City of Saints and Madmen Page 10

  Tonsure spent these five or six days wandering the city, which he still found a marvel. He had, he wrote in his journal, “squandered” much of his early life in the realm of the Kalif, where architectural marvels crowded every city, but never had he seen anything like Cinsorium.26 First of all, the city had no corners, only curves. Its architects had built circles within circles, domes within domes, and circles within domes. Tonsure found the effect soothing to the eye, and more importantly to the spirit: “This lack of edges, of conflicting lines, makes of the mind a plateau both serene and calm.” The possible truth of this observation has been confirmed by modern-day architects who, on review of the reconstructed blueprint of Cinsorium, have described it as the structural equivalent of a tuning fork, a vibration in the soul.

  Just as delightful were the huge, festive mosaics lining the walls, most of which depicted battles or mushroom harvesting, while a few consisted of abstract shiftings of red and black; these last gave Tonsure as much unease as the lack of corners had given him comfort, although again he could not say why. The mosaics were made from lichen and fungus skillfully placed and trained to achieve the desired effect. Sometimes fruits, vegetables, or seeds were also used to form decorative patterns—cauliflower to depict a sheep-like creature called the “lunger,” for example—with the gray caps replacing these weekly. If Tonsure can be believed, one mosaic used the eggs of a native thrush to depict the eyes of a gray cap; when the eggs hatched, the eyes appeared to be opening.

  The library yielded the most magnificent of Tonsure’s discoveries: a mechanized golden tree, its branches festooned with intricate jeweled shrikes and parrots, while on the circular dais by which it moved equally intricate deer, stalked by lions, pawed the golden ground. By use of a winding key, the birds would burst simultaneously into song while the lions roared beneath them. The gray caps maintained it in perfect working condition, but had no appreciation for its beauty, as if they “were themselves clockwork parts in some vast machine, fated to retrace the same movements year after year.”

  Yet, as Tonsure’s appreciation for the city grew, so too did his loathing of its inhabitants. Runts, he calls them—cripples. In their ignorance of the beauty of their own city, he wrote (in the biography), they “had become unfit to rule over it, or even to live within its boundaries.” Their “pallor, the sickly moistness of their skin, even the rheumy discharge from their eyes,” all pointed to the “abomination of their existence, mocking the memory of what they once had been.”27

  Why the normally tolerant Tonsure came to espouse such ideas we may never know; certainly, there is none of the element of pity that marks his journal comments about Manzikert, whom he calls “a seething mass of emotions, a pincushion of feelings who would surely be locked away if he were not already a leader of men.” Although Tonsure’s disparaging comments in his journal seem overwrought, similar comments in the biography are easily attributed to Manzikert himself, for if the monk reviled the natives, the Cappan hated them with an intensity that can have no rational explanation. Tonsure records that whenever Manzikert had cause to walk through the city, he would casually murder any gray cap in his path. Perhaps even more chilling, other gray caps in the vicinity ignored such unprovoked murder, and the mortally wounded themselves expired without a struggle.28

  At the end of the first week, Manzikert and Sophia held a festival not only to celebrate the completion of the docks, but also “this new beginning as dwellers on the land.” Due to its timing, this celebration must be considered the forerunner of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid.29 During the festivities, Manzikert christened the new settlement “Ambergris,” after the “most secret and valuable part of the whale”30—over Sophia’s objections, who, predictably enough, wanted to call the settlement “Sophia.”

  The next morning, Manzikert, groggy from grog the night before, got up to relieve himself and, about to do so beside one of the gray caps’ round dwellings, noticed on the wall a small, flesh-colored lichen that bore a striking resemblance to the Lepress Saint Kristina of Malfour, a major icon in the Truffidian religion. Menacing the Saint was a lichen that looked uncannily like a gray cap. Manzikert fell into a religious rage, gathered his people and told them of his vision. In the biography Tonsure dutifully reports the jubilant reaction of Manzikert’s men upon learning they were going to war because of a maliciously-shaped fungus,31 but neglects to mention this reaction in his journal, presumably out of shame.32

  Late in the afternoon, Sophia and Tonsure at his side, Cappan Manzikert I of Aan and Ambergris led a force of 200 men into the city. The sun, Tonsure writes, shone blood red, and the streets of Cinsorium soon reflected red independent of the sun, for at Manzikert’s order, his men began to slaughter the gray caps. It was a horribly mute affair. The gray caps offered no resistance, but only stared up at their attackers as they were cut down.33 Perhaps if they had resisted, Manzikert might have shown them mercy, but their silence, their utter willingness to die rather than fight back, infuriated the Cappan, and the massacre continued unabated until dusk. By this time “the newly-christened city had become indistinguishable from a charnel house, so much blood had been spilled upon the streets; the smell of the slaughter gathered in the humid air, and the blood itself clung to us like sweat.” The bodies were so numerous that they had to be stacked in piles so that Manzikert and his men could navigate the streets back to the docks.

  Except that Manzikert, as the sunset finally bled into night and his men lit their torches, did not return to the docks.

  For, as they passed the great “library” and the inert shapes sprawled on its front steps, Manzikert espied a gray cap dressed in purple robes standing by the red-stained altar. This gray cap not only clicked and whistled at the Cappan, but, after making an unmistakably rude gesture, fled up the stairs. At first shocked, Manzikert pursued with a select group of men,34 shouting out to Sophia to lead the rest back to the ships; he would follow shortly. Then he and his men—including, for some reason, Tonsure, journal in his pocket—disappeared into the “library.” Sophia, always a good soldier, followed orders and returned to the docks.

  The night passed without event—except that Manzikert did not return. At first light, Sophia immediately re-entered the city with a force of 300 men, larger by a third than the small army that had slaughtered the gray caps the evening before.

  It must have been an odd sight for Sophia and the young Manzikert II.35 The morning sun shone down upon an empty city. The birds called out from the trees, the bees buzzed around their flowers, but nowhere could be found a dead gray cap, a living man—not even a trace of blood, as if the massacre had never happened and Manzikert himself had never walked the earth. As they walked through the silent streets, fear so overcame them that by the time they had reached the library, which lay near the city’s center, more than half the men had broken ranks and headed back to the docks. Although Sophia and Manzikert II did not lose their nerve, it was a close thing. Manzikert II writes that:

  Not only had I not seen my Mother so afrightened before, I had never thought to see the day; and yet it was undeniable: she shook with fear as we went up the library steps. Her hands whitest white, her eyes nervous in her head, that something might any moment leap out of bluest sky, the gentle air, the unshadowed dwellings, and set upon her. Seeing my Mother so afeared, I thought myself no coward for my own fear.

  Within the library, which had been emptied of its books, its mushrooms, its “shelves,” they found only a single chair,36 and sitting in that chair, Manzikert,37 who wept and covered his face with his hands. Behind him, in the far wall: a gaping hole with stairs that led down into Cinsorium’s extensive network of underground tunnels. Into this hole the night before, Manzikert I would later divulge, he, Tonsure, and his bersar had entered in pursuit of the fleeing gray cap.

  But at the moment, all Manzikert I could do was weep, and when Sophia finally managed to pry his hands from his face, she could see that there were no tears, for his “eyes had been pluck
ed from their sockets so cleanly, so expertly, that to look at him, this pitiable man, one might think he had been born that way.” Of Tonsure, of the cappan’s men, there was no sign, and no sign of any except for the monk would ever turn up. They had effectively vanished for all time.

  Manzikert I remained incoherent for several days, screaming out in the night, vomiting, and subject to fits that appear to have been epileptic in nature. He also had lost his bearings, for he claimed to have been underground for more than a month, when clearly he had only just gone underground the night before.

  During this difficult time—her husband incapacitated, her son stricken with immobility by the double trauma of his father’s condition and Tonsure’s disappearance—Sophia’s grief and fear turned into rage. On the third day after discovering her husband in the library, she reached a decision that has divided historians throughout the ages: she put Cinsorium to the torch.38

  The conflagration began in the library, and she is said to have expressed great regret that no “books” remained to feed to the fire. The city burned for three days, during which time, due to a miscalculation, the Aan were forced to work long hours protecting the docks which, when the winds shifted, were in serious danger of going up in flame as well. Finally, though, the city burned to the ground, leaving behind only the fleeting descriptions in Tonsure’s journal, a few other scattered accounts from Manzikert I’s clan, and a handful of buildings that proved resistant to the blaze.39 Chief among these were the walls of the library itself, which proved to have been made of a fire-repellent stone, the aqueducts, and the altar outside of the library (these last two still stand today). Sophia realized the futility, not to mention the economic consequences, of dismantling the aqueducts, and so took out her frustrations on the altar and the library. The altar was made of a stone so strong they could not crack it with their hammers and other tools. When they tried to dig it out, they discovered it was a pillar that descended at least 100 feet, if not farther, and thus impregnable. The library, however, she had taken apart until “not one stone stood upon another stone.” As for the entrances to the underground sections of the ancient city, Sophia had these blocked up with several layers of burned stones from the demolished buildings, and then topped this off with a crude cement fashioned from mortar, pebbles, and dirt. This layer was reinforced with wooden planks stripped from the ships. Finally, Sophia posted sentries, in groups of ten, at each site, and five years later we find a description of these sentries in Manzikert II’s journal, still manning their posts.

  By this time, Sophia’s husband had regained his senses—or, rather, had regained as much of them as he ever would . . .

  Manzikert I refused to discuss what had occurred underground, so we will never know whether he even remembered the events that led up to his blinding. He would talk of nothing but the sleek, fat rats that, hiding from the carnage and the fires, had re-emerged to wander the cindered city, no doubt puzzled by the changes. Manzikert I claimed the rats were the reincarnated spirits of saints and martyrs, and as such must be worshipped, groomed, fed, and housed to the extent that they had known such comforts in their former lives.40 These claims drove Sophia to distraction, and many were the screaming matches aboard the flagship over the next few weeks. However, when she realized that her husband had not recovered, but had, in a sense, died underground, she installed him near the docks, in the very building beside which he had met his first gray cap. There she allowed him to indulge his mania to his heart’s content.

  Although no longer a fearsome sight, short or tall, Manzikert I lived out his remaining years in a state of perpetual happiness, his gap-toothed grin as prominent as his frown had been in previous years. It was common to see him, with the help of a walking stick, blindly leading his huge charges—sleek, well-fed, and increasingly tame—around the city he had named. At night, the rats all crowded into his new house, and to his son’s embarrassment, slept by his side, or even on his bed. Such reverence as he showed the rats, whether the result of insanity or genuine religious epiphany, greatly impressed many of the Aan, especially those who still worshipped the old icons and those who had participated in the slaughter of the gray caps. Soon, he had many helpers.41 One morning, eight years after the fires, these helpers found Manzikert in his bed, gnawed to death by his “saints and martyrs,” and yet, if Manzikert II is to be believed, “with a smile upon his eyeless face.”

  Thus ended the oddly poignant life of Ambergris’ first ruler—a man who thoroughly deserved to be gnawed to death by rats, as a year had not gone by before his blinding when he had not personally murdered at least a dozen people. Brave but cruel, a tactical genius at war but a failure at peace, and an enigma in terms of his height, Manzikert I is today remembered less as the founder of Ambergris, than as the founder of a religion which still has its adherents today in the city’s Religious Quarter and which is still known as “Manziism.”42

  II43

  TO MANZIKERT I’S SON, CAPPAN MANZIKERT II, WOULD fall the monumental task of converting a pirate/whaling fleet into a viable land-based culture that could supplement fishing with extensive farming and trade with other communities.44 Luckily, Manzikert II possessed virtues his father lacked, and although never the military leader his father had been, neither did he have the impulsive nature that had led to their exile in the first place.45 He also had the ghost of Samuel Tonsure at his disposal, for he had taken the monk’s teachings to heart.

  Above all else, Manzikert II proved to be a builder—whether it was establishing a permanent town within the old city of Cinsorium or creating friendships with nearby tribes.46 When peace proved impossible—with, for example, the western tribe known as the Dogghe—Manzikert II showed no reluctance to use force. Twice in the first ten years, he abandoned his rebuilding efforts to battle the Dogghe, until, in a decisive encounter on the outskirts of Ambergris itself, he put to flight and decimated a large tribal army and, using his naval strength to its best effect, annihilated the rest as they took to their canoes. The chieftain of the Dogghe died of extreme gout during the fighting and with his death the Dogghe had no choice but to come to terms.

  Thus, in Manzikert II’s eleventh year of rule, he was finally able to focus exclusively on building roads, promoting trade, and, most importantly, designing the layers of efficient bureaucracy necessary to govern a large area. He himself never conquered much territory, but he laid the groundwork for the system that would reach its apogee 300 years later during the reign of Trillian the Great Banker.47

  Manzikert II also laid the groundwork for Ambergris’ unique religious flavor by building churches in what would become the Religious Quarter—and, less to his credit, by active plundering of other cities. Obsessed with relics, Manzikert II was forever sending agents to the south and west to buy or steal the body parts of saints, until by the end of his reign he had amassed a huge collection of some 70 mummified noses, eyelids, feet, kneecaps, fingers, hearts, and livers.48 Housed in the various churches, these relics attracted thousands of pilgrims (along with their money), some of whom stayed in the city, thus helping to spark the rapid growth that made Ambergris a thriving metropolis only 20 years after its foundation. Remarkably, Manzikert II’s astute diplomacy averted catastrophe in at least four instances where his thievery of relics so infuriated the plundered cities that they were ready to invade Ambergris.

  On the architectural front, Manzikert II built many remarkable structures with the help of his chief architect Midan Pejora, but none so well-known as the Cappan’s Palace, which would exist intact until, 350 years later, the Kalif’s Grand Vizir, upon his temporary occupation of Ambergris, dismantled much of it.49 The palace was, by all accounts, a rather peculiar building. The exterior inspired the noted traveler Alan Busker to write:

  The walls, the columns rise until, at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the shore had been frost bound
before they fell, and the river nymphs had inlaid them with diamonds and amethyst.

  However, the interior prompted him to write: “We shall find that the work is at least pure in its insipidity, and subtle in its vice; but this monument is remarkable as showing the refuse of one style encumbering the embryo of another, and all principles of life entangled either in diapers or the shroud.” The actual bust of Manzikert II pleased Busker even less: “A huge, gross, bony clown’s face, with the peculiar sodden and sensual cunning in it which is seen so often in the countenances of the worst Truffidian priests; a face part of iron and part of clay. I blame the sculptor, not the subject.”

  Manzikert II ruled for 43 years and sired a son on his sickly wife Isobel when he was already a gray beard of 45 years. During his reign, he had managed the impossible task of both consolidating his position and preparing for future growth. If his religious fervor led him to bad decisions, then at least his gift for diplomacy saved him from the consequences of those decisions.

  Following the death of Manzikert II,50 Manzikert III duly took his place as ruler of lands that now stretched some 40 miles south of Ambergris and 50 miles north.51 Manzikert III suffered from mild oliphauntitus52 that apparently affected his internal organs, yet oddly enough he died, after six tumultuous years, of jungle rot53 received while on a southern expedition to procure lemur eyelids and kidneys for an exotic meat pie. The Cappan’s condition was not immediately diagnosed, perhaps due to his oliphauntitus, and by the time doctors had discovered the nature of his condition, it was too late. Displaying a fine disregard for mercy, Manzikert III’s last order before he died was for every last member of the Institute of Medicine to be boiled alive in an eel broth; evidently, he had thought up a new recipe.54