Ancient Echoes (21 page)

I wanted to say to him, oh yes I do. There are some things that never change. He had been prepared to lose his life to save the girl’s. He had run that risk so that he could go back again.

We were in deep waters, and the boat tossed, although a brisker wind was carrying us forward nicely. As I held William’s hand, I thought he started to laugh. I smiled and leaned towards him, only to realize that he was weeping, though whether he cried with the pain of his wounded body, or that from his broken heart, I couldn’t tell.

I stroked his face and he looked at me with glistening eyes, then held his hand to me, thrusting the fingers to me, and the odour was familiar, an aroma that in different times would have been erotic and arousing, but which now seemed a fading memory of a hopeless love.

He brought the hand to his mouth and kissed it, smiling, hugging his fingers as he hugged a memory of the elder sister. Then he closed his eyes and sighed, and the sigh was like a song, fading on the wind. And shortly after this, the breath went from him.

The boatman was guiding the craft to a muddy shore among the trees, but as I looked into the distance I saw, about a mile away, a white stone tower, half obscured by green. It was an image all too familiar to me, and I urged the man to tack slightly, to sail along the shore to a place where I felt certain Greenface had once ventured, though whether she would have returned to the place – she and Greyface had seemed afraid of the tower – was an argument I suppressed for the moment.

The solemn man agreed, but pushed me back, as if to say,
Sit down! Now!

I clutched my stomach and held onto the rough wood and blackened leather of the hull. The lake was so wide that in its middle the waves had rocked us like the sea, and I was feeling sick. But I soon recovered when I noticed the beached boat, the same boat, as I understood it from our captain’s gestures, that days before had been given to Greenface.

We came onto the mudflats and reedbeds below the ruins, crumbling walls spreading out along the shore and up the wooded hill, the white tower most prominent of all. The boatman helped me with the corpse of William Finebeard, dragging it through the reeds to higher, drier ground, where five small horses were grazing, though they scattered at our approach. Before I could express any thanks, the man had passed me a small leather bag, which from its feel contained a liquid. He indicated that I should rub this unguent into the wounds on William’s body, and I said, ‘He’s dead. It’ll do no good. The man is dead.’

The boatman raised his eyebrows, kicked the body, then
turned and waded back to the tethered craft, pushing off from the mud and catching the wind.

A moment later a hand with a vice-like grip grasped my ankle.

Too stunned to feel pleasure for a moment, I looked down at the anguished face of my friend, twisting up from the earth. He was making exaggerated licking motions with his lips, trying to smile.

‘Christ! I thought you’d died. I wept tears for you!’

I found water and moistened his mouth. He was in severe pain, now, and befuddled as he surfaced from the coma. But he was alive! And I was overjoyed – and if I’m honest, relieved – I no longer felt so alone again. My guide was back.

All thought of Greenface had fled for the moment. And if I was aware that the woman had been afraid of these white towers, then I had either forgotten, or suppressed the concern, because it was to the base of the tower that I dragged the revivified and groaning carcase. I fetched the packs, the harpoons, the fish gum and dried fish and then began to ease the man’s jacket off, aware that his back and legs were caked with drying blood and that he was in a terrible state.

As the heavy cloth of his shirt came away, so I saw the reason that he had survived. Before the Walk to the Shore, he had turned the bone cuirass around to cover his back – I discovered later that he’d had an inkling of what would lie in store for him if he’d been caught with Ethne and had prepared accordingly – and though fifteen of the bone harpoons had penetrated his flesh to the depth of half an inch, their full power frustrated by this crude defence, only two had struck deeply. I was moderately certain that no vital organ had been hit, although clearly one of the strikes had severed a major vein, accounting for the massive blood loss.

Most of the bone blades dropped out when tugged; four had gone deep enough for the teeth to need to be cut free. I poured the boatman’s unguent onto the cuts and rubbed it in, while my fair-bearded friend howled again. There must have been
iodine in the dressing liquid, since his back turned yellow, but any characteristic smell was overwhelmed by the pungent aroma of the preparation’s main ingredient.

Fish, of course.

Even the deepest of the wounds had clotted by now, and I was certain it could not have inflicted internal injuries, since it was high up on his shoulder. I washed the rest of his body with cold water, then dressed him as best I could before fetching the mountain-survival bag from my pack and tugging it around his shivering form. I made him as comfortable as possible, placing him face down, and put two of our own harpoons next to his right hand.

As William slept, I looked at the bag of medicine. The boatman had been prepared for this moment, I realized, prepared to help a wounded man, not a dead one. And it occurred to me, now, that the young and athletic Two Cuts should have clearly been able to overtake the struggling man with ease, on that long walk to freedom.

He had chosen not to.

So perhaps there had been no intention to kill the young man, an intriguing element of the duel, a puzzling aspect of the brutal walk.

I constructed a windbreak and built a fire. Then, clutching the third harpoon and a vegetable knife from my pack, I walked into the treeline and approached the base of the tower itself.

Now that I examined it closely, the ivory tower was revealed as exactly that – a towering column of shards and lengths of polished bone, broken towards its top to give the illusion, from a distance, of crenellations. It was cold to the touch, almost unnaturally so. It must have had a diameter of fifty yards or more. There were round openings in its walls, high above my head, and I was reminded of pores. I could see vegetation and the dark masses of large nests, tangling and nestling in the spikes and cracks of its shattered rim.

Why had Greenface seemed so frightened of this silent, shining pillar? Or had I misconstrued the scene? I had been a child,
they had been glimpses, I had had a vivid imagination and my stories turned on fear, on chase, on quest, indeed, on the childish yet primal and ever-potent trappings of fairy-tale.

She had certainly passed
back
this way, however, and I climbed the wooded hill, away from the tower, looking for signs of the woman but finding none as I explored the fragments of stone and ivory wall that had once reached from high ground to the shore and the tower itself.

At the top of the hill, leaning against one of the massive pines that crowned the ridge, I looked back to the lake, reassuring myself that all was peaceful and safe down at the shore, where William lay healing. Then I picked my way over the summit of the hill, to see if I could discern a way ahead for us, and my life seemed to stop for a moment, my senses stunned by the vision that was laid out before me.

From just below the ridge to the high cliffs in the far distance, the whole land was slowly turning, a vast whirlpool of thick forest and white ruins, steadily draining down to a centre that was obscured by mist and shadow. Everywhere, the cliffs were crumbling, sheets and pillars of rock crashing into the dense canopy to be swirled downwards. And yet, the towers and turrets, the gleaming white walls of castles or shaped outcrops of white rock that were being carried by the turn of the land, seemed from the pattern of the flow to be spreading
out
from the sinkhole itself, to pass, increasingly battered and broken, to the outer edge of the turning land!

The earth before me shuddered, shook and groaned as it was both swallowed and recreated – two swirling streams of forest, land and ruin, moving against each other, an entwining spiral.

I followed the winding path towards the deep cut that separated me from the edge of this whirlpool of forest, aware of the vibration of the hill below me, the increasing sense of instability, the proximity of change, of sudden destruction. Creatures, too, were moving away from the shifting wood. Whether they had come from the centre of the maelstrom or not I couldn’t tell. I heard their movement through the trees, listened
to their growls, chatters and cries. Three creatures of enormous size, their skin almost black, and thick like an elephant’s, moved across my path, each towering above the trees, walking on massive legs. The tallest turned to look at me and bellowed. Its head was wide, tapering to a short trunk which flexed like a cat’s tail. Tiny eyes challenged me. It stamped a huge foot against the ground and I felt the tremor.

It moved away, a creature from the long-gone time of the world, some precursor of the elephant, but almost brontosaurian in its shape and movement. And as it cleared the path, crashing through trees, I glimpsed a slim and furtive human shape.

Greenface!

She was watching me. She seemed startled to see me, glanced round nervously, then ran into the cover of the undergrowth. I ran towards her, shouting out. Something struck a tree close by, then I felt a glancing blow on my shoulder and was aware of a shaped stone crashing into the bushes behind me.

I stopped and pulled into cover, watching through the trees, scanning the light, and soon she moved into the open again.

‘Please don’t run from me!’ I called. Could she understand? Christ, she was an inhabitant of
my
world.

She shouted something at me, which I took as a good sign, but which communicated nothing intelligible. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ I called again. I realized I was holding the harpoon and quickly stuck it in my belt. A second later I felt a stinging pain in my leg and saw a short, thin dart hanging from my trousers, the point having grazed my flesh. I pulled it out of my clothing and kept it.

She uttered the high, bird-like trill that I had so often heard in my early visions, and immediately was gone, vanishing silently, certainly heading towards the edge of the arboreal drowning-pool.

I was about to follow when a creature that looked like a cross between a warthog and a jackal darted into my path, snarled, salivated, backed away and erected horny spines around its
neck, a dangerous looking frill, signalling clearly that it was about to charge.

I fled. The creature bounded after me, but stopped when I turned suddenly and threatened with the harpoon. Its stink was overpowering. Canine teeth jutted from pugnacious jowls and its tiny eyes narrowed, gleaming yellow.

The land shifted, the trees around me bowed slightly, seemed to stretch from their roots. The hog, whatever it was, took steps backward, then slunk away.

I returned to the summit of the ridge from where I watched the steady spiral flow around the sump for more than an hour, hoping that I would see the woman again, wondering how, if at all, I was to traverse this moving land.

A different trill, on the whistle that Five Cuts had given me, reminded me that I had a friend, someone whose life was in my immediate care, and that there might be danger back along the shore of the lake.

Again the whistle, and again I returned to the camp. A week or so had passed since we had first landed here.

William Finebeard was up, fully clothed and agitated, in pain still but substantially recovered from the exhaustion of the walk and the wounds. He beckoned to me urgently as I slipped and ran down the last slope, then quietened my questions, leading the way along the edge of the lake, away from the tower. I could see already that the dry mud shore was marked with the hoof-like prints of several animals. After half a mile, William held me back and pointed to the tree-line.

Five small, horse-like creatures were grazing at the lower branches. They were probably the same animals I had seen previously. Their colour was a deep brown, with black stripes over their rumps and manes of brilliant gold. As they reached up on their hindlegs to browse they revealed stubby toes at the sides of the central hoof. Small-eared, smaller faced, as high as a tall child at the shoulder when on all fours, their relationship
to horses was obvious enough, and I felt sure they were an extinct precursor of that animal.

William’s idea was to catch them – or two of them – and use them as transport.

‘And how do you propose to do that, exactly?’

‘
I
don’t propose
to
do
anything,’
he indicated. ‘You build a trap. I’ll drive them into it, then you close the trap on two of them …’

‘That simple, eh? And then?’

‘You smack each on its face in turn. That stuns it. Get on its back, tie yourself with rope to the creature’s neck, and ride with it until it’s exhausted.’

‘You’ve done this before?’

‘No. But I’ve heard about it.’

‘So have I. A lifetime of westerns.’

He didn’t understand, of course, but clearly he had encountered the
experience
of taming what I believed to be a species of
hipparion,
and knew it could be done. Indeed, he established that the icon-hunters sometimes traded for these creatures, though hunger usually fated the beasts for the pot – stewed with sacred statues? – and away from the duties of carriage.

Despite his confidence that the proto-horses could be tamed, William’s injuries and my nervousness combined to cause failure and bruising.

The hippari were moving slowly through the trees, paying little attention to anything but their meal, and we set up a leg-snare below a thick bunch of cut leaves, dangling juicily from a branch. As the small herd came by the smallest of the horses began to nibble and stepped into the snare, but when I yanked it tight the animal charged us, turned and kicked out with its hindlegs, its haunches flaying wildly left to right, the sharp horn on its vestigial toes suddenly scything the air like sharpened kitchen knives.