Hiron had been twenty-seven when he’d been chosen, ferociously proud and careless of his health the way only a healthy young man could be. He had never spoken a word of fear or hesitation to Grovin; the closest he’d ever said was, “They’re usually giving it to dried up old ancients. It’s no wonder they die so soon. Anyway, no one can live forever,” smiling, and he’d smiled even after he’d shown Grovin the hand of his statue, the intricate surface with its layers of small disks built up, tiny mountains like an army of bliba figures flattened out, and the palm stained dark brown with his blood, like a mirror of the white bandage wrapped around his own hand. It had been only three months after he’d begun. “A piece of glass,” he’d said, still careless. “I didn’t see it. It’s nothing, a shallow slice, the priest says it’ll be closed in a week.”
The wound had closed only after three, and the scar never stopped being irritated and red. Both of Hiron’s hands had been a battlefield of faint scar lines and half-healed cuts by the Festival of the Sun, and one of the other masters had even ventured, “Perhaps you should rest them a while.” Grovin had eyed the man with irritation: at that very moment Hiron had been halfway through the magnificent breastplate, a marvel of delicate carving done at just the right stage of air-drying; he rose three times a night to check the sections, to be sure he didn’t miss the chance.
Hiron had laughed a little, and said, “I’ll rest them when the statue is done,” but a month later, he had rested them sooner after all, because he spent a week vomiting and with the flux. Grovin hovered, feeding him soup and bread and wine with honey, miserably anxious: there were four pieces waiting for carving. Hiron tried to go to the workshop once, but his hands were shaking too badly; he scarred one piece beyond redemption, and then had to run staggering to the pot again anyway. After four days, Grovin looked in on the pieces that morning, then went back to his bedside and said, “It’s no use, they’re gone. You’ll have to remake them when you’re well again,” and Hiron had wept a little before he turned to the wall and slept for the better part of three days.
His hands were healed a little more after the enforced rest, but he had a hollowed blue look to his face that hadn’t been there before. He had been slower, afterwards; he only lost three pieces waiting for carving when feverish shakes laid him up two months later. He was sick three times during the rainy season, and listless; he was better once the weather dried out, but when the statue went up at last—after only eleven breakneck months of work—he came home from the dedication ceremony and lay down and was sick for a solid month with an illness no priest or physician or wisewoman could name or cure. Grovin brought a dozen through to look at him, spending the last of his own money to do it; Hiron had not sold a single piece since beginning to make the statue, and Grovin had not fired anyone else’s work. Neither of them had ever put much of anything aside.
The landlord came by and apologetically said that he had to have the back rent, which wasn’t to be had. Grovin had to sell four pieces of his prized collection, in anguish, although he managed to sell them to temples to be put on display, so at least he could go and visit them. “Never mind,” Hiron said, consolatory. “The statue’s done. As soon as I’m well, I’ll sell some pieces, and you’ll buy them back, if you really want to bother.” Hiron himself had never had much patience for the work of other clay-shapers.
He did rise at last, thinner, and went back into the workshop, back to the clay. But he wasn’t quite the same. Grovin swallowed it for a month, but he couldn’t bear it; when Hiron tried to hand him one truly awful urn, finally Grovin burst out, “What are you doing? This looks like the work of those guildless imitators down by the docks, making trash to pawn off as the grandmaster’s work. It’s—timid.”
Hiron had flinched, and then he’d smiled again, a little waveringly, and said, “You’re always right, Grovin,” and then he’d taken the piece and smashed it. His pieces improved after that, but there was still a thread of what Grovin called caution running through them, something withheld, for the next two years. Hiron wasn’t sick quite as often, and once he was making pieces for sale, there was more money for food and firewood, although never quite enough to buy back Grovin’s pieces. He never brought in as much as Kath’s crates full of dishes, and the money had somehow vanished more quickly even with only their two mouths to feed.
Then at the start of the fourth year, the blood-poisoning took hold. Hiron was feverish every evening, even when he felt well in the mornings. Everyone consulted could name it, of course; the symptoms were well known. There was no cure, except to stop working the bone clay. The grandmaster Ollin had even done so some two centuries before; he had died a year later in a plague and was still spoken of disdainfully among clay-shapers as having been justly punished for cowardice. Hiron and Grovin had insulted his name amongst themselves many times.
Hiron didn’t stop working the clay. Grovin was a little afraid at first, not of that, but of another weakening in his work. But the timidity didn’t return. Hiron’s work bloomed instead, going abruptly larger and stranger and even more complicated and convoluted. The pieces he made had no purpose but display, and found few buyers, but Grovin gloated over them with brooding joy, firing them with immense care and almost alone in the kiln; he added in only grudgingly enough other goods to pay for the fuel, at rates so low that their shapers wouldn’t complain about having their work treated dismissively and shoved to the sides. Hiron’s pieces became still more wild as the fevers crept further and further into his days, figures that twisted and writhed as if against strangling bonds. He had long since stopped speaking of when I’m better. But he still never spoke of fear. Grovin took the pieces that didn’t go in the final sale and used them to decorate Hiron’s tomb, a monument he considered greater than the statue itself, even if less refined tastes didn’t appreciate them properly.
Hiron had lasted four years, in the end. Longer than most grandmasters. But the bone clay had been taking him from almost the beginning; in a long, slow feasting, not a quick slaughterhouse blow. Sitting in Kath’s workshop, Grovin stopped lecturing Ala and instead looked down at her small, tender, unmarked hands. When Kath came in, he took her hands and turned them over, peering close: one small burn, from touching a cooking pot, and not a single cut, and her pains had not changed since the day they had first gone to the temple of Forgin three years before. She had been ill, now and again, but not with clay fever, or poisoning, or infections.
“Well, I’m not having you be the proof,” Kath said to Ala, and sent her to sit in her room for punishment, and then she called in her journeymen and told them all that she’d let some of them knead the bone clay for her, if they were willing to try and see if any of them began to be ill. “But don’t any of you do it if you have a child coming,” she added, “and I won’t have any bragging or teasing; it’s not a joy worth dying for.”