Piers Anthony - Chthon

She touched her fingers to his chin again and put her other hand on top of his head to tilt it sidewise a little. She held him, just so, and leaned forward to kiss him softly on the mouth.

Aton, seven, did not know what to do. He felt nothing, he was ever after to tell himself, dwelling on this moment; but that nothing he did feel he could not understand.

“Have you been kissed that way before?”

“No.”

She smiled brilliantly. “No one, no one else will kiss you that way—ever.”

Her eye fell on a tiny plant almost at her foot. “This too is beautiful,” she said, letting her hand drop toward it.

Aton spoke sharply. “That’s a hvee. A wild hvee.”

“May I not have it?” she asked, amused.

“May you not!” he said, unconsciously imitating her choice of words. “Hvee is only for men. I told you.”

She laughed once more. “Until they are loved.” She took it up. “See. See, it does not wither in my hand. But I will give it to you, my present, and it will love you and stay with you as long as you remember my song.”

“But I don’t know your song.”

She put the green stem in his hair. “You must come back to me to learn it.” Her fine hands took his shoulders, turning him around. “Go, go now, and do not turn back.”

Aton marched off, confused but somehow elated.

He returned next day, but the glade was empty. The nymph of the wood had gone, and had taken her song with her. He dwelt on it, trying to recover the tune, but he possessed only a fleeting fragment. He touched the flat stump where she had sat, wondering whether the warmth of her body remained in it, beginning to doubt that she had been there at all. But he was unwilling to let the vision of the nymph go. She had talked to him and kissed him and left him the hvee and part of a song, and the memory was strange and strong and wonderful.

In the days and weeks that followed he continued to visit that place in the forest, hoping for some hint of the music. Finally he stopped and gave himself up to the more somber world of reality—almost.

Their nearest neighbor lived five miles down the valley. This was a branch of the low-caste Family of Eighty-One, farming poorer land and doing it less conscientiously. Aurelius never mentioned them. Aton had not known of their existence until his nymph indirectly introduced him to the children of Eighty-One.

Taken by a fit of loneliness when his tenth visit to the forest had been to no avail, Aton had either to assume the woman to be gone forever (because he found that easier than counting on into two figures with only ten fingers), or to begin a search for her farther afield. He chose the latter. Surely she was somewhere , and the logical place to investigate was the long valley, since he was not supposed to walk along the hot black highway. His aunt always arrived by aircar from that direction, over the valley, and while he did not conceive her residence in terms of place, nor wish to visit it, the fact added logic to his decision.

He set off, armed with his weighty LOE , and marched through many wonderous domains of field and meandering stream and dark stretches of forest. The world, it developed, was a bit larger than anticipated; but he shifted the growing mass of the book from arm to arm, and rested occasionally, and disciplined his little feet to be undaunted by the unthinkable distances they traveled, and found himself at last at the fringe of Eighty-One.

In this manner he came to meet, not the nymph for which he searched, but the twin boys his own age, Jay and Jervis, and their little sister Jill, and compounded a friendship that was to endure an even seven years.

“Look—he got a hvee!” Jay shouted, spotting the determined traveler.

The children of Eighty-One clustered around Aton, who responded to this interest in his mark of distinction with a condescending frown. “Why don’t you take one?” he inquired. Jervis skuffled. “I tried. It died.”

“Where you get yours?” Jay demanded.

Aton explained that a lovely woman in the forest had given him the plant for his seventh birthday, and that he was looking for her now.

“I wish I could fib like that,” Jervis said enviously. “Can you make a bomb?”

“We’re making a bomb!” little Jill exclaimed.

Jervis slapped her across her bare chest. “No girls!” he pronounced. “This is man’s business.”

“Yeah,” said Jay.

“Yeah,” Aton echoed, though it made no difference to him. “But I need a safe place for my book. It’s got Words-Earth in it.”

“Is that like purple sand?” Jay asked. “Maybe we can use some for our bomb.”

“No! Words-Earth is a poet. He makes rhymes about hot ashes. ‘Oh, joy that in our embers’.”

“Who cares about that stuff?” Jervis said. “ Real men make bombs.”

In due course the three were ensconced in the twins’ hideout, a hollow in the ground not far from the hog corral, concealed by thick bushes. They were fashioning a bomb from rocks and colored sand. Jervis had heard that the correct mixture of sulphur (which they could recognize because it was yellow) and saltpeter would explode, if dropped hard enough. But somehow it wasn’t working.

“Must be the salt,” Jervis said. “This stuff is just white sand. We need real salt.”

Jill, hovering just outside, saw her opportunity. “I can get some salt!”

When she returned with a shaker snitched from the kitchen, she refused to give it up until granted a share of the enterprise. For the rest of the afternoon she attached herself to Aton, somewhat to his disgust. She was muddy all over, and her long black braids kept falling into the bomb.

The years were left behind. Tutoring began. Aton became versed in the history and traditions of his planet and the great Family of Five. He learned to read the difficult mother language and gradually, wonderfully, worked his way through the mighty text of LOE . He learned to count far beyond ten, and to do other things with numbers; he learned the K scale of temperature and the § scale of time. He began the long hvee apprenticeship.

His free time, more valuable now, was spent largely at the farm of Eighty-One. The boys went on to other projects after giving up on the bomb. Jay and Jervis were not obligated to endure the extent of tutoring required of a son of Five, and had an easier time of it. Jill never relinquished her initial affection for Aton. The twins teased him constantly: “Kiss her and maybe she’ll bring some more salt. Good salt.” But he saw her as the sister he had somehow never been granted, and contented himself with yanking her braids just hard enough to make her behave, while time acted subtly on all of them.

At home, the farming of the delicate green flowers was an intricate matter, composed of science, art, and attitude. It was soon evident that Aton had the touch. The plants he worked with grew larger and finer than average, and his pilot plots flourished. His future as a farmer seemed assured.

His future as a mechanic might have been otherwise. He learned to operate the Five aircar, pinpointing planetary coordinates on the machine’s geographic vernier. The location grid was calibrated in standard units for easting and northing, with the superimposed vernier scale throwing everything out of focus except the correct reading. This was where Aton had endless difficulty. He seemed to lack mechanical aptitude, at least as a child. “Don’t ever join the Navy,” the tutor warned. “They’ll be certain to make a machinist out of you. They have uncanny ability to select exactly the wrong man for the job.” But once Aton mastered the technique he came to respect it well. There was something about the sudden sharp focus, after interminable struggle, that was exhilarating.