9 All quotes without attribution are from Tonsure’s journal, not the biography.
10 Quote taken from the biography. One wonders: if the Cappan was so fierce, how much more fearsome must Michael Brueghel have been to make him flee the south?
11 The Cappan’s appending “II” to his son’s name gives us an early indication that he meant to settle on land and found a dynasty. The Aan clan would have thought the idea of a dynasty odd, for usually cappans were chosen from among the ablest sailors, with hereditary claims a secondary consideration.
12 I find it necessary to interject three observations here. First, that the paragraph on the gray caps written for the Cappan’s biography is far worse, describing as it does “small, piglike eyes, a jowly jagged crease for a mouth, and a nose like an ape.” The gray caps actually looked much like the mushroom dwellers of today—which is to say, like smaller versions of ourselves—but the Cappan was already attempting to dehumanize them, and thus create a justification, a rationalization, for depriving them of life and property. Second, and surprisingly, evidence suggests that the gray caps wove their clothing from the cured pelts of field mice. Third, Tonsure appears to have given away a secret—if, in fact, the gray cap they met came “only to the Cappan’s shoulder” and the gray caps averaged, by Tonsure’s own admission, three and one-half feet in height (as do the modern mushroom dwellers), then the Cappan could only have stood four and one-half feet to five feet in height, something of a small person himself. (Is it of import that in a letter concerning future trade relations written to the Kalif, Brueghel calls Manzikert “my insignificant enemy,” since “insignificant” in the Kalif’s language doubles as a noun meaning “dwarf” and Brueghel, who wrote his own letters of state, loved word play?) Perhaps Tonsure’s description of Manzikert in the biography was dictated by the Cappan, who wished to conceal his slight stature from History. Unfortunately, the Cappan’s height, or lack thereof, remains an ambiguous subject, and thus I will stay true to the orthodox version of the story as related by Tonsure. Still, it is delicious to speculate. (If indeed Manzikert was short, we might have hoped he would look upon the gray caps as long-lost cousins twice removed. Alas, he did not do so.)
13 We can only speculate as to why Manzikert should find children and mushrooms repulsive. He certainly ate mushrooms and had had a child with Sophia. Perhaps, if indeed undertall, his nickname growing up had been “little mushroom”?
14 As this is the first and last time the gray caps actively attempted to communicate with the Aan, one wonders just what the gray cap was saying to Manzikert. A friendly greeting? A warning? The very loquaciousness of this particular gray cap in relation to the others they were to encounter has led more than one historian to assume that he (or she—contrary to popular opinion, there are as many female gray caps as male; the robes tend to make them all look unisexual) had been assigned to greet the landing party. What opportunities did Manzikert miss by not trying harder to understand the gray cap’s intent? What tragedies might have been averted?
15 Tonsure was criminally fond of Oliphaunts. References to them, usually preceded by mundanea like “as large as” or “as gray as,” occur 30 times in the journal. Possessed of infinite mercy, I shall spare you 28 of these comparisons.
16 Tonsure’s description in the biography also includes a series of mushroom drawings by Manzikert—an attempt to “appear sensitive,” Tonsure sneers in his journal—from which I provide three samples for the half dozen of you who are curious as to the Cappan’s illustrative skills:
17 Apparently, since Tonsure fails to describe it.
18 The mammologist Xaver Daffed maintains that these were “actually cababari, a stunted relation of the pig that resembles a rat.” (Quote taken from The Hoegbotton Guide to Small, Indigenous Mammals.) If so, then, as subsequent events will show, the rats of Ambergris have managed something of a public relations coup; the poor cababari are today extinct in the southern climes.
19 James Lacond has suggested that the fungus had hallucinogenic qualities. Tonsure, for his part, sampled a “fungus that resembled an artichoke” and found it tasted like unleavened bread; he reports no side effects, although Lacond claims that the rest of Tonsure’s account must be considered a drug-induced dream. Lacond further claims that Tonsure’s later account of Manzikert’s men glutting themselves on the fungi—some of which tasted like honey and some like chicken—explains their sudden mercilessness. But Lacond contradicts himself: if the rest of Tonsure’s account is a fever dream, then so is his description of the men eating the fungus. As always when discussing the gray caps, debate tends to describe the same circles as their buildings. (A similar circularity drove a subdivided Lacond, late in his life, to declare that the world as we know it is actually a product of the dream dreamt by Tonsure. Since our knowledge of our identity as Ambergrisians, where we came from, is so dependent on Tonsure’s journal, this is close to the heresy of madness.)
20 Admittedly, a perilous and notoriously inaccurate undertaking; the mushroom dwellers tend to look unkindly upon intrusions into their territory.
21 The question of where the gray caps came from and why they were concentrated only in Cinsorium remains a mystery. The subject has frustrated many a historian and, to avoid a similar fate, I shall pass over it entirely.
22 But surely they farmed the fungus?
23 Tonsure reports the following symbol showed up repeatedly:
24 Volume XX, Issue 2, of The Real History Newsletter, published by the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society.
25 In a city otherwise so pristine, such blatant “disorder” should have made Tonsure suspicious. Was he now so completely set, as was his master, on the goal of discrediting and dehumanizing the gray caps, that he could see it no other way?
26 Unfortunately, this claim strengthens Sabon’s assertion with regard to the Patriarch of Nicea—see footnote 6.
27 Poor Tonsure. Just preceding this diatribe, the monk describes a kind of hard mushroom, about seven inches tall, with a stem as thick as its head. When squeezed, this mushroom suddenly throbs to an even greater size. While walking innocently between the “library” and the amphitheater, Tonsure came across a group of gray cap women using these mushrooms in what he calls a “lascivious way.” So perhaps we should forgive him his hyperbole. Still, shocked or not—and he was a more worldly monk than many—Tonsure should have noticed that for every such “perversion,” the gray caps had developed a dozen more useful wonders. For example, another type of mushroom stood two feet tall and had a long, thin stem with a wide hood that, when plucked, could be used as an umbrella; the hood even collapsed into the stem for easy storage.
28 Here Lacond proves useful. He puts forth two theories for the gray caps’ passivity: first, that Manzikert had landed in the midst of a religious festival during which the gray caps were forbidden to take part in any aggressive acts, even to defend themselves; second, that the gray cap society resembled that of bees or ants, and thus none of the “units” in the city had free will, being extensions of some hive intellect. This second theory by Lacond seems extreme to some historians, but the idea of passivity being bred into particular classes of gray cap society cannot be ruled out. This would support my own theory that the entire city of Cinsorium was a religious artifact, a temple, if you will, in which violence was not permitted to be inflicted by its keepers. Were Manzikert’s actions tantamount to desecration?