Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  The spear sliced through him.

  He was too quick for the hunter-fisher, though, and for a moment the face behind the fish-skull mask looked startled. Then Two Cuts was running for the shore, for the ships, William behind him, the spear raised although his body racked with pain from the wound.

  Fire-shadow made the shore a confusion of movement. The air stank with burning. Ethne had slipped her captors and was running for the forest. As Two Cuts stumbled in the muddy water, screaming to his warriors, William killed him, a single strike to the back with the spear, a second strike to the neck, severing the masked head from its armoured corpse.

  By dawn, the ships of the raiders had slipped away, dispersing across the lake, travelling further into the mountains, abandoning the fishing city for ever, now that Two Cuts lay mutilated in the mud.

  Again I woke, but again, the sap dreams sent me back into William’s memory …

  Ethne, a pale-faced, beautiful figure, for ever to be found wandering naked and smiling along the lake, a primal creature among the brontotheria and hippari, bathing with them, drinking with them, chasing birds, fishing for the golden-scaled chubb and silver bream with a skill and a speed that was astonishing.

  William made statues of the children and placed them in a garden, with statues of himself and Ethne making up the square around a fountain. Ethne loved the place. She slept here, danced here, bathed in the spring that one of William’s discoveries in the hills – an architect, a dreamer, a man wandering the Deep aimlessly – had directed to the granite sturgeon whose jaws spouted the fresh and cleansing water.

  Ethne roamed the castle. And after a while she began to sail across the lake, to the ruins of her city.

  Since she always returned, William let her go; he was still lost in grief, for his twins and for the woman he had loved, who was now just a ghost in his fortress. She travelled with the builder, the man who could tame spring water, and he knew where to acquire a gleaming stone, black and hard.

  Obsidian!

  He woke one morning to the feeling of a kiss, but on opening his eyes he saw nothing but the room, the bed, the murals of Ethne and her sons that had been painted on the ivory walls of the tower.

  He ran to the garden, then to the harbour. Her boat was gone. She had sailed, he learned, the night before, crossing the lake in darkness with the stone-shaper.

  Intuitively, he knew that this was her final passage.

  He followed her across the water, disembarking where her small vessel lay hauled up on the shore. The small, black monument had been built where once she had lived in her father’s house. It was a stone coffin, crystal topped, shaped by the man who stood behind it, leaning on his staff, watching the distraught figure who stumbled to the mausoleum, to hold the stone, to kiss the glass that covered the gentle, peaceful body of his wife.

  Ethne had built her own, small tomb. She had lain on her side, wrists tied, legs tied, the poison taking her to her father’s world. The stone-shaper had done the rest.

  ‘It’s what she wanted. To lie in peace, close to her mother’s ashes.’

  ‘But I want more. Build a hall to hold the coffin. You’ll have all the labour you need, all the ships you need for the stone.’

  ‘What would she think of what you’re doing? She wanted something close to the heart.’

  ‘Build it like I say. Build it so the roof is on the sky itself!’

  ‘It’s not what she would have wanted.’

  ‘She’s gone. She’s in the world of lakes and forests. And it’s what I want that matters now. When I come here, I want space to scream and hear the echo. Do what I tell you!’

  And while the mausoleum was built, William stayed by the tomb, wrapped in furs against the cold when the winter blizzarded and silenced the whole land; draped in the same red ochre as his dead Ethne when summer made the land wilt with heat. He ate sparingly, slept a great deal, never walked outside the confines of the hall, standing and staring at the open sky, where the fragile scaffolding held the great blocks of polished stone as they were winched and eased into place.

  His life was one of the sounds of carving, chipping, shouting, laughing, screams and music. The monument was built in a single cycle of seasons, and William sailed home again.

  There was one more memory in the sap, but it was hazy, elusive. I began to wake, my awareness starting to wrestle with the sheer scale of the building that William had ordered, thinking in terms of pyramids, and the workforce, and the work hours involved, questioning how he had found labour on such a scale …

  But the drip of sweet tears closed my eyes again …

  A memory that had not been taken fully from him, now shaped and shimmered on the lake.

  The Bull-Gate of Glanum, horns rising from the lake, the tower streaming water as it came above the surface. It moved through the dawn mist, ploughed through the harbour, into the mud, stone screaming as it cut the fortress right across, devouring the heart of the city. It threw down the statues that decorated Ethne’s garden and engulfed the place where William had made a shrine to the lost dancers of his own land. Earth falling from its walls, the limbs of trees cracking from the trunks that grew from between the massive stones, Glanum entered the mountain, shaking the land as it turned towards the Eye …

  I woke to the single, immediate thought:

  Glanum was close and coming closer. It was circling this place, as if hunting an elusive prey. Greenface? Instinct told me differently.

  It was seeking me. It knew I was here.

  34

  In the morning, I found the garden deserted, and though I called for William there was no answer. But I found the small hull of a boat hauled from the reeds beyond the harbour onto the higher bank, the mud around churned where the man had laboured in the dawn.

  He was beginning his preparations to cross the water again.

  Then at about midday the sound of equine protestations announced William’s arrival from the hills. He was on foot, dressed in protective leather shirt and trousers, running towards the castle leading two of the hippari on short ropes. The creatures’ hindquarters bucked and swayed as they ran awkwardly, and I realized that each had their hind-legs bound together at the hoof, allowing them to move, but frustrating their scythe-like, defensive kick.

  He led them up to me, a breathless, grinning man, sweat pouring from his face.

  ‘Watch!’ he said, then turned and used his fist to hammer each of them solidly and stunningly on the muzzle. The beasts went down, eyes open, flanks heaving, totally subdued. The hunter drew his stone knife and went round each hipparion, severing the vestigial toes close to the hoof. Where the cuts oozed blood he spat on the wounds, rubbed them, then caked a little mud on the surface.

  He tied the horses together by the neck and left them lying there, one of them, the larger, making faint sounds, somewhere between a whinny and a laugh, not at all happy, however.

  ‘Leave them there for a few hours. They’ll handle like old friends.’

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ I said and he frowned.

  ‘Have I? Only in my dreams, then. It came naturally to me, a sort of instinct. Here, these are lucky.’

  He passed me the sixteen stubs, some of them razor edged, some blunt and heavy. Was I supposed to make a necklace of them? An amulet?

  William laughed, held up his arms and I realized that the sleeves of his shirt were stiffened from wrist to elbow with hipparion toes, a crude form of chain mail. To demonstrate their effectiveness he used his heavy knife to strike heavily at his own limb. The blade was turned aside harmlessly.

  It had not occurred to him to question how the bones had come onto his sleeves if he had never tamed the creatures save in his dreams. He was a living contradiction, but I no longer felt inclined to confront him about it.

  ‘Thank you. I’m sure they’ll be very useful.’

  I had assumed that he had acquired and (hopefully) tamed these creatures so that we would have one each to ride into the hills. But his unease
at dusk, as he prepared grilled fish, giant periwinkles and a heavy cake made from wild grains and nuts, was more than obvious. When I politely refused the massive, tongue-like curls of the fresh-water molluscs, he was insistent that I ate them. ‘For stamina. For the long ride!’ he told me. I managed one and was nearly sick. A second, large though it was (it was impossible to bite into the half-cooked mass) sailed beyond the wall as I blew it from my mouth when William was away, urinating. Desperation had strengthened my lungs.

  In the morning, one of the equines had been loaded with my pack, with poles to erect skins for a tent, and with strips of drying, salted, suspicious looking food.

  He held the other hipparion by its bone bit, stroking the striped muzzle, watching me with his shining blue eyes.

  ‘Is this goodbye, then?’ I asked him, and he handed me the crude reins.

  ‘I think so. I’ve thought hard about it, and perhaps your path takes you away from me, now. I have a boat to build, a lake to cross, a heart to rescue. You have a Bull to find, a city to find, something I can’t understand to resolve.’

  ‘I have to find the woman,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Greenface. Beyond that, I have no idea what life holds.’

  ‘She’s close,’ he said. ‘The bull is close. The end is close.’

  They were strange meanings, but they echoed my own feelings that I was at the centre, now, of a diminishing circle, that everything in this world of mine was coming together, coming to me, as if the wandering Midax spirit was at last taking charge of its own heaven and hell.

  There remained a problem, and I pointed across the lake to the distant shadow of the mausoleum.

  ‘Who built the black tower?’

  He didn’t look to where I pointed, simply tugged my ear and smiled. ‘Things will have changed. I know that.’

  ‘But what do you know? William … more time has passed than–’

  He silenced me with a finger to my lips, a hand raised, palm towards me: quiet!

  ‘I will find what is there for me to find. But Ethne belongs here, with me; I’ll die unless I get her back.’

  Did he know that she was dead? Were we talking at cross purposes? What should I say?

  I said simply, ‘Time has taken a terrible toll on the eldest daughter.’

  But all he did was laugh!

  ‘Jack,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Jack: I’ve fought and killed creatures as high as that ivory tower; I’ve battled against harpoon hunters and left them for the lakescrow to feed on.’ He grinned meaningfully as he watched me. ‘Do you think I can’t make war upon that bloody tyrant Time?’

  The image behind his words and gestures had a strange resonance, a familiar feel, and I remembered school, the Sonnets (‘make war upon this bloody tyrant Time’) and I looked at William, saw myself again, saw the echo, the shadow of my childhood, embodied here in rose-torn, fine-haired beauty.

  Though he probably knew he would find Ethne dead, nothing, it seemed, would dampen Finebeard’s optimism. And I took a great strength from that. It seemed to affirm my own quest. I felt hopeful of finding Ahk’Nemet, and hopeful of releasing Natalie from Greyface’s ghoulish grip.

  And in any case: once out of sight, he would be out of my frame of reference, a cat allowed to play! In William’s world, once I was no longer fixing it by observing it, perhaps Ethne was only sleeping after all.

  And a kiss from his lips would indeed bring her out of the dark hall and onto the bright lake again, loving and laughing, and fishing in the Deep …

  While in suburban Exburgh, I ate breakfast and went to work!

  At the top of the hill, leading my pack-hipparion awkwardly through the crowded woodland, I blew three shrill blasts on the bone pipe.

  From the shore came three imitations of the lakescrow, the carrion eater that plagued the water’s edge. And then my name, bellowed three times and followed by the cry of Greenface!

  And a laugh so suggestive that I will never forget it, loud enough to wake the dead.

  ‘Goodbye, you rogue,’ I whispered. ‘And magic to your kissing!’

  35

  All my life I had been haunted by the Bull, but I had never felt endangered by it. It had threatened strangers in my dreams, and I had merely watched and witnessed.

  It hunted me, now, and I ran before it, terrified, senses heightened, aware of the slightest shadow, the smallest path, the most concealing tree. The small horses had long-since been killed, one by the effort of the journey, the other by the predators which roamed the forest.

  I had reached the edge of the maelstrom on the second day, sheltering from the rain and wind as a black storm raged across the swirling land. There was no sign of Greenface and I began the journey round the Eye, towards distant forests which, in the light-streaked gloom of the tempest, might have been the giant cedars that seemed to mark a place where she felt at home. I sought shelters of stone, the fragments of strong buildings, but the only walls I found were dissolving into mud and rotting wood; there was something older about the ghosts now spewing from the whirling pool of earth – all shadow of the mediaeval gone, replaced by crude and prehistoric dwellings.

  When the rain cleared I entered deep forest, emerging occasionally on to the precipice that fell away to the deeps and divided the world of the shore from the maelstrom. Here, I lost the pack hipparion. It was ill, rather than overladen, struggling to breathe, and as I removed its burden it laughed in that odd way of the creatures and bolted towards the edge, plummeting instantly to its doom. Shortly after, I found the ruins of the Watching Place, the arch remaining full, but the decorated façade scarred by wind, rain and time, a dead place through which I passed and around which I found no recent trace of Ahk’Nemet. But she had made the place into a shrine, I thought: the broken walls of a wooden room revealed the smashed statue of a stooping man, the face sheared away, the arms broken. I kicked through the undergrowth and eventually found the features that had been destroyed; I stared at my own anguished face in stone, the hard, cold legacy of my previous visit. Who had smashed the idol, I wondered, and guessed that more of William’s mercenaries had once passed this way.

  The Watching Place, a dead place? So it had seemed. But as I walked on, leading the second hipparion by the reins, so for the first time the earth shuddered in a less familiar way, like a beast stamping the ground. I turned in alarm.

  The watery sun was behind the Watching Place. I thought I saw raised horns in silhouette, and though they seemed to move slightly, I imagined the whole effect was simply an illusion in the shifting light. Minutes later, the gate had disappeared from view as I hurried on.

  I soon became aware of a strong, cooling wind blowing from behind me and of an odd restlessness in the forest and in the air. The hipparion became agitated, started to scream and buck against the restraining rope that was tied between its teeth. There was no calming the beast and I held it strongly as I stripped off the pack. Before I could disentangle the dried fish, it ripped away from me and ran ahead. The earth was shuddering dramatically and I began to follow the creature, glancing back, searching the trees and the skyline …

  The bull’s head rose suddenly and the bellow was deafening. It was higher than the trees, the horns scything the sky. Huge eyes stared at me. The red body shook, the saplings snapped as it stepped forward, shaking the foliage as it began to move towards me.

  I ran for my life, half tempted to discard the pack, but clinging onto it with all my strength. I could feel the heavy breathing of the monster, and my memory threw up dreams of Greenface running just like this, the swaying bovine crashing through the trees behind her.

  Abruptly, the woodland opened out into a steep defile, and I slipped on the slope and skidded in the mud, tumbling and rolling, aware that the monstrous shape had arrived above me, the head leaning out into space, the eyes watching as the muzzle gaped and moisture dripped.

  I stumbled to my feet and followed the course of the stream and when hours had passed I huddled, pack to my chest, below a fallen trunk.
It rained again and I was miserable. I hardly slept. At dawn I moved on, lost now, passing through a gorge that widened out, but rose more steeply on either side. The river deepened, grew faster. I felt watched at all points.

  Soon I found the savaged remains of the frightened horse. Something, probably a smilodont, perhaps several, had killed it and dragged it into the fork of a tree, where half of it had been consumed, the other half still draped in tattered gore, the eyes open and watching me with a mournful gaze.

  I began to recognize where I was; I had been here before, daydreaming in France, nearly losing Natalie by drowning. The day warmed, the sun brightened, the river wound away ahead of me, carrying spring blossom that was falling from wild cherry and rose in the forest, blown by the soft breeze. I cut through the woods and soon heard the sound of laughter and voices, and on approaching the river saw the four girls again, with their ring of flowers. It was strange to stand for the second time and watch them at their game. I looked around to see if some spirit echo of myself lurked here as well, some intrusion from my dreaming mind of long ago, but there was just the dappled light, the rustling leaves.

  The girls fled suddenly, screaming, as the mastodons broke cover and thundered to the water, first drinking, then wading towards the village, where cooking fires scented the air with their aromatic smoke.

  When I had watched this scene before, a shadow had darted past me, ill-defined and unrevealed, perhaps Greyface, perhaps the woman. I waited for that same figure now, but this time she rose from the cover of tall grass among the scrubby trees, between the heavy wood and the river. She was watching me. Her face was the face of her sisters, green-lined, taut and beautiful, her hair braided and tied to the shoulder of her cloak, which was parted to reveal the glitter of cowrie-shell and brilliant lapis-lazuli that laced her tunic.

  I broke cover and walked to her, aware that she carried a fistful of thin lances, a blow-pipe and wore a girdle of bone-blades. She seemed unmoved to see me, and waited unmoving as I approached.