Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [181]
With a sigh that was close to a growl, he heaved his bulk out of his chair and waddled to the window. Outside, trembling in the coolish winter wind, flowering vines splashed scarlet over the garden wall. Two slaves moved across the square of lawn, raking fallen leaves. He barely saw them, his mind ranging far to Deverry. If only he could have traveled there! Impossible, of course; not only was his health so poor that the sea journey would have killed him, but also he was too well-known to the Master of the Aethyr. For a moment he was close to panic. His delicate position in the Brotherhood depended on successful predictions, not advice that led to disaster. What if the other members of the ruling council decided that he’d outlived his usefulness? Then he steadied himself, recalling that he still had power beyond most, that he was far from defeated yet.
He went to the door, rang the gong for his majordomo, and told the slave that he was not to be disturbed for anything short of the house being on fire. Then he settled himself in his chair and let his breathing slow while he prepared for the working. The Old One had discovered and elaborated a most curious form of meditation over his long years that was the source for many of his most accurate predictions. In Bardek at that time, when parchment and writing materials were extremely expensive, learned men had developed a clever system of training their memories to store information. First the subject learned to visualize clear mental images of ordinary objects, say a silver wine flagon. Once he could hold this image in his mind for a moment or two as clearly as if it sat before him, he went on to doing the same thing with more and more elaborate objects, until at last he could hold an entire room, filled with furniture, in his mind and have that room return, exactly the same, every time he recalled it.
At this point he began to build a memory house, imagining and visualizing it one room at a time. Into each room he placed objects symbolic of things he wanted to remember, and these images were usually amusing or grotesque the better to stimulate the memory. For instance, a spice merchant would have a room in his house where he stored information about certain important customers. If a rich woman detested black pepper, say, he would put in a statue of her sneezing violently. If at a certain point he remembered that she had a special quirk, he would mentally walk into the room, look round, and see the picture, which would remind him to bring her a present of some other spice.
Now, it’s obvious that this method of memory training has a great deal in common with the beginning steps of a dweomer-apprenticeship, and the Old One had realized it as soon as he began his dweomer-studies. As a young man he’d been trained as a government clerk, a job that required the memory method above all else, because in those days the very simple idea of filing papers and information in alphabetical order had yet to be invented. In his mind the young slave eunuch who was still known as Tondalo had built a vast archive, into which he could walk and find the location of every important document in his care. Once he had bought his freedom—and made himself a rich man by squeezing every drop of the rich juices of a civil service run mostly by bribes—he had spent an intensely pleasurable afternoon burning that archive down to the precisely imagined ground.
The technique, however, had remained extremely valuable, especially once he’d chanced upon a way to expand it. It had happened,