Chthon

by Piers Anthony

  The boy came to a glade and peeked through the tall ferns rising strongly at its edge. He saw the nymph of the wood. She was a young woman of striking beauty, so elegant that even a child just mastering seven could understand immediately, without question, that there could be no other on his planet to match her. He watched and listened, spellbound.

  She sensed him, hiding there, and ceased her singing. “No!” he wanted to cry as the song was broken again in midrefrain; but she had put aside her instrument.

  “Come to me, young man,” she said, clearly and not loudly at all. Discovered when he had thought himself secure, he went to her, abruptly bashful.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Aton Five,” he said, proud of a proud name. “I’m seven years old yesterday.”

  “Seven,” she said, making him feel that it was indeed the right age to be. “And what is this burden you have undertaken?” she inquired, touching the volume in his arms and smiling.

  “This is my book,” he said with diffident vanity. “It has my name.”

  “May I see it?”

  Aton stumbled back a step. “It’s mine!”

  She looked at him, making him feel ashamed of his selfishness. “It’s locked,” he explained.

  “But are you able to read it, Aton?”

  He tried to tell her that he knew that the big LOE spelled The Literature of Old Earth, and that the rest was his own name, to show that it belonged to him; but the words got all tangled up in his throat as he encountered her deep and silent eyes. “It’s locked.”

  “You must never tell the numbers to anyone, ever,” she said. “But I will close my eyes and let you open it yourself.”

  She closed her eyes, her features as calm and perfect as those of a statue, and Aton felt somehow committed and not a little confused. He fumbled with the lock, turning the dial in the pattern so recently memorized! The clasp popped open and the tinted pages were exposed.

  Her lashes lifted at the sound and her gaze fell upon him once more, as warm and bright as a sunbeam. He pushed the volume into her waiting hands and watched, half fearfully, as she turned the fine sheets.

  “It is a beautiful book, Aton,” she said, and he flushed with pride. “You will have to learn to read the old language, English, and this is a difficult thing, because the symbols do not always match the words. They are not so clear as those of Galactic. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She smiled. “Yes, you can, if you try.” She found a place and spread the pages flat. “You are a child, Aton, and this book will have meaning for you. Here is what Mr. Wordsworth says about the immortality of childhood: ‘O joy! that in our embers/ Is something that doth live,/ That nature yet remembers/ What was so fugitive!’ “

  Aton listened blankly. “It only seems obscure,” she said, “because your symbols do not quite match those of the poet. But when you begin to grasp it, the language of poetry is the most direct route to the truth you can find. You will understand, Aton, perhaps when you are twice seven.

  “And when you are twice seven what will you be, what will you be doing?”

  “I’ll be farming hvee,” he said.

  “Tell me about the hvee.”

  And so Aton told her about the green flowers that grew in the fields, waiting to love, and how when a person took one it loved him and stayed green as long as he lived, and survived on no more than the air and his presence, and how when the owner grew old enough to many he gave his hvee to his betrothed and it lived if she loved him and died if her love was false, and if it did not die he married her and took it back to himself and did not test her love ever again, and how the hvee grew only on Hvee, the world named after it or maybe the other way around, in the ground, and was sent all over the human sector of the galaxy because people everywhere wanted to know they were loved, no matter what.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, when he ran out of breath. “Love is the most painful thing of all. But tell me, young man—do you really know what it is?”

  “No,” he admitted, for his words had been rhetoric, a rehearsal of adult folklore. He wondered if he had heard her description correctly.

  Then she said something else to him, something strange. “Look at me. Look, Aton, and tell me that I am beautiful.”

  He looked obediently at her face, but all he could see were her black-green eyes and her hair, a fire and a smoke, burning and swirling in the wind. “Yes,” he said, finding unexpected pleasure in the saying, “you are beautiful, like the blaze upon the water when my father burns the swamp in the spring.”

  She laughed with the light echo of her music, accepting the compliment on its own terms. “I am indeed,” she agreed. She reached out her hand and lifted his chin with her cool fingers so that he gazed into her eyes once more. The effect was hypnotic. “You will never see a woman as beautiful as I,” she said, and he found himself compelled to believe it absolutely, never to question it so long as he should live.

  She let him go. “Tell me,” she said, “tell me—have you ever been kissed?”

  “My aunt kisses me every time she visits,” Aton said, wrinkling his nose.

  “Do I resemble your aunt?”

  He examined her. Women hardly counted in the primogenitive genealogy of Hvee, and the aspect of his father’s sisters was lackluster. “No.”

  “Then I shall kiss you now.”

  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 figure
s 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.

  Two

  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.

  Perhaps, he thought, the beauty of that focus could be appreciated only because it came after struggle.

  One thing continued to dull his appreciation of his destiny: the lingering image of the nymph of the wood. He could not be entirely complacent while that mystery remained. As he worked in the field, sweating in the hot sun to remove the encroaching weed-plants (he thought of them as krell, though they were hardly dangerous) from the valuable hvee, the broken song ran through his mind, insistent, tantalizing. Where had she come from? What had been her purpose? What could she have wanted with a small boy?

  Gradually, age dimmed the memory. Only the central core of dissatisfaction remained, keeping him ever so slightly off-balance, making him wonder whether the life he contemplated as a farmer of hvee was actually the very best available. Yet—what else could there be?

  He was a young man of fourteen, transplanting infant hvee near the edge of the property, when the distant melody came a second time. His hands shook. Had she—had she returned at last to the glade?

  He set his plants aside and followed the magic sound, now eager, now holding back. Excitement pounded in him as he circled the disused deep well within the forest. Was there really a nymph? Did she summon him?

  He arrived at the glade, which was almost unchanged from his memory of seven years. She was there! She was there, sitting and singing, her quick fingers rippling over the little instrument—an offworld, six-stringed lute lovely beyond belief. The ancient image in his mind faded before the new reality. The forest, the glade, the very air about her was beautiful.

  He stood at the edge, absorbing her presence. It seemed only a moment since he had stood this way before; the intervening time a lonely dream—a moment and an eternity. She had not changed—he was the one who had aged seven years. And what he saw now was not what he had seen as the child of seven.

  She wore a light green dress, translucent in the spot of sunlight, laced up the front in a bodice unused on Hvee. Her face was pale and fair, framed by the luster of hair which flowed deep red and deep black in fascinating alliance. There was a gentle fullness in her figure, not voluptuous, not slim. Her aspect represented a juxtaposition of opposites that Aton had never consciously realized he was searching for. Fire and water, so often at war, here merged into exquisite focus like the crossing scales of the vernier.

  He stood entranced, forgetting time and self in the delight of that study.

  She spied him, as before, and put aside her song. “Aton, Aton, come to me.”

  She knew him! He stood before the lovely woman, embarrassed, flushed by the first ungainly surges of manhood. She was man’s desire, and in her presence he felt great and crude, conscious of the earth on his hands and the sweat on his shirt. He could not stay; he could not leave.

  “Fourteen,” she said, putting her magic into that word. “Fourteen. Already you are taller than I.” She stood, unfolding as a flower, to show that it was true.

  “And you are wearing my hve
e,” she said, reaching up to take it from his hair. It nested in her hand, its green blossom hardly darker than her dress. “Will you give it to me now, Aton?”

  Speechless, he gawked at her, unable to comprehend the offer. “Ah, it is too soon, too soon,” she said. “I will not take it from you now, Aton. Not yet.” She noted his curling, empty hands. “Where is your book, Aton?”

  “I was in the field—”

  “Yes, oh, yes,” she said, twirling the hvee. “You are twice seven and you are a farmer now. But do you remember—”

  “William Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’?” he blurted, immediately shocked by his own loudness.

  She caught his hand in hers, squeezing it. “Never forget, Aton, what a wonderful thing it is to be a child. There is that immortal bit of light in you, a ray of that sun for which you are named. You must cherish that ember, and never let it die, no matter how you grow.”

  “Yes,” he said, unable to say more.

  She held the hvee to her cheek. “Tell me, tell me again, Aton—am I not beautiful?”

  He gazed into the black and green depths of her eyes and was lost. “Yes,” he said. “The forest fire, and the still water. You drown me in fire—”

  Her laugh was the echo of candlelight and thicket streams. “Am I then so devastating?”

  You compelling creature, he thought. You play with me, and I am helpless.

  She reached her arms around him, standing close to replace the hvee in his hair. The light perfume of her body intoxicated his senses. She was timeless; she was perfection. “You have found no woman to compare to me,” she said.

  Protest was useless; even her vanity was rapture. No mortal woman could rival the splendor of her person.

  “You must not forget me,” she said. “I shall kiss you again.”

  Aton stood, hands rigid at his sides, feet rooted, half afraid that if he moved a muscle he would topple. The woman of the forest placed those cool fingers on his elbows, the gentle pressure evoking a responsive tingle from tight shoulders to clenched fists. She raised her sweet lips to his, holding him in ecstasy. The kiss: and desire and chagrin suffused his mind.