to the docks.

For, as they passed the great “library” and the inert shapes sprawled on its front steps, Manzikert espied a gray cap dressed in purple robes standing by the red-stained altar. This gray cap not only clicked and whistled at the Cappan, but, after making an unmistakably rude gesture, fled up the stairs. At first shocked, Manzikert pursued with a select group of men,³⁴ shouting out to Sophia to lead the rest back to the ships; he would follow shortly. Then he and his men—including, for some reason, Tonsure, journal in his pocket—disappeared into the “library.” Sophia, always a good soldier, followed orders and returned to the docks.

The night passed without event—except that Manzikert did not return. At first light, Sophia immediately reentered the city with a force of 300 men, larger by a half than the small army that had slaughtered the gray caps the evening before.

It must have been an odd sight for Sophia and the young Manzikert II.³⁵ The morning sun shone down upon an empty city. The birds called out from the trees, the bees buzzed around their flowers, but nowhere could be found a dead gray cap, a living man—not even a trace of blood, as if the massacre had never happened and Manzikert himself had never walked the earth. As they walked through the silent streets, fear so overcame them that by the time they had reached the library, which lay near the city’s center, more than half the men had broken ranks and headed back to the docks. Although Sophia and Manzikert II did not lose their nerve, it was a close thing. Manzikert II writes that:

Not only had I not seen my Mother so afrightened before, I had never thought to see the day; and yet it was undeniable: she shook with fear as we went up the library steps. Her hands whitest white, her eyes nervous in her head, that something might any moment leap out of bluest sky, the gentle air, the unshadowed dwellings, and set upon her. Seeing my Mother so afeared, I thought myself no coward for my own fear.

Within the library, which had been emptied of its books, its mushrooms, its “shelves,” they found only a single chair,³⁶ and sitting in that chair, Manzikert I,³⁷ who wept and covered his face with his hands. Behind him, in the far wall: a gaping hole with stairs that led down into Cinsorium’s extensive network of underground tunnels. Into this hole the night before, Manzikert I would later divulge, he, Tonsure, and his bersar had entered in pursuit of the fleeing gray cap.

But at the moment, all Manzikert I could do was weep, and when Sophia finally managed to pry his hands from his face, she could see that there were no tears, for his “eyes had been plucked from their sockets so cleanly, so expertly, that to look at him, this pitiable man, one might think he had been born that way.” Of Tonsure, of the Cappan’s men, there was no sign, and no sign of any except for the monk would ever turn up. They had effectively vanished for all time.

Manzikert I remained incoherent for several days, screaming out in the night, vomiting, and subject to fits that appear to have been epileptic in nature. He also had lost his bearings, for he claimed to have been underground for more than a month, when clearly he had only just gone underground the night before.

During this difficult time—her husband incapacitated, her son stricken with immobility by the double trauma of his father’s condition and Tonsure’s disappearance—Sophia’s grief and fear turned into rage. On the third day after discovering her husband in the library, she reached a decision that has divided historians throughout the ages: she put Cinsorium to the torch.³⁸

The conflagration began in the library, and she is said to have expressed great regret that no “books” remained to feed to the fire. The city burned for three days, during which time, due to a miscalculation, the Aan were forced to work long hours protecting the docks which, when the winds shifted, were in serious danger of going up in flame as well. Finally, though, the city burned to the ground, leaving behind only the fleeting descriptions in Tonsure’s journal, a few other scattered accounts from Manzikert I’s clan, and a handful of buildings that proved resistant to the blaze.³⁹ Chief among these were the walls of the library itself, which proved to have been made of a fire-repellent stone, the aqueducts, and the altar outside of the library (these last two still stand today). Sophia realized the futility, not to mention the economic consequences, of dismantling the aqueducts, and so took out her frustrations on the altar and the library. The altar was made of a stone so strong they could not crack it with their hammers and other tools. When they tried to dig it out, they discovered it was a pillar that descended at least 100 feet, if not farther, and thus impregnable. The library, however, she had taken apart until “not one stone stood upon another stone.” As for the entrances to the underground sections of the ancient city, Sophia had these blocked up with several layers of burned stones from the demolished buildings, and then topped this off with a crude cement fashioned from mortar, pebbles, and dirt. This layer was reinforced with wooden planks stripped from the ships. Finally, Sophia posted sentries, in groups of ten, at each site, and five years later we find a description of these sentries in Manzikert II’s journal, still manning their posts.

By this time, Sophia’s husband had regained his senses—or, rather, had regained as much of them as he ever would …

Manzikert I refused to discuss what had occurred underground, so we will never know whether he even remembered the events that led up to his blinding. He would talk of nothing but the sleek, fat rats that, hiding from the carnage and the fires, had reemerged to wander the cindered city, no doubt puzzled by the changes. Manzikert I claimed the rats were the reincarnated spirits of saints and martyrs, and as such must be worshipped, groomed, fed, and housed to the extent that they had known such comforts in their former lives.⁴⁰ These claims drove Sophia to distraction, and many were the screaming matches aboard the flagship over the next few weeks. However, when she realized that her husband had not recovered, but had, in a sense, died underground, she installed him near the docks, in the very building beside which he had met his first gray cap. There she allowed him to indulge his mania to his heart’s content.

Although no longer a fearsome sight, short or tall, Manzikert I lived out his remaining years in a state of perpetual happiness, his gap-toothed grin as prominent as his frown had been in previous years. It was common to see him, with the help of a walking stick, blindly leading his huge charges—sleek, well-fed, and increasingly tame—around the city he had named. At night, the rats all crowded into his new house, and to his son’s embarrassment, slept by his side, or even on his bed. Such reverence as he showed the rats, whether the result of insanity or genuine religious epiphany, greatly impressed many of the Aan, especially those who still worshipped the old icons and those who had participated in the slaughter of the gray caps. Soon, he had many helpers.⁴¹ One morning, eight years after the fires, these helpers found Manzikert in his bed, gnawed to death by his “saints and martyrs,” and yet, if Manzikert II is to be believed, “with a smile upon his eyeless face.”

Thus ended the oddly poignant life of Ambergris’s first ruler—a man who thoroughly deserved to be gnawed to death by rats, as a year had not gone by before his blinding when he had not personally murdered at least a dozen people. Brave but cruel, a tactical genius at war but a failure at peace, and an enigma in terms of his height, Manzikert I is today remembered less as the founder of Ambergris, than as the founder of a religion which still has its adherents today in the city’s Religious Quarter and which is still known as “Manziism.”⁴²

2⁴³

To Manzikert I’s son, Cappan Manzikert II, would fall the monumental task of converting a pirate/whaling fleet into a viable land-based culture that could supplement fishing with extensive farming and trade with other communities.⁴⁴ Luckily, Manzikert II possessed virtues his father lacked, and although never the military leader his father had been, neither did he have the impulsive nature that had led to their exile in the first place.⁴⁵ He also had the ghost of Samuel Tonsure at his disposal, for he had taken the monk’s teachings to heart.

Above all else, Manzikert II proved to be a builder—whether it was establishing a permanent town within the old city of Cinsorium or creating friendships with nearby tribes.⁴⁶ When peace proved impossible—with, for example, the western tribe known as the Dogghe—Manzikert II showed no reluctance to use force. Twice in the first ten years, he abandoned his rebuilding efforts to battle the Dogghe, until, in a decisive encounter on the outskirts of Ambergris itself, he put to flight and decimated a large tribal army and, using his naval strength to its best effect, annihilated the rest as they took to their canoes. The chieftain of the Dogghe died of extreme gout during the fighting and with his death the Dogghe had no choice but to come to terms.

Thus, in Manzikert II’s eleventh year of rule, he was finally able to focus exclusively on building roads, promoting trade, and, most importantly, designing the layers of efficient bureaucracy necessary to govern a large area. He himself never conquered much territory, but he laid the groundwork for the system that would reach its apogee 300 years later during the reign of Trillian the Great Banker.⁴⁷

Manzikert II also laid the groundwork for Ambergris’s unique religious flavor by building churches in what would become the Religious Quarter—and, less to his credit, by active plundering of other cities. Obsessed with relics, Manzikert II was forever sending agents to the south and west to buy or steal the body parts of saints, until by the end of his reign he had amassed a huge collection of some 70 mummified noses, eyelids, feet, kneecaps, fingers, hearts, and livers.⁴⁸ Housed in the various churches, these relics attracted thousands of pilgrims (along with their money), some of whom stayed in the city, thus helping to spark the rapid growth that made Ambergris a thriving metropolis only 20 years after its foundation. Remarkably, Manzikert II’s astute diplomacy averted catastrophe in at least four instances where his thievery of relics so infuriated the plundered cities that they were ready to invade Ambergris.

On the architectural front, Manzikert II built many remarkable structures with the help of his chief architect Midan Pejora, but none so well-known as the Cappan’s Palace, which would exist intact until, 350 years later, the Kalif’s Grand Vizir, upon his temporary occupation of Ambergris, dismantled much of it.⁴⁹ The palace was, by all accounts, a rather peculiar building. The exterior inspired the noted traveler Alan Busker to write:

The walls, the columns rise until, at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the shore had been frost bound before they fell, and the river nymphs had inlaid them with diamonds and amethyst.

However, the interior prompted him to write: “We shall find that the work is at least pure in its insipidity, and subtle in its vice; but this monument is remarkable as showing the refuse of one style encumbering the embryo of another, and all principles of life entangled either in diapers or the shroud.” The actual bust of Manzikert II pleased Busker even less: “A huge, gross, bony clown’s face, with the peculiar sodden and sensual cunning in it which is seen so often in the countenances of the worst Truffidian priests; a face part of iron and part of clay. I blame the sculptor, not the subject.”

Manzikert II ruled for 43 years and sired a son on his sickly wife Isobel when he was already a gray beard of 45 years. During his reign, he had managed the impossible task of both consolidating his position and preparing for future growth. If his religious fervor led him to bad decisions, then at least his gift for diplomacy saved him from the consequences of those decisions.

Following the death of Manzikert II,⁵⁰ Manzikert III duly took his place as ruler of lands that now stretched some 40 miles south of Ambergris and 50 miles north.⁵¹ Manzikert III suffered from mild oliphauntitus⁵² that apparently affected his internal organs, yet oddly enough he died, after six tumultuous years, of jungle rot⁵³ received while on a southern expedition to procure lemur eyelids and kidneys for an exotic meat pie. The Cappan’s condition was not immediately diagnosed, perhaps due to his oliphauntitus, and by the time doctors had discovered the nature of his condition, it was too late. Displaying a fine disregard for mercy, Manzikert III’s last order before he died was for every last member of the Institute of Medicine to be boiled alive in an eel broth; evidently, he had thought up a new recipe.⁵⁴

Manzikert III had not been a good cappan.⁵⁵ During his reign, he had launched numerous futile assaults on the Menites, and although no one ever doubted his personal bravery, he had all of his grandfather’s impatience and impulsiveness, but none of that man’s charisma or shrewdness. A grotesque gastronome, he put on decadent banquets even during the famine that struck in the third year of his reign.⁵⁶ About all that can be said in Manzikert III’s defense is that he provided monies for research that resulted in refinements of the mariner’s compass and the invention of the double-ruddered ship (useful for maneuvering in narrow tributaries). However, Manzikert III is best remembered for his poor treatment of the poet Maximillian Sharp. Sharp came to Ambergris as an emissary of the Menites, and when it came time for him to leave, Manzikert III would not allow him safe passage by the most convenient route. He was consequently obliged to make his way back through malarial swampland, as a result of which this greatest of all ancient masters caught a fever and died.⁵⁷ Manzikert III, when brought news of Sharp’s death, is said to have joked, “Consider this my contribution to the Arts.”⁵⁸ Another year and Manzikert III might have exhausted both the treasury and his people’s patience. As it was, he managed little permanent damage and all of this was put right by his successor: Manzikert II’s illegitimate son by a distant third cousin, the handsome and intelligent Michael Aquelus, arguably the greatest of the Manzikert cappans.⁵⁹ If not for Aquelus’s firm hand, Ambergris, cappandom and city, might well have crumbled to dust within a generation.

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We now stand on the threshold of the event known as the Silence. Almost 70 years have passed since the massacre of the gray caps and the destruction of the ancient city of Cinsorium. The new Cappandom of Ambergris has begun to thrive over its ruins and no gray caps have been seen since the day of the massacre. An initial population that may well have flinched in anticipation of some terrible reprisal for genocide has given way to people who have never seen a gray cap, many of them Aan clans folk from the south who also wish to resettle on land. Manzikert II has already, during an exceedingly long reign, overseen the painful transition to a permanent settlement—already, too, a prosperous middle class of merchants, shopkeepers, and bankers has sprung up, supplemented by farmers who have settled in Ambergris and the outlying minor towns.⁶⁰ River trade is booming, and has made the city rich in a short period of time. Compulsory two-year military service has proven a success—the army is strong but civic-minded while Ambergris’s enemies appear few and impotent. Units of barter based on a gold standard have been introduced and these coins form the principal form of currency, followed closely by the southern Aan sel, which will gradually be phased out. All of Ambergris’s rulers—including Manzikert III—have successfully foiled attempts by the upper classes (mostly descendants of Manzikert I’s lieutenants) to form a ruling aristocracy by parceling out most of the land to small farmers. Thus, there are no serious internal threats to the succession. Finally, we are on the cusp of a period of inspired building and invention known as the Aquelus Age.

Everywhere, new ideas take root. The refurbished whaling fleet has focused its efforts on the giant freshwater squid, with great success. Aquelus will not just make freshwater squid products a national industry, but part of the national identity, inadvertently introducing the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, which will remain a peaceful event throughout the rule of the Manzikerts.⁶¹ The old aqueducts have been made functional again and extensive settlement has occurred in the valley beyond the city proper, creating a separate town of craftspeople. Every day a new house goes up and a new street is dedicated, and by the time of Aquelus there are over 30,000 permanent residents in Ambergris: approximately 13,000 men and 17,000 women and children.⁶²

And yet, as Aquelus enters his sixth year in power, there is something dreadfully wrong, and although no one knows the source of this wrongness, perhaps a few suspect, at least a little. First, there is the sinister way in which the gray caps have entered the collective consciousness of the city: parents tell tales of the old inhabitants of Cinsorium to children at bedtime—that the gray caps will creep up out of the ground on their clammy pale hands and feet, crawl in through an open window, and grab you if you don’t go to sleep.

Or, more frequently now, the term “mushroom dweller” is used instead of “gray cap,” no doubt become more common because, rather disturbingly, the only major failure of the civil government and private citizens has been the war against the fungus that has overgrown many areas of Ambergris: cascades of dark and bright mushrooms, gaily festooned with red and green, or somber in jackets of gray or brown, sometimes as thick as the very grass. Public complaints proliferate, for certain types exude a slick poison which, when it comes into contact with legs, feet, arms, hands, leaves the victim in extreme pain and covered with purple splotches for up to a week. More alarmingly, a new type of mushroom with a stem as thick as an oak and four or five feet tall, begins to spring up in the middle of certain streets, wrenching free from the cobblestones. These blue-tinged “white whales,”⁶³ as some wag nicknamed them, have to be chopped down by either fire emergency workers or the civil police department, causing hours of inconvenience and lost work time. They also smell so strongly of rotten eggs that whole neighborhoods have to be evacuated, sometimes for days.

Certainly the afflicted areas had grown more numerous in those last years before the Silence, almost as if the fungi formed a vast, nonsentient advance guard … but for what? At least one prominent citizen, the inventor Stephen Bacilus⁶⁴—the great-great-great grandfather of the influential statistician Gort—appears to have known what for, and to have recognized a potential danger. As he put it to the Home Council, a body created to address issues of citywide security:

The very fact that we cannot stop their proliferation, that every poison only makes them thrive the more, should alarm us. For it indicates the presence of another, superior, force determined that these fungi should live. The further observation, made by many in this room tonight, that some fungi, after we have uprooted them and placed them in the appointed garbage heaps for burning, mysteriously find their way back to their former location—this should also shock us into action … and, finally, I need not remind you, except that so many of us today have short memories, that several of these mushrooms are purple in hue. Until a few years ago, a purple mushroom could not be found in all the city. Somehow, I find this fact more sinister than any other …

Unfortunately, the Council dismissed his evidence as based on old wives’ tales, and placed an edict on Bacilus that forbid him to speak about “mushrooms, fungi, lichen, moss, or related plants so as not to unwittingly and unnecessarily cause a general panic among the populace.”⁶⁵ After all, the Home Council was responsible for security in the city.

But did Bacilus have cause for alarm? Perhaps so. According to police reports, three years before the Silence the city experienced 76 unexplained or unsolved break-ins, up from only 30 the previous year. Two years before the Silence this figure rose to 99 break-ins, and in the year before the Silence, almost 150 unexplained break-ins occurred within the city limits. No doubt some of these burglaries can be attributed to the large number of unassimilated immigrant adventurers flooding into Ambergris, and no doubt the authorities’ failure to show undue concern means they had reached a similar conclusion. However, the victims in an astonishing number of these cases claim, when they saw anyone at all, that the intruder was a small person, usually hidden by shadow and almost always wearing a large felt hat. These mystery burglars most often made off with cutlery, jewelry, and food items.⁶⁶

It is unfortunate indeed that the urban legend of the mushroom dwellers had spread so widely, because, reduced to stories to scare children, no one took them seriously. The police passed off such accounts as hysterical or as bald-faced lies, while criminals complicated the situation by disguising themselves in gray cap “garb” when committing burglaries.⁶⁷

Worse still, the efficient government and the network of peace treaties Manzikert II and Aquelus had created proved to be built on a fragile foundation.

At the time of the Silence, it would have seemed that Ambergris was not only secure but richer than ever before. Indeed, Aquelus had just formed an even stronger alliance with the Menites⁶⁸—and took the first step toward the continuation of his bloodline by marrying the old Menite King’s daughter Irene,⁶⁹ who by all accounts was not only beautiful but intelligent and could be expected to rule jointly with Aquelus, much as had, in their fashion, Sophia and Manzikert I.⁷⁰

The same year, Aquelus secured his western borders against possible attacks by the Kalif ⁷¹ with the signing of a treaty in which Ambergrisian merchants would receive preferential treatment (especially the waiver of export taxes) and in return Aquelus promised to hold Ambergris in vassalage to the Kalif.⁷²

The depth of Aquelus’s deviousness is best illustrated by his response when the Kalif asked Aquelus to help suppress the southern rebellion of Stretcher Jones in return for further trade concessions. The Kalif, a devious man himself, also wrote that Aquelus’s two half-brothers, closest successors to the cappanship, had been awarded the honor of studying in the Kalif’s court, under the tutelage of his most able instructors, “among the most learned men in the civilized world.” Aquelus, who had remained neutral in the conflict, replied that a Brueghelite armada of 100 sail already threatened Ambergris—a fleet actually some 200 miles away, contentedly plundering the southern islands—and he could not spare any ships to attack a friendly Truffidian power in the west; nonetheless, he gratefully accepted the privileges so generously offered by the Kalif. As for the invitation to his half-brothers, Aquelus returned his “devout and immense thanks,” but they never went. Had they gone, the Kalif would almost certainly have kept them as hostages.⁷³

However pleased Aquelus may have been at the adroit deflection of these potential threats, he still, as the annual freshwater squid expedition came ever closer, had two other dangerous situations that required swift resolution. First, the clear shortfall in the spring crops, combined with the influx of new settlers (which he had no wish to see slacken) meant the possibility of famine. Second, the Haragck, a warlike clan of nomads who rode sturdy mountain ponies into battle, had begun to make inroads on his western borders.⁷⁴ Aquelus had no cavalry, but the Haragck had no fleet, and if it came to armed confrontation, Aquelus must have been confident—now that Morrow, in firm control of the northern Moth, was an ally—that he could stop the barbarians from crossing the river in force.

If the Haragck had been Aquelus’s only enemy, he would still have had cause to thank his good fortune, but to the south an old adversary chose this moment to reassert itself: the Aan descendants of the same Brueghel who had chased Manzikert I upriver. Drawn by the Aan exodus to the rich suburbs of Ambergris, these Brueghelites, as they called themselves, had begun to make trouble in the south. Understandably, they resented the loss of so much potential manpower when they found themselves beset by the still more southerly Gray Tribes. Most damaging, in light of the famine, the Brueghelites waged a trade war instead of a military war, which might at least have been resolved quickly. Some of their weapons included transit dues on Ambergrisian goods, heavy tolls on produce bound for the southern islands, and customs houses (backed by large, well-armed garrisons) along the Moth.⁷⁵

Eventually, Aquelus would find a way to set the Haragck against the Brueghelites, eliminating both as a threat to Ambergris,⁷⁶ but as the freshwater squid season approached, Aquelus could not know that his bribes and political maneuverings would bear fruit. Thus, he made the fateful decree that three times as many ships would participate in the hunt as usual. His purpose was to offset the shortfall of crops with squid meat and by-products, and to provide enough extra food to withstand a siege by either the Brueghelites or the Haragck.⁷⁷ In the event there was no siege, these provisions could accommodate the continuing flow of immigrants. The maneuvers to catch the squid, coincidentally, required a prowess and skill level far greater than necessary during an actual war, and so Aquelus also looked to toughen up his navy.

At the appointed time, Aquelus, at the head of nearly 5,000 men and women, took to the river in his 100 ships.⁷⁸ They would be gone for two weeks, the longest period of time Aquelus thought he could safely remain away from the capital. His new wife stayed behind. No two turns of fate—Irene’s choice to stay at home and the enormity of the fleet that set off for the southern hunting grounds—would have a more profound effect on Ambergris during its early history.

3

Any historian must take extreme care when discussing the Silence, for the enormity of the event demands respect. But when the historian in question, myself, explains the Silence for a paltry pamphlet series, he must display a degree of solemnity in direct inverse proportion to the frivolity of the surrounding information. I find it unacceptable that you, the reader, should flip—a most disagreeably shallow word—from this pamphlet to the next, which may concern Best Masquerade Festivals or Where to Procure a Prostitute, without being made to grasp the awful ramifications of the Event. This requires no melodramatic folderol on my part, for the facts themselves should suffice: upon Aquelus’s return, the city of Ambergris lay empty, not a single living soul to be found upon any of its boulevards, alleyways, and avenues, nor within its many homes, public buildings, and courtyards.

Aquelus’s ships landed at docks where the only sound was the lapping of water against wood. Arrived in the early morning, having raced home to meet the self-imposed two-week deadline, the Cappan found the city cast in a weak light, wreathed in mist come off the river. It must have been an ethereal scene—perhaps even a terrifying one.

At first, no one noticed the severity of the Silence, but as the fleet weighed anchor and the crews walked out onto the docks, many thought it odd no one had come out to greet them. Soon, they noticed that the river defenses lay unmanned, and that the boats in the harbor around them, as they came clear of the mist, drifted, under no one’s control.

When Aquelus noticed these anomalies, he feared the worst—an invasion by the Brueghelites during his absence—and ordered the crews back onto the ships. All ships but his own sailed back out into the middle of the River Moth, where they remained, laden with squid, at battle readiness.

Then Aquelus, anxious to find his new bride, personally led an expedition of 50 men into the city.⁷⁹ His fears of invasion seemed unfounded, for everywhere they went, Ambergris was as empty of enemies as it was of friends.

We are lucky indeed that among the leaders of the expedition was one Simon Jersak, a common soldier who would one day serve as the chief tax collector for the western provinces. Jersak left us with a full account of the expedition’s journey into Ambergris, and I quote liberally from it here:

As the mist, which had hidden the true extent of the city’s emptiness from us, dissipated, and as every street, every building, every shop on every corner, proved to have been abandoned, the Cappan himself trembled and drew his cloak about him. Men from among our ranks were sent randomly through the neighborhoods, only to return with the news that more silence lay ahead: meals lay on tables ready to eat, and carts with horses stood placidly by the sides of avenues that, even at the early hour, would normally have been abustle. But nowhere could we find a soul: the banks were unlocked and empty, while in the Religious Quarter, the flags still weakly fluttered, and the giant rats meandered about the courtyards, but, again, no people; even the fungi that had been our scourge had gone away. We quickly searched through the public baths, the granaries, the porticos, the schools—nothing. When we reached the Cappan’s palace and found no one there—not his bride, not the least retainer—the Cappan openly wept, and yet underneath the tears his face was set as if for war. He was not the only man reduced to tears, for it soon became clear that our wives, our children, had all disappeared, and yet left behind all the signs of their presence, so we knew we had not been dreaming our lives away—they had existed, they had lived, but they were no longer in the city … And so, disconsolate, robbed of all power to act against an enemy whose identity he did not know, my Cappan sat upon the steps of the palace and stared out across the city … until such time as one of the men who had been sent out discovered certain items on the old altar of the gray caps. At this news, the Cappan donned his cloak once more, wiped the tears from his face, drew his sword and sped to the site with all haste. As we followed behind our Cappan, through that city once so full of lives and now as empty as a tomb, there were none among us who did not, in our heart of hearts, fear what we would find upon the old altar …

What did they find upon the altar? An old weathered journal and two human eyeballs preserved by some unknown process in a solid square made of an unknown clear metal. Between journal and squared eyeballs blood had been used to draw a symbol:⁸⁰

More ominous still, the legendary entrance, once blocked up, boarded over, lay wide open, the same stairs that had enticed Manzikert I beckoning now to Aquelus.

The journal was, of course, the one that had disappeared with Samuel Tonsure 60 years before. The eyes, a fierce blue, could belong to no one but Manzikert I. Who the blood had come from, no one cared to guess, but Aquelus, finally confronted with an enemy—for who could now doubt the return of the gray caps and their implication in the disappearance of the city’s citizens?⁸¹—acted decisively.

Those commanders who argued that a military force should attack the underground found themselves overruled by Aquelus, who, in the face of almost overwhelming opposition, ordered all of his military commanders back to the ships, there to speed up the disembarkation so as to simultaneously process the squid, which otherwise would have rotted, and take up defensive positions throughout the city. Aquelus knew that the Haragck, upon hearing of the developments in Ambergris, might well attack, followed by the Brueghelites. Worse still, if the Cappaness could not be found, the political consequences—regardless of his love for her—would be disastrous. Might not the King of the Menites blame Aquelus for the death of his daughter?

Once the commanders had taken their leave, Aquelus transferred power to his minister of finance, one Thomas Nadal,⁸² and announced that he intended to go down below himself.⁸³ The Cappan’s decision horrified his ministers.⁸⁴ In addition to their personal affection for Aquelus, they feared losing their Cappan after all else that had been taken from them. Many, Nadal included, also feared the Haragck and the Brueghelites, but Aquelus countered these arguments by pointing out, truthfully enough, that his military commanders could easily lead any defense of the city—after all, they had drawn up a plan for just such a situation months ago. However, when Nadal then asked, “Yes, but who other than you can lead us to rebuild the morale of this shattered city?” Aquelus ignored him. Clearly, only he or his disappeared wife could make Ambergris a viable, living metropolis again. Still, down below he went, and down below he stayed for three days.⁸⁵

Aboveground, Aquelus’s military commanders might well have staged a coup if not for the arrival that first night of Irene, only 12 hours after Aquelus’s descent into the domains of the mushroom dwellers. By a quirk of chance both cruel and kind, she had left the capital for a two-day hunting trip in the surrounding countryside.⁸⁶

Faced with the double-edged horror of the Silence and her husband’s underground sojourn, Cappaness Irene never faltered, taking quick, decisive action. The rebellious commanders—Seymour, Nialson, and Rayne—she had thrown in prison. Simultaneously, she sent a fast boat to Morrow with a message for her father, asking for his immediate military support.⁸⁷ The Cappaness might have thought this ended her immediate problems, but she had severely underestimated the mood of the men and women who had returned to the city. The soldiers guarding the rebel commanders freed their prisoners⁸⁸ and led a drunken mob of naval cadets to the front steps of the palace.

Inside, the Cappan’s ministers had succumbed to panic—burning documents, stripping murals for their gold thread, and preparing to abandon the city under cover of darkness. When they came to the Cappaness with news of the insurrection and told her she must flee too, she refused and, as reported by Nadal, said to them:

Every man who is born into the light of day must sooner or later die; and how could I allow myself the luxury of such cowardice when my husband took all our sins upon himself and went underground? May I never willingly shed the colors of Ambergris, nor see the day when I am no longer addressed by my title. If you, my noble ministers, wish to save your skins, you will have little difficulty in doing so. You have plundered the palace’s riches and with luck you can reach the river and your boats moored there. But consider first whether when you reach safety you will not regret that you did not choose death. For those who remain, I shall ask only that you contain your fear, for we must present a brave face if we are to survive this night.

Shamed by these words, Nadal and his colleagues had no choice but to follow the Cappaness out to the front steps of the palace. What followed must be considered the crowning achievement of early Ambergrisian nationalism—a moment that even today sends “chills down the spine” of the least patriotic city dweller. This daughter of Menites, this Cappaness without a Cappan, made her famous speech in which she called upon the mob to lay down its arms “in the service of a greater good, for the greater glory of a city unique in the history of the world. For if we can overcome this strife now, we shall never fear ourselves ever again.”⁸⁹ She then detailed in cold-blooded fashion exactly who the rebels would have to kill to gain power and the full extent of the repercussions for a severely divided Ambergris: instant assimilation by the Brueghelites.⁹⁰ Further, she promised to strengthen the elected position of city mayor⁹¹ and not to pursue reprisals against the mob itself, only its leaders.

Such was the magnetism of her personality and the passion of her speech that the mob turned on its leaders and brought them to the Cappaness in chains. Thus was the most severe internal crisis in the cappandom’s short history diffused by Irene—the daughter of a foreign state with a heretical (to the Truffidians) religion. The people would not soon forget her.

But the Cappaness and her people had no time to draw breath, for on the second day of Aquelus’s disappearance, 7,000 Haragck crossed the Moth and attacked Ambergris.⁹² The Cappaness’s forces, although taken by surprise, managed to keep the Haragck pinned down in the region of the docks, except for a contingent of 2,000, whom Irene allowed to break through to the city proper; she rightly sought to split the Haragck army in two, and in the labyrinthine streets of Ambergris, her own troops had a distinct advantage.⁹³

Outflanked by the Ambergrisian ships behind them, which they had neglected to secure before establishing their beach head, the rest of the Haragck floundered; bereft of their ponies, they fought hand-to-hand on the shore while the Ambergrisian sailors assaulted them from behind with arrows and burning faggots. If the Haragck had managed to fire the ships, they might still have won the day, but instead they tried to capture them (rightly perceiving that without a navy they would never be able to conquer the region). Even so, the defenders barely managed to hold their positions through the night. But at dawn of the third day an advance guard of light horsemen arrived from Morrow and turned the fortunes of the defenders, who, tired and disheartened by all they had lost, would soon have given way to Haragck pressure.

By nightfall, the surviving Haragck had either tried to bob back over the Moth on their inflated animal skins or run north or south. Those who swam were slaughtered by the navy (the inflated animal skins were neither maneuverable nor inflammable);⁹⁴ those who fled south ended up as slaves to the Archduke of Malid⁹⁵ (who, in his turn, would be enslaved by the encroaching Brueghelites); those who fled north managed to evade the Menite army marching south, but then ran into the ferocious Skamoo with their spears made of ice.⁹⁶

That night, Cappan Aquelus made his way back to the surface on his hands and knees, his hair a shocking white and his eyes plucked from him;⁹⁷ they would never, even posthumously, be returned to him.⁹⁸ Weak with hunger and delirium, Aquelus soon recovered under the personal ministrations of his wife, who was also a noted surgeon. Like Manzikert I, he would never discuss what had happened to him. Unlike Manzikert I, he would rule again, but in the three days of his absence, the dynamics of power had undergone a radical shift. His Cappaness had proven herself quite capable of governing and had demonstrated remarkable toughness in the face of catastrophe. The Cappandom was also indebted to the Menite King for his help.

Finally, not only had Aquelus been blinded, but even many of his own ministers concluded that his underground adventure had been an act of rashness and/or cowardice. Never again would Aquelus be the sole ruling authority; from now on it would be his wife who, backed by her father, ruled in matters of defense and foreign diplomacy. More and more, Aquelus would oversee building projects and provide valuable advice to his wife. That she ever intended to usurp the cappanship is unlikely,⁹⁹ but once she had it, the people would not let her abdicate it.¹⁰⁰

The problem went deeper than this, however. Although Aquelus had sacrificed his sight for them—indeed, many have speculated that Aquelus reached a pact with the mushroom dwellers that saved the city—the people no longer trusted him, and would never regain their former love for him. That he had gone below and survived when so many had not was proof enough for the common naval cadet that their Cappan had conspired with the enemy. Tales circulated that he snuck out at midnight to seek counsel with the mushroom dwellers. It was said that a tunnel had been dug from his private chambers to the mushroom dwellers’ underground lair. Most ridiculous of all, some claimed that Aquelus was actually a doppelganger, made of fungus, under the mushroom dwellers’ control; he had, after all, forbidden anyone from attacking them.¹⁰¹

The latter part of Aquelus’s “reign” was marked by increasingly desperate attempts to regain the respect of his subjects. To this end, he would have himself led out into the city disguised as a blind beggar and listen to the common laborers and merchants as they walked by his huddled form. He also gave away huge sums of money to the poor, so seriously draining the treasury that Irene was forced to order a halt to his largesse. Aquelus’s spending, combined with the promises made to entice people to settle in Ambergris, led to the selling of titles and, in later years, a landed aristocracy that would prove a constant source of treasonous ambition.

Despite these failings, Aquelus managed partial redemption by having four children with Irene, although surely the irony of the Cappaness being the instrument of his salvation was not lost on him. These children—Mandrel, Tiphony, Cyril, and Samantha—became Aquelus’s delight and main reason for living. While Irene ruled, he doted on them, and the people doted on them too. In Aquelus’s love for his children, Ambergrisians saw the shadow of their former love for him, and many forgave him his involvement with the mushroom dwellers—a charge almost certainly false anyway.

Thus, although in many ways tragic, the partnership of Cappaness and Cappan would define and redefine Ambergris—both internally and in the world beyond—for another 30 years.¹⁰² They would be haunted years, however, for the legacy of the Silence would permeate Ambergris for generations—in the sudden muting of the voices of children, of women, of those men who had stayed behind. For those inhabitants who had lost their families, their friends, the city was nothing more than a giant morgue, and no matter how they might console one another, no matter how they might set to their tasks with almost superhuman intensity, the better to block out the memories, they could never really escape the Silence, for the “City of Remembrance and Memorial,” as one poet called it, was all around them.¹⁰³ It was common in those early, horrible years—still scarred by famine, despite the reduction in the population—for men and women to break down on the street in a sudden flux of tears.

The Truffidian priest Michael Nysman came to the city as part of a humanitarian mission the year after the Silence and was shocked by what he found there. In a letter to his diocese back in Nicea, he wrote:

The buildings are gray and their windows often like sad, empty eyes. The only sound in the street is that of weeping. Truly, there is a great emptiness to the city, as if its heart had stopped beating, and its people are a grim, suspicious folk. They will hardly open their doors to you, and have as many locks as can be imagined … Few of them sleep more than two or three hours at a time, and then only when someone else is available to watch over them. They abhor basements, and have blocked up all the dirt floors with rocks. Nor will they suffer the slightest section of wall to harbor fungus of any kind, but will scrape it off immediately, or preferably, burn it. Some neighborhoods have formed Watches during the night that go from home to home with torches, making sure that all within are safe. Most eerie and discomfiting, the citizens of this bleak city leave lanterns burning all through the night, and in such proliferation that the city, in such a hard, all-seeing light, cannot fail to seem already enveloped in the flames of Hell, it only remaining for the Lord of the Nether World to take up his throne and scepter and walk out upon its streets. Just yesterday some unfortunate soul tried to rob a watchmaker and was torn to pieces before it was discovered he was not a gray cap … Worst of all: no children; the schools have closed down and their radiant, innocent voices are no longer heard in the church choirs. The city is childless, barren—it has only visions of the happy past, and what parent will bring a child into a city that contains the ghosts of so many children? Some parents—although usually only one parent has survived—believe that their children will return, and some tried to unblock the hole by the old altar before the Cappaness made it a hanging offense. Still others wait by the door at dinner, certain that a familiar small shape will walk by. It breaks my heart to see this. Can such a city ever now lose a certain touch of cruelty, of melancholy, a lingering hint of the macabre? Is this, then, the grief of the gray caps 70 years later given palpable form? I fear I can do little more here at this time; I am caught up in their sadness, and thus cannot give them solace for it, although unscrupulous priests sell dispensations, which they say will protect the user from the mushroom dwellers while simultaneously absolving the disappeared of their sins.

What are we, in this modern era, to make of the assertion that 25,000 people simply disappeared, leaving no trace of any struggle? Can it be believed? If the number were 1,000 could we believe it? The answer the honest historian reluctantly comes to is that the tale must be believed, because it happened. Not a single person escaped from the mushroom dwellers. More hurtful still, it left behind a generation known simply as the Dispossessed.¹⁰⁴ The city recovered, as all cities do, and yet for at least 100 years,¹⁰⁵ this absence, this silence, insinuated itself into the happiest of events: the coronations and weddings of cappans, the extraordinarily high birth rate (and low mortality rate), the victories over both Haragck and Brueghelite. The survivors retook their homes uneasily, if at all, and some areas, some houses, stood abandoned for a generation, never reentered, so that dinners set out before the Silence rotted, moldered, and eventually fossilized.¹⁰⁶ There remained the terrible conviction among the survivors that they had brought this upon themselves through Manzikert I’s massacre of the gray caps and Sophia’s torching of Cinsorium. It was hard not to feel that it was God’s judgment to see Ambergris destroyed soul by soul.¹⁰⁷

Worst of all, there was never any clue as to the fate of the Disappeared, and in the absence of information, imaginations, as always, imagined the worst. Soon, in the popular folklore of the times, the Disappeared had not only been killed, but had been subjected to terrible tortures and defilements. Although some still claimed the Brueghelites had carried off the 25,000, most people truly believed the mushroom dwellers had been responsible. Theories as to how cropped up much more frequently than why because, short of revenge, no one could fathom why. It was said that the ever-present fungus had released spores that, inhaled, put all of the city’s inhabitants to sleep, after which the mushroom dwellers had come out and dragged them underground. Others claimed that the spores had not put the Disappeared to sleep, but had actually, in chemical combination, formed a mist that corroded human flesh, so that the inhabitants had slowly melted into nothing. The truth is, we shall never know unless the mushroom dwellers deign to tell us.

4¹⁰⁸

But what of Samuel Tonsure’s journal? What, after all these years, did it contain? Aquelus wisely had it placed in the care of the librarians at the Manzikert Memorial Library.¹⁰⁹ In effect, the book disappeared again, as—hidden and known by only a few—it was not part of the public discourse.¹¹⁰ Aquelus made the librarians swear not to reveal the contents of the journal, or even hint at its existence to anyone, on pain of death. The journal was kept in a locked strongbox, which was then put inside another box. We can certainly understand why Aquelus kept it a secret, for the journal tells a tale both macabre and frightening. If the general populace had, at the time, known of its contents, they would no longer have had anything to fear from their imaginations—only to have their worst nightmares given validation. The burden on Aquelus and Irene of not releasing this information was terrible—Nadal, who was privy to most state secrets, reports that the two frequently fought over whether the journal should be made public, often switching sides in mid-argument.

To head librarian Michael Abrasis fell the task of examining the journal, and luckily he kept notes. Abrasis describes the journal as:

… leather-bound, 6 x 9, with at least 300 pages, of which almost all have been used. The leather has been contaminated by a green fungus that, ironically, has helped to preserve the book; indeed, were the lichen to be removed, the covers would disintegrate, so ingrained and so uniform are these green “shingles.” Of the ink, it would appear that the first 75 pages are of a black ink easily recognizable as distilled from whale’s oil. However, the sections thereafter are written using a purple ink that, after careful study, appears to have been distilled from some sort of fungus. These sections exude a distinctly sweet odor.¹¹¹

Abrasis had copies of the journal made and secreted them away—which accounts for the existence of the text in the city to this day—but, unfortunately, the original was pawned to the Kalif during the tragic last days of Trillian.

We have already discussed the early days of Ambergris as recounted in Tonsure’s journal, but what of the last portion of the journal? The first entry Tonsure managed to make following his descent¹¹² reads:

Dark and darker for three days. We are lost and cannot find our way to the light. The Cappan still pursues the gray caps, but they remain flitting shadows against the pale, dead glow of the fungus, the mushrooms that stink and writhe and even seem to speak a little. We have run out of food and are reduced to eating from the mushrooms that rise so tall in these caverns we must seek sustenance from the stem alone—maddeningly aware of succulent leathery lobes too high to reach. We know we are being watched, and this has unnerved all but the strongest men. We can no longer afford to sleep except in shifts, for too often we have woken to find another of our party missing. Early yesterday I woke to find a stealthy gray cap about to murder the Cappan himself, and when I gave the alarm, this creature smiled most chillingly, made a chirping sound, and ran down the passageway. We gave chase, the Cappan and I and some 20 others. The gray cap escaped, and when we returned our supplies were gone, as were the 15 men who had remained behind. The gray caps’ behavior here is as different as night is to day—here they are fast and crafty and we hardly catch sight of them before they strike. I do not believe we will make it to the surface alive.

Tonsure’s composure is admirable, although his sense of time is certainly faulty—he writes that three days had passed, when it must still have been but a single night, for Manzikert I was found in the library the very next morning.¹¹³ Another entry, dated just a few “days” later, is more disjointed and, one feels, soaked through with terror:

Three more gone—taken. In the night. Morning now. What do we find arranged around us like puppet actors? We find arranged around us the heads of those who have been taken from us. Ramkin, Starkin, Weatherby, and all the rest. Staring. But they cannot stare. They have no eyes. I wish I had no eyes. Cappan long ago gave up on all but the idea of escape. And it eludes us. We can taste it—the air sometimes fresher, so we know we are near the surface, and yet we might as well be a hundred miles underground! We must escape these blind staring heads. We eat the fungus, but I feel it eats us instead. Cappan near despair. Never seen him this way. Seven of us. Trapped. Cappan just stares at the heads. Talks to them, calls them by name. He’s not mad. He’s not mad. He has it easier in these tunnels than I.¹¹⁴ And still they watch us …

Tonsure then describes the deaths of the men still with the Cappan and Tonsure—two by poisoned mushrooms, two by blow dart, and one by a trap set into the ground that cut the man’s legs off and left him to bleed to death. Now it is just the Cappan and Tonsure, and, somehow, Tonsure has recovered his nerve:

We wonder now if there ever were such a dream as aboveground, or if this place has always been the reality and we simply deluding ourselves. We shamble through this darkness, through the foul emanations of the fungus, like lost souls in the Nether World … Today, we beseeched them to end it, for we could hear their laughter all around us, could glimpse the shadows of their passage, and we are past fear. End it, do not toy with us. It is clear enough now that here, on their territory, they are our Masters. I looked over my notes last night and giggled at my innocence. “Degenerate traces of a once-great civilization” indeed. We have passed through so many queer and ominous chambers, filled with otherworldly buildings, otherworldly sights—the wonders I have seen! Luminous purple mushrooms pulsing in the darkness. Creatures that can only be seen when they smile, for their skin reflects their surroundings. Eyeless, pulsating, blind salamanders that slowly ponder the dead darkness through other senses. Winged animals that speak in voices. Headless things that whisper our names. And ever and always, the gray caps. We have even spied upon them at play, although only because they disdain us so, and seen the monuments carved from solid rock that beggar the buildings aboveground. What I would give for a single breath of fresh air. Manzikert resists even these fancies; he has become sullen, responding to my words with grunts and clicks and whistles … More disturbing still, we have yet to retrace our steps; thus, this underground land must be several times larger than the aboveground city, much as the submerged portion of an iceberg is larger than the part visible to a sailor.

Clearly, however, Tonsure never regained his time-sense, for on this day, marked by him as the sixth, Manzikert would already have been five days aboveground, eyeless but alive. Perhaps Tonsure deluded himself that Manzikert remained by his side to strengthen his own resolve, or perhaps the fringe-historians have for once been too conservative: instead of a golem Manzikert being returned to the surface, perhaps the underground Manzikert was replaced with a golem. Tonsure certainly never tells us what happened to Manzikert; his entries simply do not mention him after approximately the ninth day. By the twelfth day, the entries become somewhat disjointed, and the last coherent entry, before the journal dissolves into fragments, is this pathetic paragraph:

They’re coming for me. They’ve had their fun—now they’ll finish me. To my mother: I have always tried to be your obedient son. To my illegitimate son and his mother: I have always loved you, although I didn’t always know it. To the world that may read this: know that I was a decent man, that I meant no harm, that I lived a life far less pious than I should have, but far better than many. May God have mercy on my soul.¹¹⁵

And yet, apparently, they did not “finish” him,¹¹⁶ for another 150 pages of writing follow this entry. Of these 150 pages, the first two are full of weird scribbles punctuated by a few coherent passages,¹¹⁷ all written using the strange purple ink described by Abrasis as having been distilled from fungus. These pages provide damning evidence of a mind gone rapidly deranged, and yet they are followed by 148 lucid pages of essays on Truffidian religious rituals, broken infrequently by glimpses into Tonsure’s captivity.

The essays have proven invaluable to present-day Truffidians who wish to read an “eyewitness” account of the early church, but baffle those of us who naturally want answers to the mysteries inherent in the Silence and the journal itself. The most obvious question is, why did the mushroom dwellers suffer Tonsure to live? On this subject, Tonsure at least provides his own theory, the explanation inserted into the middle of a paragraph on the Truffidian position on circumcision:¹¹⁸

Gradually, as they come to me time after time and rub my bald head, it has struck me why I have been spared. It is such a simple thing that it makes me laugh even to contemplate it: I look like a mushroom. Quick! Alert the authorities! I must send a message aboveground—tell them all to shave their heads! I can hardly contain my laughter even now, which startles my captors and makes it hard to write legibly.

Later, stuck between a discussion on the divine properties of frogs and a diatribe against interspecies marriages, Tonsure provides us with another glimpse into the mushroom dwellers’ world that entices the reader like a flash of gold:

They have led me to a vast chamber unlike any place I have ever seen, above or below. There stands before me a palace of shimmering silver built entirely of interlocking mushrooms and festooned with lichen and moss of green and blue. A sweet, sweet perfume hangs pungent in the air. The columns that support this dwelling are, it appears, made of living tissue, for they recoil at the touch … from the doorway steps the ruler of the province, who is herself but a foot soldier compared to the mightiest ranks that can be found here. All glows with an unearthly splendor and supplicant after supplicant kneels before the ruler and begs for her blessing. I am made to understand that I must come forward and allow the ruler to rub my head for luck. I must go.

Other entries hint that Tonsure made at least two attempts to escape, each followed by harsh punishment, the second of which may have been partial blinding,¹¹⁹ and at least one sentence suggests that afterward he was led secretly to the surface: “Oh, such torture, to be able to hear the river chuckling below me, to feel the night wind upon my face, to smell the briny silt, but to see nothing.” However, Tonsure may have been blindfolded or been so old and have existed in darkness for so long that his eyes could not adapt to the outside, day or night. Tonsure’s sense of time being suspect, we can only guess as to his age when he wrote that entry.

Finally, toward the end of the journal, Tonsure relates a series of what surely must be waking dreams, created by his long diet of fungus and the attendant fumes thereof:

They wheeled me into a steel chamber and suddenly a window appeared in the side of the wall and I saw before me a vision of the city that frightened me more than anything I have yet seen below ground. As I watched, the city grew from just the docks built by my poor lost Cappan to such immense structures that half the sky was blotted out by them, and the sky itself fluxed light, dark, and light again in rapid succession, clouds moving across it in a flurry. I saw a great palace erected in a few minutes. I saw carts that moved without horses. I saw battles fought in the city and without. And, in the end, I saw the river flood the streets, and the gray caps came out once again into the light and rebuilt their old city and everything was as before. The one I call my Keeper wept at this vision, so surely he must have seen it too?¹²⁰

Then follow the last 10 pages of the journal, filled with so concrete and frenzied a description of Truffidian religious practices that we can only conclude that he wrote these passages as a bulwark against insanity and that, ultimately, when he ran out of paper, he ran out of hope—either writing on the walls¹²¹ or succumbing to the despair that must have been a tangible part of every one of his days below ground. Indeed, the last line of the journal reads: “An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.”

Thus passes into silence one of the most influential and mysterious characters in the entire history of Ambergris. Because of Tonsure, Truffidianism and the Cappandom cannot, to this day, be separated from each other. His tutorials informed the administrative genius of Manzikert II, while his counsel both inflamed and restrained Manzikert I. Aquelus studied his journal endlessly, perhaps seeking some clue to which only he, with his own experience below ground, was privy. Tonsure’s biography of Manzikert I (never out of print) and his journal remain the sources historians turn to for information about early Ambergris and early Truffidianism.

If the journal proves anything it is that another city exists below the city proper, for Cinsorium was not truly destroyed when Sophia razed its aboveground manifestation. Unfortunately, all attempts to explore the underground have met with disaster,¹²² and now that the city has no central government, it is unlikely that there will be further attempts—especially since such authority as does exist would prefer the mysteries remain mysteries for the sake of tourism.¹²³ It would seem that two separate and very different societies shall continue to evolve side by side, separated by a few vertical feet of cement. In our world, we see their red flags and how thoroughly they clean the city, but we are allowed no similar impact on their world except through the refuse that goes down our sewer pipes.

The validity of the journal has been called into question several times over the years—lately by the noted writer Sirin, who claims that the journal is actually a forgery based on Manzikert I’s biography. He points to the writer Maxwell Glaring, who lived in Ambergris some 40 years after the Silence. Glaring, Sirin says, carefully studied the biography written by Tonsure, incorporated elements of it into his fake, invented the underground accounts, used an odd purple ink distilled from the freshwater squid¹²⁴ for the last half, and then “produced” the “journal” via a friend in the administrative quarter who spread the rumor that Aquelus had suppressed it for 50 years. Sirin’s theory has its attractions—Glaring, after all, forged a number of state documents to help his friends embezzle money from the treasury, and his novels often contain an amount of desperate derring-do in keeping with the fragments of reason found in the latter portion of the journal.¹²⁵ Adding to the controversy, Glaring was murdered—his throat cut as he crossed a back alley on his way to the post office—shortly after the release of the journal.

Sabon prefers the alternate theory that, yes, Glaring did forge parts of the journal, but only the sections on obscure Truffidian religious practices¹²⁶—these pages inserted to replace pages removed by the government for national security reasons. Glaring was then killed by the Cappan’s operatives to preserve the secret. Unfortunately, a fire gutted part of the palace’s administrative core, destroying the records that might have provided a clue as to whether Glaring was on the national payroll. Sabon further speculates that Glaring’s embezzlement had been discovered and was used as leverage to make him forge the journal pages, for otherwise, some of his relatives having disappeared in the Silence, he would have been disinclined to suppress evidence as to mushroom dweller involvement.¹²⁷ Sabon explains away the few paragraphs dealing with Tonsure’s captivity as Glaring’s genius in knowing that a good forgery must address issues of its authenticity—the journal must therefore contain some evidence of Tonsure’s underground experiences. These paragraphs, meanwhile, Lacond claims are genuine, pulled from the real journal.¹²⁸

Another claim, which has taken on the status of popular myth, suggests that the mushroom dwellers skillfully rewrote and replaced many pages, to keep inviolate their secrets, but this theory is rendered ridiculous by the fact that the journal was left on the altar—a fact confirmed by Nadal, the then minister of finance. This eyewitness account also nixes the first of Sabon’s theories: that the entire journal is a forgery.¹²⁹

To further complicate matters, an obscure sect of Truffidians who inhabit the ruined fortress of Zamilon near the eastern approaches to the Kalif’s empire claim to possess the last true page of Tonsure’s journal. According to legend, Trillian’s men once stayed at the fortress on their way to the Kalif, bearing the journal that, the careful reader will remember, was hocked by the Cappandom. A monk crept into the room where the journal was kept and stole the last page, apparently as revenge for the left femur of their leader having been spirited away by agents of Cappan Manzikert II 300 years before.

The front of the page consists of more early Truffidian religious ritual, but the back of the page reads as follows:

We have traveled through a series of rooms. The first rooms were tiny—I had to crawl into them, and even then barely squeezed through, banging my head on the ceiling. These rooms had the delicate yet ornate qualities of an illuminated manuscript, or one of the miniature paintings so beloved by the Kalif. Golden lichen covered the walls in intricate patterns, crossed through with a royal red fungus that formed star shapes. Strangely, in these rooms I felt as if I had unlimited space in which to move and breathe. Each room we entered was larger and more elaborate than its predecessor—although never did I have the sense that anyone had ever lived in the rooms, despite the presence of chairs, tables, and bookshelves—so that I found myself bedazzled by the light, the flourishes, the engraved ceilings. And yet, oddly enough, as the curious rooms expanded, my sense of claustrophobia expanded too, so that it took over all my thoughts … This continued for days and days, until I had become numb to the glamour and dulled to the claustrophobia. When hungry, we broke off pieces of the walls and ate of them. When thirsty, we squeezed the chair arms and greedily drank the drops of mossy elixir that came from them. Eventually, we would push open the now immense doors leading to the next room and see only distantly the far wall … Then, just when I thought this journey might never end—and yet surely could not continue—I was brought through one final door (as large as many of the rooms we had passed through). Beyond this door, it was night, lit vaguely by the stars, and we had come out upon a hill of massive columns, through which I could see, below us, a vast city that looked uncannily like Cinsorium, surrounded by a forest. A sweet, sweet breeze blew through the trees and lifted the grass along the hill. Above, the immense sky—and I thought, I thought, that I had been brought aboveground, for the entire world seemed to spread out before me. But no, I realized with sinking heart, for far above me I could see, when I squinted, that, luminous blue against the blackness, the lines of strange constellations had been set out there, using some instrument more precise than known of aboveground. And yet the stars themselves moved in phosphorescent patterns of blue, green, red, yellow, and purple, and after a moment I discovered that these “stars” were actually huge moths gliding across the upper darkness … My captors intend to leave me here; I am given to understand that I have reached the end of my journey—they are done with me, and I am free. I have but a few more minutes to write in this journal before they take it from me. What now to do? I shall not follow the light of the moths, for it is a false light and wanders where it will. But, in the lands that spread out before me, a light beckons in the distance. It is a clear light, an even light, and because light still, to me, means the surface, I have decided to walk toward it in hopes, after all this time, of regaining the world I have lost. I may well simply find another door when I find the source of the light, but perhaps not. In any event, God speed say I.

Surely, surely, such visions indicate Tonsure’s advanced delirium or, more probably, monkish forgery, but one is almost convinced by the holy reverence in which the inhabitants of Zamilon hold their page, for it means more to them than any other of their possessions, and even now, after many a reading, it moves more than one monk to tears.¹³⁰

To attempt to put the controversy to rest¹³¹—after all, Tonsure has become a saint to the Truffidians by virtue of his faith in the face of adversity—a delegation from the Morrow-based Institute of Religiosity,¹³² led by the distinguished head instructor Cadimon Signal,¹³³ journeyed 20 years ago to the lands of the Kalif, under guarantee of safe passage, to examine the journal in its place of honor in Lepo.

The conditions under which the delegation could view the journal—conditions set after their arrival—could not have been more rigid: they could examine the book for an hour, but, due to the book’s fragile condition, they themselves could not touch it; they must allow an attendant to do so for them. Further, the attendant would flip through all of the pages once, and then the delegation would be able to study up to 10 individual pages, but no more than 10—and they must name the page numbers in question on the basis of the first flip through.¹³⁴ The delegation had no alternative but to accept the ridiculous conditions,¹³⁵ and resolved to make the most of their time. After half an hour, they found it appeared parts of the book had been replaced with different paper, and that the penmanship appeared, in places, somewhat different from Tonsure’s own (as compared against the biography). Alas, at the half-hour mark, news reached the Kalif by carrier pigeon that the then mayor of Ambergris had tendered a major personal insult to the Kalif, and he immediately expelled the delegation from the reading room and sent them via fast horses to his borders, where they were unceremoniously dumped with their belongings. Their notes had been taken from them, and they could not remember any useful particulars about the page they had seen. No further examination has been allowed as of the date of this writing.

Thus, although we have copies of the journal, we may never know why pages were replaced in this invaluable primary source of history. We are left with the difficult task of either repudiating the entire document or, as I believe, embracing it all. If you do believe in Samuel Tonsure’s journal, in its validity, then your pleasure will be enhanced as you pass the equestrian statue of Manzikert I¹³⁶ in the Banker’s Courtyard and as you survey the ruined aqueducts on Albumuth Boulevard that are, besides the mushroom dwellers themselves, the only remaining sign of Cinsorium, the city before Ambergris.¹³⁷