Andras is on guard duty at the gate. He waves me past without looking. I don’t want to look at him either. I’m red-faced, dripping with sweat, panting like a dog, wearing a torn shift tied between my knees. And I’m a purple slave. This is not how I want to see the only person here who could have been a friend.

But I don’t know where the pottery workshop is, and this sledge is too heavy to haul around town searching for it.

‘Where do I take it?’

Andras stares in shock. ‘Leira? I thought you were going to be a house servant.’

‘It seems no one wanted to be reminded that priest-folk could fall, and it would be easier if I disappeared.’

‘I thought you were avoiding me. You weren’t even at the sun festival yesterday.’

‘No.’ It’s too hard to say more, and I’m too exhausted to try. ‘Where do I take these?’

He points down a lane to the right. ‘But you’ll find it a sad place today. One of the apprentices went to the goddess last night.’

Sacrificed? Like the poor slave girl at Tarmara?

‘She drank too much ale and fell off the roof where she was sleeping. Her neck broke.’

‘Not your cousin?’

‘No, Teesha is well – no more than a sore head from the feasting, and grief for her friend.’

I fix the strap around my forehead again, lean into it, and start hauling. I hope the potter still wants these shells. What will I do if they’re all away mourning that poor girl?

It’s strange – a year ago I wouldn’t have thought anything of this girl, unless she made a pot I wanted. Yesterday I’d have envied her being a potter’s apprentice, one of the craft-folk, almost free. Today I feel sorry for her, because although I’m still a purple slave, I’m alive.

The sledge’s right runner catches between two stones, spilling shells across the lane. I shove it out, pick up the shells, and catch my breath. A thought is tickling at my mind but I’m too exhausted to hear it. I keep on going.

The workshop floor in front of the storeroom is quiet, but the potter is at her wheel, a boy is stoking the fire at the kiln, and a girl my age with a tear-stained face is preparing clay from the two piles behind her: one of red clay dust and one of white.

When the purple, the red and the white are one…

I have one chance. I don’t care if purple slaves aren’t supposed to speak, I’ve got to say all I can; show what I know.

‘I’ve brought the shells to strengthen the clay,’ I tell the potter. Teesha looks up with a sad half-smile, so I continue. ‘Is the kiln ready to burn them, so they can be crushed and mixed in?’

‘What do you know of mixing clay?’ the potter asks.

The lie comes easily, straight from the goddess and Nunu. ‘My family were potters. Our home and village were lost in the flood, the night of the war of the gods.’

‘What was your village?’

‘No one here has heard of it. It was called Swallow Town, a small settlement outside Tarmara. Everyone has gone.’

‘So how did you end up at the purple works?’

‘I fled here with my mother and grandmother. My mother’s spirit left when our house fell on her – she doesn’t remember the skills she had, and my grandmother’s hands are too old. I was told you had no need of another apprentice so I offered myself as a servant to the palace. But that was the time when the purple needed more workers, so I was sent there.’

‘Wait here,’ says the potter, lifting the finished bowl off the wheel. She wipes her hands on her leather potter’s kilt, and strides down the lane.

I squat gratefully in the storeroom’s shade; the working floor is soft and smooth with years of clay dust. Below us the town stretches towards the harbour where the sailors and fishers are rebuilding their homes and boats. In the months I’ve been at the purple works, I haven’t realised how the wind and occasional shower have washed so much of the ash away; when I look out from here, there are colours everywhere. Behind us the smooth walls of the palace are painted in whites and bright colours, but the rock walls of the buildings around me are golden in the sun. Out to the west the hills are covered in shades of green, from dark to bright to the softest grey-green or gold, with patches of red where clay has been dug, though between the town and the deep blue of the sea are the white hills where we’ve built our hut in the ruins of the Old Ones.

When the purple, the red and the white are one… I think again. No, it’s not just thinking, I’m praying. Purple doesn’t mean the colour, but the leftover shells – when the dye-sac has been stewed into rich, stinking dye, and the rest of the creature eaten, the shells serve one final purpose, strengthening clay so it’s less likely to break in the kiln.

Teesha wipes the tears off her face with the back of her hand, smearing red clay and snot across her cheeks. ‘Are your family really potters?’ she asks.

I hesitate. ‘My grandmother’s family,’ I say at last, because claiming Nunu as a grandmother doesn’t seem a lie at all anymore. ‘I’d only just made my first pot – the first one to be fired – before our home was lost.’

‘A fired pot already!’ she exclaims. ‘I’m allowed to watch and practise when I finish my work, but I’ve been mostly hauling dirt and mixing clay for a year now. I’ve never made anything good enough to fire.’

I think of the ugly little jug, so kindly given when we needed it. Then I remember my little saffron pot, the best I’d made – it might have been better than the other girls’, but not a pot to be sold or traded. Not a pot to be fired if I hadn’t been Swallow Clan.

‘It might have been to please my grandmother,’ I whisper.

Teesha laughs, then lowers her voice too. ‘Better to tell her that truth than claim more than you are and fail. Her name is Mirna. She’s strict but fair.’

I trust Pellie-oracle. I even think I’m calm. I think the tightness in my chest is from the strain of pulling the heavy sledge. But when I see Mirna in the laneway I can’t breathe.

‘It’s done,’ she says simply. ‘There are any number of poor creatures who can labour in the purple works. There are no others with the beginning of an understanding of clay. You’ve been reassigned to me. I don’t care what you’ve already learned somewhere else; you will start at the beginning, so don’t think your sledge-hauling days are over.’

Teesha flashes me a grin, which Mirna sees.

‘So Teesha has told you of the joys of getting the raw clay?’

I nod. My throat might as well have a lump of clay stuck in it already, for all the words it can get out.

‘But has she told you that if you work well, you’ll progress until you’re an artisan yourself, free to work wherever you will?’

I still can’t speak, but she accepts the nod.

‘You’ll live here till then, with the family,’ and she points to the house next to the storeroom.

The sudden bright hope fizzles out like a hot coal in a puddle.

‘But my mother and…

‘Yes, of course,’ Mirna says impatiently. ‘Your mother and grandmother too. Goddess forgive me, I have argued rations for them as well, saying they’ll be working. No, don’t cry, that’s the whole point: I don’t want an apprentice dripping salt tears into the clay.’