The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘Georges Dinard, Father Paon: what’s in a name?’ said Lèni. ‘Pay attention!’

  The man in the cup spoke. ‘This is justice,’ he said. ‘My final reward. I shall soon be with them, the beautiful dead.’ A thunderous noise rushed from the bowl of the cup and it trembled and shook in Lèni’s hands. The face moved suddenly forward and fell out of sight. Guy recoiled. He could see past Georges Paon’s bloody neck and headless trunk into a huge and crowded square. The people there were silent and motionless and then a great murmur swept through the crowd as a group of clouds, so suffused with rose and gold they looked like distant palaces, floated across the sky and three white doves flew down and perched on Paon’s body.

  ‘When he opened his eyes, he was in Paradise,’ whispered Lèni. ‘A whole man once more.’

  Guy lay back. ‘Give me justice,’ he said. ‘A reward for my endurance.’

  He closed his eyes and, surrendering to the opium, walked on down the nave of the cathedral until he came to the altar steps. The sun shone in all its glory through the east window above him. Beyond was a kingdom of light which, when he floated out into it, overwhelmed the mighty building and pulled him into a vortex. He spun there unprotesting for an age.

  A small light glowed. Guy saw that it was the flame of Koschei’s lantern and that the old man himself was in the room with him, an unfamiliar room which was neither Lèni’s silk-lined purgatory nor the first room in the Memory Palace. Koschei was intent on his task of arranging some objects on a table and Guy, peering over his shoulder, was able to distinguish them, one from another: a school exercise book lay next to a dark red ball, and a long necklace of cowry shells snaked between the two.

  ‘Hah!’ said the magician suddenly, ‘I felt your presence with me some time ago. Age and experience does not moderate your curiosity.’

  ‘Those are my things.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘Open the book.’

  Koschei held up the book and turned its pages with fingers whose nails had grown so long that those which were not filed into sharp bodkins were twisted in upon themselves and curled like ram’s horns.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It says “Chemistry” on the cover but there is a story inside, my first. It is about a boy and an eagle.’

  ‘It says “Alchemy” and the story inside is my first. It is about a fair young girl who bears more than a passing resemblance to the Lady Nemione.’

  ‘The ball then. It is a cricket ball and it was given me by my father.’

  ‘Nonsense. It is not a ball but a pomander, look. Smell it! As for the shells, I stole them from Nemione (she used them when she was learning to divide and multiply) and strung them myself.’

  ‘That is a necklace I bought in Fiji for my wife.’

  Koschei held up his lantern. They stared at each other. The magician combed his beard with his nails and Guy pushed back the lock of hair which always fell into his eyes when he was annoyed. He was surprised when Koschei smiled.

  ‘A truce,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we must agree to share these mnemonic devices.’

  Guy nodded, but his sense of honour was not satisfied.

  ‘Is this the second room?’ he asked.

  ‘The second in the sequence, although the first to be built. I constructed a new shell about the original building when I moved it to Pargur.’

  ‘You did not move it! How could you? The Memory Palace stands in the Virtue Garden behind the Cloister of Espmoss.’

  ‘No. I moved it – though I left the garden. It was no easy task: a challenge to my powers. Because a thing is difficult and terrifying, neither I nor you avoid it. If you look behind the door there, you will find something which challenges you.’

  The door was low and narrow, but when Guy stood in front of it, it seemed large. It was like the cellar door in his father’s house and like the door of the cupboard where the suitcases were kept, and like that door at school before which the choirboy Chris Young had stood in fear. The latch, however, was made of iron. It was stiff, but he pressed it hard. The catch yielded. He did not like the way the door swung out towards him.

  There was nothing behind it but a flat, empty space like a painting of the inside of a cupboard. He challenged it to tell him something. Then he saw the stairs, a steep wooden flight of them ascending into darkness, and he was afraid.

  ‘You must go up,’ said Koschei, behind him.

  ‘Will you make me?’

  ‘You will force yourself.’

  Guy set his foot on the first stair and lifted the second after it. There was no handrail and as he went higher, he feared the drop; but this was a minor emotion, compared with his fear of the staircase itself. Above him he saw a turn. A sourceless light illuminated it and nothing else. The space around the stair was completely dark. He came to the turn and climbed again. A door confronted him. It was a door like the one below, exactly alike, and he opened it with sweating hands. The gale that was his own breathing surged about him. He climbed. When he reached the top he would find the answer. He climbed until he came to the turning. He climbed to the door and opened it. He climbed the stairs and woke.

  He was in the cupid bed. The amoretti flew lazily, grinning down at him and making obscene gestures with their fat fingers. Even the damaged ones were in the air, flailing their amputated legs. He begged them to be still and the biggest, which wore a garland of rosebuds, hovered over him.

  ‘What is at the top of the stairs?’ he asked it.

  The cherub covered its mouth with the tip of one of its wings and laughed lewdly.

  ‘If you don’t know,’ it said, ‘no one does. Excuse me now. It is about to rain and I would rather keep dry.’ It kicked out vigorously with all its limbs, like a strong baby in a cradle, and flew away.

  Guy heard the rain falling and turned over in the bed. Lèni was approaching, the silver tray in her hands. She put it down beside him and laughed, deep in her throat.

  ‘I have brought you a gift.’

  His two hands lay on the tray, resting there like gangling spiders. He looked at them, lovingly. They were beautiful. He recognized the ridged nail of his left thumb and the old scar from the chisel on the right little finger. His father had forbidden him to use it but, knowing better, he had taken it and, out in the garden, tried to cut the all-important groove in the deck of his toy boat. Otherwise the gun slipped off.

  His hands. Of course, he could not move them; but he could contemplate. The wrists had not healed but the skin and flesh had settled into a damp boss. The bone was rough and splintered where the saw had torn through. There was no pain, just the cold. He could feel the smooth surface of the tray and then the catchy texture of the silk bedspread under his fingers. The hands were moving, all on their own, and Lèni smiled at him. She sat on the bed. He wanted to touch her: a thank-you. In amazement; in wonder and delight, he watched his hands walk to her and climb on to her skirt. The old black dress was also made of silk. He stroked the stuff. His severed hands took hold of hers. He smiled.

  ‘Everything is smooth,’ he said. ‘The silk, your fingers, but the rough skin of my hands catches it like sandpaper.’

  ‘We had to look after our hands,’ she said. ‘So that we did not damage the silk.’

  ‘Did you weave it?’

  ‘No, I used to parcel it up for the buyers from Worth and the other Paris couturiers. Then I became a seamstress myself and sewed the wonderful stuff. Do you know how many silkworms die to make a kilometre of yarn? A thousand, ten thousand? – one, monsieur! It is because of my trade that Paon brought so much soieries in here: the bedclothes, the hangings, the upholstery, my clothes, his – even his drawers!’

  ‘You really are Lèni la Soie?’

  She did not answer his question directly. ‘I have been a long time fading here,’ she said, ‘but I daresay I will last the course. I have given up the blood, though Georges might bring it even now. Who wants eternal youth? All I desire is rest and now that I have told you my tale
it may come. Yes, monsieur, I have aged as you can see, and lost my joie de vivre.’

  ‘Tell me more about the blood. How can it preserve the flesh when it is a fleshly thing itself?’

  ‘Are you Paon? You do not need such a thing. For you, there will be another way.’

  ‘Then tell me: have you seen Paradise?’

  ‘One glimpse as he died. I stood at the back of the crowd, afraid to be discovered, and I saw what passed over him when the doves flew down from the sky. I saw a garden with a little house in it, a house of marble and gilded tiles, though when I questioned my neighbours in the crowd, they had seen nothing but poor Paon dying.’

  ‘That is Koschei’s Memory Palace. In Malthassa.’

  ‘Have you been to Malthassa?’

  ‘In a sense. In so many words, tens of thousands of words.’

  He had expected her body to give some of its warmth to his hands but they stayed cool. She had been beautiful. Now her beauty was of the same kind as his hands’, of life denied and a past preserved like a lovely moth in formalin. The absinthe had destroyed her face and dulled her eyes and her expression. Her mouth remained unravaged, and her small hands. He gripped them tightly with his mind and his hands did what he asked of them.

  ‘This is my reward,’ he said. ‘For endurance. Why did Paon mutilate you?’

  ‘He put his mark on me. He wanted to preserve me for himself. My scars are his. Let go!’

  He freed her hands. Instead, he gripped the silk of her skirt. She unfastened the high neck of her dress: white stuff beneath, lace and laces, the stiffness of a corset. His severed hands followed after hers. He felt them all, successive layers, her disintegrating shrouds, until the ridged flesh of her breasts was underneath his fingers. In between the scars, the skin was smooth. The contrast and the ecstasy of touch, of restored touch, aroused him. The hands squeezed the woman’s breasts while he watched them perform, as might a voyeur.

  ‘Aux innocents les mains pleines,’ he said, laughing at his macabre joke. He expected Lèni to move now, closer to him. He wanted sex; with his dead hands moving as he willed them, he had become a necromancer.

  ‘You are no fool,’ she said. ‘You are a wise man and a magician as well – But too much power is not good for you.’ She looked down at her exposed breasts and at the puckered hands which clung to them. ‘Come, fetishes, it is time to sleep.’ She stood and gently detached the hands, which offered no resistance. They lay passive in her small grip; indeed, he had lost all the sensation their independent activity had given him. She carried them from the room and he, rising quickly to follow her, found the door shut in his face. The brass knob looked slippery and stiff. In vain he tried to hold and turn it with his teeth.

  Nothing had changed despite the weird interlude of touch and feeling which had just passed. He did not know which frightened him most, her words or her control over him. He lay down once more on the bed, in his prison, and closed his eyes in despair.

  He could hear thunder rolling, soft and menacing, far away. He imagined the iron clouds gathering over the vineyards to the north which, he thought, was somewhere on the far side of the room, beyond the wall and beyond other unknown walls.

  Lèni lit the candles.

  ‘This place of shadows,’ she said, ‘this afternoon is truly the anteroom to hell.’

  The thunder was scarcely louder but it waited outside, a ravenous beast. Lèni took up her mending.

  ‘Paon’s holiday shirt,’ she said. ‘I cannot keep up with the decay.’ Guy watched her thread her needle with a fine, blue thread and fit a silver thimble on the middle finger of her right hand. The needle was so small; but she held it confidently and pushed it in and out of the shirt collar.

  ‘How can you do that?’ he said.

  ‘It is not so difficult – if one has hands.’

  ‘Shall I tell you a story?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? It is your trade after all, as this is one of mine.’

  The Archmage spat into the golden cuspidor. The nut I had given him was infested with the eggs of the black worm and now, after swallowing it, he was bringing up tiny gobbets of blood which stained his sputum and convinced me that he would soon die. He coughed loudly and said,

  ‘This is not the Ripe Nut of Wisdom. You have been tricked.’

  ‘No, Archmage, I am not deceived. What the nut is, or was since you have greedily swallowed it whole, surely depends on how it is received: how it is used. If you had bitten into it, you would have seen what it contains – poison.’

  I had not believed what the Om Ren told me when he picked the nut for me and pressed it into my reluctant hand, ‘A fresh intelligence and new wisdom in the world – if you discover how to use the nut!’ but, seeing now before me the pain my act of acceptance was causing the Archmage, I silently praised the wisdom of the Man of the Woods. In a little while, the splendid robes, the castle, the pele tower of Peklo, the infallibility and intellect of Manderel Valdine would be mine.

  He coughed again and spat out more blood.

  ‘You are trying to kill me, Koschei,’ he groaned. ‘You are both dissembler and assassin, as it is written.’

  ‘I would prefer to be remembered as the instrument of your foretold death.’

  ‘It is time,’ Valdine groaned. ‘It is five o’clock on the fifth day of the eleventh month, and this is my seventieth year. The lady Nemione is taking tea with her dwarf in the White Tower and, in the Tower of Silence, Olburn is pressing my faithless son to death.’ His dying eyes glittered and he clutched his stomach and bent forward in agony. ‘Release me!’ He tried to draw deep breaths of the fetid, perfumed air.

  ‘I must help you succeed,’ he gasped. ‘You know the old jingle: “In a bed, in a house, in a street, in a town, in a green province, in a wide country, lies my love”. Think on it. You will know that you have found my soul: that you can at last slay me when you hold in your hand the alabaster box on which is written Prospero’s Book. Open it and burn what you find inside.’

  I leaned eagerly over him.

  ‘I must begin with the “wide country”?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘The widest lands I know in Malthassa are the Plains.’

  ‘Good, good. How you torture me. Go!’

  But I had not finished with him. It pleased me to see him writhe.

  ‘May I take Frostfeather?’

  ‘Why not? You will take my life. Take whatever you need. Only, make haste.’

  I looked about me, at the stone walls and the tapestries, the chests and the blood-red carpet on which the Archmage’s carved chair was set. His Book lay open on a lectern, its covers of human skin held firm in the fingers of a carved monkey, and a long marker of tasselled silk upon it.

  ‘I think – I will take your bookmark!’ I said.

  ‘Spare me that!’

  ‘I will certainly take it.’ I folded the thing with care and laid it in my wallet next to the dyed lock of Nemione’s hair. Then I left the room and strode to the head of the winding stair. The Archmage called me back.

  ‘Against my will, I must advise you,’ he said. ‘Make a secure place in which to hide your own soul. You stand there, brave in your new clothes, strong in body and mind – so young – and ridiculously mortal.’

  The white balloon Frostfeather rose above the city and I, though experiencing still the novice’s sensations of nausea and of time cut off, leaned against the basketwork and looked down. Pargur was already far below. It looked like a diamond pinned to a mantle of green velvet. A margin of blue, the beginning of the ocean, ran along one edge of it; the rest was lost in mist. But we, rising above these lowly visual delights, came out upon a sunlit plain where the great illusions of nature, her ever-changing, insubstantial towers and palaces made an immense city many times more fascinating than Pargur.

  Peder turned from his work with furnace and sandbags.

  ‘We shall rise another ten thousand feet,’ he said. ‘You must put on your furs and strap your air-cowl to your h
ead.’

  I was already clad in woollen breeches, stout boots and a leather overcoat. He passed me a long fur robe which was lined with the soft skins of unborn lambs, a warm stole for my neck, and gloves. I put them all on and he handed me the cowl or breathing apparatus. I pulled it over my head and secured its straps. They were narrow and they fastened with several small brass buckles. The front of the cowl was a mask with a window of clear mica to see through and an ugly muzzle like the jaw of the Om Ren himself. Inside it were contained the materials which enabled one to breathe in a rarefied atmosphere, a quantity of dried sholgirse and seven pulverized geodes mined from the great asteroid which fell on Pargur in the Year of the Warrior. When mixed together these exuded air. A small lever broke the membrane which separated the two components and this, I operated. The device was then good for two hours. Peder donned his own protective clothing and we stared at each other, two fur-clad apes in a flying basket thirty thousand feet above the friendly ground.

  I breathed easily and surveyed my aerial realm. To step from the balloon and walk away across those golden fields would not have been a difficult feat. They looked as solid as the pavements outside Espmoss.

  All at once the clouds parted and revealed the measureless forest. The clouds dissolved. Ahead of us the forest gave way to bastions of snow-encrusted rock, and, on the basketrim next to my fur-covered hands, crystals of frost built themselves into miniature battlements. The stays from which the basket hung turned silver, but Frostfeather’s silk envelope was unaffected, warmed by the fire which drove her and which made a pleasant play of red shadows on her snowy sides.

  ‘The frost is pretty,’ remarked Peder, ‘and deadly. We must risk it to cross the Altaish mountains. Overland, the journey would take a year.’

  ‘I know it!’ I said fervently. ‘You forget, I travelled to Pargur from Espmoss.’

  ‘Perhaps the journey would take you only eleven months, sir,’ Peder said. It seemed to me that he sneered, but I dismissed the notion from my mind. It was irrelevant in our lofty situation.