Читать книгу The Memory Palace - Gill Alderman - Страница 9

‘Goodbye, Master Wolf,’ he replied, screwing one of his eyes into a hideous wink and confounding me with his words. I had been careful to reveal neither identity nor allegiances; I wore an old shirt and jacket over my cuirass and, further, had tied a dirty length of cloth I’d bought for a farthing in Tanter slantwise about my body to suggest to any bold jack that I was a brigand. My beard was growing fast.

‘I see it in your eyes,’ the butcher explained. ‘A look of confidence – nay, arrogance – under the dirt.’

‘I suppose it’s useless to ask you to hold your tongue,’ I said.

‘I’m not such a gossip as you suppose, not even in my cups. I leave that to my wife.’

I gave him more than he deserved, a silver threepenny bit, and wondered what kind of woman would allow him to bed her. The butcher tested the coin on his teeth.

‘A good one,’ he said. ‘Thank ye. I’ll keep it in case I meet a werewolf.’

I watched him drive off, watched him till he was out of sight. Then I called softly,

‘Erchon, Master Scantling.’ He liked his nickname and usually answered it at once; but there was no response. I called again and, pushing the pendant branches of the chestnut tree aside, crept into its shadow. All I found was a dappled green shade, empty. I circumnavigated the tree. Nothing.

I cursed Erchon. The universal reputation dwarves have for carousing is fully justified. I supposed the wretch lay drunk in some alley or fleet. I wished he would awake with the father and mother of sore heads and a sick stomach as well.

I did not know what to do. Soon, it would be dusk; then, dark. I had planned to set up temporary home with his help, a camp where we might rest safe by the light of a good fire with one to watch while the other slept. The track looked quiet enough, striking off amongst the trees, a band of late sunlight illuminating it and picking out the colours of the summer flowers which grew beside it. I resolved to walk along it until the sunlight gave out, or I reached a corner.

It was a pleasant walk. The birds sang and the shade under the trees tempered the heat. I could see a herd of deer a little way off, all of them lying calmly at rest. A family of rabbits grazed; I walked so softly I did not disturb them. I walked with such unwary joy, and a deeper feeling of peace, that I did not notice the corner till I had rounded it, nor that the light had fled and given the forest back to Night. I must hasten back to the chestnut tree. That stood by the road, at least. I might even chance upon a late-travelling waggoner who would carry me to Myrah. I turned in my tracks and was confronted by the terrible marriage of oncoming night and the forest’s own shadows. The tranquil animals were gone with the sun.

Soon I came to a parting of ways, one I did not remember. Surely I had walked along the only track? I took the left fork, certain that it led in the direction of the tree at the Y. I walked fast and held my head high. I did not look behind me nor to right or left. The track led me on but I never found the chestnut tree, only another division of roads. This time, in near-panic, I took the right-hand fork. And so continued, faster, left then right, alternately cursing myself for a fool and praying for my own safety

because soon there must be a junction at which the girl could safely be set down to continue her journey. Then, free of her, he would also be released from his unlovely desires. Men found themselves in court for less.

The road was sunlit and empty. It wound below steep vineyards and above a little stream buried in dusty summer boskage: he should be enjoying this, not behaving like a guilty fugitive. But she – he glanced – looked happy enough.

The morning, which was almost afternoon, had continued difficult. Leaving behind them the shabby hotel and the simpleton taking the air on its steps, he had explored Avallon with Alice. They came to a busy café, sat at a pavement table and ordered pastries and lemon tisanes. He did his duty, and bought a picture postcard of Avallon to send his wife.

‘What’s the date?’ he asked Alice.

‘June 25th – Wednesday, all day.’

‘Of course. Yesterday went on for ever.’

A red currant from the barquette she had eaten was stuck to Alice’s upper lip. It looked like a glistening drop of blood. He leaned across the table and wiped it away with his handkerchief.

‘I’ll go and ‘phone Dad.’

‘Do you know how – in French?’

‘I do, Guy. Yes,’ she said confidently. She left him and went into the café. In her absence he contemplated her, the little he knew: When he’d asked her the date a faint frown had appeared, and quickly cleared from her brow. He could imagine that frown in class as she worked at her lessons; he could visualize inky fingers, the rows of girls, the uniforms.

Quickly, untidily, he wrote bland platitudes on the postcard and addressed it.

He was startled from a second reverie when Alice swung out of the café. The first thing he noticed was the length of her legs, brown in the daylight against the white of her shorts. Perhaps she wore these briefest of coverings on the tennis courts at school?

She sat down opposite him and played with the packets of sugar in the bowl.

‘Have you finished your postcard?’

‘Yes – I’ll post it now, before I forget.’

‘Poor old man!’

‘Alice?’ Now he would ask the question. ‘Alice, how old, exactly, are you?’

She smiled, not innocently.

‘Fifteen,’ she said.

‘Come on! You must be seventeen – at least. Don’t tease.’

‘I was born on April the first, nineteen seventy-five.’

‘Come on!’ he’d said again, angrily.

So now they were driving, nearly parallel with the auto-route it was true, but seemingly deeper and further into the French countryside.

‘Where does this road go?’ he asked. ‘Look at the map.’

‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

It took her moments. She was very quick – both to start a hare or follow one up.

‘It goes to your village, the one you’re looking for – Coeurville.’

‘But I was going to drop you somewhere – where you could get another lift!’

‘It’s OK. It’s only Wednesday.’

‘I am going to visit an old friend.’

‘It’s OK, I said. I’ll stay in the car.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

He ignored her.

‘Fuck, my bloody hands are hurting like buggery.’

They were there, had arrived in Coeurville. Automatically, he had slowed the car when they passed the sign. He drove sedately into the square. His sudden blast of irritation was gone with the bad language, though the tendons still ached. He was purged and limp.

‘I’m sorry, Alice.’

‘’S all right. Temperamental writer!’

He parked. The place was deserted, the shops and the café shut, though a battered table, under which an old dog slept at full stretch, seemed to await visitors. Guy got out of the car and prowled the square, conscious that he was the anomaly; he and the red machine. Alice too had got out of it and was wandering on the far side of the square, peering into dark windows and the openings of shady passage-ways. She looked as though she belonged, a composed French girl dreaming out the heat. He sighed. Her hair shone in the sun, all the long length of it. She needs a boy, he thought, one of those tawny young lions one sees prowling at the sea-side, someone who won’t be irritated by her silliness.

In the centre of the square, a war memorial rose out of a bright bed of magenta and scarlet petunias. He went closer to it. It was unusual. Three figures, Victory, Hope and Liberty lay one upon the other, and Victory, who flourished a sword, pressed Hope (to death it seemed) beneath him, while the figure of Liberty, far from being the usual resplendent Marianne, lay at the bottom of the heap and was angular and distressed. He glanced again at Alice, paused now outside the shuttered café. He saw a blind fly up, and the glass door opening. Alice disappeared inside.

Then he was alone in the silent square. He looked around him once more and willed the village to awake, but nothing stirred except the dog which got to its feet and also disappeared inside the café. The shop next to it was a general ironmonger’s and then came the bakery and patisserie. That was all, except for the butcher’s shop on his left, where a small horse’s head sign indicated that this particular butcher killed and cut up horses. He went to find Alice.

She was speaking in French to a woman, something about a gypsy, ‘la romanicelle’, the Romany woman: she was asking the way to Helen’s house. In Avallon, apart from one hesitant ‘Merci’, she had let him do all the talking and to hear her now, with laughter and complicity in her voice, fluently conversing, shocked him more than had her precocious sexuality. Of course she would, with a father resident in the country. A cup of black coffee stood on the counter in front of her and, as he came in, she turned to him and smiled and the French woman began to prepare another coffee.

‘You haven’t far to go,’ said Alice in English. ‘It’s the old presbytery and it’s just by the church.’

‘Helen’s house?’

‘Yes. The fortune-teller’s house. She is well-known here – ask Madame.’

He spoke to the woman: ‘Good day, Madame,’ he said in French. ‘She tells me you know Helen Lacey – la voyante?’

The woman, who had a broad, strong face, turned and looked him in the eye. ‘Hélène, Mme Dinard, yes,’ she said. ‘The girl is correct. Yes, the fortune-teller. A suitable profession for a gypsy, but – she owes everything to that man.’ She put his cup of coffee on the counter.

He lifted the cup and drank gratefully, feeling the warmth of the liquid flowing through him and the ache ebbing from his hands.

‘She is married?’

‘You can call it marriage.’

‘To Georges Dinard?’

‘Yes. The butcher, there – the horse butcher.’

Alice gently touched him. ‘You go,’ she said, ‘and I’ll wait here. It will be better.’

‘Wait in the car if you have to. It isn’t locked. Here –’ He gave her a two hundred franc note. She suddenly hugged him and kissed him on the lips.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And, by the way, I am seventeen – last April.’

He left her in the café and walked swiftly across the square and along the dappled street, where lime trees grew in dry beds between the pavement and the road, until he came to the church. That ‘Thank you’ of hers – it had been like a farewell, a kind of ‘Thanks for everything’. He had no idea if she were now telling the truth about her age.

The church looked abandoned. It was neglected and weeds grew on the roof. There was absolutely no sound, no notices, no indication that it was ever used. The door was shut and locked. He’d forgotten this was usual. The key would be lodged in some obscure house miles away. He thought of entering the church. Not to pray, God no, but as an interval, a break in the journey between Alice and Helen.

Beyond the church, a pair of scarred stone pillars marked the entrance to the Old Presbytery. He wondered where the priest lived now; perhaps, as in his own village, in a new house.

The gates were open; sagged, in fact, on lax hinges against dark evergreens. He walked up the short pathway to the front door and lifted his hand to the bell, noticing as he rang it how the paint lay flaked and twisted on the wood, weathered into many shades of green. He felt a hot quietude swell and billow towards him from inside the house, a silence made absolute by the noise of the bell. If, after all this, there was no one at home! He listened. He waited; glanced to right and left. Like those in the square, these tall windows were closely shuttered.

Treading carefully, like an animal which wishes to hide, he crept to the nearest pair of shutters and pulled on one of them. The window behind it was open and, as he peered in, the smell of the house came to meet him, a blend of dusty warmth, stale incense, roses and her perfume, ‘Sortilège’. The dusky room was crowded with large pieces of furniture and he felt a child’s dread: some other place that he remembered intervened between the room before him and his present intentions. His mother’s house had also been crammed with massive pieces of oak and mahogany; but here were also statues, two gilded and oddly decadent humaniform lamp-bearers, an Ethiopian dwarf and an Egyptian hawk-headed god; and a bronze nude who concealed her pudendum with a caressing hand. The rose-scent came from a bowl of spent and faded beauties whose petals lay scattered on the floor.

He withdrew; pushed the shutter to. Perhaps at the back of the house –

There was no one in the garden at the rear. A mulberry tree filled up most of the yellowed lawn; the flowers in the long beds drooped in the heat and roses scrambled, overtopping a wall. He saw that a part of the area he had first taken for scorched grass was a yellow towel, and walked up to it. Someone had been sunbathing there: a tube of sun cream lay by the towel and the towel itself was spotted with what at first he took for blood, the juice of the mulberries. For a moment he considered the pleasures of eating ripe mulberries in such an advantageous position – they might drop into a waiting mouth – then, looking up into the tree, saw that the mulberries were still green. The stains, then? He shrugged inwardly, turned and walked toward the house.

A porch with benches in it shaded the back door and on one of them stood a red-splashed mixing-bowl. The door itself was open; beyond it a shadowy hall with the inside of the front door at the far end, stairs, open doors to left and right. Guy raised his hand to knock.

He saw Daniel, his second son, walking towards him and was bewildered. Reality intervened; comprehension.

‘Dominic,’ he said. ‘You are Dominic?’

(What would he say, the tall fair-headed boy – Helen’s son – his son – the true love child?)

‘Hi, Dad!’

Guy was shocked: the accent was American. But now the boy was close. What should he have said: ‘My son, my son!’ with tears – of joy? He held his arms out in a gesture of welcome. This boy was taller than Daniel – already. And two years younger? His brain made frantic calculations and Dominic, smiling from Helen’s fathomless brown eyes, walked into his embrace. Kisses, one, two, three – he was almost French. Dominic smiled properly, his teeth virginal and even against his year-round skier’s tan.

‘Mom said you’d be here today,’ he said. ‘She was in the yard, in the garden.’

Guy, overcome at last and assailed by the lost legions of the past, spoke carefully.

‘I am very glad to see you.’

(He has my nose and build, he thought. The rest is Helen.)

‘Great. No problem.’ At least he sounded like a normal teenager. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Er, no. I don’t think so.’

‘Later then? You want to see Mom.’

‘I do want to see your mother. Very much.’

‘And you’re worried. I’m what you hoped for, but I’m not. I learned my spoken English from Georges. He was in Chicago for a while.’

‘Georges?’

‘Ma’s Lilo.’

‘What?’

‘Live-in-lover. You know.’

‘Oh. Yes. The butcher.’

‘That’s him, the horse-butcher. She’s in the vardo. You can go there if you like. It’s in the orchard, there’s a gate in the garden wall. See you later!’

A fleeting memory of Alice Tyler jumped at him, and was gone. He forgot her. He was wholly lost, as helpless as he had been years ago, when he had first seen Helen on a country bus and, dismounting at her stop, had followed her – home, as he thought, but actually down a long and winding lane which led eventually into the secretive valley of the little river Char. She had stopped on the pack-horse bridge and waited for him –

Soon afterwards the worst and best ten months of his life had begun.

Now, seventeen years later, he was walking to her through a sunlit afternoon garden in France.

He had wanted to fuck her there and then, in the February snows beside the river, but she, taking him by the hand, had led him to the black-painted vardo in the old cattle-drift, had made him her apprentice. Had made him her slave. It wasn’t till June –

He opened the door in the garden wall. A skewbald horse was grazing in the orchard. The sleeping van, the vardo, stood a little way away, close beside a cherry tree. Ripe fruit brushed its curving roof. It was identical with the original, the one which had burned; an exact copy, down to the golden suns and moons around the door. He panicked. The van was so much like.

Her face, as dark and perfect as it had been that first time, rose up in the doorway. She still had her incredible cataract of hair. It fell straight down from a centre parting and then curled upon her shoulders like water rebounding: the sign of a gypsy sorceress. She leaned upon the half-doors and watched him approach. She said nothing. He trembled in his expensive canvas shoes. She is still dressed, he thought, in that crazily beautiful mix of antique clothes: she is the epitome of a gypsy-woman.

Helen looked down at him.

‘You always come when I call,’ she said.

‘Don’t mock me. I came to see Dominic.’

‘Yes! You came to see the boy.’

Her voice had deepened a little, against his memory.

‘Come in,’ she said, and opened the doors. He stepped up into the van. The interior was dim and heavily perfumed. Her crystal ball and tarot cards lay on the folding table and her lucky chank shell stood on the shelf above the bed; the paperbacks were there as well and, incredibly, a soft leather-covered manuscript book which looked very like the diary of Lèni la Soie. He admired the turned and carved woodwork, the shiny stove and the patterned china; the lace edgings on the sheets and the crocheted bedspread.

‘It’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘It looks the same –’

‘It is the same.’ She gave no explanation but seated herself on the bed and waved a hand toward her chair. He sat down.

‘Now, welcome, Guy. The years between us have vanished today. Our son has brought us both here.’

‘He is a fine young man.’

‘He was born of a sorceress and fathered by a story-teller. Would he be ordinary?’

‘I suppose not.’

Helen stood up to light the oil lamp upon the cupboard. She lifted the lit lamp down and held it by its heavy base; the yellow light illuminated her dark skin and made it glow like burnished bronze. Guy could not see a mark or a line upon her face. Her lips were as softly full as they had been when she was only twenty-two.

‘I am thirty-nine, Guy. Am I still beautiful?’ she asked him.

He breathed in and held the breath a long moment.

‘Yes,’ he said, eventually, when he had studied her as if she were the Mona Lisa or one of Titian’s heavenly nudes. ‘Yes. The only thing which has changed is your voice. It has become melodious, a contralto holding your every experience.’

‘Good. Do you love me, Guy?’

He could not find a ready answer to this question, and hesitated. She intervened.

‘Oh, I know you have “loved” a lot of women.’

He still could not find an answer but, groping in his mind for words, found one he thought might do.

‘I certainly love my memory of you – but when the vardo was burned: at first, I thought you had died in it.’

‘The police did not discover my remains!’

‘But you had gone. I had to reconstruct my life. There was a void in it.’

‘I am glad you no longer love me, Guy, for I have lived with Georges Dinard for nearly ten years and it seems like eternity.’

‘You brought me all the way to France to tell me that?’

‘As you said, you have come to visit Dominic.’

Helen set the lamp on the table and sat close by him on the locker top. He stared at her face, and its shadow which the lamplight threw high up the wall. Her beauty was supernatural; he had never seen another woman close on forty with a face like that. There was no artifice about it, no cutting or stretching, no clever making-up. It was the face of a young woman, and as such puzzled him. She divined his thoughts.

‘If you had come to the house ten minutes earlier, you would have surprised me lying naked in the sun,’ she said, ‘and you would have seen that nothing has changed. You would also have embarrassed me. As you know, Romany women are modest and do not show themselves to strangers.’

‘Helen! You are cruel.’

‘And you are an old philanderer; but you are the father of my son. We will drink a toast to the past at dinner this evening. You’ll stay in the house.’

‘I must fetch my car from the square and I have a – er – companion.’

‘Of course you have. Think of the old days, Guy. You were an adulterer then. I made you one.’

He closed his eyes to avoid her, but could not avoid the things she spoke of and roamed the gallery of his mind, pausing now and then before portraits and pastoral scenes. He saw the dished summit of Karemarn Hill, the craggy circle of hawthorns extending their ragged shadows under the stars; snow, and himself cold, alone. He saw the same trees bright with blossom and a full Spring moon, the twelve naked witch-women dancing round him, backs turned, legs leaping, buttocks muscular, flat, rounded, heavy –

Helen spoke into his echoing mind. ‘Those were the days – of youthful adventures!’ she said. ‘But now you see clearer visions than I do. Why not show me your power? Tell me a story!’

‘Very well.’

His eyes remained closed. It was easier thus to invent, and it prevented him from seeing her burning beauty. He began to tell her a story:

‘Once upon a time, as they say in Malthassa and other unmapped countries of the mind – once, then, upon a fine midsummer’s evening, Koschei came upon Brother Fox perambulating the cloister. He was young and still without discipline and the Brother, whose profession was to instil self- and other disciplines in the novices, was of middle age; but both men felt the lightness and cheer which the warm evening induced. Brother Fox paused so that Koschei could come up with him.

‘“Look, Corbillion,” he said. “Even the moths are hungry – see the fat moon moth feeding on the honesty flowers in the garth, and the night-hawk on the woodbine.”

‘“I,” Koschei responded dreamily, “Do not hunger in that way. Neither marchpane nor sugar, not tender veal nor a bloody beefsteak would satisfy me. I am in love.”

‘The sly Brother held his long sleeve up against his mouth and laughed quietly into it. At length, recovering, he said,

‘“With whom, my Cavalier Corbillion – or am I bold to ask?”

‘“With Woman, with every She, with the Female and the Feminine – the Sex itself,” answered Koschei.

‘“And none of these in particular?”

‘“There is –” Koschei began and, stifling the sentence and the thought that provoked it before they were fully born, began again,

‘“Any,” he said, “would satisfy me tonight – young, old, fair or foul, in her prime or past it.”

‘Brother Fox looked sideways at the young novice and admired the white teeth which gently bit into the fleshy, lower lip, the dark, jutting nose and the black curling hair which, against every rule of the Order, had been teased into ringlets and dressed with perfumed oil. Indeed, the heavy perfume dizzied the monk.

‘“You are an agreeable sight yourself,” he murmured and, speaking more loudly, said,

‘“I know where to find a pretty something which will quench your fire and satisfy your pride. Return secretly to your cell and wait there. When I return with the prize, she shall knock three times.”

‘The newly risen moon shone into the cloister garth and Koschei marvelled as he looked at its unwavering light and at the pallor it lent the bright flowers. Everything, the stones, the plants, the arches of the cloister and their two faces, his and Brother Fox’s, had been turned silver or black. Brother Fox winked lewdly at him, half dispelling the magical mood, and padded off in the direction of the town. Koschei returned silently to his cell.

‘In Espmoss, at the sign of the Rampant Lion in Grope Lane, Brother Fox concluded his negotiations. The midsummer madness was full on him and the moon shone bright in the street outside; or else why did he spend his own coin and risk his reputation for sternness and severity to please his favourite Novice? He had chosen the woman as one might a peach, for colour and ripeness and for the complex odours which assailed his keen nose when he bent his head and applied that huge organ to her silk-shrouded bosom. He pinched Ysera carefully on the buttocks, paid over his silver to the bawd, and brought the wench home to the cloister.

‘Koschei sat quietly on his mattress of straw and thought about Woman, soft where he was hard, tender where he was vigorous, submissive where he was masterful. The moon shone on his windowsill and a narrow ray of its light penetrated the cell and lit a square of flagstones by the door. At length, that door was thrice tapped and a scented, warm and breathing bundle of silks propelled into the room by the plump hand of Brother Fox. The door closed. Koschei did not hear Brother Fox’s footsteps as he walked away; the monk might still be eaves- or, rather, hinge-dropping, peering through the crack with a hot and beady eye. Koschei did not care: Ysera stood before him, packed in her silks like a surprise parcel. She had on a veil, and a wrapper of silver, but her face was dark like his and her veilings shrouded her upper body only for her lower was encased in tight trousers which shimmered as she gently moved, eyeing him. He had never before seen a woman trousered. The sight was almost too much for him. Her curves, her differences, her fascinating sex, all were revealed as the garment writhed and glittered with her movements which, every second, became bolder and more seductive.

‘“I dance for you,” she whispered.

‘Koschei reached out and took her in his arms. He untied her first veil, and her second, and kissed her on the lips. Then, turning his head the better to kiss her tiny, right ear, he saw a shadow tremble and settle itself across the square of moonlight on the floor. The Fox! But wait – it was no man’s shadow, being female and at once sinuous and slender. For a moment he thought it must belong to Ysera but, no, her shadow and his were twined together at the edge of the room. His ardour faded, his desire fell away; he did not kiss the ear of the pretty whore in his embrace but pushed her from him and stared into the night beyond the window, where stood the owner of the intrusive shadow –

‘A woman, leaning casually against the tracery. She was naked and her long hair fell down her back in a great cascade and was as white and pallid as the moon’s light; she had her back to him and her hands were upraised to her head, one holding a brush and the other a comb. All Koschei’s passion and his firm resolve deserted him. He did not want Ysera nor any other woman, kind or cruel, but this one, this enigma who stood so carelessly outside his window, and he concentrated on the splendour of her hair. He wished to kneel down and worship this Unknown and felt his heart and soul dance merrily together in his chest.

‘“You must go,’ he told Ysera and threw her silks back at her. “Go!”

‘“But, lord,” she said entreatingly, “Oh new Beloved, Best of Men – Bright Youth, how can I leave such a one as you before I have seen the manner of your make?”

‘“Go to the Brother who brought you here. His appetite surely exceeds mine now; he will satisfy you lickerishness.”

‘“Very well.” Ysera bowed her head. “Yet – be blessed, young Novice, and enjoy whatever life brings henceforward – even your pain and your longing which, I see, is for the unattainable and not for common women like myself. Farewell.”

‘“Good bye,’ said Koschei, hardly aware of her going.

‘Now the door was shut and he alone again; but with this dream, this vision, at his window. Should he call out to it, approach it – touch it through the unglazed window-arch? He knelt on his mattress and held up his hands in prayer. The Unknown stirred and, as she turned toward him, let down her hair to cover her nakedness. He recognized her, his sister-neophyte, Nemione Sophronia, chaste star and lodestone of the novice-class, daughter of the town’s chief magistrate, Ninian Baldwin.

‘Koschei shivered on trembling knees and felt his whole body shake. For an instant she was there, solid, tangible – but he would never be able to prove that now – and then she was gone. No one was there in the cloister outside the window, nothing but the arabesques of stone and the empty roundels carved by chaste monks long ago; nothing but the moonlight setting the cloister garden ablaze with its consuming, dazzling white light. He looked down and saw that, although Nemione had disappeared, her shadow still lay on the floor of his cell. Marvelling, exhausted, he stretched himself out beside it, laid one hand on the shadow’s empty breast and slept the heavy, sweat-exuding sleep of the damned. But, in her own cell, the false Novice of the Order and true of the magic Arts woke still and –’

Guy faltered and stopped speaking. Opening his eyes, he saw the dimly lit interior of the vardo and the gypsy, Helen Lacey, who touched his lips with a cold forefinger and said,

‘Amen! But softly now; be still.’

His head swam. She, as enigmatic and beautiful as his creation, Nemione, smiled with a dozen curved and lovely sets of lips. The mirrorwork on her bodice reflected his myriad dazed faces.

‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ he said. ‘It’s nerves.’

‘You are all right now.’

He felt steady, back at the reins. She, he realized, had willed him calm.

‘Shall I go on?’

‘No. I have enough – it is old stuff, that.’

‘Yes, from Koschei’s First Pilgrimage.’

‘Old matter,’ Helen mused, ‘ancient and far-off, full of the magic of your fantasies, Nemione and Koschei compounded of my dreams and yours. Us. We, as we were but are no more. You and I as we might be if – if all the world were paper and every tree had golden leaves and every flower a pearl at its heart. If. But. To no purpose. Besides, Koschei is not in the Cloister. He is in the Forest.’

He did not understand and continued to stare at her, mesmerized by her dark eyes. He used to call them ‘snake’s eyes’. They were still that, bottomless pools in which he saw the tiny twin images of himself.

‘My Love,’ he whispered. ‘My one Truth.’

Helen’s breathing changed: the even gusts became deep snatching breaths.

‘Don’t!’ she cried. ‘Is it not enough to have possessed my body a hundred times, and my soul with your words?’

He looked away, at her velvet skirt, her rings, her soft, mirrored breast to which, he noticed, was pinned a small, gold cross. It looked gimcrack and poor amongst the finery; but such, he thought, was once my talisman too. He should ask her why she wore it there, beside the pagan glories, but something else distracted him: a thin sliver of light had pierced the darkness of her bed beside him. It was moonlight, the moonlight he had conjured in his tale and so, since the curtains which covered the window over the bed were only half-drawn, it had crept into and enchanted the small, close room, touching the many crystals there, the looking glasses, the glossy china and Helen’s agonized face.

‘Leave my vardo now,’ she commanded. ‘Before it is too late.’

She folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head. He thought, I cannot bear to go; but I must. The intimacy of mind is over, she has some other task and does not want me here, a distraction – at least I am that. Should I return to Dominic? – and Alice. The remembrance of Alice’s youth flowed into and tantalized him. He had abandoned her in the afternoon; hours had passed.

He stood up, unfolding his body with care.

‘You feel your age,’ said Helen. ‘Never mind: those aches and pains will pass. She helps.’ Though he looked at her when she spoke, she kept her eyes downcast. Perhaps she was able to see him, all the same? And who did she mean by ‘she’? – herself, Nemione, or the bright moon?

‘Dominic will show you your room,’ she said.

She did not speak again nor seem inclined to speak, though he waited. He sighed and left her, descending the three wooden steps of the vardo into an orchard bewitched by night and by the scents of honeysuckle and tobacco flowers. The other perfume, ‘Sortilège’, the distillation of their vanished hours together was in his pocket. He took it out and left it on the top step. The house, too, was quiet and shadow-haunted. He found his way along the hall and opened the door on the left, the one which had first disgorged and brought him Dominic.

The bright light startled him. A nocturnal creature, an old badger caught in headlights, he stood still and blinked rapidly. Alice and Dominic were sitting side by side on a big sofa, cans of beer and Coke on a coffee table in front of them. The television was on. Dominic turned lazily and smiled at him; Alice was also smiling.

‘She kept you ages!’ Alice said. ‘There must have been a lot to talk about.’

‘Seventeen years’ worth,’ he said. He could not begin to tell what had really taken place.

‘And now you are tired?’ his son said. The innocent remark pressed a trigger in him, resentment at their sparkling, hopeful youth.

‘Where did you find her?’ he testily asked Dominic.

‘In the square. She was guarding your mean machine. You should have brought them both with you, up to the house, Dad –’ (Guy winced at the familiarity) ‘–You’d left the keys in her. It was too much: I drove her round for you – she’s on the drive.’ He rolled sideways in his seat and extracted Guy’s keys from his pocket. ‘There you go – Dad.’

‘Thank you.’ Guy took the keys and stowed them deep and safe, in his own pocket. ‘I suppose you can drive – surely you’re not old enough?’

‘Oh, I’m old enough. I’m not old enough to be on the road by myself, that’s all.’

Guy perceived that he was frowning. Alice looked up at him, such a melting look of pure azure tenderness. If she went on with it, he would be embarrassed in front of his own son.

‘I’ll go and see what damage you’ve done,’ he said. ‘I’ll take a walk before I crawl into my bed – you won’t mind amusing Alice for a little longer.’

‘Oui, Papa!’ The boy was still grinning. No one should have such perfect teeth, Guy thought. He could not help grinning back and so retreated, disturbed, abashed. He let himself out by the front door. How stupid to let his exuberance irritate me, he thought, and felt a new surge of annoyance when he saw the Audi, perfectly parked with all its windows closed and its doors locked. He peered through the windscreen. Nothing was damaged. He walked round the car gently kicking its tyres.

At least the absurd confrontation, if that was what it had been, had put his refreshed desire for Alice back to sleep.

– But he had forgotten to ask where he was to sleep. And she?

He walked past the church and on, beyond the confines of the village. The road led to St Just and the Burgundy Canal. Maybe he would go as far as the water, see what a French cut looked like by night. He was walking roughly north-east, away from the route nationale, away from the autoroute. He passed beneath some evergreens. Their clean scent was unavoidable and he inhaled it pleasurably. The trees hung low over the road and, looking at them against the dark backdrop of the sky, he puzzled at their shape and wondered were they cedars? cypresses? The moon must have set, already. Then what time was it? He consulted his watch, pulling back his sleeve and holding the small dial on his wrist close to his face. Without his glasses he was blind, in this respect. Yet this quiet was what he needed, an interval to stroll in, a period of time alone between Helen and Alice, before bed, before the question of Alice’s bed came up. He was still staring into the additional night of the trees when a soft noise behind him made him turn his head. The noise was scarcely audible, like someone trying to move silently and avoid breathing.

‘Hello!’ he said.

He could make out nothing certain, no animal or passer-by against the darkest shade; but he was sure he was no longer alone. Another man waited – there, where the branches dipped down; more, this man, whom he could barely see, wore a ragged beard. Guy walked toward him, one fist raised; walked through him: indeed, there was no other there beside the dark, the shadows and his imagination. He smiled to himself and shrugged, turning his pensive gaze once more upon the trees, for surely they did not deceive him. They were a pair of arbor vitae, one much taller than the other.

I thought: if I climb the biggest tree I shall be safe from the beasts of the night and can rest, if not sleep, till morning. I had a second thought: in Ayan I had heard one market woman tell another that every ring of earth round every tree has its guardian puvush, and I visualized a legion of them ranged out all over the world. I stood still in my fear and someone spoke,

‘Helloo! Master Corbillion.’

Erchon, the slippery truant, come into the forest on my trail to save me!

It was not Erchon. A creature greater and blacker than any nightmare or sea monster stood beside me. I tried to make it out in the darkness, but all my diminished senses could tell me was that it loomed, huge, and smelled rank as a sewer after a feast day.

‘What are you?’ I cried. ‘Why have you come to pester me in my trouble?’

‘You might strike a light; then, you could see me,’ the creature said.

At once, I began to fumble in my pockets for my tinder-box.

‘Not like that. Try Nemione’s way. I believe in you.’

I think it strange, to this day – a portentous action – that I obeyed this unknown of the forest and the night. I knew then neither incantation nor pass, but I tried (despite my fear of the unseen creature) to empty my mind of all distractions and concentrate on the idea of fire, of heat, of flame, of matter consumed by searing brands. I bent my consciousness inside myself and searched in all the far reaches of my being for the strength to make the first spark. I journeyed in the deep recesses of my mind and, when I had gathered hope, need and momentum and they threatened to burst from me and destroy everything before them, myself also, I enclosed these inchoate forces in the iron channel of my reason and sent them forth with a softly breathed ‘Go!’

A spark sprang out of the darkness at my feet and from it a tall yellow flame arose.

‘Excellent!’ said my companion, laid his hand upon my shoulder and gave it a clumsy pat which felt like the shaking a terrier gives a rat. My new-born light showed me that his hand was a mighty paw and that the rest of him matched the hairy appendage for strength and hideousness. The mouth from which his scholarly voice issued was a red maw, lipped with thick folds of leather, toothed like a tiger.

I cried his name fearfully, ‘Om Ren!’ and, losing all my new-found power, began to mutter a woman’s charm to placate and appease him.

‘Peace, master,’ the wild man said. ‘If you were a mere soldier, albeit a Green Wolf and one of the best – if, as I say, you were a common man, I would have let you continue your hopeless wandering. You would have died.

‘But I have stepped into your path because I wish to speak to you. Look upon my intervention as happy – but also as the beginning.’

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.’

He squeezed my hand until it ached.

The Om Ren’s house was a shambling affair as squalid and dishevelled as himself. It did not look like a house but like a great faggot of branches someone had thrown against a tree.

‘The puvush of this tree’s earth is saintly,’ he told me. ‘Peace now, Iron Glance, it is only myself.’

I heard something scratching in the earth. Inside the ramshackle house lay a heap of straw and a long coil of straw rope.

‘My bed and my weapon,’ said the Om Ren proudly. He showed me his larder, a hollow in the tree, and took seeds and nuts from it.

‘Eat!’

I managed to swallow a few dry walnuts and a handful of green wheat. Noticing a big red nut amongst the remaining grains, I stretched out my hand.

‘No!’ the Om Ren suddenly cried. ‘Not that one. It should not be amongst these wholesome fruits. Let me put it away.’ He picked the red nut up himself and tucked it away under the long hairs which covered his belly. ‘That nut could kill you.’

‘I have never seen its like before,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

‘It is called the Ripe Nut of Wisdom. It is nothing of the kind of course, but the peasants tell stories about it. It looks so appetizing.’

‘It does indeed. Is it a deadly poison?’

‘A good one would bring on an attack of the megrims. The one you saw is addled: it is full of the eggs of the black worm and they are fatal if consumed.’

‘It is fortunate that you saw it in time.’

‘Oh, I am a careless fellow. Cankers, toadstools and belladonna arc my daily companions. Have the rotten nut if you will. It may help you. It will bring catastrophic changes if you use it well.’ He retrieved the nut from his body hair. ‘There! Here’s to a fresh intelligence and new wisdom in the world – if you discover how to use the nut!’

I tried, of course, to question him further, but he would not respond and diverted all my queries with uproarious laughter or with his vile bodily habits of scratching his private parts (not at all private in him but hanging there for all to see), his belly and his armpits. His body was obviously a pasture to herds of fleas and lice; for my safety I had to remain with him while the darkness lasted and sleep in his musty bed, where he snored and scratched all night. Yet I thought him a kindly creature, more bark than bite. What use as a weapon was a rope of straw? – and his house was like an unlit bonfire. The wolf in the children’s tale could easily have blown it away and any wildfire which coursed through the forest after a storm would burn it down.

We woke at dawn and breakfasted on the last of the seeds. The Om Ren shambled out to relieve himself against his house and, after a decent interval, I followed him. He glanced in my direction as I urinated and, leavening his words with one of his fearful smiles, said,

‘If I may say so without offence, you Wise Men are poorly endowed. How do your women pleasure themselves on such a tiny thing?’

‘They are very inventive,’ I said.

He laughed and offered me a drink of rainwater from his cupped hands. It was good water, he told me, collected from another hollow in his tree. Treading carefully, that we did not disturb Iron Glance’s slumbers, we left his home. We walked for a while, not long, and soon came to a broad track, which we followed. Though it was lined with tall bents and foxgloves, I did not recognize it.

‘Are you sure this is the way?’ I said.

The Om Ren replied with a wave of his arm. He pointed to a tree in the middle distance and this, I recognized: the chestnut which spread its branches low to the ground, like a woman’s skirt.

‘The Silver Dwarf waits there,’ he said. ‘In hiding. His kind are happier when they cannot see the sky. Listen! A woodbird sings. It is a good omen. Go safe on your way.’

What should I say? Not feebly ‘thank you’ nor yet suggest some temporal reward.

‘I hope you never find yourself the master of the Red Horse,’ I said, intending, by this obscure and convoluted compliment, to wish him a long life.

He laughed, or roared, through his hand – I think he hoped to mute his voice.

‘You mean to say “I hope your skin is never made into a bridle for the mightiest stallion,” I think. It is an honour, Master Corbillion, and I will be already dead, you know. The Ima have access to the power of my kind, even when the wielder of that power is dead.’

‘Well, I hope they have all they need, for a long while yet.’

He gently thumped me. It felt like one of the well-aimed blows of my sparring partner. ‘You won’t get to the battle,’ he said confidently. I protested:

‘I will. You have put me on my road!’

‘You will go to Pargur. I think you have a desire to see the city and a greater desire to interview its prince, the Archmage Valdine.’

‘Have I? I must follow my duty first, wherever it leads me.’

The Wild Man took my hand in his and squeezed it, much harder than he had before.

‘Does that hurt?’

‘Aagh!’

He let me go.

‘You are a self-deceiver, Koschei,’ he said. ‘You are already more than half way to abandoning your life as a Green Wolf, just as you abandoned your life in the cloister.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Certainly. But the dwarf waits under the chestnut tree. He is anxious. You forget how sharp his hearing is.’

I set off along the path, intending to turn and wave. When I looked back, the Om Ren had gone, camouflaged by the forest greenery like a puvush or a deer. I pushed my way under the branches of the chestnut. Erchon was sitting there on the ground, his back against the trunk of the tree and his goods spread out around him, rapier on top.

‘Who were you talking to, Master?’ he asked. ‘A gypsy was it, or an apparition? The Om Ren himself!’

‘Hush, you fool! It was he.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘It was the Wild Man indeed. I was lost in the forest – I have a tale to tell.’

‘It will sound better over breakfast.’ The dwarf got up and rummaged in a woven basket. He fetched out a length of smoked sausage, bread, mustard and beer.

We sat down to eat, safe enough beneath the chestnut tree. I told him as much of my tale as I judged fit, gratified to impress him at last.

‘Perhaps we should go to Pargur before we turn toward the battle and possible death?’ I suggested finally.

‘Perhaps we ought, Sir Green Onetime-Wolf. I should like to see my Lady. She journeys to Pargur.’

‘I should also like to see Nemione!’

‘Then we are agreed?’ said Erchon, and I felt that he had taken hold of my uncertain scheme and made it into a reality.

‘To Pargur!’ I said. ‘But where were you, Erchon, till now? What delayed you on the road?’

‘Oh that is another tale – not so grand perhaps as yours. I was detained in Tanter by a – hold, master. Be still.’ He leaned forward quickly and pressed his ear against the ground.

‘Hooves, wheels,’ he whispered. ‘The Romanies – no, it is a timber waggon. Rest easy. I’ll continue my tale.’

Guy heard the lorry changing gear before he saw it, one of those continental juggernauts sensibly barred from his own country, which now with lights blazing and engine growling threatened to engulf and crush him under its wheels as comprehensively as might any Hindu god-waggon. He jumped back into the hedge, only there was none, and found himself floundering in a dry ditch, strands of barbed wire clutching at his clothes.

When the lorry had gone and he had extricated himself from his predicament – lucky it was a dry night! – he turned back towards the village, comforted by the few lights still showing there, small yellow, homely stars.

‘I bet the bugger never even saw me,’ he muttered, ‘– another careful French driver.’

One of the yellow stars shone out of the downstairs room at the Old Presbytery, the comfortable living-room in which he had left his son and Alice Tyler. The curtains had been drawn back, and the lamplight illuminated a stretch of gravel and his car. A second car, a big saloon, was parked beside it – Georges Dinard’s, he supposed. He heard Alice calling softly, ‘Guy! Guy?’ She was standing outside the open front door, her white shirt gleaming almost as much as her hair.

‘There you are! You missed dinner.’

He went swiftly up to her and put his arms round her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m always abandoning you. Where’s Dominic? Inside?’

‘He went to bed, ages ago. We are to sleep in that room.’ She pointed to a pair of open casements above the dining room into which he had peered in the afternoon; long ago in terms of new experiences: before he had met his son, before he had re-encountered Helen.

‘And Helen?’ he asked Alice. ‘Have you met her?’

‘Oh yes. She cooked for us and there was Bordeaux and a Pouilly Fumée. Georges came back from Lyon.’

They, he thought, are now in bed together. Jealousy crept up and snapped at his heels; he wanted to run into the house, upstairs, to throw the usurper out.

‘She left you some food,’ said Alice.

‘I’d rather go to bed!’

‘OK – this is the way.’ They walked, still joined in their embrace, up the staircase which turned near the top to repeat the layout of the wide passage below. The moonlight, he saw delightedly, had returned to light the passage and to coat Alice with its glamour. A crowd of statues stood elbow to elbow before him.

‘My God!’

‘They belong to Georges. Dominic showed me. There are others in the dining room,’ the girl said innocently. ‘Each one is connected with a death.’

‘That’s sick.’

‘Every artefact is connected with death, isn’t it? Everything passed on when someone dies.’

‘The gypsies burn all the possessions when one of them dies, even the sleeping-waggon.’

‘The vardo, yes. There’s a figure of the god Horus downstairs. Dominic told me it belonged to a man called Paon – who was guillotined for serial murder. In Lyon. In 1884–’

He touched the cold figure of a woodland nymph. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I looked at your book in Avallon, while you slept. Strange to find something of Paon’s here.’

The whispered conversation, or the moonlight, was affecting him with a nervous agitation. He thought Alice relished her revelations too much, though her shoulder felt pleasantly warm under his hand.

‘Just coincidence,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

Their room had bare, polished boards and a wide bed, its white linen inviting. There were no curtains.

‘I’ll close the shutters,’ he said.

Alice caught his arm. ‘Leave them. I want to see you.’ She unbuttoned her shirt. ‘Look! Wouldn’t you prefer her?’

The soft finger of the moonlight reached right across the room and touched the statue of a second nymph, surely the sister of the first. Instead of wild fruits and leaves, this one wore a garland of kingcups and water lilies. The white marble she was carved from had been so highly polished it seemed as though her skin was wet, and they both went up to her and laid exploring fingertips upon her, Guy upon her left breast and Alice upon her right thigh.

‘Magic!’ he whispered. ‘She is you.’

‘No, she isn’t me; not now. She’s a nivasha – like you put in your books.’

‘You know,’ he turned away from the statue to Alice. ‘I don’t think I have ever described one. I imagine them much more deadly, sinister attenuated creatures.’

When he turned to look at the statue again it seemed dead and prosaic, a heavy piece of Victorian sentimentality standing guard over a cupboard door. In the moment of conversation with Alice he had glimpsed her moonlit body under her open shirt. He picked her up and laid her on the bed.

‘We are fortunate,’ he said. ‘Two nights of love under the moon. I want to see you in daylight too, at midday when the sun is hottest.’

‘In a hayfield – in an orchard in the shade of an old tree.’

But moonlight, he thought, best becomes her. He knelt over her. ‘Wait,’ she said and sat up to unfasten the ribbon which concealed the blemish on her neck. The mark looked darker, almost livid. He touched it.

‘It doesn’t spoil you,’ he said.

‘No. How could it? It is a mark of courage.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Because I survived hanging. They imprisoned and tortured me, they tore off my nails one by one. They strung me up on the gibbet outside the town gates, but I did not die – not for another sixty years. I hung till evening and when they cut me down, I had not died.’ Her voice rose triumphantly.

‘You are Alice Naylor,’ he whispered.

‘I am Alice Naylor, Roszi, and Alice Tyler.’

‘Roszi?’

‘Ah, Roszi.’ She gave no further explanation, but held his fingers against the scar on her neck. He could feel slight ridges and troughs, the negative cast of the twisted hemp.

‘Your survival of the hanging has rewarded you, given you a kind of eternity?’ he said but, no doctor or mortician accustomed to horrors, he shivered involuntarily. In the old days, such reverential touching was reserved for ghastly relics, feet of dead saints, dirty bones, crucified hands – which still took place in some holy fanes like Mediterranean churches, temples of the Far East; and this, the guest bedroom of Helen Lacey’s house in Coeurville, the town where he had lost his senses to this odd schoolgirl. She moved his hand away from her neck and held it between her breasts.

‘You understand, Guy Parados,’ she said, ‘because you are yourself abnormal, a storyteller obsessed by his inventions – so much so that you write them down and get them made into books which obsess others. Yes, I am Alice and Roszi and Alice again.’

‘My Roszi?’

‘Go to the top of the class, Mister Author! – but the real nivasha, not the paper one!’ She laughed, almost maliciously. ‘She lives in me alongside the others – just as you are both Guy Kester Parados and Christopher Guy Young.’

It was true, what she said. In a way, he was possessed of many identities and these were only two, the ordinary self he had been born with and to and his hard-won, writer’s persona.

‘Yes, I’ve almost forgotten my real name,’ he admitted.

‘Christopher Guy is a law-abiding Christian husband and father.’

‘Who is Guy Kester?’

‘The writer, the storyteller. My lover!’

‘Winter to cover your Spring!’

‘Autumn perhaps, but hard as frost!’

‘Warm me! Soften me!’

Inside her – Arcadia? Paradise? – he moved slowly and deliberately. He was, as his son had intimated, a man learned in all the skills of life and loving. Alice accepted him now, whatever her first intentions had been, as he accepted her – whoever she was. One of his chief delights was to touch her softly, as if she were his precious, mortal soul, a living talisman which might easily break or melt in his hands.

They rested and slept a little, lightly, lying close. He woke, kissed her and rolled her over so that she fitted him exactly, tucked between his thighs and his chin. He began to kiss her neck, lifting her long skein of hair aside to reveal the skin. The mark of the rope went all the way round, a weird necklace.

‘We might almost be married, newly wed,’ she said drowsily.

‘We are, for tonight at least.’

‘I feel goodness in you, but deeply buried. You could be one of the kristniki, a Twelver – one of the twelve sons of Stanko who fight the witch-host on St John’s Eve.’

‘Christopher probably is. Guy is quite a different other. Once he played the black dog, cold Master Robin to a coven of witches.’

‘Many years ago.’

‘I am here because of it. And Dominic.’ He opened his eyes. They focused lazily, adjusting to the twilit distance between Alice’s neck and the marble nymph. Her sylvan sister stood beside her now, frozen in an attitude of suspense. He blinked and closed his eyes again, too involved with Alice’s body to make sense of what he saw, if it had any sense in this illogical night. Women in childbirth took notice of neither bombs nor portents; he, held more securely than a child deep in Alice’s birth-canal, had no interest in the world beyond it. He abandoned himself to the sensation their conjoined movement produced.

Lying still, exhausted; dead within her, he succumbed to the curiosity which awoke in his mind now that his body was satisfied. He opened his eyes wide. The second nymph, who still stood on tiptoe, surprised in her prurient, lustful eavesdropping, was Helen. The door behind her was open. He could make out the dark shapes of furniture in another room. Perhaps she wants to begin again, bring me another dozen lusty women to serve? he thought.

Helen knelt beside the bed and laid a hand on each of them, himself and Alice.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I knew you were still an adept. Roszi – Alice, you were always a sublime minx.’

‘It is better, far, far better,’ Alice murmured, ‘than my icy spring, or school, or imprisonment – oh far, far more than my golden torture.’

Guy, listening to them, half believed he dreamed; but, no, this body-warmed sheet was real, this golden hair, this small, aroused breast.

‘Love is close to torture, is it not?’ Helen inquired.

‘Ah – yes!’ he said, and Alice echoed him, ‘Yes – ah! – yes.’

To lie with them both, as once he thought he had, sometime, in the witches’ dreaming long ago: inwardly he rehearsed an invitation: Will you join us? – No – Helen, come a little closer – lie down on this side. As if she heard him, Helen drew back and stood by the statue of the nymph.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘But you must not touch!’ He studied her, marble-distant beyond Alice’s warmth and the smell of her pleasure, far away. The body was as perfect as the face. Dawn, which he suspected of trespass in the room, bringing parting, bringing day, made a goddess of her. Here was no slender woodland seducer; no maid of chill waters. She had heavy breasts, a small waist, swelling hips; all of these no older, no less alluring than they had been when she left him at the age of twenty-two. She had the dangerous look of Herodias, the cunning of Jezebel, the beckoning come-hither blatant sexuality of a Salome cast in metal, heated in the fire, poured into an unimpeachable mould.

The pain of desire, which Alice had likened to torture, returned to torment him as he lay looking at her untouchable nakedness, feeling Alice’s pliant flesh and will against him.

‘Why deny me?’ he said. ‘Georges must enjoy you!’

‘Georges. Ah Georges, who slumbers soundly! He understands my predicament – I must go back to him. Sleep!’ Swiftly, she turned away and passed through the doorway. He heard her turn the key. The door was made impregnable and Georges slept with her behind it, behind the thin shield of its panels. Guy lay quiet, entirely limp and relaxed, every part still except his mind. Alice slept. He rehearsed the unquiet night, going over and over its many and intimate details until his imagination was sated. He remembered Alice’s uncalloused feet, her straight toes and her tender earlobes, her waist, her lips, her tongue, her navel: all these asleep beside him. He remembered the bracelet Helen used to wear about her left ankle, her painted toe-nails, the many rings which pierced her neat ears, how he could almost span her waist with his two hands and how her tongue met his; the jewel he had removed with his lips from the deep pit of her navel: all these asleep beside his successor, Georges Dinard.

He remembered the serious young man he once had been and the insatiable rake who still woke in him; the Christian he was and the pagan, the husband and the philanderer. He remembered his books standing in a line at home, all with crimson covers and the distinctive lettering of the legend beneath each title: A Book in the Malthassa Series, by Guy Kester Parados – or Christopher Guy Young whose unremarkable name he had let drop as carelessly as a lost handkerchief. He signed everything now, books, contracts, cheques, with Parados’s name.

The early birds were waking. Words from the first line of The Making of Koschei haunted him: ‘I began building the year the …’ He chased the troublesome ghosts from his mind – he was on holiday, enjoying such a vacation! He fell asleep as the sun came up and turned the cold white statue gold.

Guy woke again because his left hand was aching. The struggle to come fully awake was aggravated by troublesome thoughts of typing and driving. Maybe Sandy’s Chinese balls! He grinned, half asleep. Of course, not Sandy. Alice. And it was Thursday, the third day in France. Alice was lying on his hand. He freed it. The ache continued and his right hand gave a sympathetic twinge.

‘Blast!’ he said. He would get up, walk for a while. Relax and forget it.

The sun was well up. He leaned out of the window, the sill covering his nakedness. Georges Dinard’s car, he was glad to see, was a plain four-door Citroën. It sat like a lumpen ox beside his shiny predator. Vineyards crowded the village and their bright uniformity stretched into the distance, over hill and through valley, meeting whatever tracts of forest stretched out to meet them in a blur of dull and biting greens. When he turned from the window and saw Alice sleeping under the watchful eye of her tutelary nymph he felt at least twenty-five and, simultaneously, as old as a biblical patriarch. David, wasn’t it, who needed a virgin to warm him in his dotage? Alice slept, but maybe Helen was awake, about. He stretched and massaged his hands before collecting the scattered garments which, when they were assembled to clothe him, made up the image the world perceived as Guy Parados.

In the kitchen a cooling pot of coffee was the only sign of life. Guy found a cup and drank some of it black. Outside, the garden was in shade and, suddenly needing the sunlight which had warmed him at the bedroom window, he went out and walked swiftly across the grass until the shadows were behind him. He opened the door which led into the orchard.

The black vardo was closed up. He glanced at and avoided it, striking out for the far side of the orchard where, instead of the vines he expected, a small stand of hazels and other scrubby trees hid a plantation of conifers. An indeterminate but regular noise drew him: it sounded for all the world like a giant drumming deep in the heart of the wood. There was no hedge or other boundary and he walked amongst the trees until he found a ride where tall grasses and a few foxgloves struggled upwards in the dim light. The ground was dry and strewn with old pine needles and cones. He followed the ride and the sound until he came upon a clearing. Here stood a group of ruinous wooden buildings that looked as if they had been old before the wood was planted. Some letters were chalked upon the nearest. When he was close enough to see them properly he made out the single word ‘Arcadie’ and the memories and associations it woke confused him. Someone had written it there as a joke, he supposed.

Ivy made the place picturesque and the early morning sun reached with long fingers into the clearing. The puzzling noise had resolved itself into a regular beat. He stood in the warmth and willed his seething mind blank for precious, restful moments. Relax! On holiday! Then he walked quickly to the barn and looked into it. A man was sawing wood at a small saw-bench powered by a compact little engine. The brassy shine of the engine and the smell of hot oil attracted him. He took a step forward and the man, who was turning to reach for a fresh branch, looked round and gave him Dominic’s insolent grin.

The shock of recognition and of disparity which coursed through Guy’s body made him shout,

‘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.