The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘A way you take pleasure in, if I remember aright.’

  ‘Do I know you – perhaps you served Nemione at Castle Sehol, or before?’

  ‘You know me well, Koschei.’

  ‘You are not Nemione, yet you call me by my first name, like an equal.’

  ‘Correct. I am not Nemione, who waits for you.’

  ‘You must have a name?’

  ‘Nemione calls me Lucasta. I dared touch her, and this is my punishment.’

  I looked into the woman’s eyes. She spoke the truth: I had last exchanged a glance with those eyes, warm and dark with merriment at the juggler’s antics, hazy with the mists of drunkenness, at my first feast in the Shield Hall: Pargur’s Lord Marshall, following Nemione in hope, as I did, had indeed been brought low, his valiant manhood forced into a woman’s shape.

  ‘You want release – by magic, or in death?’

  ‘You are still my rival, Koschei. And I still hope. Is it not possible that, some day, Nemione may admit me to her bed? She cannot fear the embraces of a woman.’

  ‘Then I must kill you.’

  Lucas, or Lucasta, watched calmly as I tried to draw my sword. ‘Your efforts are in vain,’ he said. ‘She has locked it in the scabbard. Here, in her castle, we are both powerless unless she wills otherwise. Let us go to her and plead our separate cases.’

  ‘As vain a hope, Lord Marshall – Lucasta – as any of mine. You helped her fortify this place – surely you remember what she did?’

  ‘No. I have lost half my memory as well as all my valour. Take my hand, Archmage, and learn fear as I have. It is dark, where we must tread.’

  I could barely see the stairs she led me up, but fear hung on them and surrounded us with a choking gloom. The chamber at the top of it was darker still, and I thought I should suffocate in its aura of despair. The sensation was strongest beside the room’s only piece of furniture, a close-curtained bed which we approached cautiously, still hand in hand. Nemione’s voice rang out, behind the curtains.

  ‘You make a fine couple, Lucas, Koschei. Shall I send for a priest?’

  Lucas opened sensual lips to protest, but, ‘Say nothing!’ I hissed and, speaking out,

  ‘Shall I send for a body to complete you, Roszi? What would you: the legs of an estridge and the trunk of a camel, the arse of a baboon?’

  I pulled the nearer curtain violently open, tearing it from top to bottom. Nemione was there, sitting on the pillows, where I had expected her head of gold – and she cradled Roszi in her arms. I looked again, and saw only Roszi; a third time, at an empty bed whose pillows were undented.

  ‘Be patient,’ I told Lucas. ‘She will tire of this and show herself.’ We waited, gazing at the tall pillars of the bed, at its painted canopy where cupids flew in crowds or, reclining on plump clouds, depended pink limbs and soft wings. We watched the room surge about us and finally become a bare attic high under the roof-leads. The bed, dissolving slowly, crumbled into the floor. We waited on, an hour, two perhaps. At last, Erchon came in.

  ‘My Lady desires your attendance, Koschei,’ he said. ‘Lucasta is to go to her mending and the Lady Nemione reminds her that there are still twenty yards of torn hem that require stitching.’

  Lucas left the room with his woman’s head bowed and woman’s tears on his cheeks. Erchon was brisk with me.

  ‘This way.’

  I tried my sword again as I followed him, but it would not budge. I emptied my mind, searching for my inner self, that elusive part which concentration made a subtle instrument that, ranging far, could take up and use the untamed powers which lie in all the elements; my mind filled up and over-brimmed with images of Nemione, dressed, undressed, lying, sitting, standing; running, swimming, laughing, kissing; attired for a feast, a wedding, a lovers’ tryst.

  Erchon left me at her chamber door. She stood alone in the room, which was furnished as a scholar’s study. Stuffed birds in static flight hung from the vaulted ceiling and an owl perched on the chandelier, his feathery horns erect; the books were bound in brushed leather and lettered in gold, and a fire burned beneath a tall chimneypiece. The fire-irons had the shapes of the Gratian and the Vedrate chimeras. I walked up to her and bowed, my face level with the white kerchief she held in her hand – which I would venture to kiss. I reached out for it and saw her curtsey, her gown of golden tissue creasing into a thousand folds and, as she continued to curtsey lower and lower, shrink into itself and disappear with her. I was left holding air, bent forward before the golden head, Roszi, who smiled maliciously.

  ‘Won’t you smile sweetly for me, Roszi?’ I asked. ‘The body of a saint would become your lovely face.’

  She smiled more gently and her beauty broke out, despite her coating of gold and the loss of every lissom part of herself. I, still leaning forward in my ridiculous position, kissed her on her hard lips, which could never part to expel a breath or admit a lover’s tongue.

  Then, standing straight, I turned about and saw Nemione at last, lying on a couch shaped like a cat-a-mountain, its body covered like that animal’s in striped grey fur, and the open-jawed head carved out of silver chuglam wood. I started forward and the catamount’s head roared at me.

  ‘Stay where you are, Koschei!’ Nemione cried. ‘You may look but you may not touch. Am I not all you have dreamed of, for so long and so vainly – the crown and epitome of womanhood?’

  An answer would have been superfluous. She was everything she claimed to be. Her gown, I had no doubt, was enchanted. It differed from her former attire by as great a degree as did her couch from the common, being woven from her own, living hair which flowed from her head into the neck of the garment and became a pliable second skin – she had grown a limber coat of golden hair. Again, I stepped forward, disregarding the low growl which issued from the catamount’s head.

  ‘Stay, Koschei! Do you not see my creatures about me? I have fled you so that I may be complete. A Sorceress does not need a master, or a man.’

  ‘Poor Lucas is proof of that.’

  ‘The presumptuous jackanapes!’ Nemione stirred and her creatures, which sat on cushions all around her, awoke. I saw her Child, grown blue as heart-sickness, close beside her and Halfman, the monkey, jumped from her shoulder and ran along the couch; her other familiars I had never seen before. A chattering sooterkin clung to her arm and a scaly, green imp to her ankle, while a small grey-skinned dog without fur or ears, but with crude three-fingered hands where its paws should have been, lay tightly curled against her stomach. This creature, suddenly convulsing, reached underneath its tail and produced a black egg, which it gave Nemione.

  ‘She-mage’s food, Koschei.’ She bit the shell and drank the yolk which ran out of it. A trace of yellow and a chip of shell remained on her lower lip and she picked at this with her nails to remove it. ‘I have become as terrible as Circe and as fearsome as the Witch at Endor. I revolt you.’

  ‘You forget, Nemione, that I have voluntarily sundered myself from my soul. Things that were hideous are lovely to me; I am indifferent to beauty – indeed, to kiss your hard-shelled Roszi thrilled me more than the tender touch of my mistress’s lips. You also, are tempted to call your soul out of your body and put it away in some remote or secret place. The signs are on you: delight in perversion, love of ugliness. We are true mates still and you cannot escape me, or your destiny.’

  ‘Have you brought some costly or uncommon gift which will convince me of your honesty?’

  ‘I brought nothing to Castle Lorne but myself. Only – if you will lift your ban from me, even by one iota, I will conjure a diversion for your pleasure.’

  ‘Very well. It is lifted. Bring me lewdness, Koschei. Let me see disease and suffering, starvation and slow death.’

  ‘I will bring you all these. Wait until the clamour of total silence has filled this room – still the crackling of the fire and the tick of the clock! I will conjure.’

  I saw the spirits which live between the several worlds fly to me and felt them touc
h and empower me, exchanging their knowledge for my wit. I first demanded a curtain, that I might present my show with all the counterfeit emotion and pompous show of the theatre.

  ‘Let the masque begin!’ I cried.

  A red curtain covered in gold-dust formed itself from the firelight and hung unsupported across the fire-place, stirred by a draught which ran suddenly along the floor.

  ‘Raise the curtain, Koschei,’ Nemione said eagerly.

  ‘Without an overture? Listen.’

  I brought music from a place outside my own space and time, loud as cannon-fire and unpredictable as a sudden thunder-clap upon a summer’s day. It made Nemione’s creatures scuttle under the cushions, while Halfman fled across the furniture, shitting, urinating and screaming, all at the same time – a fitter overture for my prelude than the music. Nemione herself jumped up and stood swaying her hips beside the head of the couch, which put out a red tongue and licked her thigh. I saw her from the centre of my concentration, a great way off, and marvelled at her robe of hair and at the manner in which her body moved within it. ‘Soon, Koschei, soon!’ I said under my breath while, with a frown of concentration and a theatrical gesture, I commanded the curtain to raise itself and my demons to come forth. A salamander crawled from the fire and, after it, a crowd of tiny demons, tusked and horned, some bearing the marks of the flames from which they were created.

  ‘Child’s play, Koschei,’ said Nemione. ‘Amateur theatricals.’

  ‘But look – more nearly.’

  The creatures formed a ring and danced, both facing each other and back-to-back, in pantomime of a witches’ sabbat. Then, with much squealing and scratching of putrescent boils and lacerated wings, they fell to coupling one with another or with several – and with such ingenuity of organ and position that neither sage nor scholar could have classified them as fish, fowl or hermaphrodite mongrel.

  Nemione leaned close and her familiars crept from their hiding-places to watch these miniature orgiasts, more adept at the niceties of nastiness than they.

  ‘Would you choose to be this one, Nemione, or that one?’

  ‘The second – without question. Its pleasure – or is it torture? – is the most exquisite. The other is merely crude.’

  I brought the curtain down upon them. ‘Then let us see a play of slow torture and utter despair, with a rousing finale – all acted by ghosts. Lights! Music!’

  The curtain rose again and, now, the music was subdued and slow, the thunder rolling in it echoed by uneasy groans from the air outside the castle; the illumination, from a dozen candles, modest. The scene was close, domestic. In the decaying room which appeared beneath the chimney’s hollow arch we saw two actors, a man and a woman – what others are fit to take the principal parts in life’s drama? They took their ease upon a bed hung with ragged curtains and painted with cupids, he lying (as has many a lucky man and his lady-love) with his head on her breast while she reclined against a pile of tattered pillows; their clothing was as shabby as the bed. They were not solid, these figures, but moved in and out of view against the flickering background of the flames. Dusty statues and huge pieces of rotting furniture filled the room in which they acted out their lives.

  Nemione, sitting on the edge of her couch to watch the play, called out, ‘That is my bed!’

  ‘Hush! They are about to begin.’

  The man, lifting an arm, yawned, and moved the arm back to its resting place upon the woman’s shoulder. Before Nemione could complain at the slow pace of the action, I whispered,

  ‘This apparent peace is only to emphasise what follows –’ and, as if he heard me and recognized the truth of what I said, the man (who favoured me in looks, though not in age, for then I was under thirty) again lifted his arm and looked about him with sorrowful eyes. Then, taking hold of one of the long cuffs of his jacket in his teeth, he drew it slowly back to reveal a scabby stump. Sighing deeply, he repeated his action with the other arm.

  ‘How could he lose them both?’ Nemione whispered. ‘Think of it! He would be unable to scratch himself, or lift food to his lips – he could not open the smallest door!’

  ‘It is a cruel fate,’ I agreed.

  ‘Oh, but it is superb, true comedy. He is unable to caress his lover!’

  ‘What do you think of the lady?’

  ‘Hideous, divine! Surely, she has used up all her beauty lotions and avoided her mirror for many years! – He, with his grey hair and without his hands, is far too handsome a mate for her!’

  ‘But a man must seek solace where he finds it.’

  ‘Yes, men are weak enough for that. What time and age does your play depict, Koschei?’

  ‘Not this, but another in the past or in some imagined future time.’

  ‘What country?’

  ‘It is a land called Lugdon, not far from that world of Albion which we sometimes hear news of in Malthassa. I have discovered it only lately, in one of my devices, where it seems to overlay the western parts of Malthassa. Occasionally, I find it in my mind – the man is imprisoned in the room. I think he calls me out of his distress.’

  ‘Perhaps you have imagined it.’

  ‘Perhaps. Fancy is a wayward and fickle mistress. Like yourself, Nemione.’

  ‘Look, the scene changes!’

  The man had risen from the bed, leaving his mistress asleep. His melancholy mood had left him for he walked smiling about the room and Nemione and I saw that he was tall – as tall as I am – and that his shape, for all its deprivation and confinement in the room, was fine and manly. Suddenly, he began to whistle, loud and tunelessly but could not keep to his inharmonious racket which turned to melody and soon to song. His voice was a pleasant and determined tenor.

  ‘… Let me set free, with the sword of my youth,

  From the castle of darkness the power of the truth,’

  he sang, and, with a stirring like that of young rats in the nest, his two severed hands climbed out of his pockets. Hopping sideways as fast as my son, Cob, on his backward-bending limbs, they swiftly ascended his body and perched, two desiccated servants, on his shoulders.

  Nemione clapped her hands and, high above her on the chandelier, the owl flapped silent wings, up and down, high and low, raising a draught which stirred my hair.

  ‘He is a powerful mage!’ she exclaimed.

  The woman was awake, his consort, his delight (as I suppose). He sent his hands before him, love’s ambassadors, and they undressed her, layer by ragged layer, while he looked on. When she lay naked on the bed, the hands returned to perform the same office for him.

  ‘She is spoiled, too!’ Nemione whispered, pointing at the woman whose stomach and breasts, we saw, were covered in a filigree of old, white scars, lace open-work from whose lattice her yellow skin sagged. ‘Koschei, should we not imitate them? Come, sit on Puss’s back, beside me. We will at least watch the dénouement of the play, which I think will be one common to all mankind, together.’

  My pleas, my prayers, were answered! I went eagerly to her and sat close, my left arm whose hand was full of life and ambition, about her waist. So near, I was unable to concentrate, and my play disintegrated as I went, the naked limbs and sad faces of the two players becoming mere pictures in the fire until all that remained was a last, fading impression of his severed hands beneath her buttocks, raising her; and the constant flames.

  ‘All my creations dissolve before your beauty!’ I said to Nemione.

  ‘And you, Koschei, are you also clay in my warm hands?’

  ‘Lady!’

  ‘But, say, my Lord – your man of Lugdon surely has the means of escape from his prison, his two obedient hands. You saw how they performed his will.’

  ‘He has not thought of that. Perhaps he will, and so gain liberty.’

  ‘Well, it will ever be a mystery – how do you like me in this guise? I think I please you more than the old, sweet-natured Nemione.’

  ‘Whatever you are, or become, Nemione, will never fail to delight me. I shou
ld love you even if you were as much decayed as the woman of Lugdon.’

  ‘That is evidence of true love. I think you would have won every contest had you become a plaintiff at my Court of Love.’ She lightly kissed the corner of my mouth. ‘The prospect of love always makes me hunger. Strix!’

  Her owl, in answer to its name, bobbed its head and flew down into a corner from which came, suddenly, the squeal of a dying mouse. With the tail hanging from its beak, the bird flew to Nemione and dropped the mouse in her hand.

  ‘Bravo, bonny Strix. Try it, Koschei. You will find the taste agreeable – something like a ripe plum.’

  ‘I am not hungry,’ I said, mindful of my independence, for to eat the food of a sorceress is to become her slave, and that I was already because of my lust.

  ‘Not hungry? – after such a journey from Pargur, such trials here. Taste this morsel – you will not be disappointed. See, I will season it with a kiss.’ Nemione broke off the head of the mouse, put it to her lips, and kissed it. She laid the tiny, warm face, whose ears were still erect as if they listened for the hunting owl, against my lips so that I was forced to raise my hand and dash it to the ground.

  ‘I am not hungry!’

  ‘But you have refused my kiss. Look, it lies there on the floor, spurned – oh, cruelly rejected.’

  ‘I will take a kiss direct from your lips.’

  Nemione smiled and laid her head on my breast. ‘How I torment you – poor Koschei. Very well then.’ I put my other arm about her and felt the catamount-couch sink fearfully beneath me and saw her familiars back away – so, falsely convinced of the infallibility of my powers and of my supremacy, I kissed Nemione on her parted lips, tasting blood and honey and the sweet savour of herself. Her trapped hands moved against my chest, little fluttering birds or scurrying mice themselves, as they encountered the rigid cuirass beneath my coat. I pulled her closer still, devouring her and feeling her robe sunder in my puissant hands into its original yarn, a cascade of hair. But my own armour also was dissolving in our conjoined lust and even as I pushed Nemione lower and covered her more closely and more weightily, her enchanted couch opened its carved mouth and howled and Roszi on her pedestal screamed,