The Amber Seeker

by Mandy Haggith

  ‘Do you know how amber is made?’ I said

  ‘It is not made.’

  I waited.

  ‘Where exactly are these people you will take the amber to?’

  I explained where our Great Sea is relative to her but she seemed not to comprehend. She was shaking her head. Perhaps she did not believe the distances involved.

  Then Og murmured something. The Greatmother snapped at Miki, who said, ‘Please repeat what you said.’ Miki stepped respectfully aside from where had stood between me and the old woman, partly blocking her view of Og. Now the Greatmother could see us both clearly. Her eyes were on Og.

  ‘He is a rich man.’

  She frowned, clearly nonplussed by this unsought-for judgement.

  ‘He is generous with his gold,’ Og went on, ‘if you tell him what he needs to know.’

  The Greatmother seemed to contemplate what Og had said. Silence billowed into the hall as we all waited for her to speak. But she said nothing, just sat watching us, her eyes switching between the two of us. I would indeed have been generous with my gold to know her thoughts. Og’s last words seemed to linger, smudged by the murmur of the translator, who eventually broke the pause with a question to the crone, who shook her head. Breaking out of her contemplation, she waved the wand around in the air and, finally, staring at me hard, spoke. ‘Your punishment will be the amber knowledge you seek.’

  She rose to her feet, in that creaking way an old person does after sitting a long time. She said a short phrase to Miki, then shuffled to a little lamp burning behind us, which I had not noticed before. She lit something smoky from it, and began creeping about the hall, wafting the fumes. It was resinous and pungent, and reminded me of the Artemis temple. I suddenly wanted to tell her all I could about the ceremonies they held there, but I dared not speak. She was in the midst of some ritual, murmuring to herself. She made a point of smoking me thoroughly, waving the smouldering pot in front of my face, then blowing on me as if to be sure that I was clean. She treated Og similarly, then bowed to all four cardinal points, before stubbing out the fire, putting the pot down on her chair and leaving the hall without a further word to either of us.

  TRAPPED

  IN THE VILLAGE

  Miki turned, smiled, and said, ‘Food! Follow me.’

  We traipsed out and over to a round building where smoke and food smells welcomed us. We were presented with bowls of porridge by the same two women who had been at the flowers earlier. I realised I was indeed ravenous and tired, almost trembling with fatigue. We ate, then one of the women, seeing my yawn, showed me a pallet at the far side of the fire close to the wall, and gave me a blanket. I curled up and slept. My last memory was Og’s voice telling Miki about his beloved homeland.

  When I woke the fire was out, everything was quiet. I was the only person in the building.

  I was thirsty and needed to urinate. I got up and went looking for water. Outside it was raining. I relieved myself by the side of the building, and was spotted by one of the women, who took me to a smaller hut. I mimed drinking, and she gave me a beaker of a disgusting, sweet milky substance. I did not know how to ask for mere water. I tried to indicate it by pointing to the rain, but she failed to understand me. I sipped the foul paste and then sat the beaker where the drip from the eaves could rinse it and gather what I needed. She seemed amused and left me alone. I hoped she would return with bread. I was ravenous again. The whole time I was in that place, on the amber shore, I was hungry. Those people seemed to live on air, or expect me to. I was thin as a reed by the time I left there.

  I sat in the doorway of the miserable little hovel I’d been taken to, looking out into the rain. Pigs rootled about, making the mud worse. Pork is tasty, but it is not worth the mess pigs make, I don’t think. Cows can be nearly as bad of course, although they’re more useful, and they have a good smell. One of the pigs was friendly and it came to me to be scratched. It looked at me with its almost-human eyes as if to tell me it knew something I did not yet know, but would soon find out.

  Og was wandering about, aimlessly, it seemed, and he came over and talked to me about his freedom and what he might do now. He asked my advice, seemed at a loss, unsure, after so many years of following another’s whims, of how to go forwards under his own command. I asked him what he wanted and he said, ‘A home.’ Where would he make it? Would he go to the tin-mining village he had taken me to? ‘Maybe.’ He seemed so unsure. ‘I could go anywhere.’

  ‘Start there,’ I advised him. He seemed pleased to be told what to do, and nodded and went away. I saw him talking with Toma, but the other slaves appeared to shun him. I foresaw that he would be lonely.

  Suddenly, into the quiet morning, screams erupted from one of the other small huts. Blood-clotting howls that froze me where I crouched and made me want to hide further back in the shadows, or simply to run away. In retrospect I should have done the latter, but instead I watched with a horrified fascination.

  Women came and went from the hut. I saw Og try to investigate and be turned away. I went over to talk to him but I was also led away, asked politely with gestures to return to the place I had been assigned. It was like being sent back to a sty. I was brought a fleece to cover the wooden bench which was the only furniture in my hut. A thin, silent lad stood watching me for a while, before giving me some bread. Then Li came with my sleeping roll, writing box and gnomon from the boat. I asked him what was happening but he wouldn’t stay to talk. I ate the bread, washed down with rainwater I had gathered in the beaker from the roof, and continued watching from the doorway. I saw the Greatmother leave the hut of screams, and then she sent the bread-boy and Miki over to me.

  ‘Follow the boy, Arald. He will take you to see what you want to see,’ Miki said.

  Arald was a shy, lanky youth. He made an attempt at conversation but soon realised I did not speak his language. This seemed to suit him. We set out in the drizzle, through the village fence, down to the long beach and along the shore southwards. When we crossed a stream that ran across the sand, I drank my fill. We clambered up onto the dunes, then onto a stronger trail across a headland to another bay where a river poured out into the sea. Was this the Eridanus River of the fables? On this side of it was another long sandy beach where we began to look for amber. Arald spotted a piece almost immediately and offered it to me. It took us a while to find another, and once again it was the boy’s sharp eyes that spotted it. Before long we had three pieces, one quite substantial. I wanted to know if it came down the river or out of the sea, but Arald nodded and smiled at everything I asked him, understanding nothing.

  By the afternoon, he was getting restless and we returned to the village. As we came over the brow of the headland into view of the beach close to the village, I saw that Ròn had gone. I looked out to sea. There she was, sail up, heading away. They had left me behind, and taken my tin! My chest tightened with fury. I started shouting, swearing, I don’t know what I was saying. I stamped my feet. I ran into the sea and back out again. I thought I would lose my mind. The boy ran away, scared.

  Eventually, as the boat vanished over the horizon, I calmed down. There was nothing I could do. I was, once again, entirely on my own. I would have to use my wit to complete my voyage.

  The screams, I can tell you now, were from Ussa, as the Greatmother cut her eye out. I spent a lot of time with the Greatmother and I got to know her rather well, and I want to assume she took out Ussa’s eye because it was so damaged it could not be healed. But I can’t be sure. She is capable of terrifying strength when she is judging people, as I know to my cost. She has a ruthless thread like iron that runs through the fabric of her soul. Perhaps it was a punishment. I’ll never know.

  WALKING ON THE SPOT

  After I was abandoned, my journey changed. At first I hoped each day a boat would pull up on the shore, but as luck would have it, when one eventually did, I missed it. I was on an amber-gathering expedition to the south, and when I got back to the beach I saw a ship at t
he far end and started running, but by the time I got close the vessel was already heading back out to sea, a strong crew of twelve men at the oars. How I cursed and fumed.

  Several weeks passed before the next seaworthy boat came. There were boats plying in and out from the shore, of course, and some fishing, but only light craft that were not capable of weathering a storm. The people from the village never seemed to go anywhere else. Why should they? They had everything they needed right where they were, but people came to them for amber and to trade from time to time, and I pinned my hopes of getting away with them.

  The next boat came late one evening, and the crew hauled it ashore on the high tide and stayed in the village overnight. I do not know whether they were judged like us. Possibly. I tried to ask for passage with them when I eventually got close to them as they were eating, but they refused any offer. No gold, no amber was enough to persuade them to take me. I guessed the Greatmother told them things about me that put them off. I was effectively her prisoner, her slave, although it took me a while to see it that way.

  I’ve already said I became thin while on the amber coast. I never adjusted to their food and during that winter I was always cold and damp and got sick frequently. They do something disgusting to fish that makes it almost inedible to my taste and their bread is hard, dark and heavy on the stomach. I did not eat meat for the whole time I was there except for a handful of occasions, when everyone feasted: the winter solstice, a celebration of spring, a harvest festival. They have fat cattle and pigs, but I swear their dogs got more meat than I did. I don’t count the strange grisly sausages they made, smoked until they stank. If it were not for the cheese I swear I would have starved to death. Those big cows yielded plenty of milk and although much of what they made with it was a rough, bitter curd, there was a woman called Uine who made delicious cheese. She and her husband Don, a mild fisherman, tolerated me. They were the closest I had to friends there, apart from the boy Arald. He was an odd, obsessive little creature, not quite normal, somehow, too clever and single-minded to play with other youths. The pair of us lived in our huts on the fringe of the village, shunned by most of the community, not quite ostracised but never treated like real people.

  Meanwhile, I learned their language and gathered amber on the river outfalls and along the beaches. I became skilled in spotting it and Arald seemed to like my company. We invariably returned with a few pieces. At first I tried to keep them to myself but I swear the Greatmother can smell amber if you have it on you. She sniffs it out of any hiding place and uses the threat of the bears to ensure it is handed over. I learned to show her everything I found and she said that once I had paid my due, whatever that meant, she would let me keep some of it. I reconciled myself to this. They had given me the use of the little hut, they fed me and I had few useful skills to offer. I could have paid them gold but a share of the amber seemed a fair exchange. The rest would make me rich on my return home. I hoped, always, to learn more about its original source and more of its mysteries, but although I gathered hundreds of pieces, I made no new discoveries.

  I learned their language largely so that the old woman might let me into some of her many secrets. Rather than her prisoner, I wished to be her student, but she was a reluctant teacher; even when I had reasonable mastery of their tongue and knew the shape of their land, from many expeditions across the bogs behind the coast, along the shore and up the meandering river inland, she never let her knowledge come my way.

  I tried to interest her in my scientific work. I took a gnomon measurement on a sunny day soon after I arrived. It was sixty-four days after the summer solstice and when I adjusted for this, I calculated that the sun height was around six cubits. I deduced that we were a similar distance north to the island of Monopia, on the west coast of Albion, where I had taken a shadow-reading on my journey north from Belerion.

  I asked the Greatmother for an audience and intended to tell her about my method for calculating our relative position. She saw me in the Bear Hall. She was sitting on her big chair and indicated that I should sit on the floor in front of her. I said I wouldn’t be able to show her how I did my measurements if I wasn’t standing. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  I showed her my staff. ‘This is my gnomon. I use it to measure the height of the sun in the sky.’

  She reached out with both hands and snatched it from me, then scrutinised the engravings from top to bottom. ‘What is this?’

  It was one of the dolphins. ‘A symbol of the god who looks after sailors, Apollo.’

  ‘There is no such god. This?’

  It was an owl. ‘Another symbol. This is of the goddess Athena, the wise one.’

  ‘There is no owl goddess. If you were not so stupid I would think you dangerous.’ She showed no sign of wanting to give me back my gnomon.

  I stepped forward and took it from her. She sat back in her chair as if I had hit her. I started to talk about my method for measuring shadows but she simply turned her head away from me and said, ‘Go.’

  ‘But this is useful. It would be useful for you. You could measure distances more accurately. For example, when you need to take amber to trade at Abalus.’

  ‘What do you know of Abalus?’

  ‘Very little. Just what I have heard people here saying, that amber from this coast is taken there to exchange for bronze.’

  She seemed completely uninterested in the possibilities of improved knowledge of the world, simply flicking her fingers at me in dismissal.

  I went to find Arald. But he simply laughed at the very idea of measuring shadows. The rest of the villagers treated me as if I had a stupid, if harmless, obsession.

  I am always surprised by how few people have interest in understanding the world beyond their immediate horizons, but at that time, with no-one to talk with about navigation or cosmology or geography, I began to wonder if I was on my way to madness. I became desperate to return to the sea, to continue my survey of this northern land, to work out how far exactly this place was from a port reachable by future traders from my homeland. I had reached the location where amber came from, even if I was still no clearer on how it came to exist, so to that extent my quest was almost complete. All that remained was to find out where this place was in relation to the rest of the known world, to chart its distance from Albion, for example. I also wanted to learn more about its geography. What was the extent of this amber coast? Where was the island of Abalus, which Uine had let slip was the market place? Were there navigable rivers going south that may act as trade routes? I could only find out by going there. And meanwhile, I longed to know more about the origins of the electrum I gathered almost daily.

  In spring a ship made of planks arrived, rowed by a gang of rough-looking men, so I told Arald I would not join him that day. My hopes lifted that I might be able to travel away with them. One of their party came ashore with his hands tied behind his back, and he and three others were taken to the Bear Hall. He was carried out dead a little while later. The men took him to the beach, built a bonfire of driftwood, got out several flagons of some kind of liquid from their boat and proceeded to get blind drunk while they burnt the body. They sang and danced in a frenzy, while the Greatmother and several other villagers kept watch over them. They also kept me away.

  Although I asked what was happening no-one would give me any kind of explanation. I tried to get close enough to address the men directly but the villagers repeatedly dragged me away. This was the day I realised I was no longer free to leave. If I had been stronger I might have acted differently, but I still hungered after knowledge of amber’s mysteries. I found it impossible to give up hope that the Greatmother’s promises would come to something, and I tried to live within the bounds of the situation I found myself in.

  I began to feel like the bears. Mostly they were imprisoned, but sometimes the Greatmother paraded them around the village on leashes. At the harvest festival, in a ceremony that I watched from the margin
s, the dark, pacing bear was killed, whether by accident or not, I never quite understood. It had always been demented, I thought. Perhaps death was a release. If the bears felt anything like I did about life there, I pitied them.

  Every day, after hours spent scouring the beaches for little orange stones, I would go down to the shore and stare out into the distance, trying to will a ship into existence that could take me away. I thought longingly of my stash of tin in Ussa’s hold. I became very miserable and struggled to retain a sense of who I was. Although I tried to treat it as an opportunity to become familiar with the northern sky, tracking the stars over the months as they rotated around the celestial sphere, this intellectual activity could not fully satisfy me. I made ink from oak galls when my supply ran low and wrote in increasingly tiny letters to try to keep myself company. I was a misfit. Perhaps I always was, still am, always will be. It is enough to say I learned the art of loneliness in the amber land. If it weren’t for Arald I would have been utterly alone.

  Arald might have been my friend, but one day I discovered he was a thief. He stole my gnomon. I had been doing some work for Uine and Don and when I came back I noticed it was missing. I had a habit of strolling out early in the morning to the high point on the headland to see if I could see any boats, and to gauge the weather as best I could. I always took the pole as a walking stick. I like the feel of its engravings under my fingers. Over time, I have worn them almost away where I hold it. Anyway, it was missing. I knew I’d had it with me during the daytime the day before, and I knew Arald admired it.

  When I challenged him, he admitted right away that he’d taken it. He had the awkward, newly deep voice of puberty even though he was quite a big young man. ‘I need it for my wedding.’

  ‘You’re getting married?’ I was amazed. ‘Who to?’