Taran did not answer immediately, and as he hesitated, the weaver-woman smiled and spoke again.
“I know what is in your heart, Wanderer,” she said. “A young man’s way is restless; yes, and a young girl’s too—I’m not so gone in years that I’ve forgotten. Your face tells me it is not your wish to stay in Commot Gwenith.”
Taran nodded. “As much as I hoped to be a swordsmith, so I hoped to be a weaver. But you speak truth. This is not the way I would follow.”
“Then must we say farewell,” answered the weaver-woman. “But mind you,” she added, in her usual sharp tone, “if life is a loom, the pattern you weave is not so easily unraveled.”
Taran and Gurgi set off again, still journeying northward, and soon Commot Gwenith was far behind them. Though Taran wore his new cloak on his shoulders and his new blade at his side, his pleasure in them shortly gave way to disquiet. The words of Dwyvach lingered in his mind, and his thoughts turned to another loom in the distant Marshes of Morva.
“And what of Orddu?” he said. “Does she weave with more than threads? The robin has truly been scratching for his worms. But have I indeed chosen my own pattern, or am I no more than a thread on her loom? If that be so, then I fear it’s a thread serving little purpose. At any rate,” he added, with a rueful laugh, “it’s a long and tangled one.”
But these gloomy thoughts flew from his mind when, some days later, Melynlas bore him to the top of a rise and he looked down on the fairest Commot he had ever seen. A tall stand of firs and hemlocks circled broad, well-tended fields, green and abundant. White, thatch-roofed cottages sparkled in shafts of sunlight. The air itself seemed different to him, cool and touched with the sharp scent of evergreens. His heart quickened as he watched, and a strange excitement filled him.
Gurgi had ridden up beside him. “Kindly master, can we not stop here?”
“Yes,” Taran murmured, his eyes never leaving the fields and cottages. “Yes. Here shall we rest.”
He urged Melynlas down the slope, with Gurgi cantering eagerly behind him. Crossing a shallow stream, Taran reined up at the sight of a hale old man digging busily near the water’s edge. Beside him stood a pair of wooden buckets on a yoke, and into these he carefully poured spadefuls of pale brown earth. His iron-gray hair and beard were cropped short; despite his age, his arms seemed as brawny as those of Hevydd the Smith.
“A good greeting to you, master delver,” Taran called. “What place is this?”
The man turned, wiped his deeply lined brow with a forearm, and looked at Taran with keen blue eyes. “The water your horse is standing in—and churning to mud, by the way—is Fernbrake Stream. The Commot? This is Commot Merin.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Potter’s Wheel
“I’ve told you where you are,” the man went on good-naturedly, as Taran dismounted at the bank of the stream. “Now might you be willing to tell me who you are, and what brings you to a place whose name you must ask? Have you lost your way and found Merin when you sought another Commot?”
“I am called Wanderer,” Taran replied. “As for losing my way,” he added with a laugh, “I can’t say that I have, for I’m not sure myself where my path lies.”
“Then Merin is as fair a place as any to break your journey,” the man said. “Come along, if you’d see what hospitality I can offer the two of you.”
As the man dropped a last spadeful of clay into the wooden buckets, Taran stepped forward and offered to carry them; and, since the man did not refuse, set his shoulders under the yoke. But the buckets were heavier than Taran reckoned. His brow soon burst out in sweat; he could barely stagger along under the load he felt doubling at every pace; and the hut to which the man pointed seemed to grow farther instead of closer.
“If you seek daub to mend your chimney,” Taran gasped, “you’ve come a long way to find it!”
“You’ve not caught the trick of that yoke,” said the man, grinning broadly at Taran’s effort. He shouldered the buckets, which Taran gladly gave back, and strode along so briskly, despite the weight of his burden, that he nearly outdistanced the companions. Arriving at a long shed, he poured the clay into a great wooden vat, then beckoned the wayfarers to enter his hut.
Inside Taran saw racks and shelves holding earthenware of all kinds, vessels of plain baked clay, graceful jars, and among these, at random, pieces whose craftsmanship and beauty made him catch his breath. Only once, in the treasure-house of Lord Gast, had he set eyes on handiwork such as this. He turned, astonished, to the old man who had begun laying dishes and bowls on an oaken table.
“When I asked if you sought daub to mend your chimney I spoke foolishly,” Taran said, humbly bowing. “If this is your work, I have seen some of it before, and I know you: Annlaw Clay-Shaper.”
The potter nodded. “My work it is. If you’ve seen it, it may be that indeed you do know me. For I am old at my craft, Wanderer, and no longer sure where the clay ends and Annlaw begins—or, in truth, if they’re not one and the same.”
Taran looked closer at the vessels crowding the hut, at the newly finished wine bowl shaped even more skillfully than the one in Lord Gast’s trove, at the long, clay-spattered tables covered with jars of paints, pigments, and glazes. Now he saw in wonder that what he had first taken for common sculleryware was as beautiful, in its own way, as the wine bowl. All had come from a master’s hand. He turned to Annlaw.
“It was told me,” Taran said, “that one piece of your making is worth more than all of a cantrev lord’s treasure-house, and I well believe it. And here,” he shook his head in amazement, “this is a treasure-house in itself.”
“Yes, yes!” Gurgi cried. “Oh, skillful potter gains riches and fortune from clever shapings!”
“Riches and fortune?” replied Annlaw smiling. “Food for my table, rather. Most of these pots and bowls I send to the small Commots where the folk have no potter of their own. As I give what they need, they give what I need; and treasure is what I need the least. My joy is in the craft, not the gain. Would all the fortunes in Prydain help my fingers shape a better bowl?”
“There are those,” Taran said, half in earnest as he glanced at the potter’s wheel, “who claim work such as yours comes by enchantment.”
At this Annlaw threw back his head and laughed heartily. “I wish it did, for it would spare much toil. No, no, Wanderer, my wheel, alas, is like any other. True it is,” he added, “that Govannion the Lame, master craftsman of Prydain, long ago fashioned all manner of enchanted implements. He gave them to whom he deemed would use them wisely and well, but one by one they fell into the clutches of Arawn Death-Lord. Now all are gone.
“But Govannion, too, discovered and set down the high secrets of all crafts,” Annlaw went on. “These, as well, Arawn stole, to hoard in Annuvin where none may ever profit from them.” The potter’s face turned grave. “A lifetime have I striven to discover them again, to guess what might have been their nature. Much have I learned—learned by doing, as a child learns to walk. But my steps falter. The deepest lore yet lies beyond my grasp. I fear it ever shall.
“Let me gain this lore,” Annlaw said, “and I’ll yearn for no magical tools. Let me find the knowledge. And these,” he added, holding up his clay-crusted hands, “these will be enough to serve me.”
“But you know what you seek,” Taran answered. “I, alas, seek without knowing even where to look.” He then told Annlaw of Hevydd the Smith and Dwyvach the Weaver-Woman, of the sword and cloak he had made. “I was proud of my work,” Taran went on. “Yet, at the end neither anvil nor loom satisfied me.”
“What of the potter’s wheel?” asked Annlaw. When Taran admitted he knew nothing of this craft and prayed Annlaw to let him see the shaping of clay, the old potter willingly agreed.
Annlaw drew up his coarse robe and seated himself at the wheel, which he quickly set spinning, and on it flung a lump of clay. The potter bent almost humbly to his work, and reached out his hands as tenderly as if he were lifting
an unfledged bird. Before Taran’s eyes Annlaw began shaping a tall, slender vessel. As Taran stared in awe, the clay seemed to shimmer on the swiftly turning wheel and to change from moment to moment. Now Taran understood Annlaw’s words, for indeed between the potter’s deft fingers and the clay he saw no separation, as though Annlaw’s hands flowed into the clay and gave it life. Annlaw was silent and intent; his lined face had brightened; the years had fallen away from it. Taran felt his heart fill with a joy that seemed to reach from the potter to himself, and in that moment understood that he was in the presence of a true master craftsman, greater than any he had ever known.
“Fflewddur was wrong,” Taran murmured. “If there is enchantment, it lies not in the potter’s wheel but in the potter.”
“Enchantment there is none,” answered Annlaw, never turning from his work. “A gift, perhaps, but a gift that bears with it much toil.”
“If I could make a thing of such beauty, it is toil I would welcome,” Taran said.
“Sit you down then,” said Annlaw, making room for Taran at the wheel. “Shape the clay for yourself.” When Taran protested he would spoil Annlaw’s half-formed vessel, the potter only laughed. “Spoil it you will, surely. I’ll toss it back into the kneading trough, mix it with the other clay, and sooner or later it will serve again. It will not be lost. Indeed, nothing ever is, but comes back in one shape or another.”
“But for yourself,” Taran said. “The skill you have already put in it will be wasted.”
The potter shook his head. “Not so. Craftsmanship isn’t like water in an earthen pot, to be taken out by the dipperful until it’s empty. No, the more drawn out the more remains. The heart renews itself, Wanderer, and skill grows all the better for it. Here, then. Your hands—thus. Your thumbs—thus.”
From the first moment Taran felt the clay whirling beneath his fingers, his heart leaped with the same joy he had seen on the potter’s face. The pride of forging his own sword and weaving his own cloak dwindled before this new discovery that made him cry out in sudden delight. But his hands faltered and the clay went awry. Annlaw stopped the wheel. Taran’s first vessel was so lopsided and misshapen that, despite his disappointment, he threw back his head and laughed.
Annlaw clapped him on the shoulder. “Well-tried, Wanderer. The first bowl I turned was as ill-favored—and worse. You have the touch for it. But before you learn the craft, you must first learn the clay. Dig, sift, and knead it, know its nature better than that of your closest companion. Then grind pigments for your glazes, understand how the fire of the kiln works upon them.”
“Annlaw Clay-Shaper,” Taran said in a low voice that hid nothing of his yearning, “will you teach me your craft? This more than all else I long to do.”
Annlaw hesitated several moments and looked deeply at Taran. “I can teach you only what you can learn,” said the potter. “How much that may be, time will tell. Stay, if that is your wish. Tomorrow we shall begin.”
The two wayfarers made themselves comfortable that night in a snug corner of the pottery shed. Gurgi curled on the straw pallet, but Taran sat with knees drawn up and arms clasped about them. “It’s strange,” he murmured. “The more of the Commot folk I’ve known, the fonder have I grown of them. Yet Commot Merin drew me at first sight, closer than all the others.” The night was soft and still. Taran smiled wistfully in the darkness. “The moment I saw it, I thought it the one place I’d be content to dwell. And that—that even Eilonwy might have been happy here.
“And at Annlaw’s wheel,” he went on, “when my hands touched the clay, I knew I would count myself happy to be a potter. More than smithing, more than weaving—it’s as though I could speak through my fingers, as though I could give shape to what was in my heart. I understand what Annlaw meant. There is no difference between him and his work. Indeed, Annlaw puts himself into the clay and makes it live with his own life. If I, too, might learn to do this …”
Gurgi did not answer. The weary creature was fast asleep. Taran smiled and drew the cloak over Gurgi’s shoulders. “Sleep well,” he said. “We may have come to the end of our journey.”
Annlaw was as good as his word. In the days that followed, the potter showed Taran skills no less important than the working of the clay itself: the finding of proper earths, judging their texture and quality, sifting, mixing, tempering. Gurgi joined Taran in all the tasks, and soon his shaggy hair grew so crusted with dust, mud, and gritty glaze that he looked like an unbaked clay pot set on a pair of skinny legs.
The summer sped quickly and happily, and the more Taran saw the potter at his craft the more he marveled. At the kneading trough, Annlaw pounded the clay with greater vigor than Hevydd the Smith at his anvil; and at the wheel did the most intricate work with a deftness surpassing even that of Dwyvach the Weaver-Woman. As early as he rose in the mornings, Taran always found the potter already up and about his tasks. Annlaw was tireless, often spending nights without sleep and days without food, absorbed in labor at his wheel. Seldom was the potter content to repeat a pattern, but strove to better even what he himself had originated.
“Stale water is a poor drink,” said Annlaw. “Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.”
Not until autumn did Annlaw let Taran try his hand at the wheel again. This time, the bowl Taran shaped was not as ill-formed as the other.
Annlaw, studying it carefully, nodded his head and told him, “You have learned a little, Wanderer.” Nevertheless, to Taran’s dismay, Annlaw cast the bowl into the kneading trough. “Never fear,” said the potter. “When you shape one worth the keeping, it will be fired in the kiln.”
Though Taran feared such a time might never come, it was not long before Annlaw judged a vessel, a shallow bowl simple in design yet well-proportioned, to be ready for firing. He set it, along with other pots and bowls he had crafted for the folk of Commot Isav, into a kiln taller and deeper than Hevydd’s furnace. While Annlaw calmly turned to finishing other vessels for the Commot folk, Taran’s anxiety grew until he felt that he himself was baking in the flames. But at last, when the firing was done and the pieces had cooled, the potter drew out the bowl, turned it around in his hands as Taran waited breathlessly, and tapped it with a clay-rimmed finger.
He grinned at Taran. “It rings true. Beginner’s work, Wanderer, but not to be ashamed of.”
Taran’s heart lifted as if he had fashioned a wine bowl handsomer than ever Lord Gast had seen.
But his joy changed soon to despair. Through autumn Taran shaped other vessels; yet, to his growing dismay, none satisfied him, none matched his hopes, despite the painful toil he poured into the work.
“What lacks?” he cried to Annlaw. “I could forge a sword well enough and weave a cloak well enough. But now, what I truly long to grasp is beyond my reach. Must the one skill I sought above all be denied me?” he burst out in an anguished voice. “Is the gift forbidden me?” He bowed his head, and his heart froze even as he spoke the words, for he knew, within himself, he had touched the truth.
Annlaw did not gainsay him, but only looked at him for a long while with deep sadness.
“Why?” Taran whispered. “Why is this so?”
“It is a heavy question,” Annlaw replied at last. He put a hand on Taran’s shoulder. “Indeed, no man can answer it. There are those who have labored all their lives to gain the gift, striving until the end only to find themselves mistaken; and those who had it born in them yet never knew; those who lost heart too soon; and those who should never have begun at all.
“Count yourself lucky,” the potter went on, “that you have understood this now and not spent your years in vain hope. This much have you learned, and no learning is wasted.”
“What then shall I do?” Taran asked. Grief and bitterness such as he had known in Craddoc’s valley flooded over him.
“There are more ways to happiness than in the shaping of a pot,” replied Annlaw. “You have been happy in Merin. You still can be
. There is work for you to do. Your help is welcome and valuable to me, as a friend as much as an apprentice. Why, look you now,” he went on in a cheerful tone, “tomorrow I would send my ware to Commot Isav. But a day’s journey is long for one of my years. As a friend, will you bear the burden for me?”
Taran nodded. “I will carry your ware to Isav.” He turned away, knowing that his happiness was ended, like a flawed vessel shattered in the firing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Spoilers
Next morning, as Taran had promised, he loaded Melynlas and Gurgi’s pony with the potter’s ware and, Gurgi beside him, set out for Commot Isav. Annlaw, he knew, could as well have sent word to the Commot folk, asking them to come and bear away their own vessels.
“This is not an errand I do for him, but a kindness he does for me,” Taran told Gurgi. “I think he means to give me time to myself, to find my own thoughts. As for that,” he added sorrowfully, “so far I’ve found none. I long to stay in Merin, yet there’s little to keep me here. I prize Annlaw as my friend and as a master of his craft. But his craft will never be mine.”
Still pondering and troubled at heart Taran reached Isav some while before dusk. It was the smallest Commot of all he had seen, with fewer than half-a-dozen cottages and a little grazing plot for a handful of sheep and cattle. A knot of men were gathered by the sheepfold. As Taran rode closer he saw their faces tightly drawn and grim.
Perplexed at this he called out his name and told them he brought pottery from Annlaw Clay-Shaper.