Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

I stopped and pulled into cover, watching through the trees, scanning the light, and soon she moved into the open again.

  ‘Please don’t run from me!’ I called. Could she understand? Christ, she was an inhabitant of my world.

  She shouted something at me, which I took as a good sign, but which communicated nothing intelligible. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ I called again. I realized I was holding the harpoon and quickly stuck it in my belt. A second later I felt a stinging pain in my leg and saw a short, thin dart hanging from my trousers, the point having grazed my flesh. I pulled it out of my clothing and kept it.

  She uttered the high, bird-like trill that I had so often heard in my early visions, and immediately was gone, vanishing silently, certainly heading towards the edge of the arboreal drowning-pool.

  I was about to follow when a creature that looked like a cross between a warthog and a jackal darted into my path, snarled, salivated, backed away and erected horny spines around its neck, a dangerous looking frill, signalling clearly that it was about to charge.

  I fled. The creature bounded after me, but stopped when I turned suddenly and threatened with the harpoon. Its stink was overpowering. Canine teeth jutted from pugnacious jowls and its tiny eyes narrowed, gleaming yellow.

  The land shifted, the trees around me bowed slightly, seemed to stretch from their roots. The hog, whatever it was, took steps backward, then slunk away.

  I returned to the summit of the ridge from where I watched the steady spiral flow around the sump for more than an hour, hoping that I would see the woman again, wondering how, if at all, I was to traverse this moving land.

  A different trill, on the whistle that Five Cuts had given me, reminded me that I had a friend, someone whose life was in my immediate care, and that there might be danger back along the shore of the lake.

  Again the whistle, and again I returned to the camp. A week or so had passed since we had first landed here.

  William Finebeard was up, fully clothed and agitated, in pain still but substantially recovered from the exhaustion of the walk and the wounds. He beckoned to me urgently as I slipped and ran down the last slope, then quietened my questions, leading the way along the edge of the lake, away from the tower. I could see already that the dry mud shore was marked with the hoof-like prints of several animals. After half a mile, William held me back and pointed to the tree-line.

  Five small, horse-like creatures were grazing at the lower branches. They were probably the same animals I had seen previously. Their colour was a deep brown, with black stripes over their rumps and manes of brilliant gold. As they reached up on their hindlegs to browse they revealed stubby toes at the sides of the central hoof. Small-eared, smaller faced, as high as a tall child at the shoulder when on all fours, their relationship to horses was obvious enough, and I felt sure they were an extinct precursor of that animal.

  William’s idea was to catch them – or two of them – and use them as transport.

  ‘And how do you propose to do that, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t propose to do anything,’ he indicated. ‘You build a trap. I’ll drive them into it, then you close the trap on two of them …’

  ‘That simple, eh? And then?’

  ‘You smack each on its face in turn. That stuns it. Get on its back, tie yourself with rope to the creature’s neck, and ride with it until it’s exhausted.’

  ‘You’ve done this before?’

  ‘No. But I’ve heard about it.’

  ‘So have I. A lifetime of westerns.’

  He didn’t understand, of course, but clearly he had encountered the experience of taming what I believed to be a species of hipparion, and knew it could be done. Indeed, he established that the icon-hunters sometimes traded for these creatures, though hunger usually fated the beasts for the pot – stewed with sacred statues? – and away from the duties of carriage.

  Despite his confidence that the proto-horses could be tamed, William’s injuries and my nervousness combined to cause failure and bruising.

  The hippari were moving slowly through the trees, paying little attention to anything but their meal, and we set up a leg-snare below a thick bunch of cut leaves, dangling juicily from a branch. As the small herd came by the smallest of the horses began to nibble and stepped into the snare, but when I yanked it tight the animal charged us, turned and kicked out with its hindlegs, its haunches flaying wildly left to right, the sharp horn on its vestigial toes suddenly scything the air like sharpened kitchen knives.

  It landed a glancing blow to my arm and I withdrew. The creature reached down and worried at the rope, leaving it where it lay. It snorted, then turned to the shore. Suddenly all five hippari raced along the lake’s edge, kicking in that wild way, turning inland a half mile distant and disappearing from view.

  I helped my young friend to his feet, aware that he was in pain through his smiles.

  ‘Perhaps not the best idea you’ve had, William.’

  ‘I’m sure it worked for the icon-hunters,’ he seemed to be saying, as together we limped back to our camp.

  I made William rest and recover for a full day, against his stronger instincts, his more reckless wishes. He wanted to go back across the lake, back to the eldest sister. As I sat with him, among the bulrushes where the shore was drier, listening to the sounds of the prehistoric forest behind us, I could feel his love, his loss, like a strangling grip. He smiled, he frowned, he laughed out loud as he muttered words, he wept and smashed his fist into the dry mud.

  Time and again he said her name, shaking his head, so angry with fate.

  And so I was in a quandary. By the swirling wood, Greenface might still be prowling, gathering courage as I would have to gather courage to pass into the maelstrom of that sucking land. I could get to her, I could try to establish contact with her, I could embark upon the persuasion, the attempt to bring her back to the violent entity that was her male shadow.

  But here was a man who was shuffling between the deeper world and the Hinterland, held in an endless cycle of hope and despair by the simple fact that on the far shore of the lake, in a community of prehistoric fisherfolk, was the woman he loved. So simple, so agonizing, and if William was a representation of that basic drive, the basic conundrum that has haunted lovers from Australopithecine times at least, my own response was probably of a similar great antiquity to those ancient and forgotten forebears:

  I simply couldn’t abandon him in his time of need. For the moment, his desperation for the companionship of the woman he loved powerfully outweighed my own need for the resolution of a problem, for the seeking out of Greenface; for the saving of Natalie. I can’t explain it, but for a while, at least, I abandoned my daughter instead.

  We sat long into the night, by a fire which I kept stoked high with wood, and slowly and carefully ate the fish that the boatman had given us. We laughed as I consigned the fish-gum to the deeper waters – speculating that it might creep back during the night and sneak into the pack again – and lay back and talked, he in his language, I in mine, and somehow despite the strangeness of the words, we understood each other.

  I had made the mistake of trying to ‘identify’ William’s baseculture from his clothes, which were distinctly medieval. In fact, he had traded for the garments with the icon-hunters, whom he had joined a year or so before, shortly after what he called the Great Cold.

  ‘What did you trade?’

  ‘Part of what I was carrying, the least part, though the icon-hunters aren’t aware of it.’

  ‘And what exactly were you carrying?’

  His pack was very small; he had crude weapons, winter furs, odds and ends of wood and bone, nothing that could be called tradable.

  ‘Ten steps from the winter dance,’ he said. ‘And the knowledge of how to mark them.’

  ‘How many steps altogether? In the winter dance.’

  ‘I don’t know. As many as exist when all the steps come back together. There are summer dances, and spring dances …’

  ‘
Autumn dances?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘And the knowledge of how to mark them. How’s that kept?’

  ‘Marks on wood, marks on stone. All together, they make a great dance.’

  ‘But you only know ten steps, and only from one season. Why is that valuable?’

  ‘It’s valuable if you’ve lost it. It’s valuable if you don’t understand its meaning. It’s especially valuable when all the steps have returned from exile, in whatever sons and daughters have now become the dancers.’

  ‘What was the winter dance for?’

  ‘To encourage the spring.’

  ‘Fertility stuff,’ I said with a smile at the earnest man. ‘I’m sorry I asked. I’m disappointed. What happens if you don’t dance the winter dance?’

  ‘No spring comes. There are no fish in the rivers. No meat for the spear. No life on the land.’

  ‘But has that ever happened? I mean … that the dance wasn’t danced and the spring never came?’

  He seemed amused. ‘Of course. That’s why the Great Cold came. It was too late to save the land, so the dance was sent into exile. A song played through bone pipes by children will bring us together again. However many, from wherever we are, and when we share our knowledge, and the dance is danced, the spring will return.’

  ‘The Ice Age. I understand, now. You’re a creature of the Ice Age. Well I’m damned. I had you far later than that. But who sent you into exile?’

  ‘My last winter father. My own father sang his song to me, but my last winter father was a long gone man, and a wise one. He shared the dances among his children and they went away from the tundra, away from the cold, waiting to come back when – (and here he spoke a name which was almost unpronounceable) – has died from the poison of (another name, another confusing image).’

  I felt like saying to him that in the libraries of my own land his story was listed in a thousand different ways – The Wasteland, most notably – his fears were now demons, his hopes now gods, his own part in the dance an element of myth that would have been pieced together like an ancient skull, fixed and fiddled to make it conform to the current way of thought and culture.

  * * *

  The moon rose over the far shore, a moon as I have always fancied it existed in legend, quite huge, almost full, a silver jewel that made the lake gleam, the land filled with night shadow.

  We moved back into the crude shelter, and soon William was asleep. I dozed for a while and woke to the gentle sound of splashing water.

  The five hippari had returned and were spread out along the lake’s edge, drinking and grazing the reeds. They moved almost silently, constantly alert, the leader in particular watching the wooded hill, the gleaming tower, the paths through the forest to the dangerous world beyond.

  And then, as I watched these ancient creatures, I saw a swifter shadow, a human figure darting across the muddy shore, stooping and drinking, then gathering a handful of the taller rushes.

  I rose and walked towards her. She saw me, hesitated, eyes bright in the moon glow. A moment later she ran again to the trees, head low, body lithe.

  ‘Greenface …’ I whispered, then called her name more strongly. ‘Please come back.’

  I was apprehensive, aware that my skin still itched where her dart had struck me, but went anyway to the spot where she’d vanished.

  ‘Greenface!’ I called again, not too loudly. There was only silence. After a few minutes I returned to the ivory tower, but when I was a hundred yards from where the woman had slipped into darkness I heard furtive movement behind me, someone going deeper.

  She had been there. She had watched me. She had heard my voice.

  I don’t know why, but I felt she was curious, or linked to me in some other way. And it was a feeling, an instinct, that carried with it the tenuous thread of hope.

  21

  I was being shaken awake, violently, urgently. William was struggling out of the foil and felt survival bag, shouting at me to ‘Get up! Quickly! Up!’

  I quickly grasped the crisis. The woods behind were being trampled and crushed with a nightmare noise as dawn signalled new arrivals at the shore.

  We had time to grab our packs and supplies and fling ourselves into the lee of the white, bone tower. Seconds later, elephantine legs, mottled grey and black, pounded the scrub where we had been lying, shattered the crude windbreak, carrying the first of four of the huge, short-trunked creatures down to the lake’s edge.

  They bellowed and roared, waded into the water and used the short snouts to drink and spray each other. They defecated, they wallowed, they enjoyed themselves. Then one mounted a second and the water churned, the air reverberated with trumpeted irritation as she tried to escape the attention.

  All along the shore of the lake, creatures had come to drink, frolic and annoy each other. Dense, dark flocks of birds circled and squabbled, while solitary winged giants, feathers gleaming with metallic golds and purples, swooped and snapped at their smaller kin in an aerial dance that flowed and swirled, then suddenly exploded like some avian display of fireworks.

  A snarling in the bushes preceded the slavering jaws of one of the fox-jackals I had seen in the Hinterland. Other, similar sounds, and the flashing of green, quizzical animal eyes, suggested more than one of these beasts was investigating the possibility of a human breakfast.

  Most sinister of all, the sleek, red-furred body of a big cat slunk around the tower, dawn-light catching the curved fangs that curled below its lower jaw. Smilodon, the sabre-tooth. It watched us for a few seconds, breath rasping in its lungs, then slipped into the forest, scattering birds from the canopy.

  The lake-side restaurant was open, and my Ice-Age friend and I had no safe table among its customers.

  Nevertheless, I practically had to haul William away from the waterside. He complained bitterly, trying to shrug me off, almost pleading with me. There were no tears in his eyes, but a frown on his face that aged him with its forlorn despair.

  I tried to tell him that there was no way back across the lake, not without risking the eldest sister’s life, indeed, without forfeiting his own, but of course he knew this and indicated that if I would help him for a day, he would stay with me three days. That was all. Just three days in my quest for Greenface, and then – and this was the deal – the two of us (three, if the woman was amenable to the return to the Hinterland) would build a raft and return, by night, to the village, where he in turn could find his loved one and aid her to freedom.

  In the meantime, he would start to build a stronghold here, where the ivory ruins of another people would be the shell from which he would construct his fort. Even as he spoke, he was pacing out the distance – here the stables for the hippari that he would capture and tame, there the harbour, out across the reedbeds; the watchtower was obvious, and up on the hill, among the fallen walls, the main body of the city – to which he would bring Ethne; and in which he would spend his life with her. Of all the nightmares I had expected to encounter in the hidden land of my unconscious, frustrated love was not one of them. But then, neither had these encounters with the ancient world of mammals, although I should have anticipated such a presence in the Midax Deep after witnessing the fights between Greyface, Greenface and some of the more rampaging of the grotesque creatures.

  For a day, then, I helped him mark out the borders of his hold, using lengths of creeper and broken branches to define the limits of his fort. We assessed the woodland for its use in making fences against the behemoths which constantly emerged from the maelstrom, stumbling and thundering towards the lake. We avoided all talk of strategy, of the way he would ‘invade’ the fishing village to bring Ethne to his new-found land.

  The following dawn, we began the steady climb through the pinewoods, away from the tower, towards the dull sky above the shifting earth. I had expected William to be astonished by the sight beyond the highest of the ridges, but he simply scanned the distant cliffs, then looked to the right (I had no idea of compas
s directions) and pointed.

  Had he been here before?

  ‘Not here, but somewhere similar. There are many of these moving lands. Some suck forest and the white towers into the darkness, some, like this one, bring them out to the light. The trick is to navigate around the outer circles. Don’t penetrate too far towards the centre. Otherwise you become lost in the Eye.’

  ‘Not a good thing to do?’

  ‘Not if you want to go home.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot. What’s within the Eye?’

  ‘I’ve heard no songs that tell the answer to that.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’s dangerous?’

  He grinned at me. ‘Because I’ve heard no songs that tell the answer to that!’

  For all his good humour, William was weary, now, and the deeper of his wounds had begun to bleed again. I could smell it, and in this primeval landscape, such a scent should be avoided. I quickly washed him, patched him again, aware suddenly and with some concern that he needed two or three stitches, surgery beyond my capability or resources; but I got him moving. I was looking for a sign of Greenface, half suspecting that she was not far ahead of us, perhaps torn between full escape back into the Deep of her world and an attachment to the ghost in the machine of the land which she inhabited.

  ‘You should return to the lake,’ I said to him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘She’s close, Jack. I’ll stay with you until she comes to you. A promise is a promise. She’s close.’

  And indeed, after a few hours following the natural ledges and ridges of the country towards the high cliffs that might mark the beginning of new territory, we found her first direct communication with me, two crossed branches in a forest glade that opened from the dry path of a winding stream. She had tied one of her bone darts so that its point indicated the lake. Two locks of her hair were tied to the crossed boughs, each matted with fresh blood.

  Leave me alone. Go back.

  William intuited the meaning as quickly as did I, and was exasperated when I simply took the dart and dismantled the cross.