Ancient Echoes Read Free

tops, turning sharp angles, circling above and around his home. Now he wanted to run. He could hear running, the sound of gasping breath. His legs felt compelled to move as the sound of people running came pounding close behind him.
    He glanced back in fright, just as the shadow-shapes leaped across him, making him cry out. In the trees behind his parents, an enormous red-faced bull bellowed; he glimpsed the spread of its horns, the wet glistening around its mouth.
    If he was aware of his father’s cry of alarm, he later forgot it. Suddenly he was running – running down the hill – then towards the sandstone cliff, to the overhang, where deep shadows on the sun-baked red rock suggested shelter, safety. The tall, dark man in his swirling cloak was ahead of him, thewoman in her leopard skins and flayed leathers running at his shoulder, her green face grimacing with fear.
    On he ran, towards the cliff, above the wide, parched land, descending fast, his legs threatening to give way.
    He started to scream. An animal’s breath was hot and hoarse behind him, bellowing suddenly as the ground thundered beneath its hooves.
    The bull-runners had fled into the shadows against the rock wall. Jack stumbled, rolling towards the precipice – falling heavily down the hill until strong arms grabbed him, halted his uncontrollable tumble. Breathless, he gazed at the sky. His father’s ruddy face loomed close.
    ‘What are you doing? You’ll hurt yourself, you silly boy! What was all that screaming?’
    He didn’t know what to say. He watched a floating cloud, felt the warm drops of sweat from his father’s face on his own.
    ‘The running people. Running before the bull. Red cliffs …’
    ‘You’ve been daydreaming,’ the strong man said. ‘Come on. It’s a long way back to the knoll.’
    He stood, hauled up by his father. He heard his mother’s voice, distantly, and his father shouted, ‘He’s fine. Just acting on impulse. Get the heart massage machine ready for me, though.’
    He grinned down at the wheezing boy. ‘You certainly run fast!’
    ‘Bull-runners. Running from the bull.’
    They began the hot walk up the hill.
    His story about two running people was put down to a blossoming imagination. His cousin Roland was much the same, an older lad who delighted in constructing wild tales, usually concerned with the grotesque murders of the Victorian Age, from Burke and Hare to the Ripper, but often with that abiding obsession of the young: buried treasure.
    Jack liked Roland’s company, he liked the stories, he liked the hidden camps in his cousin’s huge family garden in Devon,a tract of land that opened onto fields, and the river shore. He especially liked fantasizing about building a raft and floating away down the wide river and out to sea.
    It was here, two years after the incident known in the family as ‘running-down-the-hill’, that Jack glimpsed the two hunted people for the second time. He was sitting with Roland on the upturned rowing boat that belonged to Roland’s family. It was a cool autumn day, heavily overcast and showery and the river was grey and choppy.
    They’d been sitting in silence for a while, caught in that restless
ennui
that comes from being aspiringly adventurous, but constrained by the conditions of the weather. They certainly didn’t want to go up to the house, where the parents and grandparents would be talking endlessly about things the boys had no interest in. They wanted to go exploring, but Jack had to leave in thirty minutes for the return drive to Exburgh.
    With a shift in the wind came the smell of fire and the sound of flames, huge flames, like a forest burning …
    The man and the woman were suddenly stumbling towards him, the wood behind them brilliant with the conflagration. Both of the bull-runners were coughing violently, the woman crying out in her distress. She was carrying a flaming torch, which she cast aside, throwing it into Jack’s face, it seemed. They ran past