A Single Shard (6 page)

"Tree-ear!" she said sharply. He looked up in surprise, wondering what he had done wrong. Then he saw that though her mouth was stern, her eyes were twinkling.

"How can you work properly for the honorable potter if you are shivering with cold?" she scolded. She held out something dark and soft, and Tree-ear rose from his bow to take it from her. His eyes widened in wonder.

It was a jacket and pantaloons made of heavy cotton, quilted and padded—the warmest of garments. Min's wife took the jacket back and held it up before him.

"This should be just the right size," she said, raising her eyebrows. Realizing what was expected of him, Tree-ear reached for and donned the jacket. A delicious coziness enveloped him; Min's wife must have had the jacket warming by the fire inside.

"Good." She nodded, seemed to hesitate for a moment, then spoke softly. "Our son, Hyung-gu, died of fever when he was about your age," she said. "These clothes I made for him, but they were never worn."

Tree-ear tried to swallow his surprise, but he was sure that it must have shown on his face. Min, a father? It hardly seemed possible. Tree-ear could not envision Min at anything but his work. The idea that he might once have had a son—

"Wear them in good health." Her soft voice interrupted his thoughts, and he was suddenly aware of his discourteous behavior. He bowed again.

"Deepest gratitude to the honorable potter's wife," he said. She nodded again and disappeared into the house.

Min came out the next moment. He looked over Tree-ear in his new jacket. Tree-ear held his breath, wondering how Min would feel ... his son's clothes on a lowly orphan. "Her idea, not mine," the potter muttered, and waved at Tree-ear to get started on his work.

Throughout the day Tree-ear kept rolling up the sleeves of the jacket, which were a little too long for him. And it made him almost too warm, accustomed as he was to hard work in his sparse burlap tunic.

So the idea was born. The jacket should fit Crane-man fairly well.

 

And fit it did, to Crane-man's delight. At first he refused it, saying that it was meant for Tree-ear. But Tree-ear insisted, having thought about it all the way home. Was it wrong to give away a gift that had only just been given him? It was a
gift,
he argued with himself, which meant that it was now his to do with as he pleased—to wear, or to give away. He thought of Min's wife, and decided it would not displease her if he chose to give the jacket to his friend.

Persuading Crane-man was another matter. "If you will not wear the jacket, I will not wear the new sandals," Tree-ear said firmly, nodding at the unfinished shoe in Crane-man's hands.

"Ha!" Crane-man shook his head. "Stubborn monkey, I have been making you sandals every winter since you came here—and now you would refuse them?" But even as he spoke, he put on the jacket, and Tree-ear could see the pleased look beneath his scowl.

The trousers were too short for Crane-man, so Tree-ear wore those himself. They examined each other, their new garb in sharp contrast to the other rags they wore. Crane-man began to laugh. "Apart, we look strange enough, but together we are as properly dressed as any man!"

And he was still laughing as Tree-ear served supper from the gourd bowl.

 

Flickering lamplight caught Tree-ear's eye as he walked back to the pit from Min's one evening, snug in his new trousers. The days were so short now that he always came home in darkness. The light came from the shed behind Kang's house. Tree-ear paused in midstride. A light, visible from a shed with no windows—there must be a hole or a crack somewhere...

The temptation was too great. Tree-ear stole silently over the frozen ground, edged along the wall of the shed, and after a quick glance around, hunched over to put his eye to a shoulder-level knothole.

With the two bowls of red and white slip before him and an oil lamp just beyond, Kang sat in profile to Treeear's view, using his wheel as a worktable. He was working on a small wine cup. With an incising awl, he inscribed the leather-hard clay—a simple chrysanthemum design, far cruder than much of the elaborate incision work for which the potters of Ch'ulp'o were known. But rather than outlining the petals in the usual way, Kang was clearing away the clay to leave teardrop-shaped depressions.

As Tree-ear continued to watch, Kang took up a dab of the semiliquid white clay on the tip of the awl and deposited it into one of the petal-spaces. He repeated this action for each empty space until the white-petaled flower was clearly visible against the dull clay. For the stem and leaves he used the red clay. Then with a planing tool, he carefully smoothed away the surface of the design so that the colored clay was completely level with the body of the vase itself.

Kang eyed his work critically, then stood and replaced the tools on a shelf. Tree-ear realized with a start that the potter must be finished for the night and would emerge from the shed momentarily. He looked around warily and darted back to the road.

Tree-ear's neck and shoulders were cramped from hunching in one position for so long. As he hurried on his way, he shrugged to loosen the stiff muscles. But he might as well have been shrugging over what he had seen.

In the days that followed, Tree-ear visited the kiln every evening in an attempt to glimpse Kang's mystery wine cup after it was fired. Once he even came upon Kang's son at the kiln, removing fired vessels and loading them onto a cart. Tree-ear pretended admiration to inspect the vessels closely. They were of ordinary celadon—no sign anywhere of the strange little chrysanthemum. By snowmelt, Tree-ear had still not seen it.

As he returned one evening from the kiln, he noticed several men and boys congregated about the wine shop. Every night there were a few who stopped by for a drink or two, but tonight there were so many that not all could fit inside. The group seemed excited about something, and one of the boys hailed him.

Tree-ear was surprised by the greeting. The other children of Ch'ulp'o had long spurned him, for orphans were considered very bad luck. Children would step aside when he drew near, and the smaller ones often ducked behind their mothers' skirts. Since he had begun working for Min, the other potters' assistants tolerated his presence, but a friendly greeting was still a rarity. It must be important news indeed.

"Tree-ear! Have you heard? A royal emissary comes to Ch'ulp'o!"

Tree-ear moved among the clusters of people, learning bits and pieces as he listened. With winter storms over, the sea-trade routes were open again. A boat had arrived in Ch'ulp'o that afternoon; those aboard carried the news that a royal emissary would be a passenger on another boat sailing in the next moon. The emissary would be bound for Ch'ulp'o and then the district of Kangjin, a pottery region farther to the south.

Ch'ulp'o and Kangjin! The two destinations could mean only one thing: The royal emissary was on a tour to assign pottery commissions for the palace!

The men drank and the boys milled about, all speculating as to how many commissions would be assigned. Nervous, fearful, impassive, serene—whatever the individual's nature, hope shouted from the face of every man, though not one spoke of his desire.

Tree-ear saw Kang in a corner of the wine shop, sitting with his legs outstretched and his hands behind his head. Listening, saying little, his eyes half-closed and a half-smile on his face, Kang looked like nothing so much as a man with a secret.

***

That night Tree-ear tossed about, restlessly awake. He and Crane-man were living under the bridge again. He stared at the underside of the bridge, rolled onto his stomach, then onto his side.

Finally, Crane-man poked him. "What demon scratches under your skin tonight?" he asked crossly. "It seems intent on keeping us both from slumber."

Tree-ear sat up, pulled his knees close, and wrapped his arms around them for warmth. "A question-demon," he said.

Crane-man sat up, too. "Well, let us hear it, then. Perhaps if the question is asked and answered, the demon will leave you in peace—and I will be able to sleep."

Tree-ear spoke slowly. "It is a question about stealing." He paused, started to speak, stopped again. Finally, "Is it stealing to take from another something that cannot be held in your hands?"

"Ah! Not a mere question but a riddle-question, at that. What is this thing that cannot be held?"

"A—an idea. A way of doing something."

"A better way than others now use."

"Yes. A new way, one that could lead to great honor."

Crane-man lay back down again. He was silent for so long that Tree-ear thought he had fallen asleep. Tree-ear sighed and lay down himself, thinking, thinking.

Min's work was far superior to Kang's. Everyone in Ch'ulp'o knew this, and Tree-ear had seen it for himself. Kang's work was skillful enough, his vessels well-shaped and his glaze a fine color. But he lacked patience.

Firing—the final step in the process that determined the color of the celadon—was handled well by no man. Try as the potters might, the wood in the kiln never burned the same way twice. The length of time a vessel was fired, its position in the kiln, the number of other pieces fired with it, even the way the wind blew that day—a thousand factors could affect the final color of the glaze.

So when Min made a special piece, he prepared not one but several, sometimes as many as ten. Identical when they entered the kiln, they would emerge in slightly different colors. If all went well, one or two might glow with the desired translucent green; others would be duller or less clear. Worst of all, some of the pieces often had brown spots here and there, or even an overall tinge of brown, spoiling the purity of the glaze. No one knew why this happened, so making several identical pieces was the best safeguard to ensure that at least one would fire to an un-flawed celadon green.

Not only was his work slow to begin with, but Min made more replicas than any other potter. Kang's pieces lacked Min's attention to detail in the making as well as his caution in the firing. The untrained eye might see little difference between the work of the two men—but in Ch'ulp'o, every eye was trained.

And, Tree-ear was sure, the emissary's eye would be equally sharp. The palace would send only an expert—a true connoisseur—to handle the task of commissioning work. This idea of Kang's, the use of the red and white slip ... could it be of such newness and beauty that it would mean a commission? If that were indeed the case, Tree-ear had no doubt that Min could use the process to far better effect.

But Min did not know about it. And therein lived the question-demon: If Tree-ear were to tell Min what he had seen, would that be stealing Kang's idea?

Crane-man's voice startled Tree-ear.

"If a man is keeping an idea to himself, and that idea is taken by stealth or trickery—I say it is stealing. But once a man has revealed his idea to others, it is no longer his alone. It belongs to the world."

Tree-ear did not reply. He lay curled on one side, listening as Crane-man's breathing slowed and evened in the rhythm of sleep.

An image floated out of the darkness into Tree-ear's mind—that of himself with his eye pressed to the knothole of Kang's shed.

Stealth.

He could not yet tell Min of Kang's idea.

 

Tree-ear's activities in the days that followed were no different than they had been for months. Min and the other potters continued throwing pots, incising them with designs, glazing, firing, rejecting some vessels and keeping others. But things felt different to Tree-ear—the smallest of changes here and there.

Min no longer sang at the wheel. His wife, normally almost invisible as she went about her household tasks, emerged from the house more often, sometimes to watch her husband at work for a moment, at other times to give him a cup of tea or a rice cake, as he now worked right through the midday mealtime. At the kiln the potters no longer joked among themselves or smoked idly. Instead, they paced about in restless silence.

All went about their work with their faces tighter, as if the news of the emissary's impending visit had pulled the string of village life taut.

 

By unspoken agreement, Tree-ear joined the other potters' assistants one morning in the area between the beach and the village that served as a marketplace. They picked up debris, swept the space clear, and set up planks to display their masters' wares. Tree-ear glanced surreptitiously at his colleagues; many were setting up half a dozen planks or more. For Min, only two such planks would be needed. As usual, he would have by far the fewest pieces to display.

Min's instructions had been explicit. Tree-ear was to set up the stall so that Min would stand with his back to the sea and his wares before him. The emissary would thus be facing the sea when he inspected Min's work. Though Min did not explain, Tree-ear knew why. It was so the emissary would see how Min's vessels captured the elusive green and blue and gray hues of the waves.

The boat docked one evening at sunset. The emissary and his entourage spent the night at the home of the local government official. Tree-ear guessed that if those in the royal party slept that night, they were the only ones in Ch'ulp'o who did so. Long before dawn the market space was lit by dozens of oil lamps as potters and their assistants rushed about in an anxious, eerie silence, preparing their stalls.

Tree-ear wheeled the cart down the road from Min's house—a step at a time, or so it seemed. The potter walked by his side, keeping up a constant stream of warnings and invective.

"Watch that stone there, to the left! Keep the cart even, stupid boy. This way—the path is smoother here.
Ai-go!
What's the matter with you? Can't you keep it from bumping for even one second? You will ruin my work, pighead!"

Min's vessels were muffled in layers and layers of tightly packed rice straw; Tree-ear thought grimly that even if he ran at full speed, no harm would come to the work. At least his master's limited output meant that only one such trip would be necessary.

At last, they arrived at the makeshift stall. Min would not allow Tree-ear to unload the cart or unpack the vessels. Instead, he was ordered to pick up every scrap of straw on the ground.