Chapter 20 Echo #4
‘Yes, though increasingly I think our interest should lie in that tension between imbalanced opposites, because without understanding that tension, we can’t regain balance.
’ Nabu sighs, no doubt remembering Harmodios, Aristogeiton, and Leaina.
‘So I’d promote change through understanding and investigation. ’
‘Rather than intolerance and interrogation!’ calls another dissident voice.
Kosmos swills his wine. ‘We are drawing close to that avalanche again—why don’t we swap our artistokrats and farmers for the wanderers, Nabu? Being both divine and mundane, they might create some interesting stresses for us.’
‘Very true.’ Nabu smiles broadly, more relaxed than Echo’s ever seen him.
‘Depending on cosmology the tensions will differ vastly. Anaximander’s tubes of ether would create one set of tensions, Anaximenes’s fiery celestial bodies another.
But we might find some universal tensions.
For example, the negotiations of each wanderer with the other celestial bodies and Time herself, to ensure the creation of omens at pertinent moments. ’
‘And there are further tensions between the bright wanderers and the silent darkness they traverse,’ Kleisthenes says.
‘One might imagine the discussions if a wanderer wished to alter course or stretch or pause, it couldn’t happen without consent from the committee of the universe.
We have such trouble even agreeing who should rule one polis, imagine trying to negotiate moving the world! ’
Nabu nods. ‘And add to it the tension between the divinities’ boredom and their persistent footsteps across the sky.
It’s a strangely mortal problem: to have such little power over our set path, and yet remain hopeful that by putting one foot in front of the other over and over, we’re slowly moving constellations into formations that the future needs… ’
Despite the pleasant atmosphere, Echo’s stomach turns, sinking and rising all at the same time.
The Not Here hisses in her ear, and she has to step into the courtyard.
Is sickness part of anamnesis? Hazel hasn’t mentioned it, and though it’s made Echo dizzy before, it’s never made her want to puke.
Her shoulder burns. Nabu said it would itch while it healed, but should it itch this much?
She just makes it to the latrines before she vomits so violently bile streams from her nose.
She shakes on the floor, waiting to see if she’ll be sick again. This isn’t the Not Here.
Passing by, Unatti spots her. ‘Echo, what’s wrong?’
Her Hellenic falters. ‘Not know. Sick.’
Unatti puts a palm to Echo’s forehead. ‘You’re burning hot. Come to the kitchen, I’ll get Nabu.’
‘No, he is busy. He must be with philosophers.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Unatti says, with the firmness of a mother used to tantrums. ‘I’m getting Nabu and that’s that.’
In the kitchen, Nabu frowns at Echo. ‘It’s not the food or we’d all be sick. How’s your injury?’
Echo pulls down the back of her tunic, hearing the bad news in Nabu’s hissed breath.
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
‘You said it would itch.’
He describes the infection—red, swollen, oozing. ‘This isn’t itching, this must really hurt.’
‘I did not notice. It did not feel so bad.’ The thrill of success caught her, or perhaps she’s been overriding her discomforts so long she can’t access her pain function correctly anymore.
Nabu drains the wound of pus, then sighs, disturbing her neck hairs, the weighty breath he reserves for serious cases.
He says the diagnosis in Hellenic—σ?ψι?—and the psi’s trident spears her.
Sepsis. From the verb ‘to rot.’ The Not Here knows the cure—penicillin, azithromycin, tetracycline—but that’s no help in Athens.
If she commits anamnesis now, she might have a chance.
She wills the Not Here into existence, but as always when trying to catch memories, the more desperately she grasps for them, the further out of reach they dance.
‘The skin’s not necrotic,’ Nabu says. ‘If you sleep and rest, you might recover.’
He gives her a sedative she’s never seen him make before, steeped with herbs whose names she doesn’t know in English or Hellenic, and tucks her in bed.
The concoction steams, burning her throat and tickling her tongue.
She almost throws up again, but Nabu rubs her stomach gently, singing in his lost language, and instead she passes out.
Sleep cocoons her, a dark perpetuity filled with half-formed memories too weak to take her home until, finally, the dreamscape summons her.
‘Echo.’ Hazel’s voice is a homing beacon. ‘You look like hell.’
‘I’m sick,’ Echo replies, barely in control of her tongue. ‘Really sick. The medicine here can’t help. I need to go home. Please, tell me how.’
‘I—’ Hazel takes her hand. ‘I’m sorry but I have to fix CHARL1E first, we have to check the timeline’s really mended.’
‘It’s done, the Deed’s done. It’s time.’
Hazel’s grip tightens. ‘You don’t understand, there’s nothing here. Nothing. I have to check.’
‘But even if you check, I can’t do anything more. This is it.’
‘Just one more day—maybe two.’ Hazel sounds desperate, but Echo still wants to shake her.
If only she could move. ‘Any amount of time could make a difference. You must stay where you are as long as possible. I will give you the keystone but only when we’re sure.
I want to—’ Hazel stumbles. ‘I want you to go home, more than anything, but all this will be pointless if we leave too soon, and I cannot let the world become what it is here.’
Echo swallows, sensing her real body crying even if her dreamscape one isn’t. ‘I don’t have a choice, then, do I?’
‘I’m sorry.’ At least the apology sounds genuine.
From the world beyond the dream, Echo’s fever shakes return. ‘Do you think we’ll go back to our time simultaneously?’
Hazel hesitates. ‘I don’t know. I hope so. I wouldn’t want to be here without you.’
‘It would be hard, wouldn’t it?’
A hollow silence follows.
Sharp buzzing wakes Echo: a wasp caught in an empty terracotta cup.
Echo wheezes, examining nail marks in the back of the hand Hazel was holding.
Her own nails slot into them perfectly; she must have been clutching it in her sleep, trying to make something not-quite-real tangible. The wasp’s wings drumroll.
Echo levers herself from bed, groaning at her aching lower back, and throws a sheet of papyrus over the cup to stop the wasp escaping. She leans on her knees, stretching out, trying to wriggle away from her own kidneys. The infection is spreading.
Weakening of the vocal cords; should I say paresis— But that diagnosis wasn’t hers. Whose was it?
The wasp punches the papyrus. Echo shuffles to the window, putting all her weight against the shutters to open them.
She’s got weaker overnight. Taking up the cup, she flicks the wasp outside and watches it spiral into the sky.
She slumps onto the thick high windowsill, soaking up the morning sun, too tired even to get back to bed.
A breeze lifts her sweat-stiff hair from her forehead.
One hand still clutches the papyrus, a study of Heraclitus’s latest riddles.
All things are one, even the day and the dusk, for in differing the universe agrees with itself, a back-tuning harmony like the bow and a lyre.
This oneness is in all things—winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and famine—but changes like olive oil which, when it is mixed with perfumes, gets its name from the scent of each.
From this one, all things are constituted and all things will be consumed, coursing in a river through which ever different waters flow, so that we step and do not step into the same river; the oneness is parent and child, teacher and student—
‘Mundane and divine,’ Echo mumbles, cheek pressed against the stone sill.
—Yet the uncomprehending, though present, are absent. Though seeing, they do not see, that death is ever-present in our very selves. In this oneness, we are immortal humans, living our death and dying our life.
Does being one mean relishing the worms in her flesh before they feast?
Not to invite death, but to acknowledge her brevity?
‘She’ makes sense only because of her quick, persistent collisions with the outside world, without which the boundaries of her ‘self’ would collapse.
Her skin crawls with creatures too small to see; her lungs imbibe particles of air; her nostril hairs and intestinal villi reach for foreign nutrients; her eyes grab the light and fold it into her brain.
With every heartbeat, the oneness becomes her, and she becomes the oneness, the distance between ‘her’ and the world dissolving as fast as her mind can reconstruct it.
Echo’s wound pulses, and she stops grasping for lost memories.
Instead, she yields to the oneness, embracing the trespass of sun and breeze on her bodily boundaries.
The door opens and Nabu gasps. ‘What are you doing up and about?’
He bundles her back into bed and she clutches the Heraclitus page under the covers. Nabu smooths the sheet, repeating, ‘You should’ve said something sooner.’
‘I did not know.’ She rests her free hand on his.
Worry carves his face, for a patient beyond his help and for a friend.
‘This is not your fault, Nabu.’
‘In your land, they could help you. Go home, you’ve done what you came here to do.’
‘There is no done. It does not finish.’
‘I’ll finish it for you,’ says Nabu.
‘All this time, still you think it so simple.’ She laughs, making her kidneys convulse.
Nabu touches her forehead. ‘Your temperature’s rising again, your yellow humours must be thickening. You need rest.’
She couldn’t resist the instruction if she wanted to. She lies in bed, watching sunlight pace the room, listening to the birds call the worms and Unatti sing over sloshing laundry. Winji brings her food, Kosmos news, and Nabu medicine, all pretending these things help.
Over the next days, Echo continues decaying, but it doesn’t scare her anymore.
She doesn’t want to die. The blackbird’s tune stabs her with beauty, and she crawls from bed just to watch mist rise from the burgeoning fields, trying to imprint every mote of dust on a place so deep inside her it will become enduring and permanent.
Yet, dying has fundamentally altered its nature.
It’s less final, simply a continuation of a lifelong process.
The herness will finish, but the oneness will continue.
Nabu leeches her to extract the yellow humours, and their bites sting her into ecstasy.
How many generations must live in that jar, biding their time until one day, when even Nabu is gone, their descendants will be released back to the river and contribute the recycled molecules of Echo’s blood to the mud, fishes, reeds, and water.
Removing her breasts’ binding at last, she excretes and vomits until there’s nothing to extract from her but pale strings of spittle.
The earth consumes these bilious, fecal, uretic humours too, as they abandon the Echo for the one, emissaries for the rest of her.
She knows they are emissaries because her body starts rejecting food.
Soon enough, it will stop absorbing anything from the oneness; then the oneness will reabsorb her, salvaging her for its own wondrous ends.
She sleeps under the sedative’s spell but, either because Hazel isn’t calling loud enough or Echo’s sleep has grown too deep, she does not enter the dreamscape. Fevers shake her awake and she rattles in bed, body aching and neck tingling with tantalising anamnesis.
Five days after she takes to her bed, her arms turn blue and Nabu grows quiet.
‘It is alright,’ she says, though her voice sounds weak weakened weak—
He shakes his head. He doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t have the energy to explain.
The here and now stops making sense, but Nabu stays by her side, dabbing her forehead with oregano oil and cold water, or snoozing in a chair at the foot of her bed.
Kosmos stops bringing her news, but sometimes she catches him standing in the doorway.
Unatti puts a dark red stone in Echo’s hand, and Echo clutches it until it rolls under the bed where Nabu can’t reach it.
Events occur without linkage—Nabu coating her feet in piglet’s blood; wet cedar spitting in a portable stove; more leech mouthprints on her chest—as the gaps grow between her bouts of lucidity.
The last memory she has in Athens is of Kosmos asleep in the chair while Nabu kneels beside her, holding her hand.
‘The last Traveller just went on the wind.’ He whispers so as not to wake Kosmos. ‘Can’t you do the same?’
Can she? No. Hazel has the zephyrs’ secret names.
‘Deed,’ she manages.
Nabu frowns, then realises what she means. ‘I promise. I will stay. I’ll complete the Deed for you.’ He strokes her hair. ‘I’m your Caretaker, it’s why I’m here.’
She relaxes into the bed, embracing the dark that takes her from her body.
Did she manage to thank him out loud? If this is her end, at least she passed the mantle on, though it doesn’t feel like much now.
All those purpose-filled days, painted with rebels’ blood and philosophers’ smudge, ringing with debate in languages known and unknown—were they enough?
How can there be no more time left, when there’s still so much she could do?
A whisper emerges from the yawning dark: ‘I’m here. I have your keystone.’
A horizon of molten light interrupts Echo’s fall, her body caught by interwoven branches and roots.
Leaves tickle her face and floral perfumes scent the dreamscape.
Vines snake around her limbs, stilling her shakes.
Worms nibble her fingers and toes, gobbling her pain.
Maggots and fungal blooms devour her eyes, and seeds take root in her chest. The gentle denizens of the one are here to take her back. As it should be.
Whatever Hazel says is immaterial. Far louder are the lullabies of the chthonic gods, who so often gifted Echo the unjudging oblivion of dreams, and accept her surrender now so gently.
It is time to be reclaimed.