The Amber Seeker

by Mandy Haggith

  Because she was, she is, voluptuous. She is a genius of seduction. I have honestly never met anyone like her.

  The lyre player stopped and there were cheers and shouts for more music. Ussa turned her head to something the host said, and shrugged apparent agreement. She downed her drink and the fat man came and took her goblet. She pushed her bench back and joined the musician on the dais. She said something to the girl with the flute, who beamed and got up too. The beautiful youth, the rich man and the foppish lad all shifted around to watch the stage, where Ussa was making the musicians laugh. And then the drummer rolled his stick around the skin and Ussa finger-clicked them into a wickedly jaunty little song, simple as a child’s ditty, but performed – oh, how can I help you to imagine it? Let me just say she made every word of the lyrics seem to smoulder with sex. Into the simplest phrases she squeezed innuendos I would never have imagined possible. It was enthralling and yet at the same time embarrassing. I found myself breaking out into sweat and finishing my drink much too quickly. She looked around the room, her gaze licking into the faces of any man she could make eye-contact with, but at the most lewd of the lines her gaze seemed invariably to be cast in my direction. When I felt it settle on me, I experienced something I’d only ever heard and thought was just some cliché – that a look can make you feel as if you are being undressed. It was truly like that. Not so much her, as the way her lingering gaze on me made other people in the room turn their heads to see who it was that was getting so much of her attention. These smiles and envious glares were what made me feel naked and exposed. It was excruciating.

  Yet, strangely, when she looked away and clicked her fingers, or swung her hips or tossed her hair behind her, I wanted her to look my way again. Like I said, she is some kind of sorceress.

  I don’t remember clearly what ensued. She sang. I think the girl played her flute while she writhed. I remember she took her coat off so we could all be in no doubt about her charms. Then she stopped and bowed to the cheers and shook her head to calls for more. After she had conspired with our host and swatted away a few admirers she came over to me and I found myself being seduced. As another younger, thinner and scantier-clad woman took the floor to whistles from the crowd, Ussa applied herself to conquering me.

  To this day, she probably thinks she failed.

  It was a game with her, I saw that immediately. I like games. I like to play cat and mouse and it isn’t often that I get to be the mouse.

  ‘I’ll be completely honest,’ she said to me. ‘You’re not the most handsome man in the room, but you have something about you that is intriguing to me.’

  My gold perhaps. I liked the way she scrutinised me as if I was an object she was choosing for a collection.

  ‘And who is more handsome?’ I replied.

  She chuckled. ‘I do like men who are competitive.’

  We bantered like this for a while before I asked her whether this was her home.

  ‘I gave up the idea of home a long time ago. I am like a snail, only faster.’ She waited for me to laugh at her double meaning. ‘I carry my home with me. I wear it here, around my neck, on my hands.’ She thrust her ring-laden fingers towards me, glittering.

  ‘So you have no place of your own?’

  ‘What use is a place? A woman in her place is nothing unless she can influence others and for that she needs this.’ She tugged at her heaviest gold chain, pulling one strand so the other choked her neck and swinging the long loop like a weapon. I wondered then what cruelty she was capable of and I became a more cautious mouse.

  ‘So you travel a lot?’ I asked, with what I hoped was a voice of worship.

  ‘I travel constantly.’ She pulled the gold chain back to two even coils.

  ‘Not only singing, I assume.’

  ‘Not only singing, indeed. I supply people with the things they dream of and relieve them of their surpluses. I make everybody happy, most of all myself. And you? You travel too, clearly. You are most definitely not from these parts, not even known here. You look to me like a man on a journey.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And yet you speak our language. How is that?’

  ‘It is not my mother tongue, but my nurse was a Keltic speaker, so I grew up with it.’

  She touched my forearm with a finger. ‘So, tell me your mission. Perhaps I can help you to find what you’re dreaming for.’

  There was a part of her, I could see, that genuinely wanted to please people. With her claws withdrawn, she was a beautiful creature, one any pleasure-seeking mouse could not help but be drawn towards. So I told her I was seeking the heavy stone from which the magic came to enable the smiths to smelt bronze. I didn’t name it, because I know there can be taboos around such things.

  ‘You’re a seeker of magic.’ She smiled at me with approval. ‘How far will you go for it?’

  ‘To the ends of the earth.’ It sounded like a declaration and I knew as I said it that it was true. I am a scientist and I take my contributions to the Akademie seriously, but that is not to say I am not also romantic. I think many of us who strive for understanding and new knowledge are, at heart, adventurers. We are all mystics, one way or the other, delving into the mysteries at the edge of what is known, whether that is in the margins of mathematical treatises or on the fringes of our continents, or both.

  ‘The end of the earth is a treacherous place.’ She fingered her white coat, drawing my attention to it.

  ‘Is that from there?’

  She nodded. ‘This is the ice-bear’s coat. It is the most dangerous animal on our earth. It knows no fear, not like the bears of the forests, which hide and run from men. The ice-bear is a demon. Its hunger knows no bounds.’

  ‘And where does it live?’

  ‘It rules the North. It can swim as fast as a boat and can run on the frozen sea. In its dominion there is perpetual winter.’

  I pictured a frozen waste and wondered if that was my destination. ‘Is the heavy stone found there?’

  ‘The tin stone? Cassiterite. You can use its name with me, I’m not scared of it.’ She laughed at me. ‘That stuff washes up on the beaches near where I grew up. I could take you there. I’m sure my aunt and my cousins would be very pleased to meet you. They’ll sell you more cassiterite than you can carry. They’ll weigh you down so you can’t walk with all their heavy stones and fancy crystals.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My quest had hardly begun and here she was suggesting it could be completed by a visit to some old relative of hers. I was sceptical. She must simply be stringing me along, trying to get me interested in her. She was succeeding, however, so I decided to humour her.

  ‘And where is this place, where you grew up?’

  ‘Belerion.’ It wasn’t a name I knew. She saw my blank look and gestured north ‘It’s over the Channel. They call it the Land of the Goddess, but it’s too full of ghosts for my liking these days. However, if you’re after tin, you must go there.’

  ‘When you say over the Channel, where is that?’

  ‘The sea,’ she said, as if I was stupid. ‘I’m from Alba, the big land to the north.’

  ‘Alba,’ I repeated. It was a name from a myth. ‘So I am to visit Nesos Albionon, the island of Albion.’ I felt a thumping of excitement inside. Now my adventure was really beginning. ‘So it is not just a mythical place?’

  She hooted with laughter. ‘Pinch me!’ She rolled up her sleeve and offered me her arm. ‘Go on, sweetheart, press yourself to my flesh and verify that I am real! I’ll show you just how real we people of Albion, as you so quaintly call it, can be.’

  ‘And now I understand,’ I said, stroking her rose-painted cheek, ‘why the story calls you all Pretani, the painted people.’

  Of course she wanted to seduce me, and I resisted. I was a cunning little mouse. Instinct told me that if I succumbed to her she would lose interest in me, so I held out, and in her desire to conquer me she did exactly what I wanted. She invited me to sail with her to Albion.<
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  TO ALBION

  I killed time until Ussa was ready to travel onwards, exploring the area around Le Yaudet. It was an interesting place, with many stone stellae, which people told me were erected by ancestors long dead. They revered them and left offerings of milk beside them, similar to the way we offer libations to our gods.

  The weather was mild and I sauntered about. One man, seeing that I was interested in his stones, took me to see his house and an edifice underground that I now believe to have been some kind of sacred place. It was a kind of long, thin, corridor-cellar, and he pointed out where sacks of grain would be stored over winter. I mistakenly took it simply as a granary, dismissing his ramblings about ceremonies. I wish, given what I experienced later, that I had paid more attention to what he was trying to explain to me about how the people honour the spirits of the underworld in the season between one cycle of life and the next. That day, although the subterranean space was not damp, it was chilly and I wanted to be back out in the sunshine, watching people tending the fields where their grain was already sown, not wondering about how they made it through the winter.

  We set off early in the morning, a couple of days later. Back home it would have felt like spring, but the mild spell had turned to something that still felt like winter, and a raw wet cold sucked at my bones, as it did so often in the north. I followed Ussa to the harbour and she led the way down the wooden jetty to where her boat, Ròn, lay. It was nothing like the elegant merchant ships I was used to from our sea, nor like the magnificent Armorican wooden vessels I had sailed north on. It was a rugged affair, consisting of a lattice of strong oak timbers over a hull of animal hide, mostly open to the elements except for a hide shelter at the prow. I have to tell you I was sceptical that it was sea-worthy. I was wrong, of course.

  Ussa’s three slaves were already on board, along with all of her cargo. I also recognised the old sailor from the tavern, who introduced himself as Toma and, by the way he showed me the boat, was clearly its skipper. The crew was completed by a boy, Callum, who looked like a miniature version of its captain and never took his eyes off him.

  It was good sailing weather, Toma assured me. The wind was strong enough to make headway without being too wild, but it cuts through you. A wind on the open sea at those temperatures is life threatening. I had to put on all of my clothes and I swore that when I reached wherever we were going I was going to pay good gold for skin breeches like Toma’s and for something warmer to wear under my coat than the cloth garment I had brought with me. I saw even the slaves were dressed in woollen undershirts, with thick knitted tunics on top and skin coats with hoods over that. No slave in my experience had ever dressed so well, but this band of slaves Ussa travelled with, I came to realise, had to be able to withstand conditions the like of which, until that time, I had never even begun to imagine.

  There is so much to tell you about the sailing but I devote a whole chapter to that in my book, so you can read it there if you want the details. What I really want to tell you about next is where Ussa took me, my first sight of Albion, and my welcome from the Pritanike, the painted people.

  We sailed all day and I was a trembling shell of my usual self by the time we landed. I was soaked through: my fine leather coat was incapable of shielding me from the weather and the rain had penetrated to every inch of my skin. I was cold, miserable and barely able to take in what I was seeing, but I remember a pallid forest, hung with wispy lichens. It was dusk. Never have I been anywhere that conjured the atmosphere of Hades so well. Cloud billowed among the trees. Looking back out to sea, the sky merged into it in a swirl of grey, and out of the mist, beyond the beach, a hill rose up, conical. On it was a settlement they called Ictis.

  We disembarked on the beach, and I don’t know what they did with the boat. I was shivering and unhappy, and I had to endure some ridiculous process of questioning about what I was doing there by a woman in a long robe. All I wanted was dry clothes and warm food but her enquiries were about the purpose of my journey and the contents of my luggage. I don’t know how rude I was to her but eventually I was taken to a hut and given hot soup and a bed.

  I was ill for several days then, with a fever that was both awful and wonderful. I don’t know if you have ever experienced it but there is a kind of euphoria that a high fever brings. I was well cared for, Ussa was attentive to me, and I will remain grateful to the people of Belerion forever. They could have robbed me of every coin that I was carrying, yet my stash of gold was perfectly intact when I recovered myself enough to seek it, and my box of instruments had not been tampered with.

  Apart from their preliminary inquisition, they treated me with the utmost respect. They called themselves the Keepers and were mostly women, spiritual to the extreme I’d say, living a life of strange rituals governed by the moon and tides. It holds a special place in my memory, of course, for reasons I am sure you well understand. I wonder if Rian is still with them.

  Anyway, those kind people nursed me back to health and then I spent a happy time among the tin workers, learning some of their secrets and customs and discovering their land. I’m sure I barely scratched the surface of their mysteries but I will tell you what I learned.

  Tin, as you no doubt know, is needed for bronze, which is essential, on the one hand for the weaponry needed to conquer barbarian lands, and on the other for objects of beauty. If you have never seen its alchemy you should try to, although it is rare that you will find a smith who will share the secrets of his knowledge. Most will make out that there is only copper and magic involved. It is true that there is much that seems magical about it and so many arcane rituals that it has left me unsure whether it requires divine intervention, or whether in fact there is nothing else to it than the blending of two metals, no more magic than adding yeast to flour to make bread. Copper is the bulk, but tin is essential.

  I have been lucky: I gained the confidence of a smith. He was a magician for sure, but he respected my scientific work and he showed me the smelting process. I swore myself to secrecy of course, so you will not find his methods in my book, although I allude to what I learned and give as much away as I dare without breaching a sacred promise. But for all I know he will be dead by the time you read this, and I think the spirits will not begrudge me passing on this knowledge.

  A teardrop of shining tin will melt a whole heart of copper. You can stand a block of copper in the forge – the shape and size does not matter. It glows but does not melt. A dragon could breathe on it and it would not melt. It stands there as if fireproof, as if the crucible insulates it from the flames. Yet if you add a tiny drop of tin, what happens is extraordinary.

  If you get a chance to watch the tin work its magic in a crucible, grab it. Smiths are chancy people, and secretive, quite rightly. Don’t push them too far with your probing. And when they offer you the opportunity to see the alchemy, watch with both eyes wide, wide open, because it is one of nature’s wonders.

  The tin melts to a silvery drop in the base of the crucible and you can see it hungering for the other metal. The copper tries to resist, but the tin melts it from the bottom, as if it is sucking it down, sup, sup, sup, licking up the metal just above the surface of its pool, like a tide licking up the rocks on a shore. And the copper succumbs. It can resist the fire but it cannot resist the tin, just as a beating heart cannot resist the tears of a loved one. It melts down, it joins the tin, the tiny drop swallows the whole heart into itself and the result is bronze!

  Tin is precious and rare, found nowhere on the shores of the Great Sea, so we must import it and its sources are beyond our control. The trade route to the east through Anatolia originates high in the mountains of Balkh. It used to be secure but there are conflicts in that land and sometimes the supply dries up, as it did for the years before my journey. Smiths get nervous then, the price of tin rockets and even broken bits of old bronze are worth a fortune. Robbers have a field day, breaking into houses and armouries. It’s no recipe for a peaceful life, which is what we
need.

  There is another source, however, and when the price of eastern tin rose so high a few years ago, some of the traders began to come in with ingots of good quality, and of a strange shape like a knucklebone. The rumour mill ground away about where these ingots came from. The source, it turned out, was northern. They were coming along the Garonne River and the Consul made it known to me that there was a commission to be had for establishing where they were being found and smelted. It was a valuable commission and set my imagination alight, as a way to fund the journey I had always dreamed of, travelling to the edge of the earth, taking measurements to enable me to calculate its ultimate extent, perhaps even to resolve the arguments about the relationship between earth and heaven, or at least to better understand how land and sea and sky combine to make our world.

  Perhaps now you understand one of the gifts that I have given you – the bronze owl. It’s my dear Goddess Athena, in all her wisdom. She is waiting for you, waiting for all of us, to listen to her.

  *

  While I was recovering from my fever, one of Ussa’s slaves, a big friendly man called Og, said he would take me to find the source of tin, a heavy, heavy stone, cassiterite.

  Og didn’t seem to mind his situation. I guess there are many worse slave-owners than Ussa and he had a special role with her, more like a henchman than a slave, really. I sometimes wondered if he loved her. He was almost a body-guard to her at times.

  He took care of me with the Keepers, made sure I had everything I needed. When I was finally able to get out and about he walked the long beach with me, and told me what he knew about tin. He had come from a tin mining familyand he warned me that it would be hard to persuade a miner to reveal his secrets. The tin is found in stream beds throughout the land, and it washes up on the beaches sometimes, after a storm. I told him I wanted to see it, to watch people digging for it, and also to see them smelt it into the ingots that make their way to Massalia, to prove to myself that I understood the process whereby it is made. He agreed to take me to a place he knew, when I was strong enough. I was eager to go exploring with him.