My divine Helen, for her rich clients, uses her magic Cup, the King’s Goblet upon whose surface passes not only What is Gone but What Will Be, here on Earth. It is not hers, this wondrous Cup but stolen like my body – and I think we are both scented by an ambitious pursuit for I have seen (one dawn in Suleiman’s Mountains) an eagle fly up hastily from the rock beside our camping-place and (in the hot afternoon when the red dust rises over the Thar) a camel wake from deep sleep to stare after me.
We have wandered through the warm, wine-loving countries which crowd around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea; we have crossed the driest deserts and the highest mountains to reach this, our temporary home. Its people, who are god-fearing and industrious, call it Sind; but we belong to a smaller nation, my Lady’s Tribe of Romanies which history, legend and themselves name the Gypsies of the Gypsies. They crowd about and protect us with their noise and numbers while we make our grail-less, idyllic odyssey. In time, we shall journey to Albion, or England – as I have learned latterly to say – that old land full of loose, unharnessed magic which jealously guards its ancient secrets and its long-held reputation for perfidy. He showed himself perfidious after all, that son of Albion, the Englishman Guy Parados, in moving my mountains and causing new rivers to run through my lands. Once there, in his birth-place, I shall easily reclaim my throne, that of the true author of Koschei the Deathless. Unless the Red Horse of the Plains can open the book in my memory and find my sleeping soul I have eternity in which to make my mark and Helen Lacey and her people to aid me for
Ki shan i Romani
Adoi san’ i chov-hani.
Wherever gypsies go
There the witches are, we know.
If you enjoyed The Memory Palace, check out this other great Gill Alderman title.
From hell all other places are accessible: this is a reason to go there, the only one not steeped in madness. But it is not Gry’s reason. Gry is only running from home, riding the Red Horse which was once her father’s horse – not a woman’s. And surely she is mad, for the Red Horse talks to her…
At the Fortress of Lilith the two worlds will meet, and between the two walk the Gypsies.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Sue and Ian, Anne et Hervé and grateful thanks to Ray. Also grateful, and sadly posthumous thanks to Seán Dunne for permission to use the quotation from his poem Message Home (published in his collection Against the Storm, Dolmen Press, Mountrath, Portlaoise, Ireland, 1985) on the title page.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GILL ALDERMAN was born in Dorset. She is married with two daughters and five grandchildren. She lives with her second husband (a research scientist), two lurchers and two cats in Cobh, County Cork, Eire. Until 1984 she worked in microelectronics research. This is her third novel.
OTHER BOOKS BY
The Archivist
The Land Beyond
Lilith's Castle
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
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United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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