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 crowlike 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.
It will sound odd, but I realize now that if I had looked closely enough, I could have seen physical evidence of the beginning of Mary’s attacks on Duncan’s books. Stare long enough, hard enough, with the appropriate intensity, and Duncan’s theories were all there, woven into the brick, the stone, the wood, even inhabiting the wind that came down and whispered through narrow streets backed up with rubble. And, in the sheer remembered violence of bloodstains, burnt wood, crippled brick: Mary’s retort, her refutation of him. As Mary walked through some other part of the city that day, through some other aftermath, what did she see? What could she see but the embodiment of her father’s Nativism theory? Everything catalogued as the most natural of disasters. {Truly a stretch, Janice, if ever there was one!}
I understand now, remembering my walk through the city, that the glittering flesh necklace surrounded a neck that supported a head filled with maggoty ideas. Filled with images that do not connect, and which will always make it impossible for Sabon to recognize the truth in Duncan’s theories. She has found her own personal history; she has written it to drown out the truth.
In a sense, almost every word, every sentence, every paragraph she has written about Ambergris since the war has been an attempt to undo my memories—what I saw during that war, what I saw that night with Sybel beside me, what I saw afterwards, walking through the city. And, of course, everything she saw belowground. {This is nonsense. Mary reacted no differently than many other Ambergrisians. A deep sense of denial pervaded the city, but how can you blame any of its inhabitants? They still had to live on in the city. It must have been much worse after the Silence. Imagine your loved ones being spirited away one night and you unable to do anything except go about your daily business and hope that you, too, would not be subject to the same fate.}
Eventually, on that first morning after the war, I found myself at Blythe Academy. I had hopped and hobbled my way there after an hour or two, my journey aimless and funereal. An ache and an emptiness had begun to gnaw away at me. A glimpse of the familiar acted like an anchor.
For some reason, I had assumed that the desecration of the Truffidian Cathedral would have extended to Blythe Academy as well, but this was not the case. I saw a few broken windows, two overturned benches, an area of burnt grass, and a singed section of roof, but the willow trees remained the same as always. Priests and teachers bustled across the lawn, cleaning up the debris. The air of activity, of honest labor, gave me hope.
I sat down on a bench, hoping that somehow the memory of those long-ago conversations that had so calmed me then might calm me now.
Instead, a shadow fell across me. I looked up, and there stood Bonmot, staring down at me with a grim smile upon his lips. His face was grimy with soot or dirt. He had a long, shallow cut running down his left cheek. Bonmot, in that moment, looked invincible, even though he had become more vulnerable than I could then know. {Whose faith wouldn’t falter for at least a moment in the midst of such inexplicable carnage?}
His grim smile softened to concern as he saw the condition of my foot—or, rather, the lack of a foot.
“You’re alive,” I said, in wonder. By now, the lack of sleep, the terror of what I had gone through, had taken me somewhere else entirely.
“You need to see a doctor,” Bonmot said. He crouched down beside me, gently cupped his hand under my calf to better examine the wound.
“Not really,” I said. “There’s nothing to be done now. It’s mostly cauterized. I washed the rest of it. The flesh is clean. I spent all night with a mob of corpses in the Truffidian Cathedral. You may wish to investigate.”
He bowed his head, looking at my stump. “I know. I’ve heard. You were there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Pretending to be dead. Please, don’t worry about the leg.”
He stared at me. “Janice, you need to have it looked at anyway.”