Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘You’ll have me. Anat and Harikk …’ But even as she spoke, the figures of Arithon and Hora appeared at the edge of the camp, the girl huddled in her cloak, staring at the ground before she entered the family tent, her secret to be kept until her death.

  ‘All of us,’ Nemet added, and Baalgor nodded, then touched his brow and his breast in thanks.

  ‘What do you dream, Nem? Tell me about your dreams.’

  ‘Running …’

  She had said the word before she had even thought. It was the only word that sprang to her lips. She had wanted to express the desire that was her life: to be passionate with her brother; to bear their children; to shout and be angry, probably with their mother, who would be old and infirm; to fish, to gather, to walk with the goats and sheep and pigs and dogs; to find deep valleys in the hills, with sweet spring water, where they could pitch their tents, then build their huts and gather bulrushes for the floor, and shells to clatter in the wind; to lie with the warm earth on her back, and combed sheep-skin on her belly; and the sun on her face, and the fragrant scents of bushes and trees making her drowsy as her husband stroked her.

  This. This! What more IS there?

  ‘Running!’

  He tore the clay from his face and grabbed her by the hair. When their mouths met she stiffened, but relaxed to the fierce kiss, her fingers spreading across the seeping wounds above his breasts.

  ‘Running,’ he said as the clay peeled away. He looked at the tents, then at the hills.

  ‘Running,’ she whispered. ‘Why do I dream that?’

  ‘Why do I!’

  She was stunned by the violence in his voice. He closed his eyes and sighed, then looked at her again.

  ‘Nem! We’re alone, you and I. We have to leave. We no longer belong here.’

  ‘I can’t leave them. Our sisters.’

  ‘Too late. Too late. You’re all that matters now.’

  He was hurting her. She pushed him away, but held onto his clothing, her fingers digging into his flesh. He eased the grip, then took her into his arms again, reassuring her as she cried.

  ‘I can’t leave them’ she said again, and now he seemed to understand.

  ‘I know. We’ll take them with us. It’s all right, Nem. If you follow me, we’ll all go away together …’

  ‘Yes!’

  His mouth was on hers again. The night and its sounds gathered around them. They slipped down the muddy bank, feet and ankles in the water, laughing. There was singing from the settlement, and the bleating of goats left unmilked.

  ‘Promise me that Anat–’

  ‘I promise!’ he insisted.

  ‘That all of them: Anat, Harikk, Hora … they’ll come with us!’

  ‘I promise. How many times do I have to say it? My sister,’ he added in a whisper, his fingers thrilling her.

  ‘My brother,’ she murmured, longing for him. She pulled his body over hers and said his name again, watching the bright moon over his shoulder, and the shadows of giant birds flying to the north, to Gl’Thaan Em.

  A season had passed and they were still in the village; Baalgor’s cloak, still wretched to smell, was now long and fully encompassed his tall body, although only Nemet knew this since he wore the cloak only at night, and only with his sister. Nemet’s hoard of shells and the shining, colourful scales of reptiles was huge, now, and she had begun to make a dress, decorated with these purloined jewels from the sanctuary.

  She had not returned with Baalgor to the labyrinth of mud and stone beyond the cedar walls. Her brother had ventured to the town alone. Nemet felt uneasy about his journeys, but it was her insightful sister Harikk who cast the strongest doubt.

  ‘Arithon knows he goes there. He ignores it, that’s all. I don’t like the feel of this.’

  ‘Only our father, though. No one else knows. He’d not betray his son.’

  ‘Everyone knows,’ Harikk whispered, but she was speaking through inner sight not real sight and shrugged and waved her hands to indicate her guesswork. ‘If I was his sisterwife, I’d warn him that he isn’t as clever as he thinks.’

  I’m not his sisterwife. Not yet.

  Harikk’s warnings, her increasing gloom, began to irritate Nemet, who avoided the girl’s company, concentrating instead on helping the chatterer, Anat, to prepare for the next tattoos, the next stage in her lengthening, blossoming growth. She would be tall, like Baalgor, and was willowy still, unlike Hora who was plump and rather slow on her feet. The chatterer was now her father’s favourite too, or so it seemed, and Nemet seethed sometimes as the two of them sailed on the river, returning hand in hand with blades and polished stone, seeds, roots and on one occasion, odd little red clay icons – zheen – squatting figures and dancing shapes into which thoughts and dreams could be placed, or so it was claimed by the tribes who made them. Anat picked the tekki, enchanted by its closed eyes and pouting mouth, its sweet innocence. Tekki was sweet voice, sweet words. Harikk stared at the hoard for a while, then selected etni, the flaming face, the watcher with other eyes.

  ‘I’ll make sure to keep an eye on you lot!’ she said with a smile as she strung the amulet.

  Hora ignored the zheen for a long time, but eventually flicked among them, discarding, scrutinizing, discarding, complaining, discarding …

  She picked bet – seeing over hills, finding paths.

  ‘This can’t do me any harm.’

  Finally, Nemet picked one of the figurines for herself, startled by her powerful response to the small, running figure, its swollen breasts indicating its sex. It was called ahk, meaning running with beasts; the hunter, and, like her sisters, Nemet attached the name to her own.

  Ahk’Nemet; bet’Hora; Harikk’etni; Anat’tekki.

  They called out their new names as they held hands in a circle and danced around the talismans, laughing and imagining the effects their new-found guides would have in life.

  Baalgor waved the trinkets away, then changed his mind and picked out the smallest of the zheen, a hairless head, wide-eyed, heavy-browed, guileless. It was called el, meaning the deepest thought; the first secret. He used clay to shape a crude bull’s muzzle around the face of innocence, and pushed the curving wishbone of a goose into the outer head to signify horns. He covered the clay with strips of skin from a bull that had been sag-bellied and stilted in the sanctuary, a red beast, impossibly large, the centre of the shrine as if it alone commanded the greatest respect.

  It had been hard getting close to this monstrous puppet, and the belly had writhed with not one but two human shapes, being digested inside to hold the memory of the bovine in the shadow-world of the Fragrant Pasture.

  He had succeeded, slicing a piece of skin from the throat, but had been aware as he slipped into the gloom of the alleys that the man on the tower had seen him, watching him without raising the alarm.

  It had made the bull talisman stronger; it carried the seeds of inner strength, of secret purpose; and Baalgor hung it round his neck in triumph, though Hora was disgusted at his arrogance.

  Anat had attained her full face, and though the scars from the fish-bone needle were still sore, she danced like a woman and teased like a woman, and chattered as the fires burned high, and the voices of the singers, and the melodious breathing of the pipes, filled the night with their celebration.

  Arithon was close to Nemet during the feast, and in the morning shook her awake and passed her a bundle of nets and a bag of cheeses.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go fishing. The rains are coming from the north–’

  Nemet had felt the cooling wind, the scent of moisture that always meant a rain-storm would swirl across the dry plain of the river in a week or so’s time.

  ‘– so the fish will be swelling in the shallows.’

  Yes!

  She dressed quickly, kissed her sisters on the cheeks, gentle with Anat who was still sore, still slightly swollen where the marks had greened her flesh.

  Where was Baalgor?

  ‘He’s hunting.’ Ari
thon was impatient with her. He wanted to go, to get onto the water before the shoals passed downriver.

  For most of the day they fished, but the catch was poor. Arithon grumbled, but as dusk came he relaxed and lay back in the boat’s prow, eyes to the sky, relaxed and content. Nemet joined him and for a while they drifted with the flow of the water.

  Later, Nemet took the sail, her father the rudder, and the small craft skipped the waves, turning towards the fires on the shore.

  For the brief time she had lain with Arithon, she had felt that something was wrong with her father; he had become solemn, agitated, his eyes on the faraway. Now, as the boat came close to the mud bank, Nemet felt her mouth go dry.

  At least one of her sisters should have been there, to help them with the catch. But the shore was deserted, the tents flapping forlornly in the rising wind, the fires untended.

  The village was deserted, even the goats had gone; even the two skinny boars that Baalgor had trapped in the forest and had brought back to fatten up.

  Nemet ran between the tents shouting, half sobbing. Her father stood by the boat for a while and he seemed to be crying.

  ‘You knew!’ Nemet screamed at him, but he remained impassive.

  She went into her house, searched through Harikk and Anat’s clothes, found the small shells and polished stones that her sisters had so carefully gathered. She held the trinkets and wept, sensing that they had gone to the sanctuary, terrified at what this desertion meant.

  ‘Baalgor too,’ she whispered to her running spirit – the ahk. She went to his sleeping bench and touched the bulrushes, not knowing what she was looking for but suddenly seeing the green and silver feather that had fallen from his cloak. No! Not fallen. She picked it up and saw how the quill was snapped!

  Arithon had come into the windy tent. His eyes were dead. The tight ringlets of his hair and beard, caked in river salt, seemed grey, ageing him dramatically. The skin on his face sagged, almost peeling from him. He held a rope and a club, and when he stepped towards his daughter, Nemet ran.

  Tired though she was from the day on the river, she was still faster than her father, and she ran ahead of him into the hills, towards the gully in the rocks where she had hidden her hoard from the sanctuary. Breathless, she crouched behind yellow-flowering furze, watching the man labouring up the path, the sweat falling from him in shining droplets. He was still dead-eyed, but quite determined.

  Nemet felt an overwhelming sadness. The man she had loved and respected had tricked her, knowing that she would fight to stop her sisters being taken. He had removed her from harm’s way, leaving the girls and their brother to their fate. Now he was coming for his own, favoured daughter, to lead her like a beast into the mud-walled town.

  He called for her, but the voice was that of a ghost, not of a parent. He spotted her and came towards her and she drew away, fleeing along the rough path until she came into the slight shadow of the rocks, where she and Baalgor had spent so many hours.

  The knife was there, the handle jutting from the rock, feathery with grey wool where an animal had used it as a scratching post.

  She wrestled with the handle, tugging, twisting, but the blade was embedded deeply and she couldn’t move it.

  Arithon stumbled into the rocks, breathing hard. The coil of rope snaked over her shoulder as he flung it, then fell to the ground. He stepped quickly towards her, swinging the brutal, polished wood.

  His first blow missed her and she darted round him, flinging a stone which struck his cheek but didn’t slow him.

  ‘You have to come,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Not with you!’

  ‘I’ve lived all my life for this time. The others have gone. I wanted a last few hours with you. To remember.’

  She was too shocked by the words to respond. She saw, now, not a man who had loved her, an ordinary man, but a creature that had long since been gutted like the gutted beasts on stilts, the resurrected echoes in the sanctuary.

  ‘Your brothers and sisters have made me proud. Make me proud too, Nem …’

  ‘I’ll kill you first!’

  They circled the small clearing and again she reached the knife and tugged, screaming with frustrated effort. And again she flung herself aside as the club whooshed towards her. The wood struck the horn handle of Baalgor’s knife and snapped it. The broken bone, with a slice of blade attached, fell at her feet. As her father stepped towards her, pushing her to the ground and hauling on the rope, she took the weapon and slashed across his throat.

  For a second he looked startled, then stepped back, his hand red where he held the gash. Then he sat down heavily, a puzzled expression on his salt-bearded face. His eyes melted, filled with tears.

  Nemet began to shake with fear.

  She crouched before him, then made herself more comfortable, sitting cross-legged, the knife now cast aside. The dusk grew deeper as they waited, facing each other in silence.

  I’ve killed my father. The terrible deed. I’ve killed my father …

  After a while, Arithon sighed and slowly lay down on his side. His last words, no more than a ghostly whisper, sounded like I was so proud.

  Nemet took her shawl and placed it over his shoulders, then wept over his body, her hands spread on him, her hair hanging loose across his peaceful face.

  Later, she went back to the river and washed herself, holding her right hand away from her body as she did so, dipping and drinking as she remembered her father and cried for him. When she was too cold to continue she went back to the shore and picked up the ahk, crushing the fragile clay of the runner in hands that were suddenly strong, then smearing the gritty powder against her legs.

  Yes! I did it. I have done it.

  The terrible deed.

  He was proud of me. I loved him.

  But now I start running …

  (ii)

  She was half way to the rock gully, where the stump of Baalgor’s knife still marked the shrine to their eldest brother, when she realized that she was running in the wrong direction.

  The camp had been deserted. They had all answered the call to the sanctuary. Who, then, was going to judge her for her father’s murder?

  She stood on the edge of the cliff, the wind in her hair, her mind clear, her senses heightened by the fragrance of the wild forest behind her. She had dressed herself in a linen tunic decorated with the shells from the sanctuary. She carried the club her father had used against her. She felt stronger, now, than at any time in her life, and one thought above all others made her turn her head towards the north.

  I can stop what’s happening. I can bring my sisters home …

  And it occurred to her that Baalgor, too, was in the sanctuary, inside the earth walls, in the shadow of the white stone tower. He was among the beasts, and Nemet could not believe that he would have allowed himself to be trussed, to be made helpless, waiting to be skinned.

  If we don’t stop it now, there will be more sanctuaries, more skinning, more Arithons, living for nothing more than the deaths of their children as a price to pay for what belongs to all of us.

  The thoughts were so clear. The horror of the subjugation of the people she loved as strong in her mind as the awareness of the heat on her limbs, and the subtle scent of balsam and olive blossom in her nostrils.

  The earth is OURS to shape. We use it to hide from the wind, from the sun, from the rain. We use it to trap beasts, to trap water, to hold fires. The earth is OURS to shape!

  It’s wrong to let the earth shape US.

  Such a clear thought, such a simple thought: that a price was already paid for the shaping of the world: in the lightning fires that consumed the tents; in the floods that swept down the valley, drowning men and goats and washing their flesh into the deep of the river; in the droughts when skins and minds shrivelled and decayed; in the beasts that flung themselves from rocks and branches to carry off the young.

  This killing in skins, this skinning and living immolation, was a corruption of the w
ay of life that had existed with the spirits in the earth since the flesh of the land had first folded into valleys and hills, and grown the forests, and moulded the creatures to inhabit them.

  Wrong!

  Nemet ran lightly, head low, the club strung across her back, her hair tied tightly in a single plait and pinned to her tunic. She had rolled in the dust and now was a red-grey ghost on the dry land as she moved through the hills, away from the shrinking river, towards the scent of fresher water from the springs where the sanctuary town was being raised.

  Around her, the dust began to rise, to swirl as in a windstorm. She tied a cloth around her mouth and pressed on, aware of the looming bulk of the sanctuary, a shadow in the sand ahead of her.

  And then she heard the call, the strange song, the melodious summoning voice drifting like a searching snake from the tower that rose starkly above the walls and shelters in the town. She crouched as the sound entered her, feeling its rising, falling notes as spikes, impaling her, drawing her closer. But the song was not directed at the approaching woman. It was calling into a far-flung place, a long-gone place, and Nemet felt the earth shudder as the long-gone was drawn – fishes on a line – closer to the surface of the world she knew.

  Behind her, the ground bellowed as if in pain, and she turned, shocked to see the great creature lumbering towards her. She darted away from it, recoiling from the faecal stink as it passed, its trunk slapping against its columnar leg, the shaggy hair on its body caked with black mud and glistening green slime. It walked towards the shadow town, dropping dung, bellowing its fear.

  Again the earth shuddered.

  Nemet watched as the ground folded down, then swelled, the scrub of trees and bushes rising as a second, monstrous head appeared, two dulled eyes buried in a face of bulging horn and flaring nose, a mouth gaping, teeth blunted and yellow. This thing stood on its hindlegs, stepping from the earth, shaking its hairless torso and scratching with curved claws as long as Nemet’s arm. Its cry of pain was like a man dying, but sustained for a minute as its torso weaved and rocked, a child born into a strange world, gasping for breath.