The “truth”—and every squidologist is always painfully aware that today’s truth may be tomorrow’s chum — is that the Festival, as Martin Lake once put it, “exists whole and darkly glittering in the mind of each citizen of Ambergris.” I would travel farther than Lake and state that each separate version/vision creates a splinter Festival — and another, and another, until, turning upon that distant stage, no stars above for comfort, one finds oneself trapped in a hall of fractured mirrors comprised of so many reflected Festivals that it becomes impossible to choose the real Festival, even should freedom depend upon it. The various accumulations of rituals and odd customs, gathered together and twisted into a beggar’s pack before being offered up by smug experts as the “festival experience,” have no intrinsic worth.
The true “festival experience” cannot be fully explained even by the most learned squidologist. At the height of the Festival, one almost feels at home as, surrounded by squid floats and revelers in squid masks and squid balloons and the musky odor of fresh fish and seaweed, one can almost pretend that the trail of the light-festooned street is the Moth itself, and the revelers freshwater squid, gathered for social intercourse. The giddy energy, the sense of swimming upstream caused by the heavy thickness of the people you must brush up against to walk along the sidewalk, the sloshing of drinks in their glasses and cups, the wild surge of conversations, like the trickling of water over rocks downstream… There is such longing in these memories.
I experienced my first Festival more than 15 years ago. Freed finally from the ancestral home, from the magnifying-glass attentions of my mother and the febrile energy of my father, I was taking classes with the esteemed squidologist Chamblee Gort and breathing in such liberty as I have not known since. The Festival came as a revelation to me. It wakened in me all of those long-repressed feelings that I had accumulated in my youth among the books, reading tome after tome in that library as large as many people’s houses. Like many others, I ran naked through the revelers, clad only in my squid mask and lost myself in the crowds. It was only later, when I remembered the attendant violence, that I realized the Festival was a poor substitute.
AN ATTEMPT TO ATTEMPT THE SUBJECT REGARDLESS
However, despite my introduction, why not attempt (and tempt) the impossible. Therefore: The Festival did not originate as so many feckless historians (from Mr. Shriek on down) have suggested — namely, with an order by Cappan Manzikert I, first ruler of Ambergris, a year after founding the city. No, the Festival echoes a much earlier Festival put on by the indigenous tribe called the Dogghe.
The Dogghe worshipped what we now call the “Mothean Scuttlefish,” a dour type of squid, primitive by invertebrate standards, that likes nothing better than to wallow in the silt at the river’s bottom and siphon gross sustenance from the rotting refuse to be found there.
The Dogghe believed — for reasons forever lost to us along with most of the Dogghe — that the flesh of the scuttlefish held regenerative powers and heightened the amorous abilities of those who ate of it. Their annual celebration, held at roughly the same time as the modern day Festival, culminated with the choosing of one man to hunt the scuttlefish. Given that the average Mothean Scuttlefish, flattened against the riverbed, forms a circle roughly six feet across and that their primary defense consists of stuffing as much of their invertebrate bodies as possible down their attacker’s mouth and other available orifices, being selected cannot have been considered much of an honor by the selectee. (Imagine being suffocated underwater rather than drowned.)
No doubt the Manzikert clan, opportunists as always, usurped the Dogghe’s festival for the practical reason that it marked the start of the best (“best” is a relative term in this context) time to hunt the King Squid but also to replace the Dogghe’s rituals with stronger “magic.”
From dubious sources such as Dradin Kashmir’s third-person autobiography, Dradin, In Love, we can extract a few additional “facts”:
The Festival is a celebration of the spawning season, when the males battle mightily for females of the species and the fisher folk of the docks set out for a month’s trawling of the lusting ground, hoping to bring enough meat back to last until winter.
Beyond the obvious errors in this silly passage, I would point out the pathetic phallacy of battle. No such contests occur, except within the syllables of overheated ultra-decadent purple prose. The depiction of a
“spawning season/lusting ground” conjures up a depraved scene of tentacular orgies with great strobing bodies entangled and writhing as they thrash about in the silt. Alas, King Squid mate for life and do not congregate to breed. Only “widowed” or “unwed” squid maneuver for mates, and then only in solitary, scattered rituals that occur at another time of year entirely.
No, in fact, the squid gatherings at Festival time appear to consist of an orderly convocation of conferences — a convention of squid, at which a good deal of intense strobing occurs, but very little sexual activity.
I cannot overstate the dangers involved in disrupting such meetings for the purpose of hunting squid. One year, Ambergris lost 20 ships and over 600 sailors. On average, the squid-hunting season results in at least 30 casualties and the loss of more than a dozen ships. Even the casual researcher begins to wonder, scrutinizing the statistics, whether the King Squid congregate merely to hunt humans.
What benefits does Ambergris gain from this yearly sacrifice of men and materials? The answer is “an abundance of riches,” from the skin used as airtight containers and the meat sold to the Kalif’s empire, to the experimental new motored vehicle fuels developed by Hoegbotton & Sons Industrial Branch from squid oil and ink. Every part of the squid is used for some product, even the beak, which, ground down, comprises a key ingredient in the perfume exports that have, in recent years, brought money pouring into the Ambergris economy (little of which has gone into invertebrate research).
THE SQUID MILLS OF MY YOUTH
As an offshoot of the hunt — and perhaps to offset its unpredictable nature, Ambergris and many other Southern river cities experimented with squid mills for a time. Such attempts to breed the squid in semi-captivity were doomed to failure: the mills required too much space, blocking river traffic, and the squid were, at best, uncooperative.
In a depressingly familiar scenario, replicated throughout my life with regard to the objects of my desire, I remember the squid mills precisely because I was not, at first, allowed near enough to them to satisfy my curiosity (and when I finally was allowed, I could not enjoy the experience).
Framed by the third-story window of the locked library, the River Moth wound its way through the vast expanse of grounds to the west. With the naked eye, all I could make out of the squid mills was a glint of sun off metal and a suggestion of movement. With the aid of a spyglass, smuggled up from my rooms, I could just discern the unsubmerged portions of the squid mills: the tops of the huge metal cages, the great white pontoons that separated and supported them. Around these cages, from which I often fancied I saw a tip of tentacle creep out, strode the squiders in their red boots, overalls, thick gloves, and wide-brimmed hats. The single-minded attention they paid to their tasks only underscored the dangers of farming the squid.
Those men assigned to the deeper parts of the river, which contained completely submerged squid cages, used “squilts”—long, thick stilts that required great strength to maneuver through the turgid water.