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.
The top half of the squilts could be detached for use as a weapon against either the captive squid or the wild squid that often attempted to free their brethren.
From my vantage, through the selective eye of the spyglass, those squiders in the deepest parts of the river seemed miraculous—“walking” on the water, the squilts completely submerged as they trudged along, gaze intent upon the swirling silt below them. The job of the squider took a tremendous sensitivity, for they “felt” the water with the squilts, searching for the vibrations of wild squid, sometimes sweeping special hand-held hooks through the water, hoping to encounter rubbery flesh. When the caged squid were used as bait for juvenile wild King Squid, the squiders would herd the wild squid into nets using nothing but the hooks and squilts. On one occasion, I observed a sudden frantic splashing of water, the suggestion of a large, dark body shooting up from the river bed, followed by a squider suddenly disappearing, his squilts still upright and vibrating…
Little wonder that to be “put through the squid mill” still means accomplishments gained through tedious yet dangerous labor. As we were driven through the local village on our way to the Truffidian Cathedral, I would often hear the children of the squiders singing: Oh, stop the squid mill, stop it, I pray
For I have been tending squid a good deal today
My head is quite sore from the thrashing I’ve received.
And my squilty bosses ache so much that sorely I am grieved.
Oh, stop the squid mill, stop it today, and I’ll be relieved.
For a long time, stuck in that library for so many months, forbidden by my mother to go outside, I wanted to be a squider. Alas, eventually the village children got their wish and the squid mills died out. I turned to squidology and the library became associated not with squid mills but with a series of other banal events.
RELATED SQUIDLORE
Many of the folk remedies attributed to lesser squid do not apply to the King Squid, which seems oddly resistant to being of use. For example, the old remedy in which one “lays a squid on the feet of the afflicted” to cure toothache or headache would take on a nightmarish context should a two-ton squid be winched into position and dropped on the patient! Nor does the ground beak of the King Squid, mixed with wine, stimulate sexual prowess or draw the poison from the bite of a venomous snake.
This also applies to the “squid cap”—a popular folk remedy to cure headaches and insomnia, immortalized in these lines from a play by Machel:
