EVERYONE KNOWS THAT the pottery created in the legendary village of Terralogica was beautiful, but what most people don’t know is that it was also unbreakable, no matter what you did to it.
“Look here,” Ana Rabbitleaf used to say, pointing at her son, Cane.
Cane’s job was to hold the pot high above his head. He was only twelve, but he’d been taller than his mother for the last two years. Ana was quite a tiny woman.
As the crowd of tourists watched, the glaze of the pot would catch the sun from the skylight overhead, and its colors would come alive: deep eggplant purple, stone brown, olive green. It was the signature pattern of Cane’s family, the Rabbitleafs.
With a flourish, Cane would flip his hand over, and the pot would fall. The tourists would gasp and back up, covering their faces to avoid the crash of shattered clay.
But the clay did not shatter. As the pot hit the stone floor of the Rabbitleaf shop, it made a loud thunking noise, bounced once, and lay resting on its side unscathed.
Ana would lift the pot triumphantly.
Unbreakable! she would say.
And, if their demonstration had worked as intended, which it usually did, the tourists would rush to clear the shelves of plates, drinking cups, and of course the large and small bowls that Terralogica was most famous for.
All Terralogica pottery was unbreakable, but every family had its own way of selling it, and every family had its own unique design painted on it, the family’s signature. On a first glance, the Rabbitleaf signature seemed to be an abstract pattern winding its way around the sides of the pale white clay. A closer look revealed a picture: leaves scattered on twisting vines, and between those, the sleek shapes of rabbits jumping, sitting, running.
Cane’s parents had created the signature during the first month of their marriage, according to the custom, by combining the signature of Ana’s family, the Rabbitarrows, with that of her husband’s family, the Snakeleafs. Cane’s parents had prepared for their signature-making their entire lives, mixing the clay, working with their parents at the throwing wheels, manning the family kiln. They had gone to school to learn brushwork and design principles, just like Cane, his sister Gatta, and all the children of Terralogica. And like all good children of Terralogica were supposed to do, Cane’s parents had dreamed of the day they would enter into a union and create their own family signature that would mark their pottery for the rest of their lives.
“But it didn’t work out that way,” Ana always told Cane and Gatta. At dinner time, she liked to tell them stories about their father so they wouldn’t forget him. “The war with Gemella happened, and your father was killed in the fighting.”
“I was only two!” Gatta would say. She didn’t remember her father at all.
“Gemella is the only other town in the entire land of Isola that makes pottery,” Ana said. “And since the war, they are the sworn enemy of Teralogica.”
Cane had been five when his father died, and he did remember him, at least a bit. Rivista Rabbitleaf had been a strong, thick-built man, quiet with a calm, easy smile. He worked in silence in the pottery studio, a striking contrast to Ana’s constant chatter.
What is he thinking, Cane always wondered, watching his father’s large hands working the thick, white clay, pounding it into the familiar shapes, bowls, cups, plates. And each night after dinner, as Rivista took his place at the small corner desk in the kitchen to write in his little notebooks, writing for hours and hours while the rest of the family played games and sang songs and had their baths and went to bed, Cane wondered: what is he writing about?
After Rivista died, Ana had raised Cane and Gata on her own for a couple of years. She couldn’t create as much pottery, which meant she had less money to feed the family and do repairs on the house, and she had to take often from the village fund.
That went on for a few years, until Donalta moved into their house. Donalta had never married and still used the signature of her home family, though she was forty years old. With her help in Ana’s studio, soon the shop was able to get back to its old levels of production and sales. Donalta took on the name Rabbitleaf and became part of the family.
No one in Terralogica could remember a household and pottery signature run by two women, unless they were mother and daughter or two sisters. But for a traditional place, Terralogica was pretty accepting of new ideas, as long as they didn’t hurt anybody. The only thing they couldn’t accept were people from Gemella, who weren’t allowed in the village ever since the battle that had killed Cane’s father. In fact, the people of Terralogica often used the word gemella to mean something low-quality or horrible or anything they hated. It was considered an impolite word that children weren’t supposed to hear or use, but Cane and all of his friends used it all the time. Donalta wasn’t from Gemella, and neither was Ana, and so everyone shrugged when Donalta joined Ana’s family.
The strangeness started one day when one of the tourists first came in the door and picked up a bowl with the Rabbitleaf signature. He held it between his fingers, turning it one direction and another. Donalta was working in the shop that day, while Ana was back in the attached living quarters making dinner. Donalta would have worried that the tourist was going to drop the bowl, but of course the bowl would be perfectly safe if that happened.
The tourist looked up from the bowl.
“I have one like this at home,” he said, pointing at the pattern of rabbits and leaves. “This same pattern.”
Donalta shook her head.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “That’s the Rabbitleaf family signature. No other pottery in the world has that pattern.”
“I got it from a salesman who came through my town,” the man said. “He had a whole cart of pottery, some with this design, some with other designs like the ones I’ve seen in Terralogica today.”
“Terralogica pottery is only sold here,” Donalta said. “But perhaps he bought it here and was selling it in your town.”
“That could be it,” the man said.
That seemed to settle things. Either the man was mistaken about the design, or someone was re-selling Terralogica pottery in the man’s town. But Donalta felt unsettled for the rest of the day. It didn’t make sense, someone in another village selling Ana’s pots from a cart. After she closed the shop for the afternoon, she found Ana in the kitchen and told her what the man had said.
Ana frowned for a second, then went back to putting pies in the oven.
“I’m sure there’s a good explanation,” Ana said. “Anyway, the pottery of Terralogica is the finest and strongest in the world. If someone is imitating it, the difference in quality will be clear.”
And so that was that, and everything continued on as normal, at least for a while. Ana and Donalta and all the other people of Terralogica went on selling their pottery. Everyone was busy preparing for the summer tourist season, when thousands of travelers would come from every corner of Isola to purchase Terralogica’s famous pottery.
Cane and his sister Gatta continued their lessons in coils and slabs and brushwork. Cane hated all his schooling, but especially brushwork. Gatta was so skilled at brushwork that she was already allowed to paint the Rabbitleaf signature on the small bowls and vases, even though she was younger than Cane, who wasn’t yet allowed to.
Cane had started taking some new lessons from a man his family had met in Alleata at the market—an expert in logic and argumentation named Penso Razion—and those lessons had quickly become his reason for waking up in the morning.
“As long as you keep up your pottery schoolwork,” Ana would warn him as he sat on his bed filling out the logic problems Penso had assigned him. “Strong argumentation won’t pay your bills.”
Cane wanted to tell her what Penso had told him—that in some villages, argumentation very much could pay your bills. A master of logic and argumentation could help people with problems in their businesses, could help design better systems for a large village to run on, could help mediate in disputes and even analyze threats from other villages. And of course, Penso said, it was excellent preparation for serving as mayor.
But Cane knew what his mother would say: “In Terralogica, everyone is a potter.” There was no other path for Cane but the one determined by his village and his ancestors; everything else was just a fun diversion. Summer was approaching fast, and there were dishes to fire and signatures to paint and shelves that needed to be stocked to overflowing, and Cane couldn’t help with any of that unless he kept up with his studies.
And so everyone did the usual things to prepare for summer, but summer turned out not to be usual at all. In fact, it was the most disturbing summer in Terralogica since the war with Gemella ended.
To start, there were more visitors claiming to have seen Terralogica pottery being sold in their own villages. The story was always the same: traveling salespeople, carts filled high with plates and bowls painted with the same signature patterns found in Terralogica’s shops, but at a tenth of the price.
And then one day, a woman came to the pottery shop of Scontro Fishspear holding a large cloth bag under her arm. Scontro’s family signature was blue and green and silver, long pointed spears intertwined with glimmering fish. The woman picked up several of his bowls and examined them.
“Aha,” she said, reaching into her bag. “Finally a match!”
She pulled out a bowl that looked nearly identical to the ones made by Scontro and his family. The spear, the fish, the shimmer of silver. To the untrained eye, there was no difference between her bowl and the ones on Scontro’s shelves.
“I bought this in my village,” the woman said to Scontro. “I’ve been searching for another one with the same pattern.”
Scontro was a grumpy man. People in Terralogica sometimes speculated that his grumpiness hurt his sales, but the truth was that many tourists did not mind it. Some shoppers preferred his standoffish style to the relentless chattiness that Ana used to engage tourists in her shop.
“Let me see that,” he said.
The woman handed him the bowl. He could tell immediately that it was a copy. The clay felt fragile in his hands, not dense and strong. The fish and spear design was the same as his family’s signature, but painted without life, as though by machine. Every fish and every spear was exactly the same, while his fishes and spears each had their own particular details: a changed shape of eye or mouth on the fish, an extra flourish on the spear handle.
“Where did you get this?” he asked
“From a man in my town,” the woman said. “He was selling them door-to-door.”
“This is a fake.” Scontro’s voice grew louder, and his hands began to shake from anger. “My family created this design. Whoever made this bowl stole my family signature.”
“Give it back to me,” the woman said. “It’s mine.”
She tried to grab the bowl from Scontro, but he held on. He wanted to keep the fake so he could study it and determine who had made it.
“How much did you pay for this?” he asked.
“Ten Fondis,” the woman said. Scontro’s bowls, like all bowls in Terralogica, cost one hundred Fondis.
“Well, I’m keeping it as evidence,” Scontro said. He was still holding on to one side of the bowl, while the woman held the other. “I will give you the ten Fondis.”
“You can’t keep it,” the woman said. “It’s mine!”
She yanked the bowl towards herself. Scontro tried to hold on, but the bowl slipped from his fingers. The woman, who was still tugging, stumbled back a few steps. She lost her grip on the bowl, which fell out of her hands and down to the stone floor.
When it hit the floor, it shattered into a hundred pieces.
“There!” Scontro pointed at the broken bits of clay. “You see, it’s a counterfeit!”
“I don’t care what it is,” the woman yelled back him. “That was mine and you broke it!”
Scontro pulled a ten Fondi note from his pocket and threw it at the woman. The note hit her shoulder and fell to the ground, where it rested on top of the chipped pieces of pottery.
“Take your ten Fondis,” he said. “That’s more than your bowl was worth.”
The woman didn’t pick up the money. She just clutched her empty bag tight to her shoulder and ran out of the store.
Word of the counterfeit bowl spread fast around Terralogica. At the vegetable market and the tool repair shop, or walking on the road to Alleata, the neighboring town where everyone from Terralogica went to buy meat and clothing and shoes and visit the doctor and do all the things you couldn’t do in Terralogica, which was mainly a place to make and buy pottery. Everywhere people went, the only topic of conversation was the bowl that shattered in Scontro’s shop.
“I heard they shatter like glass if you drop them!”
“They copied the Fishspear signature, and Birdstar, and Dragonriver, and a bunch of other ones.”
“They’ll keep selling their cheap copies until we lose all our customers.”
Everyone was so concerned that the mayor sent out an emergency Newspost inviting everyone to a special town meeting. The meeting hall was large enough to hold just over half of the people of Terralogica, but every single person showed up. Not only that, but at least fifty people from Alleata came as well, just to see what all the fuss was about. People who came after all the seats were full had to stand in the back or in the aisles, and once those were full, people crowded outside in front of the open windows, trying to get a view of the mayor as stood behind the speaker’s podium at the front of the hall.
Mayor Moderata was a calm, gray-haired woman who carried herself quietly, always taking her time to think before she spoke, never interrupting. Ana and Moderata had been close friends even before both their husbands were killed in the war with Gemella, and even more so since then, and so the mayor warned Ana to show up early before all the seats were gone. That was how Ana, Donalta, Cane and Gatta ended up right in the middle of the second row of seats.
Cane didn’t like being squished so tight between Ana and Gatta that he couldn’t move, but he was excited to be close to the action. Something interesting was finally happening in Terralogica, and he couldn’t wait to soak in every second.
“Citizens of Terralogica.” The mayor’s voice didn’t go far in the crowded hall. She cleared her throat and took a deep breath through her nose, then started again, louder. “I understand your concern about the recent disturbing events at the shop of our cousin Scontro Fishspear.”
Mayor M. had been elected two years ago. As usual, no one ran against her; it was hard enough to get one person to run for mayor, much less two people. But the village constitution was very clear on the point that the mayor must be elected and serve for a three-year term. And so ballots were distributed to every adult in the village, with the name Moderata Lizardflower next to the words yes and no, and everyone circled yes because Moderata was level-headed and amiable and no one had any problems with her, and anyway no one else was stepping up to be the mayor.
“I conducted a bit of an investigation,” Mayor M said. “And I’d like to share some information with you all.”
From behind the podium, she produced two bowls, both marked with what appeared to be the Lizardflower signature, seemingly identical. She placed them on the podium while she spoke.
“With a bit of research, I have tracked the origin of the imposter bowls. They are being made by an organization called Nemico. Nemico has created a series of machines that can make over one thousand bowls in a week.”
Around the hall, there were loud gasps and cries of indignation. Using the ancient Terralogica process, a potter could create ten bowls each week, spinning them on wheels that were passed down over generations. The bowls were dried slowly over several days, turned every few hours to ensure evenness of drying, then fired for six hours in the kiln, which only fit three large bowls or five small ones. After that the hardest part began: painting the signature. It required tiny brushes, specially mixed glazes, and a very steady hand. With all that, a pottery would be lucky to get ten good bowls at the end of a week, and that was excluding the ones that cracked before they got to the kiln, in which case they needed to be thrown in the remnants pile, to be smashed and returned to wet clay at the end of the month when new clay was formulated, new glazes stirred up from pigments. There were fifty-three pottery shops in Terralogica. That meant that all the shops in Terralogica could produce only five hundred and thirty bowls on a good week.
“The bowls of Nemico are spun into shape on a spinning machine,” said Mayor Moderata. “Then dried by a quick-dry machine, fired in a giant high-speed kiln the size of a house, then painted by painting machines. They send spies to buy our pottery so they can copy our signatures. But signatures created by a machine will never be the same as the ones we paint ourselves. And then, of course, there are other deficiencies.”
She pointed at the bowls on the podium.
“Examine these two bowls,” the mayor said. “Who can tell me which is the imposter?”
Ana already knew. Perhaps it was her optimal spot at the front of the hall, or the fact that one of the bowls in question was made by her friend Moderata. But Ana felt like she would know, even if it hadn’t been a Lizardflower bowl, even if she had been standing behind the farthest row of seats. The bowl on the right had a life to it, a beauty in its subtle variations, a hard-to-pinpoint but definitely present lack of evenness. It was a human bowl. On the left, the bowl was uniform but lifeless, the tiny rabbits and leaves dull and passive, more a pattern than a signature.
It seemed that people in the back of the hall weren’t quite so sure as Ana. Perhaps they were from Alleata. She could hear them yelling:
“The right!”
“No, the left, the left!”
The mayor lifted both bowls, one in each hand, to the height of her shoulders, which silenced the shouting as everyone held their breath. The drama was a bit out of character for Moderata, who wasn’t usually one for spectacles. She gave Ana a little wink as she let go of the bowls.
The bowls fell to the podium, then bounced off to the floor. There was a crash, a shattering sound, loud gasps from the people all around Ana in the first few rows.
Mayor M. bent down behind the podium. When she stood back up, she was holding Ana’s unbroken bowl on her right-hand side, and a jagged fragment of shattered pottery on her left.
“This,” the mayor said, holding the bowl and the shard high in the air, “is the reason we have nothing to fear. The Nemico bowls may be inexpensive, but money spent on Nemico is money wasted. The Fondis spent on a Terralogical bowl will never need to be spent again. Terralogica quality speaks for itself!”
There was a grumble from the crowd. People began to shout.
“They need to be punished!”
“They’ve stolen our designs!”
“They’re thieves!”
But Mayor M. was firm. There was no need to take action against Nemico; the pottery of Terralogica could fight for itself in the marketplace. And since people trusted the mayor, they decided to wait a season and see if Nemico would go away, a victim of its own shoddy craftsmanship.
Once the people of Terralogica accepted the presence of Nemico, things got more peaceful. Some tourists still mentioned the less expensive pottery or questioned the prices in the Terralogica shops, but this came to be seen as low-class. Sometimes other customers in the shop would shame the complainer for their cheapness and drive them out of the shop, without the shop-owner having to say anything. A few shop-owners even bought a supply of Nemico bowls to throw at the feet of any customer who complained about prices.
And so again, everything was peaceful. Until the day Moderata came to Ana’s house just before lunchtime, unannounced, hair a bit of a mess, eyes red-rimmed like she hadn’t been getting enough sleep. Cane was helping tourists in the shop, but he went and got Ana from the workroom.
“It’s Nemico,” said Mayor Moderata to Ana. “They’ve got someone called a marketer.”
Usually Moderata only came to Ana’s on Sunday evenings with her grown daughter and her husband, so the families could share a meal.
“What’s that?” Ana asked, wiping her hands on a cloth to remove the clay. She felt like she had heard the word somewhere before—perhaps a vendor who worked at the market in Alleata.
“He’s a persuader.” Mayor M. reached into her pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Ana. “His job is to persuade people not to buy our pottery. Like this.”
Ana unfolded the paper. It was printed in a slick, shiny type of ink that Ana had never seen before.
“Made by a machine,” Ana said. “The machine does the lettering, the same way it paints on pottery.”
On the left side of the paper was a drawing of a bowl, decorated with a simple swirl in place of a signature. On the right was a drawing of ten bowls, each identical, its swirl pattern aligned exactly the same as all the others as though they had been created using a stamp.
Why buy one, the paper said, when you can buy ten?
“They’ve handed these out to houses in all the nearby towns,” Ana said. “Someone in Alleata gave this one to me.”
Ana studied the paper, the identical printed bowls, the simple statement.
“It’s persuasive,” she said. “But it doesn’t change any of the facts. Like you said, money spent on Nemico is money wasted! Terralogica quality speaks for itself!”
The Mayor shook her head.
“Not this time,” she said. “I was wrong. They won’t stop until they’ve put our entire village out of business.”
Ana folded the paper and handed back to Moderata. It was awful to see her friend so defeated, and frightening as well.
“Maybe we need our own marketer,” Ana said. “You know, fight fire with fire.”
Moderata sighed. The idea of two marketers battling to convince customers to buy their products, using tools of persuasion and even trickery, contradicted everything she personally cared for and believed in. But more than that, it seemed to contradict the foundational principles of life in Terralogica, the traditions and values that had been passed down for generation after generation. When the parents and grandparents of Terralogica taught their children to paint each stroke of the signature as though it were a masterpiece in and of itself, when they instructed their children to carefully turn each piece as it dried, to never rush the drying or firing. Wasn’t all this a way of saying: our work is our word, and no words are needed beyond that?
“Perhaps,” said the Major, her voice as heavy as her heart. “Perhaps it has come to that.”
“I think you need a logician,” said Cane.
He had been sitting by the cash box counting Fondis, and Ana had forgotten he was still in the room. His voice had dropped a register over the last month and Ana still wasn’t used to it.
“A what?” asked Mayor M.
“A logician.” Cane put his counted stack of Fondis in the box and locked it with the small key he wore around his neck. “Someone who is a master of logic, to help you outsmart the marketer.”
“But sweetheart,” said Ana. She usually called him that when she didn’t think he was making sense. “Where are we going to find a logician?”
“I know one,” Cane said. “He’s my teacher!”
“Your teacher?” Mayor M. thought she knew all the teachers at the pottery training school in Terralogica. In fact, she knew almost everyone in Terralogica, and she’d never met a logician.
“He takes lessons in Alleata,” Ana said, a bit sheepish. “From a man we met in the market. Donalta and I are never sure quite what he’s studying.”
“I’m studying how to think.” Cane stood up from his stool. “How to come to reasonable conclusions. How to use my powers of observation and deduction. In a word, logic!”
Ana blinked and looked up, as she now had to do, at her son. She’d never heard him speak so passionately before, not about anything. He was looking more like his father every day, she thought, with a strong jaw and quiet, thoughtful eyes.
“I bet he would help us,” Cane said. “He’d find it interesting. You probably wouldn’t even have to pay him.”
Ana wondered how the teacher might help. She’d watched him giving his lessons to Cane through the window to the backyard where they studied. He was a very young man, not much more than a decade older than Cane. But he had the clothing and mannerisms of a much older man in ill-fitting formal clothing, fumbling to remember his etiquette, but with a smile that was sweet and kindly.
“It’s worth a try,” Mayor M. said. “Anything to avoid having to get our own marketer.”
And that’s how Penso Razion became the first official town logician in the history of Terralogica.