Ancient Echoes (46 page)

Two … no, three, it seemed, Harikk too … three creatures had escaped that hidden Deep, and come through me into the world of flesh and consciousness; but how had the city itself, the sanctuary, the primal ark come to be there?

I had seen it in the real world, and John Garth had been in the real world …

What had Brightmore said?
Glanum recognizes no boundary between our earth and your mind – the same place being experienced from two different perspectives – a different set of dimensions
…

The storm turned, the sound of drums lulled me, hypnotized me. I could smell burning wood and flesh; in places, beyond the wooden walls, the brilliance of fires tinged the black clouds with red. I recognized this place; Nemet had led me here from the Hinterland, on my first Midax journey, trapping me by her own magic in a snare of roses, scarring me, stigmata that had surfaced on the flesh and shadow in the real world and so scared the watchers that they had hauled me back, dragged me back as if I had been a drowning man in deep water.

So the heart, this ark, had always been in the Midax Deep, and Nemet had come close to it once, almost ‘home’, but then abandoned the place for the second time, after trapping me in rose-thorn, to come and find me again.

Now she was at the gates of the shrine that had hunted her, alone and unprotected, one of the seven of her tribe that Gl’Thaan Em had pursued through the earth and the minds of humankind. Baalgor was not here. And Nemet stood, shivering,
staring at the sky, perhaps wondering whether to enter or run again.

I suspected that this was the moment when she would choose between life and death.

But the decision, it seemed, was no longer in her own hands; when Glanum had risen from the Deep and taken us, another spirit had controlled the movement, and he came now out of the shadows.

I sat up, then stood, watching as tall gates closed on the fires inside the heart of the sanctuary; by their flaring light, the tall, cloaked form of the Rememberer was silhouetted as he came towards me. Then the gates closed and only the grim light of the sky showed the grey eyes, and the deep scar between them.

Nemet had stepped away and dropped to a crouch, head bowed, arms across her breast, a posture of humiliation.

But John Garth was staring only at me, reaching out to touch my shoulders with skeletal but still strong hands. Below the cowl, he was smiling, a thin, grim gesture, that contained the merest hint of recognition and pleasure.

‘Garth,’ I said.

‘I remember you,’ he whispered.

‘John Garth,’ I said again, touching his fingers with my own.

‘Yes. I remember you. I can still see the boy in your face … the boy who told stories … the boy who was born on the day I finally found where GI’Thaan Em was hiding.’

‘Mister Garth …’

‘I remember you.’

‘I’ve never forgotten you either. What happened to you changed my life. I’ve always lived in two worlds; neither has any real fear for me …’

John Garth was here, in the Midax Deep; and yet he had been there, in Exburgh, and when I had stalked the ghostly streets of the city with him he had seemed not to understand everything that was happening, or that had happened. He hadn’t known the past, or so he’d claimed.

‘You must have known more than you told me. You must
have known who my Greenface and Greyface were. You must have recognized the tower, and the Bull. Why did you pretend differently?’

Ahk’Nemet had begun to sing, her body rocking as she huddled. I thought she was in pain, perhaps in terror, but Garth ignored her.

‘I remember you,’ he repeated to me. ‘But then, I remember many like you. It had been a long journey, searching for the city. Memory is like an echo, Jack. It fades each time it is reflected, but somehow, never dies. I had forgotten the city. The city had forgotten me …

‘But when I saw your sketches, when I saw the crude faces in plaster in the ruins of ancient Glanum, I was looking at the last flicker of light on the faces of the two who had killed me – others had held me, but those two did the deed, drowning me in my own blood, watching me.’

He looked at Ahk’Nemet, who was silent and still, huddled and waiting for the end.

Garth went on, ‘When I saw them in your own town, I began to remember. I knew they were close, whoever they were. And I started to realize that Glanum was close too. I was unaware of who or what had been born in me, but I knew I had to return to the city. When it finally came to me, as curious about me as I was about it, it didn’t recognize me at first. I remember hauling myself up the city walls …’

‘It was spectacular to watch!’

‘It was terrifying to do. I hung there for days, wedged into the gap between a tree and the stone it grew from. I was like a bug on the city’s skip, and it tried to scratch and scour me off; but I clung on, inching my way inside. I didn’t know that I was coming home, but once inside, so much memory returned.’

I
was a ghost, resurrected and adrift in my own song, passing through time, caught by that song as much as the city itself, and the beasts, and the seven who had done the deed. But I was insubstantial,
surfacing at random in strange centuries
, strange
places in the world
,
only occasionally hearing the cries of the hunted, and the thunder of the sanctuary itself as it swam in pursuit of its killers.

I had been abandoned and had become lost; but I had never abandoned hope.

Garth was walking towards the gates, now open again to expose the fires beyond. Ahk’Nemet followed behind him. She had thrown down her weapons, cast off her robe. She was naked. Even the skins of her sisters lay on the ground, catching the grim light of the heart of Glanum.

At the gate, Garth stepped aside and Nemet passed through. The gates closed behind her, locking her in. She had not looked back.

The Rememberer watched me for a while, then looked at the hill, where the walls of the outer city glowed, shimmering in the moonlight from beyond the storm. He came back to me and passed me, saying, ‘And now for the other one. The brother. Come on, Jack. My Jack. He’ll come to you.’

I looked at the gates.
What would happen to her? She had gone so willingly, so compliantly.

‘Garth!’

He stopped and turned, shouting at me to hurry. I stood my ground. ‘You were already dead when she put the spear in you. It’s Baalgor you want, not Nemet.’

‘Both of them. All of them,’ he said.

‘Let her go.’

John Garth stared at me for a few moments, his expression one of half concealed amusement, then said, ‘I intend to, Jack. Just as soon as her brother comes back to the sanctuary. I intend to let her go.’

He meant, of course: skinned and digested in a tent of bones and leather, fulfilling the role for which he believed she had been born.

‘Let her go,’ I urged. ‘Let her live.’

‘Why?’ the Rememberer asked, his tone mocking. ‘What is she to you?’

I struggled to say the words which would indicate my feelings; odd and inappropriate words, in their way; words of betrayal to my family; words I could scarcely believe would be so important to me. Something – perhaps the sense of being watched and monitored beyond the city walls
(turn the damned thing off! The machine. The Midax eye. Let me alone!) –
something stopped me expressing my love for Ahk’Nemet, my true passion for her.

I said only, ‘She’s been through enough. Can’t you see that? She’s been through enough.’

Garth watched me coldly.

‘For her, it has hardly started.’

And he turned from me again.

I went quickly to the discarded faces on the ground, but on instinct picked up only the half-skin belonging to Harikk, the Scorched One. The thin gut-threads were still in place and I pulled the tissue over my head. It was cold, slightly greasy. I looked through the slit where her eye had once watched for warning omens, I looked at the man on the hill, his hair flowing, his cloak billowing, his stride as purposeful as I remembered from my childhood.

Help your sister,
I said aloud, before pursuing the Rememberer.
Harikk. Help me.

Like a great, rough ship of stone, the ark of Gl’Thaan Em ploughed the ages, a hulking, savage city, surfacing as the whale, sudden, vast and shocking, to hunt and gorge on the civilizations that had once covered the earth. No mindless beast, it was sentient, furious, a creature formed unnaturally from the earth, given hope, given meaning by its creator, then abandoned, now pursuing those who had betrayed it.

I watched from the white tower, braced against the chthonian swell, Garth beside me, monstrous in his coldness, singular
in his own determination to scent and catch the man who’d killed him.

I watched as nations rose and fell, the proud pillars, the totems in grinning wood, the spires of marbled granite, all of this Herculean arrogance rising in the passing of a breath, all of it crumbling in the time it took to wonder at the beauty, their shards, their ruin, sucked into the white leviathan that was Glanum, a city built to remember all life, now a malevolent leveller of all hope, the eater of shrines to a system of belief that had
begun
within its first walls, perhaps consuming them to satisfy its own frustrated ambition.

And suddenly it surfaced into a place I knew well, into Exburgh, rising briefly among the shops and churches, the halls and arcades, swallowing back the haunting, snaring shadow it had left behind before, when it had passed this way. At once, Baalgor was thrown out of his hiding place and into the Rememberer’s
song
again, at loose in time, and in the world of shadows, and on his own.

‘He’s running. Ahead of us,’ Garth cried. ‘I can almost smell him … there! Look there!’

As the city plunged into the dark, I glimpsed a forest, ages old, its canopy alive with birds of carrion. Somewhere in that swathe of green, Baalgor was fleeing the Bull, the gaping, staring Bull carved on the gate of Glanum, and which had manifested as the great beast itself in my crazy, childhood visions. Garth had sensed the fear of the running man, the anguish, and using that blind instinct had pinned him down.

We came up. I was giddy with the motion. We hovered, hanging in space, vertical to the world, the shrines like limpets on the body of the whale.

Down, then! And such a dive! Down into the earth through a darkness that began to shimmer, and that shimmering illuminated corridors of bone and stone, of runes and marks, of the history of a world that had been swallowed by that greatest of tyrants, Time itself.

Up it came, rising from the Deep!

Like a shark, it chewed at the buried past.

Like a bull, it grazed the runes.

Like a cat, it clawed and played with the columns and façades of stone which had been decorated under the direction of a vision that had come from the earth itself …

From life itself!

Carved, shaped by the hands of the priests, put up to please the eye, subverted to please the soul, images of the life and the death of our prehistoric, wonderful and
sensual
awareness formed the ocean in which this most monstrous of all sanctuaries swam, in search of a man who had killed the first singer of the songs of
blind faith.

Garth, beside me, exhilarated as Glanum plunged through the deserts of Egypt, the mountain valleys of the Hindu Kush, the monumental hills of Greece, the wind-swept, yellow grasslands of the New World, even biting at the bulking, ruddy, painted rocks of what I imagine was Australia at a time so long in the past that only a
whisper
of the songs we heard remained in my own age.

At last, Baalgor himself
gave up the
ghost, swallowed by the Bull-Gate, hunted through the world of my own pre-conscious and perhaps captured by my own
willingness
to have him caught, for this was partly a world of my own making, and surely by persistence I could make things happen! Yet strangely, I felt a moment’s sadness as he tumbled among the earth and stone of his crude hiding place, which also had been consumed when he was
bitten
out of his wild running.

He recognized me at once, and came towards me. He stripped off his stinking cloak of scalps and feathers and threw it at my feet. His naked body bled from cuts. The clay had broken away from his body. Tattooed eyes gazed unblinking from his hard-boned flesh.

‘I didn’t kill my father.’

‘I know you didn’t.’

He seemed surprised, stepping forward. ‘Nemet killed my father.’

‘I know.’

‘Then if you know … why are you hunting
me?’

‘I’m not.
He
is …’

Baalgor glanced contemptuously at Garth, but seemed confused as he looked back. ‘But he’s the skinner of souls! I killed him because he was taking something that didn’t belong to him!’

‘I know.’

‘You
know?’

‘I have a good idea, at least. It all happened a long time in the past.’

‘What
past? It’s now! He’s come back. He’s come back! And it will all start again …’

‘He came back, Baalgor. A long time ago. He came
back.
And it
did
all start again. And in the words of the cliché: that’s life! And life as we know it has been terrorized by the Great Lie ever since.’

‘The Great Lie was this place of beasts. What do you mean … What do you mean by the Great Lie?’

Baalgor, young and raging, naked and bleeding, was a man doomed to die, but still violent in his defence of his philosophy.

‘That there is something greater than you and I, an all-seeing eye … a
maker.’

‘But I
know
that’s not true! That’s why I killed the Rememberer! It all belongs to us! The life and death of even a single sprig of thyme … it
happens.
The flood that takes our dogs and donkeys, the rains that fill our wells … it happens. It belongs to
us.
When we go on, when we die, we have only the Fragrant Pasture, a wonderful place. It’s where we all go, the young who die in the womb, the old man who has been blind all his life, the strongest and the weakest of us. We all go there. It
belongs
to us.’