City of Saints and Madmen

I

THE HISTORY OF AMBERGRIS, FOR OUR purposes, begins with the legendary exploits of the whaler-cum-pirate Cappan John Manzikert, 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 foot-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 currentportofStockton, 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.

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.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 Truffi dian 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 Truffi dism and thus gained influence over him — plays a major role, perhaps the major role, in our understanding of Ambergris’ early history. It is from Tonsure that most histories descend — both from the discredited (and incomplete) Biography of John Manzikert I of Aan and Ambergris, 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.

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.” 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.

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, 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.

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,” 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, 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 Oliphaunt 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. 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.

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, 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.

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 Ambergris 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.

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.” 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 letters 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.”

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. 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 of 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. 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 sheep-like 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 to 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.”

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.

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. During the festivities, Manzikert christened the new settlement “Ambergris,” after the “most secret and valuable part of the whale” — 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, but neglects to mention this reaction in his journal, presumably out of shame.

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. 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, 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 re-entered 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. 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:

Within the library, which had been emptied of its books, its mushrooms, its “shelves,” they found only a single chair, and sitting in that chair, Manzikert, 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 diffi cult 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.

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. 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 re-emerged 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. 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. 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’ 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.”