No one replied, but long, curving swords and bows which they had concealed in their kilted clothing, appeared in the lma’s hands.
‘Oh ho,’ said Githon quietly, darting a glance at Parados. ‘Determined men.’
It was a caravan, this other set of travellers in the Plains, a loose column of men who walked beside and kept guard on a huge, lumbering cart. It had eight wheels, Parados counted them, wooden wheels which screamed on their axles, and was drawn by a team of oxen in whose twenty horns dead twigs and small pieces of coloured cloth were twined. A large cloth woven of fibres which alternately gleamed in the sun or dully absorbed its light hung over the waggon on a frame. Two men rode on horses in front of the waggon and some boys driving a few scrawny sheep brought up the rear. One of these carried the grass-topped pole which signified a holy purpose.
The two companies journeyed parallel for a time, each ignoring the other’s presence, but when the tangle of bushes Nandje called the Nut Ground appeared on the horizon, he began to make audible comments about the other procession:
‘It seems they have a better purpose than ours.’
‘I imagine they believe themselves to be alone under the wide sky.’
‘Certainly they are foreigners crossing our Plains without leave.’
This had the desired effect. One of the riders before the waggon turned his horse and galloped straight at Nandje, drawing a knife from his saddle as he came. He flourished it and pulled his horse up cruelly, so that it canted backward on its hind legs.
‘This is a poor weapon for a horseman, but I shall not hesitate to use it,’ he said.
Nandje laughed openly.
‘What is it you carry in your wheeled snail that requires such rashness?’ he asked civilly.
‘Something more precious than a flax crop; more valuable than a wain-load of mulberry leaves and far, far more delicate than the smallest silkworm,’ he said. ‘Yet it has no value to you. Ride on your way and leave us to our slower progress.’
‘But you have made me very curious. It must be a magical device.’
They rode on, side by side, constantly exchanging these and other challenging pleasantries until they came to the bushes, where the pilgrims made a great show of halting and setting up a camp and the Ima did the same. Two fires were lit and two separate meals prepared at them. Parados, as he sat enjoying the warm wind on his face and the salty taste of the morsels of dried horse-flesh which Githon cut for him from a strip of it, noticed that the rival travellers had only hard oatcakes to eat. Githon fed him more of the jerky with a beaker of kumiz and another to follow. He grew merry and laughed heartily at Githon’s jokes but, when evening came and the others lay down to rest, he could not sleep and made up his mind to cross the neutral ground between the two camps, enter the other and look into the mysterious cart. A light was burning inside it, he could see that from where he sat.
His opportunity soon came. The guards, on both sides, concentrated their watch on the outer sides from whence, he supposed, wild animals or tribesmen might attack and he walked unchallenged up to the enormous waggon where he found, set against the rear of it, steps which he climbed. The covering-cloth or awning, looking yellow in the dusk and with a light from within, hung down in front of him and he pushed it aside with his head and peered inside. A small oil-lamp burned there, on the wooden waggon-floor. Beyond it was a sort of throne: a huge stone chair. No wonder they needed such a waggon! A child-sized image hung with gold necklaces and dressed in many tattered layers of silk was seated on the throne. It was made of wax and its brown glass eyes glittered in the lamplight. He stood still for an instant while he wondered what its purpose, clearly of great significance for its escort, was: perhaps it guarded some treasure of monetary or spiritual worth. His inability to touch it was fortunate: such idols were best left to those who understood them and this one was particularly sinister, for its eyes were articulated like those of a china doll. He watched its eyelids slowly close. When the eyes were fully closed, he would dare to sneak away; but the brown eyes flicked suddenly open and the image whispered,
‘I’ve shut my eyes and held my breath, but you are still here, Spirit. Please bless me and go.’
‘I’m a man, not a ghost,’ he said, staring at the image in amazement. ‘And you are child!’
‘Only in body,’ the child said, haughtily. ‘What is your name?’
‘G –’ he began and, remembering his new identity, corrected himself: ‘Parados.’
The child jumped from her throne and came nearer, looking up at him with curiosity.
‘Are you a shepherd?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Are you a flax farmer?’
‘No.’
‘A silk-weaver?’
‘No!’
‘You’re not a bit like my father – but perhaps you aren’t a father. Have you any children?’
He racked his brains: no unhappy memories. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I think I have.’
‘“Think you have!” What a funny man you are. Are you a soldier?’
‘Yes, that’s what I am, a soldier.’ So Gry had told him and so, he thought, he once had been – in Cyprus, that was the place. In the other life. Before.
‘Have you a sword?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t. I was wounded, you see.’
‘Oh?’ He had been afraid of this, interest. ‘Where?’
‘You wouldn’t want to see where.’
‘I would. My father at home was hurt. He lost his left leg – they cut it off after he got frostbite in the snows.’
‘Well then – I have lost both hands.’
‘Poor man.’ She stared so hard and with such fearlessness, that he lifted his arms until the sleeves of his jacket fell back and his two stumps poked skywards like worn broom-handles. The child did not cry out or blench. ‘Just like my father’s stump,’ she said. ‘You told me your name, Parados, so I shall tell you mine; and my secret.’
‘Secret?’
‘It isn’t a true secret, only from my enemies, and I know you are my friend. I was Livvy, from Russet Cross beyond the Plains – but that is all past. I am Polnisha, the new Living Goddess.’
‘You are extraordinarily wise and mature for a child,’ he said. ‘I think I once knew you – perhaps you had another life before this one?’
‘Of course I did – many! But no-one remembers their past lives.’
‘I do.’ – and perhaps I can teach her to recall hers, he thought. But, in her present state, she is so small and even more vulnerable than she was before. Too much questioning would tire her – what was she now, six years old, seven? – all swathed and decorated as she was, in her robes and ornaments. He had better treat her as a child, frame the next question suitably.
‘I expect you brought a doll to keep you company?’ he asked and bent low, to be on her level, but her eyes blazed so angrily and she stood so straight that he stepped back from her.
‘A doll – a toy?’ she said. ‘You must treat me properly, Parados. My body is that of a little girl-child but, like you, I have the gift of Life. And I can also deal out Death.’
He had been aware of movement outside the waggon. Now, as she spoke the word ‘death’, a long knife-blade slid from behind him under his arm and remained there, pressing against his ribs.
‘Like this?’ he said. ‘By setting a trap for me?’
‘No.’ The child smiled suddenly. ‘Put down the knife, Master Finder. This man is not an enemy.’
‘You must prove it to me, Goddess. I did not leave Flaxberry all those months ago to fail in my task. I did not journey to Russet Cross to bring back another dead child.’ The knife moved slowly up and down against the cloth of Parados’s jacket, shaving wisps of fibre from it.
‘He has a kindly look on his face,’ said Polnisha.
‘So may a murderer.’
‘He wears linen clothing.’
‘Anyone may buy that.’
‘He has no hands!’
<
br /> ‘Now that, Goddess, interests me. Step down from the waggon, Master Anonymous, and let us see what we shall see.’
The knife compelled him and Parados turned and jumped from the waggon, stumbling as he landed on the dark ground and unable to save himself from falling on his face.
‘Stay there!’ The knife kept him down. ‘Now, Sir Stealthy – who are you?’
‘Guy Parados.’ The two words, spoken into the ground, were lost but the child, somewhere above him, had also answered,
‘Parados! That is his name. He is a soldier but, I told you! he has lost his hands – he can’t fight you.’
‘He might be a magician. You didn’t think of that, did you?’
‘Is that the way to speak to Me? Let him get up and prove he is what he says he is.’
He was raised from the dirt. Hands dusted him down, wiped his face and gently touched his bruises: Nandje was there, with Githon and two others of the Ima, Leal and Thidma, whose names he had learned as they rode. The lamplight, spilling from beneath the awning of the waggon, patterned their faces with yellow shadows. Nandje muttered some words which, half-heard, sounded like prayers, turned to him and tucked the branch of flowering mulberry beneath his arm. He looked wonderingly at it: there was no sign on it of withering or decay and the green and gold catkins were as fresh as they had been when Gry brought the branch to him. His assailant was now the one upon the ground, fallen there in astonishment and awe, while the child, Polnisha, styled the Living Goddess, clapped her hands joyfully. He looked away from them – they were all mad as hatters. He must also be, or asleep and dreaming. The stars winked at him, colluding in the dream, their constellations as unfamiliar as the wild inventions of a story-teller.
I saw and admired my foe, the story-teller. He had troubled me a long time, appearing with regular inevitability in my dreams and conjurations. Leaving aside the matter of his maiming – and that was not obvious while he rode the white mare, her idle, knotted reins seeming disregarded by an expert horseman – he looked strong and fit. Torture and privation are good teachers. I moved the mirror so that I might see his face which was lined, but with the experiences of life not sickness or despair. A firm mouth was buried in a beard luxuriantly thick and grey. He had blue eyes, not speedwell bright as were Nemione’s (mourn her!), but likewise keen and I wondered idly whether such eyes are common in Albion – Helen, of course is a Romany chi, dark as her witchcraft and possessed of almost as much beauty as was Nemione (rest her!). Her peculiar practices with blood keep her young. Indeed, when first I spied her in that extraordinary prism which is hidden in the back of my smallest mirror, she stood naked – a remarkable work of bronze! – in a cold, winter garden, a bowl of crimson blood on a bench beside her. I watched her anoint herself with it, as a woman customarily uses a perfumed oil.
I wished I might welcome Parados as a brother. Finding significant numbers of his possessions there, I had recently set up in my Memory Palace a new table dedicated to him. The first objects I laid on it were the chiming silver balls which, on closer examination, I found were incised with a grinning silver dragon each. A dragon, to the commonalty, is the sign for fertility: well enough, for Parados has fathered many children. Their musical chiming pleased me. I opened the window to compare it with the striking from all quarters of Pargur’s unsynchronized clocks and thought, as I stood there listening, that the dragon in his awesome pride is a cosmic force, the ultimate of dangerous beasts. The shattered eye-glasses were another potent matter. I had ceased, now they were powder, to fear them; nevertheless, I took a chirurgeon’s care in sweeping their remains into a dust-pan and depositing the gritty pile on the new table. Then there was the cock’s feather, an everyday object – my neighbour of the old days in Midnight Street kept a loud and colourful rooster to master and tread his hens. It looked dull under our dull skies and its meaning eluded me; I wished for an opportunity to question Parados about it and discover what tide of memory it would release.
The bedroom furniture of his infancy, the birthplace bed with its blue coverlet and worn toy bear, encumbered the palace so much that, each time I passed through the brazen doors, I felt I entered the dark shop of a dealer in secondhand goods, or the attic of my grandfather’s house in dear Espmoss. His staircase also took up a deal of room but I made use of that, for a good staircase always has more than one ending. I resolved to construct a new room to house his belongings.
Why did I not simply cast out this clutter of his, perhaps by flinging it into some convenient void in the ether or by consuming it with preternatural fire? ‘Let it remain!’ I said to myself and Cob. ‘The care of it will teach me caution and besides remind me Parados is here, walking the cursed earth of Malthassa. Its constant presence will sustain me while I wait.’ – For I had already decided to bide my time in the matter of Parados. I had felt a new vigour since he came into the land. Each night I slept deeply; each morning woke rested and, surveying my face in the pier-glass between the westward windows, saw that it had more colour and solidity than for many a year – long devotion to the art of magic wastes the flesh as well as the mind. The fingernails of my left hand were magnificent, five foot-long ram’s horns, all gilded but that of the middle finger which was encrusted with the detritus of my alchymical and chymical creations for I used it as a rod to stir my crucibles. My woman’s pap was firm, my wind sound, my mind agile. I felt a dozen years younger, near my true age. Vanity! All – and nothing. I was not a man and the deficiency I concealed with much padding and decorated cod-pieces kept me sombre-hearted. He was whole, entire. I envied him. There can be no disputing which was the greater, my deficiency or his. With utmost concentration I watched him riding his white mare over the Plains, curious – nay, fascinated – for soon he would realize that all was not right in the world and his first inkling, at the border of SanZu, lay only three or fours hours ahead.
The province of SanZu, marked by its permanent cloud-cover, grew ever closer as they rode across the spring grass. New flowers opened and the sun shone down.
The two companies had mingled, one with the other. Ima guarded the rear and flanks while the people of the Goddess marched in front of her waggon and Parados rode beside her on his white horse and taught her nursery rhymes and songs. The awning which had covered her was turned back, so that she might be seen by the mass of her people when she came to SanZu and because she demanded to be no longer in the hot half-dark beneath it but where she might see the wondrous Spring. She sang,
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush,
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning,
and ‘Teach me more,’ she said, ‘for I will see nobody but my nuns when I am in my own house in Flaxberry. I shall sing your rhymes over in my solitude.’
‘Your life is in that rhyme. Mine is in this,’ said Parados, and recited,
If all the world were paper,
And all the sea were ink,
And all the trees were bread and cheese
What should we have to drink?
‘Stories!’ cried the Living Goddess.
‘It isn’t a riddle,’ he said and turned his head to greet Githon, who had ridden up beside him.
‘You haven’t fallen off!’
‘So far,’ said the dwarf. ‘There is still time. Do you see the black birds flying over SanZu?’
‘Why are there so many of them?’
‘Ride on a way. We don’t want the little one to hear. Now: crows feast on the dead and there has been no harvest in SanZu since the last Goddess died. Two girl-children, before this one, were found and brought back from afar, but they died before they got ten miles inside the border – who can conjure food out of the bare earth? No doubt they were not the true Goddess but I am afraid the same fate waits for this one.’
‘I won’t let her die, Githon. She is like a daughter to me because, once I had daughters, and sons too … but never mind it. Our happin
ess was an illusion caused by the fine weather. Thoughts as black as those crows come to me –’
‘From SanZu. Be thankful they are not sown in your mind by Koschei.’
‘He has a powerful reputation. You all speak of him with awe.’
‘We have good reason. We thought Valdine evil in his day: we knew nothing, supposing that his love of gold and finery and his courtship of the Lady Nemione were terrible sins. That was a passing fancy beside Koschei’s obsession. He has destroyed the country with his lustfulness.’
‘You, were more sympathetic when you told me of his grief at Nemione’s death.’
‘That’s a legend now, tells well, and he was noble once like yourself. These days, he is old and envious, devious – and inventive.’
‘Then he has one redeeming quality. You speak of him as if he has a place in my story.’
‘That is for you to tell us, Parados. At present, we devote ourselves to the search for your happiness.’
‘But Koschei is a very skilful magician?’
‘The best. He has and has had no equal. Now that Nemione is dead, the study and the practise of his Art is food, drink and religion to him. Love.’
The honeyed scent of the mulberry catkins was strong, filling the air for yards around the white horse, Summer. Parados lost himself in it, recalling the past from which memories reached out to him like dreadful ghosts. If he were to be made happy – had he ever been so? Possibly, he thought, but those times had no value now, as far-off and unreachable as Nemione in her glass tomb on Windring. Glass? Had Githon told him that? – he could not remember because his picture of Nemione, white hands folded about an everlasting flower of diamonds and amethysts, dominated everything, the sunshine, the mulberry-scent and his old and worn-out memories.
A breath of cold broke his dream open and he struggled out of it, convinced that he was crawling in the alley, eternally without a destination. The horse snorted. She was alive and moving beneath him; the saddle creaked. He looked ahead and saw a dark division across the land, straight as a ruled line. On the near side, the renewed turf of the Plains flourished. Birds flew up from it and a hare ran swiftly away. On the far side were many small fields, bleak with perpetual winter; nothing grew in them and the road which wound between the fields was filthy with black mud and pools of stagnant water. No animal walked there and no birds flew save the black crows.
The Memory Palace Page 29