City of Saints and Madmen

II

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. 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. 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 ofCinsorium or creating friendships with nearby tribes. 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.

Manzikert II also laid the groundwork for Ambergris’ 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. 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. The palace was, by all accounts, a rather peculiar building. The exterior inspired the noted traveler Alan Busker to write:

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, Manzikert III duly took his place as ruler of lands that now stretched some 40 miles south of Ambergris and 50 miles north. Manzikert III suffered from mild oliphauntitus that apparently affected his internal organs, yet oddly enough he died, after six tumultuous years, of jungle rot 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 theInstituteofMedicine to be boiled alive in an eel broth; evidently, he had thought up a new recipe.

Manzikert III had not been a good cappan. 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. 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. Manzikert III, when brought news of Sharp’s death, is said to have joked, “Consider this my contribution to the Arts.” 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. If not for Aquelus’ firm hand, Ambergris, cappandom and city, might well have crumbled to dust within a generation.

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 ofCinsorium. 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. 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’ 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’ 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. 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.

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,” 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 affl icted 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 Bacilus — 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 city-wide security:

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 amongst the populace.” 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. 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.

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 Menites — and took the first step toward the continuation of his bloodline by marrying the old Menite King’s daughter Irene, 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.

The same year, Aquelus secured his western borders against possible attacks by the Kalif 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.

The depth of Aquelus’ 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’ 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, “amongst 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.

However pleased Aquelus may have been at the adroit deflection of these potential threats, he still, as the annual fresh water 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. 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’ 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.

Eventually, Aquelus would find a way to set the Haragck against the Brueghelites, eliminating both as a threat to Ambergris, 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 byproducts, and to provide enough extra food to withstand a siege by either the Brueghelites or the Haragck. 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. 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.