Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  This thing too began to follow the summoning song, and though it glanced and growled at Nemet, stooping to take its weight on its forearms, it stalked into the dust, shadowed and lost.

  Again the earth flexed its muscles, and a pair of horns the girth of Arithon’s river-boat punched up from the soil, and a bull’s head followed, the muzzle snorting, the crimson body arching up behind it, hooves scrabbling to raise this forgotten monster.

  Blood-red and massive, the Bull suddenly lay down as it passed Nemet, rolling over, legs kicking monstrously, its eyes never leaving the crouching, fearful woman.

  When it stood again it was hesitant, aware of its small companion, almost uncertain in its actions.

  Nemet approached the creature and it lowered its head. Its breath reeked of sweet grass. She touched its muzzle and its fleshy lips drew back from teeth like marker stones.

  It bellowed in anguish.

  Nemet soothed it.

  The call from the white tower was still strong and the Bull became agitated, began to walk towards the summoning voice. Drawn out of a time when the earth was roamed by giants, now it carried a smaller creature, clinging to its underquarters, arms entwined with the matted hair that hung down from the grumbling bulk of its belly.

  Swaying with the movement of the beast, limbs beginning to tire, Nemet was carried into the sanctuary, aware of the frantic beating of skin drums, the shrieking and chanting of female voices and the mournful, rising notes of great, bone horns. When she smelled the rot from the skins of the stilt creatures, and heard the faint cries of their human companions, shedding their lives into the Fragrant Pasture, she dropped away, scurrying into the shadows.

  For a while she crouched in darkness, catching her breath, watching the irregular parade of nightmares stalk through the writhing skins, occasionally butting against the heads which swayed on the ends of their poles. The tower rose ahead of her, the shape of the summoner motionless as he uttered the eerie cry. When the breeze in the sanctuary changed, Nemet scented blood and fear and though her stomach heaved, she began to follow the stench, head low, moving from skinned creature to skinned creature as she strove to remain invisible to the watchful man on the edge of the white stone.

  ‘Baalgor!’ she whispered to the sanctuary. ‘Where are you? Where are you hiding?’

  Eventually she reached the slaughterhouse, passing unnoticed through the tall gate in the high wall of wood and clay, walking among the fires and drummers, stepping round the skins that were being cleaned, the bones that were being stripped of meat, aware of the strutting and circling flock of carrion birds, whose own cries added to the cacophony.

  Whichever way she wandered through the noise and chaos of this arena of sacrifice, the white stone tower was always ahead of her, its base gaping where the unbarred entrance called to her …

  She watched in silent horror as the first of the beasts she had seen summoned from the earth was brought to its belly by cuts to its legs, then beaten on the brow by clubs until it was still. The sawing and cutting began, the heat from its body manifesting as a writhing vapour above the carcase. The blood-red Bull bellowed and struggled against the leather ropes that now restrained it. And yet … suddenly it seemed to see Nemet and it calmed, as if recognizing an ally.

  Nemet was shocked to feel a reciprocating sense of peace and understanding.

  This beast is MINE. Its belly is my grave. Its bones are the forest grove where I’m to lie, skinned and travelling!

  She turned from it, ignoring its angry cry, fleeing across the arena, stumbling suddenly to the base of the stone tower.

  ‘Nemet!’

  The call was distant. She couldn’t tell which of her sisters had seen her and was crying for her, but again the voice sounded in her ears, distinct above the pulse of life, drums and wailing song behind her.

  She stepped towards the open door, stepped towards the darkness. As she reached the threshold of the tower her mother appeared, hair awry, eyes wide, face sagging beneath the weight of horror.

  ‘Nemet …’ she managed, then thrust something sticky yet gossamer into her hands before suddenly running into the sanctuary, slipping on the wet pelts, sending fire and smoke swirling as she kicked through the burning wood. Flame took on her shawl, her dress, but she was lost in the smoke, in the confusion.

  Nemet looked at the green-tinged fabric, spread the tissue slightly, recognized the marks of one of her sisters, then realized that she held two faces, and half a face …

  ‘Anat,’ she breathed, recognizing the eyes that marked the cheeks. She fumbled, shaking, to spread the faces. Whose was the second?

  Then Harikk burst from the tower, one side of her face still burning where the flayed flesh had been sealed. Her good eye was wide and wild. She stared at Nemet, recognizing her, then screamed with pain before saying, slowly and angrily, ‘Our brother has doomed us!’

  ‘Baalgor?’

  Still grimacing, her eye weeping as the scorched flesh smouldered, Harikk said, ‘This has turned out badly. There will be no peace for us now …’

  And she ran across the slaughter yard to the edge of the sanctuary, a naked shape glistening with oils, lithe and athletic despite her mutilation, hard like a creature, determined to escape.

  Ahk’Nemet looked back, then – acting on instinct – looked up.

  The grim sky was darkening. A man’s shape was growing above her as it fell. The scream surrounded her, an alien sound. She stepped to one side a heart’s beat before the opened body of the Rememberer broke and twisted on impact with the earth, a man’s length from where she stood. Instinctively, she flung her spear at the body, striking it in the chest. The startling grey eyes, separated by a scar, watched her from the beginning of the forest path to the Fragrant Pasture. The long, grey hair blew in the breeze. The mouth chattered through the rictus of death, a nervous music that slowed, then stopped, and allowed the purple tip of a tongue to extrude and taste the air.

  Everything in the sanctuary had gone silent. Glancing round, Nemet realized that the eyes of her tribe, and of the still-living animals, were set upon her.

  A moment later there was mayhem, a panic that killed as the sanctuary was abandoned, a frantic escape to the outside world that left bodies broken and writhing beneath the feet of the untethered beasts.

  A touch on her shoulder made her scream, but a finger on her lips silenced her and she was suddenly staring through the baked clay mask that covered her brother’s face. He was shaking, but with triumph, not fear. He stank of triumph. The sweat on his body added to the glow of the kill that lit his eyes, fuelled his heart, powered his limbs.

  He held a stone blade towards her, the stench of blood still strong on the cutting edge.

  ‘They’ve killed Anat. Jarmu and Anat. There’ll be no more, though. I’ve seen to that.’

  ‘Hora is dead too. Kohara gave me her face … and half of Harikk’s. Harikk is alive and burning. She has started running.’

  ‘Hora,’ her brother whispered, then flung the knife to the ground, turning and spitting on the curved, cracked corpse of the Rememberer.

  ‘Do you have the ahk?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s on my body.’

  ‘Then you can run for eternity. But sister: you’ll have to carry me when my own legs go. I have this, though.’

  He held up his clay talisman, the skin-covered bull, the clay-covered el.

  ‘Inside the skin, the animal; inside the animal, the secret; inside the secret, the life itself; inside the life, the maker! I have woven my own needs into this small piece of the dead.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To strip the inside from the outside of a beast. To take its essence, its power; to shape that essence, to make what I need.’

  ‘New beasts.’

  ‘New power.’

  Ahk’Nemet smiled. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I know so.’

  ‘We’re going to need that if we’re to pass into the Fragrant Pasture at the end of our days, and not
into oblivion.’ Baalgor didn’t seem to notice her warning words, and ignored, too, the way the sanctuary was beginning to shrink, to fold, to crowd in upon them. He was still fevered and shaking from the deed he had committed; the smell of hunting and lust was redolent on his lithe and towering form. He held Nemet in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. His right hand reached down to hold the muscle of her thigh, the fingers spreading, the thumb moving to intimate contact with her sex.

  ‘Your legs are like the polished limbs of cedar; strong and beautiful … the scent between them as sharp and pleasant as the ripest olive …’

  She pushed him away. ‘Save the gossamer words for a time when the forest conceals us. My legs may be like polished cedar, but my right hand took the life of our father.’

  Astonished, her brother could do no more than echo her words.

  ‘Arithon? You killed him?’

  ‘Cut his throat. With my right hand.’

  ‘Why? I loved him. We all loved him.’

  ‘And he loved us. He truly did. So much so that he was prepared to have us skinned. He believed in something that only he understood. A voice told me to end him, and to escape.’

  ‘The terrible deed,’ Baalgor whispered, still shocked. Then he asked, ‘What voice? Tell me what voice?’

  Nemet smiled grimly.

  ‘What voice?’ he repeated.

  Nemet said, ‘In a city of lies, I lied about the voice. Unless, of course, my right hand whispered its needs to me …’

  ‘My own right hand silenced the Rememberer. Silenced his song, his summoning …’

  Nemet glanced at the twisted body. ‘So I see. All things considered, brother, it would be better if we were somewhere else …’

  ‘Our sisters are dead.’

  ‘Not Harikk, remember? Her face is scorched, but she’s alive. She’s fled the sanctuary. The etni saved her.’

  Baalgor’s eyes widened as he thought further. ‘And four others, all cut but not peeled. They held the Rememberer while I ended his song. I’d thought it finished. But it isn’t finished at all! Which way, sister?’

  ‘This way!’ she said, and led him to the Bull-Gate in the high wall of cedar.

  But as they stepped into the world beyond the sanctuary, they heard the echo of the song of summoning, felt it embrace them like a gossamer web.

  ‘Which way, sister?’ Baalgor asked again, his voice a whisper.

  They stared at the land, which twisted and shifted like hills in the highest heat of summer, a vision not of the world they knew, but of worlds only the Rememberer had seen as he had sung through time.

  Ahk’Nemet felt her heart sink and her mouth grow dry as she realized that after all they had not escaped the clutches of Gl’Thaan Em. She also felt her legs starting to move.

  Running!

  ‘This way,’ she said. ‘Trust me, brother.’

  ‘I do trust you.’

  Running.

  (iii)

  Silence and the stink of ghosts had come to the abandoned sanctuary. The fires guttered and failed, the wind began to stir the ashes. The bulging skins of the beasts, summoned and sacrificed, ceased to writhe, the hollow voices quietened.

  Nothing moved except the Bull.

  The Bull moved about the ruins. When the wind whipped up the dust from the plains, it became like a ghost itself, massive and slow, wandering the alleys and the chambers, stepping through the bones and hearths of those who had lived here during the long years of Remembering, of Summoning. It seemed to be searching.

  Rains came, light at first, then heavy enough, year after year, to move the hills themselves. The mudbrick of the town walls dissolved and crumbled, burying the skins and bones of the beasts that had been called from time, burying the Bull as it lay dying, exhausted with searching and waiting for the eternal companion it had seen and recognized, burying the broken remains of the Rememberer, and the last echoes of his song and magic.

  Times changed again and the rains eased. Under an unrelenting sun the land dried, the river dropped away, the mound of Gl’Thaan Em baked and hardened, the spring below its belly searching through the seeds of life for the way back to the surface. Trees grew, thick and vibrant on the hill, their roots tapping the hidden waters, tangling with the dead.

  Travellers settled for a while, making a clearing on the hill, close to the crumbling tower of white stone, throwing up tents and letting their goats and pigs root and scavenge in the woods. They dug for water, but found only nightmares. Ululating songs and deathly screams rose from the hole at night, and spectres of giants stalked the wood, calling at the moon.

  The travellers killed a goat, then killed a child, blood to the spring waters, a gesture of pacification before the nomads folded their tents and fled to the east, towards the distant river. They had strange stories to tell and stranger visions to interpret.

  Blood to the spring! Life to the waters! And below the woods …

  … life came back to the mound!

  The spring rose and branched through the compacted earth, nourishing and renewing, touching the seeds of time, the echoes of the creatures that were carried in the sanctuary. Now the Rememberer’s song returned, oozing from the remains of walls, circling inside the hill, vibrant and mournful. The hill of Gl’Thaan Em shimmered by night, visible to the nomadic peoples of the valley and beyond, tribes who arrived in their hundreds from the faraway, called and made curious by the stories of the burning forest on the burning hill.

  Murdered and abandoned …

  The notion flowed through the hill, carried on the spring waters that circulated like life-blood, carried on the spiralling song, reverberating through the network of skeletal remains that formed the matrix of the hill, pounding like drums off the hides of the beasts.

  Murdered and abandoned …

  This primal sentience began to form faces in its earthy mass, the faces of those who had murdered and abandoned it, this place of mud and brick, this shrine to the life in the earth, this uncompleted place.

  It heard the sound of their running. They had gone into the song, the Rememberer’s song, the song that touched the long-gone and the long-to-come. They were there, ducking and weaving through the worlds of wood and hill and shadow that the song encompassed. They were running through the ages, eternal in their terror, eternal in the knowledge of the deed they had committed.

  Seven faces, seven lives, seven to be hunted down, seven to be brought back to fertilize the sanctuary …

  The mound collapsed!

  The shimmering light formed into the giant head of a bull, turning slowly to look across the camps, with their tents, fires and huddling figures. A voice echoed from the muzzle of the bull, or perhaps only in the minds of those who stared in terror at the spirit of the beast.

  I AM RESURRECTED.

  I AM LIFE.

  I AM THE HUNTER.

  I AM THE BLOODED CITY.

  I AM ETERNAL.

  The burning aura collapsed. The earth shook violently, and the fires of the camps roared, guttered and faded, their flame sucked away by the freezing wind that swirled about the hill.

  Then something moved downwards, downwards to the earth, away through the mountains to the west, leaving only silence and desolation, and the smouldering trunks of cedar on the shattered knoll.

  38

  Nemet was calling to me, a dove’s coo as she roused me from the inner journey, her hands gentle on my face as she turned my head to left and right. Her dark eyes showed that she was glad to see me surface, and her quick kiss conveyed relief.

  ‘Jack,’ she murmured. ‘My Jack. Don’t be frightened …’

  ‘I saw what happened … Arithon … the remembering of creatures long extinct … one of your sisters, face burning, fleeing …’

  ‘I wondered if you would go there.’

  Ahk’Nemet had drawn away from me, standing and staring down. Behind her, the dark walls of prehistoric Jericho rose against the storm-swirl of the sky.

  The elements of the enco
unter with her past were a similar swirl in my head: the sense of the fabled ark in the gathering of beasts, a place not just for continuity by the holding of the seeds of life – its meaning in mythology – but for memory, for holding the seeds of the life that had preceded the animals of the day. That strange function had been destroyed by Baalgor and his sister when they had killed the grey-haired summoner …

  It had been John Garth’s face that watched me emptily from the broken ground by the white tower.

  And Harikk, the scorched face! The haunting image that I thought I had created in my childish stories, the watcher and guardian from the glades that I had embroidered around the glimpses of Greyface and Greenface, thinking this was fertile imagination; but she had been there too, part of the echo that did not belong to my own pre-conscious mind. Which meant that she, too, was loose and on the run!

  How had Jandrok characterized the Midax Deep? The Hinterland giving way to marshes, savannahs, deserts, deeper layers – all of them with primal functions, all memories from the beast-times, all of them inhabited. From one inner world I had journeyed to a far deeper realm, to a place that had come into my mind by a means other than inheritance, hidden from even my deepest dreams by the barriers, the incorruptible walls, of the mind itself, walls which locked this intruder away at its heart.

  Two … no, three, it seemed, Harikk too … three creatures had escaped that hidden Deep, and come through me into the world of flesh and consciousness; but how had the city itself, the sanctuary, the primal ark come to be there?

  I had seen it in the real world, and John Garth had been in the real world …

  What had Brightmore said? Glanum recognizes no boundary between our earth and your mind – the same place being experienced from two different perspectives – a different set of dimensions …

  The storm turned, the sound of drums lulled me, hypnotized me. I could smell burning wood and flesh; in places, beyond the wooden walls, the brilliance of fires tinged the black clouds with red. I recognized this place; Nemet had led me here from the Hinterland, on my first Midax journey, trapping me by her own magic in a snare of roses, scarring me, stigmata that had surfaced on the flesh and shadow in the real world and so scared the watchers that they had hauled me back, dragged me back as if I had been a drowning man in deep water.