The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘Did you see?’ the great ape whispered. ‘You turned her into a great luce!’

  Parados laughed, seeking relief from his embarrassment. ‘Must I kiss them all?’ he asked.

  ‘I do not think you will be troubled again. The place has a new and desolate feeling and the sun is setting.’

  ‘It has been setting ever since I came here!’

  ‘No, it dips below the horizon, see! We have less time now than I expected.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Forward!’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What will, will be.’ He would say no more about their destination but untied the rope from Parados and, taking his arm in a hairy hand, led him past the myriad lakes until they came to a stone pillar whose wide foot was buried in the grass.

  ‘Here we are,’ said the Om Ren.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the start of the maze. Can’t you see it?’

  ‘The bank there?’

  ‘That is only the first.’ The ape sat on the ground and arranged his rope in coils about his neck.

  ‘Go on,’ said Parados.

  ‘I am tired now. You must lead me – begin, there is a good light from the stars.’

  Parados looked up at them. They had become familiar and he could name their constellations: the seven stars of Bail’s Sword in the north, the Swan, the Hoopoe and the Dancing Crane. He took a step forward, past the beginning of the high bank and found another which ran parallel with it. The path between them led away round a curve.

  ‘Watch how you go,’ the Om Ren said. ‘You must not walk the maze, but dance.’ He picked some white flowers which were opening their petals to the night and tucked them into his coat amongst the leaves.

  Parados, feeling like a bull at the ball, lifted his arms and skipped a step. The stars pricked the dark cloth of the night sky with their pulsating light and woke his imagination: he would dance like a crane, flapping his incomplete arms as the bird does its wings. He leaped, and sprang in the air and heard the Om Ren’s heavy tread behind him. The path divided continually as he danced on, taking now a left and now a right turn until he lost his way. He could not climb the steep turf banks without hands and, thinking again of the crane, whose dance he imitated, he raised his arms high and soared up into the night sky to fly below the starry Crane and above the maze. It was made of seven spirals, each one linked to the rest. The Om Ren looked small, far below, an animal in the night. He had lain down on the path and was asleep. There was the centre of the maze, a shadowy boulder at the heart of the central spiral. He flew down and alighted on it, his beautiful snowy wings turning back at once to mutilated arms, his short space of freedom over, his terrible disability come back. The wonderful lightness of body and spirit had fled with the wings whose long, primary feathers had been so much like fingers. But there! His severed hands were lying on the rock, a few steps away. They looked like hungry spiders crouched in wait for a careless fly, and the left one clasped the right. Once, he had been able to animate them. He had used them to make love to Lèni, to eat and drink and perform a thousand personal actions; he had hoped to teach them to write. And before, when they had been parts of his whole, they had written millions of words; been immersed in the waters of the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Thames; tended a garden, stroked animals, caressed a host of women, his wife, Helen and the witches, his mistresses; touched his dead grandfather and his new-born children. He did not wonder how they came here into Malthassa but knelt down close beside them and looked at them with love.

  ‘If I could only touch you,’ he said and smiled at the impossibility of his wish.

  This Ima coat had no long cuffs like the ones Lèni had sewn. The sleeves hardly concealed his stumps but there were deep pockets into which the hands might climb as they had done before. He felt in the pockets: there was ample room. The right one contained a clasp-knife and in the left was a handkerchief. He remembered beautiful Gry, who must have put them there, and took out knife and handkerchief to examine. The knife was heavy and had two blades. He opened and closed the blades. The handkerchief was clean and made of white linen. He blew his nose on it, bent his fingers and unbent them, pushed back his sleeves so that he could see his wrists: there were no scabs, no scars or any sign that there had been a wound and nothing on the rock where the hands had lain but ten fingerprints, two sets of hollows in the stone. He clapped his hands together and shouted until the hilltop rang and echoed with his joy. The Om Ren must hear!

  ‘Wake!’ he shouted, ‘W-a-a-ake!’

  He climbed down quickly from the boulder, his hands finding the necessary ledges and holding him steady while he moved his feet. The way out was clear in his mind. He careered along it until he found the Om Ren standing with head and ears upraised, but did not stop until he had run into the ape and let his hands experience the rough, crisscross pile of his hairy coat, the hard flexibility of the twigs, the ridged leaves and the smooth flower-petals of the greenstuff which adorned it. ‘Look; look at my hands,’ he said tearfully, incoherent with happiness and realized dreams, and the Om Ren took them both in his and held them for a moment.

  ‘All is well,’ he said. ‘And I must take the road. Follow your nose Parados and, remember, the animals cannot cross the bridge: I am certain you will find your way home.’

  ‘I have no home – I have become a wanderer like a gypsy,’ Parados replied.

  ‘Home to Flaxberry, where you will find that the people call you a knight-venturer – and perhaps they wait for you to earn your spurs.’

  ‘And my horse! The one I ride belongs to the Imandi.’

  ‘Summer, the white mare? Farewell, Parados and do not concern yourself about horses. Time solves every problem. A horse would be a handicap where you must journey. But you will find a good rope made of my hair. I had it woven as a gift for the Lady Nemione.’ He let go of Parados and took several paces along the way he had come. Parados ran at his heels.

  ‘Am I going into the Altaish, like you?’

  ‘The Altaish, as you know yourself, is an immeasurable mountain range.’

  ‘Shall I meet you there?’

  The Om Ren only raised one hand in a salute and did not turn back.

  ‘Then, goodbye!’ Parados called after him, ‘Farewell.’

  The night, for all the beauty of its stars, seemed darker. Being alone in it with the nivashi, the animals and whatever other supernatural creatures might be abroad was a daunting prospect. Parados climbed the nearest bank and looked down on the sevenfold maze. He could not be sure its curving pathways were empty of dread and danger. Thinking that he might fly over all the perils he expected, he lifted his arms and beat the air with them; but whatever magic had helped him find the heartstone and his hands had departed. The path across the lakeland was a maze itself and the way between the guardian animals its beginning, each stage leading to the next like a many-coloured ball of wool. But wool could be unravelled and to delay was vain. Thoughts would not carry him back to Flaxberry and the ford across the River Morus. You may lead a horse to water but a man must walk there by himself, he thought illogically and, scrambling from the bank-top, strode out along the path. He felt his boots sink in mud and then in water and looked intently about in case the nivashi were abroad. The sun’s rays broke suddenly above the horizon and all the stars vanished into a pale, early-morning sky. He saw the ford at Flaxberry in front of him and, on the far side of the little river Morus, the rejuvenated town awakening, smoke rising from its chimneys and a wonderful smell of new bread wafting out toward him. At his back, the level fields of SanZu stretched out, green and flourishing with new crops and the prow-shaped Rock on the horizon was sunlit and studded with bushes. The leaves on the trees were well out and the bleating of lambs and joyous bursts of birdsong filled the air. He splashed hurriedly through the clear water, delighting in the fish he could see there, for Githon had appeared on the far side and was shouting greetings at the top of his voice.

  When
he took hold of Githon’s outstretched hands he felt the callouses the miner’s pick had raised and the wonderful warmth of the hands. He reached down and embraced the dwarf: the cloth of his brown coat was soft and a tear on the right shoulder had been repaired with large, hard stitches of horse-hair.

  ‘Let me look at your hands,’ said Githon. ‘Are they the same, with fate etched in the left and reason in the right? Look about you – you have brought life back to SanZu, and the Goddess and the Thread Man between them have given the people food. The people found their granaries had filled with corn overnight and discovered living silkworms where there had been only dry, dead skins. And the trees are in leaf, the flax grows. It is a happy morning and the Finder, the Mayor of Flaxberry and the Abbess wait to welcome you.’

  ‘Polnisha?’

  ‘The child? – she has demanded fireworks, a procession and seven nights of celebrations. It is not difficult to welcome excess!’

  Parados flew, but without wings. His balloon was pale blue and grey, the colours of the sky before dawn, with a resplendent sun blazoned on its convex walls. It rose softly and he, leaning against the basket’s side, had plenty of time to gaze his fill upon the roofs and environs of Flaxberry as they receded from him and the town, lying comfortably amongst its green fields and leafy groves, became no bigger than a model settlement.

  Before he left, the Abbess, restored to vigorous middle age and with a fine head of iron-grey hair, had taken him about the countryside and shown him the mulberry set, multitudes of green berries on every tree: there would be a bumper crop. The flax was being harvested and they had ridden into the fields and watched the tall stems being cut and carted to the retting pits where they would lie in water and rot until their strong fibres could be drawn out. At each homestead he had received a royal welcome and been surprised when children ran up and begged him for a piece of his coat to keep, or shy girls blushed and asked for a lock of his hair.

  ‘Humour them: you are not an ordinary man,’ the Abbess said.

  He had asked her about the Rock, which he saw lying asleep on the skyline every day as he went about the business of balloon-making in Flaxberry.

  ‘Surely they go out from the town to climb it and spy out the land – or take their wives and families for the day?’

  ‘Not there, we have balloons for that, and the people make excursions to the river or to the forest-edge.’

  ‘What about the farmers whose land reaches to its foot?’

  ‘They are busy men. Ask no more questions, Parados. It is not in our country but falls under the Imandi’s rule; it is Ima territory in the heart of SanZu.’

  Three balloons had been ready when he returned to Flaxberry. He watched impatiently while the other two were assembled and sewn. There was plenty of silk, bales of it, barns-ful. As the Mayor told him, ‘No one eats silk,’ and the Finder, ‘No one buys silk when Malthassa starves.’ Some had been used for shrouds; the rest had lain, gathering dust, until he came and Githon proposed that the expedition into the Altaish should be undertaken by balloon. Nandje and Leal had returned home to the Plains and taken the horses with them, but Thidma remained with him, a sturdy and somewhat morose lieutenant. The other men, who would navigate the balloons and fight if need be, were sought in the town and, further afield, in the villages of SanZu.

  Here they were, a flight of five balloons, sailing slowly up into the bright blue summer sky. His navigator, a young man from Flaxberry called Aurel, worked hard at the furnace. It was necessary to carry the fuel for the balloon, dry stuff and dead stalks collected from the forest, and the calculation to raise it loaded was fine. He had thought of lifting them all by thought but the power worked randomly and he, growing used to its vagaries, was content to lean on the wickerwork and admire the fruitful garden he had made of SanZu. About them the other balloons of the flight, Githon’s copper-coloured, Thidma’s bronze like the Plains in autumn, and the two which carried the soldiers a workmanlike dull green, rose silently.

  At last Aurel turned from the fire, smiled at and saluted him and brought packets of ham and cheese-and-pickle sandwiches from the hamper.

  ‘She rises like a lark,’ he said. ‘What will you call her?’

  ‘Perhaps Summer, after the horse I rode across the Plains – or Lèni for a courageous woman I once knew – But I think, yes, I will call her Esperance, for I always journey in hope.’

  ‘A good name. It reminds me of my sister who went singing through the darkest days and died last year when the grain ran out. She is buried in the nunnery garden. Look, there’s the old Rock! My mother used to tell such a tale of it.’

  Parados looked eagerly out as Esperance approached and passed over the huge outcrop. From above it looked flat, a lumpy contour map, and the windcut trees and low bushes were hastily-drawn-in details. A group of small white clouds of the kind which pass across the sun and make a hot day chilly rushed together below the balloon, obscuring his view. They reminded him of a herd of galloping Plains horses as they streamed below him in the wind. He did not speak because Aurel continued to talk of his childhood and, after following many side-roads and diversions through his earliest years, began his mother’s story of the Rock:

  In Riverside, they call the Rock a cat-a-mountain and in Linum and Bombyxius a lion. They say that those two long ledges which overhang Ringan’s plot are its front paws, it rests its hind feet in Aldwyn’s highest fields and its tail stretches out a half-mile until the tassel at the end of it stirs the loose stones above Forcat’s land.

  But we of Flaxberry know a better tale. Look at it, my son! It is the great ox-cart which brought us the first Polnisha who floated with her waggon and ten oxen over the sea and drove through the ever-shifting forest until she came to SanZu. The name means Homeland, Aurel, and it is not one of our words. She met the magician Garzon, who built Castle Sehol, walking with his Firebird on a crest of land above the quiet fields.

  ‘I hear that you are an architect,’ Polnisha said to Garzon. ‘Would you make me a castle out of my ox-cart, for I do not need it now that I have come home?’

  ‘That is like asking for a feather from the Firebird,’ said Garzon. ‘What will you give me in return?’

  ‘My body, to enjoy for ever,’ said Polnisha and, good as her word, she stepped into Garzon’s embrace and submitted to his will there, on the hillside. So, when he had loved her for seven nights, he built the Rock from her cart and sent her oxen into the forest where they bred and became the herds of wild cattle which are there today. Polnisha was happy but, knowing she had work to do in SanZu, on the eighth night stepped out of her body and left it, a beautiful, witless shell, for Garzon to kiss and whisper words of love to as long as he should live. Polnisha wandered for a while, in SanZu and out of it, until she found a girl-child who would take her in and give her human shape.

  And that, my dearest son, is why each new Polnisha comes to us in the shape of a little girl and why her Cart stands mute and petrified above us as we work the silk and linen.

  As Aurel finished speaking, they left the Rock behind them and floated on.

  ‘Thank you. It is a good story well told,’ said Parados. ‘But why does the Rock belong to the Ima?’

  ‘They say it is their most sacred ground and that their shamans have released evil puvushi from their prisons in the shifting sands of the Far Plains to live there (sometimes a boulder tumbles down into the fields and that is their doing) – and worse things I dare not name. So, the Ima keep the Rock for themselves. To question their right would only cause another war and, besides, we keep the living Polnisha and her waggon in Flaxberry.’

  The wind blew them south-west toward the forest and the Altaish, and played on the struts and cords of the balloon like a mad harper. When SanZu was far behind, it seemed to Parados that the land was too empty, nothing but scrubland in which the trees became ever more dense but were not yet forest. He wondered where the deer drank and, looking down, saw a gushing spring, which quickly became a stream and flowed s
wiftly away between the birch trees.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘Look there, Aurel. That is the source of the River Sigla.’

  ‘Which flows into the Lytha? A sight to cheer us – I have heard men say that its headwaters are impossible to reach, yet here we are sailing above it and the way to it through the trees looks easy enough.’

  ‘The water should be sweet,’ said Parados. ‘It is as clean and bright as our new weapons.’ He gestured at them, two swords and a heavy pistol; all of them wrapped snugly in oiled cloth and leather to keep out the cold and the damp, deadly yet comforting presences which might one day save his life. He had tried and was sure of them; but of his ability to put rivers in the landscape he was less certain, and the Sigla had surely been there amongst the grey birches and the blue-leaved junipers all along? Githon was shouting from his copper-coloured balloon,

  ‘Drop down! Drop! Room by the stream!’

  They descended and were camped near the spring before sunset. Aurel and Hadrian, one of the soldiers from Flaxberry, collected wood and lit a fire. They sat a long time round it, eating the bread they had brought with them and drinking the clear water of the Sigla. Beyond the circle at the fire the balloon-baskets lay idle, their neatly-folded silks stowed out of sight inside them, and Hadrian walked constantly in a wide circle, keeping the watch. When it changed and Vaurien took over, Hadrian went to his basket and brought from it a tin flask which he offered Parados.