The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘I mean to show you what a sham love is,’ Nemione said.

  Her gaze met mine; once more, those brilliant eyes unmanned me and I felt myself weak as water. I looked away and, in so avoiding her blue glance, caught sight of the guard in the corridor. His studded jesserant, pike and leather helmet made virile trespass in Nemione’s world of gramarye and I thought of my hideous mentor of the forest, the Om Ren and, taking strength from the memory, I resolved to fight. I stirred the liquid which had been the ice-cold sea-maiden with my fingers and my mind. The ice began to reform.

  ‘And I,’ I said, ‘will prove love’s strength and infallibility.’

  Time trod slowly but I had no idea of its passing. The head of the mermaid re-formed under my command, exactly as it had been before. I was pleased, not only with my power to make an image of Nemione’s familiar, but also with my perseverance. I waved my hand to indicate that Nemione should take her turn. The icy surface of the mermaid’s brow reflected her azure concentration and she blushed delightfully with her effort. Tiny beads of moisture grew upon her brow and her upper lip. I wished I might kiss them away.

  In the dish, the mermaid’s features leached slowly away until she was water. I took my turn once more: the mermaid’s cold face returned. We struggled long, Nemione and I, the dish between us. At last, we were exhausted and there was neither ice nor water in the dish, but a mush which was not one nor the other, continually in flux. Nemione closed her eyes in weariness for an instant – a breath, a sigh – and I, through a mist of failed concentration and imminent megrim, willed the head into being. Patiently, it rose up from the freezing water and returned my gaze.

  ‘Your try, Lady,’ I said.

  Nemione bowed her head. She sat unhappily in my dominion but did not attempt escape. On the contrary, she was so quiet and tearful that I stretched an errant hand across the table to hold hers and comfort her. She recoiled from me.

  ‘The weird Child is mine,’ she said sullenly. ‘Come, my daughter.’ She beckoned to the fishy imp which left my side to kneel at hers.

  ‘It serves and obeys you, certainly, and the energy you used in fashioning it makes it your slave. It is obliged to you for its very existence.’

  ‘All those, yes; but I gave birth to it – as other women do. It was born in the spring, while you were away.’

  Fear and its companion, rage, alerted me but I tempered them.

  ‘Who dared touch you?’ I said quietly. ‘What obscene incubus invaded the sanctuary of your room and your body to father it?’

  ‘It is Manderel’s Child, Koschei. I agreed to bear it for him and, when it was a year old, to give it him for his sole use. Listen! I will tell you what passed between us. It is not as you think.

  ‘Manderel wrote to me, no love letter this nor poem, but a heartfelt and servile request: if he found a way by which I might painlessly bear his Child without the customary intercourse, he would free me from all obligation, past and future, to him and let me go to Castle Lorne.

  ‘One winter’s day, when I was swimming in the hot baths in the castle gardens, my maidservant came to me. She brought me a legal parchment and a small bottle like a perfume vial. I stared at them both for a long while. The document was the agreement between Manderel Valdine and myself, to bear his Child under the conditions (which were specified) of his request. The bottle contained the last of his seed. I thought, it will be weak stuff given his case; most likely it is dead already. I called for a pen and signed; then, as the document instructed, I tipped the seed in its vile liquor into the pool with me. I felt nothing, though I swam and lay there for two hours. When I was dressed I went about my affairs as usual, continuing my studies in magic, music and philosophy. I held court over my lovelorn subjects in the afternoons. Soon I knew that Manderel’s last vain mix of magic and matter had worked. I was with child and I sent him a note of one word, “Success.”

  ‘I carried the Child two months and felt it quicken. It was born after three months had passed, giving me no more pain than does a surfeit of good food on a feast-day: a little white slimy thing no bigger than your thumb which yet had the strength to crawl on to my leg and, thence, to my belly – nay, further. I gave it suck. It was my babe. I fed it every hour for two days; by then, it had grown a blue skin and was as long as your arm. It hurt me with its sharp teeth when I nursed it.

  ‘“You must be fed meat,” I said to it. “You grow apace and I can no longer support you with my milk.” It spoke its first word then: “Fish” and fish was brought for it, stewed in milk. It refused to eat, crying still for “Fish” and so I sent for carpling from the fishponds and these it devoured, starting at the head and working down the body of each fish until it had eaten five. It grew again, almost as big as it is now. It walked and ran about my room and sang with the voice of a young river.’

  I stared at her as if she were a gorgon and had mesmerized me.

  ‘Does it have a name?’ I asked. I thought a good name bestowed upon it might mitigate its ugliness and turn it into something I could tolerate. Then I would disregard these loathsome matters, court Nemione until she deferred to me and, in wedding and possessing her, dispel the last vestige of Manderel Valdine.

  ‘I was to call it Gaster in memory of his traitorous son. But it seems to be female and so, it is nameless. What should I call it? Destiny or Hope? Belle or Brute?’

  ‘Why did you agree?’

  ‘It was the better of my desperate choices and I reasoned that what Manderel asked for was neither marriage nor a lover’s privilege, but something abstract – harmless.’

  ‘Pretty one!’ she called suddenly. The Fish-Child stood up and twirled upon its finny feet. It danced and sidled up to her and she let it climb into her lap and rest its ugly head upon her breast.

  ‘There, there,’ she said, and held its bloated face to her white bosom. I could not sit still opposite her and watch. I rose, jumped from the dais, and walked about the room. The statues, which long ago had stopped playing and retired to their places, eyed me cruelly. I turned about and went back to Nemione. Her savage Fish-Child still nestled in her lap.

  ‘I think I have won, Koschei,’ she said. ‘Erchon!’

  Her dwarf took the Child from her and hoisted it on his back. They left the room together, she towering over the silver dwarf who carried her misbegotten offspring pick-a-back as if it were the legitimate child of a lawful marriage made before God.

  I could have smiled at my defeat if Erchon, pressing his suit, had overcome her maiden’s pride to win her. Or raped her so that she bore his mongrel! Tragedy would have made her a heroine not this base conspirator. Her virgin body brought into being the vile miscegenation conceived in Valdine’s corrupt mind; I could not bear to think of their perverted union in the pool.

  I ran from the Court of Love to the castle gate, forcing the guide to hurry through the maze before me. The misleading reflections in the prism blinded me; without Estragon to lead me I would have been for ever lost. I hurled myself through the changeable streets, not caring where I went: there was some relief in action. Instinct alone brought me to my own door and I stumbled up the stairs, pushing past Ivo who came out to greet me. In the sanctuary of my room, I sat down and wept.

  I sat in my room. Bereft. Shamed. It took two days for me to understand which was the worst condition. I called for food and fresh clothes. Then, with inner and outer man refreshed, I descended to the lowest and most vile level of Pargur’s changeable territory. Here I wasted a week in debauchery.

  In Nether Pargur, to which zealots liken Hell saying it cannot be more depraved, I swung with a harlot on a glass trapeze, swam in milk with another, and rogered a third while I watched a troupe of young men dance in travesty. I think I did these things although there is no record in the Memory Palace. I found lodgings in a house of ill-fame and there lay on a gilded sofa smoking the pipe of oblivion until I soared up out of Pargur and its mutabilities and entered the world of dreams and make-believe.

  Erchon was wait
ing for me when at last I came home. He smiled wryly when he saw me.

  ‘I am here for old times’ sake,’ he said.

  ‘Those uncomplicated days are long gone,’ I answered. ‘What confronts me now is a maze of new ideas. I must live by my wits, Erchon, to win. My first task is to discover the way to the Archmage’s pele tower.’

  ‘Peklo,’ he said. ‘That conundrum is the reason for my visit. Here is my hand – in comradeship: I can only guide you part of the way.’

  ‘My success is in your interest?’

  ‘Your victory is of great interest to all dwarves and men.’

  ‘And Nemione? Your loyal service?’

  ‘You know that I, too, love her vainly, Master Usurper. But it is not wounded vanity or disappointed desire which prompt me. Pargur will vanish if the complex tides of its being are subject to wilful female magic alone. The city needs an Archmage.

  ‘I will help you; but I will not swear allegiance nor shall I desert my Lady. When my short scene is done, I shall return to Castle Lorne.’

  ‘How do you propose to help me, Erchon?’

  ‘I am not an indifferent swordsman, when one is needed, and I have a good sense of direction. Also, I know the whereabouts of the map which shows the way to Peklo.’

  ‘You know it? What good fortune!’

  ‘As long as I give you my knowledge, Master – and telling brings its own problems. The map can only be in one place and that is in the matter that was the Archmage.’

  ‘It no longer exists. Peder fed his butchered body to the pye-dogs.’

  ‘Then, Master Koschei, you must indeed use your wits.’

  Thus Erchon condemned me to many more inactive days of thought. Though Ivo went abroad on my errands, I did not move from my rooms until I had a scheme and then, I hesitated. Soon, it rained, light and successive summer showers which drove the citizens on the street below my window into the shelter of the shops and taverns. I went out to the fishmongers and, from thence, a parcel beneath my arm, to the water meadows beside the River Lytha where I sat beneath a willow tree and waited.

  Ivo, my third eye, had every day observed Erchon strolling with a small companion beside the river. Soon, from my leafy shelter, I saw him coming. The other, who could have been his dwarf-wife or any comrade of his race, was muffled in a cloak. I stepped out into their path.

  ‘Do you swim with it as well?’ I said.

  Erchon caught hold of the Child so that it should not take fright and run away.

  ‘I see that you have reached your conclusion, Master Usurper,’ he said.

  ‘I mean to prove my suppositions at the least. Will it sit under the tree?’

  ‘It is a shy thing but it loves to be entertained, and I think you have the best means of entertaining it in your parcel. Come, Sprat, let us sit down and talk with this gentleman.’

  ‘Sprat?’

  ‘My name only. My Lady, though she dotes on the Child, will not give it one.’

  The Child watched apprehensively with open mouth and sharp teeth on view. Its thin hair had been dressed in plaits and it wore a sumptuous gown of the kind its mother loved. Its finned feet showed beneath the embroidered hem.

  ‘Why does she not push it in the river?’ I whispered to Erchon.

  ‘Master, she is woman!’

  ‘I suppose every mother loves her child.’ I undid the string which tied my parcel and unfolded the several layers of paper to reveal a plump young smolt. Nemione’s Child cried out at the sight, a strange and forlorn whistle like that of the lone otter I once heard on a moonlit stretch of the Esp at home. I offered it the fish and turned away, for I still could scarce endure to behold it and I knew that if I saw it eat the raw fish, I must leave. The noise of its gulpings and tearings was enough.

  ‘She is satisfied,’ Erchon said. ‘Turn this way, or she will be offended. She is more sensitive than she looks.’

  ‘She? It,’ I said, but I turned about to see the creature baring its teeth at me.

  ‘She smiles,’ said Erchon.

  I bared my own teeth in reply and, swallowing my disgust, spoke to the Child.

  ‘You father was a noble man,’ I told it, ‘but he is dead. (Does it understand me, Erchon?) I am also a magician who, since he cannot talk with Manderel Valdine, must needs visit you – all that is left of the greatest mage.’

  The teeth remained uncovered.

  ‘Well, then, will you let me hold your hand in mine for a while so that I may get an impression of your father’s greatness?’

  The teeth were covered now, by the goldfish lips. The head moved up and down.

  Erchon spoke for the creature: ‘“Yes.”’

  ‘Why doesn’t it reply? It understands me.’

  ‘Fish have no speech organs.’

  ‘Then why did Valdine not get an articulate child?’

  ‘Who knows the mind of an archmage? Perhaps, because he was so weak, he failed, and this unfinished creature was all he could engender. You must know that every man climbs the successive steps of creation in the womb.’

  Willing courage into my veins, I held out my left hand and Nemione’s ill-gotten scion extended a webbed mockery: I felt its cold, damp skin against mine and could not suppress a shudder. To my horror, it stroked my face with its other hand.

  ‘She thinks you are warm and would comfort you,’ said Erchon. I closed my eyes. The fishy hand lay quietly in mine and I felt, faint as the heartbeat of a mouse, the shadow of Valdine’s memory stir. I saw him from a great way off and as he was in the Otherworld, seated on a stone at the bottom of an echoing well.

  ‘It works!’ I whispered to Erchon and immediately cursed myself, for the vision disappeared at the eager sound of my voice.

  Thereafter I met Erchon and the weird Child, for which Nemione had no name but which the dwarf called Sprat, each day, and each time I brought it a choice, whole fish. By night, I read in my books, seeking a precedent for what I had to do. A week passed. The Child remaining passive, I progressed (if the word will suffice to describe my disquiet) so that I was able to sit her on my knee and so receive a strong impression of her dead, once-potent sire.

  On the eighth day I persuaded Erchon to leave me alone with the Child, which liked to play in the leafy tent beneath the willow tree. I gave him money for ale, and promises, and, while he drank in the nearest tavern, I sat with the Child in my arms and thought about what I must do next. On the ninth day Erchon left me as soon as my money was in his hand. The willow tree hid my base actions from the world but, to be the safer, I cast a pall of silence over the Child and myself.

  The she-shaman, Katsura, once called up the spirit of an alraun which had been confined a thousand years in hell. She clothed his ash-root image in the simulacra of male garments, and fed it on bread and wine. The image woke and moved, but it would not speak to Katsura nor tell her the secrets she longed to know. Katsura laboured hard and cut a new image, man-sized, from a living ash. On this, she resolved to work her strongest magic, of carnal longing and the fulfilment of desire.

  I took my last precautions, which were to tie its sash tight about the Child’s mouth and bind its hands with the ribbons from its hair. Then, though I did not know what I should find beneath its long skirts, I lifted them, and forced it. There were orifices like those of a woman. This was the magic Katsura had used; to make it work in my needy case, I imagined that I had the Fish-Child’s mother under me.

  As I expended my virility, my understanding rose up in the weird Child’s consciousness and, passing through a terrible chasm where demons were engaged in hideous games, soared until it rested in Valdine’s mind. I read his past and knew his hopes and disappointments. I read his ‘map’ and learned the way to Peklo tower.

  I looked down at the Fish-Child, which was weeping silently. Quickly, I covered it up and covered myself. My use of it was no worse than the employment of a whore: it would get its wages and besides, was cold-blooded. I unbound it and rewarded it with the tail of a silver salmon and with
sturgeon’s eggs. Its snivelling and whimpering ceased at once and it allowed me to tie the ribbons back in its hair while it fed. I kept the sash. (This is the very one, faded now. It was the colour of a ripe cherry when Nemione’s Child wore it. I still believe my own sacrifice of taste, pleasure and discernment justified: the perverse union was but a small step on my way to Valdine’s throne.)

  When Erchon returned I gave him a purse of silver to use for the entertainment of the Child.

  ‘Do not bring it to me any more,’ I told him. ‘I have what I need.’

  If Erchon was not made purblind by my promises and coins, he never gave sign of it. He came to my rooms next day, all quickness and vitality, spoiling for adventure, armed cap à pie.

  ‘You have seen the map, Master Usurper,’ he said eagerly. ‘When do we set off?’

  To disappoint an accomplice is unwise.

  ‘Tomorrow, Master Scantling,’ I replied, using the old nickname. ‘After dark. You will enjoy yourself: we must first assail the white hills and bosky mounts of Nether Pargur. When they are safely conquered we can proceed: there is a gate –’

  ‘To a hidden way?’

  ‘Something like. You shall see.’

  The thought that I, a young man with hearty appetites, should have been surprised by the appetites of a dwarf astonishes me today. I intended to lose Erchon in the labyrinthine purlieus of Nether Pargur but never dreamed how easy it would be. He succumbed to the first temptation, the second. And the third – I left him in the arms of a lusty country girl who had come to Pargur to sell a parcel of her land and made a better profit out of selling her flesh (I paid Erchon’s reckoning). I went into the jakes, which was untenanted, and, after relieving myself, spoke the formula I had found in Valdine’s mind. There had never been a map. In a trice I was whisked away. A she-devil appeared in the void beneath my spinning body and bore me up in her arms. I saw the tower-top and the sharp rocks of the lonely promontory below and, while I wished I had stayed to enjoy the soft continents the dwarf was exploring, found, myself descending rapidly. The demon had dropped me.