The scream of the Kalif’s mortar fire—often indiscriminate or ill-timed—was a welcome contrast to the whine of fungal bullets, the garrulous chatter of Hoegbotton guns. (As the city was at war, so, by then, was my body. The rumblings of my belly, where fungus fought fungus—much remarked upon by Mary in her less charitable moments—matched the Kalif’s invasion. The sharp pains that sometimes annihilated my chest hurt no more or less than the spiraling flight of bullets through the Ambergrisian air.)
Perhaps more insanely, no one paid the Kalif’s troops much attention once we knew H&S and F&L had united against them. Even the day they came marching down Albumuth Boulevard on a daylight raid in a long, proud column of red, we ignored them. We had suffered through too much war. Either we could not digest this new threat, or we felt no need to.
This, then, is how things stood that year on the threshold of the Festival.
2
There came a night so terrible that no one ever dared to name it. There came a night so terrible that I could not. There came a night so terrible that no one could explain it. There came the most terrible of nights. No, that’s not right, either. There came the most terrible of nights that could not be forgotten, or forgiven, or even named. That’s closer, but sometimes I choose not to revise. Let it be raw and awkward splayed across the page, as it was in life.
Words would later be offered up like “atrocity,” “massacre,” and “madness,” but I reject those words. They did not, could not, cannot, contain what they need to contain.
Could we have known? Could we have wrenched our attention from our more immediate concerns long enough to understand the warning signs? Now, of course, it all seems clear enough. Duncan had said the war could not continue in the same way for long, and he was right.
As soon as Duncan and I saw Voss Bender’s blind, blindingly white head floating down the River Moth two days before the Festival, we should have had a clue.
“There’s a sight you don’t see very often,” Duncan said, as we sat on an abandoned pier and watched the head and the barge that carried it slowly pull away into the middle of the river. A kind of lukewarm sun shone that day, diluted by swirls of fog.
“It’s a sight I’ve never seen before, Duncan,” I replied.
F&L had cut apart a huge marble statue of Voss Bender that had stood in the Religious Quarter for almost twenty years and loaded it, piece by piece, onto the barge, displaying a remarkably dexterous use of pulleys and levers. There lay the pieces of Bender, strewn to all sides of his enormous, imperious, crushingly heavy head. About to disappear down the River Moth. As vulnerable-looking in that weak sunlight as anything I had ever seen.
“I wonder what the people who live along the banks of the river will think about it,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Duncan asked.
“Will they see it as the demolition, the destruction, of a god, or will they be strangely unmoved?”
Duncan laughed. “I’m strangely unmoved.”
In part, we had come to the pier to relax. We were both still a little rattled from a close call the day before, when we had arrived at what was supposedly the scene of a bomb attack only to find the bombs exploding as we got there. My hair was dirty and streaked with black from the explosion. My face had suffered half a dozen abrasions. Duncan had had a thumbnail-sized chunk of his ear blown off. Already, it had begun to regenerate, which I found fascinating and creepy at the same time. (Do you want a glimpse of something even more fascinating? The real problem was: it wasn’t my ear. That had been blown off a long time before.)
“I think it’s sad,” I said. “They’re carting off all of our valuables, like common thieves.”
Until then, F&L had contented themselves with bombing us silly day and night. The steady northward stream of goods, art, and statuary had only started in the past week. It should have been a clear sign that the war was about to change again. After all, F&L, with their fungal mines, bombs, and bullets, seemed to have a direct line to a certain disenfranchised underground group.
“Actually, Janice,” Duncan said, as he dipped his ugly toes in the Moth, “I hesitate to try to convince you otherwise, but I think the sight of Voss Bender’s head floating vaingloriously down the Moth is very funny. So much effort by old F&L, and for what? What can they possibly think they will do with these ‘remains’ when they reach Morrow? Rework the marble into columns for some public building? Reassemble the statue? And if so, where in Truff’s name would they put it? We hardly knew where to put it ourselves.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean it can’t be sad, too.”
* * *
Did I already say that there came to be the most terrible of Festival nights? It burned down the Borges Bookstore. It stopped the war between F&L and H&S. It stopped the love between Duncan and Mary, too. Snapped it. Was no more. Never again. (It brought an end to many things, this is true. But the Festival had nothing to do with ending my relationship with Mary. I caused that all by myself.) There had never been a Festival like it, except, perhaps, during the time of the Burning Sun. There may never be another like it again. (Why would there need to be? Every week since the Shift began, some part of the city is as raw as during Festival time.)
As far as I can remember, our father had never had anything to say about the Festival. (Not true. In his essay “The Question of Ambergris,” he wrote [I paraphrase from memory]: “At the heart of the city lies not a courtyard or a building or a statue, but an event: the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It is an overlay of this event that populates the city with an alternative history, one that, if we could only understand its ebb and flow, the necessity of violence to it, would also allow us to understand Ambergris.” Statements like this led me to my explorations of Ambergris. I remember trying to read my father’s essays at an early age, and only understanding them in fragments and glimpses. I loved the mystery of that, and the sense of adventure, of the questions implied by what I could understand.) However, he did say one or two things about the gray caps. I recall that at the dinner table he would ramble on about his current studies. He had no gift for providing context. He would sit at the table, looking down at his mashed potatoes as he scratched the back of his head with one hand and pushed his fork through his food with the other. There was always about him at these times a faraway look, as if he were figuring something out in his head even as he talked to us. Sometimes, it would be a kind of muttering chant under his breath. At other times he was genuinely talking to us but was really elsewhere. He smelled of limes back then, our mother having insisted he wear some cologne to combat the smell of old books brought back from the rare book room of the Stockton Library. But since he hated cologne, he would cut up a lime instead and anoint himself with its juice. (I enjoyed that smell of books, though, missed it when it was gone—it was a comfortable, old-fashioned smell, usually mixed with the dry spice of cigar smoke. I came to feel that it was the smell of learning, which provoked the sweat not of physical exertion, but of mental exertion. To me, book must and cigar smoke were the product of working brains.)
At one such dinner, he looked up at us and he said, “The gray caps are quite simple, really. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. So long as what you’re doing doesn’t interfere with their plans, they don’t care what you do—even if you cause one of them physical harm. But if somehow you step across the tripwire of one of their ‘activities,’ why, then, there is nothing that can save you.”