Ancient Echoes by Robert Holdstock Read Free Book Online Page B

next chamber was downwards, through a stone trap-door.
    Garth could stand upright in the skull room, standing on a wooden platform that had been carefully placed so as to avoid disturbing the bones. With Jack at his side he pointed to the earth below.
    ‘It goes four chambers down, maybe more. That’s all we’ve been able to reach. The whole sanctuary area spreads out to the west and slightly to the north, chamber after chamber, each embedded more deeply within the complex, accessible by a single door, or shaft. This one is free of rubble, but beyond and below it the chambers are impacted with the earth itself, and a lot of them are probably obliterated.’
    ‘This isn’t Roman …’
    ‘Damn right. Nor Greek. And it certainly isn’t Celtic. Older than all those times.’
    Jack stepped down to the floor without thinking. Garth crouched beside him, watching as the youth bent down to touch the crumbling skulls, with their wide horns. ‘Bulls. The skulls of bulls. What is this place?’
    ‘It could be pre-Minoan Crete; it could be pre-dynastic Egypt. It could be Turkey, the Levant, as far east as Persia … anywhere where the bull was sacrificed to worship. The walls are mud-brick. I’m inclined to think Turkey, Levant, maybe Egypt. But older by centuries than the Hercules shrine, than Minerva of the Shoe Shop, than the Lord of Animals under Market Square. It’s what Glanum is all about, the concentration of temples.’
    ‘But in Exburgh? They came all this way from the Middle East to
Exburgh?
’
    Without thinking, Jack had picked up a bull skull, one horn shattered, one stretching two feet, curving up from the bone, still polished white. If he felt the shrine shake, it might have been imagination, traffic, or the contact with the runners. There was a hard breathing somewhere around him, and the sense of something vast moving furtively through tall grass. But the mood passed quickly and he placed the dead bone down on the dry earth floor, by the well into the dark below, the chamber underneath.
    There were no paintings, no frescoes, no carvings, no symbols anywhere in the room.
    Just bones.
    Just wrongness.
    He said, ‘Is this the heart of Glanum?’
    ‘No. Where we are now is on the edge of the heart. As I said to you, the sanctuaries get older the closer you get to the centre of the city. Wherever you find Glanum, it’s always the way: the heart in the corpse is always inaccessible. But we’ve come damned close in Exburgh. And since the corpse is still warm …’
    Jack watched the man in the half light from the street, aware that John Garth was talking more to himself than to the student in the pit.
    ‘How many Glanums are there?’ he asked.
    ‘As many as you can find,’ Garth answered darkly. ‘Glanum has left its shadow across the world, and it has been doing so for longer than you can imagine. Are they close? The bull-runners?’
    Suddenly chilled, Jack said, ‘No.’
    He hauled himself onto the wooden ramp and climbed the ladder from the cold room into a street that hummed with traffic; he stared up the slope of Castle Hill to the sheer walls of the Castle itself. He thought: Solid sandstone. The hill is solid sandstone. There’s nothing underneath but rock and mantle. There could never have been a city there!
    The town of Exburgh bustled, seeming to widen with every passing month as a new ring road was built, and rows of terraces bulldozed down to make way for a supermarket, and a wide, well-appointed parking area.
    The excavations were prettied up and made presentable, and the tourists came in the spring and summer months, fascinated by the frescoes and the given story that Glanum was a city of shrines, a city whose heart was hidden below the Castle Rock, beyond the abilities of contemporary excavation.
    Jack worked at weekends in the small museum, collectingtickets, selling pamphlets about Glanum, postcards, and other Heritage Industry publications. On occasion he acted as a guide, but Angela was