To put it plainly, what hawkish Sirin had anticipated so accurately was an economic invasion of Ambergris by Frankwrithe & Lewden, the type of invasion that only coincidentally results in bloodshed. For years, the constant pressure exerted by Hoegbotton & Sons on F&L in their home markets around Morrow had hindered Frankwrithe’s attempts to expand into Ambergris—although a tenuous toehold had been gained through influence on Antechamber book bannings and through bookstores large enough to ignore Hoegbotton intimidation. However, mere months before my enlightening trip to Morrow, F&L had managed to take over its governance from a failed monarchy, in the process issuing a decree banning all Hoegbotton agents and imports from the city. Hoegbotton found itself unable to mount an effective counteroffensive. (In part, F&L took advantage of H&S’s temporary shift of attention to trains and railways, a fixation that emanated from Henry Hoegbotton, the hoary but clever patriarch of the Hoegbotton clan. Henry Hoegbotton—of whom not enough has been written; if not for my present circumstances, I would attempt the biography myself—had hoped for an era of economic domination over all of the South, to the very tip of the last atoll of the Southern Isles, and all of the North, including the frozen Skamoo in their spackly ice huts. Many experts speculated that Hoegbotton might then wage “a holy war of commerce” against the closed markets of the Kalif’s empire. However, such a vision required Hoegbotton to overextend itself so much that it became unable to effectively respond to a threat like being banned from Morrow.)
This new vision on the part of F&L explained the large numbers of their operatives that had dominated my view from the window of my (comfortable, furnished) prison(-like) cell. Emboldened by victory at home, F&L sought to bring their trade downriver, staking their chances not only on their diversification into a superior brand of typewriter, the Lewden Model II—a version of which I am typing on now and which I swear and sweat by; if only this fungus would not keep nibbling on the accursed keys—and long-distance telephone services. In fact, many infiltrations of Ambergris began as the result of F&L agents installing telephone poles: not only did F&L inject liquid explosives into hollow portions of these poles, but the installers themselves formed a secret army of espionage in the city. F&L also funneled more and more funds into Ambergrisian banks, hoping to create influence in those quarters.
Hoegbotton, naturally, resisted, and matters came to a head over Sophia’s Island, a curling finger of an atoll located north of Ambergris in the middle of the River Moth. The “Sophia” of Sophia’s Island was none other than the wife of Ambergris’s founder, Manzikert I—they had used it as a summer residence many hundreds of years ago. Now, it occupied a strategic position in the northern trade routes: whoever controlled the island could levy all sorts of tariffs, and use the island as a storeroom to boot. An obscure lease on the island had been given to the rulers of Morrow, the Menite Kings, as a thank-you for their aid to Ambergris during the Silence. Despite the fall of the Menite Kings, the lease had never been withdrawn, and Frankwrithe & Lewden used it as pretext to lay claim to the island, with predictable results. The conflict that had begun on the island had spread to Ambergris, and had probably been an excuse to initiate open warfare.
The opera attempted to convey the entire origin of the conflict in song using a motley collection of servants, bankers, merchants, and soldiers—a chorus of voices that stumbled ragged about the stage—while a forbidden love affair between members of the Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe clans—a plot device old long before Voss Bender took his first, tottering steps—played out in the foreground. A subplot involved two servants, one from each clan, and the odd appearance of a man from the Nimblytod Tribes, who observed from on high (in this case, two boxes set atop each other), and provided sporadic narration—much to the disgust of Sybel, who muttered to me about “stereotypes.” The ghost of Sophia Manzikert also made many an appearance, fated to roam her beloved island as all manner of skullduggery occurred around her, and she unable to stop it.
A hail of catcalls and whistles abused the singers when Sophia’s Island first appeared as a series of earth-colored potato sacks stitched together and held up by men dressed in black who were still, tragically, visible in the green light. As the island sailed toward the singers rather than the other way around, atonal booing drowned out the voices coming from the stage.
Pieces of the music had clearly been stolen from Bender’s Trillian, as might be expected with Gallendrace in charge. The orchestra was short a flutist, his place taken by a rather aggressive whistler. (In fact, the entire orchestra sounded like the “scrittling, scratching brittlings of a skeleton crew,” as one wag put it.) A few holes in the floor of the stage—apparently there had been no time to repair them—resulted in Sophia’s ghost at one point pitching headfirst into the orchestra pit, much to the delight of the audience, which stood and clapped. (We might have been glad to have an opera during wartime, but that didn’t mean we had given up our essential nature as Ambergrisians.)
The (almost) corresponding holes in the curtain made scene breaks tantalizing, and scandalous, in that the audience could see the flash of thigh and buttock in the frenetic thrashing of costume changes. The set changes proved much less dramatic, as Gallendrace had chosen to use the set to suggest rather than illustrate, letting unpainted wooden boxes and other unconcealed objects serve as placeholders for the imagination.
Still, it was a passable attempt at an opera. The orchestra lurched on even after Sophia fell on top of them. The singers had good voices—they had convinced the great retired baritone Samuel Rail to make a short appearance. However, the hole in the ceiling, even clogged with fungus, changed the acoustics in such a way that sometimes those voices came to us profoundly curdled or twisted; at times, I felt as if I were hearing the voices of gray caps, not human beings at all.
Halfway through the second act, my legs beginning to fall asleep, I turned in my seat and looked back. Some ten rows behind us, I caught a glimpse of Bonmot with some of the teachers from Blythe Academy. I waved; he waved back. I was inspired for a moment to go talk to him, perhaps even join them—after all, Duncan had his Mary and Lacond had his Duncan, and Sybel was too busy being angry about the depiction of his people to be of much use to me. But it was then that Sophia fell into the orchestra pit, and as I turned back to watch the ensuing chaos, the moment was lost. By intermission, Bonmot had left for some reason (along with several others in the audience!), although not before Mary had made a great show of going over and talking to him, abandoning Duncan for several minutes. (She didn’t do it to hurt me, Janice, but to help me. She worked hard to try to repair the rift, thought that a ceasefire for the warring Houses might also mean a ceasefire for House Bonmot and House Duncan, but it was not to be.)
After intermission, the set design devolved even further, and the plot became ever more ludicrous, featuring a plethora of ghosts, and even an appearance by a wingèd fairy—a device so pathetic I thought violence might break out. The singers desperately tried to cover for these faults with stellar, sometimes over-the-top performances, voices drowning out voices, dissonant not in their individual talents, but as a group.
By the middle of the fourth section, I seemed to have missed some essential act of communication. I had lost the thread of the narrative, I suppose. Actors dressed in deep red uniforms identical to those favored by the Kalif’s soldiers began to appear on the stage, to much clapping and cheering from all of us. Finally, some real costumes! Some spectacle to satiate our lust for pomp. They poured onto the stage in a tight pool, almost as if a bottle of wine had overturned and leaked across a table. In their midst, we saw the white turban of a Kalif’s commander as he fired his guns across the stage with a great crack and recoil. The audience roared once more, for he presented a fine sight on that stage, singing or not singing, with his dark beard and mustache, his piercing gaze.