One Pot, Two People

by **Rhu** on November 22nd, 2015, 10:24 am

21st, Fall 515 AV

Rhu stared at the lump of clay in front of her, willing it to somehow transform into one of the graceful specimens around her. Preferably the red and brown one with beautiful gold detailing, the one she had watched Sal perfect only minutes ago, and leave to dry. She sat a good distance away from it, ensuring that no sudden movement of hers would have it hit the ground and fracture before it could be sold. A pot. She could make a pot. Her father had made thousands, had made her mother one, once, to store the bones of her enemies. There had been children half her age in the clan who could make pots, and while they weren't brilliant, Rhu had the niggling suspicion that they would be a damn sight better at this than her.

There was more than one way to create a pot, she recalled, although there was only one method she remembered. It was not, she was certain, the one Sal had used - she had no idea how the smooth, almost reflective surface on that pot had been created. There was a creak, old wooden slates bending from an unknown pressure, and Rhu glanced up at the door, reaching instinctively for the sword she had left at home; it was too bulky and obvious to carry around, but she missed the weight and had regretted its absence the moment she had first stepped outside. Nobody stood at the door, but Rhu stared at it for a long moment anyway, senses too alert to return to her task.

Sal would come back at some point, he hadn't specified when exactly so Rhu assumed whatever point suited her least, and and he expected the pot to be ready by then. It was possible that coming clean about her lack of experience in the craft would have been sensible, but Rhu had needed this job. Besides, she thought, it was just a petching pot. A lump of petching clay and a petching pot and it couldn't be that difficult.

Muscle memory, like when she fought. Rhu dipped her hands into a bowl of water, and absently rubbed the liquid into her fingers. There were tools here, equipment she didn't know how to use. Strange wires and brushes she assumed were for detailing. That would come later, she thought with dismay. Painting couldn't be that difficult though, surely. With her hands now wet, Rhu shook the remaining drops from her hands and picked up the piece of clay again. She rolled it between her hands, feeling the texture and the way the lump grew sticky and flexible. The smell, warm and earthy, grew stronger, and she inhaled it deeply. It smelled like home, like her father when he had hugged her after work. A tear stung her eye and she only just managed to stop herself from reaching a clay-encrusted finger up to wipe it dry.

No. Focus

She put the piece of clay on the table, and examined it critically. It was long and thin. She was sure it was supposed to be shorter and less slim. This would be a wide pot, then. A big pot with a weak - delicate she corrected herself, it sounded better - body. Perhaps if it was wide enough, it would not have to be as tall. She coiled the roll into an approximation of a circle, then straightened it out and tried again. This time it was more symmetrical, a neat shape that she was immediately satisfied with. Smiling, she reached for the next piece of clay. Easy.

by **Rhu** on November 23rd, 2015, 3:46 pm

The next piece of clay had not gone as planned. Too thick, too flat, too chunky. Rhu prodded it with one dubious finger and shook her head, squeezed her hand closed and remoulded the wonky lump into a ball. She tried again, this time rolling it out on the tabletop, deliberately ignoring the occasional smear of brown that got left behind. She had plenty of clay left, anyway, and Sal had never specified how big her pot was to be. Actually, Rhu thought instructing ones newest employee to "make me a pot" then leaving them along in his workshed, with easy access to ones house provided said employee was willing to smash a door or two - Rhu had never tried that before, but the door didn't seem that sturdy - was not a sensible thing to do. As far as she was concerned it was Sal's fault if her pot went wrong, and that was exactly what she would tell him if he criticised her.

She glanced down as the clay beneath her fingers changed shape, and stared in dismay at the fragment that had just fallen off. "Skurak," she muttered under her breath. Now that she was paying attention, she realised the clay had grown dry. Far, far quicker than she remembered. Frantically, she patted her coiled piece with more water, smoothing it down where cracks had already started to form. She wetted her hands again, and ran the second piece through them until the clay shone with water. Too much water, almost certainly, but she felt better once it was slippery beneath her touch.

This time, when she rolled the piece out it was smoother, and closer to the same thickness and general shape as the first. Still a little chunkier, but she supposed she could make that some sort of pattern, either making each ring chunkier than the next or alternating between two rough sizes. She added a tiny amount of extra water for stickiness and carefully arranged the new coil atop her first, pressing lightly on top until it looked unlikely that they would fall apart.

Looking at it from above, at the thumb indents on the rim and the dips and rises where she had pushed, Rhu doubted that had been the right thing to do. Still, it was the general appearance that mattered, and a couple of mistakes at the bottom wasn't the end of the world. The last time father made a mistake she mused, turning the 'pot' around with one light finger, he started again from scratch. Suffice to say, Rhu had not inherited that particular characteristic from him.

by **Rhu** on November 23rd, 2015, 4:03 pm

The next two coils had gone on easily enough, and Rhu was halfway through the fifth when she realized that her pot had no bottom. An amateur mistake, and one she was equally ashamed of having made as she was relieved at having caught it before Sal came back. A bottom, right. she abandoned the latest coil and squeezed a select amount of what was left into her hand, moulding it until pliable before kneading it out on the bench beneath the heel of her hand. She moved to the nearest drawer and hooked it open with her elbow, then tilted her head to try and see past the clutter for a rolling pin. She should have got one before her hands were a mess and she knew it. A flat piece of metal caught her eye, and she wrapped her pinky around it and drew it out, careful to keep her clay-stained hands to herself.

It wasn't as good as a roller, but it worked. Rhu waited until she judged the piece thick enough, then trimmed the edges off and carefully picked up her incomplete pot and placed it gingerly on top. She didn't squish them together as she had done the first time, but rubbed the two pieces' outsides together until they became one, working carefully and all the way around until any hint that they had ever been separated was gone. It looked... well it could have looked worse. Probably. The bottom was a little too chunky, and she had evidently not trimmed off as much as she should have, for the bits she had merged together were obviously thicker than the rest of the pot, little protruding corners on an otherwise-circular pot. Not a good look, she had to admit.

Rhu peered into the drawer again and pulled out a small, very finely tipped knife. She held it like she held her sword, then awkwardly shifted positions. Not a weapon she reminded herself, and adjusted her grip to something she felt more appropriate - blade pointed down at the pot, tilted slightly to the right for easier slicing. Carefully, oh so carefully, Rhu made a neat cut at the top of one of the lumps of sticking-out clay, slicing the top of it off.

Her next cut, just as neat, carved an elegant, unplanned slice through her bottom coil. Rhu would have dropped the knife with a resounding clang if it hadn't been so pointy. Instead, she put it gently in the centre of the table, blade facing away from her, took a single steady step back, spun around and kicked a stool, foot adjusting mid motion when she realized in a flash of horrified clarity that her first target had a pot on it, hard. Its legs shrieked against the ground in a way that set her ears on fire, and made the wooden clang as it hit the wall all the more satisfying. The burst of words from her mother tongue were among the most foul that she knew, and not the sort she would dare say aloud in a language other people here were likely to understand - at least not unless she wanted to get into a fight.

"What a lovely welcome," a horribly familiar voice said, and Rhu whirled around, panting slightly from some hellish mix of exertion, anger and frustration, to see Sal cross his arms and frown at her from the door. He raised an unimpressed eyebrow. "I'm assuming that's your peoples' way of greeting their employers, hmm?"

"Yes?" Rhu said hopefully. He didn't look angry, thankfully, at least no more so than usual. With a curious grunt, the old man dumped the sack of Myri knew what and walked over to her failed attempt of a pot. Rhu cringed with every step, but forced herself to meet his eyes steadily over the sunken, cracked rim when he looked back up.

"Well I've certainly seen worse," he said at last."Rarely, you understand. Mostly from children."

"It's not finished," Rhu attempted, her words feeble even to her own ears.

"Oh? My mistake. By all means," he waved his hand around the pot, summing up its pitiful state with one broad sweep, "finish." Rhu stared at him blankly, marshalled her courage and stepped closer. Petching right she would finish. She'd show the skurak. "Stop," he said, and she froze, one arm outstretched to the piece of clay she had been halfway through making. He held up a chunky stick of charcoal. "Scrap that bit and get something fresh. Each piece should be about this thick, measure them against it to make sure. Better to make them too long than not enough and whatever you do don't clump bits on the end if they're too short. It's too noticeable. I want three coils, exact copies of each other. Understood?"

Half-expecting to have just been sacked, it took Rhu a dumb moment to replay his words in her head. She nodded silently and reached for the clay.

by **Rhu** on November 24th, 2015, 1:03 am

Out of the corner of her eye Rhu watched as Sal smoothed over the bottom of the pot, first with his thumb, which he then licked, and then with a piece of rough-looking paper, possibly a thin fabric. Some of the wetter clay stuck to it and he grumbled his irritation under his breath as he scraped it off with a small wooden block. The charcoal-stick trick was helpful. Annoyingly so. So simple, so helpful. It was the sort of thing she should have thought of herself, to measure each piece against another object, but she hadn't. Sal, her employer, had had to tell her to. If she made it to the end of the day with her job, she would be surprised.

The coil was coming along nicely, and Rhu carefully moved it to just next to the charcoal, gauging the similarity. It was close, certainly, perhaps a little too thick still... she risked a glance at Sal. His fingers were deep inside her pot, gently massaging the inside. Smoothing it, she realised. She frowned, turning back to rolling the clay and resisting the urge to tell him that she knew she had to smooth the inside, she'd been going to, but only when the rest was done. She wasn't a complete beginner.

Even after only a few minutes of work, her pot looked better. The sides had been smoothed in such a way that each ring was merged into the others, creating one smooth surface. She finished the newest coil and, as Sal stood back to let her, put it on top. Rhu copied his movements, carefully massaging both the outside and inside until it was all one. That done, she returned to the rest of the clay, dampened her hands and picked up another piece to begin again.

"Not bad, not bad at all," Sal said, as she adjusted the final coil and started flattening out the top. The thin piece of metal Sal had given her to do it with made the edges too square, so she went back over the whole thing, tucking the clay in and rubbing it back into shape with water. When she finished and stepped back, he nodded in approval. "Do you know what happens next?" he asked, and Rhu shifted to look at the kiln across the room. "Straight away?"

Even if Rhu hadn't known the answer she could recognise a trick question when she heard one. "We wait," she said. "Let pot dry."

Sal'a expression didn't change much but, as he stood and wrapped the pot in a piece of thin, stretchy material, Rhu thought she saw a faint smile on his lips. "Then what?"

A harder question considering there were different answers depending on what exactly they were doing. Rhu assumed, based on the fact that he was asking, that the answer wasn't simply 'paint it'. "We glaze. Decorate. Fire again."

"And should I assume you're as skilled a painter as you are a potter," there was derision in his tone, and a slight amusement, as if daring her to lie and Rhu frowned at him.

"No," he opened his mouth, eyes narrowing in annoyance but Rhu continued talking before he could interrupt, "am less skilled. Have rarely painted."

"Well I'd always known I'd need to train my apprentice up," Sal mused. "I'll finish this one up - see if we can get it looking good enough to sell. You come back tomorrow nice and early and we'll see about filling in a custom order or two - if you start that off then you'll have a chance of having something presentable by the time they're due."

Normally Rhu would not take such an insult without argument, but it was true. Besides, he was giving her a job and an argument over just how much more she needed to learn to do the job she had been hired for was an easy way of reminding Sal just how much she needed to learn, and therefore was an easy way to lose the aforementioned job.

So she smiled and said her thanks and made her exit. Sal had not said what time to come the next day, but Rhu had started to think that his vagueness was simply a test to see how much work she would do when not given clear instructions or being watched over constantly. A lack of skill but willingness to try was apparently, thankfully, good enough for him.

That meant a very early start then. With a half-yawn and mild surprise at how late it had gotten, Rhu turned down in the direction of the tiny sunless room she had recently purchased. An early start meant an early night, it seemed.