What the Hollow Held Instead

At Rhosus someone shaped a hollow for nuts, another for fish, another for soup, a hundred and twenty-two ways of being ready.

Before the crates were closed someone pressed soft clay into each hollow and set the next dish down on it, the raw kind keeping the fired kind from cracking, so the first thing those dishes ever held was the stuff they had been made from.

The ship went onto the shoals in weather off Adrasan. For twenty-one centuries the sea stood on the stack, and the hollows kept doing the one thing they could do there: hold what was given, and not break.

Nobody in Rome ate from them. That meal is the one that didn't happen. The others did, thousands of tables of them, nuts on red-gloss plates, fish on the fish plates, which is how anyone in Rhosus knew the shape of a nut plate at all. A word you never say still means what the talking around it means.

The same week in Oise, beside the Agrippa road, they found a workshop with its clay pits still open, the start of the chain. Off Adrasan the chain ends the way it starts, in clay that was never fired.

When one comes up whole and somebody taps it, listen for the ring. Potters tapped what came out of the kiln, a clear note for sound, a dull one for a crack. The note is the dish's. The test is the potter's. A ring from this one says the packing held.