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
Above ground, Aquelus’ military commanders might well have staged a coup if not for the arrival that first night of Irene, only 12 hours after Aquelus’ 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 under-estimated 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’ disappearance, 7,000 Haragck crossed the Moth and attacked Ambergris.92 The Cappaness’ 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 animals skins were neither maneuverable nor inflammable);94 those who fled south ended up as slaves to the Arch Duke 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 council 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’ “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 th
e poor, so seriously draining the treasury that Irene was forced to order a halt to his largesse. Aquelus’ 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’ delight and main reason for living. While Irene ruled, he doted on them, and the people doted on them too. In Aquelus’ 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 birthrate (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 re-entered, 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.
IV108
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 strong box, 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 th
e 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.
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