The Amber Seeker

by Mandy Haggith

  After a while, Ishbel placed another hot mug of sweetness into my hands. I supped it, drinking in the sounds from below, bathed in moonlight and steam. I allowed a honey glow to smile from my belly to my face. I knew then that I was the luckiest man alive, to share in such a mystery, to be granted this place I inhabit upon the edge of our society, exploring the margins of the world, granted the chance to go over and back. I did not want to cross too soon again. It left me with a healthy respect for the infinite darkness that lies beyond the small pool of light we dwell within. I know I shall go there permanently one day, and I also realised that night that part of me is there already, perhaps that is where we go in sleep, to re-join the subterranean part of ourselves, our under-minds, where all our urges and anxieties hide. For that hour, or however long it was I sat there, it was all exposed. All my desires spoke. All my fears stood, disarmed. I knew myself.

  Later, the waves of the soul closed over everything again. I’ve never experienced that absolute clarity of spirit since, but I gained something lasting that day. I knew myself. It was the greatest gift I have ever been given. Until that day I was making my journey in order to take back to Massalia the secrets of the north and thereby become rich and gain the status of councillor. I was going out in order to get in – into the elite that is. But that night in Brigid’s Land I realised there was really no need to take anything home, and that no amount of formal status would satisfy me if I was not already satisfied by my own discoveries. To return was still there as an aim, of course – it was my intention, shall we say. And to return with gifts and revelations – that was something I had in mind to do as well. But these were no longer the centre of my purpose. The journey had become its own end.

  Looking back on it, I think this was the start of a process in which I came to realise that all people and perhaps even all objects have an intrinsic value, and we do wrong when we treat them as merely means to an end. But that realisation, as you will soon learn, had yet to take shape in my mind.

  I was there, in Brigid’s Land, listening to the music of the underworld given voice by the strings of a lyre and by a kind and undemanding woman who had offered me this gift for nothing, for no reason I fully understood, simply recognising in me my need for passage over an edge within myself. I was there, sitting on a chilly step, back in this world after an indescribable and essential journey into a world beyond normal reach. By being given the chance to gain that place it was as if I had been forced to let go of a support I had been clinging to without realising it – my ambition, if you will – and I found myself walking hands free, upright and strong. I was rid of the burden of ultimate purpose. I was here. I was free.

  It left me in a state of unrefracted joy for quite some time that night. I was still in that state, now I look back on it, when I first encountered Rian. You might say, if you were fanciful, and I do not know if you are or not, that I was being purified by the gods, or by the spirits of that wild and beautiful place, to meet her. Or you might say it was all just a long string of coincidences. I cannot tell. From inside my own story it has always seemed to make perfect sense, while being, when I think hard about it, completely incomprehensible.

  I conceive it as a moment when a tide turned inside me. There’s a long chapter in my book, On the Ocean, about tides. It includes all my measurements and the work I did over the course of my journey to verify my theory. I already had a good idea of how they worked before I got to Brigid’s Land but I had one of several conversations there that made me understand their rhythms more deeply.

  It was after Seonag came up out of the cave. She was radiant in that robe of sun, her eyes huge and dark, carrying the wooden lyre cradled in her arms like a baby.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Happy,’ I said. ‘Happier than I have ever been. My soul is clean.’

  She smiled at me and bowed deeply at the cloud-furled moon. ‘Thanks to the moon. She will set soon enough. Another day. Moon rhythm, sun rhythm. All of life, coming and going. It is all tidal: bleeding, birthing, sleeping, ageing.’

  I asked what she meant. She saw rhythms everywhere, linked to phases of the moon, the dances of the white goddess as she described it… What she said has transformed how I think about tides. How sad it is that when I attempt to discuss this with my fellow countrymen I am met only with scoffs and jeers.

  ‘Each day and night, we begin asleep, we wake, we live out our bodily functions of eating and moving, and then we sleep again. Meanwhile the tide goes out and in, twice. Many of us sleep in the middle of the day as well, allowing the tide of our thoughts to go out twice, as the watery tide does. Each month the moon waxes and wanes and so does a woman’s womb, but just as there are two tidal fluxes for each full day-night cycle, so there are two tidal fluxes with each moon. At both full and new moon, the high tide is high, the low tide is low, its range is maximum. Between them, on the half moons, the range is modest enough. We have words for this. We call the big tides ‘springs’ and the small tides ‘neaps’.’ That’s what she said.

  She also told me something I have been unable to verify, which is that the northern ivory, which comes from the tusks of the great sea-creature called walrus, is also linked to the moon and tides. The animal has two tusks, one of which represents the waning moon, while the other is in the waxing mode. An amulet made with one will increase the influence of the thing it represents, but if made with the other it will reduce its power. So if you want to be kept safe from the danger of a bear, you should make an amulet in its form from the waning tusk, whereas if you want a boat to sail well, you should make a little ivory ship from a waxing tusk. She pulled a necklace out from inside her clothes – it was made of polished ivory beads. ‘This is pure waxing moon,’ she said. ‘I wear it next to my skin so her influence is always strong in me. But with or without such a thing, we all ebb and flow with her.’

  People here mock me for the assertion that the moon influences the tides. I am sorely challenged to produce an adequate proof and I am the first to admit that there is much about tides that I cannot explain. There are places I have been to around the coast of Albion where the tidal range is as much as 30 podes. I have seen it with my own eyes: huge areas of flat land dry out and are inundated twice each day. In narrow channels, the force of the tidal water runs in and out like river rapids, as fast as a trireme with full crew. Narrow passages between islands can be filled with swirling water and even out at sea a tidal flow can stop a boat dead with the wind behind it. No doubt the gods play with these forces, but there is also a regularity about them that has its own power. Surely their mystery is open to analysis.

  I am entranced by the fundamental tidal rhythm, the swelling to a cusp, then the slide out to a minimum. I told Seonag so, and she smiled.

  I was sleepy, and she let me rest. When I came round I was aware of someone playing a flute somewhere outside and a robin answering from a tree, or was it the other way around? It was innocent and beautiful. All of it.

  I have never told anyone about my underworld experiences. I feel I am becoming confessional and that is not my intention. It is as if my guilt is tidal, ebbing and surging, and when it rises I have an urge to go off at a tangent, to divert from the tale I really should relate.

  I shall press on. North!

  AMBER

  NORTHERN LANDS

  GNOMON

  My gnomon measurements have often caused amusement. People think I am simple-minded to measure shadows, and they laugh because they lack my knowledge of what the measurement means, what I can do with it. The laughers think they know where they are, but I can calculate exactly where that is, how far north, how far from home.

  I always need a helper, and I’ve learned a lot from the people who have assisted me, through their responses. Rian helped me the day after we arrived in Assynt. It was the first time, indeed one of very few times, that we were ever alone together.

  She was gathering wood and at first I think I frightened her. She was a slip of a thing, a ski
nny little creature, but those bright green eyes like emeralds, coupled with her amber-coloured hair, were unique. I had never seen such a combination on a person. That alone wouldn’t have been enough to persuade me to buy her. Rather, it was her intelligence that clinched it, and this day was the first time I noticed it. We seemed to have no language in common so I thought it would be a challenge to work with her, but she turned out to be easy to communicate with. We used signs and gestures and she was so smart, she never needed to be told or shown anything twice.

  It was a beautiful day: crisp and blue. The landscape there is extraordinary, I have never seen anywhere so unintelligible. Mountains and bogs butt up against woods and rocky crags and everywhere you go your way is blocked by water: streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, swamps or the sea-shore, so you must meander and swerve and constantly lose your way. It is impossible to keep your bearings. Yet everywhere I found myself marvelling, either being caught unawares by a sudden vista of sea or mountains, offset or reflected in water, or by being forced to watch my feet and noticing some of the wonders of the season unfolding. Although it froze at night and the trees had no leaves, there were signs of spring everywhere. The woodland was dotted with little flowers, pale yellow primroses, and a three leaved plant with delicately pink-veined white petals. A bright green beetle charged ahead of me on the path and a golden bird hopped along, patiently, as if showing me the way. There were birds in the treetops and a light breeze that stroked my skin like a lover. I suppose spring was touching everything equally like that, and maybe this is why the birds sang and the flowers and mosses glowed.

  But I am a scientist and I was trying to find out how far north I had come and for that I required an unobstructed exposure to the sun, where the shadows of the trees would not obscure my measurement. I gestured to Rian to follow me, trying to explain what I was seeking. It sounds strange, but what I required was flat ground, and that place seemed to have none at all. I should have just taken the measurement out on the fields behind the broch, but I wanted to gain some height and get a vista. She obliged me by going up to the brow of the slope we were on, but that landscape is perpetually confusing. I saw that there were successions of other knolls, rippling out, obscuring and occluding the landscape in all directions. There were small bodies of water, lochans, they call them, in every hollow, glittering in the sunshine, their surfaces wrinkled by the breeze, catching every glint of light and doubling it. It was a jewelled land. From here too I could see the sea reaching out and islands, hazy in the west. A headland obscured the beach and the lagoon where the broch stood to our north.

  Below us was the perfect spot, a grassy patch above the shore. I gestured to it as the destination and she showed me the easy way down through the birch trees and willows. I saw she was watchful as we broke out from among the trees. There were four black shaggy cows grazing the sward. This was clearly someone else’s place and I could see she was readying herself in case we encountered them. It is strange how at times I seemed to be able to see her thoughts and at other times she was as calm as the windless ocean, as featureless and unreadable. I heard many people call her cold and unfeeling, whereas I think of her as deep and capable of a serenity that mystics only dream of.

  She looked at me expectantly once we were on level ground, but a cloud had covered the sun. They were fast-moving and seemed to billow out of the northeast where I later saw there were mountains. While the sun was out and they were rising they looked white and fluffy as lamb’s wool, but once they reached overhead they were grey-bottomed and menacing. Yet as they shifted out over the ocean, they seemed to dissipate as if the sea’s reflection up into the sky was too blue and pure to tolerate them. The edge thinned, like strands of a fleece pulled apart by a spinner, and then disappeared into the blue: fluff, then flecks, then gone.

  We stood watching the cloud disintegrate over the languorous sea. She pointed out a seal lolling on a seaweedy rock in the bay. It rolled onto its side and lifted its tail, as if in greeting, curving its back, fluttering its flippers, then collapsing back into a slump of apparent bliss. We shared, Rian and I, a smile of admiration for the good example it was setting us.

  The cloud split open, the sun broke through, the water blazed into a million shards of dazzle and my gnomon cast its line. I pointed to the tip of its shadow and gestured for Rian to stand there, precisely, and she positioned her left toes with perfect care exactly where it fell. I measured the distance between the staff and her, laying the staff out horizontally. The pole/shadow ratio was 5/8. A golden ratio: the ratio of 5 to 8 being the same as 8 to their sum, 13. Many of our greatest thinkers, not least Plato, see this ratio as the essence of life’s generative force. I like to think everything that followed between myself and Rian was destined from that moment.

  I knew from the height of the sun that it must be about noon and I was worried that I might have missed the moment. I waited just a minute and then took another measurement. She seemed to find this amusing. It was exactly the same. I paused again. The next reading of the shadow was marginally longer. I waited to be sure then took a fourth reading. It had lengthened further, so I knew my first reading must have been at noon, if I hadn’t missed it. The second reading was comforting, its implication was that I had caught the sun, by chance, at its cusp.

  I do not know how much of what I was doing made sense to her, but she paid close, perhaps I can go so far as to say rapt, attention to it all. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, that being in the presence of Rian often made me feel that a moment was happening where life was brimming, a tide reaching its zenith. She seemed to inhabit the perfect calm that occurs between storms. Did joining her mean inevitably passing from one phase of life to another? Was that her mysterious magic?

  I know she changed me utterly, and I look back at myself as the person I was before I encountered her, and the person I have since become. Perhaps it was because she was on the knife-edge of transformation from maiden to mother. But I think it is deeper than that. She exemplifies a universal tideline between the people of nature and the people of things, or rather between the people controlled by nature and those who put nature under their control.

  It is hard to express this, but one image stays with me from those days I spent in Assynt. There are many herders in the fields behind Massalia and I was accustomed to their way of herding: they drive the cattle where they want them to go with a stick and often a dog or two. I saw the same in Belerion, up those marvellous trackways I told you about. In other places I have seen the cattle lead, and I watched it often in the north. The herders follow their herd, allowing the animals to choose where they will forage.

  This is the distinction I mean. The former controls nature, the latter is under nature’s control.

  In Assynt I watched Rian with her cow and I could not tell who was leading whom. I can only describe their movements as of two individuals together who knew where they were going. The cow grazed, lifted its head, moved on, paused to munch again, and at any moment you would have sworn the girl was simply drifting along at the mercy of the cow’s urges. She had no stick, nor did I see her slap the cow or push it along or steer it in any way. I’m not sure I heard her issue any commands, though I can’t guarantee she wasn’t humming to it below earshot. No whistling or calling, anyway, none of the characteristic hullaballoo of the herders in our place bringing the cows in for milking. Just a stroll, punctuated by frequent mouthfuls of grass; but over the course of a sunset the cow was down from the hill beyond the woods, across the field without damaging the young crop, and back to the house. Did the cow want to come home and did she just allow it to follow its whim? That is what it looked like. But somehow it also looked as if, had she not gone to encourage it home, it might have stayed out in the wilds.

  And something similar was involved in the nature of our relationship. Whereas I was her master and she my slave in theory, in reality I felt possessed by her. If she coughed I would look up. If I heard her singing, I would try to watch her without he
r noticing. If love can enslave a man, I was her slave, although I didn’t recognise it at the time.

  I am telling you this because you need to understand me. It is hard to explain oneself to another, to tell one’s story truthfully. I think there are only ever a few moments in our lives that really define us. Fleeting instants when we know ourselves for who we really are, when we feel the pure mineral lodes that run within us, the bones of our soul. The rest of our lives we hide from ourselves, attend to our flesh, fuss about with pretence and tricks to try to convince others as well as ourselves that we are moral, upstanding, disciplined, good-natured people. In my vanity, I have wanted to appear benevolent, a giver of gifts. But I know myself in my heart to be greedy.

  Do you know the story of Patroclus and Briseis? It is one of my favourite sections of Homer. She was a princess, beautiful and clever, and when all of her family were killed in the Trojan War, Achilles claimed her as his war booty. Patroclus tried to comfort her, explaining that Achilles was a gentle man, and would treat her with honour. By belonging to him she would escape the indignity of being a mere chattel, which would have been her fate if any of the other princes had taken her as their prize. I like to believe it was in this spirit that I bought Rian.

  Life is a long curtain of self-deceits, and there are only very few moments when a chink of the true light of our nature breaks through. It is those chinks I therefore dwell upon, so you may be familiar with the unadorned truth of me, even if it is not pretty. The strongest desire I have ever felt has been the urge to possess a person. I have tried to pretend it was simply a wish to take care of them, but that is disingenuous. The compulsion to own another human reduces them to something like a commodity: it is a denial of their sacred reality. I know that now.