The Potter of Bones h-11

by Eleanor Arnason

  Now, Haik thought, she was in the south. War was continuous here; and lineages vanished from existence, the men killed, the women and children adopted. A family that lacked soldiers like Ettin Taiin would not survive.

  This idea led nowhere, except to the thought that the world was full of violence, and this was hardly a new thought. In front of her, Dapple tripped over the sul’s long dragging penis and tumbled into a somersault, which ended with her upright once again, the penis wound around her neck. The audience hooted its approval. The world was full of violence and sex, Haik thought.

  Once again the captain joined them at the inn. This time he drank less and asked questions, first of the actors, then of Haik. Where exactly was her family? What did they produce besides pots?

  "Are you planning to invade us?" she asked.

  He looked shocked. "I am a soldier, not a bandit, young lady! I only fight with people I know. The purpose of war is to expand the size of one’s family and increase the amount of land held by one’s kin. That should always be done along existing borders. You push out and push out, gathering the land and the women and children immediately beyond your borders, making sure the land is always contiguous and protected–if possible–by natural barriers. Any other strategy leaves you with a territory that is not defensible."

  "He’s not planning to invade you," Dapple said in summary. "Your land is too far away."

  "Exactly," the captain said. "Bandits and pirates use different tactics, since they want valuable objects rather than land and people. We’ve had both in the south and dealt with them."

  "How?" asked Haik.

  "The obvious way is to find where they came from, go there and kill all the men. The problem is, you have to do something with the bandit women and children. They can’t be left to starve. But obviously no family wants members with bad traits."

  "What do you do?"

  "Adopt them, but spread them among many houses, and never let any of them breed. Often, the children turn out well; and after a generation, the traits–bad or good–are gone. This, as you can imagine, is a lot of work, which is a reason to kill enough men so the bandits will think twice about returning to Ettin, but leave enough alive so the women and children are provided for."

  The carpenter was right. This was a frightening man.

  Dapple said, "The Tulwar are foresters. For the most part, they export lumber and flowering trees. Haik makes pots for the trees."

  "Do you have children?" the captain asked Haik.

  "Two daughters."

  "A woman with your abilities should have more. What about brothers?"

  "None."

  "Male cousins?"

  "Many," said Haik.

  The captain glanced at Dapple. "Would it be worthwhile asking a Tulwar man to come here and impregnate one of our women? Your lover’s pots are really excellent; and my mother has always liked flowers. So do I, for that matter."

  "It’s a small family," said Dapple. "And lives far away. A breeding contract with them would not help you politically."

  "There is more to life than politics," said the captain.

  "The Tulwar men aren’t much for fighting," said Haik, unsure that she wanted any connection with Ettin.

  "You don’t mean they’re cowards?"

  "Of course not. They work in our wild backcountry as foresters and loggers. They used to sail the ocean, before most of my family drowned. These kinds of work require courage, but we have always gotten along with our neighbors."

  "No harm in that, if you aren’t ambitious." He grinned, showing his missing tooth. "We don’t need to breed for ambition or violence. We have those talents in abundance. But art and beauty–" His blue eye glanced at her briefly. "These are not our gifts, though we are certainly able to appreciate both."

  "Witness your appreciation of Cholkwa," said Dapple, her tone amused.

  "A great comedian. and the best-looking man for his age I’ve ever seen. But my mother and her sisters decided years ago that he should not be asked to father Ettin children. For one thing, he has never mentioned having a family. Who could the Ettin speak to, if they wanted a breeding contract? A man shouldn’t make decisions like these. We do things the right way in Ettin! In any case, acting is not an entirely respectable art; who can say what qualities would appear among the Ettin, if our children were fathered by actors."

  "You see why I have no children," Dapple said, then tilted her head toward the carpenter. "Though my kinswoman here has two sets of twins, because her gift is making props. We don’t tell our relatives that she also acts."

  "Not much," said the carpenter.

  "And not well," muttered the apprentice sitting next to Haik.

  The captain stayed a while longer, chatting with Dapple about his family and her most recent plays. Finally he rose. "I’m too old for these long evenings. In addition, I plan to leave for Ettin at dawn. I assume you’re sending love and respect to my mother."

  "Of course," said Dapple.

  "And you, young lady." The one eye roved toward her. "If you come this way again, bring pots for Ettin. I’ll speak to my mother about a breeding contract with Tulwar. Believe me, we are allies worth having!"

  He left, and Dapple said, "I think he’s imagining a male relative who looks like you, who can spend his nights with an Ettin woman and his days with Ettin Taiin."

  "What a lot of hard work!" the carpenter said.

  "There are no Tulwar men who look like me."

  "What a sadness for Ettin Taiin!" said Dapple.

  From Hu Town they went west and south, traveling with a caravan. The actors and merchants rode tsina,which were familiar to Haik, though she had done little riding before this. The carrying beasts were bitalin: great, rough quadrupeds with three sets of horns. One pair spread far to the side; one pair curled forward; and the last pair curled back. The merchants valued the animals as much as tsina,giving them pet names and adorning their horns with brass or iron rings. They seemed marvelous to Haik, moving not quickly, but very steadily, their shaggy bodies swaying with each step. When one was bothered by something–bugs, a scent on the wind, another bital–it would swing its six-horned head and groan. What a sound!

  "Have you put bitalinin a play?" she asked Dapple.

  "Not yet. What quality would they represent?"

  "Reliability," said the merchant riding next to them. "Strength. Endurance. Obstinacy. Good milk."

  "I will certainly consider the idea," Dapple replied.

  At first the plain was green, the climate rainy. As they traveled south and west, the weather became dry, and the plain turned dun. This was not a brief journey. Haik had time to get used to riding, though the country never became ordinary to her. It was so wide! So empty!

  The merchants in the caravan belonged to a single family. Both women and men were along on the journey. Of course the actors camped with the women, while the men–farther out–stood guard. In spite of this protection, Haik was uneasy. The stars overhead were no longer entirely familiar; the darkness around her seemed to go on forever; and caravan campfires seemed tiny. Far out on the plain, wild sulincried. They were more savage than the domestic breeds used for hunting and guarding, Dapple told her. "And uglier, with scales covering half their bodies. Our sulinin the north have only a few small scaly patches."

  The sulinin Haik’s country were entirely furry, except in the spring. Then the males lost their chest fur, revealing an area of scaly skin, dark green and glittering. If allowed to, they’d attack one another, each trying to destroy the other’s chest adornment. "Biting the jewels," was the name of this behavior.

  Sitting under the vast foreign sky, Haik thought about sulin. They were all varieties of a single animal. Everyone knew this, though it was hard to believe that Tulwar’s mild-tempered, furry creatures were the same as the wild animals Dapple described. Could change go farther? Could an animal with hands become a pesha?And what caused change? Not trickery, as in the play. Dapple, reaching over, distracted her. Instead of evolut
ion, she thought about love.

  They reached a town next to a wide sandy river. Low bushy trees grew along the banks. The merchants made camp next to the trees, circling their wagons. Men took the animals to graze, while the women–merchants and actors–went to town.

  The streets were packed dirt, the houses adobe with wood doors and beams. (Haik could see these last protruding through the walls.) The people were the same physical type as in Hu, but with grey-brown fur. A few had faint markings–not spots like Dapple, but narrow broken stripes. They dressed as all people did, in tunics or shorts and vests.

  Why, thought Haik suddenly, did people come in different hues? Most wild species were a single color, with occasional freaks, usually black or white. Domestic animals came in different colors. It was obvious why: people had bred them according to different ideas of usefulness and beauty. Had people bred themselves to be grey, grey-brown, red, dun and so on? This was possible, though it seemed to Haik that most people were attracted to difference. Witness Ettin Taiin. Witness the response of the Tulwar matrons to her father.

  Now to the problems of time and change, she added the problem of difference. Maybe the problem of similarity as well. If animals tended to be the same, why did difference occur? If there was a tendency toward difference, why did it become evident only sometimes? She was as red as her father. Her daughters were dun. At this point, her head began to ache; and she understood the wisdom of her senior relatives. If one began to question anything–shells in rock, the hand in a pesha’s flipper–the questions would proliferate, till they stretched to the horizon in every direction and why, why, whyfilled the sky, like the calls of migrating birds.

  "Are you all right?" asked Dapple.

  "Thinking," said Haik.

  At the center of the town was a square, made of packed dirt. The merchants set up a tent and laid out sample goods: dried fish from Hu, fabric made by northern weavers, boxes carved from rare kinds of wood, jewelry of silver and dark red shell. Last of all, they unfolded an especially fine piece of cloth, put it on the ground and poured out their most precious treasure: a high, white, glittering heap of salt.

  Townsfolk gathered: bent matriarchs, robust matrons, slim girls and boys, even a few adult men. All were grey-brown, except the very old, who had turned white.

  In general, people looked like their relatives; and everyone knew that family traits existed. Why else select breeding partners with so much care? There must be two tendencies within people, one toward similarity, the other toward difference. The same must also be true of animals. Domestic sulincame in different colors; by breeding, people had brought out variations that must have been in the wild animals, though never visible, except in freaks. She crouched in the shadows at the back of the merchants’ tent, barely noticing the commerce in front of her, thinking difficult thoughts.

  Nowadays, geneticists tell us that the variation among people was caused by drift in isolated populations, combined with the tendency of all people to modify and improve anything they can get their hands on. We have bred ourselves like sulinto fit in different environments and to meet different ideas of beauty.

  But how could Haik know this much about the history of life? How could she know that wild animals were more varied than she had observed? There are wild sulinin the far northern islands as thick furred and white as the local people. There is a rare, almost extinct kind of wild sulinon the third continent, which is black and entirely scaly, except for a ridge of rust-brown fur along its back. She, having traveled on only one continent, was hypothesizing in the absence of adequate data. In spite of this, she caught a glimpse of how inheritance works.

  How likely is this? Could a person like Haik, living in a far-back era, come so near the idea of genes?

  Our ancestors were not fools! They were farmers and hunters, who observed animals closely; and they achieved technological advances–the creation through breeding of the plants that feed us and the animals we still use, though no longer exclusively, for work and travel–which we have not yet equaled, except possibly by going into space.

  In addition to the usual knowledge about inheritance, Haik had the ideas she’d gained from fossils. Other folk knew that certain plants and animals could be changed by breeding; and that families had traits that could be transmitted, either for good or bad. But most life seemed immutable. Wild animals were the same from generation to generation. So were the plants of forest and plain. The Goddess liked the world to stay put, as far as most people could see. Haik knew otherwise.

  Dapple came after her, saying, "We need help in setting up our stage."

  That evening, in the long summer twilight, the actors performed the peshacomedy. Dapple had to make a speech beforehand, explaining what a peshawas, since they were far inland now. But the town folk knew about sulin, tli,and penises; and the play went well, as had the trading of the merchants. The next day they continued west.

  Haik traveled with Dapple all summer. She learned to make masks by soaking paper in glue, then applying it in layers to a wooden mask frame.

  "Nothing we carry is more valuable," said the costume maker, holding a thick white sheet of paper. "Use this with respect! No other material is as light and easy to shape. But the cost, Haik, the cost!"

  The bitalincontinued to fascinate her: living animals as unfamiliar as the fossils in her cliffs! Her first mask was a bital. When it was dry, she painted the face tan, the six horns shiny black. The skin inside the flaring nostrils was red, as was the tongue protruding from the open mouth.

  Dapple wrote a play about a solid and reliable bitalcow, who lost her milk to a conniving tli. The tliwas outwitted by other animals, friends of the bital. The play ended with Dapple as the cow, dancing among pots of her recovered milk, turned through the ingenuity of the tliinto a new substance: long-lasting, delicious cheese. The play did well in towns of the western plains. By now they were in a region where the ocean was a rumor, only half-believed; but bitalinwere known and loved.

  Watching Dapple’s performance, Haik asked herself another question. If there was a hand inside the pesha’s flipper, could there be another hand in the bital’s calloused, two-toed foot? Did every living thing contain another living thing within it, like Dapple in the bitalcostume?

  What an idea!

  The caravan turned east when a plant called fire-in-autumn turned color. Unknown in Tulwar, it was common on the plain, though Haik had not noticed it till now. At first, there were only a few bright dots like drops of blood fallen on a pale brown carpet. These were enough to make the merchants change direction. Day by day, the color became more evident, spreading in lines. (The plant grew through sending out runners.) Finally, the plain was crisscrossed with scarlet. At times, the caravan traveled through long, broad patches of the plant, tsinaand bitalinbelly-deep in redness, as if they were fording rivers of blood or fire.

  When they reached the moist coastal plain, the plant became less common. The vegetation here was mostly a faded silver-brown. Rain fell, sometimes freezing; and they arrived in the merchants’ home town at the start of the first winter storm. Haik saw the rolling ocean through lashes caked with snow. The pleasure of salt water! Of smelling seaweed and fish!

  The merchants settled down for winter. The actors took the last ship north to Hu Town, where the innkeeper had bedrooms for them, a fire in the common room and halinready for mulling.

  At midwinter, Dapple went to Ettin. Haik stayed by the ocean, tired of foreigners. It had been more than half a year since she’d had clay in her hands or climbed the Tulwar cliffs in search of fossils. Now she learned that love was not enough. She walked the Hu beaches, caked with ice, and looked for shells. Most were similar to ones in Tulwar; but she found a few new kinds, including one she knew as a fossil. Did this mean other creatures–her claw-handed bird, the hammer-headed bug–were still alive somewhere? Maybe. Little was certain.

  Dapple returned through a snow storm and settled down to write. The Ettin always gave her ideas. "When I’m in the
south, I do comedy, because the people here prefer it. But their lives teach me how to write tragedy; and tragedy is my gift."

  Haik’s gift lay in the direction of clay and stone, not language. Her journey south had been interesting and passionate, but now it was time to do something. What? Hu Town had no pottery, and the rocks in the area contained no fossils. In the end, she took some of the precious paper and used it, along with metal wire, to model strange animals. The colors were a problem. She had to imagine them, using what she knew about the birds and bugs and animals of Tulwar. She made the hammer-headed bug red and black. The flower-predator was yellow and held a bright blue fish. The claw-handed bird was green.

  "Well, these are certainly different," said Dapple. "Is this what you find in your cliffs?"

  "The bones and shells, yes. Sometimes there is a kind of shadow of the animal in the rock. But never any colors."

  Dapple picked up a tightly coiled white shell. Purple tentacles spilled out of it; and Haik had given the creature two large, round eyes of yellow glass. The eyes were a guess, derived from a living ocean creature. But Haik had seen the shadow of tentacles in stone. Dapple tilted the shell, till one of the eyes caught sunlight and blazed. Hah! It seemed alive! "Maybe I could write a play about these creatures; and you could make the masks."

  Haik hesitated, then said, "I’m going home to Tulwar.–"

  "You are?" Dapple set down the glass-eyed animal.

  She needed her pottery, Haik explained, and the cliffs full of fossils, as well as time to think about this journey. "You wouldn’t give up acting for love!"

  "No," said Dapple. "I plan to spend next summer in the north, doing tragedies. When I’m done, I’ll come to Tulwar for a visit. I want one of your pots and maybe one of these little creatures." She touched the flower-predator. "You see the world like no one else I’ve ever met. Hah! It is full of wonders and strangeness, when looked at by you!"