The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘Nemione! Oh my Lady – beware!’

  and, looking at my half-naked love and my undone self, I saw that I had grown two woman’s breasts upon my hard, well-muscled trunk. My cuirass had vanished entirely; in place of this, my armour, was women’s softness and vulnerability. I moved my hands and gripped Nemione by the throat.

  The couch roared, the familiars snarled and screeched, clamouring in enmity. They bit me and clawed at my eyes and pummelled me with hard fists, especially my new-grown tender orbs; and I spat in Nemione’s face:

  ‘Return my shape to me!’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Traitoress!’

  ‘Lecher!’

  The owl beat its wings against my head and Erchon came running, Lucas at his heels – who could do nothing useful but rail like the woman he was; but Erchon thrust at me with his rapier so that I, to save myself, was forced to release Nemione and draw my sword. I swung it wildly, worn out with my wretchedness and the debilitation brought on by my long conjuration and the ferocity of my desire for the queen bitch, who rested on her cushions and laughed hysterically. I swung wide, missing Erchon entirely and quite unable to bring him to bay, and my blade caught Lucas’s drapery and travelled on, wounding him mortally and depriving me of any hope in the outcome of the contest. Erchon knocked me to the ground and leapt on me. His small weight felt like lead on my weak and useless breast, pressing ever harder; nor could I grasp or hold him because of the familiars, which held fast to my legs and arms.

  Erchon turned his silvery head to look up at Nemione.

  ‘Shall I kill him, Mistress?’

  ‘I must consider, Erchon. Hold him well while I deliberate – it may be more agreeable to play with him a while. The Tire burns up and Puss’s teeth and appetite are sharp.’

  ‘My blade longs for his blood, Mistress.’

  ‘I would not disappoint it, Erchon – nor you, my good and faithful servant. Why not? Yes, you may kill the Archmage – painfully, now.’

  I saw her lovely long, white feet (which I would have grovelled at and kissed) draw back as she knelt up on the catamount’s back for a better view; and Erchon brought his rapier down in one slow, agonizing thrust and pushed it through my left pap. I felt the tissues split and my ribs cleave apart. A terrible burning filled every horizon and my heart burst asunder. I felt it stop and saw the gates of Hell open wide to receive me. Severed heads, whose mouths stood open in lamentation and whose eyes wept tears of stone, were fixed upon its spikes, the countless heads of slothful men and women; of the proud, the gluttonous, the lecherous, the envious, the irate and the covetous. Asmodeus smiled a welcome. I reached out to take the hand he offered me and, in that eternal moment, felt a new and rapid beating beneath my shattered ribs. My heart thundered, living, exultant, strong. Satan’s lieutenant faded from my sight; the iron gates vanished.

  I threw the rejoicing dwarf from me and wrested my limbs from their invidious hold.

  ‘My dear and precious Soul!’ I shouted. ‘Oh, Life – oh love of life!’

  I laughed at Nemione, drunk with joy, swaying but on my feet. She shrank from me, clinging to her couch which, with a last roar, jumped up and fled the room with her.

  Erchon came at me again; I easily cast him off to lie half-conscious across the dying Lucas. Then, trusting all to the Fates and to Urthamma on whom I called with a mighty yell, I tore the golden head, Roszi, from her column and with her wailing in my hands cast myself from the window into the rising storm.

  That is how I became Koschei the Deathless.

  Immediately, I dropped a thousand feet past the dark castle walls and its desolate courtyards, before the storm caught and lifted me in its airy toils and buffeted me with thunderous gusts and sturdy bolts of lightning. My body became the playground of the elements which alternately tossed me up and threw me down, while they ripped my clothing from me and beat me black and blue. Knowing I was Deathless, I laughed triumphantly and bade them do their worst, while I clutched Roszi to my breast and buried her cold face between my female paps. Soon, tiring of its vain amusement, the storm abated and a cool and soothing breeze carried me along the canyons of the Altaish until I saw the stones of Windring and Frostfeather, with Peder Drum in her basket, below me. The breeze gently wafted me down beside him.

  ‘Master? My Lord!’ The man tried to kneel before me. No doubt I was a fearsome vision with my naked and lacerated soldier’s body, all its gear on show, and my fine and broad female bosom where nestled the beautiful golden head of the cruelly-used nivasha, Nemione’s cousin, Roszi Baldwin.

  Peder recovered himself,

  ‘She has done her worst for you, my Lord.’

  ‘And failed miserably, Peder. Return to Castle Sehol. I must to Peklo to repair the damage she has done.’

  I spoke the charm and was swept into the firmament. My adversary the thunderstorm rolled languidly there and ‘Follow me!’ I cried to it. ‘I will reward you with rocks to break and the endless ocean to play over.’ And so, with a crown of lightning and a halo of iron grey cloud, I was whirled on the storm to my stronghold, my tower of enchantment, where my dear son, Cob, jumped crabwise from his miniature palace to greet me, not caring how my shape was changed.

  Guy paused in his narrative. His two hands climbed up to scratch his back and one found a handkerchief under the pillow and tenderly wiped his nose. He had been two whole days, as far as he could judge, telling Lèni the central part of Koschei’s story and she had become as close to him, during the telling, as his wife or any of his mistresses – and closer still, he thought. Not afraid to open every part of her abused body to his frank gaze.

  Not afraid as he was – and had been for many months – years? Ever since he’d peered in through the window of the Old Presbytery in Coeurville and seen the shadowy Egyptian figure in Helen’s dining room, the fallen petals of the roses on the polished table; ever since Alice, appearing as if by magic in the car park, had stepped into his car, his life, the life which was running now too fast, too incoherently, too out-of-control. His hands, these separated, scuttling crabs, had lives of their own and no longer wrote what was in his mind. He imagined them over there, at the credenza or at the little walnut desk, writing this new, outrageous story in which he had become a character; he peered across the room.

  No hands. They lay quiet as cats on the bed. The shadows and the dim candlelight had returned Lèni’s beauty to her. With bent head and loosed hair, she looked like the madonna; and Helen too, he thought, unsurprised by the exemplars his drugged and sated mind threw up, pleased only by their aptness. Lèni yawned and he sent his right hand to stroke her hair.

  ‘Whatever the time, day, evening or night,’ she said. ‘Whatever the season, the people of Malthassa must perform like Guignol’s puppets each time their story is told.’

  ‘Or silently read,’ he answered.

  ‘Send me back there, Master Puppeteer. Let me dream again of Koschei and the other world I glimpsed so long ago. I am so weary now that I have told you my tale and heard so much of yours. I am exhausted without the blood, drained –’

  He tried to rouse her, saying,

  ‘Do you hear the thunder?’

  ‘Curious!’ She yawned. Her eyes closed. ‘I hear it – and yet a thunderstorm is rare in winter. Perhaps it thunders in my dreams.’

  ‘It is the storm Koschei has brought with him from the Altaish to Peklo Tower.’

  ‘Father!’

  ‘My son! How have you fared in my absence?’

  ‘Well, Father, well – I have spied through the bronze mirror upon the servants and the courtiers of Castle Sehol. I have swept the floors and dusted the furniture – and I have been sitting in my window watching for you through your window. You have brought a storm with you, Father.’

  ‘It tried to destroy me, and it saved me. It will serve me now to conceal the magic I must work.’

  My first task was to heal myself, not high magic this nor snow of the intellectual summit, but journeyman’s work wi
th herbals and chirurgeon’s manuals. A few days spent and I was good as new – save for one breast, a single woman’s pap upon my left side, which I could not shift. I could not shrink it, make it disappear, nor cut it off, and I tried all these means to rid myself of it. As soon as it was gone, it was in place again. I looked at it, both from my own superior viewpoint and in a mirror and, seeing it was handsome, nay, beautiful, resolved to leave it alone for the nonce. I squeezed it and a milky juice spurted forth, covering the mirror with a constellation of droplets, my own Via Lactea. My grotesque appendage pleased me, Nemione’s keepsake and a singular attribute of the kind usually given to the Gods. I spent another three days with pigments and oils, taking a sketch of myself, which when it was completed to my satisfaction, I hung on a wall in the Memory Palace.

  ‘Drink of this hermaphrodite essence, Cob,’ I commanded my son, offering him the brimming breast. Obedient, he climbed to my knee and sucked; the sensation was pleasant but he complained, saying ‘This stuff is weak – I want blood!’ and crying and whimpering at me. So I made a spell (another week) which changed the milk to strong liquor with a taste of brimstone, black treacle and asafoetida, and this Cob delighted in, taking a good feed of it after an apéritif of blood from my leg. To conceal my odd particular I wore a padded doublet and forbade Ivo to attend me in my bath, saying I had developed an incurable impostume and feared it would infect him.

  I achieved a sort of peace with the creature I fashioned from the golden head, all that remained of Roszi, and the body of a fire-demon, and I called my creation Rosalia for old times’ sake. In Espmoss, my beloved birthplace, the young men and maidens hang garlands of wild- and moss-roses on the tombs of their ancestors at Soultide and this ceremony is called the Rosalia. My living puppet was a memorial too, of Roszi the head and Roszi the water-sprite, and was, besides, supremely lovely like a wreath of morn-plucked roses on whose damask petals there lie fresh drops of sparkling dew, or like a rosebud blackened by canker and hard frost which yet hangs on the mid-winter bough. The effort cost me a month in my sick-bed when Cob, faithful creature, kept watch at my mirrors, my map and my globe, and told me of the cupidity and civil pride of the Council in Pargur and how Malthassa prospered, overlaid as were its western marches by the shadows of Albion and Lugdon and dogged in the north by bad harvests.

  I sat Rosalia on a chair beside my bed and gazed upon her while I convalesced. Her beauty, a blend of Roszi’s and Nemione’s with a touch of alien charm, encouraged my recovery. I had clothed the fire-demon whose headless body I united with the golden head in skin as pale as buttermilk. The skin had a translucent cast beneath which the demon’s red veins could be seen. The creature’s feet and hands, her breasts and secret parts, I modelled on Nemione’s and I gave her long nails of gold, sharpened to a keen edge, and a belly in whose centre there grew (instead of a navel which she could not have, being born unnaturally and not of woman) a marvellous crystal like the blossom of a fire lily but watery and green as finest aquamarine. At the junction of the white shoulders and the golden neck, where there was a horrid scar, I placed a necklace of silver toads and water marigolds and finally, I bade Rosalia open her hard lips and replaced her stiff tongue with one which was soft and pliant, a tongue of great length, hinged at the front like a frog’s. This changed her voice, which was no more the echo of Nemione’s, but sibilant and bubbling, alive like falling water or a rushing stream. Her face had a melancholy expression which contrasted fittingly with her radiant smile; she was in perpetual pain, but I could do nothing about that for the demon’s fire vaporized the nivasha’s water and the water quenched the fire. Rosalia’s body was in a constant state of flux. If one or the other had prevailed, she would have destroyed herself. Steam issued from her nostrils only to be replaced by smoke. The vapours alternately dampened and dried me when I kissed her; both warmed me and the warmth transferred itself from my lips to hers, stiff and metallic. I grew strong, looking at her, and began to give her small tasks such as the tender kissing, fetching my meals from Cob (who had taught himself to be an excellent chef), tidying my bed, turning the pages of my book as I read. She was grateful, for she had a body once more – and most desirable! On the first day of summer I drew aside the sheet which covered me and invited her to the enjoyment of my eccentric body.

  Lèni slept as if she was entranced, but Guy could find no peace. Until she woke he was free of her and of the long narrative which so filled his skull that, while he told it, there was no room for other thoughts. The candles guttered and he looked to see where the draught came in. The door of the room stood open. Lèni had forgotten to close it again. His hands, which were resting on his shoulders, gently tapped his forehead. The constant soft blows annoyed him.

  ‘Quiet!’ he said, as he might to a dog; but the hands tapped on. He moved his head from side to side, attempting to avoid their touch. They moved nimbly and kept up their tattoo. He got up slowly from the bed, moving in stages so that he did not wake Lèni, noticing as he moved across the room that his hands were still again.

  In the mirror which backed the credenza he saw a tattered relic of a man, pale-faced and thin, the long cuffs of his jacket giving him an aristocratic air, the two hands perching like weird epaulettes on his shoulders. The thick beard he had grown masked his chin and neck. ‘A gentleman tramp,’ he muttered. ‘A classy hobo.’ He peered at Lèni’s reflection behind him, a bundle of rags in the dilapidated bed. She had not moved. A wide area of wood on the top of the credenza shone as if it had been dusted recently and there, in the polished midst of it, a photograph lay. Old and sepia-tinted, it showed two smart figures against the painted backcloth of a photographer’s studio, the elaborate fashions of the 1880s before a counterfeited Temple of Diana. He recognized the chief actors of his opium dreams, those all-too-solid, passionate creatures, Paon and young Lèni herself, and bade his right hand turn the photograph over. Sure enough: printed on its back in capital letters was the legend, ‘Georges et Hélène, 1882.’

  Her sleeping figure in the mirror had stirred; she was sitting up. Startled, he turned about and saw her rising in the bed, her arms extended and her expression, as the bedclothes unveiled her, welcoming. She was in the fullness of her beauty, crowned by her sinuous dark hair, her fascinating snake’s eyes compelling him. Obediently, he started forward, calling her by the lover’s names which once delighted her,

  ‘Beloved, Swan’s Daughter, Goddess, Helen, Witch –’ They were the truth, and had been spoken many times. The old words came upon him like a litany: ‘She is very pleasant and will be old and young when she pleases,’ and again, ‘She makes any King whom she pleases and lies with any she pleases.’

  Helen smiled as he reached her. He bent to kiss her and her mouth dropped open in a soundless scream. Gesturing at the shadows behind him, she fell back and became, before his appalled gaze, the scarred and drunken Lèni la Soie who, instantly ageing, shrank into her absinthe-violated body and lay still and deathly, a wasted cadaver whose yellow skin stretched tight across her bones, whose eye-sockets were empty and whose lipless mouth gaped in that final silent, hopeless scream. A shining lens winked at him from inside the skull and from its mouth crawled a snake, a lamia gaudily patterned in bands of orange, scarlet and black. It reared up before its little cave and drew back its jewelled head to strike.

  There had been a time when he admired snakes. He tried to speak to the lamia to calm her but the only words which came were magical gibberish put into his mouth by the power of the thunderstorm, by his creation, the Archmage Koschei, or by his addled mind itself.

  ‘Serpent of Evil,’ he cried. ‘I exorcise thee in the name of the great River Lytha and by the eternal snows of the mighty Altaish, thou snake of the tribe of basilisks, thou foul, illusory, five-sensed, variegated Lamia. O Snake, cousin of the Dragon and the Fearsome Worm, thou that art on the right side of Hell and should be prisoned by its iron walls; if thou bite me thou shalt in the names of Asmodeus and Urthamma have no power to harm me –’ />
  – And the Lamia, which had remained upright in her deadly, striking pose, closed golden eyelids upon her glassy eyes, coiled up amongst the bones of Lèni la Soie, and vanished.

  His heart was racing and his breath coming in painful gasps. He stumbled clumsily backward and fell against the hawk-headed statue. Something crashed from the hollow of its beak to the floor. His left hand ran after it; came up with a key.

  He fled the room and reached the locked apartment door, which he banged and butted with his head. He kicked its scuffed panels while his hands, moving swiftly and with great dexterity and none of his panic, inserted and turned the key; opened the door. He stepped out. The stairway before him was broken and old, every window boarded up, but he rushed downward, tripping and recovering himself in the dim light. A doorway on the next floor had been closed off with a rough grey wall, another with a cross of wood. He paused for an instant, listening for the silk-looms of a century ago, but there was no sound at all. If it had been entirely dark, he would have believed himself beyond the grave. A grudging light filtered up the stairwell from below and made visible some words painted in crimson on the wall. He read them: COMME LA VIE EST LENTE ET L’ESPERANCE VIOLENTE: ‘How slow is life and how violent hope.’ As a clap of thunder broke the deathly silence on the stair, the sentence illuminated the long opiate night in his mind and, This is real, he thought. Outside, I shall find people, and hope, so long denied. He tried to run again, the rest of the way down, but his legs would hardly obey him, weaker agents of his escape than his detached hands.

  The hallway had been reduced by the years to a grime-streaked cavern. Here were two doors, both closed. The smaller door: that, he seemed to remember – stumbling through it – some rubbish on the floor – Georges. If he were to come – now. Panic shot through him: I am still imprisoned.