The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  ‘A new building for a new decade (my third).’

  He began to relate the story of his early years in the cloister at Espmoss. When he spoke Nemione’s name, or described her in those years, his strong voice (which contrasted oddly with his decadent appearance and with his elaborate way of speaking) became reflective and tender, almost melancholy. He spoke vigorously of his desire to join the roving band of sanctioned outlaws, the Brotherhood of the Green Wolf, and of the orderly, box-hedged garden of the Memory Palace with its wild, untended opposite, the zone where Nature was allowed to sow and reap as she pleased in memory of the original garden at Espmoss. Parados watched him closely as he talked: the man looked old, true, but had a vigour which belied his greying beard and his bent back; indeed, he seemed to grow younger and stronger as he spoke.

  ‘Notwithstanding these outside imperfections,’ said Koschei, ‘the interior of the building is, as you will see, in perfect order. We will climb the staircase (genuine porphyry – but mind the broken step! Segno did that – a servant of mine. He was a careless fellow: I put him in the dungeon for Olburn to instruct.) We will climb the staircase and enter by the brazen doors which, yes, resemble more than a little the Gates of Paradise.’

  The old man took a key from the leather wallet he wore on his sword belt, fitted it to the lock and turned it. Parados followed him through the left-hand fold of the doubled doors.

  ‘I love to entertain my visitors (few enough) with such speeches,’ said Koschei. ‘They are props to the ailing structures of my mind. As for the palace – here it is. I cannot escape from it. It has swallowed me whole, mind and body, hates and loves, possessions, beliefs, gold – that which glisters and is my fool’s reward and grail attained.

  ‘Since I am the one you never forget, it will be easier if I show you round. I’ll make you regret your memories of me! The grand tour I think, the one that takes in all the sights, leaves not a stone unturned. I do not have the resilience of some, not now. I lack the boldness of those outside.

  ‘Here we are. I’ll close the door – it lets in too much light, and also dirt, from outside. This is the chamber in which I was born. You must begin at the beginning, you see, if you are to make sense of my memory palace.’

  His guest craned his head forward as he tried to distinguish the heavy pieces of furniture with which the room was furnished from the general gloom.

  ‘Could we have a little light?’ he asked.

  ‘A glimmer!’ His guide struck a match and lit a small bull’s-eye lantern. But even with this it was hard to make anything out – the furniture seemed very big and also far away, the sort of dim and massive wooden giants he remembered from early childhood, of bottomless chests, cavernous wardrobes and tables as big as houses. He stepped gingerly forward.

  There was a bed. The covers were partly thrown back, white sheets, blue blankets and a patchwork quilt. He could just about manage to climb up. His teddy bear lay on the quilt; the smell was right – Castile soap and Eau de Cologne, a faint overlay of sweat.

  ‘Mummy?’ he said and heard the dry laugh of the old man with the lantern.

  ‘Forgive me, Parados. I cannot preserve your memories.’

  ‘But this is my mother’s bed; where I was born, not you.’

  Koschei laughed again. He held the lantern high so that its light fell on both their bearded faces.

  ‘Curious. We are the same height, the same build: we might be brothers,’ he said. ‘But as to the question about this room and the objects in it: it may be yours, it may be mine. That remains to be seen. The case as yet is unproven.’

  ‘No,’ said Parados. ‘We have proved it time and time again. These are my memories.’

  ‘But don’t you remember our discussion in the room I built for these disputed memories? We had, each of us, a different explanation for them – the notebooks, the pomander, the shells; and the objects which appeared here more recently, I mean the cock’s feather, those pretty silver balls which imitate the chiming of Pargur’s clocks and your shattered eye-glasses, doubtless has, one and all, an explanation and a story. Hold the lantern, here is something else.’

  Parados took it and the magician plunged his hand deep in his wallet and drew out a gold cross hanging from a broken chain. He lifted the chain on the end of a cork-screw nail and let the cross swing from it.

  ‘That is Helen’s cross,’ said Parados. ‘I saw it once amongst the glittering trinkets which covered the bosom of her gown.’

  ‘Protecting her deep and comely bosom, her heart and soul themselves? Well enough, she was always one for talismans and charms – but I salvaged it from the floor of Nemione’s room on the day she played midwife to my son!’

  ‘Then are they one and the same, Helen and Nemione?’

  ‘The gods must judge – you know what is inscribed on the cross: “Keep Faith”. We have both done that. But it may only be that your memories and mine have coincided yet again. One thing, certain, amusing, diverting: we both lust after the same kind of headstrong, heart-wrecking woman.’

  ‘Lust? You, Koschei, after what Peder Drum did to you?’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘Come, Archmage, why dissemble? We both know how much Peder enjoyed cutting flesh and making blood flow. The land is humming with rumours; the very trees whisper to each other and to anyone with ears keen enough to hear that Koschei is no man – but they can give no explanation for their strange words,’

  ‘I have heard them – not an hour ago, in the garden. They speak with Erchon’s voice. He got himself into Castle Sehol with the help of the gypsy witch and has stolen away my Rosalia, my lovely bedfellow born of the golden head, Roszi, and a fire-demon I took, in my turn, from Urthamma’s kitchen. Erchon and Roszi have fled and, doubt it not, he now has all her superstitious fear of me and my supposed habits in his dull, dwarfish head. His new knowledge burdens him and, imitating the Phrygian king, Midas, he has whispered his secret abroad; the first tree told another and so you heard the false rumour. You must not believe everything you hear in the forest. What do they say about me in Malthassa? – tell me! I can at least derive some amusement from the inaccuracy and marvellous variety of their guesses.’

  ‘I left as the rumours were beginning. They have surely grown by now, but before this, as I travelled in SanZu and the Altaish, I heard nothing said about you that was not tinged with fear.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Some were kinder than they should have been.’

  ‘Most members of the human race have an over-developed capacity for sympathy, women and dwarves especially. I am disappointed in you, Parados. I thought to hear inventive splendours and wild, weird theories.’

  ‘I could invent some, Koschei, as I invented the whole tale and you.’

  ‘I do not discount that possibility. But, as with our disputed memories, the case is not proved and you are, at the moment, in my Memory Palace. If you want to see more than this nursery of genius you must climb the stairs. There is the door to them, look – over there. Hold the lamp carefully or you will douse the wick in the oil and put it out.’

  Parados opened the terrible door, pressing the latch down boldly. He stepped into the cupboard behind it, saw that it was not a cupboard and that the infinity of wooden stairs to which it was the beginning reached up into the dark. His little light gave no more comfort than a glow-worm. I can’t, his old, remembered selves protested. I can’t! Don’t make me!

  ‘Do you hesitate? Are you afraid?’ Koschei’s voice thundered out of the room beyond the little door.

  He did not speak an answer but began to climb the stairs. They were more precipitous and rickety than ever before; if he looked down, he saw them in perspective and in plan, both at the same time, the spiral winding tighter and tighter below in a well as deep as the one which was Goldenbeard’s prison and home. Each time he reached the door and opened it he found the same endless ascent waiting for him, and quailed. The lamp burned low. When it goes out, he thought, I shall fall over
the edge. How long before I hit the ground? Where is the ground?

  ‘Hurry!’ Koschei called and his voice lingered on every turn of the stair; but the stairs and the door were always there to be climbed, to be opened, to be climbed.

  Again, Parados thought of the failing lantern and the fall and, with jolting inspiration, of his goal, the little room whose window gave a view of the cloister. He opened the door and stepped into the dusty, steep-ceiled room. A small table stood near the window, with a box on it, a plain box with a brass lock-plate and keyhole from which a key projected. He turned the key. The lid of the box flew open and a severed head rose suddenly up. He recognized it: it was his own but of long ago, when he had been the artless choirboy, Chris Young. The fair hair was neatly cut and the mouth as soft and tender as a girl’s. The eyelids opened to show the grey-blue eyes Nemione had likened to water in a stained-glass goblet and the lips parted. The boy sang:

  When a knight won his spurs, in the stories of old,

  He was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold;

  With a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand

  For God and for valour he rode through the land.

  No charger have I, and no sword by my side.

  Yet still to adventure and battle I ride,

  Though back into storyland giants have fled,

  And the knights are no more and the dragons are dead.

  The voice was pure and the notes exact, without strain. That was water, the melodious fountain soaring upward out of the child’s mouth. When he had sung the hymn in school – at the Christmas concert, he was eight or nine? – he had pictured the knight riding in his shiny armour, white surcoat over it, lance in its rest and ready; the dragon roaring from his cave; the maiden in distress an ill-drawn, scarce-defined picture compared with the fiery dragon. The head began again,

  ‘“When a knight …”’

  ‘Another of your selves?’ said Koschei sarcastically, coming into the room behind him. ‘Another memory? It is a pretty toy. I made it one winter’s afternoon when the storm beat against the walls of Peklo tower; and that is your land he sings of, the place the giants have fled.’

  ‘“… and the dragons are dead.”,’ sang the boy in the box and immediately began at the beginning,

  ‘“When a knight …”’

  ‘Asmodcé!’ said Koschei irritably. ‘Zernebock! I should have given it more verses.’

  ‘I never sung the last,’ Parados told him. ‘An epidemic of scarlet fever had broken out in the school and while I trilled “dead” and my mother got out her handkerchief (she was proud of me), I fainted dead away and they had to carry me off the stage and put me to bed in the sanatorium.’

  ‘You have a solution for every problem and a ready answer in every situation. Listen to the wretch!’

  Parados reached out and closed the lid of the box.

  ‘There, he’s gone; good as dead. He is dead. I am not he.’

  ‘You are the paladin from the Plains, that is what the people say. The man who follows the star.’

  ‘The man who is watched over by the star.’

  ‘Look out of the window.’ Koschei approached the open casement and stood beside it with one hand extended like a conjurer exhibiting a trick on stage. Parados looked out. It was night, and this surprised him, but there was the cloister, in every other respect exactly as he imagined it should be, Nemione’s small, arched window above the north arcade. She stood there musing, her green and white gown as fresh as the flowers which spilled from the bunch in her hands, the whole picture gilded by the light of the single candle which burned on her windowsill. Parados leaned from his window and called softly to her, ‘Nemione! Love!’ but she did not answer or even turn her gaze toward him.

  ‘She is fixed for ever in that attitude, and in memory,’ said Koschei.

  The stars were bright above the steep roofs of the buildings which abutted on the cloister. Parados did not recognize them: they were neither those remembered far-off stars which shone over his garden in the other world, nor were they the newly-familiar constellations of Malthassa, the Swan, the Hoopoe, the Crane and the rest; Custos did not shine.

  ‘What have you done to the stars?’ he asked Koschei.

  ‘You should know: that is the night sky of Belgard,’ said the Archmage.

  Parados looked at the strange stars once more. They were like a glimpse of the dream-world whose after-image haunts every moment of the following day. He asked no more questions about them, for he had no way of telling whether Koschei had merely borrowed and displayed a facsimile of Belgard’s sky or if he had moved Castle Sehol there. In either case, Koschei would lie.

  ‘You are cheating,’ he accused the magician. ‘This is a Memory Palace.’

  ‘May I not have memories of Belgard?’

  ‘I know nothing of them.’

  ‘Nor should you, for you do not know if Belgard exists outside my mind. Beware, Parados: the you and I who stand here and discourse with uneasy courtesy are not memories either – we are men who act and re-act and will soon resume our mutual hostilities. We shall be as Gogmagog and Alexander, as Fenris and Odin at Ragnarok – our minds are labyrinths which can hold an Armageddon, a world or two, the universe, comfortably within their narrow bounds; but if I strike you lightly – so! – you feel my blow. Leave that superseded Nemione to her eternal musings and I will show you a different sort of maze.’

  Koschei led the way into the library of the Memory Palace, opening the grey banewood door which was the replica of the library door in Peklo. He passed through with a swirl of his crimson robe, grown in strength and apparently another half-dozen years younger. The broken tassel on his slipper tapped the floor as he went. He strode up to the lectern and pointed to the complicated prayer of dedication and ownership visible on the first page of his Book of Souls.

  ‘Read here!’ he commanded and Parados read the nine names of Zernebock and Koschei’s own to which was now appended the title, ‘the Deathless’.

  ‘That is my style throughout Malthassa,’ Koschei said proudly. ‘A name I travelled beyond the Gates of Hell to win. Turn the pages. See – there is your name and Nemione’s upon the white left-hand page which signifies Malthassa. These names, and these, known to one or other of us here or in your Albion or Lugdon, are written on the red. Sometimes the red and white correspond: “Father Renard” and “Brother Fox”; “Olivia” and the little Polnisha, “Livvy”. But they are all written in ink, not blood.’

  ‘Subject to change?’

  ‘Subject surely, to the vagaries of the continually-revising mind?’

  ‘Find me another name, Koschei. It is “Helen”.’

  ‘Of Troy? Of Jerusalem? Of Myrah? The milliner of Espmoss, the cartomancer of Actinidion?’

  ‘Plain “Helen Lacey”.’

  ‘There, behold! Her name has been a long time in the book, since Valdine’s day. You loved her once, I think?’

  ‘Before I knew Nemione.’

  ‘“Since”, Sir, “since”. Nemione has been with us both far longer, if only as ideal or ghost. And remember always, writ in ink.’

  The names danced before Parados’s eyes and seemed to make new combinations. Weariness overtook him and he grasped the book and closed it feeling, as he did so, the soft hairs still fixed in the cover which had once been the skin of a parricide’s back.

  ‘I have tired you, Parados, strong as you are, for you are not used to the toll magic demands. It is easier to travel a hundred leagues through the forest than to cross one room of the Memory Palace. Let us eat.’ Koschei reached up, above his head, and pulled a basket from the air. The basket, which had been nothing, was a sound and solid chip and, being opened, was found to contain two stone bottles of beer and a great pie.

  ‘Do not fear to eat my enchanted food: I shall also partake,’ said Koschei. He drew a dagger and sliced the pie in two. ‘Thus have you divided Malthassa: half for Koschei, half for Parados, and interfered with my design. See, the pie is
stuffed with chickens, squabs and larks, all headless, not knowing what has become of them.’

  He lifted half the pie from the basket and gave it to Parados. A rich, savoury jelly oozed from it and some fell to the floor.

  ‘But if Malthassa is an invention, a tale as unreal as a vision, the case is altered,’ said Parados. ‘For instance, your very identity and name may be stolen. There is a great magician in the storybook of Mother Russia: “Ko-sh-ch-ei” – that is how they spell his name. I omitted an “h” when I borrowed it.’

  ‘Are you certain, Parados, that your Koshchei of the North is not myself with the addition óf an “h”? Have you proof that I am not he and that those folk-tales are not records of my appearance in your world?’

  ‘I have no proof that anything is what it seems to be – that door, for instance. It is not the one we entered by.’

  ‘No, it is the one by which we shall leave.’

  The door was made of dark wood which, in the blinking of an eye, changed to a billowing curtain of muslin. Shelves of books could be seen beyond it.

  ‘What is there?’ Parados asked.

  ‘Some other rooms of this library. It has a great many and we shall visit some of them when we have eaten the last crumbs of this excellent pie. Truly, the cooks of Hell exceed my hand-picked chefs of Castle Sehol in pastry-making and the art of combining spices and meats! Nor is their brewing indifferent – you are replete? Come then, through the changeable doorway.’

  If these endless shelves of books and comfortable groupings of overstuffed chairs, sofas and small tables, were in the library of the Memory Palace, it was vast, thought Parados. Galleries loomed overhead, one atop the other and all iron-railed and reached by open-backed stairs; niches and alcoves were filled with books on stands and in neat piles on desks and tables; doorways opened into other book-lined halls.

  ‘Browse at leisure if you will,’ said Koschei and left Parados beside a shelf labelled ‘A’. He wandered as a traveller lost, attracted now by this book, now by that. The books were in every language, neatly and alphabetically ordered but without reference to subject. He needed only to walk past ‘Altaish’, ‘Andersen’ and ‘Arboles’ to realize the contents of the library were infinite and, deciding to seek proof, left his course beside the first letter and struck out at right-angles until he came to ‘P’. There they were! – the three books of short stories and all fifteen novels including his last, the unpublished Making of Koschei. He took one down, Koschei’s Marvellous Library, and put it hastily back, unable to face the chaos into which his mind would be thrown by reading one line of it. Hurriedly, he walked away until he came to ‘Q’, that weird cousin of the perfect circle, ‘O’, an eccentric even to Koschei’s twisted mind, Malthassa and this library. Quaquaversal Dance, he read. A Quatch-buttock’s View of Nether Pargur, Quinquagesima and Quasimodo, How to Rid Your Pleasure-grounds of Quitch, Quodlibets for Students of Bibliomancy and The Art of the Quipu in Mnemonics. So, turning once again from the incomprehensible, he came to ‘K’ and immediately recognized his old, green-backed poetry book, the Keats anthology he had been given as a prize (for boxing) at school.