The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

I walked in the cloister with the abbess. It was very like my old refuge of Espmoss, pervaded with order, calm and quiet purpose: I felt at home. Polnisha, the deity they worshipped there, was once, the abbess told me, a foreign goddess from beyond the forest.

  ‘Then it has an end?’ I asked, excited by my thoughts of trees thinning out and the needle-strewn ground giving way to meadows or to an empty strand on which the sea dropped its bounteous waves.

  ‘Our books tell us that it is not boundless,’ she replied. ‘I, myself, believe that the forest is a fog which fills the mind and not a wood at all.’

  ‘I have walked in it!’

  ‘Have you?’ She smiled.

  ‘It moves!’

  ‘Does it? Did not you?’

  ‘It appears to be both beyond and on the near side of the Plains,’ I ventured.

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ she returned.

  After supper, I entertained the nuns. They were not nuns in the strict sense of my old order but hand maidens or lay sisters. Those are better descriptions. They were less devout than true nuns but no less merry. I stood up before a crowd of them and went through my repertoire of tricks with sunbeams, moonbeams, silver doves and golden cockerels. I extracted yards of ivy from Peder’s ear and conjured a worthless, sparkling necklace (which I told her to keep) into the bosom of the prettiest nun. How they all laughed when she felt it lying cold and slippery between her breasts!

  ‘Asmodée!’ I said to Peder, ‘If only I dare offend the abbess and let that trinket be my herald and not my ambassador! – but I must play the harmless fellow, a travelling prestidigitator who has no vices.’

  I cultivated the abbess, attending on her assiduously. So, though I never asked her name, I wormed out all her secrets until I knew the routine of the nunnery as well as she. She showed me the abbey’s extensive mulberry groves and its wide acres planted with flax in rows as neat as partings. She conducted me on a tour of the retting-pits and the cool barns where the silkworm caterpillars and, later, their cocoons, were reared.

  ‘This place, she said, ‘is now Polnisha’s home. She watches over the sowing of the flax, its growth and its reaping. It is she who taught our ancestors what to do with the silk caterpillars they found in the mulberry trees.’ She showed me the goddess’s reaping hook and her bobbin of pure silk thread, which were kept in a shrine upon whose wooden doors was carved the grinning, fleshless face of Death, and she showed me the doors of Polnisha’s house. I walked around the outside of this building, a large and elegant house lit by arched windows too high above the ground to spy through. I spent time in the abbess’s private library where I read about the goddess and also about women’s deepest desires, knowledge I kept in my heart to use. In truth, I was lost. I did not understand Valdine’s jingle. It seemed no more to me than a silly love poem or a child’s skipping song and I told Peder to prepare the horses so that we might ride out to the Rock. The prettiest nun pursued me, continually finding herself wherever I was. Polnisha, she said, was sometimes a goddess of love, especially by night. Then the goddess rose from her bed to bathe.

  ‘I expect you will watch her from the window of your cell,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no. Polnisha stays in her house. I shall look out, in case I see you.’

  ‘Look well,’ I said, and kissed her hands.

  I had no intention of visiting her cell. Nemione was my love. Whatever dreams and desires she sent me, I must bear. I sat in my own cell and pondered the nun’s words. She meant the moon, of course: the moon rose from her daytime bed. Unless, in Polnisha’s house some vision or manifestation was displayed, a revelation germane to my purpose – I went hastily out and walked about until I saw the nun.

  ‘Walk with me,’ I said.

  We strolled in the cloister and the cloister garth and I led her out into the nunnery garden. We walked beneath the walls of the goddess’s house.

  ‘The abbess tells me that this wonderful building is the holy of holies,’ I said. ‘She showed me the doors – what labour, what art went into the making of them! Would a mere man, a traveller such as myself, be allowed a peep at what he supposes must be finer work within?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I must tell you: I am not really a conjuror but an architect in the service of Manderel Valdine, Prince of Pargur and Archmage of Malthassa. Could you accommodate such a man?’

  My double meaning was intended – an unsubtle weapon. I drew her into the lee of a buttress and kissed her. I found the cheap necklace I had summoned tucked inside the neck of her habit and played with it while I paid her worthless compliments.

  ‘I know where the key is kept,’ she suddenly said. ‘I will show it you –’

  ‘If,’ said I, ‘I promise to come to you in your cell? Very well. A bargain, then!’

  We sealed it, naturally, with more kisses. One might kiss an aunt, or a friend. Therefore I did not lose faith with Nemione.

  Petrified, or turned to stone: the furnishings and artefacts, even the food laid out in baskets, the baskets themselves, seemed sculpted from marble. Polnisha’s house contained everything she might require from agate books to a deep, onyx bath. Her mirror had been fashioned from a sheet of red-veined porphyry. The goddess herself, the guardian of the flax crop and the silent cocoons of silk, lay grey-faced in a granite bed and was covered over with a length of cloth whose warp was linen and whose weft was silk. It was the only flexible, organic thing in the House beside the dancing flames in the lamps and myself, who knelt in the shadows and was petrified, suspecting magic but unable to sense it.

  ‘You must not stay there,’ the nun had whispered as she took the key from its simple hiding place in a barrel of flour. ‘One glance to satisfy your curiosity before – oh, Koschei! – you return to me. And replace the key.’

  I had already determined to wait in the House until daylight came to dispel any lingering evil or enchantment I might behold. I knelt on the cold floor, as motionless as the sleeping goddess, my hand on the hilt of my sword. Outside, the world waited for the moon: I saw her light grow gradually until it filled the windows and moved in bright shafts over the floor. The lamps burned low. In a moment I should fall asleep, a false knight keeping failed vigil. I heard a pin drop and, following on its tinny echo, the voice of a girl:

  ‘God rot!’

  Putting her stately mask and her coverlet aside, the goddess climbed from her bed and stood beside it, yawning. She had long, brown hair and was dressed like the peasants of the region in colourful weaves. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and began to walk about her house, examining the various stone objects until, coming to a table laden with a counterfeit feast, she snapped her fingers and picked up a carven loaf. I saw the loaf turn soft and brown in her hand. The girl bit into it hungrily. Crumbs fell upon the floor; I smelled new-baked bread. Then, with a muted gasp, the girl dropped the loaf and rushed back to the bed. From some recess in its rigid pillows she took out a box made of pale, luminescent alabaster. Now that she had it safe again, she again walked about her house until she stood beside the bath where, after placing the box on the rim of the bath, she snapped her fingers twice. Water flowed out of the empty air, and filled the bath. She undressed swiftly and stepped into the tub. I, straining out of the shadows to see, was far more interested in her box than in her body, wanting love and in need of lust though I was.

  ‘Now!’ I said to myself, ‘here is a fine opportunity.’

  Water streamed from Polnisha’s face and hair. She looked up at me and said,

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Koschei the Pretender.’

  ‘That’s a meaningless title! I am the Living Goddess.’ She lay back and floated in the water. ‘You can touch me if you like, but I won’t promise to cure you.’

  ‘I am not ill. Besides, another woman waits for me.’

  ‘One of those stupid nuns? They must be as bored as I am – but you are a handsome young man. You are not a farmer.’

  ‘I am a magician.’

 
‘Who borrows his skills from Urthamma. Watch me!’

  Three times she snapped her fingers. Immediately, a cockatrice appeared on the rim of the bath. It hissed at me and set its foot on the alabaster box. Her ridiculous trick annoyed me but it was a clear sign that the box, or its content, was valuable.

  ‘Watch me!’ I said. I made the water in her bath turn red and, while she splashed it contemptuously at me and prepared a fresh insult in her mind, I drew my sword and spitted her conjuration. Having no corporeal body, it disappeared at once. Before she could snap her fingers again, I served her in the same swift way. Her blood was the same colour as my illusory dye. I wiped the blade of my sword clean on her discarded dress, picked up the box and fled with it.

  Peder had the horses ready in a trice. We left the place without disturbing anyone: women who pray and who have, therefore, clear consciences, sleep as soundly as the dead.

  This adventure of mine was the cause of a war. When the dead goddess (a paradoxical impossibility) was discovered, the men of Flaxberry pursued us. We observed their rage in safety, from the vantage point of Frostfeather’s basket, and I made a spell which dropped hail on them. They fired a few arrows at us, but we were out of reach of their feathered sticks and sailed on, unharmed. They had falsely concluded that I was an agent of the Imandi, the Rider of the Red Horse, chief of the Ima, and careered furiously back to Flaxberry to make their preparations for the first assault. A few thousands died. It was a small war, a long time ago.

  Isolated from such dangers and passive in Frostfeather’s floating basket, I was at leisure to examine the box. Hideous octupi and other denizens of the ocean were carved upon it in cameo and, within a garland of kelp, the words the Archmage had told me I should find: Prospero’s Book. Other words were traced beneath this inscription,

  Deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I’ll drown my book.

  ‘What does it mean, Peder?’ I said, without expecting a reply. The Navigator was, as usual, occupied with keeping his fire burning at a steady rate. I waited a moment and opened the box – it had no catch or fastening.

  There was a book inside. Manderel Valdine had instructed me to burn what I found there. Fortune had favoured me with the means, to hand, but first I opened the book, thinking it must be the journal or other secret writing of an ancient sage. I was disappointed. There had been writing in the book but it was all faded and illegible, worn away by the salt water into which the book had been cast. The pages had also suffered a sea-change and wavering marks like seaweed covered them, and the dried tracks of sea-snails, and fishes’ scales. I closed the book and some grains of sand fell from it over my hands.

  ‘Let us rise a little higher, Peder,’ I said. ‘Here is fresh fuel.’

  I placed the old book in Frostfeather’s furnace. Soon, it was consumed, and nothing of it except some ashy flakes which blew away in the wind, remained.

  ‘Valdine is dead,’ I told Peder.

  I decided to keep the box. It was a pretty trophy and should go in my Memory Palace so that when I mused there in my dotage I would recall these long-ago events with perfect clarity. I turned to close its lid and saw, perched on the box’s rim, a small yellow manikin about two inches high. It had neither face nor ears but seemed able to see and hear me easily for, as soon as I stretched out my hand to take it, it skipped away.

  ‘Peder!’

  My servant joined in the chase. We swung wildly about under the balloon. The manikin was nimble and ran three times about the basket while we, slow heavy creatures, turned to look for it. It danced on the top of the furnace and ran along my sword; but it could fly no more than we could and had no way of escaping to the ground. I caught it in my hands and felt it flutter hard against them like a trapped moth. I opened my hands a crack, enough to see it. This was the soul of the Archmage, not the book. Perhaps I could squeeze it to death.

  Peder peered at it.

  ‘It wears something round its neck,’ he said. ‘Can you not see it?’

  ‘Ah, yes!’ It was a length of wispy thread as fine as a hair. I parted my hands a fraction more and Peder managed to get hold of the thread. He held it between finger and thumb and the manikin dangled from it.

  ‘Give it to me!’ I swung the tiny creature about in its noose. A thin, high-pitched note came from it, the whine of a gnat. I swung it again; again, it screamed. When I had let it revolve twice more it hung limp. I held its slack body and pulled harder on the thread. It never moved and I dropped it into the fire.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘the Archmage is dead.’

  ‘Long live the Archmage!’ Peder smiled at me.

  ‘I think we have some way yet to go,’ I cautioned him.

  We flew over the forest at a height no greater than three thousand feet. We could not cross the Altaish without breathing cowls and resigned ourselves to a journey of many months. Sometimes, we landed in a wide clearing or on a river bank and picked, or killed, our food in the plenteous larder there. The journey was one of risk and tedium, but its slow passages and privations were too small to trouble a man of action like myself, or like the self I was then.

  Some journeys end in meetings, the happy resolution of earlier partings. Some end in disappointment, others in death; but those we choose to remember, to the extent of keeping diaries of what passed or writing long meditations on, the better to recall every event – those are preludes to a better life thereafter and, sometimes, to fresh journeys. I have known men who spent their lives on journeys, whether abroad in the forest and mountain country, or at home amongst their books, and I have often thought that these peregrinations of the mind bring the greatest reward.

  Traitors may journey, and the virtuous; soldiers, magicians, merchants, the Rom; favourite sons and prodigals: each has his goal. Mine, in that spring’s latter days, was all I had ever desired – fame, wealth, position, name, a beginning to the rest of my life, Nemione – and this great goal and grail of mine waited for me in Pargur, a yellow diamond far below: Summer had come to melt the city’s ice and turn her glittering roofs to pools which caught and held the sunshine. Peder and I were dazzled but, looking up, saw white streamers of cloud far above us, the heralds of continuing good weather. The ethereal wind drove them and, willy nilly, our fragile craft on toward the sea.

  ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’ said Peder morosely. ‘There is my house, and my garden with its pear tree and fountain. Now, if it were possible to row Frostfeather! – be of good cheer, Master: the updraught from the cliff will turn us back and we shall land safely in the castle courtyard.’

  The current of warm air at the edge of the land threw us violently upward. Peder muffled his fires and we began slowly to descend. I saw Castle Sehol on the starboard side; already it towered above us and we heard the hubbub of city and castle as we sank. I glimpsed a scrap of golden cloth hanging limply from the flagstaff on the Devil’s Bastion.

  ‘Look, Peder, the Archmage’s oriflamme flies,’ I said. ‘Surely a regent has been appointed?’

  ‘I am not a mage,’ he replied. ‘Augury is a branch of your trade.’

  So, coming light as thistledown to earth, we entered both Pargur and Castle Sehol unopposed. We were not enemies, or were not perceived as such: what connection could there be between the persons of the Archmage’s Ambassador and his loyal Navigator and the death last winter of the Archmage? We mounted to his living quarters: these, I intended to secure before I made my verbal assault upon the Council and my intellectual assault upon the secrets of Manderel Valdine’s pele tower upon the promontory.

  The ante-rooms and staircases were deserted; no doubt the regent had a different suite. I discoursed on the paintings and the architecture as we walked and Peder, falling in with my mood, asked to be given one of the many portraits of the Queen of Love as a memento of our journey and our partnership.

  ‘The Lady will welcome you with open arms!’ he said.

  ‘You think so?’ I allowed myself to be persuaded, sketching
in my mind new apparel for Nemione my bride.

  There was a guard on the door, one young soldier whose air of boredom radiated tangibly from him. I greeted him,

  ‘Hilloa! It is a tedious task to guard an empty room!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I have come to survey and itemize Master Valdine’s effects.’

  ‘He said nothing, sir. I am not to admit anyone.’

  ‘Come! Such devotion to duty is very well when the master lives but now that the Archmage is dead, what harm is there in admitting his friend to his old quarters?’

  ‘Dead, Sir?’ He became zealous and barred my way with his pike. Another moment and he would be shouting for his fellows.

  ‘Was the Archmage’s illness a long one?’ I asked.

  ‘He is in agony, Sir. We all pray for an end to it, but he will not give up. He writes the daily orders even now, Sir, sitting up in bed.’

  I dared show nothing either of my alarm or of my amazement.

  ‘May I not enter to pray with him?’

  ‘No, Sir. Any who wish to speak with him must report to the guard below. I do not understand how you walked past them.’

  ‘In the same way I entered Pargur in the winter of last year. Like this,’ I said, as I concentrated all the force of my remarkable mind upon his dull brain. He met me with an unscaleable, blank wall.

  ‘You will admit me. I am Koschei.’

  ‘Never, Sir.’

  ‘Very well – but you will put down your pike and draw your sword. That’s the way. Now, on guard.’

  It took me three minutes to despatch him. The guards came running but the commotion was over and the stubborn guard dead at me feet. I did not know if I could quell four men but, fortunately, they were led by Baptist Olburn, their captain and the castle’s torturer. I had not seen him since the old days, when he was Proctor in the Cloister, and a cruel ruffian to boot. Gathering my courage, I hailed him.

  ‘Why, Olburn – you would not harm your old whipping-post, your little whining dog?’ I put my bloodied hands up to my face and whimpered like a frightened child.