Free Amber by Stephan Collishaw

hear.
    â€˜ Da? ’ I said into the echoing silence. ‘Who is there?’
    The telephone hissed and crackled but nobody answered.
    â€˜Who is it?’ I called.
    Faintly, I thought, I could hear the sound of breathing, but it might have been only the wind, or the sound of cavernous space that occasionally opens up between one telephone and another.
    I waited a moment longer then replaced the receiver. Sitting down again, I lit a cigarette. When I had stubbed it out in the overflowing saucer, I got up and went back over to the telephone. I dialled the number for Vassily’s apartment and listened as it rang and rang.
    When it became clear than Tanya was not home, I turned on my desk lamp and pushed aside the piles of invoices and orders strewn across it. Beneath the sheets were some pieces of amber I had been working a few days before. I picked up one of the small tear-shaped pieces and held it up to the lamp, examining the way the light entered it and hung suspended in its heart.
    â€˜You know where amber comes from?’ Vassily said, one evening, in the village. We were beside the pond, close to Tanya’s grandparents’ cottage. Vassily had given Tanya a necklace he had fashioned. Each piece of amber had been shaped and smoothly polished and strung on to a silk thread. In the centre of the string of beads was a larger piece, a translucent, golden tear.
    â€˜Many years ago, when the forest grew thick here, when this land was under the care of other gods, when the spirits lived in the trees and Perkunas, the God of Thunder, ruled in heaven, the most beautiful of the goddesses was a young mermaid called Jurate.’
    Vassily’s face reflected the glow of the sun, which was setting across the village. On the opposite side of the pond a heron rooted among the reeds.
    â€˜Jurate was the most beautiful mermaid,’ he continued. ‘Her hair was golden and her eyes blue, bluer than the sky on midsummer’s morning. She lived not far from here, just off the coast, beneath the waves in a palace built of amber.
    â€˜In a small village like this one, there lived a young fisherman called Kastytis. Kastytis would take his boat and fish in the waters of the beautiful Jurate’s kingdom. Jurate sent her mermaids to warn him away, but Kastytis paid no attention to the messengers of the goddess beneath the waves. He continued to sail out and cast his nets on the water above her palace.
    â€˜One morning Jurate herself rose to the surface to confront the fisherman. But when she approached him in his boat, she instantly fell in love. She took the young fisherman with her, beneath the waves, to her amber palace, and there they lived.’
    Vassily stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt. Clumsily the heron took to the air, its wings beating over our heads, up across the trees towards the seashore.
    â€˜And they lived happily ever after?’ Tanya asked.
    She was sitting by him and with a small pang of jealousy I noticed their closeness. Vassily shook his head. He took another cigarette and Tanya lit it for him. The flare of the match illuminated their faces in a warm, bright glow. The sun had settled behind the trees and the air was pink and blue and cool.
    â€˜Jurate, you see, was already promised to another,’ Vassily continued. ‘Long before, Perkunas had promised the young goddess to the god of the waters. Perkunas was furious when he discovered that Jurate was in love with a mortal. He cast a bolt of lightning down from his heavenly throne, shattering the goddess’s palace of amber. Jurate was imprisoned within the rubble of her ruined palace for all eternity.
    â€˜When the winds are high and the waves break heavily upon the shore, the sea throws up fragments of her palace. And sometimes, too, it throws up these.’ He touched the tear-shaped amber drop on the necklace that lay at Tanya’s throat. ‘The tears of Jurate, a prisoner still, crying beneath the waves