Ancient Echoes (43 page)

‘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.

‘You’ll have me. Anat and Harikk …’ But even as she spoke, the figures of Arithon and Hora appeared at the edge of the camp, the girl huddled in her cloak, staring at the ground before she entered the family tent, her secret to be kept until her death.

‘All of us,’ Nemet added, and Baalgor nodded, then touched his brow and his breast in thanks.

‘What do you dream, Nem? Tell me about your dreams.’

‘Running …’

She had said the word before she had even thought. It was the only word that sprang to her lips. She had wanted to express the desire that was her life: to be passionate with her brother; to bear their children; to shout and be angry, probably with their mother, who would be old and infirm; to fish, to gather, to walk with the goats and sheep and pigs and dogs; to find deep valleys in the hills, with sweet spring water, where they could pitch their tents, then build their huts and gather bulrushes for the floor, and shells to clatter in the wind; to lie with the warm earth on her back, and combed sheep-skin on her belly; and the sun on her face, and the fragrant scents of bushes and trees making her drowsy as her husband stroked her.

This. This! What more IS there?

‘Running!’

He tore the clay from his face and grabbed her by the hair. When their mouths met she stiffened, but relaxed to the fierce kiss, her fingers spreading across the seeping wounds above his breasts.

‘Running,’ he said as the clay peeled away. He looked at the tents, then at the hills.

‘Running,’ she whispered. ‘Why do I dream that?’

‘Why do
I!
’

She was stunned by the violence in his voice. He closed his eyes and sighed, then looked at her again.

‘Nem! We’re alone, you and I. We have to leave. We no longer belong here.’

‘I can’t leave them. Our sisters.’

‘Too late. Too late. You’re all that matters now.’

He was hurting her. She pushed him away, but held onto his clothing, her fingers digging into his flesh. He eased the grip, then took her into his arms again, reassuring her as she cried.

‘I can’t leave them’ she said again, and now he seemed to understand.

‘I know. We’ll take them with us. It’s all right, Nem. If you follow me, we’ll all go away together …’

‘Yes!’

His mouth was on hers again. The night and its sounds gathered around them. They slipped down the muddy bank, feet and ankles in the water, laughing. There was singing from the settlement, and the bleating of goats left unmilked.

‘Promise me that Anat–’

‘I promise!’ he insisted.

‘That all of them: Anat, Harikk, Hora … they’ll come with us!’

‘I promise. How many times do I have to say it? My sister,’ he added in a whisper, his fingers thrilling her.

‘My brother,’ she murmured, longing for him. She pulled his body over hers and said his name again, watching the bright moon over his shoulder, and the shadows of giant birds flying to the north, to Gl’Thaan Em.

A season had passed and they were still in the village; Baalgor’s cloak, still wretched to smell, was now long and fully encompassed his tall body, although only Nemet knew this since he
wore the cloak only at night, and only with his sister. Nemet’s hoard of shells and the shining, colourful scales of reptiles was huge, now, and she had begun to make a dress, decorated with these purloined jewels from the sanctuary.

She had not returned with Baalgor to the labyrinth of mud and stone beyond the cedar walls. Her brother had ventured to the town alone. Nemet felt uneasy about his journeys, but it was her insightful sister Harikk who cast the strongest doubt.

‘Arithon knows he goes there. He ignores it, that’s all. I don’t like the feel of this.’

‘Only our father, though. No one else knows. He’d not betray his son.’

‘Everyone
knows,’ Harikk whispered, but she was speaking through inner sight not real sight and shrugged and waved her hands to indicate her guesswork. ‘If I was his sisterwife, I’d warn him that he isn’t as clever as he thinks.’

I’m not his sisterwife. Not yet.

Harikk’s warnings, her increasing gloom, began to irritate Nemet, who avoided the girl’s company, concentrating instead on helping the chatterer, Anat, to prepare for the next tattoos, the next stage in her lengthening, blossoming growth. She would be tall, like Baalgor, and was willowy still, unlike Hora who was plump and rather slow on her feet. The chatterer was now her father’s favourite too, or so it seemed, and Nemet seethed sometimes as the two of them sailed on the river, returning hand in hand with blades and polished stone, seeds, roots and on one occasion, odd little red clay icons –
zheen
– squatting figures and dancing shapes into which thoughts and dreams could be placed, or so it was claimed by the tribes who made them. Anat picked the
tekki
, enchanted by its closed eyes and pouting mouth, its sweet innocence.
Tekki
was
sweet voice, sweet words.
Harikk stared at the hoard for a while, then selected
etni,
the flaming face, the
watcher with other eyes.

‘I’ll make sure to keep an eye on you lot!’ she said with a smile as she strung the amulet.

Hora ignored the
zheen
for a long time, but eventually flicked among them, discarding, scrutinizing, discarding, complaining, discarding …

She picked
bet – seeing over
hills,
finding paths.

‘This can’t do me any harm.’

Finally, Nemet picked one of the figurines for herself, startled by her powerful response to the small, running figure, its swollen breasts indicating its sex. It was called
ahk
, meaning
running with beasts; the hunter
, and, like her sisters, Nemet attached the name to her own.

Ahk’Nemet; bet’Hora; Harikk’etni; Anat’tekki.

They called out their new names as they held hands in a circle and danced around the talismans, laughing and imagining the effects their new-found guides would have in life.

Baalgor waved the trinkets away, then changed his mind and picked out the smallest of the
zheen,
a hairless head, wide-eyed, heavy-browed, guileless. It was called el, meaning
the deepest thought; the first secret.
He used clay to shape a crude bull’s muzzle around the face of innocence, and pushed the curving wishbone of a goose into the outer head to signify horns. He covered the clay with strips of skin from a bull that had been sag-bellied and stilted in the sanctuary, a red beast, impossibly large, the centre of the shrine as if it alone commanded the greatest respect.

It had been hard getting close to this monstrous puppet, and the belly had writhed with not one but two human shapes, being digested inside to hold the memory of the bovine in the shadow-world of the Fragrant Pasture.

He had succeeded, slicing a piece of skin from the throat, but had been aware as he slipped into the gloom of the alleys that the man on the tower had seen him, watching him without raising the alarm.

It had made the bull talisman stronger; it carried the seeds of inner strength, of secret purpose; and Baalgor hung it round
his neck in triumph, though Hora was disgusted at his arrogance.

Anat had attained her full face, and though the scars from the fish-bone needle were still sore, she danced like a woman and teased like a woman, and chattered as the fires burned high, and the voices of the singers, and the melodious breathing of the pipes, filled the night with their celebration.