Chapter 1: Enter Pot Mender
Chapter 1: Enter Pot Mender
Pot Mender was a tinker mare.
That meant that she ambled from town to town, village to village, farm to farm pulling her wagon, which clanked and jangled with every little jounce as it rolled over irregularities in the road. it clanked and jangled because, hanging from hooks on its side panels were all manner of metal goods: pots and pans, teakettles, cups, roasting forks and stirring spoons, spatulas and carving knives. It was not exactly a caravan wagon, because its sides were just plywood nailed to a frame, and it had no real roof, merely points to which an oiled canvas top might be attached during inclement weather, to do its imperfect part at keeping out the rain.
This was important, because Pot Mender more or less lived in her wagon. She didn't make enough profit to stay at decent inns on a regular basis, and the real fleatraps were often more trouble than convenience for a mare on her own on the road. Many of the places at which she rested overnight were too small or out of the way for regular inns, and it was usually easier to do a deal with a local farmer for the night, to park in her barn or fields. She'd sleep in or under or beside her wagon, and thus guard her few valuables from vandals and thieves. One might not think she had anything worth wrecking or stealing, but one would be surprised how greedy and vicious some Ponies could be to other Ponies down there with them on the bottom.
There are Unicorns who are born to wealth, or at least middling good fortune, who have awesome talents for magic or crafts which they use to become famous and successful. There are even those born to poverty, sometimes with quite moderate talents, who by dint of hard work and discipline, wise choices and a little luck, manage to rise. Telekinesis is a flexible gift, which a clever Pony may apply to many careers, and beyond this are all the possibilities of magic, for the mare willing to apply herself.
That mare was not Pot Mender.
She had been born into real but respectable poverty some sixty-plus years ago, on a farm in northwestern Susquehattia Province, sometime before 1420 (neither she nor her family were meticulous record-keepers, and she'd forgotten her own exact age. Her early youth had been happy, but then her father had died, and the little society on her small family farm had become unstable, with various seedy stallions attempting to attach themselves to her mother Cornflower and her little plot of land. One of them, quarreling with her mother for some reason, had decided to seek consolation from her daughter, who was then named Mudflower.
It had not been rape, as she had consented, and had just been at the age of consent for that time and place -- ten years of age. She had not loved, nor even strongly liked, her seducer -- but she had been curious about what had been until then for her an adult mystery, and eager to learn new skills. Besides, when it was over, she was still technically a virgin, though she now knew something of what stallions wanted.
Mudflower did not regret it at all. It had been somewhat enjoyable, and afterward she felt that she had made a major step into marehood. Nor was she -- then or ever -- much burdened with nice questions of sexual morality.
But she was not tempted to do it again with him. Even less so because he had left her two bits as a present, something about which she had actually been proud, until she had learned -- in an embarrassing conversation with a friend, exactly what was implied regarding the stallion's opinion of her by a direct money gift after such an encounter. And, even in her rustic ignorance and relative innocence, she knew that it was a bad thing to be thought of as a whorse -- or actually be one.
Besides, she had already found a better way to earn money.
It was not long after her near-defloration that her mother -- preoccupied with courtship by yet another stallion (her daughter's seducer now decisively rejected, though not for that reason, as her mother had no idea what had happened) left our heroine alone, to boil some water.
A watched pot never boils, the filly thought to herself, and -- taking the old aphorism perhaps too literally -- heaped wood into the stove's firebox, and then ran off to play with her friends.
Mudflower came back about an hour later.
Amazingly, the house was not on fire. The unwatched pot had indeed boiled: all the water was gone, and the pot was glowing a dull red. Indeed, the stove itself was starting to glow.
The young filly panicked. She knew, from watching a blacksmith, that metal could glow with heat and be malleable enough to work. The blacksmith's son had explained to her that metal could be heated to the point that it would melt and run like molassses -- and that, in this state, it was highly dangerous. She did not want this to happen in her family's kitchen.
She was only ten. Metals were still mostly a mystery to her. She wanted to cool the pot down fast. And she knew how to do that. Everypony knew how to do that.
Leaving the fire merrily burning in the stove's firebox -- in part because she dared not touch the hot stove, and in part because she forgot entirely about the bucket of sand that her mother kept by the stove -- she ran to the well and drew up a bucket of nice cold water. Balancing the bucket on her back, she ran back and dashed the bucket of water all over pot and firebox alike.
She immediately learned the first reason why it is unwise to throw cold water onto red-hot metal, as much of the water flashed into steam. Luckily, she was standing well back from the stove when she did this, so she did not scald the hair right off her hide or blind herself, as she might have done had she been closer. She did have to close her eyes and back off a painful surge of steam, but the vapor which actually touched her was already condensing, and did her but small harm.
Crack! She did not at first grasp the meaning of that explosive metallic noise. Fortunately for her family, their stove was cast iron, relatively unflawed, made of multiple parts bolted together, and hence able to contract rapidly without cracking. Had she broken the stove, she would have destroyed a significant family investment, and her mother's wrath would have been terrible.
As the steam cleared, the filly gaped in dismay. She saw that the pot had cracked right down the side and part of the way along the bottom, instantly converting itself into so much scrap metal.
She knew the pot was important. Her mother made meals for the whole family in that pot. She had broken the big stewpot and her mother would be so mad at her and it was all her fault! Pot Mender was really, despite her recent quasi-romantic adventure, barely more than a little filly. Moisture which had nothing to do with condensing steam pooled in her light blue eyes. She was about to burst out into tears, when she instead -- in the extremity of her guilt and shame -- tried something new.
She reached out and touched the pot with her telekinesis. This last couple of years, it had gotten stronger, and she had noticed a certain affinity for handling metals. She had noticed that she could heat or cool them with her power, but in her childish ignorance of the world, she did not realize that this ability was at all unusual.
The next thing she did was very impractical, and not at all the way that a tinker is supposed to mend a pot. It was not even the way that a specially-Talented tinker is supposed to mend a pot.
She reached out with her aura and grasped the metal around the crack, then remembering what her friend the smith's colt had said about hot metal being softer, she reasoned that if she heated the metal there she could make it just sort of flow together and make the pot better. And so she did.
It was a testament to her power that she actually closed the crack in the pot. It was a testament to her luck that she did not cause it to shatter in the attempt. Some of the possible ways what she did could have gone wrong, she would later learn, would have resulted in her being sprayed right in the face by red-hot shards of iron, an experience which even if she had survived it would certainly have improved neither her appearance nor her disposition.
The way she should have mended the pot, she later learned, invoved clay molds, solder and a much more gradual heating process, to patch the framework with a dam which she then would have used as a guide for a slow weld. That, done by an ordiary tinker, would have made a solid weld which would have lasted almost as long as the rest of the pot.
In fact, what she did shouldn't have worked at all, save that Mudflower's affinity with metals was so good that she was able to massage the metal crystals, heating them so precisely as to let the metal flow in the grip of her telekinetic fields, and she could feel the outline and alignment of the crystals enough to orient them back into a position of strength -- mostly. For the way she was doing the job was so energy-intensive that she overchanneled herself in under a minute, and collapsed next to her poorly-finished job.
In her collapse, she barely even noticed, save as a somewhat milder sensation in counterpoint to the pain wracking her head and the base of her horn, the tingling on her flank that signified that her Talent had brought forth the usual visible manifestation. She had gotten her Cutie Mark, but was in no condition to celebrate the achievement.
When she woke up she was being alternately hugged and berated by her mother Cornflower, who had found her unconscious in the mess which had been made of her kitchen. Her mother was torn between relief that Mudflower was alive, annoyance that her daughter had damaged their pot and soaked the whole kitchen, and happiness that she had earned her Cutie Mark. She compromised by kissing Mudflower, swatting her on the behind, and sending her to bed without her supper, the last punishment of which everypony endured, as her mother needed to repair the kitchen before she could make anypony their suppers.
Cornflower was not exactly overjoyed that night by the discovery that the pot was not in fact, properly mended. However, when she took it to a passing tinker a few days later, and told him what had happened to it, the tinker -- an ageing Unicorn stallion named Tinpan Ear, was amazed at the extent to which little Mudflower had been able to repair it, and told the farm mare that her daughter had a considerable gift for tinkering, though obviously no training in the craft.
Tinpan Ear's last apprentice had grown into his own journeying last year, and as the years piled up on him, he increasingly felt the need of an assistant. He knew of no kin or friends with likely colts or fillies, and he suspected Mudflower's raw talent to be impressive. So he expressed his willingness to take the filly as his next apprentice.
Cornflower might have been suspicious of giving her young daughter over to the care of a strange stallion, to journey the roads with him and venture into all sorts of potential danger. It was neither safe nor respectable. But then, Cornflower's love for Mudflower was limited, and tinkering was a career in which an honest and diligent filly might support herself, and besides neither Cornflower (nor, had she known it, Mudflower) were really all that respectable any more. So she agreed, with the proviso that Mudflower should write to her at monthly intervals, a condition to which Tinpan Ear readily acceeded.
So began Mudflower's life on the road, though she was not to adventure under that name, for it was not the best name for a tinker. Instead, she shed her foal-name, and took the mark-name of Pot Mender, for that was the mark on her flanks -- a back iron pot with a crack in it, being welded together by orange fire.
So began the career of Pot Mender, the tinker mare.
Author's Note
Given Luna's Return as occurring in YOH 1500, Pot Mender was born in YOH 1418, and her attainment both of Cutie Mark and of precocious sexual experience took place in YOH 1428.
I actually made Pot Mender's mistake and cracked a pan in just this fashion. Sadly, I don't have a horn, or a special Talent for pot mending.
