At this point in the story, it’s important to know the meaning of the word “potter” in Haik’s language. As in our language, it meant a maker of pots. In addition, it meant someone who puts things into pots. Haik was still learning to make pots. But she was already a person who put stones or bones into pots, and this is not a trivial occupation, but rather a science. Never undervalue taxonomy. The foundation of all knowledge is fact, and facts that are not organized are useless.
Several years passed. Haik learned her teacher’s skill, though her work lacked Rakai’s elegance.
“It’s the cliffs,” said the old potter. “And the stones you bring back from them. They have entered your spirit, and you are trying to reproduce them in clay. I learned from plants, which have grace and symmetry. But you—”
One of Haik’s pots was on the wheeclass="underline" a squat, rough-surfaced object. The handles were uneven. At first, such things had happened due to lack of skill, but she found she liked work that was a little askew. She planned a colorless, transparent glaze that would streak the jar—like water seeping down a rock face, Haik suddenly realized.
“There’s no harm in this,” said Rakai. “We all learn from the world around us. If you want to be a potter of stones, fine. Stones and bones, if you are right and the things you find are bones. Stones and bones and shells.”
The old potter hobbled off. Should she break the pot, Haik wondered. Was it wrong to love the cliffs and the objects they contained? Rakai had told her no. She had the old potter’s permission to be herself. On a whim Haik scratched an animal into the clay. Its head was like a hammer, with large eyes at either end—on the hammer’s striking surfaces, as Haik explained it to herself. The eyes were faceted; and the long body was segmented. Each segment had a pair of legs, except for the final segment, which had two whip-like tails longer than the rest of the animal. No one she had met, not travelers to the most distant places nor the most outrageous liars, had ever described such an animal. Yet she had found its remains often, always in the cliffs’ lower regions, in a kind of rock she had named “far-down dark grey.”
Was this one of the Goddess’s jokes? Most of the remains were damaged; only by looking carefully had she found intact examples; and no one else she knew was interested in such things. Had the Goddess built these cliffs and filled them with remains in order to fool Tulwar Haik?
Hardly likely! She looked at the drawing she’d made. The animal’s body was slightly twisted, and its tails flared out on either side. It seemed alive, as if it might crawl off her pot and into Tulwar Harbor. The girl exhaled, her heart beating quickly. There was truth here. The creature she had drawn must have lived. Maybe it still lived in some distant part of the ocean. (She had found it among shells. Its home must be aquatic.) She refused to believe such a shape could come into existence through accident. She had been mixing and kneading and spinning and dropping clay for years. Nothing like this had ever appeared, except through intent. Surely it was impious to argue that the Goddess acted without thought. This marvelous world could not be the result of the Great One dropping the stuff-of-existence or squishing it aimlessly between her holy fingers. Haik refused to believe the animal was a joke. The Goddess had better things to do, and the animal was beautiful in its own strange way. Why would the Goddess, who was humorous but not usually malicious, make such an intricate and lovely lie?
Haik drew the animal on the other side of the pot, giving it a slightly different pose, then fired the pot and glazed it. The glaze, as planned, was clear and uneven, like a film of water running down the pot’s dark grey fabric.
As you know, there are regions of the world where families permit sex among their members, if the relationship is distant enough. The giant families of the third continent, with fifty or a hundred thousand members, say there’s nothing wrong with third or fourth or fifth cousins becoming lovers; though inbreeding is always wrong. But Haik’s family did not live in such a region; and their lineage was so small and lived so closely together that no one was a distant relative.
For this reason, Haik did not experience love until she was twenty and went down the coast on a trading ship to sell pots in Tsugul.
This was an island off the coast, a famous market in those days. The harbor was on the landward side, protected from ocean storms. A town of wood and plaster buildings went down slopes to the wooden warehouses and docks. Most of the plaster had been painted yellow or pale blue. The wood, where it showed, was dark blue or red. A colorful town, thought Haik when she arrived, made even more colorful by the many plants in pots. They stood on terraces and rooftops, by doorways, on the stairway streets. A good place to sell Rakai’s work and her own.
In fact, she did well, helped by a senior forester who had been sent to sell the Tulwar’s other product.
“I’d never say a word against your teacher, lass,” he told her. “But your pots really set off my trees. They, my trees, are so delicate and brilliant; and your pots are so rough and plain. Look!” He pointed at a young crown-of-fire, blossoming in a squat black pot. “Beauty out of ugliness! Light out of darkness! You will make a fortune for our family!”
She didn’t think of the pot as ugly. On it, in relief, were shells, blurred just a bit by the iron glaze. The shells were a series, obviously related, but from different parts of the Tulwar cliffs. Midway up the cliffs, the first place she found them, the shells were a single plain coil. Rising from there, the shells became ever more spiny and intricate. This progression went in a line around the pot, till a spiked monstrosity stood next to its straightforward ancestor.
Could Haik think this? Did she already understand about evolution? Maybe not. In any case, she said nothing to her kinsman.
That evening, in a tavern, she met a sailor from Sorg, a tall thin arrogant woman, whose body had been shaved into a pattern of white fur and black skin. They talked over cups of halin. The woman began brushing Haik’s arm, marveling at the red fur. “It goes so well with your green eyes. You’re a young one. Have you ever made love with a foreigner?”
“I’ve never made love,” said Haik.
The woman looked interested, but said, “You can’t be that young.”
Haik explained she’d never traveled before, not even to neighboring towns. “I’ve been busy learning my trade.”
The Sorg woman drank more halin. “I like being first. Would you be interested in making love?”
Haik considered the woman, who was certainly exotic looking. “Why do you shave your fur?”
“It’s hot in my home country; and we like to be distinctive. Other folk may follow each other like city-building bugs. We do not!”
Haik glanced around the room and noticed other Sorg women, all clipped and shaved in the same fashion, but she did not point out the obvious, being young and polite.
They went to the Sorg woman’s ship, tied at a dock. There were other couples on the deck, all women. “We have a few men in the crew this trip,” her sexual partner said. “But they’re all on shore, looking for male lovers; and they won’t be back till we’re ready to lift anchor.”
The experience was interesting, Haik thought later, though she had not imagined making love for the first time on a foreign ship, surrounded by other couples, who were not entirely quiet. She was reminded of fish, spawning in shallow water.
“Well, you seemed to enjoy that,” said the Sorg woman. “Though you are a silent one.”
“My kin say I’m thoughtful.”
“You shouldn’t be, with red fur like fire. Someone like you ought to burn.”