Ane Riel - Resin

‘Is it worth a lot of money? Like gold is?’ Mogens wanted to know.

‘Large pieces of amber can be valuable, as it’s also used for jewellery-making. But no, it’s not valuable in the same way as gold.’

‘So what is it? Where does it come from?’ Jens asked.

Silas smiled. ‘I’ll show you in a moment, but first I want you to take a look at this.’ He stuffed his hand into his pocket and produced another golden nugget, this one slightly bigger.

‘In one sense this is worth more than gold. Take a look at what’s hiding inside it.’

‘It looks like… an ant?’ Jens whispered.

‘It is an ant. And the special thing about this ant is that it’s very, very old. People have found lumps of amber with animals several million years old in them.’

‘Big animals as well?’

‘No, mostly small animals, I believe. But just imagine: the amber preserves them. Amazing, isn’t it?’

The boys nodded in unison, without taking their eyes off the ant. Suddenly Jens looked up at his father, wide-eyed.

‘But what about people? Small people… children? Have they also found ancient children inside a piece of amber?’

Silas shook his head, ignoring Mogens’s giggles. ‘No, I’ve never heard of that.’ Then he scratched his beard, as he always did when he remembered something interesting. ‘And yet…’

Mogens fell silent immediately.

‘A long time ago…’ Silas began. ‘No, come with me. It’s better that I show you.’

Silas didn’t elaborate but led his sons across the heather and back through the forest. It had grown a little cooler but the sun was still in the western sky, squeezing long rays in between the tall spruces.

‘We’re looking for an injured tree,’ he said, finally veering off the path to wander between some pines. ‘Look for one whose bark has been damaged.’

Seconds later Mogens found one. ‘ Over here! ’ he yelled, so loudly you would think he had struck gold.

Mogens couldn’t have found a better tree. Silas Horder had known all along that there was a pine with a wound at a child’s eye level right there. He knew all his trees.

‘Good job. Now take a close look at it. Do you see those golden drops? That’s a kind of sap that exists inside the tree. When the bark is damaged, the sap runs to the cut, fills it up and thickens. It helps to heal the tree and so keep pests at bay. Try touching it… it’s sticky… then sniff your fingers afterwards.’

‘It smells gross,’ Mogens said.

‘I think it smells nice,’ said Jens.

‘You think it smells nice,’ Silas echoed in a kind voice. Then he took out the lump of amber with the ant from his pocket. ‘What you can see on the tree is called resin. And this small piece of amber here is ancient resin from an ancient tree.’

‘…in which an ancient ant was caught?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what about the children?’ asked Jens, who hadn’t forgotten the sentence their father had started at the water’s edge.

‘Well, I remembered that the ancient Egyptians – they were people who lived a very long time ago – used resin to embalm their dead.’

The boys looked at him blankly.

‘The Egyptians believed that the soul continued to live in the dead body, you see, if you treated the body in such a way that it wouldn’t decay. And they tried to do that using resin.’

‘Are you telling me it didn’t rot?’ Jens had eagerly followed the decomposition of a dead fox cub on the roadside verge just below the Neck. It had turned very dark and flat over time. And swarmed with flies.

‘How could they prevent that?’ Mogens asked. ‘What exactly did they do?’

‘This is where it gets a bit technical.’ Silas laughed. ‘But, all right… first they removed internal organs such as the lungs, the liver and the intestines and so on from the body, just like you see me do when I gut an animal.’

The boys nodded eagerly.

‘However, they left the heart in place; the dead person would need it. Then they cleaned the body thoroughly and dried it by putting it in a salt bath. Salt draws out all the moisture, and absolutely no moisture must remain in the body. It’s moisture that causes it to rot. Once the body was dry they coated it in liquid resin and various oils and wrapped it in bandages. Including the face and toes.’ Silas could not help feeling delight at the knowledge he was imparting. They were unlikely to be taught this in school.

‘Bandages?’ Jens said, tasting the word.

‘Yes, strips of thin fabric… like the ones I tied around your arm when you hurt yourself. They would also paint a portrait of the dead person and place it where the face was hidden by the fabric.’

‘But then what did they do with the body afterwards?’ asked Mogens, his brow furrowed. He was trying to understand all the details of the process.

‘They would put the body in a kind of coffin, which they left in a dry place so as to preserve it as well as possible. And it worked. Archaeologists have found embalmed bodies several thousand years old.’

‘Including children?’

‘Yes, I’m pretty sure they have also found embalmed children.’

Mogens looked at the small amount of resin which the tree in front of them had produced. ‘But how do you get a lot of it?’ he asked, scratching his chin, for want of a beard.

‘You can drain it from the trees in such a way that you get quite a lot. I might show you one day. Time to go home. Your mother will be waiting with dinner.’

‘He told you what ?’

Jens had rarely seen his mother’s eyes so big and wide as when he told her about that day’s adventures. His father and Mogens were seeing to the animals, and he was helping set the table. She didn’t seem entirely happy to hear about the ancient children and the resin.

From that meal on Jens took great care to make sure that what was said in the forest stayed in the forest.

Things went well until they didn’t. Silas Horder was found by his younger son, who dragged his dead father across the heather, through the forest and into the farmyard, where he laid him on the gravel under a blindingly bright noon sun.

Whereupon Jens himself collapsed from exhaustion next to his father.

No one could fathom how the boy had managed to drag his father that far. All right, so Jens had turned thirteen, but he was of slender build and not nearly as big and strong as his brother, who was four years older.

Despite his exhaustion, Jens refused to leave the body. He would grip his father’s shirt and scream whenever anyone came near. It was hours before his big brother could lift him up and carry him inside. At that point Jens was sleeping like a log.

It was thought that Silas had been struck by lightning while out on the common, because he had burns to his leg and back, beautiful, intricate branching that looked like the work of an artist. There had indeed been a short bout of thunder that same morning, but it had passed before anyone had really noticed.

A few days later Silas was buried at Korsted cemetery in a mass-produced coffin, witnessed by a handful of silent islanders, a deeply distraught widow and her older son.

Her younger son refused to attend.

After his father’s death Jens grew very quiet. When he skived off school, something he soon did on a regular basis, he would roam around the main island and secretly explore people’s outhouses and barns. He preferred to be alone in the workshop or in the forest before daybreak. Eventually he stopped showing up for school at all, and Else Horder didn’t mind. He worked hard in the workshop, took good care of the animals and looked after the trees with a sense of great responsibility; deep down, that was what really mattered.