Gill Alderman - The Memory Palace

Here, he paused to scratch his genitals, outdoing the butcher in lewdity and grossness. He gave me a terrible grin.

‘I am a beast in body,’ he said. ‘Filthy as any hermit, disgusting of habit as a pariah dog; and cursed with a mind as pure as snow-water. Listen to me:

‘You, Koschei Corbillion, have demonstrated your undiscovered powers to me. Will you continue on your way to join battle with the Myran forces and perhaps meet death as certainly as if I let you wander into the wilderness? You have twenty-five years only but you are an adept, of both praying and fighting; in your short life you have already been two men, a priest and a soldier, yet you are the same Koschei. Few are given the ability to pass through successive transformations and remain themselves.

‘Do I speak riddles?’ Here, the Om Ren smiled his ghastly smile again.

‘I follow you,’ I said.

‘Then, to continue: this chameleon quality of yours is one the Archmage himself would give a sight of his soul for. It is searched for and sought after; a man must be born with it, of course: it cannot be bestowed. You possess it. Will you waste it?’

‘Do you mean that I might practise magic?’

‘“Practise magic” indeed! Magic is not Medicine. You are Magic. It surrounds, inhabits and becomes you – you must learn its particular language, that is all.’

It was my turn to mock:

‘All?’ I said. ‘To learn that “language”, as you call it, takes a lifetime.’

‘Best begin!’

‘How do I know you are not a false spirit of the forest, a dissembling will o’the wisp or jack o’lantern sent to lead me astray?’

The great beast laughed, or howled rather.

‘Do I look like the ignis fatuus ?’

‘Why should I believe your words?’ I countered.

‘It was you who made the fire.’

We both looked down at the flames, which burned in contained fashion between us.

‘And you also,’ said the Om Ren, ‘who has begun to build the Memory Palace by the cloister at Espmoss.’

‘That is just a small house, a hut, filled with certain objects which hold associations for me.’

‘Is it? When you walk in there, it fills with the ghosts of your past, does it not? – with the presences of your mother and father, the little dog you had when you were a boy. You have made love to Nemione Baldwin there, have you not?’

‘Alas, only to her doppelganger.’

‘But you remember doing so, do you not? Can you distinguish between memory, imagination and clairvoyance?’

‘Yes!’

‘We will make trial of that assertion. Look into your fire! What do you see there?’

I crouched over the fire involuntarily and looked into its red heart. I suppose the Om Ren made me, with his crystal, matchless mind.

For a moment or two, I saw nothing beside the glowing coals; but soon I saw them divide and fall away as if they were the stones of a breached city wall and I looked through the doorway thus made. I saw a tower, absolute in its loneliness. It stood, tall, grey, and topped by a small turret with a conical roof, on a promontory above the ocean. Its sole door was twenty feet up the wall, and there was no ladder or stair. High above that was a slit window. I looked into it. What I saw filled me with disquiet.

I saw Manderel Valdine, Prince of Pargur and Archmage of Malthassa, in all his solitary glory. Cloaked (against the cold) in furs and robed (against any suspicion that he might be an ordinary mortal) in cloth-of-gold studded with brilliants, he was conjuring before a great map stitched together from many parchments. The curve of the wall repeated itself in the curve of the map fixed to it. It seemed leagues across that wall of map.

Valdine made arcane gestures with his staff.

‘Show me!’ he cried. ‘Show me the place of safety!’ Sweat stood in dewdrops on his broad forehead. The bald dome of his scalp glistened. He groaned with the effort of his spell, like a man in torment, like a man in ecstasy.

‘Valdine casts a spell,’ I told the Om Ren. ‘A terrible spell, surely of plague or destruction, his face is so white and red.’

‘Then listen carefully!’

The Archmage in my fire bent down, slowly lowering himself to the floor. He abased himself before his magic map, making desperate plea to Urthamma: he, the blessed, cursed demon, is the god of magicians. A column of light arose from the body of the Archmage, a twisting column composed perhaps of his golden robe or of the very essence of his manhood. I saw Urthamma standing twined within it, great and glorious, glowing like a lighted brand above the crouched figure of Valdine.

‘You try me!’ said the god.

The man on the floor mumbled wordlessly.

‘I tell you, Valdine,’ the god said from a mouth like a broken crossbow. ‘Your desire for immortality is an embarrassment on Mount Cedros. I am a laughing stock.

‘However –’ Here, he yawned and clawed his fiery tresses into some sort of order. ‘Look at your map when I am gone. The fair province of SanZu is as good a place as many.’

The god yawned again and, turning widdershins gracefully, disentangled himself from the oriflamme of silken matter and disappeared. Valdine leapt to his feet and I peered hard through the insubstantial window, disappointed because I was too far away to see any detail of the map other than a wedge of lines which seemed to represent a rocky promontory as cruel and precipitous as that on which the Archmage’s spytower stood. I heard Valdine cry ‘Aah, salvation!!’

The vision faded and the magical fire dimmed as if I had exhausted it. I stood in a murky twilight with the hideous man of the forest, who tapped my chest with a horny forefinger.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘Valdine deserves his position as Archmage. A formidable show!’

‘But what did you see?’

‘He was using his powers to find a place of absolute safety. He summoned Urthamma!’

‘No such thing – as a place of absolute safety. But what was it that you saw?’

‘I told you. I told you everything I saw, as it happened.’

‘But did it happen? Was it an episode from your imagination, projected into the fire? Was it precognition? Was it memory? Was it mere prestidigitation?’

‘It was a vision.’

‘Ah! Most deceitful of mental processes; most desired. You saw them when you were a religious, did you not – and not always spiritual in content?’

‘They were invariably sacred. I saw the blessed Martyrs at Actinidion and the Saints in Glory; Nemione Baldwin undressed twice only – more holy and more lovely than any Martyr or Saint.’

‘You remember all these visitations, or visions?’

‘I think so.’

‘Then what is the difference between the original and its copy?’

I began to protest. My memories were surely most precious, most detailed, each nuance lovingly built up – embroidered – dwelt upon. I wasn’t sure. If the vision had been less than the memory, would I have remembered it at all? At last,

‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I’m not sure if I know the difference between memory and imagination. As for clairvoyance –’

‘Huzzah!’ the beast thundered. ‘Bravo! Now, as you have satisfactorily proved my point, I will take you to my house and there you will get a meal and a good night’s rest before I set you on the way you should have taken.’

The Wild Man led me by the hand through the dark forest. I was glad he held my hand in his huge paw, content as a child to be led by his nurse for all that my hand was the broad and sinewy gripping instrument of a swordsman. A puvush danced. Nivashi sang to me, leaning up from the streams and marshy places with sad and seductive expressions on their pale faces.

‘Look,’ said the Om Ren. ‘Look and learn from looking; but never touch one. She would burn you instantly to death with her icy touch or, if she felt playful, drag you down to her streambed, lie and let you mount her as you drowned. The puvushi are little better. Their toys are ivy stems and rotting wood. You would have one chance of escape rather than none – if you were lucky.’