of our best works. I had caged to create one of the Vilanders’ favourite myths – Gorenfer escaping the maddened jungles of Bustian-Halle.
The workroom door burst in and I spun around on my stool, the vase in my hands.
My father stumbled in, followed by five men I knew by sight and reputation. Instantly, intuitively, I understood the reason for this ungracious entrance.
One of the debt-collectors shouted my name, his face red and sweaty, his hand outstretched and demanding.
Shocked, and frightened beyond any fear I’d experienced before, I dropped the vase – its death cry adding to the terror about me.
That vase could have saved us, it could have paid my father’s debts, but I let it shatter on the floor.
After that I could blame my father for nothing. If he had temporarily impoverished us, then he had also created the beauty that would have saved us.
But I dropped it…and condemned us to slavery.
Neither my father’s entreaties, nor my tears, could move these five hard-souled men. There were debts, and they must be paid. Now. Nothing in our poor house (save the once beautiful vase scattered in useless shards at my feet) could be sold to pay recompense – except us.
We were handed directly to the local slaver who dusted us down, inspected us from head to toe, and stood back, considering.
I had learned my father’s craft well. For that reason the slaver kept us together, even though, at nineteen and fair enough, I would have fetched a reasonable price hawked to some tired bureaucrat or lordling bored with his wife. So I was saved from the bed of some paunch-bellied magnate, and my father kept his tools and the last living reminder of his wife. After our initial tears and protests, we resigned ourselves to our fate. It was regrettable but not unknown; over past years I had seen three other craftsmen sell themselves and their families to escape starvation. We would still practise our craft, if to the dictates of a master rather than to the satisfactions of free choice.
And we would still be together.
We did not stay in Viland long. The slaver, Skarp-Hedin, decided we’d fetch the best price in the strange, hot realms to the south.
“They have fine sand a-plenty for you to melt,” he said, “and the nobility to buy what you craft of it. You’ll fetch five times what you will here in this sorry land.”
My father bowed his head, but I stared indignantly at the slaver. “But Viland is our –”
“You have no home!” the man shouted. “And no country, save that of the market place!”
Within the day we were bundled into the belly of a whaler for cheap transport south. For six weeks we rolled and pitched in that loathsome cavern, my father clutching his tools, I retching over whatever stale food the crew provided us. We were chained, he and I, although where anyone thought we would escape to in the glassy grey waters of the northern seas I do not know, and the chains ate at our ankles until they festered and screamed. The pain drowned out the soft whisperings of the metal links.
Finally, gratefully, the whaler docked. My father and I sat in the hold, trying to ignore the bright pain of our ankles, listening to the muted sounds of a bustling port. Over the past ten days the weather had warmed until the interior of the hold sweltered day and night. The whale meat stank with putrefaction, and I wondered to what possible use it could now be put. After an hour the crew swarmed into the hold to begin the disagreeable task of forking the meat into cargo nets to be off-loaded. On the fourth load one of them remembered we were confined somewhere in the dim hold as well; he soon caused us to be netted along with the rotting meat, and we were unceremoniously swung ashore.
Outside the intense sunlight seared my eyes. I cried out in pain, and my father tried to comfort me, but his mumblings did nothing to ease my terror. I felt the net swing high in the air, and I almost vomited, clutching at the rough rope, trying to gain any handhold that might help save me should the net break. Beside me I heard the bag of tools rattle as my father clutched it closer to his chest.
The next instant there was a sickening jolt as the net landed on the wharf. I lost my grip, and my father and I