Ancient Echoes (44 page)

Arithon was close to Nemet during the feast, and in the morning shook her awake and passed her a bundle of nets and a bag of cheeses.

‘Come on. Let’s go fishing. The rains are coming from the north–’

Nemet had felt the cooling wind, the scent of moisture that always meant a rain-storm would swirl across the dry plain of the river in a week or so’s time.

‘– so the fish will be swelling in the shallows.’

Yes!

She dressed quickly, kissed her sisters on the cheeks, gentle with Anat who was still sore, still slightly swollen where the marks had greened her flesh.

Where was Baalgor?

‘He’s hunting.’ Arithon was impatient with her. He wanted to go, to get onto the water before the shoals passed downriver.

For most of the day they fished, but the catch was poor. Arithon grumbled, but as dusk came he relaxed and lay back in the boat’s prow, eyes to the sky, relaxed and content. Nemet joined him and for a while they drifted with the flow of the water.

Later, Nemet took the sail, her father the rudder, and the small craft skipped the waves, turning towards the fires on the shore.

For the brief time she had lain with Arithon, she had felt that something was wrong with her father; he had become solemn, agitated, his eyes on the faraway. Now, as the boat
came close to the mud bank, Nemet felt her mouth go dry.

At least
one
of her sisters should have been there, to help them with the catch. But the shore was deserted, the tents flapping forlornly in the rising wind, the fires untended.

The village was deserted, even the goats had gone; even the two skinny boars that Baalgor had trapped in the forest and had brought back to fatten up.

Nemet ran between the tents shouting, half sobbing. Her father stood by the boat for a while and he seemed to be crying.

‘You knew!’ Nemet screamed at him, but he remained impassive.

She went into her house, searched through Harikk and Anat’s clothes, found the small shells and polished stones that her sisters had so carefully gathered. She held the trinkets and wept, sensing that they had gone to the sanctuary, terrified at what this desertion meant.

‘Baalgor too,’ she whispered to her running spirit – the
ahk.
She went to his sleeping bench and touched the bulrushes, not knowing what she was looking for but suddenly seeing the green and silver feather that had fallen from his cloak. No! Not fallen. She picked it up and saw how the quill was
snapped!

Arithon had come into the windy tent. His eyes were dead. The tight ringlets of his hair and beard, caked in river salt, seemed grey, ageing him dramatically. The skin on his face sagged, almost peeling from him. He held a rope and a club, and when he stepped towards his daughter, Nemet ran.

Tired though she was from the day on the river, she was still faster than her father, and she ran ahead of him into the hills, towards the gully in the rocks where she had hidden her hoard from the sanctuary. Breathless, she crouched behind yellow-flowering furze, watching the man labouring up the path, the sweat falling from him in shining droplets. He was still dead-eyed, but quite determined.

Nemet felt an overwhelming sadness. The man she had loved and respected had tricked her, knowing that she would fight to stop her sisters being taken. He had removed her from harm’s
way, leaving the girls and their brother to their fate. Now he was coming for his own, favoured daughter, to lead her like a beast into the mud-walled town.

He called for her, but the voice was that of a ghost, not of a parent. He spotted her and came towards her and she drew away, fleeing along the rough path until she came into the slight shadow of the rocks, where she and Baalgor had spent so many hours.

The knife was there, the handle jutting from the rock, feathery with grey wool where an animal had used it as a scratching post.

She wrestled with the handle, tugging, twisting, but the blade was embedded deeply and she couldn’t move it.

Arithon stumbled into the rocks, breathing hard. The coil of rope snaked over her shoulder as he flung it, then fell to the ground. He stepped quickly towards her, swinging the brutal, polished wood.

His first blow missed her and she darted round him, flinging a stone which struck his cheek but didn’t slow him.

‘You
have
to come,’ he whispered hoarsely.

‘Not with you!’

‘I’ve lived all my life for this time. The others have gone. I wanted a last few hours with you. To remember.’

She was too shocked by the words to respond. She saw, now, not a man who had loved her, an ordinary man, but a creature that had long since been gutted like the gutted beasts on stilts, the resurrected echoes in the sanctuary.

‘Your brothers and sisters have made me proud. Make me proud too, Nem …’

‘I’ll kill you first!’

They circled the small clearing and again she reached the knife and tugged, screaming with frustrated effort. And again she flung herself aside as the club whooshed towards her. The wood struck the horn handle of Baalgor’s knife and snapped it. The broken bone, with a slice of blade attached, fell at her feet. As her father stepped towards her, pushing her to the
ground and hauling on the rope, she took the weapon and slashed across his throat.

For a second he looked startled, then stepped back, his hand red where he held the gash. Then he sat down heavily, a puzzled expression on his salt-bearded face. His eyes melted, filled with tears.

Nemet began to shake with fear.

She crouched before him, then made herself more comfortable, sitting cross-legged, the knife now cast aside. The dusk grew deeper as they waited, facing each other in silence.

I’ve killed my father. The terrible deed. I’ve killed my father …

After a while, Arithon sighed and slowly lay down on his side. His last words, no more than a ghostly whisper, sounded like I
was so proud.

Nemet took her shawl and placed it over his shoulders, then wept over his body, her hands spread on him, her hair hanging loose across his peaceful face.

Later, she went back to the river and washed herself, holding her right hand away from her body as she did so, dipping and drinking as she remembered her father and cried for him. When she was too cold to continue she went back to the shore and picked up the ahk, crushing the fragile clay of the runner in hands that were suddenly strong, then smearing the gritty powder against her legs.

Yes! I did it. I have done it.

The terrible deed.

He was proud of me. I loved him.

But now I start running …

She was half way to the rock gully, where the stump of Baalgor’s knife still marked the shrine to their eldest brother, when she realized that she was running in the wrong direction.

The camp had been deserted. They had all answered the call to the sanctuary. Who, then, was going to judge her for her father’s murder?

She stood on the edge of the cliff, the wind in her hair, her mind clear, her senses heightened by the fragrance of the wild forest behind her. She had dressed herself in a linen tunic decorated with the shells from the sanctuary. She carried the club her father had used against her. She felt stronger, now, than at any time in her life, and one thought above all others made her turn her head towards the north.

I can stop what’s happening. I can bring my sisters home
…

And it occurred to her that Baalgor, too, was in the sanctuary, inside the earth walls, in the shadow of the white stone tower. He was among the beasts, and Nemet could not believe that he would have allowed himself to be trussed, to be made helpless, waiting to be skinned.

If we don’t stop it now, there will be more sanctuaries, more skinning, more Arithons, living for nothing more than the deaths of their children as a price to pay for what belongs to all of us.

The thoughts were so clear. The horror of the subjugation of the people she loved as strong in her mind as the awareness of the heat on her limbs, and the subtle scent of balsam and olive blossom in her nostrils.

The earth is
OURS
to shape. We use it to hide from the wind, from the sun, from the rain. We use it to trap beasts, to trap water, to hold fires. The earth is
OURS
to shape!

It’s
wrong to let the earth shape US.

Such a clear thought, such a simple thought: that a price was already paid for the shaping of the world: in the lightning fires that consumed the tents; in the floods that swept down the valley, drowning men and goats and washing their flesh into the deep of the river; in the droughts when skins and minds shrivelled and decayed; in the beasts that flung themselves from rocks and branches to carry off the young.

This killing in skins, this skinning and living immolation, was a corruption of the way of life that had existed with the spirits in the earth since the flesh of the land had first folded into valleys and hills, and grown the forests, and moulded the creatures to inhabit them.

Wrong!

Nemet ran lightly, head low, the club strung across her back, her hair tied tightly in a single plait and pinned to her tunic. She had rolled in the dust and now was a red-grey ghost on the dry land as she moved through the hills, away from the shrinking river, towards the scent of fresher water from the springs where the sanctuary town was being raised.

Around her, the dust began to rise, to swirl as in a windstorm. She tied a cloth around her mouth and pressed on, aware of the looming bulk of the sanctuary, a shadow in the sand ahead of her.

And then she heard the call, the strange song, the melodious summoning voice drifting like a searching snake from the tower that rose starkly above the walls and shelters in the town. She crouched as the sound entered her, feeling its rising, falling notes as spikes, impaling her, drawing her closer. But the song was not directed at the approaching woman. It was calling into a far-flung place, a long-gone place, and Nemet felt the earth shudder as the long-gone was drawn – fishes on a line – closer to the surface of the world she knew.

Behind her, the ground
bellowed
as if in pain, and she turned,
shocked to see the great creature lumbering towards her. She darted away from it, recoiling from the faecal stink as it passed, its trunk slapping against its columnar leg, the shaggy hair on its body caked with black mud and glistening green slime. It walked towards the shadow town, dropping dung, bellowing its fear.

Again the earth shuddered.

Nemet watched as the ground folded down, then swelled, the scrub of trees and bushes rising as a second, monstrous head appeared, two dulled eyes buried in a face of bulging horn and flaring nose, a mouth gaping, teeth blunted and yellow. This thing stood on its hindlegs, stepping from the earth, shaking its hairless torso and scratching with curved claws as long as Nemet’s arm. Its cry of pain was like a man dying, but sustained for a minute as its torso weaved and rocked, a child born into a strange world, gasping for breath.

This thing too began to follow the summoning song, and though it glanced and growled at Nemet, stooping to take its weight on its forearms, it stalked into the dust, shadowed and lost.

Again the earth flexed its muscles, and a pair of horns the girth of Arithon’s river-boat punched up from the soil, and a bull’s head followed, the muzzle snorting, the crimson body arching up behind it, hooves scrabbling to raise this forgotten monster.

Blood-red and massive, the Bull suddenly lay down as it passed Nemet, rolling over, legs kicking monstrously, its eyes never leaving the crouching, fearful woman.

When it stood again it was hesitant, aware of its small companion, almost uncertain in its actions.

Nemet approached the creature and it lowered its head. Its breath reeked of sweet grass. She touched its muzzle and its fleshy lips drew back from teeth like marker stones.

It bellowed in anguish.

Nemet soothed it.

The call from the white tower was still strong and the Bull
became agitated, began to walk towards the summoning voice. Drawn out of a time when the earth was roamed by giants, now it carried a smaller creature, clinging to its underquarters, arms entwined with the matted hair that hung down from the grumbling bulk of its belly.

Swaying with the movement of the beast, limbs beginning to tire, Nemet was carried into the sanctuary, aware of the frantic beating of skin drums, the shrieking and chanting of female voices and the mournful, rising notes of great, bone horns. When she smelled the rot from the skins of the stilt creatures, and heard the faint cries of their human companions, shedding their lives into the Fragrant Pasture, she dropped away, scurrying into the shadows.

For a while she crouched in darkness, catching her breath, watching the irregular parade of nightmares stalk through the writhing skins, occasionally butting against the heads which swayed on the ends of their poles. The tower rose ahead of her, the shape of the summoner motionless as he uttered the eerie cry. When the breeze in the sanctuary changed, Nemet scented blood and fear and though her stomach heaved, she began to follow the stench, head low, moving from skinned creature to skinned creature as she strove to remain invisible to the watchful man on the edge of the white stone.

‘Baalgor!’ she whispered to the sanctuary. ‘Where are you? Where are you hiding?’

Eventually she reached the slaughterhouse, passing unnoticed through the tall gate in the high wall of wood and clay, walking among the fires and drummers, stepping round the skins that were being cleaned, the bones that were being stripped of meat, aware of the strutting and circling flock of carrion birds, whose own cries added to the cacophony.

Whichever way she wandered through the noise and chaos of this arena of sacrifice, the white stone tower was always ahead of her, its base gaping where the unbarred entrance called to her
…

She watched in silent horror as the first of the beasts she had seen summoned from the earth was brought to its belly by
cuts to its legs, then beaten on the brow by clubs until it was still. The sawing and cutting began, the heat from its body manifesting as a writhing vapour above the carcase. The blood-red Bull bellowed and struggled against the leather ropes that now restrained it. And yet … suddenly it seemed to see Nemet and it calmed, as if recognizing an ally.