that if he says it, it won’t happen.
We all sit around feeling slightly stunned. A few people wander in for a drink or a chat. I serve two travelling carpenters looking for work and a thickset man with a broken nose who wants to know if we’ve got a room, but he bets we’re too busy for the likes of him.
‘Only one guest and there he is,’ I say, nodding to the new man. He’s just left the shrine and is sitting on a bench the other side of the courtyard, leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed against the glare of the setting sun.
I guess the thickset man doesn’t like the look of him any more than the carpenters because they all drink up and leave.
I, on the other hand, have to serve him.
‘More beer, boy.’
Like I said, he uses exactly the right amount of words – no more, no less – and when he finally opens his eyes and finds me staring at him, he gives me a slow, mean, crocodile stare that zings straight into my brain. It isn’t nice at all, but the funny thing is that the meaner he looks, the more I want him to notice me, even though it frightens me half to death.
Next morning, first light of day, and my mother is screaming questions at me. I don’t answer because she’s managing to do that herself :
‘What have you been doing? I tell you what you’ve been doing – playing with mud. What have you done to earn your keep? Nothing. What have we done to deserve you? Nothing. We’ve worked our fingers to the bone for you and what do we get in return? Nothing, boy. Nothing.’
And however hard I try, however much I hope, nothing is exactly what I mean to them. They found me in the Great River, you see, when I was a baby and although I call my father ‘father’ and my mother ‘mother’, I don’t think they’ll ever think of me as their son, although things might have been different if they hadn’t had Imi, their daughter, a few years later. But it’s no use worrying, because suppose they’d had Imi before they found me? They’d have left me for the crocodiles, I reckon. After a bad day, sometimes I wish they had, but then, after a good one, I’m glad they didn’t, so I suppose you could say it all balances out.
‘Yes, mother,’ I say, but she doesn’t so much as glance at me. All the time she’s been yelling at me, she’s had one eye on our new guest, whom she’s started calling the Quiet Gentleman. He’s sitting on the bench in the sun and looking at her through narrowed eyes. I notice that she’s still wearing her best dress and her dead mother’s wig, and she’s painted her eyes with thick lines of kohl.
So I sweep the yard, I repair the gate, I fix a hole in the roof, I mend a bench, I fetch, I carry, and then when I’m knackered, my mother clips me on the side of the head, accuses me of slacking and orders me to make more plates and beakers.
So I do that too.
My pottery area is in the corner of the yard close to the kitchen and across from the Quiet Gentleman. No bit of him moves apart from his eyelids, which have closed again.
I begin to work. First, I lift the cloth off the special mud I use, feel its consistency, add a touch more water and knead it. Next, I put the mud in the middle of my potter’s wheel and give the wheel a spin. Then I begin to work it.
I’m good at this. In my hands, a blob of mud flattens and stretches to make a saucer, a plate or a cup. I lose myself in my work, as I always do, and suddenly there’s a row of plates and a tray of beakers drying in the sun. Twenty plates and forty beakers.
Each plate will last for one meal and the beakers for an evening. Back before the business fell off, I had to make twenty plates a day. Now the same number will last a month.
‘Boy,’ the Quiet Gentleman says, his eyes still closed. ‘Mud boy. What else can you do with that stuff ?’
He’s talking so quietly that I have to strain to hear him.
‘Make animals,’ I say, ‘as a matter of fact.’
‘Like this, as a matter of fact?’
He holds up a lion that I must have left out.
‘Yes,’ I answer.
‘Any others?’ he asks.
‘Falcons,’ I say. ‘And lionesses and dogs and cobras.’
‘And storks?’ he asked. ‘And a sphinx or two. Maybe a crocodile?’
‘Maybe,’ I answer, wondering what he’s after.
A pause. His eyes snap open. ‘You will show me,’ he says. ‘Mud boy.’ And then they shut again.
Mud boy. Not a bad name. I am a mud boy. In my humble opinion, but in no one else’s, this makes me special. Yes, indeed. For the People of the Two Kingdoms, the People of the Great River, the People of the Black Earth, us in other words, mud is life.
Why are we the greatest nation on earth? Mud.
What do our crops grow in? The Great River’s mud.
How do we build our houses? You guessed it: from bricks made of mud.
What’s wrong with the desert? Extreme lack of mud.
If you work in an inn, you soon see how like mud we all are. Give us too much to drink and we collapse like wet mud. Give us too little to drink and we crack like dry mud. In life, we start out firm and strong and smooth like newly mixed-up mud and then, in the end, we just crumble away like old mud.
But here’s an interesting thought. I know the new king has banned the old gods, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away, does it? No, they’re hiding and I know where.
You see, the old woman who used to sweep our yard told me that in the early days of the world, Ra and Isis and Osiris got bored strolling around the muddy young world on their own, so they decided to use the mud to make the man and the woman, the dog and the cat, the crocodile and the hippo, the horse and the cow, and every other animal you can think of. In other words, they must know a thing or two about mud, and that’s a clue.
Here’s another. As she swept our yard, the old woman used to mutter a rhyme as she worked.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The stork and the falcon fly.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The cobra and lioness cry.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The sphinx is buried in earth.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The queen of the sun dies of thirst.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
