‘Red Amber’ excerpt

Once upon a time, three inspirations came together: Baltic and Russian red amber artifacts, the Tassili cave art of the northern Sahara, and the Rush song ‘Dreamline’.

Out of that mash-up, I wrote a fantasy short story set in a Paleolithic world. It wasn’t a great story. I trunked it and forgot about it for longer than some of my writer friends have been alive. Eventually I understood how to tell it properly, in a completely different ‘voice’ than the one I began writing all those years ago. The characters morphed a couple of times, the story grew. A couple of months ago I finally grasped that it was a M/M erotic romance novella about creativity, grief, pride, and lost love.

‘Red Amber’ will be on my intermittent to-write list as I finish up more urgent projects. But I thought my readers might like to see the first draft of the current first chapter, where the amber carver meets the cowherd (Stop looking for smut! No smut yet, they’re *kids* at this stage of the story.)

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“My mother says cattle are more valuable than amber,” said the willowy blue-black boy, the third time he wandered too casually past Tarhan’s little lean-to beside the docks.

“Does she, now? I suppose if I let you tell me why, you’ll finally go away and leave me alone?” The young carver squinted up from his cross-legged position on his woven straw mat, his lap covered by a thick, soft leather square and pale brown amber dust.

The stranger grinned down at him, a bright flash of teeth and eye-whites in his dark face. “Oh, you don’t want to be alone.”

“How you know that?”

The dark boy spread his arms to indicate the two docks, the shallow rising bank, the busy mud-brick village high above the worst flood levels. “You’re here by choice, to be around people. But you don’t live here. I asked. The market-mistress says you’re the Carver’s son, you’re ten years old, and you live in a big cave two hour’s walk upstream. You’ve set up carving here three days running. Why?”

Tarhan considered the other boy’s directness. It seemed neither rude nor reverent, reactions he was used to getting from the Riverfolk. “I like it here. I can carve when I want, eat when I want, and listen to the people come and go.”

“Don’t you have people?”

“My father Haxa and my mother Eliunet. My mother wants to try for a daughter again, and my father’s sent me out during the day, because the Water Lady’s shamans say conception is better during sunlight these six days.”

The other boy rolled his eyes in a doleful way. “I have four sisters. Best pray for another brother. I always wanted one.”

“What does your mother hold against amber?” Tarhan remembered some market gossip about the new family from their arrival a year before: a powerful woman from a southern tribe, married to a Riverfolk man who’d met her while trading. She was ambitious and already well-respected along the River. Tarhan had the sense from his parents that Haxa didn’t know Keef Manycows existed as more than a customer, and that Eliunet considered her some threat to their own status. Tarhan’s mother might not like him talking to Keef’s son. That made him inclined to do it more, even with the dark boy’s next words:

“You can’t eat amber. It gives no meat or milk, no leather or bone, nor dung for the fire,” recited the other boy, as he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“True,” Tarhan admitted. “But with amber I can bargain for milk or meat or leather, without having to chase cows under the hot sun all day.” He held up the flawed piece of opaque brown-gold amber he’d been shaping into a crude leaf.

The other boy laughed, more companionably than Tarhan would have guessed. “With what, that? It looks like a squirty little turd.”

To anyone else, Tarhan might have answered similar mockery with his fists. But the dark boy’s jibing was fearless and friendly. And the amber did look a bit like excrement.

“Well, not this piece. It’s only good for practice and burning for incense. But when I get better, I’m going to be richer than my mother and father, from all the pretty amber pieces I carve.”

“Cows are pretty.”

“So is amber.”

The dark boy looked skeptically at the turd again. “Erm,” he stalled, fresh laughter curving his lips.

His pride stung, Tarhan fumbled in his woven grass beltpouch. He unrolled a thin piece of goat leather, to reveal three tiny amber beads of sparkling honey-gold. He thrust his hand out of the lean-to’s shade, so the beads glowed in noon sunlight. “My father’s work. He gave me one bead for each day, so I can buy food from the market-mistress.”

“Beautiful,” admired the dark boy. “And you’re learning to do that? Can you teach me?”

“Can’t. Holy secret. You’re not part of the family.”

“The Riverfolk say your family is the only one who knows how to make amber from woodsmoke and honey.” The dark boy settled into a sideways sprawl in front of the lean-to.

“True. Still can’t teach you.”

“Don’t care about that. I couldn’t teach you the Three Secret Ways to herd cattle. Carving amber, now, that seems a fine skill. I carve wood sometimes when I’m out with the cows.”

The Riverfolk were a placid and peaceable lot, loving their luxuries but not obsessed the way Tarhan’s family was. Tarhan eyed the dark boy the way he was learning to look into a piece of raw amber, to see what could be made of it.

The dark boy was lithe where Tarhan was squat, his face finely-shaped where Tarhan’s was lumpy and broad.  And he had good skin, Tarhan noticed a little sullenly, far better for displaying amber beads than his own ruddy-tan flesh that never browned close to his mother’s shade. The other boy had dozens of skinny black-brown braids parting his scalp, and running down past his slender shoulders. Each braid was tipped with a disc of iridescent yellow shell. They matched the shell-plaque embroidery on his red linen kilt. A rich woman’s son, certainly.

“I am Tarhan Carver. If you show me how well you carve wood, I might be able to teach you about amber. If you keep quiet about it.”

“I am Aio Keefson,” said the dark boy, reaching out to slap a greeting into Tarhan’s free hand.

***

Thanks for reading! If and when this gets finished and makes it to a publisher, I’ll let you folks know.

(And yes, comments here will count as part of the giveaway contest running through 7-7-2014.)