City of Saints and Madmen - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Jeff Vandermeer (IV) #12

IV

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. In effect, the book disappeared again, as — hidden and known by only a few — it was not part of the public discourse. 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.

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 descent 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. 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. 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 above ground, 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 above ground. 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 above ground city, much as the submerged portion of an ice-berg 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 above ground, 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.

And yet, apparently, they did not “finish” him, 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, 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 Truffi dian 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:

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 inter-species 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, and at least one sentence suggests that afterwards 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?

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 walls 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 above ground manifestation. Unfortunately, all attempts to explore the under ground have met with disaster, 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. 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 squid 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. Adding to the controversy, Glaring was murdered — his throat cut as he crossed a back alley on his way to the post offi ce — 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 practices — 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. 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.

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.

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 above ground, 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 above ground. 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.

To attempt to put the controversy to rest — 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, led by the distinguished Head Instructor Cadimon Signal, 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. The delegation had no alternative but to accept the ridiculous conditions, 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 diffi cult 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 I 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.