The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘What have you done to me?’ she cried.

  ‘You gave yourself to me: to the Archmage.’

  ‘No! I was entranced. Say you have not touched me, say I am whole still. Did I kiss you?’

  ‘Sweetly, generously.’

  ‘Alas – no!’

  ‘And I kissed you, your face, your closed eyes, your lips, your neck –’

  ‘Worse, worse.’

  ‘That is all.’

  Nemione’s upper lip lifted once, in triumph and relief. Her eyes lost their submissive look and their intense colour returned. ‘You are slow, Cloister Mouse,’ she taunted. ‘Only the tyro applauds the overture.’ It was bliss to feel her body move, resisting my embrace. ‘Tyche, Flax, Fortuna,’ she whispered, and all sensation left my arms which dropped, numb, to my sides. ‘Nemione!’ I held my will against the weak force that pinned them there and felt it sway and bend. ‘Nemione, you cannot prevail. Urthamma!’ Warmth and motion flowed into my arms and I raised them. Nemione took to her heels, petticoats flying. I watched her run away from me, tempted to make her trip, or to turn her about in her flight so that she ran toward me. I laughed as I watched her go, combs flying from her head and her hair tumbling from its pins, her stockinged legs exposed to the gaze of gardener and sentry alike.

  ‘War it is,’ I called after her. ‘I fight to win!’

  It is impossible to tire of Castle Sehol. Like Pargur, the city over which it stands sentinel and guard, it is founded (the professors say) on the dreams and fancies of its first prince, Garzon, and is unstable and subject to constant change. Its inmates are used to its continual deceptions and treat them as pranks: if a kitchen is found to be fifty yards further from a dining hall, so be it. Later princes built on Garzon’s whimsical footings, adding a tower here or a solar there. Fortunately, some of them also had the wit to pay attention to the castle’s defences which are the finest in all Malthassa and less subject to sudden variation. Decimus Toricello, a stolid man of regular and modest habit and a clever engineer, was responsible for the re-siting of the curtain wall, the Devil’s Bastion, the casemates which house the quarter-mile cannon and the fireproof magazine. He loved ferns and mosses, which he studied when he was not campaigning, and it is pleasant to find a hart’s tongue fern or a yellow patch of reindeer moss high on the battlement walk, where there was none the day before. Pleasant also the fountains which appear and disappear in the inner courts, and the singing birds; even the bats which sometimes fly between the twin towers of Vanity and Probity, swooping through the music room as they go, may be viewed as nothing more than a nuisance.

  The castle is also able to change its colour. In winter it is white or crystalline, in spring a green flush like the first grass in the water meadows steals over it, high summer warms it and it resonates with the nightlong merrymaking in the city streets below, its colours unpredictable but always clear; as the leaves fall, it grows sad and grey but, recovering itself on sunny days, exhibits the rugged gloss of a ripe pippin or a shining gourd. When I entered it as Archmage and prince, it welcomed me: its stones glowed tawny and appeared new-cut; its flags and banners stood proudly out, but the many-coloured pennon which had the Regent’s badge upon it was limp. Still wearing cuirass and field-armour, I went into the Shield Hall. Elzevir Tate was sitting on the Archmage’s throne. He looked at me, struck the gong at his side and shouted as loudly as he could, in his merchant’s trembling flute,

  ‘Who comes hither?’

  There was a ceremony to be enacted and trials to undergo and I found the prospect tiresome. I held my left hand high and pointed at the wall behind Tate. Letters of fire appeared on it which spat like live coals as they were written by the burning hand of Urthamma. Tate leapt to his feet and ran from the throne while his guards jumped forward and made a ring of steel about him.

  ‘Read!’ the voice of the god thundered, and a sulphurous smell filled the room. In a ringing voice I read aloud the testimonial Urthamma had written for me:

  Koschei Corbillion, once Scholar, Priest Soldier, Mage and Usurper, now Archmage and Prince

  There was no need of more. Though my head swam with the after-effect of my conjuration I stepped out and ascended the throne. I, Koschei, called the governors and the guard came to me, Baptist Olburn first. Each man swore loyalty on his life.

  Then, while they brought me hot wine (for I was near to fainting and the sweat, which they thought came of the supernatural fires, ran off me), I rested on my throne.

  In the evening we feasted, as men will. Every fashionable lord and rich man was there. The Marshall sat on my right and Elzevir Tate on my left. The first presented me with a parchment which recited my virtues, qualifications and ancestry, and the second gave me a long cloak made of the skins of five hundred red martens. I gave them each a purse of gold and then, to amuse them while the company seated itself, I made a little strumpet appear by the Marshall’s plate and a grinning elf in Tate’s cup.

  When we had eaten, I had a stool placed next my seat and sent for Nemione. She came veiled in white muslins and attended by the Silver Dwarf who, though he had put on a robe of yellow velvet, was clearly armed beneath it.

  Nemione walked boldly up to me. I could see her contemptuous expression through the gauze.

  ‘Will you be seated, Lady?’ I asked her, indicating the low stool. Erchon stiffened and I saw his hand move involuntarily to his side. Nemione lifted her veil a little and smiled coldly before she let it fall again. The gauze covered her to her feet.

  ‘Erchon thinks I should stand,’ she said, ‘but I, too, will sit at your feet, Koschei.’

  ‘Will you let the company see you?’ I asked as she sat down.

  ‘I think not. They are all as drunk as satyrs.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘You, Koschei, are incapable of levity or proper repose. I know that. Life, for you, is a contest.’

  ‘Could I have a lovelier opponent?’

  ‘I decline to take up the gauntlet.’

  The Lord Marshall, who had drunk a good deal of claret, loudly demanded music and, when the musicians had struck up (a gigue, I recall) called above its scraping and piping for more wine to make a toast; but it was the furrier from Pudding Lane, Elzevir Tate, who climbed before he could be prevented up on the seat of his chair and clapped his hands to still the clamour.

  ‘A toast! A toast to the Lady Nemione! Salute the bride!’ The carousers rose, banged their cups and glasses on the tables, and all shouted,

  ‘Nemione! The bride! Nemione!’

  ‘I trust you will not associate my suit with this intemperance,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh, you would not stray publicly, Archmage,’ Nemione replied. She tapped her foot impatiently and Erchon, who stood close behind her, made as if to move.

  ‘I would prefer it if you stayed,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  They should have thrilled me, those three words, spoken perhaps in bridal submission or wifely admiration, but Nemione used the courtesy like cold steel.

  ‘You said you would not fight,’ I remarked, her recent womanly timidity and yielding to me in the garden clear as Altaish diamonds in my memory.

  ‘I have changed my mind,’ she said, tart as lime. I had forgotten her insults, relished her taunts and said, with a crisp, military bow,

  ‘Your privilege.’

  Though it was mine to bend so readily to her will and bow so gallantly before her beauty.

  Men at a banquet need entertainment and the music was resumed while the cupboys and stewards cleared the plates. Then came a female juggler who wore little but had much skill, given that she used her deft hands and quick eye and no magic. After her, a woman veiled like Nemione, but in scarlet and blue, stood up.

  ‘She wears her draperies with a difference,’ I said. ‘Not to conceal her beauty but to reveal it.’ I leaned towards Erchon. ‘Your friend in Nether Pargur must have made great display for you to miss your appointment with me, and with Peklo tower and destiny.�
��

  Erchon bowed.

  ‘Discretion is the greater part of valour,’ he said.

  ‘But did she please, was she mistress of her craft? – surely any dwarf-wife surpasses her for refinement and conversation!’

  ‘It pleases you to insult me, Archmage,’ Erchon answered. ‘I did not go to the whore for talk, nor did I remain with her because she was refined.’

  ‘You owe me ten crowns!’

  ‘Take it from me, lord; add it to the thousands in your coffers. You, when history has been written, will be remembered as the man who got his throne by sheer genius. I shall die a mere Silver Dwarf. Look! You are at liberty to take her, if you so desire.’

  He looked down the hall, at the dancer. She began her tantalizing dance, slowly shedding the first veil which concealed more, six I guessed. It is an old tradition. With each successive abandonment her movements grew the more abandoned and the film of colour, which did not hide but teased her audience with glimpses of her charms, changed: a true daughter of mutable Pargur! At last, she stood naked before us. She snapped her hennaed fingers and a small grey monkey dressed in a cap and a silver jacket ran out of a corner and climbed her body as if it were a tree. It stood on her shoulder and bowed. The applause rocked the tables – many men were themselves dancing on the boards.

  ‘The woman is without doubt a prodigy,’ I said, and beckoned the seneschal. Soon, the dancer stood before me and I was able to admire her at close quarters. She had no shame. Nemione also stared at her. I could see the brilliance of her eyes beneath the white shadow which covered her face. The seneschal paid the dancer with silver and I kissed her hand.

  ‘Will you give me something?’ I asked her.

  ‘Anything, Archmage. Whatever it is that you want, Prince,’ she said.

  ‘The monkey, the little ape if you please.’

  She lifted him from her shoulder and put him on my knees.

  ‘Keep him. I will get another.’ The seneschal gave her more coins.

  ‘Tell me his name and what you do to command him,’ I said and the dancer knelt and petted the monkey and showed me how to make him bow and sit and stand and feign death.

  ‘His name is Halfman.’

  ‘And yours is –?’

  ‘Friendship.’

  ‘A welcoming name. Good. You may go.’

  She ran lightly from me across the hall, passing between the tables and the men who reached out to touch her. She easily avoided them. When she reached the doorway, where the juggler was waiting with her veils, she turned and bowed with a rare grace, letting her hair sweep the ground. I, like her monkey, could feign a lack of interest in life. I stood up, with Halfman in my hands, myself bowed to Nemione and gave her the monkey.

  ‘Let Halfman be my embassy,’ I said. ‘As you can see, he has all the members of a whole man.’

  ‘And you do not,’ said Lèni, ‘though you still have the best and finest member for your male purposes. Hands as you know, sensitive hands, are necessary for pleasuring a woman. Let us play a game, of seek and find, of persistence and reward. Get up now, see how far you can walk. Explore the room.’

  Guy slid across the bed and slowly stood up. He felt well enough and better still, perambulating the room, bending to peer at the closed cupboards of the ornate credenza, the shut doors of the two armoires, the many unopenable drawers of the tallboy and the dressing chest. Lèni was laughing over her sewing, or at him.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot!’ she said. ‘The door is open, can’t you see?’

  He turned from his perusal of her decayed brushes and combs; indeed it was open.

  He went out and found himself in a dark hall. The apartment door at first compelled him; it was certainly locked but he kicked and shoved at it, in case.

  ‘Why are you making such a noise?’ came Lèni’s mocking voice from the inner room.

  Some little light crept by the shutters at the far end of the hall. He passed three doors, all closed, and a mottled mirror where his ghostly reflection made him start. The open door led into a kitchen, small, filthy and close. Dirty bottles of his time were mixed with cobweb-shrouded others: absinthe, Burgundy, cognac, Champagne. He glanced at them curiously. The meat-safe was there, by the blacked-out window; a table and, on it, three rusty knives. He looked again: the tabletop was dark with old blood and marred like a chopping-block with deep cuts. A soft humming beside him made him swing wildly about – a ‘fridge, incredibly an electric refrigerator, plugged in at a rickety, skewed socket. His fright had caused him to knock against the ‘fridge and, as he looked at it, amazed, the door swung outwards and a brilliant light spilled from its interior. Inside, next to a packet of butter and a steak on a chipped plate, lay an open white bag with black lettering on it: Georges Dinard, Boucherie Chevaline. Ten bent fingers projected from it, the nails glistening in the light and the flesh and skin as white as death.

  Guy stared at his hands in the bag. ‘Oh empty hands, forlorn hands,’ he whispered. ‘What did you steal – fame was it, or obscurity? Come here!’ and the nails clicked against the shelf and the fingers gradually unbent themselves and moved jerkily about inside the bag which rustled like dry twigs in a night wind. Then the hands crawled forward out of the bag and climbed down the shelving to the floor, where they hopped sideways until they found his legs. They began to climb, resting at last on his forearms – almost, indeed, in their rightful places excepting that, to hold themselves there, the fingers pointed at his elbows and gripped his sleeves. Carrying them thus, he returned triumphant to Lèni.

  ‘Bravo – the hands of a famous lover!’ Lèni cried and laid down her mending. ‘Can they dance well on a woman’s body, Guy? Can you dance?’

  His feet tapped the floor. He was a marionette, her leaping toy; he could not stop the movement of his feet nor of his severed hands which leaped and skipped upon his arms.

  ‘Can you dance a jig-a-jig, Guy?’ Lèni bent over the sofa, showing scarred and withered breasts hanging loose in the open neck of her dress. She lifted the lid of the red opium box. Fairground music jangled from it making him leap higher and sending his fingers into a frenzied, compulsive arpeggio.

  Music, Ivo told me, is the food of love. If this was so, then I had lost my taste for both though it was certain that my desire for Nemione was undimmed. Ivo engaged the best musicians to play for me and I tolerated the deep resonances of the violoncello and the shy notes of the lute at supper. But I longed for the clamour and din of a band of peasants playing on the fiddle and the drum – loud music for dancing in couples. I might thrust Nemione into such a dance, where the grasping of arms and the clutching of waists was customary, where kisses were exchanged in the round and the hay; and I wished she had been born a poor child in Nether Pargur and had grown to a calling in the oldest profession so that I might bring her from such low life up to luxurious dissipation in Castle Sehol.

  Meanwhile, I knew not what Nemione did or when, for she kept to her quarters and the staircase in the White Tower which once brought me to her was cold and echoing. It led to an empty room where a dead butterfly flapped its wings in the draught from the unglazed window.

  Incognito, I went to Nether Pargur again, disguised with the employment of a little magic and suitable clothing as a foreigner from the east. Again, I gave my basest instincts full rein and then, crossing the street and following an alley and a flight of steps found myself in one of the synchronicities, a Nether Pargur as vicious as the first. I visited the same whore and enjoyed the same vices. On my way from her house, as leaning and twisted a dwelling as any lodging in hell, I noticed a sign bearing the representation in paint and plaster of a pretty young demon and I went into the shop below it. It was a storehouse of ugliness, or beauty maybe since its appreciation is in the eye of the beholder. The shopkeeper was Erchon’s temporary friend, the country girl, or her double. When she saw me she stepped out from her place behind the counter; in her eyes I was a plum ripe for the picking.

  ‘Let me help you, sir,’ she s
aid. ‘Perhaps you are searching for a souvenir of your visit here or even, if you have not yet tried the delights which surround us, an accommodating lady?’

  ‘Which lady would that be?’ I asked. ‘Surely the only lady here is the one before me.’

  ‘Well reasoned, sir. What would you? A little relaxation with my masseuse and then a pipe, or a vigorous interlude in my company?’

  I paid her for half an hour and we went up to her bed; it annoyed me that when my intention was to uncover Erchon’s tastes and deposit some token of them in the Memory Palace, I had no way of telling if this woman was the one he had enjoyed. I asked her if she had entertained a dwarf but,

  ‘They are many,’ she said.

  ‘A silver dwarf from the Altaish?’

  ‘It is autumn, sir. The city is full of silver dwarves with ore and ingots to sell. You will have seen their strange balloons – the canopies are shaped like loaves of bread, ugly things, and closed gondolas hang beneath. They come here every second year and their pockets are groaning to be emptied.’

  In her shop I bought a dark picture, attracted by the scene it depicted. It was a portrait, I surmised, of a blindfolded and haltered young man kneeling before a beautiful witch, and cleverly painted, especially the coarse hempen rope by which the woman led him and the soft flesh of her upper arms and that portion of her breasts which showed above the neckline of her shift. I remembered that Nemione had hidden herself from me and returned to the castle where I bathed twice, first in the hot springs and then in a tub, with Ivo to attend me.

  Thus cleansed of my excesses, I summoned the most fashionable architects and designers, and set them to work on my quarters from which they cast out all Valdine’s arcane rubbish and installed the finest furniture and the latest appointments. I relied on their advice: my own taste was departing from me so rapidly that I had no alternative. When they were gone, I took great delight in arranging an easel in the best light and setting up the picture of the tethered youth on it. Nearby was a lacquerwork cabinet full of the rarest birds – which, on my orders, had been removed from the aviaries of the zoological gardens, skinned and stuffed. I had myself wrung their necks. I fashioned a simple spell, which made them hop upon their perches and sing with the voices of ravens.