Sect Year 7 · tenth month · night of day 3 · the sixty-fourth life: Tavrin, his nineteenth year
By nineteen Coll had his own bench under the drying-shed roof edge and a journeyman’s stamp for the base of every pot he threw. He had stopped being surprised when the yard gave him its odd jobs. The odd job that came up the yard road on the first warm morning of the spring firing was a boy of twelve, carrying a basket of clay on one hip.
The boy was thin in the wrists and the neck, and his boots had been mended with wire. He came from the orphan yard by the ferry. There, the children slept three to a bench under a roof that leaked, and everybody in Tavrin knew it and few took much notice. He set the basket on the wedging table without asking whether he was wanted, and then he stood back and waited to see what would happen to him.
“You’ve brought it dry on one side,” said Coll.
“It’s the same clay.”
“It’s the same clay, but it’s dry on one side.” Coll pulled the basket closer and pushed his hand into the grey mass, which gave under his fingers with a cool, heavy slowness. “Put your hands in it. Fold it over. Push it away from you with the heel of your hand, then turn it and fold it again. Keep going until it’s even all the way through.”
