Iskander rose from the tavern bench where he had slept and walked out into the streets of this strange city. The money they had given him in Osas was gone, and it would be twelve days before the fleet sailed. He could not simply sit around the tavern and wait for so long. What he could do instead he did not know, but the gods had sent him here, and they must have had some reason. Perhaps it was a terrible reason – you could never tell with gods. But here he was, and he must make the best of it.

  First he walked north to the harbor, just two short blocks away. Calyxia had a round stone harbor built in the Mage time, the stones smooth and fitted perfectly together. Today it was full of ships, and with boats moving constantly back and forth between the anchored ships and the quay, equipping them for war. He found himself among the shipwrights. Two large galleys were under construction, their wooden ribs rising above him like the skeletons of enormous whales. But no laborers were working here. He soon saw why, for just a little farther on he found two galleys being repaired. Workers were swarming over these, trying, he supposed, to get them ready to sail in two weeks. They shouted to each other in their language that flowed like a river, one word blending into the next with hardly a pause. This will not, he thought, be easy to learn. But if this were to be his home, until he could find a way to pursue his revenge, he would have to try.

  Across the wide street that ran around the harbor he saw businesses related to ships and sailing. He passed a big building where they made sails, as busy as the repair yard, so many sails to make and mend for a fleet of thirty ships. Coopers bound wooden staves with iron to make barrels that would carry the fleet’s water and next to them a team of smiths hammered away at brass ships’ fittings.

  He saw no work for him here, so he kept on, finding a large street leading west. It was paved with stone like all Calyxia's streets, covered gutters running along the edges. It was lined with food sellers. Many of them sold the bacon-flavored beans Calyxians ate for breakfast, and the smell gnawed at Iskander’s stomach. Farther along was a row of bakers, and beyond them butchers. Then he emerged into a broad square filled with stalls and wagons and people: a market. People were selling animals by the hundreds: cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, even great river turtles in buckets of water. Carts were piled high with carrots, onions, cabbages, eggplants and vegetables he did not know. He saw many kinds of people buying and selling. Most common were ordinary Calyxians with the lightly golden skin and dark hair of the Middle Sea, the men in pants and shirts, the women in dresses with wide skirts. There were many Siriae, their faces varying from light like the Calyxians to an even brown but all recognizable by their loose robes. There were men from the Ocean coast with lighter skin, some with golden hair, and even a few black people from the far south. One group he did not know. The had squinting faces and dark hair, their men with light shirts, dark leather pants, and large mustaches, some with embroidery on their shirts and daggers by their sides. The women covered their heads with large cloths tied under their chins, and their clothes were like the men’s except that their shirts were longer, down to the tops of their thighs. From the hills to the west, he guessed.

  Iskander passed quickly through the square, afraid that if he looked too long at chickens he might grab one and try to run. He took a street that led south. Here he passed several apothecaries, one shop run by a twisted crone with one eye who seemed to be hoping people would buy from her out of fear, then fortune tellers and a seller of amulets.

  He entered a small square and suddenly felt like he had crossed back over the sea. Here most people were Siriae and their language filled the air. Around the square were shops selling goods from the South, brass and spices and steel weapons. He stopped, looking about him, breathing in the scents of southern lands. A woman leaned out a window and called to him, saying, “Come to me, black man, I will remind you of home.” She was dressed and veiled like a girl from a Sultan’s harem, and he almost laughed out loud to think that such a woman might remind him of the village where he was born. He shook his head and walked on toward a street where everything seemed coated with dust.

  Here he found potters. First were several who sold brightly colored dishes with bold patterns, and he could see women sitting at tables painting the designs. Farther along were potters making ordinary unpainted dishes, and beyond them were two large sheds where people made the big amphorae that held oil and wine.

  A Siriae man called to him in Calyxian from the door of one of these buildings. Iskander shook his head, and the man switched to Siriae: “You looking for work?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know how to mix clay?”

  Iskander nodded. The man said, “Two pennies a day, plus lunch.”

  “What is lunch?”

  “Beans and bread. If you’re lucky you’ll find a piece of carrot or bacon in the beans. We buy it in the market so you never know.”

  Iskander said, “I am Iskander.”

  “I am Guillelmo, but most people call me Pots.”

  Iskander went into the shop. The man who called himself Pots led him to a small yard at the back of the building, very close to the city wall. Here were two great circular troughs made of brick, and beside them were piles of dusty clay and barrels of water. Iskander said, “How wet do you want the clay?”

  “Stiff. Barely workable.”

  Iskander looked into the trough, which was empty. “How much?”

  “All of it.”

  Iskander nodded, picked up a shovel and began shoveling the dry clay into the trough. When it was half full he found a bucket and poured in two buckets full of water. Then he shed his sandals, rolled his pants above his knees and climbed into the trough. He began walking on the clay, folding in the water with a precise motion he had learned as a boy, for clay pots were one of the things his village made and sold. As he walked, he remembered, and as he remembered he grew sad. He had hardly thought at all about his home since he had left it, walling off every memory. But now the smell of the clay and this old motion that had been part of his boyhood brought everything back to him, and with every step he remembered something else. The way Djema scolded him when he did not mix the clay well enough, the way blind Asano showed him how to do it correctly, saying nothing, just holding his hand and working beside him, the old man’s feet feeling the clay better than any man with eyes could see it. He saw his sister Fatima’s smile when she teased him, his father’s stern face when Iskander let a goat wander. Tears welled up in his eyes and began streaming down his cheeks. He walked through the village in his mind, seeing every house, remembering the name of every person, struggling a few times and cursing himself for that – he must not let those names slip away, for he was the only person who remembered them now, and he could not forget or they would be gone.

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  He was interrupted by a voice. Opening his eyes he saw a young Siriae woman, very small, standing only five feet away from him. Her face was flat, and bits of frizzy air were escaping from her head scarf. Her eyes drank him in, roaming over every inch of him as if he were a message that she needed to memorize.

  She said, “You’re a very big man to cry like that.”

  “I have many things to be sad about.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is my sorrow. It belongs only to me.”

  “That seems greedy.”

  “Who are you, that I should share anything with you? You have walked up to me and asked me rude questions, offering me nothing.”

  “Do you speak Mediana?”

  “What is that?”

  “The language people speak here. Calyxian is one version, but people speak it all around the Middle Sea.”

  “No, I do not speak it.”

  “If you help me load my trough, I will teach it to you.”

  Iskander looked at her and nodded. Learning new words would be a better way to pass the day than remembering old wounds. But he promised himself that he would say the names of everyone in his village every day, so he would not forget them.

  As he shoveled clay into the trough the girl watched his motions with the same greedy eyes. What is it that she needs, he wondered? She is like a vampire, but for something that comes in through her eyes. When Iskander had shoveled in the clay she poured water into the basin, hiked up her robe and climbed in. As they walked their clay they looked at each other, and she began to point at things and speak words. Pointing to herself she said, “I.” Pointing to Iskander she said, “You.” Iskander repeated her words. She moved on to parts of the body: “My arm. Your arm. My foot. Your foot. My head. Your head.” Iskander repeated everything. When they had done all the basic body parts she began quizzing him, pointing to her arm or his leg and making him speak the words. It was, he thought, a good way to spend the day. By midday he thought his clay was ready, so he went to find Pots. Pots checked the clay and said it was good, so Iskander shoveled it into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it to where the potters were working. There were four of them. They were forming the tall vessels on potting wheels that sat at about knee height. He saw that these workers were only making the main part of the vessel; the neck and handles must be put on later, after the body had dried.

  A woman came in from the street then with another wheelbarrow. It held a large pot full of steaming beans and a basket of long loaves. Each of them took a red-glazed bowl and scooped it into the pot, filling it with beans, then tore off a piece of bread about as big as a hand. Iskander did as they did. Using the bread, he scooped the beans into his mouth. The bread was good but as Pots had said the beans were from the sellers in the market and had been boiling all day, turning to mush. They needed horseradish, he thought. And more onions. Pots came in then and they passed around a jug of wine, each taking a long drink. It was not bad – these Calyxians could not cook beans but they made very good wine. Even the cheap stuff was worth drinking.

  Then it was back out to the yard to mix another basin of clay. His language teacher disappeared for a while, then came back. She acted like she wanted him to ask where she had gone, but he did not. In the afternoon they started on verbs. I am. You are. I was. You were. He is. She was. My foot is dirty. Your foot is dirty. Iskander thought, she is good at this. She has been a teacher. Why is she here, walking clay? Perhaps, he thought, she had a story like his own. There were so many sad stories in the world, so many wars, so many deaths, so many people fled from their homes. Somehow, though, life went on. People dug clay, dried it, sifted it, mixed it with water, shaped it into pots, baked them in kilns then sold them to other people who made wine or pressed olives for oil and the pots traveled across the sea on ships that people built and on it went and on, a whole world full of people working and making and doing.

  He asked himself, how do they do it? People who have lost their homes and families, who have seen the empire they grew up in sink beneath the waves. How do they go on?

  They simply go on. Because there is nothing else to do.

  He finished another trough of clay and loaded it into the wheelbarrow. As he pushed it into the shed he heard his teacher say, “I am Jamiya.”

  He said, over his shoulder, “I am Iskander.” After he said it he suddenly wondered, should I have taken a new name to go with this new language? In Madzan and Siriae I am Iskander, but they are languages of the desert. Here in the city of the sea, should I be someone else?

  No, he thought, I am Iskander. I may travel very far before I die, but I will never get away from that.

  After he unloaded the clay Pots summoned him out to the front of the shed. There was a cart there, with a donkey, and Pots was loading it with finished amphorae. Iskander helped him, piling them until they looked like a stiff breeze might send them tumbling down. Then Pots said, “How about you go with my wife and help her unload? Then you can head home, you’ve already done two troughs, and that’s twice as much as that girl will get done.”

  Iskander nodded and Pots handed him two small silver coins. Pots said, “If you’re around tomorrow, I could use you again.”

  Iskander said, “Get me onion for the beans.”

  Pots laughed. “Whatever you say, big man.”

  Iskander walked beside the cart as the little donkey pulled his mistress and the mountain of amphorae through the market and then onto a street of bakers than ran steeply upward. They took the cart up and over the ridge that Calyxia sat on, crossing over the high street where the houses of the great merchants and judges preened at each other across the pavement, each seeking to impress its neighbors with carved stone pillars and glass windows and liveried servants by the door. Down the other side of the ridge they went along a street of furniture makers where men cut table legs on lathes and fitted hinges onto chests, then farther down into a poor neighborhood that smelled of fish and the sea. Soon they found the source of the smell, the fish market, mostly empty in the late afternoon and stinking of the last unbought fish and clams. They were close to the wall again, on the other side of the city, and Iskander could see a great gate rising up. They delivered the amphorae to a man in the market, who made a show of counting them, before he nodded at the woman Pots had called his wife and she got back on the cart and drove away. She had never said a word, her face nearly hidden beneath a head cloth and a wide-brimmed hat.

  Iskander walked over to the gate and looked through it. Beyond it was another harbor, this one crowded with small boats. It was not so large or so protected as the big harbor on the other side, but the quay was the same perfect stonework that looked like neither storm nor fire could touch it. Iskander did not know if the other things they said about the Mages were true, but he had never seen such stone. Two fishermen walked by him, talking. He tried to understand their words but caught only “I” and “you.” He laughed at himself, then. What did he think he would learn in one day? Perhaps, he thought, he could get Swimmer to teach him more tonight.

  The next day Iskander worked with Jamiya again, practicing Calyxian while they walked the clay. She did not repeat anything from the day before but moved on to playing question games. “Is a knee an elbow?” No. “Is a knee like an elbow?” Yes. “How?” And then he had to remember words and put them together to say something like “a knee is a leg elbow.” The morning passed quickly, walking clay and playing these word games. When he took the first load of clay into the potters he asked her, in Siriae, “Where did you learn this?”

  She said, “I will tell you my story when you tell me yours.” Iskander nodded, since that was only fair. But he would not tell this stranger his story, so he would not hear hers.

  At lunch Pots had a big onion for the beans as he had said he would. Iskander cut half of it into pieces with his knife and mixed them into his beans, then passed the rest of the onion to Jamiya. She took Iskander’s knife, cut off one small piece, and then passed it on. The beans were better with pieces of onion.

  In the afternoon Jamiya taught animal names, using noises and gestures to tell him what beasts she meant. Then she made him act out the animals, too, asking “What does a horse say?” Sometimes they had trouble, because the noises she made for animals were not always the same as people made in Madzur, and they both laughed hard when Iskander tried to make sheep sounds. The day flew by in a breeze of words and sounds, and Iskander felt almost happy walking clay and talking to this strange woman who had once been a teacher and now struggled to work clay with a body too light to crush it correctly.