Ancient Echoes (33 page)

But he wasn’t sure, now.

As he shifted back to reality, the passion in the dream was less intense, the urge that had been overwhelming him – to travel back to the beginning of things with Nemet, to help her atone for whatever she had done so long in the past – now seemed secondary to the sweet immediacy of his family.

‘How’s Natalie?’

‘I don’t know,’ Angela said, and there was something almost tearful in her voice. ‘But
I’m
not fine, Jack. Thank you for asking.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly, and reached for her, holding her very tightly. ‘God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Angie. I’m still between two worlds. I haven’t got my feet on hard ground yet.’

She was apologetic herself. ‘Of course you haven’t. I’m too impatient. Natalie is … strange. She’s here, in the Institute. I don’t like to leave her alone, but somehow … when we’re home … somehow she always ends up dancing in the field. Do you think she puts a spell on us?’ She was smiling wearily.
‘Someone
blinds us with charm when he wants to dance with our daughter …’

Angela’s cold, tired words were like a blow to the heart, and Jack remembered the claustrophobic grimness of Glanum, and the crawling, mindless shade that was his daughter’s reflection in that world. From love, he was suddenly back in the reality of fear, because he would have to go again into Glanum, to beg for more time, another chance.

Seeing the sudden anxiety on his face, Angela reached out to stroke a finger across his brow. ‘Don’t think about it, Jack. We should go home. Go home and spend some time together. Let’s go up to the moors, go walking, find a remote pub with good beers and home-cooked food and stay until we feel like leaving.’

‘I need a debriefing session, don’t I?’

Though this time it’ll be selective and discreet …

‘Yes. Yes, of course. But after that … home for a while, then away into the moors. Without concern for the grey-green faces in your life.’

Jack stared at the woman, her own face bright, now, and not just with enthusiasm but with a need, almost a hunger, that he hadn’t seen for several years.

And all he could think was:

but I WANT to be concerned for the Greenface in my life …

It was over two days since his return and Steve was anxious to hear the details of his experiences.

‘How long would you say had passed since you were there before?’

‘Hard to tell. Nemet suggested two years. Time enough for William and his mercenaries to have built boats, sailed the lake and sacked the fishing village. But to create the fortress? And for the survivors of the village to have built their own strong-hold, and fleet? Two years doesn’t seem long enough.’

‘From what you could see of them, did William and the Fishergirl seem much the same age as before?’

‘Very much so.’

‘Then there may be a continuity of story on the level of your association with your friend William, but discontinuity of setting.’

‘Each time I go back, I go back to a variant of the experience?’

‘I think so. A third trip will help to get some hard and fast rules established. When you’re ready, of course. And only if you agree.’

Greenface was singing; a love song; a song of longing; it was a warm night and she lay, covered in skins, below brilliant stars. Her words carried on the breathing wind from the earthpool, the maelstrom, beyond the place where she waited.

‘Jack?’

‘Sorry. She’s very close. Still very close. She might be outside the room, that’s how close she feels to me.’

Of course there’ll be a third trip.

The other question that fascinated Steve was that of language. He made Jack go over and over again the sort of words and gestures that had been used by the knights of the fortress.

A linguist was brought in to listen and watch, and there was a great deal of debate about the fact that, even when communicating by sign, gesture and alien tongue, understanding was achieved remarkably quickly. Nemet, however, spoke English – or Jack spoke the apparently Levantine language of the woman – and so she clearly came from a different part of the unconscious world that was informing the Deep and the Hinterland.

Nemet and her aggressive partner – her brother/husband – were older, deeper, more a part of Jack than the others, who were most likely to have been constructs to cover the various personalities, shades of grey, that create the complex human individual.

Nemet was ‘archetypal’, though Steve was uncomfortable
with the word. But she and Baalgor were part of an archetypal image, released, or revealed in Jack’s case, but perhaps present in all the human population.

What they represented was hard to see, though their link with the City – or sanctuary, as Ahk’Nemet thought of it – their relationship with an event that had been City/Sanctuary based, suggested they came from a time when the human mind was growing aware of ‘community’.

As with the chaos of their forms, their armour and their functions, so the language of the mercenaries was a mish-mash of what Jack had
heard,
what he
knew,
and what was
innate
: a neurobabble that flowed like French, was heavily influenced by an early form of Welsh, and contained almost coherent passages of proto-Finnish, one of the earliest languages still in common usage, reflecting the common tongue of Central and Northern Europe in the period after the end of the Ice Age.

Although the words were meaningless to Jack himself, they were nevertheless part of the so-called Resurrection Imagery controlled by the brain’s
limbic system,
those scattered memories that are resurrected in the human foetus during the third month of incubation … similar to – Steve showed him – but not quite the same as, the neo-Jungian notion of Experience-Programmed Common-Unconscious … or the post-Sheldrake concept of Transmissible Resonant Neuromorphs …

The hidden mind was a world of its own, a playground for any isolated ego that had decided to go a-roving!

Jack was weary; Jack was sad. He no longer felt at home. Home was beneath the stars, by the Watching Place, where the lithe woman, wearing her sisters’ faces, waited for him. He became impatient with the Institute, irritable with Steve and Angela, and as soon as he had recounted what he remembered of the trip, saying nothing of his feelings or activities with Greenface, he called an end to the debriefing.

‘Ok! Ok!’ Steve said, as his persistent request for just ‘one more session’ began to arouse anger in the subject.

Jack calmed down.

‘Let me out of here. For Christ’s sake, let’s end it. I’m stifling …’

‘Yes. The session’s over. Go home, Jack. Angela? Look after him.’

But Steve could never let go. He walked with the couple towards the playroom where Natalie was at work on a huge jigsaw with two other children.

‘Nemet is an enigma. And Baalgor. We need to try and place them in time, and in the world. You need to try and understand what they did, where they did it, and who is pursuing them. Are you going into the
shimmering
again?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘If you do …’

‘I said, I don’t know! Leave me alone, Steve. I’ve had enough!’

Brightmore tugged at his sleeve. ‘I want to be with you if you do. I want to record the trip. There’ll be a link with the Deep. There has to be. Let me come with you.’

Angela led her husband along the corridor, calling back to Steve, ‘I’ll be in touch. Your idea’s a good one.’

But she added in an almost inaudible whisper, clearly not intended for Jack to hear: ‘He’ll take some persuading. Leave it to me.’

Natalie had a surprise for him. As they walked together to the car, the girl could hardly contain her excitement. She babbled about what she’d been doing while her father had been ‘away’, and she kept asking about the ‘tiny horses’. Again and again, as they drove home, she asked whether he had seen any more of the tiny horses.

‘Seen them, rode them, herded them!’

Natalie seemed concerned with the
colour
of the beasts. ‘Weren’t they striped with reds and greens?’

‘Only the biggest and best. But yes. Striped with reds and greens.’

The girl giggled to herself. Her small hands clutched at her father’s as they rode in the back seat of the car.

At home, Angela quickly opened windows to air the house. And after a meal of vegetable soup and garlic bread, Natalie made the presentation: her gift to her father.

Jack opened the box, aware that it rattled. Inadvertently, he spilled the contents on to the carpet. A jigsaw made of balsa wood painted with pastel. At first glance he thought there were a hundred pieces.

‘Eighty pieces!’ the girl announced proudly. ‘I made it myself. In school.’

‘Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! Thank you, Nattie.’ He kissed the girl, who squirmed away.

‘Do it, then! Put it together.’

He picked out the obvious streaks of red and green (the horses), the straight edges, soon got the general idea, then joked and made odd connections, insisting that they were right despite the girl’s protests that he was wrong.

‘Horses don’t have tails on their faces!’ She looked shocked, realizing she had given the surprise away. ‘I didn’t say horses …’ she said quietly.

‘
Bears
don’t have
tails
on their faces, did you say?’

‘I didn’t say bears …’

‘I thought you did.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘What
did
you say, then?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I thought you said “bears”.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Lots of animals have tails on their faces, mind you.’

‘No they don’t.’

‘They certainly do.’

‘What animals?’

‘The big-tailed Nose Bird, for a start. The tail-nosed Aardvark, for another … The short-tailed nostril fly …’

‘No such animals,’ Natalie announced uncertainly.

‘There most certainly are!’

‘No there aren’t.’

‘Are you insinuating that your loving father is a liar?’

She stared at him for a long moment.

‘Yes,’ she said with a sudden, mischievous smile. He looked shocked.

‘Go and get your book of
Unusual Beasts
!’

‘I haven’t
got
a book of unusual beasts.’

Even more shocked ‘You haven’t got a book of
Unusual Beasts
?’

‘No.’

He shook his head.

‘What a sad upbringing. All the wrong books. Well if you
did
have the right books, you’d see all
sorts
of huge and hairy animals with tails on their noses.’

‘You’re telling stories.’

‘I am not!’

‘Am!’

‘Aha!’

He had fitted the final piece of the jigsaw into place and sat up straight to admire the painting of tiny horses, with tall trees in the background, and a human figure – he assumed the squat and dumpy man-thing was intended to be himself – riding the biggest of the beasts.

‘This is wonderful! Just like the real horses.’

‘I like making jigsaws. There’s a special cutter that makes the shape. Are they like the horses you saw?’

‘Identical. Thank you. I’ll treasure this.’

‘Did you see any other funny …
unusual
beasts this time? Did you?’

‘Lots.’

‘Not with tails on their noses, though.’

‘Even stranger than the nose beasts. Have you ever seen wolves that stand up and run like human beings?’

‘No. What colour were they?’

‘Black, with golden streaks on their flanks and big, stiff ruffs, like spines, around their necks.’

Natalie ran for her paints. ‘I’ll paint them for you.’

‘Their lair is by a big stone arch, covered with carved figures and animals.’

Let’s see what you make of that
…

For a while, then, as his daughter exercised her imagination over the subject of wolves, Jack pondered the jigsaw, amused by it, genuinely pleased with it. And as he stared at the crudely cut, naively painted image he realized that Natalie had drawn a second human figure: hidden in the trees, the green outline, clearly female, was blended in so well with the background foliage that only by staring hard could it be resolved.

He touched the green woman and wondered exactly who or what the girl had been meaning to portray.

Only later did the thought occur to him that perhaps Natalie had not been meaning to portray anything at all; that another hand may have been guiding the brush.

The Frouden moors rose behind the small town of Chagwick like brooding cliffs, always cloud covered and shadowy, the signs of time evident in the scars and runnels of the foothills that carried the rainwater from the vast expanse of craggy, marshy land that was the moor itself.

A long drive from Exburgh, and in a remote part of the country, Angela had arranged to stay with friends, artists and toymakers, at Stinhall – Stone Hall – in the tiny hamlet of Stiniel, a few miles from the Frouden hills.

Buried in a deep valley, almost completely hidden from the road by oak and asper, Stiniel consisted of three houses, long-houses of old that had been converted inside to accommodate modern taste, but which from the outside might have been habitations out of history.

Natalie loved Stinhall. It fascinated her to think that below the flagstone floor of the house there were remains of even older buildings. She played on the turf maze in the garden with Toby, who was much the same age, while the adults indulged in the Stinhall hosts’ wonderful hospitality.

The house was a treasure cave of puppets, paintings of folkloric figures, statues, green men, and creaky, eerie nooks and corners. It had a ghost, of course; and a wild man could sometimes be seen by moonlight, running along the edge of the woods across the fields from the kitchen.

While Brian and Angela supervised the spit-roasting in the garden of a haunch of local venison – the owners of Stinhall were nothing if not overwhelming in their largesse when it came to feasting – Jack helped Wendy create her Green-Man pie, a gooseberry tart in the shape of a face, decorated in pastry
with leaves, branches, wild eyes and tongue, then painted green and red with edible dye. She had intricately carved waxy new potatoes into the shapes of beetles, to amuse the children, and created a ‘fairy tower’ out of pineapple chunks, apricots and slices of kiwi fruit.