The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  All this work took me seven weeks. Summer was gone and the autumn in her fullest flush. I hastened out upon the ramparts after dark and, in a rising wind, removed myself to Peklo. Here I laboured hard, learning the minute particulars of my Art and passing the less arduous hours, when I was weary, in scanning my map and globe and the five mirrors which gave closer views of the secrets they revealed. I soon saw where Nemione had hidden herself. She had moved her room to the undercroft of Probity Tower. It hovered there, inside the massy vaulting, as if it were uncertain of its rightful place, and I resolved not to act upon my new knowledge lest Nemione and her room flee altogether. She was, I believed, now capable of transporting material objects a great distance, a competence almost as advanced as my removal of the Memory Palace from Espmoss to Pargur. I was content to spy upon her, most content. Like the witch in my picture, she was in dishabille. Apart from her gold chain, her nightgown and a string of corals she had forgotten to remove were her only encumbrances. Her bed was tumbled and the Child was asleep there, its slimy nakedness half-covered with a sheet. Nemione sat cuddling the little ape, Halfman, on the carpeted floor. She addressed her head of gold,

  ‘Roszi,’ she whispered. ‘Roszi, wake up.’

  The head arched backwards on its short neck and the pillar it stood on swayed a little. Roszi opened her eyes and the grim line of her mouth relaxed.

  ‘What is it, Nemione?’

  ‘I told you to call me “My Lady”. The basest servant remembers that.’

  ‘Yes, My Lady, what is your desire?’

  ‘Oh – for a strong young lad to kiss me, or for a wise and potent man to instruct me in the art of Love and demonstrate its intricate disciplines with the utmost finesse – That is all impossible! Talk to me Roszi, of yourself; not of what I do and must do.’

  ‘Where shall I begin, Nem – My Lady? You know every letter of my story from the gypsy witch onwards –’

  ‘The chov-hani. She was a fearsome sight! Tell me about your waterfall.’

  A tear, a miraculously clear drop of moisture, fell from Roszi’s right eye.

  ‘I was cold then and whole beneath my cascade. I used to wear a belt of water-borne amethysts and a long rope of palest aquamarine – my lovers swam to me whenever I called. The shining drops of air caught in their clothing made them gleam like your silver rings; but that was all the air they had, for the water they had swallowed kept them below with me and no one ever found them, deep beneath the fall. Shepherds, herd-boys, a brave swimmer, a poet, a soldier, and Diccon Flowerseller – so beautiful, with his posies in his hands and his garlands about his neck. They weighed him down when he fell in, poor boy. I let him sleep beside me.’

  ‘How did you keep them faithful, Roszi, when the she-otters in their furs and the female sturgeon swam by?’

  ‘I made them promises I could not keep and kept them close to me by granting small favours – a kiss, the touch of my hand, a stone from my necklace to dream on.’

  ‘And does that suffice to hold them in captivity?’

  ‘My lovers were dead, My Lady; yours live and the blood runs fast as greyhounds in their veins. As for the Archmage, a love of fame and a hatred of innocence drive him. Beware! His mind is keen, and his body as capable and comely as my swimmer’s. Where is my body – did it all dissolve in the mould?’

  ‘I fear so. You made a deal of steam, as much as a marsh fog, when Manderel poured in the gold. We could not replicate your entire body. Manderel used all but a fragment of his magistery-stone to make the gold in the Treasury and your transformation, Coz, wasted that.’

  ‘To treat your cousin so – you have no heart! Free me!’

  ‘I never heard your heart beat, Roszi. You were all nivasha, but I have my father, the reeve’s, heart – cold enough, I grant you. Behave yourself and I will free you when your time is up.’

  ‘The years are long.’

  ‘You look too closely at the minutes. Seven years is an instant in time’s infinity.’

  ‘Get me a body, Nemione, the body of a beautiful young bride. Let me have lovers again!’

  ‘Enough! You tire me when you beg.’

  Obediently, the head closed its mouth and eyes and Nemione covered it with an embroidered cloth. With a fire in my breast which consumed all reason, I watched her prepare herself for bed. It was magic of a corporeal kind. She brushed her fine hair into a gleaming aura and worked perfumes and ointments into her skin before she shed her night-gown and stepped into her bed and lay down beside the Child. After a little while, it sleepily turned and nestled close against her. It had grown, I observed, nearly as tall as Nemione. I heard her kissing it.

  The excitement woken by imagined prospects roused me and I paced the room until the pain with which my magic-working had filled my head grew more intense than those troublesome sensations. I did not care into what deep chasm of iniquity my soul-less body might stray. Adventure had always been a welcome guest in my house.

  I slept then, though in my curtained rooms I did not know if it was night or day in Peklo. When I woke, I went immediately to my mirrors.

  Nemione – I soon found her in the castle gardens – was playing in a quincunx of tall linden trees whose yellowing leaves dropped every now and then to earth or fell upon her hair. She had dressed herself in a velvet gown and Halfman, the monkey, wore a suit which matched her dying reds and russets, a lace collar at his hairy neck. In her left hand, she held a scarlet shuttlecock and in her right, a long-handled battledore. I applauded when she tossed her pretty missile of cork and feathers high amongst the falling leaves and stretched up to hit it as it fell. I reached for my smallest mirror, which showed me every detail of her neck and of the smooth slopes which fell away below it. The thin gold links about her neck made an anchor chain and I read the huge motto on her cross, ‘Keep Faith’, a tenet she had long ago abandoned. We were both deserters, cloister renegades, each hell-rakes in our individual way and meant – by all the gods! – to be a pair. I moved the glass to make examination of her intimate country, swelling mound by long ascent, and slowly climbed her neck where I found a tall stick planted beneath her chin – a single black hair – and, climbing higher, saw above her lips a meadow of like stems waving and at the dark threshold, a tooth capped with ivory. Those black caverns were her nostrils and there, on the left, another great hair. That she should have such blemishes, the female echoes of my thick beard, intoxicated me and I was forced, for the sake of my own sanity, to retreat and view her whole in a larger mirror where she appeared her customary self, a complete and perfect beauty.

  I knew then how Valdine had used these mirrors for his own benefit, viewing Nemione while he was incapable, in his sickness, of any greater effort and I thought: can I devise a better way than his to enjoy her against her will?

  The largest mirror showed me figures moving toward Nemione through the trees. My lady laid down her shuttlecock and bat and bade the monkey stay beside them while she hid herself behind the central tree. Such men, such prospective lovers – the youth and flower of Pargur, all six or seven years behind me in years and as many hundreds in experience! They called her name and one of them, who had a mandolin, played and sang a serenade. I considered their obliteration, my extinction of their dreams as, falling one by one dead at her feet, I relieved them of life and its anguish by the exercise of my sovereign will and supernal magic. I was too curious – and too lazy – to act. One of them crept round the tree and caught hold of Nemione, who feigned delighted surprise while I stared in hatred at his hands, bold on her waist.

  ‘Stephan!’

  ‘Let me steal a kiss, Lady.’

  ‘You must earn that. Let me see you –’ Here, she paused to eye him and with a smile to raise up his hopes before she dashed them. ‘Let me see how Halfman likes you. Lift him from my battledore and bring it to me here.’

  Though he approached it stealthily, the monkey bit him, sinking yellow teeth deep into his thumb. I laughed and so did Nemione.

  ‘No ki
ss, not even one to make you better,’ she said and turned her back on him. ‘Randal, come here! See if you can catch the shuttlecock.’

  The second suitor fared no better for she kept the shuttlecock dancing out of reach, impelled by her prestidigitatory art and her own desire to outwit such dolts. They skipped about her, trying to do her bidding, while she pirouetted in their midst, aglow in her autumn colours and with her fierce virginity – in my castle, in my gardens. I turned my mirrors face-down wishing to see no more of such intemperate folly; yet I could not but admire her for her obstinacy and the pleasure she took in exercising it.

  My newly furnished apartment in Castle Sehol was my solace. I returned there and, sitting on a chair before my cabinet of birds, listened to their harsh song, which was balm to my wounded heart. I silenced them and studied next the picture on the easel where the witch and her prey played out their perpetual confrontation. He, I could see, was simply young and burdened as every youth must be by the problem of his bodily imperatives and their solving, but she, the eternal temptress, she was now the one to interest me. I was certain that her eyes, beneath the blindfold, were sapphire blue; I could see her lips, tinted a delicate pink like the newly opened petals of a camellia or like Nemione’s and they were firm (especially the upper) like Nemione’s. Winter came to Sehol while I stared at the picture and Urthorold, the brother of hot Urthamma, hung icicles from each machicolation and murder-hole and blew snow into every crevice of the battlements. I, Koschei, caused a tree of ice to arise in the centre of the hot pool in the garden that I might confound Nemione when she went there to bathe.

  I called Ivo to me and sent him into Nether Pargur to find the dancer, Friendship. When he returned, bringing her or one of her synchronicities with him, I watched the Dance of the Seven Veils in the privacy of my apartment and afterwards kissed the naked dancer. That was all – I was my own self-limiter, happier when I spied upon Nemione unseen, a beggar crouched below the salt, a servant at a feast, the unregarded flunkey who holds the door. I flew to Peklo through the blizzard and there arranged my mirrors in order, hands trembling as I picked up the first.

  She was hard to find. I searched her usual haunts: the Court of Love and its surrounding chambers, her rooms, the springs and bathing pool and, finally, the snowy gardens, yard by yard, to which – if her footprints did not give her away – she might have been carried on the back of a fancy, an ethereal griffon or a cloudy spirit of the air. At length I discovered her: she was in the kitchens (I have never ventured there) unobtrusive as a common serving wench, whose guise she wore. A marvellous change from finery! I watched her, curious to see what she would do when she left her quiet corner and her broom. As I spied on her, so she spied on the kitchen servants and waited her opportunity. Chefs in tall hats ran past her, dairymaids scurried with jugs of milk and cream, with bowls of eggs; a pair of butchers carried in the carcass of a newly slaughtered beast and at last (Nemione put down her broom) there came a little procession of chambermaids and ladysmaids bearing the tools and trappings of their trades – dusters, buckets, crystal jugs of fresh and copper jugs of hot water, scissors, fans, curling tongs. Nemione, stepping forward, joined them. Her appearance changed most subtly as she moved, from dirty drudge in sacking apron to alert and gossiping maid in clean, starched pinafore. One of the maids put a jug of drinking water in her hands.

  I followed her in my mirrors. It was a strange way to get water – she had only to call for it; she might, in harder straits, make some herself, out of the snow on her window-ledge, the liquid in one of her perfume-bottles, Roszi’s tears.

  Nemione hurried along the corridors, crossed Garzon’s random dancing floors and avoided Toricello’s sudden tangles of greenery. She negotiated courtyards and halls, climbed long flights of stairs and the steeper, spiralling ascents of towers, walked the perilous, slippery rampart, her water turning all the while to ice and, at last allowing herself assistance, spoke a charm and with a cry of Zracni vili! was spun from my sight in the direction of Probity Tower. Hastily, I changed mirrors, selecting the circular one with the rim of spun glass. The seven colours of the rainbow dazzled me; staring through them, I saw more clearly. Nemione had undergone another shift of form and appeared as herself, most soberly dressed in the grey surplice and white scapulary she had worn in the Cloister, her cross of gold hanging bright against the linen, everything chastely covered but face, hands and hair.

  She has recanted! I thought. Or does she still believe the motto on her cross and keeps faith with the Absolute? – how, then, has she been able to work so much magic; how deceive Valdine in doing so, without his knowledge or permission? Why did she allowed herself to be used by him?

  My questions distracted me and I lost concentration. The prismatic lights flowed into my mind with the force of a tidal wave and the thunderous roar of the water came with them. I cried out in pain and confusion but know not, to this day, whether my cries were the animal utterances of man who has put away his soul or were words – names – sentences – incantations. I felt a great heat at my back and, turning from the hurtful, dazzling mirror, saw fire in the doorway of my chamber and in the centre of it, Urthamma holding up his burning hands.

  ‘Greedy Koschei!’ he said. ‘Why not be content with what you have already gained?’

  I bowed my head briefly in acknowledgement of his presence and greater power and, daring to lift it and look him in the eye, said,

  ‘Because I must have Nemione. I cannot fail.’

  ‘You mortals always fail. So many centuries of civilization and yet you learn nothing and come still puzzled to your graves.’

  ‘I am closer to immortality than you think, Urthamma. No man can kill me, or woman – but I would willingly die for Nemione. Look!’

  ‘No one dies for love, Koschei – though he may wish to, nor do I need your petty devices to see your madonna. Behold!’ and the hand of the god made a glowing arabesque which cut through air, wall, space and time so that Nemione and her room appeared in mine and I could look at her direct. It was a meeting of equals. She lifted her grey skirts a half-inch and curtsied. I bowed low.

  ‘Nemione!’

  ‘Koschei! Your timing is perfect. I am playing Nurse; you can be Doctor. What better part for a prospective father?’ She moved aside and I saw the Fish-Child grovelling at her feet, its blue hands tightly clasping the rim of a huge glass bowl. It had also changed, I saw, and grown beautiful, its entire strange and slimy body swollen with my seed. It was a curious, bloated fruit, ripe and ready to shed its children; or a stranded, pregnant sea-beast, a water-cow or manatee.

  ‘Help her, Koschei! Help me!’

  Nemione gave me the jug of water she had carried from the kitchens. ‘It is the purest I can get – from Orphanswell. It must be clean water and it must be true matter, neither transformed nor illusory, drawn from the well by a human being. Hold steady and hold well!’ She knelt beside the Child and spoke the secret name of the Absolute God into the waiting ether; but she spoke it backwards as became her sham fidelity. The vestments, the displayed cross, the piety: all were means to her end and she was as rotten and far gone in the way of magic as I. I waited fearfully and Urthamma, reclining at our backs and exuding a summer heat, smiled his beatific smile.

  There was no thunder, no rising wind or storm but only a continued silence broken by the stamping of Nemione’s bare feet upon the boards as she danced out her spell. It was terrible to behold, an ecstasy as consuming and personal as her master’s, the Archmage’s, when he summoned Urthamma to help him read the map, an ecstasy which should have been mine. Nemione sweated and her cloister-clothing grew stained; her hair, flying wildly about her, settled into a disorder of elf-locks and hag-curls, and her face was red as Urthamma’s hot countenance, smiling on her. My love of her was complete and when the cascade of water she had created out of the little in the jug poured down upon me I was moved to speak, declaring my love. I do not think she heard, wrapped in her rite and her emotions, and when at last I
looked away from her I saw that the Child had become a hen salmon which swam round and round in the glass bowl, dropping her children as she went. They were small clear droplets, like the water themselves, but they grew apace and split the bubbles apart to swim up and break the surface of the water, to breathe air and clamber with limbs of horn and gristle from the bowl. They crowded together by Nemione’s feet and whimpered with the shrill voices of the new-born.

  ‘My dearest ones,’ she said, crouched down and gathered them all up in her skirt. ‘And dearest one of all!’ She helped the Child from the water, holding it by its fins which turned to arms and the tail to legs, the rest becoming as it was before. Nemione broke her gold chain and dropped it on the floor where the little cross, at this cross-roads in her life, was soon trampled under the hooves of the new-born. Reaching quickly down, I retrieved it and hid it in my sleeve – see, the chain is broken yet and you can read the motto quite easily. ‘Keep Faith’ – oh, bitter words. My Lady put off the white scapulary, pulling it eagerly over her head and dropping it likewise to the floor, opened her surplice enough to reveal one naked breast, which she held and offered to the Child.

  ‘Though she bite me, she must have nourishment,’ she said, ‘and warmth and comfort after her ordeal.’

  I did not know if she spoke to me or to the Child. The little creatures it had given birth to clung to her garments. While she nursed her Child and soothed her grandchildren with small chirps and sighs, she looked up at me and let me drown in the airless pools of her eyes.