The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  The couch-head roared. Its carved eyes were sunken and the ivory teeth it bared decayed but it took a pace forward and lashed its moth-eaten tail. Hadrian ran forward and would have thrust his sword into the cat’s open mouth but Parados, smiling and shaking his head, said,

  ‘That’s no way to treat Nemione’s guardian,’ and stroked the angry, wooden head and the furry back of the couch which was its neck. The familiars hissed and spat, uncurling and separating from the warm squalor in which they slept. Halfman sat up on the Child’s knee.

  ‘Come,’ said Parados and held out a friendly hand. At once, the monkey jumped up and swung from it, turning a somersault round the resurrected wrist and running up to Parados’s shoulder where he sat and chittered comfortably. The Child, scarred by her untimely knowledge of magicians and men, was more reluctant, but she touched Parados hesitantly, knelt and said, in her fish’s voice,

  ‘You are not the Archmage. Have you come to lead us away? – we cannot leave our home, though it is a cold castle. This was my mother’s realm.’

  ‘I shall not take you anywhere, unless you wish to go. I am Parados, journeying in hope.’

  ‘That is an unknown commodity here. Koschei has none of it and we gave ours up when my mother died.’

  Parados gazed at her glistening blue nakedness and wondered why she had not frozen like the water in the glass. Her presence woke fear in him: she, the daughter of an archmage and an enchantress was too much like a nivasha to please him.

  ‘Have you no dress, or cloak?’ he asked.

  ‘They have all rotted in the time we have been here.’

  Parados removed his outer coat of furs and draped it over her thin shoulder. Thus dressed, she was more hideous but smiled. Her face showed gentleness and trust.

  ‘Thank you. It is soft. The others grew their own warm coats, but I cannot – all I can grow are scales and spines. See, my fingers all have their own separate fins.’

  She held out her hand and raised the transparent fins which grew along the backs of her fingers.

  ‘I should live in water,’ she said. ‘Here, Leo, we will stay with Parados and see what he will do – quietly, Beasts, or this man-magician will send you back to Beelzebub’s pit and the fires of Asmodeus, where you belong.’

  ‘How do you know what I am?’ He was astonished: he hardly knew it himself.

  ‘No one but a magician could enter Castle Lorne, especially in the steps of Koschei. Such a one must be of equal standing and ability.’

  The earless dog, Leo, which had obeyed her call and stood close by her, licked her hand and held it in its curious three fingered grip.

  ‘You are no better than your fellow-familiars,’ she said. ‘Beware! Now I will show you Castle Lorne. That way, you will avoid Koschei’s magical snares, for I know every one. He is a careful keeper of other people’s treasures.’

  Aurel, who had taken shelter at the back behind Hadrian and Githon, crept forward.

  ‘Are you not afraid of these brutes, or are they your lap-dogs?’ he asked, fear and loathing loud in his voice. The imp spoke up from its long coat of hair,

  ‘Neminies, Neminies,’ it squealed.

  ‘They are Nemione’s familiars,’ said the Child. ‘I am her only daughter, got from the seed of the Archmage Valdine and conceived in my virgin mother’s bath. Do not be afraid – I am old but still a child. Treat me as one and your tolerance will be rewarded with good fortune.’

  The four men followed her about the castle. Decay was everywhere, and everywhere they went the heavy darkness in which the castle had slumbered retreated to let in the light. It seemed to Hadrian that the further they went into the castle’s most secret places, the quicker its recovery was and the more magnificent, a fine grandeur of tapestries like gardens and of white marble basins full of mysterious green water which, as Parados came near, turned crystal clear. A fountain shot up from one and played over the dirt on the floor, washing it clean and revealing red and white tiles in the shapes of roses and lilies. Another was surrounded by stone beasts from whose open mouths fresh water suddenly poured. They stood by these animals and Aurel cupped his hands and took a drink of the water. He was certain its eyes moved in its head and that it licked its dripping lips when he had drunk. Some of the castle’s peculiarities they never noticed, too slow of eye to see that the mirrors often reflected faraway places, or how the statues turned on their plinths to stare after them as they passed. In a small room near an open court where the growing light discovered mock-oranges in bud, they found a table set for six, but dared not go near it and did not see the disembodied hand which set napkins by the plates when they had turned their backs. Beyond this room, in a wide hall furnished with cushioned benches and a harpsichord, Parados stood still and held up a warning hand.

  ‘Something follows after us,’ he said.

  ‘Koschei!’ said Githon. ‘The footprints must be fresh after all.’

  ‘He sleeps in Castle Sehol. I know it.’

  ‘It is the couch!’ The Child burst into bubbling laughter as Nemione’s couch bounded into the room, the Imp, the Sooterkin and Leo riding on its back and Halfman on its head. It had grown young again and stripes and spots appeared in its fur. Its eyes were full and bright and it hung out a red tongue and panted before lying down and purring with a thunderous note. A tremor ran suddenly along the keyboard of the harpsichord and it began to play a galliard. The Child capered and Halfman clapped his paws together.

  Then nothing could stop their joyous progress through the halls and courtyards, the cellars and towers of Castle Lorne. The walls renewed themselves about them, the snow on the sills melted away and, when they looked out of the windows, they saw a pretty valley, a sparkling river and peaceful fields planted with wheat and groves of birch. Githon ran outside and looked up at Windring. Far above, on the steep cliffside, he saw the balloons tethered to a green fig tree and he called loudly up to Vaurien and the soldiers and navigators.

  ‘Wake up! Wake, lazy dolts!’

  When the balloons had been brought down and the castle shown to all, with its gardens crowded with flowering lilac and laburnum, its sparkling white walls and towers and its curios, curiosa and curiosities, they took possession of it in the name of Hope and, finding the stores and wine-cellars as full as those of happy Flaxberry, they set about preparing meals and sleeping quarters; but Nemione’s Child was quiet and sat beside the fire with her head in her hands until Parados, thinking she was tired of the new company and diversions, bent over to ask her why she wept.

  ‘We have forgotten my mother,’ she said. ‘We ran about the castle joking, laughing and making merry as if she was alive and we only waited on her pleasure till she chose to put on her finest dress and come down to the feast.’

  ‘But look what I have found you.’ He held out a white dress. ‘Is it Nemione’s? Put it on for memory’s sake and, tomorrow, we will carry flowers to her tomb, kneel there and remember.’

  Parados, though he was exhausted, for he did not know that magic saps strength and eventually wastes the body unless remedies are taken, slept uneasily. He had chosen to lie down in a room on the floor below Nemione’s study where he had found her bed, pushed into a corner and forgotten. Githon, imitating his kinsman Erchon, lay with drawn sword across the threshold of the room to protect him.

  If the bed were haunted, Parados thought, it could not be by a sweeter ghost. He drew aside the curtain, expecting moth-holes and decay, but found a pristine bedspread covering lavender-scented blankets and linen sheets. Not until he had climbed into the bed and lain down did he see that the bed-canopy was a painted swathe of silk exactly like the ceiling of the bed in which he had been imprisoned; but these cupids were whole and smiled down on him. He watched them and soon, convinced they were watched by no one but a friend, they began to frolic and play, chasing each other about the Rococo sky and swinging from the garlands which hung between the clouds.

  ‘There he is,’ said one. ‘Parados himself.’

&nb
sp; ‘And in a better state than when we saw him last,’ another replied. ‘Like ourselves.’

  ‘Cupidon, this is Arcadia.’

  ‘Don’t you think, brother, that Parados lacks something, though he has got his hands back and looks to me the sort of well-appointed man a whole-hearted woman would adore?’

  The first cupid hung upside down and fluttered his wings to keep aloft. Parados laughed: he looked absurd, suspended there like a pink and white bird of prey, all pitiless innocence and childish raillery; and then Parados, before another minute had passed, lay groaning softly like a man in a dream, so quickly had the cupid’s arrow been fitted to the golden string and fired. It had hit him in the heart. Gritting his teeth, so he would not make more noise and alert Githon, he pulled the arrow out. Three drops of his heart’s blood trickled from his chest and stained the sheet before the wound closed up and disappeared. But he knew he was stricken and turned the arrow over in his hands, examining it. It was small and wickedly sharp.

  The cupid called out to him,

  ‘Can I have my arrow back?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Parados replied gruffly, and leaned across the bed to stow the arrow safely in the pocket of his discarded coat. Now, he was free to dream. He looked up. The cupids had had their fun and lay asleep upon their clouds. A warm breeze drifted down from the azure sky and it seemed that the sun shone on him, quietly, gently, as on an afternoon in spring. He saw Nemione walking across an empty street. The doorways of the houses were in shadow and looked inviting, some doors standing open to the breeze; but she passed them all and, coming to an arched gateway, went in. He followed her. He was in the cloister, walking swiftly after Nemione: he must catch her up, declare himself, kneel to her, swear eternal love. When she only was twenty paces away, he saw Koschei walking in the opposite direction, towards him. There was a spring in his step and his dark hair and youthful beard were neatly combed and oiled although he wore the habit of the Order. His eyes shone with anger and amazement.

  ‘What is the matter, Little Corbillion?’ said Nemione pertly, and swished the skirt of her white robe aside to show her ankles and her high-heeled shoes.

  Koschei was distracted at once. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered, ‘Nothing – I thought I saw a ghost, a trick of the light and shadows under the colonnade.’

  Parados woke with two things in his mind, Koschei’s astonished gaze and his own abiding love of Nemione. The second soon obliterated the first. He was, he reflected, in exactly Koschei’s case, desperate for love of a dead enchantress. So it was that he lay wakeful when the cockerel Vifnir, which he had saved from the oven and released the evening before to serve as his watchbird, crowed to welcome the dawn. He had no more time for pensiveness: the Child came to call him to breakfast, making her noisy entrance in the lost canoe which carried her along three feet above the floor and barked at him with its dog’s head.

  ‘Hush, Sirius,’ said the Child. ‘You have slept, Parados – you look refreshed and strong, like some old traveller gazing on a new-discovered land or a man in love! Come, ride in my boat. When we have eaten, remember, we are going to pray at Nemione’s tomb.’

  Pray, he thought: for deliverance, release, escape? Paradise has its own consuming fires.

  He travelled in the Child’s boat, Aurel and Githon in Esperance: there was no hope for him. The rest remained behind to guard Castle Lorne. He nursed a sheaf of white flowers and Nemione’s familiars crowded about his feet. Windring bore its stone arches lightly, they and its wide top thick with snow. They landed outside the circle and approached on foot but, before they had passed under the arches, saw three shepherds standing forlornly in the snow. The skins and fur they wore did not seem to protect them from the cold, for they leaned on their crooks and shivered miserably.

  ‘We have lost our sheep,’ said one of the shepherds, grey-bearded and older than the rest.

  ‘You should get a dog,’ Aurel told him. ‘What use is a shepherd to his sheep without a trusty dog?’

  ‘Lend us yours – ours have perished in the snow.’

  ‘Our dog? The wild brute with the werewolf’s hair? He would make a fine, bloodthirsty sheepdog.’

  The Child snapped her finny fingers. ‘His name is Leo,’ she said. ‘He is skilled at finding whatever is lost – he has found many things for me, my comb, this boat; but he cannot find my mother. That is her tomb in the circle.’

  ‘You may call yourself her daughter,’ the shepherd said. ‘The lady who lies was never married, in church or out of it.’

  The Child snapped her fingers again and Leo bounded up. ‘What I am is not your concern,’ she said. ‘But take the dog. He is so small he walks, as you see, on the snow and will soon find your sheep.’ She smiled to see the dog, which ran about like a visible whirlwind, barking in a high, shrill voice and sniffing with all the gusto of a bloodhound at the snow. Eventually he lay down and wagged his tasselled tail.

  ‘Now dig!’ the Child commanded. ‘If, that is, you have brought spades which I doubt, since you are so careless as to lose both your sheep and your dogs.’

  The shepherds were humble and grateful.

  ‘We have spades, lady,’ they said and dug where Leo had shown them. The sheep were snug below, a flock of thirty, each with a lamb. Their warmth had melted the snow beneath them, exposing the grass which they had been cropping in their snowy cave. As they ran out and forward the snow melted under their feet and the same was happening wherever Parados trod. They all followed him to the tomb. Snow covered it and the ground immediately about, except in his track. He stood quiet for a moment (Githon thought he prayed), lifted his right hand and dusted the snow from one side of the tomb. It was made of glass. He could see Nemione’s long skirt and the white cloth which lay under her; but there were words engraved in the glass.

  ‘Et in Arcadia ego,’ he read. The shepherds crowded round him and peered at the words as if they were a sacred text. One of them exclaimed ‘So He is!’ Parados swept the snow from the top of the tomb and looked in on Nemione’s lovely face. Her eyes were closed and some colour lingered in her lips so that she seemed not dead, but sleeping. More words were cut into the glass above her shrouded breast:

  Cease now your suits, and sigh no more,

  I mean to lead a virgin’s life,

  In this of pleasure find I store,

  In doubtful suits but care and strife.

  ‘I must kiss her,’ he thought. ‘Just once, though she is in another Paradise.’

  He laid his flowers down carelessly: such tributes did not matter now that he could see her. Githon and Aurel dropped to their knees and the Child and all the familiars wept silently but the shepherds helped him clear the last of the snow, even as it melted to nothing. The tomb had no seam or join in any of its clear, transparent surfaces and he could see no way to open it.

  ‘Smash it!’ someone whispered in his ear and he turned about fearing a supernatural visit from Koschei and saw, as in a dream or vision, the Om Ren toiling up a distant peak, so far away he seemed an ant on a sugar cone. Hardly knowing what he did, he drew his maiden sword and, expecting it to shatter or rebound, brought it down on the glass: it was the glass which shattered, and the sword vibrated with a single ringing note as if he played on the world’s wine glass.

  The mirror cracked in two and doubled my picture of him: I saw two men, two swords, a double tomb in which twin Nemiones lay cold as marble effigies and then the crack multiplied itself by four and eight and swiftly doubling increments until the mirror and the image were in a thousand, nay ten thousand fragments, and a hail of glittering shards surrounded me, a storm in which there was no sound but the staccato lament of breaking glass. My flasks and retorts burst open, my wine goblet exploded, my Actinidion paperweight returned itself to scattered millefiori; I felt my pocket looking-glass rupture in its case and the lenses shot from my telescopes and broke upon the stone floor; the quicksilver poured from my thermometers and barometers, every one of my mirrors and the beautiful spun glass whi
ch framed the perfect circle was devastated and my private and clandestine view of Malthassa, its people and the doughty adventurer, Parados, lost.

  Now, I had no doubt of his power. He, who could move through space and time and change the geography of my country at will, the very rivers and mountains, had also turned the beautiful sarcophagus Oliver had carved for me – of sardonyx and serpentine it was and finished on the outside with a representation of my only love, Nemione – he who had come wanting into Malthassa was now so strong that, merely by imagining it, he had turned the polished stone to glass so that he might break into Nemione’s last and final sleep and, in so doing, smash all the glass in Peklo tower. He must, I thought, and was afraid for the first time, know of these mirrors; and he must also know that by destroying them he weakens me. I wished I had interrupted his glorious career before he got his hands back, or killed him at the start when he first crawled, weak as a babe, through the storm. My own curiosity (to see what he would do) and my cynicism (as he made his crazy progress at the head of these witless child-worshippers of SanZu) were handicaps I had myself strapped on.

  I brushed aside the spun glass which lay in a rainbow veil of finest gossamer across my table. I took up the mirrors one by one and shook the broken glass from their delicate frames. It fell like noisy raindrops, like hard frost disturbed from a branch, upon the broken vessels of my alchymy and chymistry, the sherds which had been my poison-jars. I watched the acids eat pits in the floor and mingle, hissing, with the oils which spurted from my fractured aryballuses. More glass was falling, the shattered window-panes in Cob’s small palace as he pushed them out. He brought his convex countenance to the one of the empty casements.

  ‘Have you failed in an experiment, Father?’ he asked.