Ancient Echoes (42 page)

Finally, Nemet agreed.

By the time she had caked her body with river clay, Baalgor had returned from the hills, wearing the half-finished cloak, the stink of animals forming an aura around him that was mesmerizing. They skirted the edge of the forest during the day, and crossed the hills by night. Before dawn they had come
close enough to the sanctuary to smell the fresh water of the spring that bubbled from the deep earth within the mud walls. As the sun rose, Nemet stared for the first time at the city, amazed at how high the walls had been built, at the stone tower with its dark figure, the man whose voice called and echoed across the land, eerie cries that sometimes made her skin crawl. The air was filled with the stink of burning bitumen, and dark smoke coiled from a hundred fires where the black earth smouldered.

As if invisible, they ran swiftly between the tents, then through the narrow gates in the stockade walls of cedar, coming closer to the shaped earth where bricks of mud were drying in the sun, and the sound of stone being hammered and shaped rang unfamiliarly in their ears. Above the low gate was the skull of a bull; the road to that gate was lined with the curved horns of a hundred bulls, each point fluttering with coloured fabric. Baalgor led the way along this tunnel of ivory, rubbing the steaming droppings of beasts into his limbs and onto his cloak. Nemet did likewise, and the scents from the mud of the beasts were unfamiliar, heady, not at all like the smells of goat or lion or cow. Suddenly they were lost. Nemet flung herself into the darkness of a low doorway and when Baalgor came and crouched above her she almost shouted, ‘Far enough! We don’t belong here. I’m going home.’

‘A little further. Just a little further. Come and see the creatures that are being summoned …’

‘I’m frightened.’

‘I’m
not!’

‘Then go on alone. I’m going home.’

Baalgor’s fingers hurt her as he restrained her, then his arms were round her, embracing her intimately, a signal of his need and love for her. Clay lips touched clay lips, and Nemet felt secure again, though she was aware that her brother was confused.

‘You’ve got us lost,’ she said.

‘Yes. I’m sorry. They’ve built a wall across the old street, and I’ve never been this way before.’

Nemet was aware of the path back; she also sensed the way forward, deeper. She had never felt
lost
in this place, just frightened.

‘Come on then.’

She led her twin through the maze of passages, and as Baalgor ran behind her, he re-iterated softly that she would
love
the sights that were soon to be seen.

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.