It is not an easy thing for me to walk through Ambergris these days, but there is also comfort: why, she said, her heart breaking a little, there are so many friends to visit, even if they are all in the ground.
But at first I just hobbled down Albumuth Boulevard in the late afternoon light, letting my path be decided by the gaps between supplicants and pilgrims. Happy that everything appeared normal, that evidence of the Shift was hidden, or so minute that I didn’t notice it. (Or maybe you didn’t notice it because you had become so used to it.)
I took deep breaths, to catch all the smells in this most beautiful and cruel of all cities: passionflower and incense, lemon trees and horse flop, rotting meat and coffee grounds. For a few minutes I tried to pretend to be a tourist, a passerby, an incidental part of the city. It didn’t work. How could it? I am Janice Shriek.
* * *
My leg was already beginning to ache, but I thought I might feel more optimistic if I headed for the site of my greatest triumphs. I hadn’t visited it in ages, so I went despite the discomfort. After a good half hour, I finally stood in front of what had once been the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. A flower shop and a bakery stood to either side, but the part of the building that had housed the gallery lay empty as if cursed. The shadow where the hand-painted sign had once hung had been branded into the wall by years of hard weather. Beyond the cracked windows lay dust, moldy frames, and darkness. No paintings. No paint not peeling. Just seasons and seasons of neglect. The smell of stale bread, rotting wood. Layers of purple fungus had taken root in the closest wall. Passersby hardly spared the place a second glance. It should have been a monument, or at least a memorial. It had housed dozens of famous paintings and painters. Conversations that shaped all aspects of the art world had taken place there. Much of the art mentioned in the Hoegbotton tourist guides, the descriptions of the New Art movement, had started with my gallery. I had started there. Everything I have been since came from my gallery. This dump. This husk of broken timbers. Even my memories of it—saturated in the marinade of all five senses and as sharp as yesterday—could not bring it to sudden life. I might as well have never left the typewriter. I was still trapped in an afterword.
I headed into the Religious Quarter, immediately calmed by the sound of bells—bells from steeples and cathedrals, from alcoves and altars, which I could never quite find the source of, which lingered at the edge of hearing.
I disturbed a boy in the act of lighting a candle in the recess that marked the northernmost corner of the Church of the Seven-Edged Star. He looked up at me, his face whiter even than his white robes against the tousle of black hair, his eyes a glistening green, his mouth forming a half-conscious “O,” the long match held with divine grace in his slightly upturned right hand. The white of his revealed wrist sent a shudder through me, but he smiled and the image of grace returned.
He was right to light the candle, for the Quarter at that hour had not only distant bells but distant light, the dusk so strong it might as well have been a smell, a musk, that slid over the unprotected surfaces of cobblestones, windows, and walls, leaving behind the chaos of rippling illuminations that remain in the Quarter after dark. Priests shuffled past, murmuring mouths and bare feet. Truffidians, Manziists, Menites, Cultists? Doubtless Duncan the historian would have known. No matter how Ambergris Shifted, we could count on the rituals of the Quarter remaining the same.
Moving on, I walked to the edge of the Religious Quarter—by now an act of will, as my leg really hurt—past the stern-looking Truffidian Cathedral, and by way of a flurry of alleys soon found myself in front of Blythe Academy. The dark covered the Academy comfortably, content to linger at the outskirts of lamps and torches.
Even from the street I could see directly into the courtyard, and beyond the courtyard into the student apartments, here and there a window illumined with golden light. In the foreground, the pale willow trees rustled in the breeze. (As pale willow trees are wont to do.) The stone benches and tables were solid, dark, strangely comforting masses. A monk strode across the courtyard. Another followed, cowl hiding his face. The sweet, pungent scent of honeysuckle wound itself around me.
I do not know how long I stood there, remembering those long-ago conversations, but as I did, an unbearable sadness came over me. Nothing I can type on these pages can convey—truly—what I felt as I looked into the darkened courtyard where Duncan, Bonmot, and I had sat and talked. And, if I am truthful, that place I stood in front of, which meant so much to me, no longer had any more to do with me than the Borges Bookstore. The moment, the spirit, had passed out of it and it was just a place once more. Duncan no longer taught there. Bonmot no longer sat behind the desk in his office, listening to the imagined miseries of yet another homesick student. Duncan had disappeared. Bonmot had died more than twelve years ago.
What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.
I stood there, mourning the death of that place, even though it had not really died, even though it had since spawned a thousand stories to join the millions of stories that comprised the city, and then I walked back here, to the typewriter, to continue my epic, my afterword, so consumed by what? By emotion. That my hands are shaking. They are shaking right now. What shall stop them? Perhaps a dose of the dead past.
* * *
At Bonmot’s funeral, some twelve years ago, men and women who would not have dared visit him while he was alive circled around the polished oak coffin like impatient iridescent flies. The day held a hint of rain in the gravel sky, the air moist and cool. The smell of mold was everywhere.
Outside the Truffidian Cathedral, Martin Lake dourly limped about on his polished cane, stopping to mutter grim Lakeisms to friends such as Merrimount and Raffe, all of whom avoided me as if I embodied a disease they might one day become. That’s how far I had fallen. I limped like Lake by then. I had a cane like him. But I was not enough like him, especially now that he had passed from “successful” to that ethereal realm where one’s fame will always outlive the fading mortal body.
The Morrow ambassador to the House of Hoegbotton—newly renamed to reflect the aftermath of war—presented a dapper sight in slick black tuxedo and tails, at least until he managed to slide in a patch of mud created by overzealous gravediggers and groundskeepers. A general from the Kalif’s army, a supposed friend of Bonmot’s in his youth, looked out of place in turban and gold-and-red glittery uniform, his presence barely tolerated by a city that so frequently had been bombarded by his masters.
Dozens of priests arrived from the Religious Quarter, from orders as diverse as the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star and Manziism. They all wore variations of black-on-white and somber stares. They all had guards with them. Ever since the War of the Houses, no one trusted anyone else. Hoegbotton’s men were out in force as well, armed with guns and with knives. Some of them stood in motored vehicles, in well-heeled clumps, staring.
Business leaders also arrived to pay their bemused respects. The newly ascendant Andrew Hoegbotton, a weaselly stick figure of a man with large, liquid eyes, shared uneasy space with Lionel Frankwrithe, a smug middle-aged man who kept snapping out his pocket watch in sudden motions that kept wretched Andrew flinching. Truces between House F&L and House H&S rarely lasted very long anymore.