The Memory Palace

‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Calm down, Dad. This is my place. My saw mill.’

‘Saw mill?’ Guy noticed spreading continents of oil stains on his son’s hands and clothing as he repeated the words in bewilderment.

‘Mine, Dad. Wake up! Attention! Where I cut up wood. Some of the trees are big enough for sale now – but I mostly deal with the dead stuff. We burn it in the winter – you must’ve noticed the wood-burners in the house.’

‘Why have you written “Arcadia” on the wall?’

‘It’s always been called that. It’s on the old maps, too. Want a go? That looks a likely branch.’

Guy was grateful for the boy’s invitation. It muted the dismay he felt at this young prodigy’s invasion of his life. He smiled at his son and picked up a sweet-smelling pine bough, heavier than it looked. They would work together at a task, for the first time – no matter that the land and probably the buildings belonged to the unseen, undefined Georges Dinard. He laid the branch across the saw bench.

‘Hold it steady!’ Dominic said. ‘The bench will bring it to the saw.’

Guy hung on, pressing against the branch and feeling the stroke of the engine throbbing through metal and timber. The blade spun on its mount, its teeth reduced by the rotation to a blur. In a moment it would slice into the yellow heart-wood and send fine sawdust flying. He would breathe the pungent scent of the cut. He felt the blade hit and bite. Dominic was staring at him with eyes as dark as Helen’s, the fascinating eyes of the gypsy, swallowing him, drawing him into a fathomless pit. Struggling with his son for mastery, he forgot to watch the wood. It was only when he had wrested his gaze from Dominic’s that he saw the blood on the saw-bench and the divided branch and realized it was his own; that the spinning blade had cut as neatly through his wrists. He saw his son’s shocked face. He saw his two hands lying on the floor and then there was an interval of utter quiet and total darkness. Someone was lifting him, carrying him towards the light. He blinked and closed his eyelids against the brightness. It was night again. The forest surrounded him. A deer fled before him into the silence.

Did Erchon also see the white hart, I wondered. It was a phantom deer, not one of the spotted kind I had seen near the last road. We journeyed separately again, the dwarf and I, not this time because of wayside adventures but because Erchon (so he claimed) had heard his mistress, Nemione, calling him.

‘In daylight?’ I had jestingly asked, ‘or in your dreams?’

‘In bold daylight, Master,’ he had answered. ‘I am only amazed that you cannot hear that lilting voice. It comes clearly to me through the trees.’

Next day he left me, riding high on the withers of a stray woodsman’s horse which he had waylaid. I laughed at him.

‘I shall get there faster,’ I called after him. ‘That runaway will take you to some remote logger’s camp.’

Erchon laughed at me: ‘Not it, Master!’ He clapped his heels against the neck of the horse which flung itself into a gallop and, so, they departed, the little man a flash of quicksilver, the horse shock-maned and wild.

I was tired of the forest, utterly weary of the infinite close ranks of the trees. There is no end to the forest in Malthassa just as the country itself – if that is what it is – has no boundaries. These exist far away, rumour tells, but certainly no one has dared draw them (even with dotted lines) on the map, or seen them – And so, in a sense, I was glad of the deer’s company for the little while it ran ahead of me. They are dire straits when a man is glad of the companionship of a ghost.

I came to Pargur. It appeared suddenly before me when I stepped out between the last of the trees. There is no road to it; each one must find his own way through the forest. True, I once heard that there was a road, a broad highway paved with mottled skarn, but it must have been another rumour or some tale begun in an inn; and if once there was a road, it disappeared under the forest long ago. One leaves the forest, and the city is there, immediate. Its towers of crystal and its quartz revetments dazzle the eye: the multiple refraction makes it hard to see exactly where they stand, sisters to the prismatic mists which cloak the city’s southern flank.

I came to Pargur. It was winter and fifty yards of virgin snow lay between me and the city walls. Behind me, the eternal forest spread its green without a trace of snow. I had been a long time on my journey and was still more travel-stained, as tattered as a beggar or one of those travelling mountebanks who carry a whole world of enchantment in their packs. I came exhausted to Pargur, the Mutable City, and struck out gladly across the carpet of snow. As I reached its narrow gates, which shone like a sea-breach in an iceberg, I looked up and saw above me the most amazing sight of my journey. Moving imperceptibly, as if it hung aloft in perpetual stasis, drifted a giant balloon of purest white. Ice-crystals glittered on its curving sides and red fire roared at its base, a little above a frail basket which hung down on ropes. There were people in the basket. I could see a tall head-dress of some kind and, more, folds of silver fox fur from which a hand reached out, and waved. A wan face appeared above it, glacial as the moon’s, and the lovely, lilting voice which had called Erchon floated down to me.