Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  It didn’t take long to establish that this is no lucid dream. Try as I might I cannot manipulate or control the illusion around me. I’m beginning to think of myself as Mr Eighty Percent. Too much of my central self has been condensed, re-defined and set loose for it to have the full control of dream imagery and the seepage from the unconscious that exists in the lucid dreamstate.

  Whatever was within me has formed, defined, hardened and is waiting, and I will be no Merlin, able to summon change at will.

  There is the very real experience of being in very real space, and time itself runs quite normally, according to my watch and to my own innate sense of time. The sun stays low, and the shadows defy the passage of the seconds on my wrist, but I can report that this is no timeless dream, but a defined reality in which it takes me nearly five minutes to walk to the edge of the woodland, and the same nearly five minutes back again.

  The tunnels through the trees bring a fresh smell and the sound of a waterfall. For a moment, earlier, standing in the breeze from beyond the forest, peering into the sylvan gloom, I thought I heard human voices, but it may have been nothing more than animals, birds perhaps. From that position I could see back to where the red cliffs curved into the distance, obscuring the land beyond, and I am certain that I saw furtive movement against the red sky, a small shape ducking down, then moving quickly to its right before crouching again and peering into the valley.

  Was it Greenface? I still don’t know. At this time I can see no signs that it is she who has been living in this particular borderland.

  Time to explore, now.

  Later …

  Having walked the area of the piazza, peering into some of the buildings with their scatter of fallen statues and floors littered with broken pottery, I returned to the cathedral, to the ‘Christian’ gate, avoiding the Bull-Gate with its two grotesque, ebony bulls’ heads. Inside the church was a clear echo of my previous visit: the dust, the light, the signs of this place having been long abandoned, the running, noisy chickens, pecking at the crumbling plaster, the stone floor and the weedy plants that were springing up through the cracked flagstones.

  On the altar, Christ was agonizing on his tree, but with his face upturned, his mouth and eyes opened as if calling out, his body a slim, extended post-modernist representation of the crucified carpenter, the thorns from his crown curling out like the horns of a bull, but that feature, I’m sure, is my own fearful addition to the scenario.

  Where Joan of Arc had stood previously, so proud, so robust, so ice cold in marble, now there was a different female figure, no less statuesque, no less magnificent in her form of white marble, but armoured differently – metal-scales and armoured greaves, spiked gauntlets and a belt of throwing knives slung across her shoulder. A tumble of long, full hair had been carved so intricately in the stone that even a stray, wind-blown strand curved delicately from her brow, snapped off at my clumsy touch. A raven’s wing was the pin that fastened a short cloak above her left breast.

  It was as I started to leave the church that I caught the faintest scent of wood ash, a moment only, but sufficient to tell me that a fire had been made here, and sure enough, after a few minutes of searching by the stone walls of the church I found the traces of a small hearth, almost completely concealed. The footprints in the dust were small; and by the fire itself I found a single cockle shell, bored to take a thread.

  I breathed her name aloud, wondering if she was still close.

  I might not have found the remains of her food but for the sound of snarling and crunching from a deep recess below a stained glass window. The creature that was wolfing down the scraps of the chicken meal at first struck me as a fox, but when it turned on me, baring its teeth, I realized that this was no fox that had ever hunted the nightland of my own world.

  It was the size of a hound, and its red fur was streaked with black. The bush of its tail flexed left and right, rather like an angry cat’s. From its muzzle, four horny knobs stuck out like cancerous growths. A tall ridge of black, stiffened hair ran from between its eyes to its tail.

  I backed away, but the creature was as afraid of me as was I of it, and it suddenly loped away to the piazza, uttering shrill, piercing sounds, a high pitched bark, perhaps signalling to others of its kind.

  Within the recess were the feathers, bones and charred remains of the meal, along with the entrails of the chicken, which had been carefully wrapped in leaves and smothered with mud, an obliteration to the senses that had worked so far as the ur-fox was concerned.

  Her footprints were in the dust everywhere, and I could see, now, how she had pursued her prey as it had flapped and clucked in panic about the church, catching it with her spear – I found traces of blood – and taking it to the small chapel for its preparation.

  That I assumed the traces were the work of Greenface was a simple instinct, not a reasoned conclusion. I had, after all, seen her near this place in my visions. But if such creatures as that grotesque and ancient fox inhabited my world, then other humans too might be around, and the source of those voices beyond the trees might account, equally, for the surreptitious feast within the sanctuary.

  I had been in the Hinterland for several hours and began to feel hungry and tired. There had been no change in the light outside, but my watch marked the real-time passage of from ten am to six pm. Nothing had changed, and nothing changed when I again attempted to influence the lucidity of my vision, to create movement, presence, to bring the voices of Angela and Steve (You! The both of you! I’m beginning to forget that this is a communication to people who are reading my report!) to bring your voices, your presence into the piazza.

  I am on my own, to an extent that induces a feeling of claustrophobia. The twenty percent of me that is watching the main self at large is now panicking, wants out, wants reality, is perhaps lying upon that plush couch, in its web of wires, twitching or thrashing, perhaps murmuring from its fragmentary dreamworld. It has been abandoned, but it is still aware, and perhaps it is that residual awareness that feeds back into the Hinterland as furtive movement, frightening shadow, a brooding wood, an enclosing mood that seems directed to one end only: to get me away from here …

  Ah! I think, then, that perhaps there is another explanation for this anxiety. Yes of course, the Hinterland is only the thin, conscious border that protects me from the raw unconscious. Here, I have constructed images and icons that combine both mystery and hope, sanctuary and afterlife. The cathedral, the shrine, the opening passages, the voids, the womby channels calling me back, the tunnels of light, the breezy glades, the never-neverlands in which I fantasized as a child, all …

  Calling to me? But they can’t all be the way through … Can they?

  And surely I would never have constructed the Bull-Gate!

  It exists there, reaching from the red cliff, a parasite on the rest of the ruined sanctuary. I do not believe it to be the gate I seek, rather, it is a gate to avoid. I notice, in contradiction of my statements a few hours ago, that the creatures that surround the heavy gates themselves have grown bigger, fatter, almost older; they are reaching further out across the steps, casting long shadows as their necks crane forward; their animal faces turn away from the sun, stretching round to watch the woods that hide the distant waterfall.

  So there is change here, but it is not of my doing. I suspect, therefore, that I am certainly not alone, or at least, that I am not the only influence on the world that confines and contains me.

  I slept for a while at the back of the cathedral, emerged briefly to establish that there had been no change of any devastating or inherently threatening nature, and then climbed the spiral stairs to the bell tower. From here, by squeezing through a narrow window, I could walk along the sharp angle of the roof above the main body of the building and reach that point at which church and cliff were joined, a seamless junction as if the rock had simply been carved at this point into the precise, angular dimensions of the place of worship.

  I climbed the cliff f
or a long time. The rock was hard, the smoothness of its surface consistent with petrified flesh, but still amply pitted and cracked by weather to make the ascent no more than a difficult scramble.

  High above the church and the Bull Temple, looking out across the wide piazza, I could see the swathe of the forest and the sudden drop of a steep-sided gorge, distantly, where a thundering waterfall sparkled and misted in the ruby twilight.

  I could see no signs of life, not even the flight of birds above the canopy nor the stealthy movement of deer at the edge of the woods themselves.

  Intrigued by what lay at the top of the cliffs, I climbed on for what seemed like hours. The slope curved away and soon the cathedral was lost below me, and I was surrounded only by rock and the red sky. And yet the climb remained as difficult as before, a steady ascent at a high angle past the fissures and carved entranceways that I had seen from the piazza.

  I ventured into one such passage, a horizontal, oblong opening framed with galloping and tumbling horses, manes flying, bodies curiously bloated. I realized, after several minutes, that this was probably the entrance to a tomb. The tunnel became narrow and tall after the initial scramble through the hole, and began to wind into the mountain towards a source of stale air. The walls were hung with clay figurines and shapes made out of grass and flax, some simply of dyed cloth tied to shank bones or long wooden poles. It meant little to me, and the journey inwards was unrewarding, so I returned to the hot cliff face.

  I had hoped to find one of the sources of the gleaming, silvery light, but they were elusive, catching my eye on occasion, but refusing to be at the end of the rainbow when I arrived to inspect them, breathless and sticky with perspiration.

  At last I gave up, abandoned the climb and descended again cautiously to the ruins below to rethink my strategy.

  I was still out of sight of the church when I heard the creaking trundle of a cart and human voices.

  Eight ragged looking figures, five men and three women, hauled two heavy carts across the piazza. The carts were piled high, though whether with booty or supplies was impossible to tell since the bulk was concealed beneath skins. They were moving towards the base of the red cliff, between the Bull Temple and the obsidian mausoleum, shouting at each other, struggling with the weight. As I watched, two men and a third woman came running down the steps, carrying the statue of the crucified Christ between them.

  The carts stopped. The ragged band argued noisily. From inside the church came the sound of stone being smashed and various calls went out to the two sanctuaries. I had the feeling that the words meant: ‘Enough, now. We can’t carry any more.’

  Two more figures appeared, running lightly down the steps, children, I thought. One was carrying a fragment of a stone limb, weaving beneath its weight across his shoulder, the other some icons. Behind them, two more came, struggling with part of a woman’s head – the head of the Raven Warrior – and they were cuffed and shouted at, but ran ahead of the carts to the overhang of cliff, where a temporary camp was made.

  I remained on the roof of the cathedral, or in the bell tower, for a long time, aware that two of the older men were prowling round the piazza, shading their eyes and scrutinizing the twilight slopes above them. One of them seemed to watch me for so long that I felt sure he must have seen me, but at last he moved away, and of course I was so dusted with red – as was the cathedral – that I would have been just one more shape against the landscape.

  Now a third cart emerged from the forest, pulled by an ungulate of grotesque appearance, all sagging grey skin, heavy horns, and dripping muzzle. Four men pushed from behind, two women, young and long-haired slapping the beast’s flanks. A fifth man strode behind them, weighed down by a massive leather pack, his face hidden below the flop of a cowl. As the cart continued, he stopped for a while and looked back towards the woods, as if searching, then strode towards me, passing by, heading to the Bull-Gate and disappearing below the jutting heads and horns of the guardian beasts.

  I finished the descent to the church below, where I expected to find the chickens slaughtered for the fire and my pack rifled, or stolen, leaving me without the precious pictures, icons of my external life. In fact, the chickens were quietly brooding in the far corner, caught in the dusty light from the Lady Chapel, and my pack was still secure in its niche. The only damage was to the statues and holy pictures, for these had all been either broken or taken, and it was oddly sad to see this destruction. I was especially grieved at the broken body of the Raven Warrior, whose discarded corpse lay across the wooden seats of her chapel, her arms broken, her spear snapped in two, her head taken as I had observed from the cliff.

  Christ was missing completely, of course, and his cross was upturned against the marble altar.

  As I kicked through the dust and the shattered stone, partly angry, very puzzled, I realized that a figure had arrived in the open doors to the church and was standing there, watching me. As quickly as I had seen him, he had gone. I was about to follow when a scuffle and raised voices alerted me to the squabble between two adolescent males. They were arguing over a triptych, and as they tugged at the painting so it split into its component panels. Angrily, and with a suspicious glance in my direction, these wisp-bearded youths gathered up the pieces and scurried from the hall, still bickering.

  A little later, a wind blew up from the direction of the forest. The icon hunters had formed the three carts into a windbreak, erected animal-skin walls, and lit a fire that burned brightly against the face of the cliff. I watched them again from the bell tower, saw how they formed into four distinct family groups around the blazing wood and began to prepare their meals. And it was at that moment, as they prepared for their food, that I realized that I was still inhabiting a dream, to an extent at least …

  I had assumed that these were icon stealers, accumulating their trade-goods by pillaging and looting. But as the Christ was dismembered and the carcase laid across the fire, so I saw that this was a form of cannibalism. The statues were regarded as a source of food, and the limbs and broken stone were heated until they cracked, then distributed among the family groups, who proceeded to consume them with all the fervour and happy conversation of a group of friends at a Sunday barbecue.

  It was visual madness. It was a reflection of the absurdity of dream.

  How I longed, as I watched them from my vantage point, for some interchange, some conversation with the outside world, with the thinking, rational minds of those of you who watch.

  Perhaps these icon-eaters were the last of the lucid b it ridiculous aspects of dream, inhabiting this twilight Hintorland, as real and hard as the stone-stuff they consumed, but still a function of expressed desire, or fear, rather than memory and imagination.

  I listened to them for several hours, sitting in the church, watching the dust swirl in the rising wind, the chickens run, the light from the high windows shift and darken as clouds swept over the blood-red sun.

  Eventually the newcomers slept, and though it was still twilight, I slept too, grateful for an escape from the exhaustion that had accompanied my long and arduous climb.

  I woke to the sound of drumming and the smell of fire. The chickens were flapping around in panic as one of the youths from yesterday chased them, laughing, prodding at them with an iron-tipped lance. Swirls of smoke came into the cathedral through the higher windows, but there was no fire that I could see.

  The drumming, meanwhile, kept up its rapid, rhythmic beat outside.

  Seeing me awake, the young man walked over to me, shouldering his spear as if it were a rifle. He had long fair hair, a broad smile and a thin, downy beard. His clothes were primitive, leather-stitched together, but I saw a bone cuirass below his loose jacket.

  He reached a hand to me and I thought he was about to help me up, but he passed me a small piece of wood, then laughed and left the church. The wood was a fragment of one of the triptychs, and I could see the edge of a face, a piece of building, a distant hill. I tossed the fragment into
my pack, then followed the strange young man to the source of the drumming.

  They had set fire to the Bull-Gate. With their carts lined up, the vandals stood in a wide arc around the marble steps, staring up as flames raged upon the heavy wood, and smoke billowed and obscured the jutting bulls, the stone creatures. Two men crouched behind the drums, striking them with thick wood batons and much energy. Across the piazza, the cowled man was walking in and out of the ruins, striking at columns with his staff, kicking through the rubble.

  There was a sudden cheer and the vandals raced to the burning gates, picked up the blunt, cut trunk of a tree, laced with ropes, and charged the doors. Their first attack was successful, the Bull-Gate shattering inwards, flaming wood falling from the broken bars. Now the carts were hauled up the steps and each in turn dragged through, the animal being pulled and bullied as it struggled to escape the fire, but eventually disappearing into the sanctuary, following the drums.

  In all the confusion I had failed to notice the cowled man cross the wide space and ascend the steps. He passed through the fiery gates, now, and the youth with the fair hair and fine beard, and two others, used their own staffs to push the doors back into place, blinking against the smoke, wary of the swirling flames.