THE CLOSER I GET to the end, the closer I get to the beginning. Memories waft up out of the ether, out of nothing. They attach themselves to me like the green light, like the fungi that continue to colonize my typewriter. I had to stop for a while – my fingers ached and, even after all that I have seen, the fungi unnerved me. I spent the time flexing and unflexing my fingers, pacing back and forth. I also spent it going through a box of my father’s old papers – nothing I haven’t read through a hundred times before. Drafts of history essays, letters to colleagues, perhaps even the letter he received from the Kalif’s Court, if I dig deep enough. On top, Duncan had placed the dried-up starfish, its skeleton brittle with age. (I kept it there as a reminder to myself. After your letter to me – which, while reading this account, I sometimes think was written by an entirely different side of your personality – I wanted to remember that no matter how isolated I might feel, separated from others by secret knowledge, I was still connected. It didn’t help much, though – it reminded me how different I had become.)
I’ve put the starfish on my table here, as something akin to a good-luck charm. Perhaps it will help me finish.
Next to the starfish, I found sea shells, dull and chipped – the last remnants of our most noteworthy vacation. I was ten, Duncan six. Our dad had gone on sabbatical from his position as a history professor at the Porfal College of History and Advanced Theory (or as Dad called it, ‘Poor Paul’s Collage of Hysterics and Advanced Decay’) in Stockton. I cannot recall ever taking a weeklong vacation before or since. Dad had bought berths on a river barge for us. Mom was relaxed, happy. Dad was as calm and at peace as I’ve ever seen him.
I remember one habit he picked up during that vacation. He liked to take a stalk of sedge weed and hold it in his mouth like a pipe, gnawing on the end, a wide-brimmed hat shading his face. We’d sit in deckchairs and read, or watch the countryside go by.
In those days, the west side of the River Moth was almost entirely uninhabited. We saw strange animals come to the water’s edge to drink; they would look at us with curiosity, but no fear. Once, we saw odd, short people dressed in outlandish clothes, staring across the water at us with a peculiar intensity. The water formed a mirror in which our images reached out to theirs across the waves – stretched, unreal.
We took the barge down to the Southern Isles, where we spent four days on the beaches. We couldn’t afford to go further than the northernmost island of Hathern, with its black sand and the melancholy ruins of the long-dead Saphant Empire, but we still had a good time.
Mom refused to go in the water, so she had to put up with Dad splashing water at her. Dad loved to swim – although ‘bob’ or ‘float’ might more accurately describe what he looked like when he took to the waves. Mom loved to watch the sunrises and sunsets from our little rented bungalow. During the day, she would walk along the beach for hours, and always brought back shells and shiny rocks for us. Sometimes Duncan and I went with her, sometimes we stayed with Dad.
At dusk, we sat on a blanket together and Dad would make a fire, cooking fish over the flames. I can’t remember if he bought the fish or caught them. I don’t remember him being much of a fisherman.
Then Dad would lecture us in a teasing way about the mighty Saphant Empire.
Pointing to the black-gray nubs and jagged walls drowning in the sand and sea, suffused with the orange of sunset, he would say, ‘Those are the result of war. A naval conflict and then the survivors fought on this very beach. There used to be a city here. Now, just what you see. And then . . . and then!’ And then he would find a way to bring pirates and adventures into his history lesson.
I didn’t give his words about war much thought at the time. The ruins were just great rocks to climb on, tidal pools to explore. That men had fought and died there hundreds of years ago seemed too remote from our vacation to be real.
Another time, Dad presented me with a tiny hermit crab in a white coiled shell.
‘Don’t hurt it,’ he said, ‘and leave it on the beach when we go.’
‘I will,’ I said, marvelling at the feel of its tiny legs against the skin of my palm.
The sand crunching between my toes; the heat and breeze off the sea, the lights of boats far offshore.
Mom looked after Duncan for most of the trip, because he was young and needed constant attention. (I remember only the vaguest flash of sunlight, the most tenuous thread of a memory of water – it was all too idyllic for me to retain, I suppose.)
It is one of the only times I can recall the full attention of my father upon me. Five years later, he would die. Eight years later, my mother would bring us to Ambergris and the house by the River Moth. Twenty years later, Duncan would feel the first twinge of the fungal colonization occurring within him. Twenty-five years after our long-ago vacation, I would try to kill myself. Thirty years later and the War of the Houses would almost kill us all.
*
HOW CAN SUCH A pleasurable memory as a childhood vacation co-exist comfortably with memories of the war? How can the world contain such extremes? I thought about such things as I lay among the bodies in the Truffidian Cathedral. Each question begat another question, so that soon the questions seemed to contain their own answers.
I lay there for a very long time, gazing at nothing and no one while the gray caps rummaged all around me, each syllable of their clicking speech a knife slid between my shoulder blades. I do not know what they were looking for, nor whether they found it. I could hear them rolling bodies over, rifling through the pockets of the dead. Once, a clawing hand brushed against the side of my face. I could feel someone or something looking at me; I refused to look back. I could feel the breath of one of them upon me, smell the spurling tangle of scents that clung to them like their skin: must and mould and funk and dust and a trace of some spice.
And then, finally, the stained glass above me refracted the light of the sun, and it was dawn, and the gray caps were gone, and I was still alive, surrounded by hundreds of the dead, the blood upon them dark and caked.
Stiffly, like an old woman, I propped myself up, struggled to raise myself onto my foot, stared around me at the carnage.
The dead did not look peaceful. The dead did not look planned or purposeful, or at rest, or any other combination of words that might signify comfort or the rule of law. Legs and arms lay at unnatural angles, torn or contorted or dislocated from torsos. Mouths were caught in extremes of pain and fear and surprise. Dried blood and gathering flies. Skin a pale yellow tinged with blue. Great wounds, like vast claws, had cut into chests leaving dull red furrows. A row of heads disembodied. After a while, I had to stop looking. I had to stop myself from looking.
I wish I could have told you they looked beautiful.
That is when I resolved I would never become one of them. I had to find a way out. (Even if it meant typing up an afterword in bad light on a limited budget, for a potential readership of thousands or none?)
Painfully hopping, I made my way through the bodies, pushed open the double doors with a supreme effort, and walked out into post-war Ambergris.
AFTERWORD, AFTERMATH. I’m shaking now, and I don’t know if that means I’m hungry or that I’m afraid of what might come out of that hole in the ground behind me. Or if I’m upset thinking about the aftermath of that catastrophic struggle between Houses, gray caps, and the Kalif. Between me and my now traitorous leg. Between Sybel and the fungal mine he never saw. Between Duncan and Mary.
As I hobbled through the city that morning, still in shock, using a stick as a crutch, it became clear that we had been having a bad Festival for many, many months. Buildings reduced to purple ash. Corpses still unburied, but frozen by needlings of fungus, which, mercifully, took away any smell. I marvelled at the number of people who walked through the city with a blank look in their eyes; I was one of them. A look of sadness, yes, but beyond sadness – a sense of dislocation, of desolation. We were encountering Ambergris as survivors and asking a question: is this really our city? Is this really where we live? (I thought it went deeper than that – the listlessness, the fatigue. It seemed to indicate a confusion, a mental flinch, an inability to understand if we’d won or lost. How could we tell?)
Collapsed buildings lay impaled on their own columns, which still reached towards open sky. Streets strewn with garbage and bits of torn-up flesh. Relics of past ages splintered into unrecognizable thickets of wood and metal. The Hoegbotton headquarters, which had survived any number of F&L attacks, had been brought low on that last night – looted and gutted, the stark black of extinguished fire racing up the interior walls toward the lacerated ceiling. The ever-present smell of smoke and of rot, which we had grown accustomed to over the last few years, but which, on this particular morning, had a sharpness, an intensity, that we had not experienced before. The Voss Bender Memorial Post Office had been ransacked, and little metal boxes, some of them melted and deformed from fire, littered the cracked steps. Elsewhere, whole neighbourhoods of people worked to tear down barricades erected to keep out the Kalif’s men, or F&L’s men, or the gray caps. If I could have flown crow-like over the city, I would have seen it as a crumbling eye pierced through the centre and smouldering at the edges where the abandoned mortars of the Kalif lay surrounded by the bodies of the slain.
It will sound odd, but I realize now that if I had looked closely enough, I could have seen the physical evidence of the beginning of Mary’s attacks on Duncan’s books. Stare long enough, hard enough, with the appropriate intensity, and Duncan’s theories were all there, woven into the brick, the stone, the wood, even inhabiting the wind that came down and whispered through narrow streets backed up with rubble. And, in the sheer remembered violence of bloodstains, burnt wood, crippled brick, Mary’s retort, her refutation of him. As Mary walked through some other part of the city that day, through some other aftermath, what did she see? What could she see but the embodiment of her father’s Nativism theory? Everything catalogued as the most natural of disasters. (Truly a stretch, Janice, if ever there was one!)
I understand now, remembering my walk through the city, that the glittering flesh necklace surrounded a neck that supported a head filled with maggoty ideas. Filled with images that do not connect, and which will always make it impossible for Sabon to recognize the truth in Duncan’s theories. She has found her own personal history; she has written it to drown out the truth.
In a sense, almost every word, every sentence, every paragraph she has written about Ambergris since the war has been an attempt to undo my memories – what I saw during that war, what I saw that night with Sybel beside me, what I saw afterwards, walking through the city. And, of course, everything she saw below ground. (This is nonsense. Mary reacted no differently than many other Ambergrisians. A deep sense of denial pervaded the city, but how can you blame any of its inhabitants? They still had to live on in the city. It must have been much worse after the Silence. Imagine your loved ones being spirited away one night and you unable to do anything except go about your daily business and hope that you, too, would not be subject to the same fate.)
EVENTUALLY, ON THAT first morning after the war, I found myself at Blythe Academy. I had hopped and hobbled my way there after an hour or two, my journey aimless and funereal. An ache and an emptiness had begun to gnaw away at me. A glimpse of the familiar acted like an anchor.
For some reason, I had assumed that the desecration of the Truffidian Cathedral would have extended to Blythe Academy, as well, but this was not the case. I saw a few broken windows, two overturned benches, an area of burnt grass, and a singed section of roof, but the willow trees remained the same as always. Priests and teachers bustled across the lawn, cleaning up the debris. The air of activity, of honest labour, gave me hope.
I sat down on a bench, hoping that somehow the memory of those long-ago conversations that had so calmed me then might calm me now.
Instead, a shadow fell across me. I looked up, and there stood Bonmot, staring down at me with a grim smile upon his lips. His face was grimy with soot or dirt. He had a long, shallow cut running down his left cheek. Bonmot, in that moment, looked invincible, even though he had become more vulnerable than I could then know. (Whose faith wouldn’t falter for at least a moment in the midst of such inexplicable carnage?)
His grim smile softened to concern as he saw the condition of my foot – or, rather, the lack of a foot.
‘You’re alive,’ I said, in wonder. By now, the lack of sleep, the terror of what I had gone through had taken me somewhere else entirely.
‘You need to see a doctor,’ Bonmot said. He crouched down beside me, gently cupped his hand under my calf to better examine the wound.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to be done now. It’s mostly cauterized. The flesh is clean. I spent all night with a mob of corpses in the Truffidian Cathedral. You may wish to investigate.’
He bowed his head. ‘I know. I’ve heard. You were there?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Pretending to be dead. Don’t worry about the leg.’
He stared at me. ‘Janice, you need to have it looked at.’
I laughed, an edge of bitterness in my voice. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘but who will look at it? I’ve been limping around this broken old city of ours all morning. And I’ve seen little that isn’t mangled, mashed, cracked, twisted, or dead.’
‘It won’t take long to rebuild,’ he said. ‘You’ll be surprised. All of this will be behind us someday.’ A pause. ‘Have you heard from Mary?’
This, then, was the closest he could come to asking about Duncan.
‘No, I haven’t,’ I said.
(And you wouldn’t, not for a few days. I had returned Mary to our apartment, which had been ransacked but not ruined, and we took up again the unhealthy non-bliss of our domestic lives together – a little more silent around each other, a little more reserved, a little more distant. She became fond of saying I was ‘suffocating’ her in those first few days after the war. I had no response. I needed comfort from her. I needed her.)
I started to cry. I was still talking, my face still set in a half-grimace, half-smile, but I was crying. ‘Sybel’s dead,’ I said.
And then, even though he had a thousand responsibilities that day, Bonmot pulled me to him and held me as, sobbing, I told him about all the dead.
THE LOSSES KEPT piling up. When I visited my gallery, I found the inside had been gutted by fire. All my paintings had disappeared yet again, taken by looters or flames. The artists blamed me, even though I was convinced some of them had stolen their own work off my walls. I wasted time. I wasted money. I thought I could resurrect the gallery, but without Sybel, I was lost. I did not have the requisite number of ‘friends with money’, as he had liked to call them. I reopened for a short time, but I could no longer attract even mediocre talents, especially since Martin and Merrimount opened their own gallery. I was left with a half-dozen elderly landscape-painters as clients. Clearly, I was doomed.
Looking back, the war signalled the end of so many things that the dying throes of my gallery must be considered no more than a buried footnote in the history of that period. For example, the war certainly ended my right foot – there’s no doubt about that. I’m tempted, whenever someone asks me what I remember about the war, to point to my grainy toes and say, ‘Ask my foot.’
As a hidden perk of so many people having lost limbs, the art of wooden-limb construction had reached new heights. I had Judith Aquelus, a sculptress, personally pick out the wood for the replacement, asking only that my new foot be made from the very best strangler figs on the west side of the River Moth, near where Sybel had grown up. My foot might even have been made from a tree Sybel had once climbed. Maudlin, I know, but I don’t care about the sad sentimentality of that thought. I loved him and I want a part of him with me always. Every time I put on my foot, I am reminded of Sybel and of the cathedral, even if it is only a dull ache now. Sometimes I cannot tell if I am feeling the physical ache of my stump or the mental ache of my anguish. And I don’t care. I want to be reminded. I need to be reminded.
Judith collaborated with the wooden-limb experts at Similian’s Arm & Leg Shop, long since out of business, to create the unique artefact that is my right foot. I had Judith carve a miniature, stylized version of the opera-house stage on it on which the Kalif’s soldiers could be seen, making their acting debut. No amputee should be seen in public without a Judith Aquelus creation. A foot and a cane: the perfect accessories for such necessary tasks as walking to the grocery store for a loaf of bread!
With my cane and my new wooden foot, I have attained a whole new level of eccentricity. Why, I’ve become my own work of art – my only option, considering that creating art and selling art had proven so unprofitable for me.
The funny thing is, the green fungus that has colonized my typewriter and makes it harder and harder to complete this afterword has also begun to infiltrate my wooden foot. I am becoming a rather small forest. In my own way, perhaps I’m experiencing what Duncan went through. (Dead wood does not equal living flesh. There’s nothing to compare to that heart-choking prickle of another life entering your skin and flesh.)
Since that first foot I have found it hard to resist having more made when I can afford it, or carving them myself. In my more whimsical moments, I’m tempted to leave a trail of feet through the city. One day a foot may be all that is left of me.
‘Do you like it?’ I asked Duncan the first time I showed it off to him.
‘It’s very much you,’ Duncan said. (I’d had too many strange experiences with my flesh to be too empathetic. The sloughing off of flesh, the losing and regaining of it, had become too normal an experience.)
‘It itches,’ I told him.
And this is still true now. The foot, with its lithe straps and silver clasps, itches like hell at the oddest times.
‘I itch all the time,’ Duncan said, not to be outdone.
On that particular day, down by the docks, watching the ships come in, Duncan was very pale. You could see, if you looked closely, that the hair on his head was not really hair ruffled by a breeze, but a black fungus lazily swaying back and forth. There was a further suggestion of movement under his coat. I doubt anyone else saw it – or wanted to see it. This denial would become ever stronger in those years after the war, especially when Fortress Sabon became the stronghold of that denial, its protective moat composed of members of the flesh necklace.
‘Do you miss him?’ I asked Duncan.
‘I miss him terribly,’ he replied. (I missed the everyday normality Sybel had brought to my life. Dealing with you, Janice, was an up-and-down experience, often full of melodrama. As much as I loved Bonmot, my conversations with him always had some religious subtext. But speaking to Sybel was so natural and effortless and free of judgment that I didn’t even miss the experience until it was over.)
‘If it itches really badly,’ he said, ‘I could probably find a way to grow you a fungal replacement.’
I ignored him and asked, ‘How’s Mary?’
He didn’t answer.
I HAD TO STOP to clean off the typewriter keys. The green fungus had become too insidious. The keys weren’t striking paper, but bunching up in emerald moss, the paper itself reflecting a series of ever more vegetative marks. I couldn’t get it all off, but enough of it is gone that I can continue typing for a while. I’m not sure when I will run out of time; there are so many factors to consider. When will the patience of the Spore’s owner run out? When will I tire of what increasingly seems a pointless exercise? When will something crawl out of the hole in the ground behind me and put an end to my speculations?
I think it’s morning outside, but I haven’t bothered to check. I had thought it was lunchtime earlier, but it turned out that my stomach had it all wrong. If it is morning, the sky is probably gray and undistinguished, flecked with rain. It’s that time of year when sudden showers appear and make of the city stark outlines, robbing it of colour and texture. A welter of umbrellas appears on the streets and people walk quickly to their destinations with no appreciation for anything around them.