Page 62 of Apex of the Curve
I smiled to myself. “Then put some out front and have the rest ready for the paint night this week. They get glazed and then fired again and there you have it, a finished mug.”
“Neat,” he grunted and asked with a sniff, “You got a broom back here?”
“Uh, yeah, why?”
“Mind if I work on a little somethin’ somethin’ of my own?”
“No, not at all. Go right ahead.”
“Cool.”
He pulled out a whittling knife, clipped to his jeans pocket and brought out a Crown Royal bag from his inside jacket pocket. He slipped out a chunk of stick and began peeling off the bark with his knife while I looked on curiously and let the mug’s body, I was working on, warp.
“Oh, shoot!” I turned my attention back to my work.
Fenris chuckled and looked up and over at me, blue eyes sparkling.
“I got it,” I muttered and fixed my inattentive mistake.
“What are you making over there?” I asked a time later.
“Oh, just carving up some rune sticks for a buddy of mine,” he said. “It’s a trade.”
“Oh?” I asked. “What are you trading for?”
“Some arrow repairs,” he answered. “It’s a fair trade.”
“Good deal,” I said. “You do that a lot?”
“What? Trade?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I do. It’s a lost art. One of the oldest forms of commerce, I dig it. Especially when I get a good deal.”
“Nice,” I murmured, and smiled at my work. I loved that. It sounded so simple, even though I was sure there were hidden complexities to it.
“There are a lot of folks around here involved in the SCA and the local renaissance fairs. I do a lot of bartering with ‘em – mead, goat meat, some handcrafted shit like these runes. It keeps the old ways alive.”
“What do you get in return?” I asked, mostly to make conversation, partially because I was curious.
“Bows, hand forged knives better than you can get in any store nowadays, sometimes help around the farm, that sort of thing.”
We chatted amicably while I worked at my wheel and fell into a comfortable silence as I rose to make and attach handles to the heavy clay, pot bellied tankard type mugs that I called part of my colonial line.
“So, what do you do with all this?” he asked and glanced up as I made the score marks in one of the mugs where I would attach the handle with some slip.
“Some I fire to make into hard bisque like those ones,” I pointed indicating a shelf full of hard, white, fired clay vessels, “so that patrons can glaze their own.”
“Yeah? What about the rest?”
“The rest I leave like this, unfinished, so that they can be carved and underglazes can be used.”
“Carving sounds cool, underglaze sounds just like what you would think it would be.”
“Yeah.” I smiled faintly. “Some of them underglaze decals get used.”
“What, like sheets?” he asked.
