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    Amber and Clay

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      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.


      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;


      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,

     


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