Everywhere, new ideas take root. The refurbished whaling fleet has focused its efforts on the giant freshwater squid, with great success. Aquelus will not just make freshwater squid products a national industry, but part of the national identity, inadvertently introducing the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, which will remain a peaceful event throughout the rule of the Manzikerts.61 The old aqueducts have been made functional again and extensive settlement has occurred in the valley beyond the city proper, creating a separate town of craftspeople. Every day a new house goes up and a new street is dedicated, and by the time of Aquelus there are over 30,000 permanent residents in Ambergris: approximately 13,000 men and 17,000 women and children.62
And yet, as Aquelus enters his sixth year in power, there is something dreadfully wrong, and although no one knows the source of this wrongness, perhaps a few suspect, at least a little. First, there is the sinister way in which the gray caps have entered the collective consciousness of the city: parents tell tales of the old inhabitants of Cinsorium to children at bedtime—that the gray caps will creep up out of the ground on their clammy pale hands and feet, crawl in through an open window, and grab you if you don’t go to sleep.
Or, more frequently now, the term “mushroom dweller” is used instead of “gray cap,” no doubt become more common because, rather disturbingly, the only major failure of the civil government and private citizens has been the war against the fungus that has overgrown many areas of Ambergris: cascades of dark and bright mushrooms, gaily festooned with red and green, or somber in jackets of gray or brown, sometimes as thick as the very grass. Public complaints proliferate, for certain types exude a slick poison which, when it comes into contact with legs, feet, arms, hands, leaves the victim in extreme pain and covered with purple splotches for up to a week. More alarmingly, a new type of mushroom with a stem as thick as an oak and four or five feet tall, begins to spring up in the middle of certain streets, wrenching free from the cobblestones. These blue-tinged “white whales,”63 as some wag nicknamed them, have to be chopped down by either fire emergency workers or the civil police department, causing hours of inconvenience and lost work time. They also smell so strongly of rotten eggs that whole neighborhoods have to be evacuated, sometimes for days.
Certainly the afflicted areas had grown more numerous in those last years before the Silence, almost as if the fungi formed a vast, nonsentient advance guard … but for what? At least one prominent citizen, the inventor Stephen Bacilus64—the great-great-great grandfather of the influential statistician Gort—appears to have known what for, and to have recognized a potential danger. As he put it to the Home Council, a body created to address issues of citywide security:
The very fact that we cannot stop their proliferation, that every poison only makes them thrive the more, should alarm us. For it indicates the presence of another, superior, force determined that these fungi should live. The further observation, made by many in this room tonight, that some fungi, after we have uprooted them and placed them in the appointed garbage heaps for burning, mysteriously find their way back to their former location—this should also shock us into action … and, finally, I need not remind you, except that so many of us today have short memories, that several of these mushrooms are purple in hue. Until a few years ago, a purple mushroom could not be found in all the city. Somehow, I find this fact more sinister than any other …
Unfortunately, the Council dismissed his evidence as based on old wives’ tales, and placed an edict on Bacilus that forbid him to speak about “mushrooms, fungi, lichen, moss, or related plants so as not to unwittingly and unnecessarily cause a general panic among the populace.”65 After all, the Home Council was responsible for security in the city.
But did Bacilus have cause for alarm? Perhaps so. According to police reports, three years before the Silence the city experienced 76 unexplained or unsolved break-ins, up from only 30 the previous year. Two years before the Silence this figure rose to 99 break-ins, and in the year before the Silence, almost 150 unexplained break-ins occurred within the city limits. No doubt some of these burglaries can be attributed to the large number of unassimilated immigrant adventurers flooding into Ambergris, and no doubt the authorities’ failure to show undue concern means they had reached a similar conclusion. However, the victims in an astonishing number of these cases claim, when they saw anyone at all, that the intruder was a small person, usually hidden by shadow and almost always wearing a large felt hat. These mystery burglars most often made off with cutlery, jewelry, and food items.66
It is unfortunate indeed that the urban legend of the mushroom dwellers had spread so widely, because, reduced to stories to scare children, no one took them seriously. The police passed off such accounts as hysterical or as bald-faced lies, while criminals complicated the situation by disguising themselves in gray cap “garb” when committing burglaries.67
Worse still, the efficient government and the network of peace treaties Manzikert II and Aquelus had created proved to be built on a fragile foundation.
At the time of the Silence, it would have seemed that Ambergris was not only secure but richer than ever before. Indeed, Aquelus had just formed an even stronger alliance with the Menites68—and took the first step toward the continuation of his bloodline by marrying the old Menite King’s daughter Irene,69 who by all accounts was not only beautiful but intelligent and could be expected to rule jointly with Aquelus, much as had, in their fashion, Sophia and Manzikert I.70
The same year, Aquelus secured his western borders against possible attacks by the Kalif 71 with the signing of a treaty in which Ambergrisian merchants would receive preferential treatment (especially the waiver of export taxes) and in return Aquelus promised to hold Ambergris in vassalage to the Kalif.72
The depth of Aquelus’s deviousness is best illustrated by his response when the Kalif asked Aquelus to help suppress the southern rebellion of Stretcher Jones in return for further trade concessions. The Kalif, a devious man himself, also wrote that Aquelus’s two half-brothers, closest successors to the cappanship, had been awarded the honor of studying in the Kalif’s court, under the tutelage of his most able instructors, “among the most learned men in the civilized world.” Aquelus, who had remained neutral in the conflict, replied that a Brueghelite armada of 100 sail already threatened Ambergris—a fleet actually some 200 miles away, contentedly plundering the southern islands—and he could not spare any ships to attack a friendly Truffidian power in the west; nonetheless, he gratefully accepted the privileges so generously offered by the Kalif. As for the invitation to his half-brothers, Aquelus returned his “devout and immense thanks,” but they never went. Had they gone, the Kalif would almost certainly have kept them as hostages.73
However pleased Aquelus may have been at the adroit deflection of these potential threats, he still, as the annual freshwater squid expedition came ever closer, had two other dangerous situations that required swift resolution. First, the clear shortfall in the spring crops, combined with the influx of new settlers (which he had no wish to see slacken) meant the possibility of famine. Second, the Haragck, a warlike clan of nomads who rode sturdy mountain ponies into battle, had begun to make inroads on his western borders.74 Aquelus had no cavalry, but the Haragck had no fleet, and if it came to armed confrontation, Aquelus must have been confident—now that Morrow, in firm control of the northern Moth, was an ally—that he could stop the barbarians from crossing the river in force.