Excerpt from Ayşe's Trail
(Day One, Ayşe first slips into the ancient past)
Ayşe found a usable boulder to sit on – a boulder no doubt chiselled by a Lycian artisan two millennia prior. It was a stone which by chance or design lay at the edge of a tomb. She dusted its surface down with her fingers and then folded a sarong and placed it on the top. Then, she took out a bottle of water and washed her hands. Finally, she perched on the grey slab.
Shadows yawned in the ancient arches, and a light breeze picked up, whispering over the stones, making the bushes skittish. Lycia. Every rock has had the hands of ancestors on it. Every track has been trodden by ghosts. There’s so much past lying about, people are tripping over it. Myths ooze out of the crevices. Yesteryear pushes through the cracks. The light drained away. The air thickened darkly in the temple remains. Ayşe was impervious to the gloom. She stared out over the valley, over the clandestine neighbourhoods of backpacker shacks. Lights flicked on one by one. They turned the pine thickets and citrus groves into a forty-watt wonderland, a land throbbing gently to a reggae beat.
She closed her eyes and left her thoughts for a moment. The ancient hulk of rock pulsed gently beneath. Warm from a day of sun-lounging, it was now pumping its heat back into her. She wondered what else it had absorbed as the centuries had rolled through it. A lump of limestone. A bunch of molecules. A city of atoms. A universe of quarks and bosons. She wondered what was absorbed now as she laid her hands on the hard, craggy skin feeling something palpable move between them. It doesn’t take much to sense life flowing. Just a little awareness. A little quiet. A little care.
The lights fell away. Bob Marley petered out. The backpackers gathering expectantly about the trays of aubergine and spinach below turned translucent and disappeared. Two-and-a-half thousand years deep in those rocks, other lives were being lived. Other paths walked. Other choices made. As night enveloped the valley, the ancient city stirred.
***
Olympos 545 BC
‘The Persians are coming!’ the boy hollered. He stood in the middle of the small square spluttering. His face had turned the colour of a ripe plum.
Stall holders stopped mid-haggle, children stopped mid-whine, and beggar boys stopped mid-fig-theft. Even the donkeys and goats thought twice before defecating on the flagstones. The town’s agora had become so quiet you could hear an oregano stalk drop. A crowd of Lycians, fish, figs, and milk perched precariously in their arms, had all turned to stare at the stringy, rat-haired lad. He was puffing and wheezing, his eyes bloodshot from the strain.
‘The Persians . . . they’ve got Xanthos . . . they’re coming!’
An older man strode forward. Not many realised, but even two-and-a-half thousand years before, the Olympians still looked like 1970s rock stars. It was one of the many temporal anomalies the valley was subject to. The man’s crown was bald, but a long silvery mane edged about the hairless circle like rays around a full moon. His purple robe was finely tailored. The hem almost dragged on the steps as he climbed up to the square to meet the adolescent. Milky columns lined the agora, their chiselled ridges running in dark lines the length of their pure white bodies.
‘Are you sure, absolutely sure?’
The boy blinked. ‘Harpagos. He’s . . . he’s in Phoenicus already. I saw him.’
A murmur of horror spread through the crowd. General Harpagos, commander of the Persian forces. His name had been whispered the length of the Lycian coast for weeks now. He was infamous. Unstoppable. Even the largest, state-of-the-art fortresses collapsed like rattletrap goat sheds in the face of his army.
‘You saw him? You actually saw Harpagos?’ The nobleman Licinius stared intently at the boy. He was thirteen years old but his skinny frame made him look younger. The lad nodded solemnly. His small mouth was puckered like a walnut as he peered up. It was the face of a child. He didn’t even have the fluff of adolescence yet.
‘Good grief! Well, what did he look like, then?’
‘Like a rock.’
‘A rock? What kind of rock?’
‘One of those big, flat rocks at the side of the river with the grumpy faces.’
Licinius screwed down the front of his eyebrows. The bridge of his bulbous nose splintered into wrinkles. He let out a quiet sigh. The boy thought everyone looked like a rock. He was obsessed with them.
‘Apart from his rockiness, can you tell us anything else? Try to describe his face.’
The boy pushed his irises up under his lids and thought for a moment.
‘It was hairy with a big pine cone nose in the middle. And his mouth went down at the ends like this . . .’ The boy put a grubby index finger into each mouth corner and pulled downwards until he bore the same expression as a tragedy mask.
The leader of Olympos lowered his head. He was a thoughtful man, not prone to acts of wild impetuosity. But, it didn’t get any worse than this. He had to speak. He turned to the on-looking crowd. Very slowly and deliberately, he addressed the dumbfounded citizens of Olympos.
‘It is as we feared, Lycia has fallen to Persia!’
The words fell onto the stones of the town in cold, hard spatters. Licinius gathered his robe about him. The lad noticed the chief’s hand tremble as he fumbled with the folds. Lycia had never, since he or his mother or his mother’s mother had been alive, belonged to anyone but herself. The Olympian nobleman stared out blankly. He wasn’t sure if he believed in the end of time, but if there were such a thing, this could well be it.
Resting his hand on the smooth curve of a column, he looked up to the necropolis, to the beds of the ancestors. Then he turned to the crowd one more time. ‘Go home. Everyone go home and get ready. Proceed as we have arranged.’
Slowly, reluctantly, the women and men of Olympos trailed out of the town square, a murmuring river of distress.
Licinius walked too. He stumbled over the large, smooth stones to the outskirts of his small precinct. And as he walked he lamented. The Persians, the hordes from the East with their despotic monarchs and their arbitrary barbarism, had finally breeched his beloved Lycia. Keeping the Greeks out of their hair had been work enough, at least the Athenians feigned democracy. But the fire-worshipping Persians? And that land-hungry maniac, Harpagos? It was the end of civilisation as they knew it. Probably the end of the world.
Huffing slightly, the leader increased his stride. His feet slipped in the tan leather straps of his sandals as he clambered clumsily up the hillside. He pushed heavily at the rocky steps in the earth. The necropolis. All about him, white stone shone in the dusk like the surface of the moon. The graves lay quiet. Silent. They showed no trace of the impending disaster, no sign of the chaos building on the horizon. They slept as though the future of Lycia was already assured.
The nobleman turned to look at his home. Everywhere he saw busy rivulets of humanity hurrying into their houses. Grief moved over his heart like a dark cloud. He hesitated for a moment. Only a moment. Then he knelt and prayed. Now, Licinius didn’t pray to the almighty king of the gods, Zeus. Nor did he pray to Athena, Apollo or any of the great names in the Olympian Gods-sphere. The Lycians never did anything like their neighbours. The deity he called out to was a little-known slip of a divinity called Leto. The goddess of Lycia.
‘Mother, where are you?’ he whispered. The tombs said nothing. The mouths of the stone slab caskets remained closed, and Licinius stayed on his knees. He screwed his fists closed and then stretched them open. Once. Twice. Three times.
‘What do I do? You who have walked these mountains a thousand times, help us.’ Still there was silence. Nothing moved, not even the sprigs of sage sprouting from between the rocks. The crickets had become quiet too. Everything was waiting for an answer. Even the dead. Licinius stretched out his hand and touched the flat surface of the tombstone in front of him. It was rough, but surprisingly warm, as if there was a heart and blood inside. The sensation of the stone calmed him. It was solid and refreshingly steadfast. It was then he became aware of two words circulating in his head. They were quiet yet persistent.
‘Move on.’
The nobleman lowered his eyes. He nodded. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but it was the truth. The citizens of Olympos would have to abandon their beautiful city and take to the hills. They were refugees. Licinius’ hand was still palm-down on the rock. ‘So be it,’ he said. He paused. A heaviness filled the necropolis. It felt as though the graves were sinking under the weight of the future, a future even Leto couldn’t lift. Licinius took a deep breath and turned his head to the sky. Then he shouted into the darkness, ‘But walk with us!’
His voice reverberated through the valley. Walk with us, walk with us . . . with us . . . us. Such was the force of those words, such was the emotion pulsating through them, as the sounds hit the rocks they impregnated them. Their meaning drove farther and deeper than the meaning of any words spoken there before or since.
As night sank its teeth into the valley, the huge, fir covered mountains were swallowed into the pitch. Before anyone so much as blinked, the ancients were gone.
Ayşe found a usable boulder to sit on – a boulder no doubt chiselled by a Lycian artisan two millennia prior. It was a stone which by chance or design lay at the edge of a tomb. She dusted its surface down with her fingers and then folded a sarong and placed it on the top. Then, she took out a bottle of water and washed her hands. Finally, she perched on the grey slab.
Shadows yawned in the ancient arches, and a light breeze picked up, whispering over the stones, making the bushes skittish. Lycia. Every rock has had the hands of ancestors on it. Every track has been trodden by ghosts. There’s so much past lying about, people are tripping over it. Myths ooze out of the crevices. Yesteryear pushes through the cracks. The light drained away. The air thickened darkly in the temple remains. Ayşe was impervious to the gloom. She stared out over the valley, over the clandestine neighbourhoods of backpacker shacks. Lights flicked on one by one. They turned the pine thickets and citrus groves into a forty-watt wonderland, a land throbbing gently to a reggae beat.
She closed her eyes and left her thoughts for a moment. The ancient hulk of rock pulsed gently beneath. Warm from a day of sun-lounging, it was now pumping its heat back into her. She wondered what else it had absorbed as the centuries had rolled through it. A lump of limestone. A bunch of molecules. A city of atoms. A universe of quarks and bosons. She wondered what was absorbed now as she laid her hands on the hard, craggy skin feeling something palpable move between them. It doesn’t take much to sense life flowing. Just a little awareness. A little quiet. A little care.
The lights fell away. Bob Marley petered out. The backpackers gathering expectantly about the trays of aubergine and spinach below turned translucent and disappeared. Two-and-a-half thousand years deep in those rocks, other lives were being lived. Other paths walked. Other choices made. As night enveloped the valley, the ancient city stirred.
***
Olympos 545 BC
‘The Persians are coming!’ the boy hollered. He stood in the middle of the small square spluttering. His face had turned the colour of a ripe plum.
Stall holders stopped mid-haggle, children stopped mid-whine, and beggar boys stopped mid-fig-theft. Even the donkeys and goats thought twice before defecating on the flagstones. The town’s agora had become so quiet you could hear an oregano stalk drop. A crowd of Lycians, fish, figs, and milk perched precariously in their arms, had all turned to stare at the stringy, rat-haired lad. He was puffing and wheezing, his eyes bloodshot from the strain.
‘The Persians . . . they’ve got Xanthos . . . they’re coming!’
An older man strode forward. Not many realised, but even two-and-a-half thousand years before, the Olympians still looked like 1970s rock stars. It was one of the many temporal anomalies the valley was subject to. The man’s crown was bald, but a long silvery mane edged about the hairless circle like rays around a full moon. His purple robe was finely tailored. The hem almost dragged on the steps as he climbed up to the square to meet the adolescent. Milky columns lined the agora, their chiselled ridges running in dark lines the length of their pure white bodies.
‘Are you sure, absolutely sure?’
The boy blinked. ‘Harpagos. He’s . . . he’s in Phoenicus already. I saw him.’
A murmur of horror spread through the crowd. General Harpagos, commander of the Persian forces. His name had been whispered the length of the Lycian coast for weeks now. He was infamous. Unstoppable. Even the largest, state-of-the-art fortresses collapsed like rattletrap goat sheds in the face of his army.
‘You saw him? You actually saw Harpagos?’ The nobleman Licinius stared intently at the boy. He was thirteen years old but his skinny frame made him look younger. The lad nodded solemnly. His small mouth was puckered like a walnut as he peered up. It was the face of a child. He didn’t even have the fluff of adolescence yet.
‘Good grief! Well, what did he look like, then?’
‘Like a rock.’
‘A rock? What kind of rock?’
‘One of those big, flat rocks at the side of the river with the grumpy faces.’
Licinius screwed down the front of his eyebrows. The bridge of his bulbous nose splintered into wrinkles. He let out a quiet sigh. The boy thought everyone looked like a rock. He was obsessed with them.
‘Apart from his rockiness, can you tell us anything else? Try to describe his face.’
The boy pushed his irises up under his lids and thought for a moment.
‘It was hairy with a big pine cone nose in the middle. And his mouth went down at the ends like this . . .’ The boy put a grubby index finger into each mouth corner and pulled downwards until he bore the same expression as a tragedy mask.
The leader of Olympos lowered his head. He was a thoughtful man, not prone to acts of wild impetuosity. But, it didn’t get any worse than this. He had to speak. He turned to the on-looking crowd. Very slowly and deliberately, he addressed the dumbfounded citizens of Olympos.
‘It is as we feared, Lycia has fallen to Persia!’
The words fell onto the stones of the town in cold, hard spatters. Licinius gathered his robe about him. The lad noticed the chief’s hand tremble as he fumbled with the folds. Lycia had never, since he or his mother or his mother’s mother had been alive, belonged to anyone but herself. The Olympian nobleman stared out blankly. He wasn’t sure if he believed in the end of time, but if there were such a thing, this could well be it.
Resting his hand on the smooth curve of a column, he looked up to the necropolis, to the beds of the ancestors. Then he turned to the crowd one more time. ‘Go home. Everyone go home and get ready. Proceed as we have arranged.’
Slowly, reluctantly, the women and men of Olympos trailed out of the town square, a murmuring river of distress.
Licinius walked too. He stumbled over the large, smooth stones to the outskirts of his small precinct. And as he walked he lamented. The Persians, the hordes from the East with their despotic monarchs and their arbitrary barbarism, had finally breeched his beloved Lycia. Keeping the Greeks out of their hair had been work enough, at least the Athenians feigned democracy. But the fire-worshipping Persians? And that land-hungry maniac, Harpagos? It was the end of civilisation as they knew it. Probably the end of the world.
Huffing slightly, the leader increased his stride. His feet slipped in the tan leather straps of his sandals as he clambered clumsily up the hillside. He pushed heavily at the rocky steps in the earth. The necropolis. All about him, white stone shone in the dusk like the surface of the moon. The graves lay quiet. Silent. They showed no trace of the impending disaster, no sign of the chaos building on the horizon. They slept as though the future of Lycia was already assured.
The nobleman turned to look at his home. Everywhere he saw busy rivulets of humanity hurrying into their houses. Grief moved over his heart like a dark cloud. He hesitated for a moment. Only a moment. Then he knelt and prayed. Now, Licinius didn’t pray to the almighty king of the gods, Zeus. Nor did he pray to Athena, Apollo or any of the great names in the Olympian Gods-sphere. The Lycians never did anything like their neighbours. The deity he called out to was a little-known slip of a divinity called Leto. The goddess of Lycia.
‘Mother, where are you?’ he whispered. The tombs said nothing. The mouths of the stone slab caskets remained closed, and Licinius stayed on his knees. He screwed his fists closed and then stretched them open. Once. Twice. Three times.
‘What do I do? You who have walked these mountains a thousand times, help us.’ Still there was silence. Nothing moved, not even the sprigs of sage sprouting from between the rocks. The crickets had become quiet too. Everything was waiting for an answer. Even the dead. Licinius stretched out his hand and touched the flat surface of the tombstone in front of him. It was rough, but surprisingly warm, as if there was a heart and blood inside. The sensation of the stone calmed him. It was solid and refreshingly steadfast. It was then he became aware of two words circulating in his head. They were quiet yet persistent.
‘Move on.’
The nobleman lowered his eyes. He nodded. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but it was the truth. The citizens of Olympos would have to abandon their beautiful city and take to the hills. They were refugees. Licinius’ hand was still palm-down on the rock. ‘So be it,’ he said. He paused. A heaviness filled the necropolis. It felt as though the graves were sinking under the weight of the future, a future even Leto couldn’t lift. Licinius took a deep breath and turned his head to the sky. Then he shouted into the darkness, ‘But walk with us!’
His voice reverberated through the valley. Walk with us, walk with us . . . with us . . . us. Such was the force of those words, such was the emotion pulsating through them, as the sounds hit the rocks they impregnated them. Their meaning drove farther and deeper than the meaning of any words spoken there before or since.
As night sank its teeth into the valley, the huge, fir covered mountains were swallowed into the pitch. Before anyone so much as blinked, the ancients were gone.
