Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  After that he slept, his face to the cold stone, his back to his daughter. Shade rose in the middle of the night and went down to the pool; he heard her splashing as she bathed.

  In what he imagined was the morning she shook him awake again and gave him water and a lump of honeyed cake. A pale, miserable light spilled into the cell as he ate with care and little relish.

  ‘Hurry up. Hekut wants to go hunting with us. Do you need to shit?’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  She was so matter-of-fact about it.

  ‘I’ll show you where. Sefonnie thinks Baalgor is looking for you. He knows you’re here. We’ll try and surprise him. There’s more cake if you want.’

  ‘This is fine. Thank you.’

  Hekut’s mastiff bounded ahead of them, leaping like a giant puppy through the streets and shadows. The two women ran behind, Hekut carrying a clutch of thin javelins, Shade a sling and pouch of pebble shot. They rested frequently, finding water in a small, dilapidated temple to Apollo, sitting on fragments of the statue of the god as they sipped from the bubbling fountain.

  Jack didn’t recognize the route that Shade was taking him. Last time, the confrontation had been in front of the mausoleum, with its stone guardians.

  ‘Baalgor withdrew deeper into the city when I left him, closer to its heart. It’s dangerous for him, hiding so close to the enemy. He ran from them all his life; now he’s using the tunnels in their own walls to wait for his sisterwife.’

  What was at the heart of the ghostly city? A place where the Bull-runners had committed a terrible deed, causing them to run from an enemy that they only ever glimpsed as white towers and the snorting muzzle of the monstrous bull. When he again asked Shade what she knew, she simply shrugged.

  ‘I only know that this city has grown on the ruins of other places. It scours the earth. It’s settled for a while, as if it’s waiting. Perhaps it’s waiting for you, Jack. Perhaps the watcher is being watched.’

  He listened to her words uncomprehending. There was something so knowing about this echo of his daughter; he couldn’t tell whether she was lying to him, teasing him, or simply being truthful, sharing her lack of understanding, using language that would suggest she had known Jack-the-stranger all her life. How much had she taken from Natalie? And why had he been unable to see the change in his daughter? The thought of the small girl being cleverly scooped out, looking fresh and full on the surface, but increasingly hollow … the thought made him dizzy with panic. He has to let me go, he thought, with Baalgor’s grinning face in his mind’s eye. ‘He has to let me go,’ he said aloud, and Shade laughed as Hekut watched with solemn curiosity.

  ‘He’ll not do that. You’ll have to get the two of them together again. One way or the other.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to come,’ he murmured. ‘She wants to go home, to face up to fate.’

  Shade’s touch on his hair was gentle and reassuring. ‘From what I’ve heard – from Baalgor – you like Greenface rather too much. I think that’s why he wants to kill you.’

  Shocked by her words, Jack went quickly to the pool of water around the fountain and splashed his face. He felt hot and frightened. The memory of Nemet was strong in his mind and even as he remembered her he was aroused, and this confused him. He had been in a dream. It hadn’t been real. And yet it had been real … and Angela had been upset by his actions in the Hinterland …

  And Nemet was still waiting for him, whispering to him even now!

  It was true. He could sense her, green-masked, hiding in the green of the wood, watching him, listening to his every word, missing him as much as he missed her …

  How could Greyface have seen what was happening? How could he have known?

  He was still crouching over the dark water, drifting between two worlds again, when the dog began to growl, then stretched to its full height, hackles rising, jaw gaping, teeth exposed as it watched the entrance to the temple.

  Greyface was framed there, his cloak of scalps and feathers draped around his brooding form. He had assessed the danger in an instant, stepping back into the street outside, calling for Shade, challenging her to come to him, to trust him.

  To Jack’s surprise, she rose and went out, dropping her sling and pouch of shot. Hekut hissed, tugged the mastiff and followed into the street. Shade was in Baalgor’s arms, Greyface grinning, his hand running over the woman’s hair as she stood in his embrace.

  ‘Let her go,’ Jack said. The dog growled and barked, Hekut holding it back, one of her javelins held low and ready to jab. But Greyface simply stroked his shade, his gaze on Jack. Shade’s own hands were inside the cloak, drawing the man close to her as she nestled her head against his chest.

  ‘She’s given me some trouble, this one,’ Greyface said.

  Inside his cloak, Shade’s fingers pinched him and he winced, pulling her hair painfully. She stared up at him, a meaningful smile on her face.

  ‘More trouble to come,’ she said in a loud whisper, ‘if you don’t behave. You’re not to hurt my father.’

  Again, below the cloak her fingers must have been digging into flesh. Greyface squirmed, looking pained, then reached down to kiss her, jerking back in shock before his mouth could make contact on hers and howling out.

  ‘Yes. Yes! I understand what it is you’re saying. Get your claws out.’

  Shade looked round at her father.

  ‘Don’t be sad, Jack. Don’t be shocked.’

  ‘I’m both,’ he said truthfully. ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘I’m safe, Jack. I’ve chosen the life. This scalp-cloak won’t hurt you. We understand each other now.’

  Greyface silently agreed, watching Jack, watching him hard. He let Shade go and came over, so close, face to face, that each could smell the breath from the other.

  ‘I dream of Nemet. I miss her. I miss her very much. I dream of you. I saw in my dream how you betrayed me.’

  ‘Betrayed you? Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘I sent you to fetch her back, instead you’ve made her run from me. She’s begun to love you.’

  ‘Then why not let her go?’

  ‘You know why I can’t let her go. You know why I need her here. And you know the consequences for your daughter if you don’t fetch her. Soon!’

  ‘I was frightened by that before, but I’m not frightened now. Shade seems to have you in control … and Natalie, the daughter you claim to be seducing, is fine. Yes, you get into her dreams occasionally. So what? I can’t see that you’ve done her any harm.’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘No. I can’t.’

  Baalgor’s gaze was almost amused; his breath was warm and foul as he breathed in a way that suggested he was holding back laughter. ‘How many inches has her hair grown in the last season? How tall has she grown?’

  ‘I don’t know … a little, I’m sure.’

  ‘Are you? How many new words has she learned? How many new songs has she learned? How much weight has she put on? How much have the seasons changed her? How much closer is she to being a woman and not a girl?’

  ‘I don’t …’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed the absence of those things? Haven’t you seen how motionless she is, a child now, the same child, for ever a child? Haven’t you seen the lack of growing?’

  Baalgor’s breath stank, but Jack was paralysed, standing before the leering man, limp and frightened.

  ‘Oh, Jack. Jack! Look at your daughter, look at the life I’ve stolen from you. You’ll be an old man, soon, with an infant daughter unchanged by time, a husk, a gabbling infant husk, a living ghost that will screech at you and paw you as the flesh shrinks from your bones and all you need is peace, but you’ll have no peace, you’ll have a child until you die.’

  ‘My God … poor Nattie …’

  ‘Do you get it now? I’ve stolen the future from her, all her later life sucked into this city, to be at my beck and call, no matter what she pretends.’ He glanced at Shade. ‘I’ve given her the illusi
on of independence. A fighting spirit. I find it helps. She thinks I won’t hurt you. She thinks she can protect you.’

  Suddenly angry, breaking from the horror of the image of his daughter that Baalgor had constructed, Jack said, ‘And I believe that she can.’

  ‘Believe what you want. But believe this: if I don’t have Nemet, I’ll have all the life you’d hoped for Nattie! And Shade can’t stop me. She’s growing older by the beating of her heart, faster than she knows, faster than you can imagine, and though she’s strong now, she’ll be weak soon. And then I’ll use her. To be free from the hunt.’

  As he spoke the last words, he turned, flinging Shade away from him, running towards the heart of the city. Hekut shouted at her friend, then loosed the dog. It bounded after the running man, Hekut in close pursuit, but after a while they both gave up.

  Jack found woman and hound sitting on the steps of a small ziggurat, breathing hard. Beyond them, the sky whirled, a dark storm above the city’s heart, faintly reflecting fire from below. For a while Jack sat with her, thinking of his daughter, holding back tears of fear and rage as he imagined the terror, the literal hell of the girl never ageing, a sweet, vital life denied to the one person in his life whom he truly adored.

  After a while, drawn by the sense of familiarity in the maelstrom, Jack walked deeper into Glanum. Hekut jumped up and tried to stop him, her words a babble of urgency, her eyes narrowed with caution. The bone noselet rattled ludicrously across her face, but there was no denying that the woman was warning him away, that she cared for the danger he was courting.

  ‘I want to see for myself,’ he said, and gently removed Hekut’s grip from his arm. She shook the clutch of thin javelins in her other hand, cursed him for a fool, then turned back, leashing the hound and calling for Shade.

  He walked for an hour. The storm was almost above him. He stared at the cloud-swirl and became disorientated. He seemed to be falling upwards, plunging towards the Eye. Now that he was this close he could see how rain, earth and ruin were drawn up into the thunder-cloud, streaks and twists of shape that burst from beyond the walls and towers now barring his way, writhing like captured animals, he thought, as the maelstrom sucked them in.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘That’s where it comes from. It surfaces in the Deep. I’ve watched it rise. I’ve camped in the shelter of its ruins. And Nemet is there. Above the storm …’

  He could hear the sound of drumming, a frantic rhythm, many drums beyond the walls, beyond the towers. And the sound of creatures, the bellows, cries and growls of creatures, and he was reminded of his time in the Hinterland, where the primordial products of his own imagination stalked and thundered in pursuit of life and prey.

  What’s there? What’s there?

  And is this place to which Nemet intends to return, descending from the storm like a green-masked angel?

  He turned to find White Shade behind him, strangely solemn, eerily silent, watching him as a soft wind blew her hair, the shell dress rattling, glinting with mother-of-pearl, a shining luminescence, green and silver.

  ‘What’s beyond the walls?’ he asked her. ‘What’s at the heart?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A place that was abandoned. An old place. An angry place.’

  That expression again: a place that was abandoned!

  ‘I’ve heard it called the Place of Skins. But that’s really all I know. Except that …’

  ‘Except that …?’

  ‘Hekut knows of a legend from the far future of Glanum – she sees through the years sometimes; so does Sefonnie. She thinks that Glanum has many shadows, different cities on the same piece of ancient earth. One of them was destroyed by the Bull-roaring of metal horns. She dreams the scene, sometimes, and it frightens her.’

  ‘The Bull-roaring of metal horns,’ Jack echoed.

  ‘That’s all I know. Baalgor is watching you, by the way.’

  Jack looked round. He could see nothing but the sheer walls, the storm-illuminated towers, the earth sucked into the night sky to beach in his own unconscious mind.

  ‘If he’s so close, why doesn’t it kill him? If it hunted him for so long. Why does it tolerate him living so close?’

  ‘It wants them both. They both did the deed. Baalgor is risking everything on Nemet coming back to him in the world he thinks of as the otherworld, the world you know as real. Once they’re together he believes they can live for ever, and Glanum will never find them.’

  ‘Is he right?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s what he’s said to me. I live in the city; in my dreams I go to a heavenly place, I run and swim and dance with a girl called Natalie. I paint pictures with her. I watch her world through her eyes. I watch you through her eyes. It’s the only life I have. I have to make sense of it in my own way. Baalgor told me very little and now that he has less control over me, I’m more alone than ever.’

  ‘He says he still owns you.’

  ‘He’s a powerful man. We play a game together. I can’t escape him; but he doesn’t own me any more. We live in the shadows of dead cities, and in the shadows of each other. But in my dreams I see the sunlight. It’s very real when I see the world through Natalie. Without her, I’d sink into the moon pool and stay below the water.’

  She suddenly swung her arm. Jack thought she was about to strike him and reacted by throwing up his hands to protect his face, but she had sent a slingshot into the shadows, aimed at Baalgor, he imagined. The stone clattered on rock and Shade had turned and was running. He followed, met Hekut and the hound, and returned with the women to the pool.

  A place destroyed by the Bull-roaring of metal horns …

  ‘You know the way from here,’ Shade said to him. ‘Goodbye. Daddy …’

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said to her. She was smiling, amused by something, but he felt sad, he felt he was abandoning her. ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Ask Natalie. I’m often there …’ An hour later he crossed the stinking river and passed through the cave. The Shimmering shrank from him suddenly and he found himself standing on the open hillside, dew-drenched in the cold dawn, momentarily disorientated until he recognized the thatched roofs of the houses at Stinhall, beyond the trees, a few minutes’ walk away.

  A place destroyed by the Bull-roaring of metal horns …

  Joshua … Bringing down the walls!

  Was it ancient Jericho, then, that lay at the heart of Glanum?

  31

  In the stillness of the night, with Natalie soundly asleep in bed and, to his immense relief, apparently unharmed, Jack sipped brandy and read from one of the books in their hosts’ extensive library: The Mediterranean Region in Prehistory: A Re-assessment, by Harold A. Knight. The information held Angela in thrall as more and more of a link with the Bull-runners was established.

  The site on which the modern city of Jericho now stood, it seemed, had become a settled site at an astonishingly early date – 8000BC, or even earlier. Evidence for it having been a town at the time was disputed, but the settlement had covered four hectares, a very large settlement for this period in pre-history.

  Four hectares … with round huts built of ‘hog-backed’ bricks, signs of walls within walls made of cut timber, and at least one watchtower built of white stone, occupying a prominent position against an inner wall, also of stone …

  The white tower!

  Nothing about this early Jericho made any sense – it could have supported a population of two thousand, ten times the population at other sites of this time in the Jordan Valley, such as that at Eynan – so if not a town, what had been its function?

  At the site, the bones of gazelle, cattle, lion, rhino, bears, goats and boar had been found in abundance … probably from hunted animals because of their unusual size, some from species that became extinct in the next few thousand years, or moved east with the change in weather conditions. The Jordan Valley had always been subject to alternating periods of intense drought and massive rainfall, semi-forest and fertile river p
lain giving way to inhospitable desert.

  There was no evidence for the domestication of animals at this time, though some herding must certainly have been practised. The staple grains were Emmer wheat, lentils, two-rowed hulled barley, and other crops in abundance, benefiting from the site’s permanent spring.

  The early site, then, was an enigma, its town-like nature an illusion; hunter-gathering from semi-permanent settlements was still the most common way of life.

  The precocity of Jericho, however, was most dramatically evidenced by the fact that soon after its stone walls and tower were built it had been abruptly abandoned, standing vacant, perhaps demolished, for more than three hundred years!

  Later settlers had re-occupied some of the structures, as well as using clay to coat the skulls of the dead and shells as decoration for those dead, especially in the eyes … but this was an echo, a more sophisticated application, of an earlier tradition …

  The settlement, certainly by then a town, showed signs of having had a role in this early Neolithic period that was unlike that of other towns of the time in the Near East, such as Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, in Turkey, Tell Ramad near Damascus, Hacila and Çan Hassan to the north-east and north-west of the Euphrates river.

  Only in the Bronze Age had Jericho shaken off its obscure past and become the city of legend familiar from the Old Testament.

  ‘When the walls came down to the sound of Joshua’s trumpet voluntary,’ Angela said quietly.

  ‘It would seem,’ Jack said, closing the book, ‘that the first walls had come down a long time before!’

  The White Tower … the steaming forests … the simple primitiveness of the appearance of the hunted couple … and the red bull.

  A red bull of enormous size had been painted on the walls of Çatal Hüyük in the seventh millennium BC. A creature of unusual shape, and obscure purpose, it supplied the earliest known evidence of a Bull cult in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea.