Ancient Echoes (47 page)

‘I know.’

He was wild, frightened. Not at all the menacing figure who
had taunted me from the
Shimmering.
‘You know! You keep saying you
know.’

‘Yes. And you’re right. It’s
now.
And right now, whatever you did, whatever you believed, whatever deed, terrible or wonderful you performed, is just a story! From the long-long-gone. Older than the Oldest Testament.
Forgotten.
It’s of no importance. Only one thing matters to me.’

He had laughed inadvertently when I had talked about ‘story’. Now, in an attempt to be brazen, he sneered at me. ‘You. Yourself. Your precious daughter.’

I smiled at him, but my heart was racing. In this strange place, Natalie had suddenly called to me. I could imagine her at play, perhaps calling for her ‘funny’ friend, and I wanted to be with her, to be safe with her, to have her safely in my arms again.

‘Yes. Me. Myself. My precious daughter. I
thought
you were lying. You know all about it. You
are
the same entity.
You
stole my daughter. And you certainly know why I will never let you go.’

He stared at me thoughtfully for a long time before speaking. ‘Yes. Natalie. She was my only hope.’

He sounded defeated! My spirits soared. He’d lost!

‘You still have her, then.’

‘Some of her. I only ever had some of her. I took what I could, but mostly it was your love for her that helped me.’ He smiled, staring me straight in the eye, a man lost, I realized. ‘I enjoyed dancing with her … Jack. I told her funny stories; by return, she told me funny stories of her own. Childish stories … more charming than amusing … she is the daughter I would have wanted, funny, teasing, willing to listen … I took her into my hiding place …’

‘Give her back to me.’

‘Give back
what?
I took her there, but I kept only a shadow of her laughter, a shadow of her beauty, an echo of her life … she was just an echo … You can hardly have expected me to have told you that. Thin skins, stitched together like my cloak
to make the illusion of a woman. My skill, if I had a skill, was not in stripping the soul from your daughter, but in making you believe that I had done so …’

‘Give her back to me.’

‘There’s nothing to give back,’ Baalgor said, and he had suddenly aged. ‘And what I took is precious to me. You’ll not miss it. She’ll not miss it …’

‘I want the shades. All of them.’

‘You can’t put spilled drink back in the beaker,’ he said quietly, and added with a smile, ‘You can’t put piss back in the belly. But then – such loss hardly matters.’

Shaking his head he reached for his cloak, held it to his chest, his eyes closed, his fingers rubbing the feathers of the carrion crows whose scalped corpses had supplied the ruff that had once adorned his neck.

‘I took nothing,’ he said quietly. ‘Nothing of consequence. Not from you. Not from Natalie. I tried only to stop the skinning, the burial with beasts, the sanctuary.’

‘The first sacrifices …’

‘Yes.’

‘You failed.’

‘Yes. I’m painfully aware of the fact.’

Throughout this long exchange, John Garth had stood silently, watching Baalgor with an impassive, unreadable expression. Now he turned to me and said bluntly, ‘Enough talking. Go to the gate, Jack. Your journey is nearly finished. Your wife is waiting for you. Your life. Your daughter.’

He started to move away, Baalgor walking stiffly before him. But I stepped between the two of them and shook my head. ‘I won’t let you take her. Not Nemet. I’ll hunt you down, Garth; I’ll pursue you with all the blind determination of Glanum itself if you destroy her now.’

‘I know you will,’ he whispered.

He came towards me and to my astonishment reached round
to embrace me, holding me against his breast for a minute or so, silent but for his breathing. The odour of burnt tar and fresh mud was powerful on him. I could feel the heavy thump of his heart, the slow rise and fall of his chest.

When he drew back he quickly touched a finger to my cheek, to the false skin of Nemet’s sister. The touch moved to my chin, then my mouth, and Garth watched me curiously as he marked out the shape of the scorched woman on my grizzled features.

‘I haven’t found this one yet. She is still hiding.’

‘Then let her go too. Haven’t you had your fill of death?’ I could still smell the slaughterhouse around the white tower.

John Garth said, ‘That’s what you see, isn’t it? That’s all that has happened to your vision over the thousands of years – it sees death alone. Jack, Gl’Thaan Em wasn’t built as a place of death, but as a place of life! You have the stories in your own age, of the Ark, the place of preservation. Why can’t you accept that in the far-gone we did things differently? The infant sanctuary of what you call Jericho, the prehistoric place that was born with
me,
was about
keeping time still.
Everywhere, the earth was being hardened into walls, like sores on pristine skin. And the memories of the people were hardening too – what was once remembered naturally, now was being forgotten as the very pattern of life changed on the skin of the world.

‘The Song came, a glorious song, eternal, all-encompassing … It sang at the oasis where Gl’Thaan Em began to grow. Both Land and Time, and all that had lived on that Land and in that Time, were marked and memorized so that their empowering spirit would not be lost–’

‘By sacrifice. By the brutal mating of human with animal.’

‘I have seen the world from the inside out, Jack. I can see what sacrifice
became –
the illusion of living-on in the shadow of invented Gods. But at Gl’Thaan Em, the dead were the gates by which the remembered life of the earth could continue to walk the valleys and the lakesides and the high hills. This was the deed the Song shaped us to perform.
You
make a judgement
of right or wrong, of horrific, of brutal. But GI’Thaan Em was built for a purpose that would have been wonderful – and that purpose was not fulfilled. Like any child abandoned, it has simply been doing what it needed to find its own way home!’

‘And all to preserve the memory of extinct animals. To what end, Garth? To what end? We can dig up their bones, we can know them by their bones! To what end?’

‘To an end that was in the hearts and minds of a people now remote to you, a people who had lived with ghosts, and couldn’t bear to give them up.’

Exasperated, Jack shook his head, saying, ‘And now? What now?’

Garth shrugged, glanced at the silent, brooding figure of Baalgor. ‘And now it’s almost over. Harikk can’t be far. And then GI’Thaan Em will dive one more time – and surface again somewhere in the world, and in the past, where it will complete its purpose.’

‘But not at Jericho.’

John Garth shook his head. ‘It doesn’t seem so. Memory of GI’Thaan Em haunted the people there until they invented reasons for the very sacrifice that you find so abhorrent. And with what relish the art was practised! I saw Ur in its heyday, a feast of death, ritual of astonishing beauty, incredible ruthlessness, a city like a mausoleum!’

‘So where will you go?’

‘I don’t know. In my own time on this earth, before you were born, I looked for the final site of Glanum on every continent, a site ten thousand years old or more, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s below the ice of Antarctica; more likely hidden in a mountain valley. All I have ever found, until Exburgh, was the occasional echo. So where we finish up will be as much a surprise to me as it will be to the explorer who one day finds our ruins!’

He glanced at Baalgor and I sensed impatience. Below my feet, the city shifted, a ship caught in strange winds, ready to cast off, to plough deep seas.

‘Nemet …’ I said again, and felt suddenly very frightened, very small. ‘Let her go, Mister Garth. She has come to mean half the world to me.’

And Natalie the other half, I thought, but didn’t say.

I was watching him through the half-face of Harikk. And suddenly I realized that through the eye of the scorched sister, Garth was smiling! Even though to my own, naked eye his face was hard and bruised, a man without compassion. Harikk was revealing to me the gleam of love in the heart of the Rememberer.

He moved past me and I stood my ground, shaking with an emotion I suppose was partly fear and partly hope.

‘Go to the gate,’ he said. ‘Wait there. When you feel the city start to dive, go out. Go out no matter what! But wait there until that moment. Wait and watch.’

‘Will you give her back to me?’

‘Wait. And watch!’ He marched away. For a while I stood my ground.

By the time he and Baalgor had disappeared from view, the white walls of Glanum were rising towards a summer sky.

One of the Brontotheria had blundered into the corral during the dawn hours, smashing the wooden fencing and freeing the wild hippari. The new animals were a bigger species than those he had caught with William, in another lifetime, and Jack was furious as he rode along the lake shore, assessing the best way to gather the kicking creatures back into the pens.

Nemet had circled round behind. He could see her, a dark shape on a dark horse, coming carefully through the trees, ready to turn the herd back if it began to stampede.

For the moment, the equines kicked and played in the lake water, snapping at the small birds that buzzed them, trying to land and peck at parasites.

At his signal, Nemet made her run, galloping down the shore, startling the creatures which began to bolt. But they turned away from the lake when Jack charged them, holding his long, red-flagged lance to the side.

Most of the hippari blundered back into the labyrinthine corral, and Jack hauled the gate closed, aware that Nemet was pursuing the three, ginger-maned misfits, the three largest of the herd, the three proudest.

There was a hailing cry from the harbour and Jack turned. For a second he thought it might be William Finebeard, and his heart skipped a beat; but it was not his lost friend who was summoning him. There remained no sign of William and Ethne only of the mausoleum, the tomb broken, the contents gone.

It was his daughter Natalie who walked towards him, waving, a white shape against the white tower of ivory.

He called to Nemet, ‘Can you manage now?’

‘Yes. If we lose them we lose them. I’m fine.’

He rode through the lake water to his daughter, dismounted and hugged her.

‘You’d forgotten. Hadn’t you!’

It was a reprimand.

‘The school play. Yes. I’m sorry. We’ve had some trouble with the big brontos. Nearly lost the new herd.’

‘I guessed something was up. That’s why I came to fetch you.’

She looked hungrily at the corralled animals, her eyes wide with the pleasure of what she saw. He knew what she was thinking and laughed, before wrapping his arms around her, calling to be drawn back from the Deep.

He surfaced on the frame, swung his legs off and stretched, plucking the sensors from the skin of his chest and scalp. Natalie stood before him, dressed in summer clothes, shoes polished, hair combed and ribboned. Angela was punching in the termination codes at the console.

She glanced at Jack and smiled briefly. ‘I’ve got to pick up Steve. We’ll see you there.’

‘I only need a couple of minutes. Just to freshen up.’

‘I’ll go with Daddy,’ Natalie said, and Angela shrugged. ‘Okay. But don’t be late.’

When Angela had gone, Natalie asked, ‘What are you going to do with the horses?’

‘Tame them, of course. Cut off their sharp little toes, then trade them.’

For anything but fish gum and icons, he added silently.

‘Nemet said she doesn’t like cutting off their toes.’

‘Nemet has a five-inch scar on her leg which reminds her of the good sense in the … painless … operation.’

‘Can I stay with you longer next time? I really like it by the lake. I’d like to help you look for William. Do you really think he’s still alive?’

‘I’m sure of it. He left me a picture: of “Greenface”. And everything suggests that Ethne came back to him … The only thing that puzzles me is how.’

‘And I’d like to ride one of the hipparions,’ Natalie was persisting. ‘With Harry.’

He leaned down and kissed the fresh-faced girl. ‘Harry’s too young yet. He’s like his father … tall for his age, but very clumsy.’

‘You’re not clumsy!’

‘You didn’t see me rounding up the horses yesterday! Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, you can come and visit any time you like. You know how much I love you. And I
will
spend more time with you at home, just as soon as I’ve got the ranch working smoothly, back in the Deep. And then you can come and ride whatever you like. You can even ride a Brontotherium, if you want. But you’ll have to ask Mummy. And Steve. They call the shots now. They have control of the inner eye.’

‘I know,’ Natalie said mischievously. ‘She’s always keeping her eye on you. Through the Midact-VR-Interact. Steve calls it MERV.’

‘Does he indeed.’

‘But that’s silly. It should be MIVRI’

‘Not everyone has your perfect spelling. Off you go, now. Get your coat.’

As Natalie left the Midax room, at the top of the house, Jack went over to the console, irritated more by the fact that he’d had no previous knowledge of Merv than by Angela spying on his life with Ahk’Nemet.

Not knowing how to access the ‘VR-Interact’, as Natalie had called it, he used a red marker-pen to scrawl a simple message on the screen of his ex-wife’s lap-top AppleMac.

‘Mind your own bloody business! Keep your eyes to yourself!’

Glanum:
Travellers to Provence, in particular to the region of St Remy, will know the ruins of the town of Glanum. The visible remains are essentially Roman, but the site had long been used as a sanctuary. The local museum contains the headless torso of a statue of
CERNUNNOS,
the Lord of Animals of the early Celts, discovered during excavation. The fragment is wrongly labelled ‘seated warrior’.

RH
12th June
1995

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