Ancient Echoes (35 page)

Glanum had come to fetch him again, and resigning himself, he stepped forward towards the log fire and the
Shimmering,
feeling cold and dampness wrap about him like the touch of hell.

White Shade was impatient with him. He was so slow, running and walking behind her as she led the way through the shadow city. Her frustration, her impetuosity, reminded him of Angela, as did her relentless drive forward, her constant reiteration of the need to get ahead, to get to the ‘pool’.

Where’s the pool?’

‘You remember! The well, the sanctuary where the women bathe and their dogs drink. The hunting spring. We hid there. Come
on,
Jack. You’re not an old man. Run faster.’

Jack?

She was framed, slim and palely gleaming, between walls that crowded into him, a morbid place, its stones dripping anguish.

‘I’m frightened. Everything’s closing in–’

‘Then run a little faster!’

‘Where are we?’

‘Don’t you recognize it?’

‘No I don’t! Where
are
we …?’

She looked quickly round and he thought she was shivering, uncomfortable for the moment. ‘This is where they burned the bodies. They brought them here, some still alive, and burned them with pitch, and dry wood, and straw, and the blankets and clothes from their houses. They bundled them into the alley, because the stone walls stopped the fire spreading. And the fleas couldn’t leap above them.’

‘The plague?’

‘Yes. The plague. And its victims. Hundreds, Jack. Exburgh has a very chequered history when it comes to human rights.’

‘This is
Exburgh
?’

‘This is Glanum, Jack. Glanum feeds on other cities, gorges on their shadows. You know that, don’t you? Now come on!’

She was running again, emerging from the claustrophobia of the plague road to a plaza, where the rotting trunks of trees were formed into scaffolds and lean, black dogs rooted and fought as they prowled the square.

They came to the river again, where the hulks of the barges lay half-submerged in sludgy water, masts snapped and fallen, gaily-coloured trappings and sails now fire-blackened, or faded with time. Shade trod carefully, dancing over the crumbling decks among the ruins of the jubilee, crossing to the farther bank. Jack followed, stumbling, aware that the pile of yellowed wood that shattered as he fell was the rain-eroded remnant of a man.

Shade laughed. She seemed so at home here, a bright presence in the monstrous gloom.

He called to her.

‘Last time I crossed this river, there was a party. It was so
alive.
It was a happy place. Debauched; delightful; an ancient wedding!’

‘Digested, now,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘Digested and excreted. Glanum feeds on every sort of energy, every sort of mood. This is the rubbish dump! Come on, Jack. Keep to the road!’

He followed her between the bulging, grinning features of beasts, each shaped in smooth, black marble, each marking a monolithic tomb lining the wide road that led to a white building fronted by colonnades and topped with the stretching, winged forms of women.

Was that the Moon pool? If so, it had been substantially extended since he had last staggered into its cool, refreshing depths. But Shade skirted the place, hugging shadows, alleyways and the slippery banks of the streams which wound through the city.

At last she ducked into an entrance that was familiar to him. The steps were slick; he could see Shade below him, her image
in the water broken and shining as she crouched above the pool, splashing the liquid on her face and neck. Carefully, Jack came down to join her. The whole place smelled dank; wet growth draped the stone faces of the women through whose mouths the spring water dripped.

But the pool itself was fresh and welcome. In the darkness, only the faint luminescence of the moon on Shade’s dress of shells allowed his sight to adjust to the surroundings.

‘What happens now?’ he asked his daughter.

‘We wait for my friends,’ she said. ‘Baalgor doesn’t like them. He sent me to fetch you. I think he means to kill you. But that’s not what I want. With my friends around you’ll be safer than the last time.’

Confused, struggling to remember the previous experience of the
Shimmering,
Jack simply shook his head. ‘I thought you were Baalgor’s friend,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d do anything for him.’

‘Jack, I’ve grown. Can’t you see? Sometimes I go back to Nattie, I creep in beside her, we lie there together in the darkness and dream the same dreams. When she gets up to go to school I run along with her. It’s funny to be there and here, to be young and old. I left Baalgor a long time ago, to hunt with the other women. But he catches me sometimes, and he’s very strong. I know he can take the life from me, just as he’s taking it from Natalie. I know he can take back from me what he’s stripped from the girl. He can even give it back to her if he wants …’

‘How?’

She ignored him. ‘But Jack … I like being me. I like it here. I like the double dream, being with Nattie. She’s part of my life.’

‘She could be
all
of your life, the life you’ve not known. She’s still growing up.’

‘I grew up, Jack!’ the woman said tersely. ‘Baalgor saw to that.’

He didn’t want to think about her words. ‘It’s not the same.
Shade … Natalie … if you abandon him completely, we can start again. Get out of Glanum!’

‘It’s not the same,’ the white shade echoed sadly. ‘But I can’t abandon him. What he’s done to me, to your daughter, can’t be undone.’

‘You just said he could give back what he’d taken!’

What HAD he taken? Natalie still seemed so normal
…
except when she was ‘possessed’. What had he taken? Why weren’t the scars visible?

‘Some of it. Maybe. I don’t know, Jack. I just know I’ve moved away from him, safely away; but he’s still close, so I take no chances. I’ll do some of what he tells me, his carrying and fetching. But I won’t let him hurt me any more. And I won’t let him hurt you.’

He stared at her in the faint light, seeing Angela, seeing his daughter, seeing a young, courageous woman who belonged in two worlds. Like her father himself, in fact; torn between realms, increasingly at home in both.

‘What do I do for the best?’ he whispered, suddenly over-whelmed by fear.

‘The best for what? For who?’

‘For whom,’ he corrected, and the shade laughed, echoing, exaggeratedly, ‘for
whom’.

‘Got to get the language right,’ he murmured.

‘Got to get the language right,’ she repeated affectionately, then went on, ‘You want things the way they were. Too late. You want to keep things the way they are. You want this? You want the torment? Baalgor won’t get any easier. He’s a lost man, Jack. Without his Greenfaced sisterwife, he’s slowly crumbling. You have to get them back together: her to him; or him to her.’

‘And how do I do that?’

‘How do I know? I’m your daughter’s shadow, Jack. And I’m Shade. This is my world and all I know about it is what I see; Baalgor didn’t talk to me about the centre of the city. What-ever’s there, though, that’s what he fears; that’s where you have
to take him. He lives in its shadow, but he’s hiding from it. And that’s where you have to drag him.
And
his green-faced partner. The centre of the city. It’s what drives Glanum across the earth. It’s what makes Glanum feed on the shadows of forgotten towns. It’s what drives everything!’

The pool bubbled, water splashing suddenly onto the lower steps.

‘Here they come,’ Shade said. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

Even as she spoke the words, the surface of the water erupted. Four mastiffs, monstrous beasts, saturated and panting for air, came bounding from the well and onto the stone steps, shaking water from their stinking, matted fur. They turned to sniff and growl at the hunched man who crouched in their sanctuary.

One of them reared up, eight feet high, staring nervously at the intruder. A second lapped at his face, a deep rumble in its throat. Shade slapped at them. ‘He’s a friend. Easy … Easy!’

The dogs padded up the steps and three of them slipped away into a side passage. The fourth, its face speckled with white which caught the pale moon, crouched tensely at the top of the stairs, fixing Jack with its gaze.

White faces surfaced in the pool, staring through the water, almost dreamlike. The four women emerged in quick succession, throwing weapons to the hard floor, wringing out their hair, gasping for breath. One was very old, grey-haired, grey-tunicked. Another was no older than Shade, but her face was ridged with scars, or disease, it was hard to see in this faint illumination. The other two were mature and menacing, one wearing silver torques and belt over a leather tunic and sandalled feet, the other in shell armour, similar to Shade’s, her hair cropped to the skull, a string of shell or bone fragments draped across her face, hanging from each ear, threaded through her nose.

This one hauled a rope from the pool. She, and the older woman, tugged for a few seconds and an animal, trussed and dead, was dragged into the sanctuary. Jack smelled the blood from its wounds.

Deeper in the place, the three dogs began to howl. The mastiff on the steps just growled in its throat, still watching the man it didn’t know.

‘This is my father,’ Shade said, and the older and younger women laughed. Shade went on, ‘He answers to the name of Jack. Jack? My friends have no particular names. They were eaten by Glanum much like everything else you’ll find in the city. But the old woman scowls whenever you call her
Sefonnie.’

‘Sefonnie? Persephone?’

As he spoke the name, the old woman spat at him. She was gathering her arrows together where they’d scattered on her emergence from the pool.

‘And this is Hekut,’ Shade went on, waving towards decorated-with-shells, ‘Nubissa,’ the other woman, ‘And Diana,’ the girl.

‘You certainly know how to pick your friends,’ Jack said. ‘Straight out of the wolf pack!’

‘They’re good hunters. In Glanum, you need to be. If you can’t hunt, if you can’t run, if you can’t hide, you soon end up at the river-gate, grinning at ravens.’

‘Does that mean “dead”?’

Shade laughed delightedly. ‘It doesn’t mean “making love”.’

The women had moved away from the water, ducking into the passages, and now Shade led her father into a drier place within the Sanctuary, a small cell made warm with mats and candles. The dogs were eating, and from another place came the sounds of voices, laughter and butchery. After a while, Hekut ducked into the cell, glancing with a frown at Jack, and put down a clay bowl of cooked liver and tripes. Shade used her fingers to feed on the steaming offal, and when Jack satisfied his own hunger he found the simple meal surprisingly palatable.

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 …