She looked up and stared at him with the teapot in her hand, still hollow, and then she paused—not quite as long as he had, in the temple—and then she put down the teapot and said to him flatly, “No. Not unless you marry me first.”
Grovin stared at her. “What?”
“If you marry me and take the children as your own,” she said. “Otherwise I won’t.”
“You have six sisters!”
“And they’ll make it a fight over who takes my children in, for the chance of taking their inheritance, too,” Kath said. “Marry me, and give the children a home, and I’ll make the statue and work the white clay, as long as I can, to provide for them. Besides,” she added, “they’ll look after you in your old age,” and Grovin almost opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t going to have an old age, when he suddenly remembered the priest saying a life for a death, and understood only then, in real horror, that this was the price: he was indeed going to have an old age, and more to the point a long life of raising three small children, one of whom couldn’t speak in complete sentences yet.
But he knew better than to try and go back on a bargain with the goddess, so the next morning he and Kath were married, in a quiet ceremony attended only by her family and a group of young journeymen who drank at the tavern around the corner from her house; they followed in delight to witness Grovin’s doom: he was generally viewed with irritation by them all, for being a little too dedicated to art and showing up their own professed devotion.
Afterwards Grovin moved in with her: when she’d asked him to give her children a home, she’d only meant it in the legal sense. She’d already three months before bought the house next door to expand her workshop, so there should have been plenty of room, but the chaos of the household spilled into all the space available. Grovin put his small box down in the middle of a bedchamber that held a broken birdcage, a collection of small rocks, two rickety shelves, and six small boxes arranged behind little clay horses like a caravan, each one holding precarious towers of glorious glazed cups for cargo, one of which had already been chipped by the rough handling. He sprang to rescue them and looked around himself in almost savage despair, thinking of his own two-room house, scrupulously clean, with large cabinets against every wall, full of carefully spaced pottery, and his small cot in the middle of one room and his small table with its one chair in the other.
The next day, Kath went grimly to the clay fields, trailed by a ceremonial escort and a practical mule cart. Mostly when a new grandmaster first came to the fields, he spent a day alone in vigil, carefully sieving a few handfuls of the raw slip over and over to get the feel of it. Kath just had the two young men she’d hired shovel the slip into jugs and buckets until the cart was loaded up, and then drove back with it to the house. Two of her brothers-in-law, both ironworkers, had forged her five screens, going from one very coarse to one very fine, with large pans to go underneath them. The young men shoveled the clay on top of the coarse one and rubbed it through with wooden sticks, leaving behind a glittering deadly mess of pottery shards and pebbles, broken knife blades, chips of stone, frayed moldy rags. Whatever clay made it through into the pan, they rubbed through the next screen, and so on. Even the finest screen came out clogged with tiny gleaming slivers too small to tell if they had started as clay or steel or stone. When the last pan was full, they put the slip into a bucket and carried the screens and pans to the nearest fountain and washed them completely clean. Grovin followed and watched aghast as long trailing rivulets of precious white clay went running away into the gutters, along with all the detritus. He was not alone: the journeymen from the tavern were half-gleefully shocked in audience, and apprentices peeking in on their errands.
But the men Kath had hired were only laborers, and didn’t care. They carried the clean pans and screens back to the workshop and rubbed the clay through a second time, and then a third. Three days later, after the clay was dry, Kath put on a pair of gloves made of very fine mail, and then another pair of thick leather and wool, and then a third of coarser mail, and went through the clay putting a handful at a time into a fresh bucket, poring over each one with the cold suspicion of someone eating a badly deboned fish. She only ended with three buckets of clay left out of the entire cartload.
She didn’t begin with the statue, of course; she made a few test pieces. Grovin, sitting hunched in the kitchen trying not to watch the children playing roughly with three clay toy horses, spent the days in horrible thoughts: what if she wasn’t good at working the white clay, what if it diminished her prosaic pieces, what if she had ruined the clay with too much sieving.
Finally she came out of the workshop with six cups and two bowls on a tray for him to fire, and they were ruthlessly unadorned, even compared to most of Kath’s work. Everything was in the shape, and the shape was a little too simple, too stark, but Kath only said, “Fire them and we’ll see,” tiredly, and went to put dinner on with her hands unbloodied. When he brought them back after the first firing, she only made a simple bucket of clear glaze and dipped them three times, nothing more, and handed them back over.
But when he took them out of the kiln at last, he stood sweating and silent looking at them for a long time. The starkness was unchanged, and the glaze had dried clear, with an irregular crackling that interrupted and somehow brought forth the strange opalescent finish, and he picked up the first one before it was cool enough and burned his seamed leathery hands holding it, breathtaken, his eyes wet.
He carried the tray back to her house with a ceremonial air; not inappropriate, since the streets were full of supposedly loitering clay-shapers, who had all gathered to catch a glimpse. There was even a gathering of a dozen masters at the corner of Kath’s street, all of them pretending they had accidentally run into one another. Grovin stopped beside them and they gathered around and handled the bowls and the cups in silence, turning them and passing them from one to the other, before reluctantly putting them back on the tray and letting him go into the house.
Kath looked at the tray and only nodded a little, still looking tired; she was sitting down, although it was the middle of the day, and she had a hand over her stomach. “It’ll do,” she said, and then she took one of the cups, mixed strong wine with water out of the jug, and drank it down.
In the meantime, several more cartloads of clay had come in, and been sieved and washed and dried and winnowed. She began on the statue the next day. The head was as long as Kath’s arm from chin to crown, and almost faceless, only the slightest suggestion of the curve of chin and cheek, as if seen through a heavy veil. The mouth was the only opening, and that only a little, the surface of the clay caving softly into it as if a pocket of the veil had been breathed in. When Grovin saw it, he felt a stirring of unease, a guilty man who fears his wife knows what he’s been doing with his late evenings and is just waiting to make him sorry for it. “A woman?” he said, to cover it.
Kath said, “One I’m likely to know better soon,” with a ghost of humor, and he squirmed.
“Only one copy?”
“Yes,” Kath said. “If it doesn’t come out, I’ll make another.”
While it dried, she went back to making cups and bowls and plates, a small steady stream piling up. The smaller pieces dried quicker; they were ready to go into the kiln along with the head. Every one of them came out well; the head cracked down the middle and stained with smoke. He brought it back dismayed, but Kath only shrugged and began on another copy.