Grovin stifled himself before them, but when the journeymen had boiled out again in glee, he snapped, “It should be. That’s what’s wrong with their work: they don’t care enough.”
“If they don’t care enough to die for it, that’s as much as saying they’ve got sense,” Kath said, washing her hands off, and for a moment he hated her.
“Do you feel nothing of your own art?” he said through his teeth. “I hardly know how you can make your work when you talk of it like a farmer, only worried about bringing your crop to market. I suppose there are birds that sing without understanding their own music—”
Kath startled round at him, surprised and hurt, but even as he stopped, she went indignant instead; she faced him and put her hands on her hips. “You love pottery because you’ve put your heart inside it,” she said, sharp, “and you don’t love the world because you’ve put none of yourself into any other part of it. Well, my heart’s not shut up in a jar on a shelf. I understand my work, better than you. I’m making a thing out of the bones of the dead, and if it lives again, it’s only because someone living loves it, even if it’s just me myself. You can pretend, if you like, that a lump of baked clay means something on its own, even if no one touches it or looks at it or rejoices in it, and make that your excuse for not caring what any human being needs or wants. It’s just another way of being selfish.”
She swiped her wet hands off against her hips, back and forth, a decided gesture, and walked out of the workshop, back into the kitchen, with the shouting children. Grovin stood unmoving and blind there a long moment, and when he saw again, he had turned without realizing it towards the door, towards the faces of the goddess, blackened with smoke, cracked, misshapen; the goddess with her veiled face with its open mouth waiting, waiting to breathe and live.