Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  Unerringly, she found the inner wall. The mudbrick was smoothed with clay: it seemed to grow from the ground like a tree, inseparable from the earth below. Beyond the wall, the world was loud with the cries and bellows, roars and screeching song of animals. Burning tar, burning wood, burning flesh, all tanged the air in their various ways. Smoke as dark as a travelling soul coiled and swirled into the moonbright sky.

  Drums thundered. Voices wailed in song and ululation. ‘Which way is the gate?’

  Nemet saw fire and fervour in her brother’s eyes. He would be like this, she knew, when for the first time he lay upon her. Her bowels thrilled and twisted in anticipation of the marriage. Would his breath smell so strong? Would his lips be as wet? Would the fire lick from eyes and mouth as it licked now?

  ‘Which way?’ he asked again, looking around anxiously.

  She led him.

  Invisible in their cloaks of river mud, they stepped into the heart of the town, where white stone rose taller than the cedar, and the dark Rememberer called and shrieked as he summoned the lost.

  ‘Touch your tongue to this. Not too much!’

  Baalgor had thrust the scaly skin below her nose, and obedient to her brother she dabbed her tongue to the cold, pungent surface. Baalgor did the same, then secreted the hide deeply inside his cloak.

  At once, Nemet heard voices, mere whispers, from further away than she could see. The earth below her feet boomed and shuddered. Where the mudbrick was drying she could hear the sound of water, squeezing through the clay. The thumping hearts and shivering flanks of beasts deafened her. The voice of the man on the tower dissolved into a thousand songs, each of them sweet to hear, haunting to the ear. They flowed and darted in the air like night creatures, and Nemet was momentarily mesmerized, seeing the notes, the melodies, as nightwings, trying to follow each of them as they drifted away across the walls, towards hills, and plains, deserts and the winding, distant river.

  Outside the walls, the voice was harsh, meaningless. Now she could understand what an intricate web the man was weaving with the hundreds of strands of song and summoning. Her ear was being tugged. Baalgor was twisting the flesh, his face blank behind the clay, his eyes irritated. ‘This way,’ he snapped as Nemet came back to her body, leaving the song-strands floating away from her.

  He was taking her deeper into the sanctuary and she tugged back.

  ‘Home! It’s not safe here. He’s seen us, he knows we’re here …’

  She had sensed the eyes of the man on the tower, heard his breathing, the whispered names that told her he had detected their presence.

  But Baalgor wouldn’t be persuaded. ‘I heard Jarmu. He’s in pain. I heard him call.’

  A mud wall barred their path, but Nemet saw a low door and they ducked through, coming nearer to the sounds of chaos beyond. They had entered a place where the shapes of animals had been erected on stilts, strange legs holding the bulging skins of the dead beasts. Grim muzzles lolled and sagged, eyes sunken, jaws gaping, strange colours striping the matted hide. The bones of these nightmares lay sewn inside the skins, bulging and sharp as Nemet brushed against them.

  ‘What are these creatures?’

  ‘Summoned from the mist,’ Baalgor said. ‘Brought here to be remembered.’

  ‘The size of them. Like giants. I’ve never seen skins so hard and sharp …’ she was touching the protuberances on a grey, leathery hide of an animal that had once been twice as high as her brother. Four horns grew from the wide brow; sand was spilling from the cavity inside the head.

  A moment after she touched the flank, the flank heaved, sending her flying as she drew back in shock. She looked around at this place of ghosts, the stilt creatures all lined to the east, all watching the intruders.

  A second belly writhed, then a third; and above the sound of drums, she heard the moan of a dying woman.

  Frightened, she turned to find her brother again. Baalgor was standing by the bulging belly of a beast that had once been striped in black and yellow and whose mane flowed like a cloak about the snarling, skull-less head. As she watched, Baalgor used his stone knife to slit the skin. A length of bone slipped to the ground; a stench exuded that made Nemet gag. Then an arm draped out, the fingers moving helplessly. A moment later the whole upper body of a man, skinned from hairline to chest, flopped out of the belly and uttered a wail that came close to breaking Nemet’s heart.

  ‘Jarmu!’ she cried, recognizing the sound of the voice. And the bleeding face whined, then murmured, ‘Sister …’

  Before she could think, before she could speak again, Baalgor had touched his knife to the red-raw throat and Jarmu had begun a longer journey, to the Fragrant Pasture.

  Drenched with his brother’s blood, Baalgor returned to the edge of the sanctuary and Nemet followed, sharing the tears and the sickness as the two of them reached the cold, clean air beyond the cedar gates.

  They went to the river and washed, sitting in the shallows, their arms around each other, shuddering and sobbing as they tried to understand. It was still dark when Nemet heard the whisper-song of the summoner, reaching like a filament of gossamer across the plain of the river. Soon after, she watched as a reptilian figure reared from the water and stalked on its hindlegs onto the bank, looking up at the sky, then grumbling in its throat before sniffing the air and beginning a slow, weaving walk towards the fires beyond the hill.

  Her brother was coming up the defile towards the Watching Place, aware of Nemet, glancing up at her, but trying to pretend that he hadn’t seen her. She shrunk more deeply into a crevice in the sandy rock, clutching her treasured shells in her lap, no longer thinking of destroying them but rather holding them like a protective girdle.

  Baalgor called out, begging her not to run. He was wearing a breechclout and had striped his chest with mud. He had cut his hair above each temple so that the scalp bled, no doubt explaining the act of self-defilement to his father as being for some small misdemeanour.

  Nemet knew why he had defiled himself.

  She felt frightened as he came close, aware that she was sweating now, and that her brother could scent the fear. As he stood before her he stripped the winding of rough cloth and tossed it on the ground, standing naked and humble before her. He held the knife loosely in his right hand, offering it to her.

  ‘I did a terrible thing. I acted on the impulse of the animal. I heard his song of pain and heard the last dance of his heart before death. I sent him across the river, to the Fragrant Pasture, but I had no right to do that.’

  ‘Why are you telling me?’

  ‘If you forgive me, we can make him live again in our family’s stories. And what other stories are there but the stories of our family? But if you accuse me, I’ll die and he and I will remain always in the world of shadows. No one will speak about us. Alive yet abandoned. You can’t want that?’

  ‘There is a beast in you–’

  ‘There is a beast in us all!’

  ‘Yes. Our animal guides. I know that. But the beast in you is like a cat stung by a bee. It doesn’t listen to the forest. It doesn’t listen to its own heart! I can’t forgive you.’

  ‘I haven’t committed the terrible deed.’

  ‘I can’t forgive you.’

  ‘Then who can?’

  ‘The forest. The river. The desert.’

  He came closer, she shrank back further. His eyes blazed with urgency, not triumphant, not hostile, just need and hunger. ‘Nem, I’ve scoured myself on the bark of the cedar; I’ve lain face down on the earth for a day; I’ve floated face up on the river, willing to be drowned, to be eaten. I’m still here. The earth hasn’t taken me. Why can’t you forgive me, then? You saw me kill him, only you. It’s you alone who can release his song.’

  He held the knife towards her. There was ochre red on the grey blade, but the blood was not Jarmu’s – it was Baalgor’s own. It had taken him a long time to make the blade, a year ago, under his father’s guidance. It was his pride. But now he went to the rock
where the heat of the sun had cracked the stone. He pushed the blade into the slit, worked at it, leaned on it, cried out with the effort until the whole of the cutting edge was buried and only the handle, goat horn and leather, jutted from the earth.

  ‘There. No one will ever draw that blade. This is Jarmu’s grave, and I will be content to come and remember him every year until I die.’

  What did they say to their sisters?

  Harikk especially was aware that something had happened, sensing Nemet’s distress from the moment she and Baalgor had returned from their foray. She sat reflectively by the cooking fire while Anat chattered and laughed, anticipating the return of their father from a river trip.

  At first light the next day, a wind blew through the tents, a hard wind, carrying a grey, stinging dust that swirled and billowed below the hides. While her sisters curled more deeply into their blankets, Nemet rose and went out into the storm. The sun on the horizon was a pallid, sickly disc. Everything was shadowy as the desert storm gusted and raged at the flapping skins where the families huddled.

  She became aware of the figure almost at once, a tall man, his cloak blowing about his body as he stood, staring through the dust. Nemet took a step or two towards him and became aware of his eyes, hooded and angry, watching her from the dark of his face.

  Two days before, he had watched her from the white tower, although she had only sensed this probing gaze.

  As abruptly as he had seemed to appear there, he had turned and vanished. Two loping hounds, lean-bodied and stilt-legged, their heads drooping as they walked, manifested in the dust storm, watched the woman for a moment or two, before stalking off behind their master.

  When the Rememberer had gone, the dust storm cleared. The men went out into the hills to gather in the goats and pigs that had scattered, and the women tended to the season’s plantings, where the wheat they had nurtured for so many years had been broken on the stem.

  A premature cutting began at once, to save what could be used of barley, wheat and lentil.

  Nemet looked for her brother, but Baalgor had gone again and she gazed at the valley through the hill, her head shaking as she fought feelings of anger and apprehension.

  ‘We’re in trouble,’ she whispered to the haze of heat, ‘and all you can do is go back and tempt the shadows!’

  But he was back before their father returned, and had cleaned away his grey disguise, stitched purloined cat-skin to his cloak of scalps and feathers, and participated in the welcoming meal, the family sitting around three shallow stone dishes of meat and cheese, and baskets of fruit.

  A day later, Arithon took Anat and Harikk on the river, and Nemet was surprised to feel envy, even a little resentment. Until now, she had been the only one of the sisters to accompany their father on his short trips to the river settlements; her sisters hadn’t noticed the change, too eager to sit in the shallow hull of the flimsy vessel as it bobbed and cut its way across the wind. But Hora was worried, and Nemet’s mother too.

  ‘What have you done?’ Kohara asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Nemet said, but the green lines on her face moved like snakes and her mother saw the lie. She sighed and turned away, saying, ‘This will turn out badly.’

  Hora, her face narrowed with concern though still sweet and young behind the lines and eyes that marked her status, hugged Nemet, then drew her away from the settlement.

  ‘Last night I dreamed you were running, you and our brother. A great beast pursued you for the wrong you’d done. Nemet, don’t go back to the sanctuary. There is something, a great shadow, hanging over that place.

  ‘They’re shaping the earth; they’re making the earth itself into a town, filled with passages and shrine spaces, like treeless groves between clay walls. I knew you’d been there. I could tell … yesterday … Baalgor did this. He’s a bad influence. Nem … I feel that the shadow is closing on you. I feel death, without the river journey to the pasture that follows.’

  ‘We all go on the river, Hora. The flesh and the bones wait in the grave, but we all go on the river to the pasture until we come back to our flesh.’

  ‘Not you. Not in my dream. Nor Baalgor. I’m frightened by what I dreamed …’

  ‘You’re frightening me too,’ Nemet said testily. She tried to pull away from her sister, but Hora tugged at her dress.

  ‘Why do I dream these things?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask Mother.’

  ‘I can’t. Each time I try to talk to her she turns away. Since Jarmu left us, she exists only for herself. I’ve heard her talking to the river. She whispers: My daughters are gone; they are shadows with the beast;. What does that mean? Why are we shadows with the beasts?’

  Nemet remembered the flayed face of her immolated brother, flopping from the swollen belly of the creature, from the mist in which he’d been entombed.

  More strongly, she remembered Baalgor’s swift slice, the swift killing, the beast inside him acting with compassion.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured helplessly, then fled from her sister.

  Baalgor found her by the marker for their brother. He stopped and kissed the horn handle where it jutted from the stone, then flung his stinking cloak across Nemet, huddling below it himself, though the day was warm. They were both shivering. They stared out across the trees and grasses of the river plain, watched the smoke from the fires of the community, thought of the earth sanctuary that was growing, stone-centred and strong where the spring rose from the Deep, beyond this line of hills.

  ‘The earth is throwing up its ghosts,’ Baalgor said.

  ‘I didn’t know it had any.’

  ‘Do you remember the giant’s bones? When we were children?’

  ‘Yes. Very well.’

  ‘They’d been carved in the red stone of a cliff and we made up stories about them.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘The stories were true.’

  ‘All stories are true. How can a story be not true?’

  ‘Exactly! No one told us the stories. We made them up, but we were simply remembering! Like the earth itself. The earth remembers beasts that once walked the forests and swam the rivers, but disappeared into the mist beyond the Fragrant Pasture. Not everything lives for ever. But nothing ever dies.’

  ‘I remember a tale about a ten-legged goat, and a pig taller than a tree, and crocodiles with four heads.’

  ‘Now just ghosts in the earth. Like Jarmu. Like Miat and Agathne …’ Their grandparents. ‘But they’re coming back. To GI’Thaan Em. The Rememberer of Beasts is calling them back!’

  ‘Miat? Agathne?’

  ‘The beasts! Do you think that river began to flow only at the moment of our birth?’

  ‘Of course not. The river was always there, and these hills, and the grasslands …’

  ‘Always there, always used! From before we were born. For ever, Nem! When a cloud passes overhead and vanishes into the distance, it takes its shadow with it. Nem, that cloud and its shadow come back. Time and again they pass across us, only by that time we’ve forgotten. All shadows live on, all ghosts live on, all the beasts are still alive, and they are coming back to GI’Thaan Em, to be remembered.’

  ‘Why? Why?’

  ‘Because their bones are in the earth, and the earth is in the walls of the sanctuary. I’ve heard them talking in GI’Thaan Em. This is not the only sanctuary that is being raised to the sky. There are many … very far away, further than the river.’

  Nemet was astonished. How could her brother possibly have known?

  ‘I’ve heard them talk. The builders. From the mud that’s used to make the walls, the ghosts cry out to be remembered. That’s why the Rememberer is here, to call them all, to call them from the mist. To honour them as we shape the mud with their bones into places that will hide us from the wind and rain, from the sun and snow, from the floodwater and locusts.’

  Baalgor was alive with the idea; by whatever means he had managed to hear this talk, he had certainly entered deeply, very
deeply, into the sanctuary of Gl’Thaan Em, and he knew things, now, that he should not have known. He huddled and shivered below the skins of beasts called from the mist. The feathers of forgotten hawks rose from the cloak, as if struggling to escape.

  Floodwater? Locusts?

  Echoing her mother’s words, Nemet whispered, ‘This will turn out badly.’

  Now Hora was taken on the river, a two day journey that left Nemet standing on the river shore, frightened and abandoned, watching the small craft blur against the sun, sail dipping as the breeze took it and carried it to trade.

  The other sisters were still talking about their own journey. Anat had come home decked with shells and flowers, the gift of fishers from the south who had been enchanted by her talk, her humour and her songs. Harikk had seen channels in the earth, ways deeper into the farther shore; and she had noticed the surfacing of strange animals, rising from the mud as they shook and shivered, at dawn, before beginning the walk towards Gl’Thaan Em.

  When Hora came back, her hair was lank, her body scratched, her eyes unfocused. Her father stalked away from the shore, went to the rush-floor hut where the men sat, and refused to answer the call of his wife.

  Hora bathed herself, then smeared healing wood-sap into her scratches. When Nemet knelt beside her Hora glanced at her sister sharply, then looked away.

  A day later she had gone, her father too, and no amount of questioning could elicit the answer to where their sister had been taken. Kohara worked at the quern and at her sewing. Anat and Harikk talked about nonsense things, and creatures they had seen on the river with Arithon.

  Only Baalgor scowled and growled in fury, running to Jarmu’s stone and back, cutting himself across the scalp and above each breast, then rolling in the river clay until he was invisible.

  He stalked the settlement at dusk, then stood like a tree at the edge of the water.

  Nemet could see him and went out to him.

  ‘How many sisters will I have in the morning?’ he said stiffly, the air of his voice hissing through the small round hole in the clay mask.