It was four months before the head came out clean, and Grovin was in rising alarm by then. But Kath ignored his increasing hints. She made one head at a time, weeks to dry it out, and in the waiting she heaped up more cups and plates and bowls and pots and jugs, so many that they made walls inside the walls of her workshop, so many that they overwhelmed the hunger and purses of Seven, and to empty the shelves Kath sold chests full to sea captains taking them away to distant cities. Gold took their place, and then that went out again in chests: she bought houses for each of the children to inherit, and for each of her sisters, and paid to apprentice all their sons to clay-shapers.
But of the statue there was nothing, except one broken or flawed face after another. Grovin had a moment of intense relief when one fired without a crack, but as soon as he brought it out into the daylight, he knew it was wrong. He had to study it for ten minutes before he realized what was wrong: a flawed faint line running from the left eye down the cheek, where the glaze had fought with the opalescence instead of marrying it, but even before he found it, he knew.
He brought it back to Kath anyway, in desperation, hoping that she might at least move on before recognizing that it wouldn’t do, but she only looked at him in surprise and then asked, “Are you feeling all right?” suspiciously, and made him drink a dose of one of the dozen medicines that now lined up on the high shelf above the table where the children couldn’t reach. Then she went back into the workshop and started over yet again. That head joined the others, in their cracked and broken pieces, in the alley behind the house where Grovin had to go twice a day to collect the children from the courtyard. He disliked walking past them.
At last the seventh head fired perfectly, though, and when he brought it out he sagged in relief and then put his hands over his face and wept. He had spent six hours the night before walking up and down with one of the children crying on his shoulder with toothache. The night before that, he had spent five such hours, after first spending an hour lying awake listening to Kath doing the same, and thinking of how little work she would be able to do, until those thoughts drove him to get up and send her to sleep. The day before that, the oldest boy had knocked over a salt cellar and smashed it into shards, and when Grovin had shouted in horror, the child burst into tears and Kath came running out of her workshop, hands wet with clay. Grovin had looked in past her shoulder just in time to watch a half-formed jug slumping into a formless pile on her wheel, like an undertow tide dragging away a jewel. He was very tired.
But when he took the head back to the house, Kath looked at it and sighed with something that wasn’t quite relief. “Well, I’ll go on, then,” she said, and gave him another wagonload of small pieces to fire.
She did all the statue the same way, one piece at a time, over and over until it came out properly. The year went, and the stomach pains came, but she refused to be hurried. The temple physician shrugged when Grovin finally dragged her there. “It hasn’t grown much. Another year, perhaps? Who can say.” Kath only nodded and went back to her workshop.
The goddess grew slowly in the back alley, lying flat gazing up at the sky. Tuning the sound of the statue was ordinarily a vast and difficult aspect of the task, but Kath made no effort to do anything towards it as far as Grovin could see. The statue only occasionally made an unpleasant shrill whistling noise, like a kettle not quite boiling, when the wind ran into the opening at the bottom. The pitch changed only slightly as the body grew slowly down from the neck to the shoulders over the next year.
At the end of the second year, the priest of Forgin shrugged again, and sent them away with no promises. The statue crept towards its waist. Crate upon crate of bone clay dishes went out the front door. The young journeymen from the tavern had persuaded Kath to give them places in her workshop in exchange for doing her errands; they made dishes out of ordinary clay, but in her style. Grovin eyed them with disdain and refused to fire their pieces, except for one or two he grudgingly allowed as not entirely worthless. They were all annoyed with him, until one day they weren’t, and began demanding that he tell them what was wrong with each piece they made, which annoyed him instead. But little by little they improved, roughly at the same rate as the statue grew.
The children grew also. At some point, Grovin couldn’t even keep thinking of them as the children, as much as he tried to; now they were Shan, who came home from playing boisterous games every day in cheerful dirt he had not the least hesitation in marking all the dishes with, and Maha, who liked to put together mismatched plates whenever she was told to set the table, and Ala, who still didn’t talk much and managed in her quiet obstinate way to get into the workshop every day. Grovin at last gave up and tolerated it because she didn’t interrupt Kath’s work. She only sat in a corner and watched, not her mother’s work but her mother, as if she was trying to store up something she hadn’t been told was soon to be gone.
Grovin had fed them and bathed them and told them bedtime stories of the hideous fates that awaited evil children who smashed breakable things, which they all loved so much they demanded new ones every night, although they showed no signs of becoming more careful with the dishes as a result. He had grudgingly begun to teach Shan his letters, mostly to keep him sitting in one place for awhile and away from the crockery, and Maha had begun to pick them up as he did.
Ala had no interest. But one morning Grovin came out and looked into the workshop: he measured his days by whether Kath was well enough and sufficiently free from distraction to get up and start working in the morning. She wasn’t there, but Ala was sitting at her table, playing with scraps of clay as all the children often did, only she was playing with scraps of bone clay, and when he rushed inside, she looked up at him and stopped him by holding up a thumb cup, the first work of apprentices, which Kath often made and encouraged her own journeymen to do, pressed out with fingers and hands instead of on the wheel. Ala’s cup was not competent; her small fingers had left lumpy marks and visible fingerprints, and the rim was uneven, but it had something more than the charm of a child’s work, which you liked only because you loved the child, which Grovin resolutely didn’t. He would gladly have picked it from a shelf in some cheap secondhand shop and put it on display next to a few examples of the journeyman work of the same clay-shaper, and then a single masterwork, to see the development of the eye and hand and style. He took it from her hands very carefully and put it on the shelf with the drying pieces and led her to wash her hands in the small basin Kath kept always ready now, with a row of jugs the journeymen filled fresh at dawn and a big slop bucket beneath to dump the water in after every single washing. He a little reluctantly said, “You must not touch the white clay again,” as he made her first soak her hands and wave them around in the basin before bringing them out to be washed with the sludgy soap Kath kept half-dissolved in a dish on the counter.
“It’s not the clay,” Ala said.
It was as long a sentence as he had ever heard her produce, but he didn’t care, so he wasn’t paying much attention. “The bone clay,” he said sternly again. “You must not touch it.”
Ala looked up at him from the basin and said, “It’s not the clay hurting Mama,” with an effort that made it seem an accusation. Grovin flinched. He did not know what to say, but he was rescued: Kath came in, saw what he was doing, and in moments she was scolding and alarmed, and then Ala said again, “It’s not the clay!” and burst into tears.
The whole morning was lost to soothing her: when she finally recovered and ran outside to play and yell, Kath spent an hour just sitting tiredly at the table, breathing deeply over a cup of tea. “Well, at least it’s not the clay,” she said finally, with a ghost of humor, and Grovin stared down at his hands as she pushed herself up and went at last into the workshop. He still wasn’t paying attention to anything but his own guilt; it took him catching Ala with the bone clay a second time, two weeks later, making a roly-poly bliba figurine of the kind that the children of Seven loved to play with, round clay balls for arms and legs and head and belly. She didn’t repeat herself, only stared at him mulishly after he finished lecturing, the figure on the table with its slightly tilted expression staring at him too, and in her silence, Grovin finally heard the words.