The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘You now, dearest Lady. He longs to serve you.’

  He heard Helen Lacey, close by him, answer her:

  ‘Is he ready, pretty Heifer; can he endure the last and best?’

  ‘The poor creature is in torment! Come.’

  This woman was light and busy on him, crouching high, now low. The time had come, was here. He emptied himself in her, crying out with the relief, and the shame. What should have been his to give, as with his wife, with other women in his past, had been taken. His last tormentor rolled away. His hands were grasped by long, cold fingers – Helen’s, without a doubt – and something feathery and warm put in them. It struggled, beating its body, its wings against his chest. He screamed and the bird screamed louder than he.

  ‘Don’t let go!’ Helen’s voice was urgent. ‘Get up – kneel. Now pull his neck – in the old days it would have been yours!’

  He felt for the thrashing head of the bird, held it; neck in the other – pulled the two apart. The neck dislocated in his hands. The wings flapped wildly against him and the bird was taken from him. He heard them rending it and sucking its blood and the raw flesh from its bones. Helen came back to him – her hands moved, tracing a spiral on his chest.

  ‘Next time,’ she said. ‘You will call the tune – our king, subject no longer. You have passed the test.’

  It grew quiet. He shivered. Though there had been no sound beyond a random susurration in the grass, he knew that he had been deserted, abandoned on the hill to find his own way back. His first voluntary act was to claw at the knot in the string which bound the sack over his head and then, having untied it, to remove the blind. Dark had come and the moon was up and full, yet white as the skin of the girl who had hooded him. All that remained of the cockerel were a few tail-feathers lying in the grass; of the ceremony, a dark spiral drawn, he must suppose, in the bird’s blood on his chest. The initiate stood up and moved slowly down the hill to the field where his trials had begun. His clothes lay where he had dropped them in the afternoon and he collected them wearily, put them on. The familiar fields were welcome, though invaded by the moon’s unvarying light. He spat on his fingers and rubbed away the bloody mark; passed his hands over his hair, smoothing it, and found a feather adhering. It glowed as brightly as a flare and he put it in his pocket to extinguish it and douse the glaring memories of this frantic, blood-spattered ceremony.

  ‘On he wandered, hero hallow,

  Bound in flesh and blood to follow

  Where they led him, where they called him,

  Where’er the weird sisters bade him,

  Where his fated footsteps brought him.’

  Gry rocked to and fro in sympathy with her verse, red lights glowing in her silver ornaments, her plaits swinging.

  ‘That is all I have to tell and all there is to hear,’ she said; but Parados was asleep and she gave him one tender and regretful look before creeping silently from the house.

  He rubbed his face, which itched, slowly moving his scarred stumps over forehead, cheeks, beard. All that witchery was long ago. Now Parados lay grievously wounded in Gry’s house – in the Plains – in Malthassa. He had come a long way, nearly fifty years; had never stopped travelling since that first, midsummer night. Had I truly such a wild youth? he thought. Such abandonment? Such irresponsibility? The fire burned dully, deep crimson. He sat up and looked about him: no sign of Gry. It was quiet here, too. You might hear a pin drop, a mouse breathe, a spider walk.

  ‘Your youth was a time of discovery, I think?’ said a voice at his elbow, a rich voice full of joy and good fellowship. A broad, smiling face shone beside him in the dark, spoke again. ‘A time of rash deeds for your mature consideration?’

  ‘I suppose everyone’s is.’

  ‘But yours outdid the common – how meagre, for example, were our orgies of drinking in Vonta, our little romances and our bi-annual pilgrimages to Nether Pargur, our fights at the mine, beside your exploits!’

  It took a few minutes, the identification. The language, the bass voice, the coppery hue of the face –

  ‘Githon?’ Parados said. ‘If I’m correct.’

  ‘Correct! Githon of the Copper Race, poor coin beside our Silver brothers.’

  ‘But you are Erchon’s cousin, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of a kind, not kissing-cousins. My mother is the sister of the husband of Erchon’s fourth uncle’s second wife.’

  ‘You take ancestry seriously in Malthassa!’

  ‘As you well know. It is wonderfully good to see you, Parados. Your coming has been rumoured many months and, before that, was a well-loved folk-tale in many of our little nations.’

  ‘Nations?’

  ‘A strong, war-like word. Our tribes then, our wondrous peoples. We have as many kinds as you, more perhaps: ourselves, the Dwarves; the Giants; the Om Ren all alone – and his mate who likewise dwells alone, but in the Altaish (you would call her the Yeti, no doubt, though she is a fair creature and no ape); the Nivashi; the Puvushi; the Zracni Vili, spirits of the air; Gypsies – the wandering, secret Rom; Women (how I love them!); Men in their many kinds – and the Mages amongst them might be counted a separate race. Which brings me to my tale –’

  ‘But tell me first how you come to be here, in the Plains.’

  ‘I told you: rumour is abroad and, besides, I am an idle fellow who likes to roam, though never purposefully as does my belligerent cousin, Erchon. It is of Erchon – and the others – that I would speak.’

  ‘Nemione? – Koschei?’

  ‘Of the Lady Nemione, who died so long ago (may all the gods be generous to her soul) and the Archmage, Prince Koschei. Listen to me!

  ‘Great storms and plagues of rats raged in the early months of the year in which Nemione died. Many think she died of an illness associated with rat bites or from something taken of their dirt in the food on the table. Others think she died of a more sinister poison, of pride, of jealousy, of evil magic for unrequited love; that Koschei murdered her. The only certainty is that what was bad in Malthassa – I mean the failed harvests and dismal summers, the cruel winters, the sudden agues and fevers, the rapid fading and death of tiny babes and sturdy children – had begun many years before she died and continued no better. Such attempts as have been made by clerks and scholars and other such delicate scum (I am a simple miner) to lay the country’s misfortunes at her door are false, and scandals. She was another victim, despite her magic and her high and intricate skills. It is my belief, based on nothing but a sigh on the wind and a sight through a break in the clouds of Castle Lorne – how grey and wintry it is! – I believe she died because there was nothing more for her to do: of boredom if you will.

  ‘Koschei built her a marble tomb, not where she would have wished in the meadows of Espmoss, where she played as a girl, nor under the greenwood tree where first she met the gypsies whose company she loved, but on a high alp above Castle Lorne – in the very centre of the Windring that the Giants raised and with a view (if one were needed in death!) of the snowy Altaish unfolding her clouds, ridge after ridge. There is gold up there if any one were brave enough to win it! And there is fool’s gold and rubies and their sisters, sapphires (the colour of Nemione’s eyes) and fire-opals and emeralds, carnelians as big as your fist and all the ores too, iron, antimony, nickel, mercury, chrome – we dwarves are meek and fearful fellows, Parados. Only at the mountains’ feet do we dare claw our adits out.

  ‘Enough, to the story! Well then, picture the lovely lady on her bier, at peace now and so beautiful in death. A full guard was brought up from Castle Sehol and a regiment of Navigators and their balloons. They carried her up to her resting place in a gondola specially built and laid her in her tomb – so cold in that high meadow and not a flower showing through the snow. They say that Koschei grieved so desperately he tried to clamber into the tomb with her and that his old body-servant Ivo had to restrain him. Ivo used to be a soldier and afterwards a boxer on the fairs: a strong man, though aged. He is dead now, gone to joi
n the great company we have lost.’

  Parados leaned forward, his face contorted in the flickering light.

  ‘What is it?’ said the dwarf. ‘Do your hands, though they are gone, pain you? Grieve not: all shall and will be well.’

  ‘I never meant to kill her!’ Parados exclaimed.

  ‘Koschei said something of that kind. Grief makes us witless, makes us utter wild words. He had loved her all his life, you see, and in vain too. He thought she chose to die because it was the only way she could escape him: he was mad for a while.’

  ‘But when was this, when did it all happen?’

  ‘Oh, years ago. It is not even a memory now but a tale. Call it fifteen years: who knows how long a year is, in Malthassa? Some years are much shorter than others. They fly by like a gale. Let us say it has been another fifteen, no – say twenty, twenty-five – since the lady died. Those years – that time has been fearful. Erchon told me how, after they had buried her, night fell in Castle Lorne and has not ended yet. The servants – those that were left, for most had fled to their homes far away – lit the lamps. Little was revealed by their dim light but the drunkenness of the funeral guests and the broken meats left from the wake. The castle, from high watchtower to deepest wine cellar, slept, except for Erchon, who in the dead of this eternal night, sat watching on the steps outside Nemione’s room. It was his custom and he was not ready to give it up, though he knew it was an empty folly to guard her emptier room. He heard the night owl’s silent wing, the scurrying of the cockroaches over the golden plates and the whisper of the cat to the rat: ‘Take that!’ He heard the terrible squeal of the dying rat, a mixture of anger and agony. It inspired him. He got up from the step he was sitting on, buckled on the rapier he had taken off and laid down in his grief and vowed to leave Castle Lorne, the Altaish, and all his past behind him, never to be re-visited. He vowed to leave Malthassa if it was possible. It was on his journey north in search of this delusive goal that he called at my house and, finding me there for once enjoying the company of my wife and children, told me this tale.’

  ‘Where is he now? Have you heard from him?’

  ‘Not a breath, not a shadow’s shadow. Now, my friend, it is time for real dreams. Let me pull that fleece over you – I will lie down here, in the warm ashes.’

  Gry, when she entered the guest-house in the morning found the two, man and dwarf, fast asleep. The house was warm and the embers of the fire glowed. She moved quietly about, waking the fire to flame, spitting steaks of dark red horse-meat, preparing bowls of washing-water, before she woke the sleepers.

  ‘How well you look!’ she told Parados. ‘Clear-eyed, sweet-breathed –’

  ‘And maimed,’ he finished for her.

  ‘Fear not. All will and shall be well! Githon, I am glad to see you.’

  When they had washed, and eaten the horse-meat, she bade them sit quietly and reflect upon whatever they wished, as long as it was a happy, hopeful thing.

  ‘No sad thoughts must disturb you today,’ she said, and left them. Githon smiled.

  ‘Let us exchange our thoughts,’ he proposed. ‘Give me your happiest and I will tell you mine.’

  Parados cast his mind into the past. It trawled the thoughts there and half-raised a few, slimy mud-coated hulks, which he quickly dropped back into the mire. The future, he thought, and saw, though it was pure fantasy, the sun rising on a pastoral landscape: pure peace.

  ‘An abstract, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The future – not a certain hope.’

  ‘It will do very well. Mine is no dynamite charge either – a simple prospect of my beloved Altaish on a winter’s afternoon, when darkness falls swiftly from the peaks and they become one with the night sky, save that the snow capes each one wears appear to float amongst the stars.’

  ‘Happy thoughts!’ Nandje had entered the house. ‘You are playing the game of Contentment,’ he continued. ‘It makes me happy to see you and it is an auspicious beginning.’

  The sun had risen over the Plains and brought with its rising a warm breeze to stir the newly grown grasses. The horses of the Ima grazed them, moving outside the village in loose groups of mares and young colts. The Red Horse, meanwhile, grazed alone beyond his herd, ears cocked in case of an alarm. Of the village itself there was little to see, a public hearth built of dry turves and stones, a scaffold on which several horse-skins hung to cure, a flagstaff whose flag-less rope tapped against it in the breeze and the small hillocks, miniatures of the greater which composed the Plains, which were the house-tops. The rest was underground. Someone emerged from his house, appearing like a rabbit suddenly out of the ground. A piece of blue cloth was tied about his waist which, when he unwound it, proved to be the missing flag. The man bent it to its rope and hoisted it. His emergence brought forth others from the ground and soon a crowd had gathered which milled about one particular house-hill while individuals left it to call their horses in from the herd. Presently Nandje appeared, stood upon his house and absently whistled a tune. Far out, in the tallest grasses, the Red Horse turned his head, took one last mouthful, chewed on it and swallowed; and cantered to the village.

  ‘You must crawl again – it is for the last time, I assure you,’ Githon told Parados. ‘A few yards and you will be a new man – nearly new, at least. No, not that way. That is the back door. We shall leave by the front.’

  Parados tried to shuffle along the low passageway on his knees but it was not possible. He had to bend his back and so, crawled on all fours out into the daylight. The crowd, as numerous as it had been the evening before, drew back to make a space for him and immediately pressed forward when he was on his feet. People touched him, hands reaching over neighbours’ heads and shoulders. Children, on a lower level, ran out to grasp his trouser-legs and the hem of his jacket, smiled up at him, and disappeared into the crowd.

  ‘Make way, make way!’ called Githon at his back and when a way was cleared and the people had stopped moving with him, Gry stepped forward with a heavy coat of sheepskins across her out-stretched arms.

  ‘For you, Parados,’ she said. ‘To keep you warm when the cold winds return, as they must, alas.’ She made a show of passing the coat to him and he held up his useless arms. Then she handed the coat to Githon.

  ‘Goodbye, Lord Parados,’ Gry said, made a small bob like a bow and retreated.

  Lord? He laughed wryly to himself, not liking the distinction.

  ‘Gry!’ he said; but she had vanished amongst the other blue-clad, brown-skinned women. ‘Thank you, Gry!’ He wished very much that he could see her.

  A group of horsemen waited for him. He saw Nandje there, mounted on the Red Horse, at least a dozen others, some spare horses, a flag-bearer carrying the same sky-blue standard that flew above the village. They looked like a photograph out of the National Geographic, empty green steppe, un-groomed horses, barbaric jewellery, sun-burned faces, bare chests, savagery, magnificence. He blinked, but they did not go away. The men beside him conducted him to one of the riderless horses and put him in the saddle. He was not surprised that his horse was white. Nearby, Githon struggled without any help into the saddle of a smaller horse, the men of the Ima standing back to watch him, laughing at him and slapping each other’s backs. Githon remained cheerful.

  ‘It is a fact of life,’ he said. ‘I cannot ride – but give me a miner’s pick! Nevertheless, I shall persevere and, if I fall off, do not stay to put me up again.’

  Parados, confident that his white mount would display as much understanding as the Red Horse, smiled.

  ‘Now!’ said Nandje, riding up. ‘What have you forgotten? Her name is Summer.’

  ‘Permit me, Summer?’

  ‘That form is for the Red Horse only. “By your leave” –’

  ‘By your leave, Summer.’

  ‘Good! Now she will treat you kindly. But I am afraid she is not such as expert with her bridle as the Horse. I will knot the reins for you. Let them lie there, on the pommel. Summer will not leave her kind.’r />
  ‘Nandje, this is all very well. I have no inkling of what my future holds here – but, where are we going?’

  ‘To SanZu, where else? It is in the wind – look, it bends the grasses eastward.’ He sat tall on the Red Horse. One of the riders beat a drum. The Ima cheered, and the men and women all together. ‘To SanZu!’ said the Imandi again. ‘SanZu! SanZu!’ the crowd echoed and Gry was there again, with a flowering mulberry branch in her hand.

  She held it up and presented it to her father who at once gave it back to her. Then she took it, a broad smile on her face, to Parados and, because he could not carry it, tucked it into the cheek-piece of Summer’s bridle.

  If, on that fortunate day, anyone had been afflicted with a sudden desire to step into the basket of a balloon and soar above the Plains or, being a competent magician, changed himself into a high-flying eagle; or, worst of choices, had been able to sit on the shoulder of the Archmage, Koschei, and stare into his magic mirrors, he would have seen a compact company of horsemen moving steadily over the low, green hills. At intervals individual riders shot forward from the rest, rode on a while and circled back. And then, if he had cast his eye, bird’s or magical, on the far hills of SanZu in the east the watcher would have seen there a ring of snow-clouds hanging in the air and dense flocks of crows darkening the already-dark skies. A third look would have descried another company advancing over the Plains, an untidy line with stragglers at the rear, calves perhaps from their general outline, or goats. About five miles (as the crow flies) from the two groups, some thorny bushes spread long tentacles into the grass. It looked as though they would converge hereabouts, and meet.

  The out-rider had returned again and held a muttered conversation with Nandje, who spoke in turn to the Red Horse. In a little while, it stopped and Nandje, turning in the saddle, said,

  ‘There are other travellers abroad. We shall meet and pass them at the Nut Ground – they are carrying a branch of pilgrimage and will not be kind if we speak to them. Yet I know – it is in the wind – that their journey is ours and I will speak.’