Amber and Clay

by Laura Amy Schlitz

  If Georgios lifted a hoof and caught a whiff of that smell,

  it meant a good beating for someone

  and I can’t say I blame him.

  You don’t get that smell from a day’s neglect,

  but from filth underfoot all the time.

  A horse is only as good as his hooves.

  Even a donkey is worth something.

  I plucked her grass from the courtyard

  and she nuzzled my hands.

  I plaited clean straw and rubbed her down,

  loosening those mats.

  She was smart. Right away,

  she knew I wasn’t going to hurt her.

  I told her I was in charge of her now,

  and I was going to keep her clean

  and get a good hard floor under her feet at night.

  Her clownish ears

  flicked back and forth

  catching every word I spoke.

  There was a shovel leaning against the shed,

  so I got started on her stall.

  I was at work

  when my master came out in the courtyard.

  He stopped in mid-stride

  and turned to look at me. It was light by then

  and he’s an ugly man.

  I heard the words come out of my mouth

  before I could stop them.

  “Her stall’s too wet. A donkey’s feet are like sponges.

  She’s got to have better footing.

  A donkey is only as good as its hooves.”

  He frowned. “Pyrrhos — ”

  he was silent for a moment, thinking —

  “You sound like you’re accusing me.

  You’re quick to speak up for yourself. I don’t like that.

  You have something to say, you watch me;

  wait till I’m ready to listen.

  You don’t speak up any time it suits you.

  You wait until I speak to you. Do you understand?”

  I stared at the ground.

  When he said Pyrrhos

  I forgot that was me.

  “Go on, then.”

  He walked away from me

  and started talking to Kranaos

  about the kiln.

  Which is something that you can talk about for hours,

  but I didn’t know that, the first day.

  I didn’t know how pots were made.

  I couldn’t imagine all the things I was going to learn,

  or the backbreaking work ahead. That first morning,

  when we were about to sit down to eat,

  I heard Zosima whisper, “Don’t be too hard on him, Phaistus!

  And don’t try to teach him everything at once.

  He’s only a child.”

  “He’s got to learn.”

  He was right about that. I had a lot to learn.

  That first day, he taught me

  how to wedge clay,

  which is folding it

  and thumping it

  and rolling it

  till you can cut it with a wire

  and not see any air pockets inside.

  I wedged clay until my wrists hurt

  and my hands

  and my back

  and then he showed me

  I could do it with my feet.

  So I wedged clay with my feet

  until my toes were frozen —

  clay’s cold —

  and my legs ached

  and even my bottom.

  I was almost at the point of crying,

  when he said I’d done enough, and done it well.

  He told me I could take Grau for water,

  and where the troughs were in the Agora.

  I led her there and let her graze

  while I stole glances at the city.

  I was glad to be away from my master,

  alone with the donkey. I stroked her —

  she liked my fingers

  scratching up and down her spine.

  She rocked back and forth on her heels,

  saying in donkey-talk,

  I like that. Right there. More, more, more!

  Animals know when things get better.

  People might not know, but animals do.

  That very first day, Grau knew

  I was going to be good to her

  and I swear to you, she was glad.

  I whispered: “I’m not calling you Grau.”

  And I named her: Phoibe.

  I never named anything before,

  and I didn’t know how naming something

  makes you feel

  as if it belongs to you. Phoibe means shining

  — which didn’t suit her then,

  because her coat had been neglected —

  but it gave us something to hope for.

  2. KRANAOS

  I didn’t like Kranaos.

  He was a slave himself; he was no better than I was;

  but Phaistus called him kiln-master,

  and it turned out

  he was someone else

  I had to respect.

  “That man knows about the kiln.

  There’s no man in Athens who knows more.”

  That’s what Phaistus said. The solemn way he said it —

  you’d have thought Kranaos was a god.

  The room where Kranaos slept

  was on the other side of the shed wall,

  so every morning, I could hear him

  coughing and wheezing

  and hawking and spitting.

  It made me taste the phlegm in my throat.

  Kranaos used to say

  he’d breathed in too many kiln-fires

  and the smoke had darkened him

  gullet to belly.

  He was as black inside as an old bottle.

  He was the oldest man I ever met. He was a slave,

  but half the time he sat idle,

  huddled in his cloak,

  like a tortoise in its shell.

  He was always cold,

  looking for patches of sunlight

  or hogging the space near the hearth.

  Zosima let him. She treated him like a father,

  mashed up his food in little pieces

  and coaxed him to eat.

  I didn’t like him. He watched me,

  spying out every fault

  so he could tattle to the master.

  “The boy knows nothing.”

  That was his favorite thing to say. Sometimes, for a change,

  he said it to me. “There’s a world of things you don’t know, boy.”

  Then, to the master:

  “The boy daydreams. Stops his work and stares into space.”

  I wasn’t staring into space.

  I was looking at a jar.

  There was a wine jar with horses on it . . .

  See, when I went to live with Phaistus,

  there were jars and pots and plates

  everywhere. I didn’t want to knock one over

  and risk a beating. There were so many,

  rust red and bright black

  people in helmets

  spears sticking out in all directions

  all those patterns: crosshatches and leaves

  and meandering keys —

  they were crowded, those jars:

  pictures running in circles

  like a dog chasing its tail —

  I never looked at them.

  It was too much work to look at them.

  But my eye caught this jar with horses on it,

  and the horses weren’t drawn from the side.

  They were facing me. You could see the muscles

  of their noble chests

  and their back hooves lined up

  behind the front ones.

  You could see their wide foreheads

  and the life in both eyes.

  I could never figure out how to draw a horse like that.

  I’d tried. But I couldn’t figure out where the lines should go.r />
  Phaistus had figured it out.

  That’s why I was staring. It wasn’t daydreaming.

  Anyway, Kranaos thumped me between the shoulder blades

  and dragged me off to show me the kilns.

  Phaistus had two: a round one and a rectangle.

  Kranaos could talk about those kilns

  all day and all night.

  His breath was like a rat that had been dead a while,

  and he leaned close to me

  so he could mumble

  all on one note. An ever-flowing stream

  of knowledge and foul breath:

  He told me how you have to load the pots

  so that none of them touch.

  He said that some places inside the kiln

  were hotter than others, and you had to place each pot

  just where it wanted to be.

  He showed me the air vents

  and said that at first, you needed a hot fire, with plenty of air,

  and then a hotter fire, with no air,

  and moisture — wet sawdust or green wood.

  The whole time the pots cooked

  you had to give them the fuel they wanted:

  charcoal

  brushwood

  olive prunings

  nutshells.

  What I foresaw was,

  whatever kind of fuel that was handy,

  that would be the kind Kranaos wouldn’t want.

  This turned out to be true.

  I didn’t foresee

  how smoky it would be

  or how we’d all be coughing,

  Phaistus, Kranaos, and I.

  The first time we fired the kiln,

  Kranaos clawed a lump

  from the jars where the clay was set to age.

  He rounded the lump and told me

  that clay was for the Kiln God,

  and I should always put some in for him.

  I didn’t believe in any Kiln God.

  It makes sense that we should we pray to Athena,

  the goddess of the city,

  the goddess of craft.

  I didn’t know about Hephaistos —

  we didn’t worship him in Thessaly —

  but once I found out about him, I believed in him.

  It stands to reason you’d worship a god of fire

  — but a Kiln God?

  Why would a god want to live in a kiln?

  I didn’t believe in the Kiln God

  yet.

  What I did grasp

  was that if Kranaos could sacrifice

  lumps of good clay

  to the Kiln God,

  it would be just as easy for me to reach into those jars

  when no one was looking

  and dig out a ball for me.

  You can draw on clay

  smooth it flat

  and cut in with a bone tool. You can make a horse

  and shape it

  draw it from the side

  or from the front. You can keep drawing

  and rub out your mistakes with water

  and roll up the clay

  to hide what you did.

  If you keep that clay moist and supple

  and hidden,

  a single lump

  will hold all the horses you want to draw.

  3. PHAISTUS

  He could have been worse.

  Weeks passed. The swollen moon shrank

  and fattened. In all those days,

  he never beat me. He threatened to beat me.

  He cuffed me:

  smacked my arm

  or swatted my shoulder, barking, “Wake up!”

  “I’m talking to you!”

  “Look sharp, Pyrrhos!”

  but he never struck hard enough

  to leave a mark. He never picked up a stick or a strap,

  never aimed at my head

  or kicked my feet out from under me.

  I kept waiting to find out

  what his beatings were like

  so I’d know how my life was going to be.

  He worked me, dawn to dark.

  He kept me sweaty and aching. To make pots is to work hard.

  I hauled water. Broke up the dry clay

  pounded it

  submerged it in water

  sieved out pebbles and roots and dead bugs. I wedged clay

  until the skin around my fingernails

  was cracked and bleeding.

  He didn’t starve me, though. When we ate —

  Phaistus and Kranaos and Zosima and me —

  Phaistus sat on the couch, because he was the master,

  but we all ate the same.

  Phaistus explained, “We all work. We all get a square meal.”

  If it was all right with him,

  it was all right with me.

  I didn’t say so.

  Phaistus didn’t like my mouth.

  Just knowing that

  made me think of smart-ass things to say.

  I kept them inside. I didn’t want to push my luck.

  Then I discovered

  if I kept my mouth shut

  he didn’t like that, either.

  I tried saying as little as possible:

  Yes, master. No, master.

  His eyes would narrow

  and he’d glare, suspicious.

  It was perfect. I was safe

  and getting on his nerves

  at the same time.

  Every slave knows his master.

  Phaistus was thin-skinned —

  that’s why he needed all that respect.

  When he waited on customers,

  he was slavish,

  busy and brisk as a flea.

  “You’ve chosen well, sir. You’ve an eye for quality.

  I never painted a better cup

  than the one you chose.”

  Then he’d shout for me to bring burlap and straw

  to protect the cup. “Look sharp, Pyrrhos!”

  Showing he was master, throwing his weight around.

  Against my will, I did respect him. Not all the time;

  but when he took a brush

  to an unbaked pot

  he could draw

  anything.

  Sometimes he drew the background first: a swarthy sky

  that fit around red horses

  and red heroes. By painting the sky

  he shaped

  warriors that really fought,

  cranes that really flew,

  maenads in a frenzy. And when he threw a pot —

  I was supposed to spin the wheel —

  the clay changed from rank mud

  to something alive. It stretched and spun upward

  quivering; he hollowed it with his thumbs

  reached inside it

  made its belly curve

  pinched up the rim

  and raised a tower

  whirling

  swaying

  glistening

  Then: “Not like that!”

  He’d start yelling

  because I hadn’t spun the wheel right —

  I hadn’t been fast enough

  or I’d spun it crooked —

  and he called me an idiot

  a stupid donkey. He smacked the ruined pot

  and thumped his feet against the ground

  having a tantrum.

  He swore I’d never learn.

  “He can’t learn.”

  That was Zosima, standing in the doorway.

  “He’s never seen anyone throw a pot before,

  and he can’t take his eyes off the clay.

  That’s what’s the matter with him.”

  She came forward

  and put her hand on my shoulder —

  I’d rather Phaistus cuffed me.

  “Get up, Pyrrhos.

  I’ll show you how it’s done. First watch Phaistus.

  Then watch me spin the wheel.”

  I got up, my knees aching;
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  Phaistus grunted, and she took my place,

  kneeling at his feet. He cupped his hand,

  scooped up water from a bucket,

  wet the clay. “Now!”

  She spun the wheel

  perfectly. She seemed to know exactly what he wanted,

  the speed, the steadiness. His fingers opened up

  and the clay became

  a breathing

  swelling

  changeable

  animal.

  I watched. She was skillful with the wheel,

  but I didn’t care about that.

  I wanted to do what he did.

  I wanted to make magic

  and spin the clay to life.

  4. ZOSIMA

  I didn’t trust her.

  Right from the start I knew

  there was something she wanted from me.

  She watched me too closely. She smiled too much.

  She’d named me. Like a dog. Pyrrhos. She fed me

  as if I were a dog. Slipped me tidbits:

  a handful of sticky figs

  a crust dipped in honey.

  “A growing boy is always hungry,” she’d say.

  What did I know about women? Not much.

  Georgios used to say that Woman was an evil thing:

  a meal-snatcher, a troublemaker,

  changeable as the sea.

  I didn’t know what the mistress wanted,

  but I made up my mind,

  I wasn’t going to give it to her.

  I wasn’t going to be anyone’s

  dog-slave.

  Zosima was the first up, before dawn.

  I could hear her sandals — she wore them loose —

  smacking the soles of her feet:

  slap-flap

  slap-flap

  slap-flap

  Her feet were quick and grubby

  and looked too small to carry her.

  I’d hear her in the courtyard. She’d go out in the dark

  to fetch water. She said it was her chance

  to see the other women

  and the first streaks of dawn in the sky.

  She went out by daylight, too,

  to bargain for food in the market. She was sunburned,

  the mark of a bad woman

  or a poor man’s wife.

  She bartered with the neighbors:

  a platter for a jug of wine

  clay beads for dye

  wool for dried apples.

  At supper she’d boast to her husband

  how much money she saved.

  I pitied Phaistus. Here was this woman

  who squinted when she smiled

  and talked too much

  and wouldn’t stay in the house.

  At least she was a worker.

  Her sandals flap-slapped through the house all day.

  She kept the fire on the hearth

  and made bread and broth and porridge.

  She dug the garden

  and tended the chickens

  and tamed the raw wool over her thigh

  and wove thread into cloth.

  One day I came inside the house

  and saw her sitting,

  with a water jar in her lap. It hadn’t been fired,