* * *
Five weeks after my talk with Sirin, a man later identified as Anthony Bliss walked up to the entrance of a Hoegbotton storage house near the docks. He nodded to the attendant, who stood inside stacking boxes, and then, according to a witness, held out his hand with something in it. The attendant, John Guelard, straightened up, nodded back, and took a step toward Bliss. Bliss tossed the object to the attendant. Guelard caught it with one hand, cupped it with his other hand, and then frowned. He tried to pull his hands away from the object, but he was stuck to it. Bliss nodded, smiled, and walked away into the crowd, while Guelard writhed on the ground, his skin turning rapidly whiter and whiter while beginning to peel off in circling tendrils of the purest white … until nothing remained of him but glistening strands of fungus. The strands of fungus began to darken to a deep red, and then exploded into a gout of flame. Within minutes, before water could be pumped to the scene, the storage house had burned to the ground, taking a considerable portion of Hoegbotton & Sons’ imports for the month with it. The object Bliss had tossed to Guelard had been a kind of spore mine bought from the gray caps: Frankwrithe & Lewden’s first overt action against their mortal enemy, Hoegbotton & Sons, in what would come to be known as the War of the Houses.
PART II
It is perhaps too cruel to think of Tonsure not only struggling to express himself, to communicate, underground, but also struggling aboveground to be heard as [historians try] equally hard to snuff him out.
—Duncan Shriek, from The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris
1
“Let no man nor woman say
they crossed me and lived to tell
unless in grave discomfort ever after!”
“What ho! I see Sophia’s Island
before me, weighted by the night,
as like an echo as a ghost.”
“Might we shed our ghastly fate
and shed with it this war
that we never should have waged?”
What do you most vividly remember about the War of the Houses?
Even as recently as six months ago, some brazen young reporter asked me that question, having taken the time to track me down in my apartment: a ruin crowded with the detritus of a lifetime of false starts. I can’t even remember what broadsheet he represented, to be honest.
I was surly and morose after a long day of serving as a tour guide for the type of people I call the Ignorants and the Rudes, and I had begun to take on some of their less savory characteristics. Besides, he was very young; even as a child, Sybel had never been that young. I doubted this one had been alive at the start of the war.
“What do you most vividly remember about the War of the Houses?” he asked me.
You could see dust motes floating in the air behind his head, revealed by the sunlight of the open window. I rarely opened that window anymore. I didn’t like what it revealed about my apartment: the worn red carpet, the sequined dresses half hidden on hangers in a corner, draped over a dumpy old sofa chair; the dozens of paintings I’d rescued from my gallery, none of them worth a thing. I even had two ceremonial swords from Truff knew where—and dozens of picture albums I hadn’t had the heart to pull out in years.
The place needed a serious airing out, although to the reporter’s credit he didn’t so much as wrinkle his nose, even when a plume of dust rose from the impact of his sinewy buttocks meeting the seat of the second sofa chair.
“What do I remember?” I echoed. Truff, his face was smooth and bare of worry, even in that light. Does every innocent share that look? “Why, the opera, of course,” I said.
His eyes brightened and widened, and he began scribbling on a useless little pad he had brought with him.
“When we were reporters during the war—especially by the middle of it—we didn’t have paper,” I said in a helpful tone. “We had to jot notes on handkerchiefs using our own blood. Usually when the ink ran out.”
He looked up, startled, his brown hair sliding down over his even browner eyes, then stared at his pad with an almost guilty expression until I cackled—a sound that startled me more than him—and he realized I was joking.
“Are you upset with me for some reason?” he asked, all semblance of reporter gone. Suddenly he was just a kid, the way Duncan had once been a kid.
I stared at this nascent reporter and sighed, sat back in my chair and said, “No. I’m not upset. I’m old and tired. Can I get you something to drink? Or eat? A friend made me some pastries. I think they’re still around here somewhere.” I started to look beneath the pillows assembled at my feet.
“No,” he said, a little too quickly. “That’s all right. I just want to know more about the war, about the opera.”
He had lips that would always be full and yet empty of expression or inflection. A serious mouth, without even a hint of an upward or downward curve to reveal whether he was an optimist or pessimist. Because of that alone, he might someday become a good reporter, I thought. Or a good card player.
But now he was sitting there, waiting for my answer and sweating, the sweet young scent of him filling my apartment.
“It was a war,” I told him. “A lot of people died. A lot of buildings were destroyed. It was hell—and for what? I don’t think anyone knew why after a while.”
He nodded as if he understood. But how could he, really? We’d been reporters during wartime and we didn’t even understand it. As my father always said, a reporter is a mirror, not a window, which makes it doubly painful. You don’t just let it flow through the glass of your perspective; you stare back at it.
Already a lump was forming in my throat. My apartment looked unbearable. My leg was heavy and inert and aching.
I rarely tell any reporter what I remember—to them I give platitudes, clichés, spirals of brave words that mean nothing. Because it’s painful. Because we lost so much during the war.
“No one makes it out.” Those were among Samuel Tonsure’s last written words, according to what Duncan had uncovered at the fortress-monastery of Zamilon, and it’s a good piece of life advice: No one makes it out. Enjoy what you can while you can.
I was tempted to repeat Tonsure’s wisdom to the reporter, but I had already begun to feel self-conscious, and irrelevant. Besides, he had a question.
“And what about the opera?”
I smiled and leaned forward, staring into his pretty face and untroubled eyes.
“What I remember about the war,” I said, “is that right in the middle of it near the very epicenter of the conflict, when hundreds of men, women, and children might be blown up or turned to spores in the next week, the creative powers that be in Ambergris decided to stage the most ridiculous folly in the city’s entire ridiculous history: an opera.”
* * *
And what an amazing enterprise that was, the opera described in advertisements as:
* * *
THE ROMANCE OF
AMBER & GRIS
Authored by: Anon
Sponsored by: Concerned Citizens
Directed by: Sarah Gallendrace
Staged at: The Trillian Opera House
—if still standing