Gerrard Cowan - The Memory

Jaco glanced at the trees.

‘Is that your baby?’

‘Yes, yes, my little girl!’

The woman began to move. The crewmembers tensed up, and Teel raised his blade, but Jaco quietened them with a flick of a finger.

The woman brought the baby to him, and Jaco looked down at the squalling child within the rags. Drayn hurried forward, to catch a glimpse of this infant. She had a thick thatch of black hair, and her wide eyes were the same colour. Strange, but she was not dissimilar to Jaco himself.

‘They want to make her a slave too, my lord!’ the woman cried. ‘But I will not let them! I will throw her into the sea before I allow that!’ She looked at the ground. ‘They used me most cruelly, my lord,’ she said in a quiet voice, gesturing at her child. ‘But I am not sorry to have her, oh no. I will not allow them to take her!’

‘Captain.’

Jaco turned to Teel, who was pointing into the forest.

‘There are lights in the forest, captain.’

The captain squinted into the darkness. Drayn saw it too: a flickering line of torches, coming closer. Drayn could just about make out the sound of voices, shouting and calling, the words muffled by distance.

‘It is them!’ the woman cried. ‘They are coming!’ She grasped Jaco’s arm. ‘They will kill us all if you stay! Take my baby, and leave this place, oh yes, you must leave.’

Jaco seemed to thrum with a restless energy.

‘Very well,’ he said. He turned to Teel. ‘We can launch the ship quickly.’

Teel nodded. ‘Yes. But the instruments—’

‘Oh your little tools and your maps, your little toys, they will work now!’ the woman cried. ‘This place sucks people in with its terrible tricks, but it cannot stop you leaving, oh no!’

Jaco nodded. He did not truly appear to understand, though he knew they had to leave: of that, Drayn was certain.

‘Come with us,’ he said to the woman.

‘No, my lord, no. They will chase you if they see your ship. I will stay here, and I will distract them, oh yes, I am so good at distracting!’ She thrust the child into Jaco’s arms. ‘Take her! Run!’

Jaco seemed to think this over for a moment. ‘Very well,’ he said.

The woman nodded, and turned towards the lights.

‘What is your name?’ Jaco asked.

The woman glanced back at him. ‘I have many names, my lord, but none of them matter here.’

‘What of the girl?’

The woman began to walk away. ‘Call her what you will.’

They were back on board the ship, now, in Jaco’s room. The captain sat at his desk with the child, wrapped in a woollen blanket. She was older than Drayn had first thought: perhaps seven or eight months old.

Teel came to the door.

‘We will tell no one of this,’ Jaco said, ‘apart from my wife. I will keep the child in Paprissi House, until it is time to reveal her. My wife never leaves the house anyway. They will believe she is ours. As for our journey, we went to the South as usual.’

Teel shrugged. ‘That is your concern, my lord.’

Jaco nodded. ‘Yes. It is.’

‘What will you call her?’ Teel asked.

Jaco looked down at the baby.

‘Strange,’ he whispered. ‘When I look at these eyes, sometimes I think I see the slightest hint of purple.’

Teel chuckled. ‘That’s love, playing tricks on you, sir. Makes you see funny things.’

Jaco’s head snapped up. ‘Love?’ He looked down at the baby once more. ‘She looks like one of us, doesn’t she? A Paprissi.’

‘Yes, sir. Pale skinned, my lord. A little Paprissi lady already, just by another name.’

Jaco smiled. ‘She looks like my own grandmother. So there we are – that’s what I’ll name her.’

‘Grandmother?’

Jaco laughed. ‘No.’ He touched the baby’s nose. ‘Katrina.’

Welcome.

The word was scrawled into the wall in white chalk, high above Aranfal’s head. He was alone. A narrow passageway stretched before him, formed of black stone and filled with a pale light.

He had been walking this same corridor now for hours, alone with his thoughts. He felt no tiredness, no hunger, no thirst. He was just a walking, thinking machine, mired in the past, and the present, and the game.

He began to walk again. But the wall was not finished with him, and another word waited up ahead.

To.

He studied it for a moment. Welcome To. So I am collecting words.

The next words came sooner than the others.

The Hallway of Regret.

He gave a sharp nod. Welcome to the Hallway of Regret. I have a sentence now. That’s progress, isn’t it?

There was a noise behind, a kind of creak. He turned, to find a door had opened in the wall. A golden light came from within, so bright it forced him to shield his eyes with an arm. He considered walking in another direction, back the way he had come or further down the corridor. But he knew there was only one way to go, now. The Underland would always take him there, whether he wanted to go or not.

The light was blinding, forcing his eyes closed. He had a curious sensation of floating. There was a sense of nothingness here, carrying him along with it. After a while the intensity of the light began to weaken, though he could still make out very little. He became gradually aware of a presence: he could feel it, rather than see it.

‘I can’t see anything.’

The light dimmed again, and the Watcher could finally fully open his eyes. He was in a vast hall, cut into the shape of a rough circle. All around were doors, carved into the walls in line after line, formed of all kinds of colours and materials. The room itself was empty, save for one, solitary figure.

The creature before him had the rough outline of a human, though human it was not. It was tall and thin, dressed in a blue gown that hung open to expose its birdlike chest. Thin fingers sprouted from webbed hands that sat at the end of elongated arms. Its red mouth was split open by a coruscating smile, sitting under a nose that was unusually normal on that strange face. It was completely bald, though this was not the baldness of a shaved head, or of one whose hair had fallen out: the skin had a strange quality, milk soft and satin supple, like that of a newborn baby. The creature had no eyes: just a smooth patch of skin where they should have been.

‘Time drifts, and time is still,’ it said. Its voice was familiar to Aranfal, yet he could not place it. It had a strange tone, as if it was not the voice of one being at all, but of many, somehow squeezed together into a single stream.

‘Memory is strong, and memory is weak,’ it said.

It did not appear to notice him, but to exist in a kind of suspended reality of its own.

‘Who are you?’ Aranfal asked.

‘There was once a mother, who was herself a daughter, and a mother of mothers for evermore.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He walked around the creature, unsure of what to do. It remained perfectly still as he made a circuit of its ugly form.

‘In the outside, there is a door. In the inside, there is a tree.’

His mind turned to the woman he had encountered when he first came to the Old Place. She talked in much the same way as this thing. He wondered if this was that same creature, or some twisted relation. She had spoken sense, in the end, pointing him on the path to take. But how could he draw some sense from the mouth of this monster, which seemed more distant than even the woman in the well?

‘There is nothing but stars in the sea, there is nothing but droplets in the sky. The words of my fathers were unspoken, but my children sang in rhymes. When I found …’

‘Help me,’ Aranfal said. ‘Please.’