The practice went on for most of an hour. Alice sat in her circle in her arming shirt, her armour in its neat row beside her, listening to the Red Storm of the Redcrown bark at the sky like a very large, very offended dog.
After the eleventh roar she went to the cave mouth to look.
Rakshaza was on the ledge on all fours, wings half spread for balance, glaring down into the hollow. Far below, on a boulder by the stream, a small grey figure sat with a flask. As Alice watched, the figure lifted one hand. It tilted it from side to side.
The dragon’s head sank. A long breath went out of her. It sent the dust off the ledge in a sheet.
“So-so,” Rakshaza said, without turning round. “She says so-so. To the eleventh. The eleventh was the best one.”
“The fourth was the best one.”
The great head swung round. One emerald eye, the size of a shield, fixed on her.
“You,” said the dragon, “are not helping.”
“I’m not trying to help.” Alice leaned on the rock at the cave mouth, warm in the sun, light as a girl. “I’m enjoying myself.”
The eye narrowed. Then, slowly, it crinkled at the corner.
“Come inside, Hero,” said Rakshaza. “I’ll find you something to do with your hands.”
* * *
It was not, Alice discovered, what she had thought it meant.
Rakshaza shifted at the threshold, in ash-grey silk, barefoot, a smudge of soot on one cheekbone from the eleventh roar. She led Alice not toward the bed but away from it, past the marble king, past the loom with the sheep on it, past the pottery wheel. Alice knew those. She had looked at them from the bed. She had watched Rakshaza send the bowls flying for Gideon’s benefit, had seen the sheep hung across the tunnel as a curtain, then torn in half by a retreating dragon. She had thought they were part of the hoard, like the goblets.
Rakshaza did not stop at them. She went on, into the far left side of the cave, where Alice had never once gone in a year. It had never occurred to her that there was anywhere to go.
The coins thinned out underfoot. The ceiling came lower. Then the lamplight Rakshaza carried swung round a pillar of rock, and Alice stopped.
It was a whole country back there.
Easels stood about at angles. There were canvases propped against the rock, facing inward, a dozen deep: the sunsets, Alice realised, turned to the wall since the day of the skulls. Beyond them, a forest. A tiny one, knee-high, made of grey twigs in shallow trays, row after row of little dead trees.
There was a stone bench crowded with coloured glass, all of it melted into shapes like toffee left in the sun. A wooden frame with an embroidery hoop, a single crimson thread hanging off it. A wall of hooks hung with keys, hundreds of them, iron, brass, silver, one the length of Alice’s forearm.
In the far corner stood a tower of round wax-sealed wheels, taller than both of them, roped together. Something about it made the hair on Alice’s arms stand up.
“What,” she said, “is all this?”
Rakshaza set the lamp down on a rock. She looked round at it all with her arms folded, the way a woman looks at an attic she has not been up to for some time.
“Everything I ever tried,” she said. “Once I’d stopped trying it.”
* * *
She had never shown anybody any of it. Not properly. The loom, the wheel, the lute: Alice had lived beside those for a year without asking, which had suited Rakshaza perfectly. Who would want to hear about a heap of failures?
She had not counted on Alice’s face.
The hero went through it the way she went through a fight, thoroughly, missing nothing. She started where Rakshaza had hoped she would not: back at the loom by the bed, which she had walked past a hundred times. She stood in front of it for a long time.
The sheep was on it again. Rakshaza had carried the two halves back from the tunnel after Gideon’s visit, stitched them together on the frame with thick red thread, very badly. A seam ran across the middle of the sheep like a belt.
“You mended him,” Alice said.
“Badly.”
“He hasn’t got a sky. He stops. Halfway up.”
“Skies are mostly the same blue,” said Rakshaza. “I could see where it was going.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Seven hundred years. About.”
Alice touched the seam, very lightly, as if it might mind. The sheep looked out at her with one stitched eye. It had a slightly startled expression. Rakshaza had always been rather proud of that expression.
“I like him,” said Alice. “I liked him on the curtain, too. I didn’t know he was yours.”
Rakshaza found she had nothing ready to say to that. She steered them away, a little quickly, before the hero could get any closer to the loom. Behind the loom, on the wall, in a corner where the lamplight did not reach, there were six small scratches in the rock. Five straight. One leaning. She did not look at them. She stood with her back to them, her hip against the frame, as casual as a gate.
Then Alice went back to the forest.
“They were alive when I started,” said Rakshaza, before she could ask.
“What happened?”
“I watered them every ten years. It seemed like plenty.”
Alice made a small noise. Then she crouched down among the tiny dead trees, put out one finger, touched the top of the tallest. It was the size of her hand. A pine, once. Somebody had wired its branches into a shape like a wave.
“You made it look like it was standing in the wind,” Alice said.
“For about forty years. Then it stood in nothing.”
The keys. (“Doors,” Rakshaza said. “I meant to find them all.” “How many did you find?” “One. It was a privy.”) The glass. (“You need breath for glass. Mine was not suitable.”) The embroidery. (“Too small. I kept losing the needle in the hoard. It’s still in here. Somewhere.”) Alice went from one thing to the next. She asked about every single one. She waited for every answer.
Nobody had ever waited for the answers. Rakshaza had not known, until now, that she had been keeping them.
At the tower of wax wheels Alice stopped, put her head on one side, reached for the rope.
“No,” said Rakshaza.
“I only want to...”
“Absolutely not. Those are cheeses. They’re four hundred years old. Some of them have developed opinions.”
Alice withdrew her hand. She looked at the tower with new respect. The tower, Rakshaza was almost certain, looked back.
On the way back past the bed, Alice stopped at the pottery wheel. She had looked at it for a year without a thought. Now she saw the hill of leaning bowls beside it, rebuilt since Gideon’s day, and the clay bin with its lid of slate. Her whole face changed.
“Can I?”
* * *
They were cheap ones, soft at the corners, the kind soldiers carried. She had sat down in her circle without a word, shuffled them, dealt two hands onto the stone. One in front of herself. One in front of the dragon’s nose.
“What is this?”
“Kings and Beggars. It’s a game. You’ve never played?”
Rakshaza had looked at the five little cards lying in front of her. She had played a great many games in her life. With armies. With kings. Never with cards. Never with anybody who would sit across from her on the floor.
She could not hold them, of course. Alice had turned them face up for her. That meant Alice could see her whole hand. Rakshaza had pointed this out.
“I know,” Alice had said. “You’ll have to cheat to win. Go on.”
So she had cheated. Outrageously. She had blown three of Alice’s cards into the hoard with one sigh. She had won eleven games out of eleven. Alice had laughed until she lay on her back on the stone.
It had been, Rakshaza thought, the best afternoon in a thousand years. She had not understood why. She had blamed the cards.
* * *
The clay was old. It had been sealed under a slate lid in a bin for three hundred years. When Alice put both hands into it, it sighed out a smell of river and dark.
“You wet it,” said Rakshaza, from a safe distance. She had settled on the stool beside the lute, ankles crossed, chin on her fist. “You knead it. You put it on the wheel. You kick the wheel. You put your hands round it. You make it go up.”
“That’s all?”
“That is all. In theory.”
Alice kneaded. She was very good at kneading. She had hands that had held a lance at a gallop, a bull’s horns, a falling cart. The clay had not been worked by anybody stronger than a dragon in a human shape, three centuries ago, half-heartedly. Under Alice’s palms it went from stone to dough in a minute.
She slapped it onto the wheel, dead centre. She sat. She put her foot on the kick-board. She kicked.
The wheel was solid stone, a metre across, cut by some long-dead mason for a dragon. It had been designed, as far as Rakshaza had ever been able to tell, to turn slowly under a great weight for a very long time.
It turned once. Twice. Then it took off like a millstone in a flood.
“Gently,” said Rakshaza.
“I am being gentle.”
“You are not being...”
Alice put her hands round the clay.
For one splendid moment it rose. A pale, wet column, climbing between her palms, smooth as cream. Alice made a sound of pure delight.
Then the wheel caught the edge of her strength. The column folded. Then it flew.
It left the wheel in three directions at once. One piece hit the cave wall with a noise like a slapped cheek. One went up, high, so high Rakshaza heard it hit the roof. The third, the largest, crossed the graveyard in a long, wet arc and struck the marble king, out in the hoard, square in the face.
The wheel slowed. Spun. Stopped.
The marble king stood in the lamplight with a grey moustache he had not had for a thousand years.
Alice sat on the bench with both hands up, empty, dripping. There was clay in her hair. There was clay on her cheek. Her mouth was open.
Rakshaza looked at the king. She looked at the hero. Something was happening in her chest, rising, something she had no hope of stopping.
The laugh came out of her so loud the lute on the stool rang its two strings by itself.
She laughed until she had to hold the wall. She laughed until her tail went round her own legs to keep her up. Alice was laughing too, in great helpless gulps, head down between her clay hands, shoulders shaking.
“It’s not funny...”
“He’s been there since before the Salt Wars. He was a very serious king.”
“I barely touched it!”
“You barely touched it into his face.”
When she could breathe again Rakshaza wiped her eyes. She found she was standing beside the wheel. She did not remember crossing to it.
“Again,” she said. “Slower.”
* * *
“Like this,” said Rakshaza, behind her.
She had sat down on the bench at Alice’s back, one leg on either side. Her arms came round Alice’s arms. Her hands came down over Alice’s hands on the fresh clay, the long elegant fingers lying over Alice’s blunt ones, warm, damp, very sure.
Alice forgot how wheels worked.
“Kick it softly,” said the voice by her ear. “Softer. As if it’s asleep.”
Alice kicked it as if it were asleep. The wheel turned, unhurried, a big slow circle in the lamplight.
“Now. Don’t make it do anything. Let it go where it was going. You’re only... telling it where the walls are.”
Rakshaza’s hands pressed. Alice’s pressed under them. The clay rose between their four palms, slow, grey, wet, a little crooked. It wobbled. Rakshaza’s thumb moved over Alice’s thumb. The wobble steadied.
“You did this,” Alice said. Her voice came out lower than she meant. “Before. On your own.”
“Many times.”
“Did it look like this?”
There was a pause behind her. The wheel went round.
“No,” said Rakshaza. “It was always quite good, actually. That was the trouble. I’d get good. Then I could see the end of it. Every bowl. Every sky. I could see exactly where it would go before it went there.” Her chin rested lightly on Alice’s shoulder. Her breath smelled of smoke and cinnamon. “There was nobody here to make it go wrong.”
The clay leaned under their hands. Neither of them straightened it.
“I’m very good at making things go wrong,” said Alice.
“I’d noticed. The king noticed.”
“You’re laughing again.” This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
“I am not.”
She was. Alice could feel it, shaking through the silk at her back, through the arms round her arms. She turned her head. Rakshaza’s face was right there. The soot on the cheekbone. The clay now, too, a grey fingerprint at the corner of her mouth.
Alice kissed it off.
The wheel slowed. Nobody kicked it. It turned, slower. Then it stopped. Clay-wet fingers slid from Alice’s knuckles to her wrist, up her forearm, into the sleeve of her shirt. Alice twisted round on the bench.
She got a grey handprint on the ash-grey silk. Then another. Rakshaza made a sound into her mouth that had nothing to do with pottery.
They broke apart only because the lute fell off the stool.
They both looked at it. It lay on the stone, humming quietly on its two strings, offended.
On the wheel between them stood a bowl. It was about the size of two hands cupped together. It leaned badly to the left. One side of its rim was higher than the other. There was a thumbprint in it, near the bottom, that belonged to neither of them alone.
“Oh,” said Alice.
Rakshaza looked at it for a long time. Something went across her face that Alice had never seen there. Not the boredom she had seen at the back of those green eyes all year, the old, deep, dusty kind. The opposite of it.
“It’s dreadful,” Rakshaza said softly.
“It’s lopsided.”
“It’s the worst bowl I have ever been involved in.” She sounded entirely happy. “We’ll have to fire it.”
* * *
There was no kiln. There had never been a kiln. Rakshaza explained this on the ledge, where she had carried the bowl out cupped in both hands like a bird’s egg.
“Then how did you fire the others?”
“I breathed on them.”
“Ah.”
“It went badly,” Rakshaza admitted. “I’m better at... broad strokes.”
She set the bowl on a flat stone in the middle of the ledge. She stepped back. Then the shape went out of her, in the heat and the rush, until the dragon stood there on all fours in the afternoon sun, enormous, wings folded, looking down at a small grey bowl the way a mountain looks down at a mouse.
Alice backed up to the cave mouth. Then a little further.
The dragon lowered her head until her jaw nearly touched the rock. Her eyes narrowed in concentration. Alice could see her trying, could see the whole vast body of her held still, like somebody threading a needle with gloves on.
She breathed out.
It was not fire, exactly. It was heat with a little light in it, a slow golden glow that poured over the stone in a long sigh, so gentle the air above it barely shimmered. The bowl went dark. Then red. Then a clean bright orange, like a coal, sitting in its little pool of light on the grey rock.
It held for a count of thirty. Then the dragon lifted her head and stopped.
Neither of them breathed.
The bowl cooled. Red. Dull. Grey again, but a harder grey now, with a faint ring when the wind touched it. A single crack ran down one side, thin as a hair, from the high bit of the rim to the thumbprint.
It had not shattered. It was still a bowl.
Rakshaza looked at it. She looked at it as if it were the hoard.
“I have never,” she said, “once, in three thousand years, done anything that gently.”
“It’s cracked.”
“It’s finished. It’s never been finished before.” The great head turned. “They always exploded. Every one. That’s why they lean. Those are the ones that survived not being fired.”
Alice laughed. She went out onto the ledge, picked the bowl up. It was still warm. She cupped it in both hands, the way Rakshaza had carried it out, and looked at the crack, the thumbprint, the bad left-hand lean.
Doing it with somebody, she thought. That’s all it was.
She did not say it. She thought the dragon might be thinking it too. From the look in the green eye, from the stillness of the tail, she was almost sure.
* * *
They buckled her back in at sunset. All of it this time, every piece, from the greaves up, Rakshaza’s hands doing what Alice’s had done alone for thirteen years. It took twice as long. Neither of them hurried it.
“Same time tomorrow,” said Alice.
“I’ll be here,” said Rakshaza. “I am always here.” Then, as Alice turned to climb down: “Hero. Ask her. The fourth one. Ask her what she thought of the fourth one.”
“I’m not asking her.”
“You are.”
Hester was waiting in the hollow. Grudge was already saddled. The old woman did not ask a single thing. She got herself up into the saddle, bad leg last, then looked down at what Alice was holding: a small grey bowl wrapped in a handkerchief, cradled against her breastplate like a newborn.
They rode home side by side in the last of the light. The first time anybody had ever ridden home with her. Alice found that she did not know where to put her face. After a while she stopped trying to put it anywhere.
Halfway down the road, unable to bear it, she said, “She wants to know what you thought of the fourth roar.”
Hester rode on in silence for a full minute.
“Better than the eleventh,” she said.
Alice bit the inside of her cheek very hard.
At the Lance, Marta took the bowl out of the handkerchief, turned it in her flour-dusted hands, said nothing at all about where it might have come from. Then she reached up, moved a jug, set it on the shelf above the bar, right under the old dented lance, where everybody would see it.
Pip leaned over to look. Gideon leaned over Pip. Dobbs leaned over everybody.
Hester eased herself onto her stool. She looked up at the bowl on its shelf for a long moment: the lean, the crack, the bad uneven rim.
“Bit lopsided,” she said.
“It’s meant to be,” said Alice.
She was surprised to find that she meant it.