by Wendy Orr
This is the hardest work I’ve ever done. The rope is cutting my forehead, but that doesn’t hurt as much as my neck, my back, all the rest of me. I hold the rope with my arms in every different way I can think of; none of them work. My legs are wobbling like jellyfish, but if I fall I’ll never get up.
Maybe new life means new life in the underworld.
I’m nearly halfway; I stop to catch my breath at the top of this hill, looking down at the fishers’ beach and the road to the town.
My heart is going to thump right out of my chest. Can that happen? It really feels like it could.
Pignose is rushing to catch up now he’s seen me pause, waving his stick and shouting unspeakable Pignose insults. I take a deep breath and start down the hill – it’s got to be easier than going up.
The sledge goes faster and faster, bumping my wobbly legs, knocking me over – and keeps on going. I roll out of its way just in time. Pignose laughs himself into another coughing fit.
Shells shoot off in every direction as the sledge rocks, nearly tipping over, and shudders to a stop at the edge of the road.
Pignose stops laughing – I think he’s disappointed that the sledge didn’t tip right over. Or that it didn’t run over me. But now he’s coughing too hard to follow any further, and has to sit and watch from the top of the hill. If he sees me slow down I’ll feel that stick across my shoulders when I return, so I crawl down the hill till my legs can stand, slip the rope across my forehead again, and haul the heavy sledge the rest of the way to the town.
I can’t even remember the Leira who believed that a new life would ever be possible.
Andras is on guard duty at the gate. He waves me past without looking. I don’t want to look at him either. I’m red-faced, dripping with sweat, panting like a dog, wearing a torn shift tied between my knees. And I’m a purple slave. This is not how I want to see the only person here who could have been a friend.
But I don’t know where the pottery workshop is, and this sledge is too heavy to haul around town searching for it.
‘Where do I take it?’
Andras stares in shock. ‘Leira? I thought you were going to be a house servant.’
‘It seems no one wanted to be reminded that priest-folk could fall, and it would be easier if I disappeared.’
‘I thought you were avoiding me. You weren’t even at the sun festival yesterday.’
‘No.’ It’s too hard to say more, and I’m too exhausted to try. ‘Where do I take these?’
He points down a lane to the right. ‘But you’ll find it a sad place today. One of the apprentices went to the goddess last night.’
Sacrificed? Like the poor slave girl at Tarmara?
‘She drank too much ale and fell off the roof where she was sleeping. Her neck broke.’
‘Not your cousin?’
‘No, Teesha is well – no more than a sore head from the feasting, and grief for her friend.’
I fix the strap around my forehead again, lean into it, and start hauling. I hope the potter still wants these shells. What will I do if they’re all away mourning that poor girl?
It’s strange – a year ago I wouldn’t have thought anything of this girl, unless she made a pot I wanted. Yesterday I’d have envied her being a potter’s apprentice, one of the craft-folk, almost free. Today I feel sorry for her, because although I’m still a purple slave, I’m alive.
The sledge’s right runner catches between two stones, spilling shells across the lane. I shove it out, pick up the shells, and catch my breath. A thought is tickling at my mind but I’m too exhausted to hear it. I keep on going.
The workshop floor in front of the storeroom is quiet, but the potter is at her wheel, a boy is stoking the fire at the kiln, and a girl my age with a tear-stained face is preparing clay from the two piles behind her: one of red clay dust and one of white.
When the purple, the red and the white are one…
I have one chance. I don’t care if purple slaves aren’t supposed to speak, I’ve got to say all I can; show what I know.
‘I’ve brought the shells to strengthen the clay,’ I tell the potter. Teesha looks up with a sad half-smile, so I continue. ‘Is the kiln ready to burn them, so they can be crushed and mixed in?’
‘What do you know of mixing clay?’ the potter asks.
The lie comes easily, straight from the goddess and Nunu. ‘My family were potters. Our home and village were lost in the flood, the night of the war of the gods.’
‘What was your village?’
‘No one here has heard of it. It was called Swallow Town, a small settlement outside Tarmara. Everyone has gone.’
‘So how did you end up at the purple works?’
‘I fled here with my mother and grandmother. My mother’s spirit left when our house fell on her – she doesn’t remember the skills she had, and my grandmother’s hands are too old. I was told you had no need of another apprentice so I offered myself as a servant to the palace. But that was the time when the purple needed more workers, so I was sent there.’
‘Wait here,’ says the potter, lifting the finished bowl off the wheel. She wipes her hands on her leather potter’s kilt, and strides down the lane.
I squat gratefully in the storeroom’s shade; the working floor is soft and smooth with years of clay dust. Below us the town stretches towards the harbour where the sailors and fishers are rebuilding their homes and boats. In the months I’ve been at the purple works, I haven’t realised how the wind and occasional shower have washed so much of the ash away; when I look out from here, there are colours everywhere. Behind us the smooth walls of the palace are painted in whites and bright colours, but the rock walls of the buildings around me are golden in the sun. Out to the west the hills are covered in shades of green, from dark to bright to the softest grey-green or gold, with patches of red where clay has been dug, though between the town and the deep blue of the sea are the white hills where we’ve built our hut in the ruins of the Old Ones.
When the purple, the red and the white are one… I think again. No, it’s not just thinking, I’m praying. Purple doesn’t mean the colour, but the leftover shells – when the dye-sac has been stewed into rich, stinking dye, and the rest of the creature eaten, the shells serve one final purpose, strengthening clay so it’s less likely to break in the kiln.
Teesha wipes the tears off her face with the back of her hand, smearing red clay and snot across her cheeks. ‘Are your family really potters?’ she asks.
I hesitate. ‘My grandmother’s family,’ I say at last, because claiming Nunu as a grandmother doesn’t seem a lie at all anymore. ‘I’d only just made my first pot – the first one to be fired – before our home was lost.’
‘A fired pot already!’ she exclaims. ‘I’m allowed to watch and practise when I finish my work, but I’ve been mostly hauling dirt and mixing clay for a year now. I’ve never made anything good enough to fire.’
I think of the ugly little jug, so kindly given when we needed it. Then I remember my little saffron pot, the best I’d made – it might have been better than the other girls’, but not a pot to be sold or traded. Not a pot to be fired if I hadn’t been Swallow Clan.
‘It might have been to please my grandmother,’ I whisper.
Teesha laughs, then lowers her voice too. ‘Better to tell her that truth than claim more than you are and fail. Her name is Mirna. She’s strict but fair.’
I trust Pellie-oracle. I even think I’m calm. I think the tightness in my chest is from the strain of pulling the heavy sledge. But when I see Mirna in the laneway I can’t breathe.
‘It’s done,’ she says simply. ‘There are any number of poor creatures who can labour in the purple works. There are no others with the beginning of an understanding of clay. You’ve been reassigned to me. I don’t care what you’ve already learned somewhere else; you will start at the beginning, so don’t think your sledge-hauling days are over.’
Teesha flashes me a grin, which Mirna sees.<
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‘So Teesha has told you of the joys of getting the raw clay?’
I nod. My throat might as well have a lump of clay stuck in it already, for all the words it can get out.
‘But has she told you that if you work well, you’ll progress until you’re an artisan yourself, free to work wherever you will?’
I still can’t speak, but she accepts the nod.
‘You’ll live here till then, with the family,’ and she points to the house next to the storeroom.
The sudden bright hope fizzles out like a hot coal in a puddle.
‘But my mother and…
‘Yes, of course,’ Mirna says impatiently. ‘Your mother and grandmother too. Goddess forgive me, I have argued rations for them as well, saying they’ll be working. No, don’t cry, that’s the whole point: I don’t want an apprentice dripping salt tears into the clay.’
A full moon goes by;
the new one brings my bleeding again –
though I still don’t know
if I can ever be a true woman
now the Swallow Clan’s Learning is gone.
But for now I’m content to learn the clay;
the digging is heavy,
the hauling is worse,
but when it’s mixed and ready
the clay holds magic,
a smoothness full of unborn pots
waiting for their potter –
and one day,
that will be me.
I could almost sleep
with the rhythm of rolling
long ropes of clay for Teesha to wind
up from the base of a giant pot;
I roll small balls between my palms
as we did for our saffron bowls –
my thumb in the middle making the hole,
fingers working to smooth the walls –
and though they’re only dried in air
not fired in the kiln,
I have made a cup and bowl each
for Mama, Nunu and me,
and a jug as ugly as Teesha’s –
jugs aren’t so easy.
But Mirna, daughter of potters
since the beginning of time,
sings with her wheel;
pots flow into their forms
between her long-fingered hands,
walls eggshell-thin:
bowls, vases and cups
all fit to be fired, painted and sold –
while I, when work is done,
try to mould small bits
as a child might play –
a child like I used to be.
I’ve made tablets for the palace scribes,
and when Mirna found I could write
I marked tablets for her
with how many feast cups or pots –
or even tablets –
we’ve supplied to the palace.
Mirna knows who we are
but the palace finds us an uncomfortable truth –
priest-folk who are no longer noble,
from an island that died.
Safest to keep the story
of the lost village near Tarmara
where folk speak with our accent –
because the way I say some words:
‘octopus’ and ‘evening’ especially,
always sets people laughing –
and we smile when they say ‘valley’
because they say it like ‘bottom’.
I wear my potter’s hide kilt
over my shift, which used to be white,
stained now with purple and red.
My flounced skirt stored
till the day that Dada returns –
and even in my practice pots,
kneaded back into clay again,
I sign a swallow over a crocus,
the seal that would have been mine –
and Andras says
when we are free artisans
he will make me a seal of stone.
Dada will see that mark on a pot,
will wonder and search,
until he finds us.
But what I don’t know, when Dada comes,
is whether I want to be priest-folk again
now the land our clan cared for is gone –
because if I wasn’t working,
busy all day, tired at night,
grief would swallow me whole.
I know now why Nunu laughed
when I wished my family
could be potters like hers.
I would offer anything
to change life back to how it used to be,
but even the gods can’t bring back the dead.
And Pellie, I think, has gone
to the deep underworld
from where there’s no return;
she doesn’t speak to me now,
in her own or her oracle voice;
my heart calls for her, and aches,
and sometimes, when I laugh with Teesha
or share a look that needs no words,
it aches even more.
So I tell Pellie my life, just in case she can hear,
tell her that Mama has learned to sweep –
she hums and smiles and loves her broom
and Mirna says the workshop floor
is cleaner than it’s ever been.
I tell her that Nunu
soothes crying babies
for the mothers in our lane
and is called Grandmother by all.
That Chance has grown tall
and found dog friends to roam with
but always returns
to our feet at night.
That Teesha is clever as well as kind,
sharing friendship,
teaching me more than clay,
and I am teaching her to write.
But the first time
the purple slaves came
with their sledge of shells
my stomach clenched
and I could hardly breathe –
not from the stench
but the memory of fear,
and grief that I’ve found freedom
while others have not.
I tell her I’ve learned
to hide the nausea,
smile and thank them –
so Teesha has started to do the same.
And one day,
a master craftsman,
I’ll find the small bait-gatherers
to free them into
apprenticeship too.
Then I tell Pellie
of the swallow’s nest over
the door of our home;
I’ve seen swallows dance in the sky
and hope to see fledglings
in the nest come spring.
I tell her that although in our old life
Andras could not be my friend,
he is a true one,
and also:
his voice is deep as a song
his eyes are soft
and he makes me laugh.
Autumn comes,
a full year’s circle since the day –
the start of my Learning journey –
when the goddess belched
as we picked her flowers
and we danced like swallows at sunset
offering our saffron and ourselves.
The festival here
is for folk of all clans
to honour all types of harvest –
and though it is sparse
we’re the more grateful
for each grape and grain.
Teesha and I have made cup after cup –
six hundred and fifty-six
I marked on the tablet –
though we made many more
before Mirna passed them,
because these cups, used once and smashed,
dried but not fired,
still need to be perfect
in the great mother’s honour.
But there is no wo
rk today –
the wheel is quiet, the kiln cold,
the hundreds of cups stacked in the palace,
waiting for the feast –
but now that my busy hands are still
all that I’ve tried not to think of
swamps me like the great wave itself.
For this day, when I should become
a woman of our clan
ready to serve the goddess and our land,
there is no one left to teach me
or for me to serve.
This is not something to share with Teesha
so on this strange morning of rest
I walk into the hills
away from the sea and the purple –
to tell Pellie my grief.
‘Tonight,’ I tell her,
‘the Lady and her clan
will chant the story of their home,
remembering their folk
from the beginning of time –
all those who have died
but live on in their song.
‘But no hymn will be sung
for the land of the swallows
and it will be lost as if it never was,
as if its folk never lived at all;
as if you had never laughed with me
and swallows had never come to land –
because only a woman grown
can know that song and sing it.’
And my dead sister-friend,
silent for three moons,
comes to me at last.
‘There are many gifts that please the mother;
there are many rites that make a woman.
As the first woman
once sang the first story,
in this new land you must make your own.
Our land and Learning are gone
but will never die
if you give them life.’
So I sing for Pellie,
I sing for my land and all that I’ve lost,
the stories I know
of our swallow-blessed isle,
of Kora our Maiden,
her belching mother,
and the clans who served them,
from priest to purple.
I sing them all, best as I can
and though my voice breaks,
I sing what no one has told before:
of its terrible death
that it will not be lost.
In reply, the goddess guides me to a rock crevice. Green spikes poke through the ash – and there are the six purple petals of the great mother’s flower.