I Am the Clay Read Online Free

Looters they shoot.
    He turned into a street crowded with refugees milling about and squatting upon the ground. A stench of dread and squalor thick in the air.
    Afraid. His meager supply of gathered wood might be stolen from him if he passed through this street. He decided to return to the riverbank and soon found himself lost in narrow alleyways.
    Shamed by his stupidity and fearful of attracting attention, he would not ask of others the right way but stumbled on, looking up and down the streets for the dull sheen of the river. But here the streets and alleys curved and he saw only more streets and houses and low stone walls. He wandered on and a pain began in his chest, a familiar pain, the pinpoint of pain that rose up in him whenever dread became overwhelming and he felt himself again the plaything of devils.
    On one of the streets a small dog attached itself to him: tawny-skinned, ribs protruding, red tongue dangling, breath rising in brief steamy coils. He called to it and it approached warily and when he reached out a hand it shied away. He hurled a stone at it and it scampered off through an opening in a stone wall that seemed to have been sheared by a shell and lay partly in a heap of grayish rubble.
    He paused, listening. The rumble of guns. He squatted down quickly near the broken wall to relieve himself and noticed jutting out from beneath a pile of stones the splintered edge of a piece of wood.
    He stood and went to the stones and gazed down and then looked around. The broken wall fronted a courtyard and a stately stone house that seemed deserted. The narrow paved street was bordered by low walls and elegant homes. On the walls of some of the houses were the scars of bullets and shells. The windmade a strange high-pitched moaning sound as it moved among the homes.
    The old man reached down and touched the wood and it was indeed wood and he moved away some stones and there was more wood and he moved away more of the stones and there was more wood still and he found himself after a few moments gazing down at a huge cache of shattered beams and broken boards with the nails still in them and two-by-fours and sections of wooden walls and doors. Someone’s secret hoard? For barter or sale? The spirits sent me here!
    He placed the A-frame on the ground and cleared away the stones and loaded the A-frame with as much wood as he thought he could carry and replaced the stones and returned the A-frame to his back and hurried away, staggering slightly beneath the load.
    The street sloped and he followed it, thinking it would lead to the river, and after some while there was the dark sheen of the frozen water. He passed through the row of riveredge city houses and entered the mudflats and walked among the refugees toward the shack, conscious of the wind on his face and the hard hot looks of those squatting about staring at his find of wood.
    The woman when she saw the wood said only that the boy needed the warmth if he was to stay alive and quickly set about building a fire in the oil drum.

    The two old men whose shack it was lay together inside a sleeping bag and chirped merrily when theysaw the wood, and one asked if they were to be included in the woman’s cooking that evening.
    The old man, his shoulders and back quivering from the weight of the wood and the effort of the hauling, went to the river’s edge, where the frozen mud met the frozen water, and squatted there and stared across the expanse of ice at the opposite shore and its horde of men and women and children. An aircraft as large as a ship lifted itself from the earth and lumbered by overhead in a tumultuous roar of engines, then banked and slowly vanished into the pale sky. The old man watched in wonder and terror. The machines of the foreigners. How can they be defeated, these giants of pale skin, these devils on our sacred soil? Yet the guns of the Chinese are closer now. The wood I carried will warm our bodies and keep the boy alive. She will want to