Piers Anthony - Chthon

Bossman continued, unmoved by Aton’s too-elaborate sarcasm. “I seen what you done to Garnet, too. She’s a rough gal—but she don’t deserve what you give her. I can’t do nothing about the rest of it. But I’m telling you now, you’re going to make it up to her.”

Yes—the time for a settlement had come. “You quite sure of that?”

“I’m sure,” Bossman asserted. “That’s one thing this farmer can do. She’s got to die, but she’ll die happy. You’re going to ask her real nice, and bring her in here where nobody can see you, and tell her those lies you know the gals go for, and make up to her like you meant it. She deserves that much, and she’s going to get it. The rest of them’ll take a break and get ready for the crossing.”

Aton studied him. The man was serious. “You expect her to believe it?” He shifted position slightly.

“She’ll believe what she wants to believe. I know her well enough for that. And you’re going to make it easy for her. You’re a good enough talker when you want to be.” Here Bossman permitted himself a slight smile. “Why she fixed on you I can’t figure. But she’s ready for anything you put on the line. You make it good, and you carry it all the way through—or you’ll be decoy this time, not here. If you don’t believe that —”

Aton didn’t. Trained to give no warning, he twisted over, a bare foot lashing out with all the deadly skill of his fighting art. The krell farmer was overdue for a lesson.

The edge of an iron hand brushed the kick aside. So fast he hardly seemed to move, Bossman was inside the thrust of the leg. His calloused foot kicked Aton’s other leg from under him. The bruising slam of his body against the stone floor was doubled by that of Bossman’s weight on top of him. Under what little fat was left, the farmer was hard as a cavern wall. An unyielding arm clamped Aton’s head; a powerful hand locked his own arm in an unbreakable grip. Fingers probed under his jawline.

Aton thrashed wildly. He screamed. An explosion of intolerable agony in the throat, an involuntary and useless recoil against the restraining arms, a howling darkness on the world.

The world came back, oddly unreal except for the light touch of those steely fingertips on a buried nerve center. A voice said softly, “Baby wants to play?”

Bossman let him up, on guard. “Tell her we fought for her, and you won,” he advised. “I don’t want you to look roughed up, spaceman—yet.” Bossman had made his point.

And so they played it out, the three of them, setting the scene for Garnet’s sacrifice—

—while Bossman waited with corded fist, knowing the sounds of love were false, when his compassion would willingly have made them true.

—while Aton found, obscurely, that the knowledge of death brought the melody, and the melody brought a passion astonishingly real.

—while Garnet accepted a willing death as the only way to bring that passion, and perhaps a hidden moment of genuine love, to end her misery.

…And the white wake waited…

Aton recovered slowly. The calendar on the wall across the room opened on the face of Second Month, §403—almost a year after the horror he remembered. He had kissed the minionette, and… almost a year!

Where have I been? What have I done, in that vanished interim?

He looked about. The first substantial feature of the comfortable room that his attention fixed upon was the hard-backed wooden chair: the mighty chair of Aurelius, guarding the exit. Across the floor was the plush couch, also too familiar—the couch he had always thought of as his mother’s. Above it still was the framed picture of the daughter of Ten, evoking no guilt now. Beside that—

Beside that was the webwork of Xest artistry: mother and son.

He blotted the room from his mind and studied himself. He was wearing a light shirt and clean farming overalls and the soft heavy footwear of the hvee farmer; whoever had dressed him had known how. Could he have done it himself, in some amnesiac state?

There was a stirring in the adjacent room. Aurelius? No, he was dead, as the nymph of the wood was dead, as everyone who had cared for him was dead. Who occupied this house of Five? The tread was light, familiar.

“Theme of the shell!” he exclaimed, suddenly glad, very glad. He had thought of her, too, as dead, if she had existed at all outside his dreams. He had killed her—but it had been a symbolic execution, a denial of his second love, and now the symbolism was gone.

She stepped into view, her hair longer than that of his four-year memory, glowing silver against the green hvee in the afternoon sunlight. Her fair features were set; her wrist was bare.

There was no physical death on Idyllia, and they both had known it. Yet he had pushed her off the mountain at the moment of rapture. She had no telepathy; she could not have known that his action represented denial, not of her, but of the minionette. To Coquina it was his second rejection… and the vibrant hvee she still wore showed that her love for him had never faltered.

To be worthy of such a woman.

“Daughter of Four,” he said, “I love you.”

She looked up. “Aton?”

Nonplussed, he stood up. His body felt strong—he had not spent the past year in bed. “Coquina—don’t you know me?”

She studied him carefully. “Aton,” she repeated, smiling at last.

He strode toward her. She retreated. “Please do not touch me, Aton.”

“Coquina—what is it?”

She stood behind the large-boned chair of Aurelius. “Things may not be as you remember them, Aton.”

He returned to his own chair and sat down. “Were my dreams mistaken, pretty shell? Did something die on Idyllia?”

“No, Aton, no—not that. But you have been—gone—a long time. I must be sure.”

“Sure of what? ” he demanded. “The minionette is dead and I love you. I loved you from the first, but until I conquered the minionette—”

“Aton, please let me talk. Things will be hard for you, and there is not much time.” Her formality amazed him.

“Coquina!”

She ignored his cry and began talking, a trifle rapidly, as though reading a lecture. “I went to the forest before you were released from Chthon and I talked with the minionette. I talked with Malice. I showed her the hvee I wore, and she took it and showed me that she loved you, even as I.”

“She did, in her way,” Aton said.

“She was lovely. I could see the family resemblance. She told me those things about you that I had to know, so that I could care for you during your recovery, and she warned me about the evil one that would come from Chthon, so that I could protect you from him. She said—she said that she would be gone, soon, and so she left me the song.”

“The song!”

“She wanted you to be happy, Aton, and she saw that your minion blood was destroying you, while the evil one waited for the remainder. She gave you to me. You did not conquer her, Aton. Not that magnificent woman.”

Comprehension appalled him. “All this— before I escaped from Chthon?”

“We loved you, Aton.”

“Malice knew she was going to die?”

“Yes. Her name, by the terms of her culture, means ‘Compassion,’ and she loved your father enough to leave him, and you enough to die for you. When Aurelius saw you pass the fields, with her, he understood, and he gave up his long fight against the swamp blight. She died soon after. The cousin of Five came, and we buried Aurelius beside her in the forest.”

“The song,” Aton said, unable to concentrate.