Ancient Echoes by Robert Holdstock
‘Nemet?’
She said nothing. The wind tugged her cloak, ruffled the grass. ‘Nemet?’
I realized suddenly that her gaze was not on me at all but on the woodland behind me. Her breathing was shallow, almost resigned. I turned to follow her stare, but there was nothing to be seen, or at least … nothing as yet.
‘Nemet?’
‘Jack,’ she whispered, and slowly turned to me. The lances fell from her hands and her fingers caressed my cheeks. She stepped into my arms and pressed her moist, sweet mouth against my own, breathing deeply as she kissed me as if drinking me.
‘I missed you,’ she said as she drew away. ‘You became stone; your life was drawn from me, suddenly. I couldn’t bear to see the statue, the face was so sad, so twisted in despair. Eventually, I smashed it. Perhaps somewhere you felt me end the pain for you.’
Had I? I couldn’t remember.
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I’ve missed you too. But I’ve failed again with Baalgor. He’s just as hostile, just as determined that you should come to him.’
Amazingly, she smiled, then shook her head. ‘I was frightened,’ she said. ‘I was alone, Baalgor had gone. I thought we would be separated for ever. But Baalgor was like a goat on the end of a tether. The goat wanders away from the sleeping shepherd, far away, grazing and cropping, out of sight, downwind, almost lost But the shepherd wakes, and slowly draws in the rope, and the goat is brought home again. It had thought itself free, but it was never free, and like the braying goat he is, my brother-husband is returning to me, because Glanum is drawing him home.’
Baalgor here? In the Deep? Or was he still crossing the Hinterland? What did Greenface mean … where exactly was the man who tormented me; and where, then, was Shade?
I was being watched again and the skin on my neck crawled with apprehension. Greenface looked slowly to the woods and I saw the shape of the bull reflected in her dark eyes. It was standing inside the line of trees, head above the canopy, watching us silently save for the grumble of its breathing.
‘Run …’ I whispered urgently, but Greenface reached a hand to stay me.
‘Too late,’ she said. ‘Jack. I’m going home. There is nowhere else to go, now. It’s over. The hunt is up … You don’t have to follow me. Just let me go.’
As she spoke, the grant bull shuddered, and from its maw came the sound of a dying breath. The great head turned slightly, then was still. The eyes glazed, the red hide began to lighten in colour, then turn grey. Cracks appeared, similar to the tracery that covered the clay-face mask of Greyface, but this bull had turned to stone, and the stone was being weathered as I watched it, becoming the gate again as I had seen it a few days before.
The ground shook suddenly and from behind us came the sound of the river exploding. Even as I turned in alarm, the city was rising from the water, the great span of its front wall dripping weed and branches, the white tower lost in the sky, the open gate below the dark bull’s skull like a gaping mouth. As it came from the earth and the river it seemed to hesitate, watching, waiting, then moved swiftly and suddenly towards us, overwhelming us in moments. I had time only to grab for Greenface as Glanum swallowed our cowering forms, plunging on to consume the cracked stone bull at the edge of the forest. We fell into the city amidst earth and rocks and the severed trunks of the oaks and elms that had lined the river.
And moments later, as we scrambled for shelter, the city descended again, diving like a whale, and that same, strange darkness covered us which had covered me twice before, when I had followed Shade from the outside world of Exburgh.
36
I have no idea how long we huddled in the lee of the wall. We crushed our bodies together, clinging to a stone column among the shifting, sliding rubble of rock and wood that Glanum had ingested as it surfaced, two Jonahs in the throat of the beast. The city swayed as it moved through this chthonian realm; we felt it turn, plunge deeper, then rise again, but I couldn’t tell how fast it travelled, only that it swam the deeps and that darkness swept above me.
Suddenly it broke the surface. Blinding sunlight illuminated the inner walls, the broken tower, the wasteland of stone, statue and reeking earth. We were travelling at tremendous speed, clouds streaking overhead, storms shadowing our frightened forms, vanishing as fast as they had cast their pall across the city.
Then down again, rocking to the side, our stomachs heaving, our arms tightly round the pillar and around each other as masonry bruised us, stone shards cut us.
It was imperative that we get away from this wasteland, deeper into the beast, closer to the heart of the city; closer to forgotten Jericho. Nemet agreed and we began to work our way along the wall, soon finding our feet. After a while, we left the mayhem of the gate behind, and though we were aware that the city moved, we sensed its swaying motion as it turned and dived as if distantly; we might have been walking on board a ship. We had found Glanum’s equivalent of our sea-legs.
Now, as we walked the maze of narrow streets and empty squares, watched by wild or fabled beasts, or crouching men, figures from other worlds all shaped in gleaming stone or polished wood, now I thought of Garth. John Garth had scaled the wall of Glanum; but was he now, like Ahab in Melville’s tale, bound in his own ropes to the cold wall of the cold beast, dead eyes staring from a shattered skull? Or was he, too, at large among these ancient echoes?
I called for him, but my voice was swallowed by the city. Sometimes, when we came in sight again of the tall, white watchtower, I hailed him loudly, but only my echo returned to me, like a hollow laugh in the Stygian gloom.
Time and again, as we walked the passages in the city, we came back to the tower, and I realized that we were truly in a maze, following the intricate spirals of a labyrinth: at some moments, then, we would be close enough to the heart of Glanum to almost touch it, at others at the city’s edge again.
Then abruptly we stepped from the stone streets onto a dark hillside, which sloped gently away towards a valley, thick with forest, bright with distant fires.
Nemet ran ahead of me. I was reminded powerfully of the drum-filled structure to which she had led me on my very first encounter with her, when she had – by magic – trapped me in the strangling briar.
I hadn’t realized it then, but I knew it now: this was home to her. The wooden walls, the fires, the screeching of beasts …
Jericho of old.
The place of her birth.
As we stood below the walls, in darkness, the outer city glowing on the hill behind us, listening to the sounds of the heart itself … she started to cry.
She curled up against the gate, below the watching eyes that had been carved there. I sat down with her, put my arms around her, and after a while started to fall asleep. I remember she touched a finger to my mouth, tracing my lips, then leaned over to kiss my cheek.
She was going home. She seemed content.
I began to smell the fragrance of fruit trees, and the aromatic scent of herbs.
A warm wind was blowing.
I was following the woman … back … all the way back … to the time of the terrible deed.
Asleep against her, then, I shared her dream-memory of the time in childhood when she had been turned into hunter and hunted …
PART NINE
Remembering
37
(i)
A sudden wind had begun to blow along the valley, carrying the heady scent of cedar, balsam and wild rosemary; and the sounds of lions, probably moving down to the gleaming river to drink. Nemet was watching the stars, wishing one of them to fall to earth on this moonless night. She could hear her sisters chattering in the sprawling tent, behind the stockade. Beyond them, where the men gathered, her father’s voice was a dull drone as he talked about his latest trip to Gl’Thaan Em. He had gone there with Jarmu, Nemet’s elder brother. Baalgor, Nemet’s twin, a year younger than his brother, had followed on the shore at dawn and was still not back.
Jarmu had stayed in the town, although quite w
Nervous of the animals moving from the forest, Nemet returned to the tent, where her sisters, Harikk and Hora, were making a shell dress for the youngest, Anat. Anat was performing a twirling dance round the small fire, sending the smoke curling wildly up to the wide hole, where the stars glittered. She was still sore from the bone needles that had punctured her skin, but wore her first green markings proudly, touching them as she danced and sang. She kept staring up to the sky.
‘Look at me. Look at me!’
The lines were simple, two circling patterns around her cheeks, ready for the markings of the eye when another year had passed.
Nemet had a special affection for her youngest sister, who chattered non-stop, seemed always happy, and enchanted everyone who came to visit.
Only Hora refused to be charmed by the antics of the youngest, but a sense of foreboding, of caution, of detachment had been born into the cleverest sister.
Harikk had insight and pragmatism. She was beautiful, but old before her time. Sometimes when she and Kohara sat together, Nemet felt she was looking at a single person only, reflected in the surface of still water. But Harikk and Nemet often walked into the hills, or to the river, and Nemet felt at peace with this sibling.
‘Look at me! Look at me!’ the green bird chirruped as she flew around the tent.
Almost at once, the flap of the tent was flung back and Baalgor darted in from the night. Anat cried out, then quickly stifled the noise. She had been startled by the grey face and cowrie-shell eyes that had leered in at them, before realizing that it was her brother, teasing.
Baalgor laughed and popped the shells from his sockets, blinking. The clay mud cracked and he peeled it away, tossing the pieces onto the fire.
‘It makes a good disguise. Nemet, you must come with me. It’s safe. Truly. No one sees me through the clay. The sanctuary is wonderful. Rememberer of Beasts is such a strange looking man …’
‘You’ll get caught,’ Nemet said grimly. Baalgor shrugged. He was almost a man, now, and dark hair stubbled his skin. He stank of animals and sweat, and Nemet suggested the river for a bath.
‘I’ve got you something,’ he said, and the girls crowded round as he emptied cowries from his pouch; they were perfect, painted, not yet bored for talismans, or shaped for the eyes of the dead. These were forbidden treasure and Hora, ever cautious, drew away.
‘Don’t touch them!’
Anat reached out and snatched a single shell, a blue one, running nervously round the tent. The wind gusted and dust blew in below the goatskins where they were loose on the ground. Harikk went to batten them down again and Nemet gathered the shell gifts into her hands, savouring their feel.
‘I’ll have to hide them.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Baalgor said. ‘Look what I’ve got for my cloak!’
It was a cut piece of fresh animal skin, not yet cured, still sticky where it had been flayed. The fur was tough and sharp; the colours wildly red and green, not stripes but spots. The hide had been hanging, soon after the creature had been slaughtered and the carcase buried to clean the bones. While no one had been looking, Baalgor had scalped the hide and slipped away.
He led the way, then, up to the scented bushes where a tumble of rocks marked the fall from a cliff. Behind them was a wide clearing, where she and Baalgor had often come to play as children. The rocks were painted with hunting figures, and boats, and animals. Baalgor had once fashioned eyes in the trunk of a fallen tree and wedged it across the entrance to the clearing. They called it the Watching Place.
Here, now, he hauled away a boulder and reached into the space behind for his cloak. Nemet grimaced as the smelly garment was unfurled, but Baalgor stroked it.
There were feathers from birds he had never seen before; hide from giant beasts; leathery skin from fabulous creatures, soft hair from apes and monkeys; even a strip from the red and black mane of one of the bull-sized lions.
Quickly, using a hawk’s-bone needle and goat-gut thread, he stitched the new piece onto the hem.
Half as much again, and the cloak would be full length for a man. Then he would dance among the animals as he had so often dreamed he would.
Gl’Thaan Em, the sacred town, lay beyond the hills, beyond cedar woodlands, close to a spring that had been known since the earliest stories that were told when the Watching Moon was at its fullest. Nemet had never seen the place, though she had heard of its towering walls of sun-baked mud, the stone tower where Rememberer of Beasts summoned his visions, calling wildly at dawn and dusk, his voice echoing and wailing across the plains. She had heard of the fires and the chanting and the drumming and the smells of the beasts that paraded through the centre of the place. She had heard of the skin-shrines and the skull rooms and the faces that watched from the mudbrick as the city grew.
And she knew that one day she would go there, and that her father would be proud of her as her animal spirit rose to inhabit her, making her full grown, giving her dreams of her own to dance to, as already Baalgor danced, though he had come prematurely to his own visions.
Baalgor gathered cuts of the skins, to make his cloak.
One day, shortly after Jarmu had gone to the sanctuary, he brought back a strip of scaly skin, which oozed on the surface and made him heady when he smelled the slime. The creature, long, low to the ground and very angry, had been driven from the river by torchlight in the middle of the night, and had been killed and skinned with the rising sun, the jaws, twice the length of a man, taken to the skull room. Baalgor touched his tongue to the sour and sticky fragment of skin and spat, but his head cleared and the world seemed to grow, to loom, to spin and dance around him. He laughed and licked again, then Nemet was tempted to try the poison, and for a while the Moon rushed towards her filling the night sky, almost blinding her, though she could see every detail of the scars and skin of that great disc, and the movement of strange herds on the silver ground above her where she lay.
Baalgor rolled this piece of hide and kept it apart, ready to enhance his vision when the time came for him to meet his animal spirit.
‘Paint your face to cover the green and come with me. There’s no danger, Nem. Everything is mud grey at Gl’Thaan Em. And there are animals everywhere. Such strange beasts! Come and see the sanctuary!’
‘I’m frightened. What happened to Jarmu? Why hasn’t he come home?’
‘I don’t know. Come with me. We’ll find out.’
‘We should stay in the tents until we’re called.’
‘The earth itself is being shaped, Nem. Into a town dedicated to beasts. The mud and stone are being hardened by the hands of people like us. Ordinary people. The earth is being moulded to make the sanctuary. You should see it.’
‘I’ll see it when I’m called.’
‘See it now. When we’re called, we’ll be grown, we’ll be changed, we’ll enter another life. See it now while our eyes are still young! Come on!’
His enthusiasm was persuasive. Nemet clung to him, clung to the heat from his mouth and his body. Her sisters watched, Hora alarmed and suspicious, Anat excited, intrigued by the idea, eager to come too and disappointed when her brother denied her; Harikk stitched clothes and thought hard, wondering how to cover for her eldest sister’s actions to their father, when he returned.
Finally, Nemet agreed.
By the time she had caked her body with river clay, Baalgor had returned from the hills, wearing the half-finished cloak, the stink of animals forming an aura around him that was mesmerizing. They skirted the edge of the forest during the day, and crossed the hills by night. Before dawn they had come close enough to the sanctuary to smell the fresh water of the spring that bubbled from the deep earth within the mud walls. As the sun rose, Nemet stared for the first time at the city, amazed
As if invisible, they ran swiftly between the tents, then through the narrow gates in the stockade walls of cedar, coming closer to the shaped earth where bricks of mud were drying in the sun, and the sound of stone being hammered and shaped rang unfamiliarly in their ears. Above the low gate was the skull of a bull; the road to that gate was lined with the curved horns of a hundred bulls, each point fluttering with coloured fabric. Baalgor led the way along this tunnel of ivory, rubbing the steaming droppings of beasts into his limbs and onto his cloak. Nemet did likewise, and the scents from the mud of the beasts were unfamiliar, heady, not at all like the smells of goat or lion or cow. Suddenly they were lost. Nemet flung herself into the darkness of a low doorway and when Baalgor came and crouched above her she almost shouted, ‘Far enough! We don’t belong here. I’m going home.’
‘A little further. Just a little further. Come and see the creatures that are being summoned …’
‘I’m frightened.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Then go on alone. I’m going home.’
Baalgor’s fingers hurt her as he restrained her, then his arms were round her, embracing her intimately, a signal of his need and love for her. Clay lips touched clay lips, and Nemet felt secure again, though she was aware that her brother was confused.
‘You’ve got us lost,’ she said.
‘Yes. I’m sorry. They’ve built a wall across the old street, and I’ve never been this way before.’
Nemet was aware of the path back; she also sensed the way forward, deeper. She had never felt lost in this place, just frightened.
‘Come on then.’
She led her twin through the maze of passages, and as Baalgor ran behind her, he re-iterated softly that she would love the sights that were soon to be seen.