‘You may say so,’ I answered. ‘Though not with saltpetre, nitre and sulphur but in my patient study of the phenomenon of Parados. He has plucked out my far-seeing eyes – shattered my mirrors with thaumaturgics and telekinesis. Come with me, my dear, and hold fast. We must away to Pargur and to Castle Sehol and prepare our defences there with artistry and consummate care. It will be a heavy struggle.’
‘Father, can you not see him crawling over your map and on your turning globe?’
‘Can you see him there, Cob? There is Windring, certes, but the scale is too vast. Those representations of our world are kinetic devices: they are not meant for scrying.’
I caught him to me and he clung in the bosom of my robe like the greedy leech he was. We shot into the seething vat of negation, he squealing with joy for he loved the disorienting sensations and the speed, I shouting out in grief at my loss and with anger at the presumption of the alien. And so, alighting from the maelstrom, we walked into the Bower where Toricello’s random vegetation was, at that moment, bursting into riotous flower. I sat down by the fountain and listened to the play and splash of the water; I let it cascade upon my left hand, for I had cut myself on the glass. Paloma flew from her perch in the dovecot and settled her self on my other hand. She preened and, turning about, drew her long, white tail feathers through her beak until they were smooth and neat as an officer’s cockade.
‘How are you today, my little dove?’ I asked her. She had not been given the power of speech and nodded her head and looked at me sideways from a red eye. I called the flock about me and watched the cushats strut on the fountain’s rim and dip up water from its edge. They were mirrored for an instant before ripples broke the picture up: the sight reminded me of my blindness and recalled primitive techniques. I calmed myself with even breathing and stared into the fountain. The water ran across blue and green tesserae and I tried to forget them and interpose the scene on Wind-ring as last I saw it. Once or twice the motion stayed: I saw flat, reflective water and a dark background; but nothing moved there and I let my concentration lapse, seeing the mosaic again and the wavering images of the doves. What use is a third eye if it sees nothing? What might Parados have done with Nemione since he took away my glass eyes? Why should I not sweep down upon Windring or storm Castle Lorne and take her? To remove myself there was a simple task. (I had myself moved the Memory Palace, if not mountains, countless times, stones, boulders, cannon, storms, waters, snow, ice, nivashi, puvushi, demons –) Yet, patience Koschei! I exhorted myself. There is much pleasure to be gained in anticipation and inventing. Set a trap, tempt them, see them walk in and fall the harder. Take them both, he to Asmodeus, she for yourself.
I spent my anger and frustration in Baptist Olburn’s company, watching him ply his uncharitable trade and myself trying out his apparatus on those who had the mischance to have wronged me. He has a mort (an apt term!) of ingenious devices in the anterooms of his dungeon, a Screw-Rack, Pincers, Pliers, a Pressing Plane, a Tantalus Engine, a Vertiginous Hoist, and a very fine Iron Maiden whose embrace is agonizing death – eventually – as well as hot fires, consuming acids, boiling oil, sand, thorns, molten lead &c &c. The everyday practice of the black art of torture is his kingdom, as mine is Peklo, my books and those indefinable regions beyond the upper firmament which none but an archmage can gain.
The broken glass lay in pieces on Nemione’s face and ashen hair. Parados brushed it away with trembling fingertips. The shepherds were picking the splinters from her winding sheet. One them licked his finger,
‘Not blood,’ he said. ‘This is water – see, it was ice, not glass.’ Indeed, the pieces Parados had brushed away were turning into perfect drops. One trembled like a bubble on the back of his hand, but another was stuck fast, unmelted, to the nail of his forefinger. He tried to shake it off and it stood up and bowed to him, a tiny clear figure which he knew at once was female and was Nemione’s soul, a little homunculus like the yellow Thread Man.
‘I have waited here an age,’ it complained. ‘I was asleep on the tomb, as close as could get to my mistress. You might have killed me!’
‘I would not knowingly harm anything of Nemione’s,’ he said, ‘but I am wounded in the heart and I must kiss her even if it means that I, too, must die.’
‘Everything must die. You might have met her beyond the grave,’ said the soul pettishly, and climbed to a safe vantage point halfway up his arm, where it clung and drummed its minute feet.
He turned back to the tomb. The sheaves of roses, Koschei’s tributes, which were heaped about Nemione crumbled into dust. She was neither a beautiful relic nor a noble effigy, not asleep but a corpse, quite dead. Hesitantly, he drew back her shroud. Her hands, just as he had dreamed, were folded about a posy of flowers made of amethysts and diamonds. He touched one hard petal and the gaudy posy became a bunch of simple violets on which the dew was fresh; he beheld Nemione’s white shoulders rising from the gown they had dressed her in to be entombed. A banded snake was coiled about her neck, an ugly, unexpected ornament. It opened fathomless, bejewelled eyes and looked knowingly at him. He shook with fear.
‘Helen!’ he breathed, so quietly that none of his companions heard him. The snake, as soon as he had spoken the name, began to fade away, disappearing as he looked at it. When it was gone and the long neck was as white and pure as he desired it, ‘Nemione!’ he said in firmer tones, and bent closer, wondering at the exactness of his vision: she was all he had imagined when he built her out of memories and hopes. ‘Now I should kiss her,’ he thought, bending lower, but her soul reached her first, jumping from his arm where he had forgotten it, and nestling beneath her chin. He blinked, and it had gone. Nemione opened her sapphire eyes, pleasure in them, and amazement. But she did not speak to him. Instead, she raised herself on one elbow and called out to her Child.
‘Daughter, be the first to greet me.’
The cold, scaly creature, an apparition in her draggled gown, sprang up. Nemione reached out to touch her wild seaweed hair, embraced her. She murmured lullabies to the Child which, as she sang, her voice hardly audible, lost the unnatural colour, the scales and fishy form which made it outwardly a monster and smiled up at her, a fair, fair-headed seven-year old child, made in her image, whose eyes were green as the water in a tidal race and sparkled mischievously.
‘Now that you are a proper child, and fit to be my daughter, I shall give you a name,’ Nemione said playfully. ‘What shall it be? – Grace, for your transformation from deformity; Patience, for what you have been; Charmian, since you are charming and no longer maladroit; Chloe, which means green shoot; Zillah, shade, Verity, truth, Tabitha, gazelle, Barbara, Delilah, Cassandra? I have it! Your name is Lilith, Child, and here is a kiss to sanctify it. Lilith was mother of the Gypsies, you know, and it is best to make friends with them, or beware!’ She looked about her, smiling. ‘You are all here, my faithfuls! Halfman, let me stroke your soft fur and Leo, sit by me!’ They jumped up to her, the dog becoming, as he leaped, a real lion-dog with bronze hair, wrinkled face and pendant ears. The monkey, being already fixed in his destined form, remained as he was. As for the ugly sooterkin and the imp: Nemione looked at them and sighed. ‘I cannot keep you now,’ she said. ‘Go – you are released. Return whence you came and never trouble Malthassa again!’
The creatures wailed and cried in vain as they shrank into the ground, vanishing Hellwards with a double thud. The new grass closed over them.
Nemione held up her hands to Parados.
‘I am weak, sir,’ she said. ‘Lend me your strength.’
He took her hands (which his encircled as strong shoots entwine tender stalks) and helped her rise. He had to lift her from the slab on which she had lain so long but, as she stood and he supported her, she felt the new blood flowing in her veins and a delicate blush spread over her cheeks. She spread her arms and yawned, stretched and smiled at them all.
‘The shepherds, too,’ she said. ‘How wonderful. Githon – how do you? This, Sir, mu
st be your man?’
As Aurel saluted, Parados bowed low. It was time to speak.
‘Love, not Death, lives in Arcadia,’ he said. He knelt at Nemione’s feet.
She looked down as if she saw him clearly for the first time.
‘And requires its reward,’ she said, bent a neck as white and slender as the marble columns which hold up Toricello’s folly at Sehol, inclined her perfect face and kissed him. ‘Stand up, Lord Parados, beside me. I see my stronghold, clear and bright in the sunshine beyond the mountain’s shoulder, and I know you have already been there and lit a fire to warm it. Parados, my new love, Lilith, Aurel, Githon – let us go in to Castle Lorne. I am sure the table is laid for supper.’
Beyond Malthassa’s forest lies a tract of salt-marsh, too large for anyone to compass; but Erchon had been there. There is a place where a traveller may cross it and it is marked by a line of sea-worn poles, so bent and eccentrically-shaped they look like mute and headless statues guarding a sanctuary. Erchon had followed their course and come to an island where sea-mews sang and where the wild swans gathered to let the wind drum through the pinions of their up-raised wings. A hermit lived here, all alone with his prayers and mantras. He had no possessions and no memories of his past, having discarded them all, but he told Erchon that he had reached the end of the world.
‘How can that be?’ said Erchon, ‘when I see the marshes stretching their waters and their shining mudbanks to the sky on every side and the way is marked beyond this island?’
‘Have you considered that the end may be the beginning?’ the hermit replied.
‘I will go on and see,’ said the dwarf. He followed the crazy markers and arrived, in time, at the forest edge. Deer were grazing on the salty grass where the trees began. The dwarf crept silently through the herd and under the forest canopy; but he did not know where he was. He made a fire to cook on and to sleep by and a meal of the dried fish he carried and the wild garlic which sent out its pungent scent wherever he trod. Satisfied with the food and his own company he slept lightly, dreaming of the swans, and awoke in the small hours. His fire had burned away, but the light from the new star filtered through the tree-tops and silvered the ground. He heard the woodmice rustling about their business in the leafy litter of the forest floor and the stoat which was hunting them. Then, ‘She lives!’ A mighty shout drove away the quiet and there came a thunderous tattoo on the kettledrums, the tapping of the snares and rolling waves of reverberation as the great culverin of Castle Lorne fired – nine times, nine again; nine times nine. His head echoed with it. The peace of the forest and the small sounds of its intricate night life returned slowly, but he was unable to sleep. He had no doubt that he was many marches from the Altaish, knelt in the ashes and covered up the last warm remnants of his fire with earth; then, taking up his rapier and buckling it on and hoisting his bast-bag to his shoulder, he set out towards the day and Castle Lorne.
I also heard the commotion, from my throne in Castle Sehol: the rejoicing of the rebels who must be gathering at Castle Lorne in that wondrous courtyard guarded by the statue of Princess Persimmon and the griffon-prince. Nemione’s army would be encamped there, renegades, market traders, farmers and peasants, mercenaries and mountebanks, the northern gypsy tribes and their raggle-taggle kings and queens. Then this new nobility would embark to float in the swaying baskets of their many-coloured balloons which, gently rising up, would travel forward in the changeable airs of the Altaish. I was pleased to await them. These so-elegant lords and their peerless Lady, when they had crossed the forest, might take Pargur, walk its streets and rediscover its elegant squares and mutable pleasure-grounds but, save Her, would never lord it over me in Castle Sehol. I had laid my plans. I lifted my glass of blood-red Myrish and drank to the future. Vive Nemione! Vivat Koschei!
The leaves changed from fresh to dull green, from green to yellow and from yellow to red and gold as Erchon journeyed. His ardent heart was already in Castle Lorne and he urged his body on to catch up with it. A pedlar gave him a ride in his tilt-cart for nothing and a fine lady carried him on the step of her carriage; he paid her by opening the door for her and handing her down. He worked a passage along ten leagues of the Sigla in a barge carrying horse-skins and was brought another ten leagues by a merchant balloonist ferrying spices in his fleet of patched balloons. The temptation to draw his rapier and seize one of the balloons was strong but the worn-out craft, he reasoned, could not rise into the Altaish. They set him down in a glade where there was a spring and, when he had filled his water-bottle, he set out. He walked a month or more, setting his course by the sun and stars, marvelling as did everyone he met at the beautiful new star. He called it Nemione’s Jewel, but it had been given many other names. One old fellow, a wood-cutter living alone with his axe, his adze and his lame, blind dog called it his Dear Departed and another man, a women’s quack who claimed to cure all monthly pains, milk-fevers and distempers of the heart, My Beloved.
It was clear to Erchon as he journeyed that the famine had abated and the long-lasting winter withdrawn. There had been a summer and now the nuts and apples were ripe and hunger satisfied. Hope lived everywhere. He came upon the gypsies in a village by the Lytha. Dark women and hawk-eyed men were stalking the streets, interfering with no one but causing much concern. The villagers offered them wine, which they drank, and cakes, which they disdained. A truce developed and the gypsy women went about from door to door to sell their curious flowers made of wood-shavings and their tin-bound pegs. Their men and their dogs gathered in the square before the chapel. When Erchon walked by them, the men were wagering gold coins on a match between a big brown cur with torn ears and a small, yapping terrier.
The armed Silver Dwarf, carrying his simple bag of woven grass, and dressed in his shining breastplate and cuisses and fine, feathered hat was a novel sight even to the gypsies and some of them turned to stare at him. Erchon smiled to himself: this was what he desired for he hoped to persuade the Rom to let him travel for a while in their company, as once his mistress had done. One of the men, a grizzled ruffian with a patch over his left eye, called out to him,
‘Is that skin of yours your own, or did you borrow it from a cock-salmon, Dwarf?’
‘It is old grease-paint. He comes from a travelling show,’ said another gypsy.
Erchon eased back the sleeve of his leather jerkin and undid the cord at its neck.
‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘You may care to bet on your proposals and I will take one fifth from the winner.’
The gypsy men surrounded him and some of them rubbed at his skin with handkerchiefs and neckerchiefs to see if the silver would come off. One removed his hat to examine the skin of his scalp and the gleaming hair itself.
‘I’ll lay out three coins,’ he said. ‘The dwarf has one of those gorgio illnesses like the yellow-touch, only it has turned him silver.’
‘It is his clown’s camouflage,’ another said. ‘Five coins.’
And so they piled bet on bet until many gold coins had been promised and were ranged in heaps along the graveyard wall. A gypsy chieftain was called as referee and the village sexton brought from his dinner to judge. He consulted the doctor and an encyclopaedia before he came and was satisfied with the explanation Erchon whispered in his ear, that the unnatural colour of his skin was the penalty all Silver Dwarves paid for their mining.
‘But are there Gold Dwarves?’ he wanted to know.
‘Of course,’ said Erchon, ‘– and priceless as that metal.’
The dog-fight forgotten, the gypsies bet on, wild explanations succeeding fantastic as their gold-fever grew. They made so much noise and commotion that only when she had struck the biggest of them with her cane and cleared herself a passage did anyone notice the old gypsy woman who walked into the fray.
‘Hear me, by Lilith and Gana!’ she screeched, beating the ground with her cane. ‘I have the explanation here, under my scarf.’ She tapped her head. ‘I will wager this bauble–’ and here she drew
a red handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and opened it to disclose a huge, translucent stone which shone in the afternoon sunlight and caused the men to fall silent and their eyes to gleam with greed. ‘This against all your money, my lads. He who guesses right shall take it to his rawnie. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ said some and, ‘Aye, Lurania,’ said others.
‘Will you have my explanation? Are you sure?’
‘Yes!’
‘Then who has laid out most?’
‘Muldobriar!’
‘Taiso!’
‘No, it is Danku!’
Danku who wore a purple sash and a sprig of rosemary in his buttonhole, cleared his throat and spat into the churchyard. ‘This is my explanation,’ he said. ‘This dwarf, as we all suppose him, is not what he seems, and we should be wary. This so-called dwarf is a trap laid for one, or more, of us. We have a shape-shifting puvush among us, lads – who, now she is discovered, will vanish as you see!’ He raised his arm and the gypsy-men all took one step forward with their fists and sticks up. Erchon laughed loudly and waved his hat in the air.
‘Peace!’ he said. ‘I am not worth your trouble.’
‘So Danku is the cleverest man of our tribe? You are all witless, or drunk,’ the old woman said. ‘The dwarf hails from the Altaish where he used to mine silver – the metal is in his skin until he dies and he will go shining to the grave, proud of it. Am I correct, Sir?’
‘That is what I am,’ Erchon said. ‘A miner with silver dross ingrained in his hide and love of the bright metal in my soul.’
‘And so says Doctor Scrimshaw and my All the World’s Wonders in Six Volumes, that you may know a Silver Dwarf by the argent glister of his skin – which does not diminish with age nor in sickness – and by his love of all things made of silver and silver in colour,’ said the sexton.
Erchon flourished his hat and bowed to the sexton. Turning back to the gypsies he bowed again, low to the ground, and replaced his hat.
The Memory Palace Page 35
