I’ve put the starfish on my table here, as something akin to a good luck charm. Perhaps it will help me finish.
Next to the starfish, I found seashells, dull and chipped—the last remnants of our most noteworthy vacation. I was ten, Duncan six. Our dad had gone on sabbatical from his position as a history professor at the Porfal College of History and Advanced Theory (or as Dad called it, “Poor Paul’s Collage of Hysterics and Advanced Decay”) in Stockton. I cannot recall ever taking a weeklong vacation before or since. Dad had bought berths on a river barge for us. Mom was relaxed, happy. Dad was as calm and at peace as I’ve ever seen him.
I remember one habit he picked up during that vacation. He liked to take a stalk of sedge weed and hold it in his mouth like a pipe, gnawing on the end, a wide-brimmed hat shading his face. We’d sit in the deck chairs and read, or watch the countryside go by.
In those days, the west side of the River Moth was almost entirely uninhabited. We saw strange animals come to the water’s edge to drink; they would look at us with curiosity, but no fear. Once, we saw odd, short people dressed in outlandish clothes, staring across the water at us with a peculiar intensity. The water formed a mirror in which our images reached out to theirs across the waves—stretched, unreal.
We took the barge down to the Southern Isles, where we spent four days on the beaches. We couldn’t afford to go farther than the northernmost island of Hathern, with its black sand and the melancholy ruins of the long-dead Saphant Empire, but we still had a good time.
Mom refused to go in the water, so she had to put up with Dad splashing water at her. Dad loved to swim—although “bob” or “float” might more accurately describe what he looked like when he took to the waves. Mom loved to watch the sunrises and sunsets from our little rented bungalow. During the day, she would walk along the beach for hours, and always brought back shells and shiny rocks for us. Sometimes Duncan and I went with her, sometimes we stayed with Dad.
At dusk, we sat on a blanket together and Dad would make a fire, cooking fish over the flames. I can’t remember if he bought the fish or caught them. I don’t remember him being much of a fisherman.
Then Dad would lecture us in a teasing way about the mighty Saphant Empire.
Pointing to the black-gray nubs and jagged walls drowning in the sand and sea, suffused with the orange of sunset, he would say, “Those are the result of war. A naval conflict and then the survivors fought on this very beach. There used to be a city here. Now, just what you see. And then … and then!” And then he would find a way to bring pirates and adventures into his history lesson.
I didn’t give his words about war much thought at the time. The ruins were just great rocks to climb on, tidal pools to explore. That men had fought and died there hundreds of years ago seemed too remote from our vacation to be real.
Another time, Dad presented me with a tiny hermit crab in a white coiled shell.
“Don’t hurt it,” he said, “and leave it on the beach when we go.”
“I will,” I said, marveling at the feel of its tiny legs against the skin of my palm.
The sand crunching between my toes; the heat and breeze off the sea, the lights of boats far offshore.
Mom looked after Duncan for most of the trip, because he was young and needed constant attention. (I remember only the vaguest flash of sunlight, the most tenuous thread of a memory of water—it was all too idyllic for me to retain, I suppose.)
It is one of the only times I can recall the full attention of my father upon me. Five years later, he would die. Eight years later, my mother would bring us to Ambergris and the house by the River Moth. Twenty years later, Duncan would feel the first twinge of the fungal colonization occurring within him. Twenty-five years after our long-ago vacation, I would try to kill myself. Thirty years later and the War of the Houses would almost kill us all.
* * *
How can such a pleasurable memory as a childhood vacation coexist comfortably with memories of the war? How can the world contain such extremes? I thought about such things as I lay among the bodies in the Truffidian Cathedral. Each question begat another question, so that soon the questions seemed to contain their own answers.
I lay there for a very long time, gazing at nothing and no one while the gray caps rummaged all around me, each syllable of their clicking speech a knife slid between my shoulder blades. I do not know what they were looking for, nor whether they found it. I could hear them rolling bodies over, rifling through the pockets of the dead. Once, a clawing hand brushed against the side of my face. I could feel someone or something looking at me; I refused to look back. I could feel the breath of one of them upon me, smell the spurling tangle of scents that clung to them like their skin: must and mold and funk and dust and a trace of some spice.
And then, finally, the stained glass above me refracted the light of the sun, and it was dawn, and the gray caps were gone, and I was still alive, surrounded by hundreds of the dead, the blood upon them dark and caked.
Stiffly, like an old woman, I propped myself up, struggled to raise myself onto my foot, stared around me at the carnage.
The dead did not look peaceful. The dead did not look planned or purposeful, or at rest, or any other combination of words that might signify comfort or the rule of law. Legs and arms lay at unnatural angles, torn or contorted or dislocated from torsos. Mouths were caught in extremes of pain and fear and surprise. Dried blood and gathering flies. Skin a pale yellow tinged with blue. Great wounds, like vast claws, had cut into chests leaving dull red furrows. A row of heads disembodied. After a while, I had to stop looking. I had to stop myself from looking.
I wish I could have told you they looked beautiful.
That is when I resolved I would never become one of them. I had to find a way out. (Even if it meant typing up an afterword in bad light, on a limited budget, for a potential readership of thousands or none?)
Painfully, hopping, I made my way through the bodies, pushed open the double doors with a supreme effort, and walked out into postwar Ambergris.
* * *
Afterword, aftermath. I’m shaking now, and I don’t know if that means I’m hungry or that I’m afraid of what might come out of that hole in the ground behind me. Or if I’m upset thinking about the aftermath of that catastrophic struggle between Houses, gray caps, and the Kalif. Between me and my now traitorous leg. Between Sybel and the fungal mine he never saw. Between Duncan and Mary.
As I hobbled through the city that morning, still in shock, using a stick as a crutch, it became clear that we had been having a bad Festival for many, many months. Buildings reduced to purple ash. Corpses still unburied, but frozen by needlings of fungus, which, mercifully, took away any smell. I marveled at the number of people who walked through the city with a blank look in their eyes; I was one of them. A look of sadness, yes, but beyond sadness—a sense of dislocation, of desolation. We were encountering Ambergris as survivors and asking a question: Is this really our city? Is this really where we live? (I thought it went deeper than that—the listlessness, the fatigue. It seemed to indicate a confusion, a mental flinch, an inability to understand if we’d won or lost. How could we tell?)
Collapsed buildings lay impaled on their own columns, which still reached toward open sky. Streets strewn with garbage and bits of torn-up flesh. Relics of past ages splintered into unrecognizable thickets of wood and metal. The Hoegbotton headquarters, which had survived any number of F&L attacks, had been brought low on that last night—looted and gutted, the stark black of extinguished fire racing up the interior walls toward the lacerated ceiling. The ever-present smell of smoke and of rot, which we had grown accustomed to over the last few years, but which, on this particular morning, had a sharpness, an intensity, that we had not experienced before. The Voss Bender Memorial Post Office had been ransacked, and little metal boxes, some of them melted and deformed from fire, littered the cracked steps. Elsewhere, whole neighborhoods of people worked to tear down barricades erected to keep out the Kalif’s men, or F&L’s men, or the gray caps. If I could have flown crow-like over the city, I would have seen it as a crumbling eye pierced through the center and smoldering at the edges where the abandoned mortars of the Kalif lay surrounded by the bodies of the slain.