Amber and Clay by Laura Schlitz (easy books to read TXT) 📗

him, Phaistus!

And don’t try to teach him everything at once.

He’s only a child.”

“He’s got to learn.”

He was right about that. I had a lot to learn.

That first day, he taught me

how to wedge clay,

which is folding it

and thumping it

and rolling it

till you can cut it with a wire

and not see any air pockets inside.

I wedged clay until my wrists hurt

and my hands

and my back

and then he showed me

I could do it with my feet.

So I wedged clay with my feet

until my toes were frozen —

clay’s cold —

and my legs ached

and even my bottom.

I was almost at the point of crying,

when he said I’d done enough, and done it well.

He told me I could take Grau for water,

and where the troughs were in the Agora.

I led her there and let her graze

while I stole glances at the city.

I was glad to be away from my master,

alone with the donkey. I stroked her —

she liked my fingers

scratching up and down her spine.

She rocked back and forth on her heels,

saying in donkey-talk,

I like that. Right there. More, more, more!

Animals know when things get better.

People might not know, but animals do.

That very first day, Grau knew

I was going to be good to her

and I swear to you, she was glad.

I whispered: “I’m not calling you Grau.”

And I named her: Phoibe.

I never named anything before,

and I didn’t know how naming something

makes you feel

as if it belongs to you. Phoibe means shining

— which didn’t suit her then,

because her coat had been neglected —

but it gave us something to hope for.

2. KRANAOS

I didn’t like Kranaos.

He was a slave himself; he was no better than I was;

but Phaistus called him kiln-master,

and it turned out

he was someone else

I had to respect.

“That man knows about the kiln.

There’s no man in Athens who knows more.”

That’s what Phaistus said. The solemn way he said it —

you’d have thought Kranaos was a god.

The room where Kranaos slept

was on the other side of the shed wall,

so every morning, I could hear him

coughing and wheezing

and hawking and spitting.

It made me taste the phlegm in my throat.

Kranaos used to say

he’d breathed in too many kiln-fires

and the smoke had darkened him

gullet to belly.

He was as black inside as an old bottle.

He was the oldest man I ever met. He was a slave,

but half the time he sat idle,

huddled in his cloak,

like a tortoise in its shell.

He was always cold,

looking for patches of sunlight

or hogging the space near the hearth.

Zosima let him. She treated him like a father,

mashed up his food in little pieces

and coaxed him to eat.

I didn’t like him. He watched me,

spying out every fault

so he could tattle to the master.

“The boy knows nothing.”

That was his favorite thing to say. Sometimes, for a change,

he said it to me. “There’s a world of things you don’t know, boy.”

Then, to the master:

“The boy daydreams. Stops his work and stares into space.”

I wasn’t staring into space.

I was looking at a jar.

There was a wine jar with horses on it . . .

See, when I went to live with Phaistus,

there were jars and pots and plates

everywhere. I didn’t want to knock one over

and risk a beating. There were so many,

rust red and bright black

people in helmets

spears sticking out in all directions

all those patterns: crosshatches and leaves

and meandering keys —

they were crowded, those jars:

pictures running in circles

like a dog chasing its tail —

I never looked at them.

It was too much work to look at them.

But my eye caught this jar with horses on it,

and the horses weren’t drawn from the side.

They were facing me. You could see the muscles

of their noble chests

and their back hooves lined up

behind the front ones.

You could see their wide foreheads

and the life in both eyes.

I could never figure out how to draw a horse like that.

I’d tried. But I couldn’t figure out where the lines should go.

Phaistus had figured it out.

That’s why I was staring. It wasn’t daydreaming.

Anyway, Kranaos thumped me between the shoulder blades

and dragged me off to show me the kilns.

Phaistus had two: a round one and a rectangle.

Kranaos could talk about those kilns

all day and all night.

His breath was like a rat that had been dead a while,

and he leaned close to me

so he could mumble

all on one note. An ever-flowing stream

of knowledge and foul breath:

He told me how you have to load the pots

so that none of them touch.

He said that some places inside the kiln

were hotter than others, and you had to place each pot

just where it wanted to be.

He showed me the air vents

and said that at first, you needed a hot fire, with plenty of air,

and then a hotter fire, with no air,

and moisture — wet sawdust or green wood.

The whole time the pots cooked

you had to give them the fuel they wanted:

charcoal

brushwood

olive prunings

nutshells.

What I foresaw was,

whatever kind of fuel that was handy,

that would be the kind Kranaos wouldn’t want.

This turned out to be true.

I didn’t foresee

how smoky it would be

or how we’d all be coughing,

Phaistus, Kranaos, and I.

The first time we fired the kiln,

Kranaos clawed a lump

from the jars where the clay was set to age.

He rounded the lump and told me

that clay was for the Kiln God,

and I should always put some in for him.

I didn’t believe in any Kiln God.

It makes sense that we should we pray to Athena,

the goddess of the city,

the goddess of craft.

I didn’t know about Hephaistos —

we didn’t worship him in Thessaly —

but once I found out about him, I believed in him.

It stands to reason you’d worship a god of fire

— but a Kiln God?

Why would a god want to live in a kiln?

I didn’t believe in the Kiln God

yet.

What I did grasp

was that if Kranaos could sacrifice

lumps of good clay

to the Kiln God,

it would be just as easy for me to reach into those jars

when no one was looking

and dig out a ball for me.

You can draw on clay

smooth it flat

and cut in with a bone tool. You can make a horse

and shape it

draw it from the side

or from the front. You can keep drawing

and rub out your mistakes