“Please don’t.”
Aton snapped his fingers. “Four?” he demanded, and she had to nod. “I should have known. Aurelius’ judgment was always impeccable. He swore he had arranged the finest match—and he had, oh, he certainly had—I would have loved you.”
Her expression did not change, but he sensed the hurt in her immediately. “I was speaking of the past,” he said lamely, but the damage had been done. “It was the song, the broken song. It was driving me, and I could not turn aside. Now I am suspended, a fish on a hook; I can only acknowledge what might have been.”
“You have mentioned this before.”
Yes, of course—I have been telling her everything, not knowing to whom I spoke. Not knowing!
“How did you come here?” he asked, trying to hide his embarrassment.
“I never saw the man I was to marry, or knew his name,” she said, almost inaudibly. “But I—I hated him, when he brought the shame upon my Family. To be refused sight unseen… and the Families would not annul the liaison. I couldn’t stay.”
Aton tried to take her hands, but she eluded him. “I did not know. ‘Third daughter of Eldest Four’—it was only a designation, not a person.”
“Slaves, too, have pasts,” she said. “But they do not matter.”
“But you must have known. We were not thrown together by coincidence.”
“No. You were my assignment. Your face and your name were not familiar. Until you talked about your past, and I began to understand. The Families could not introduce us formally—”
“And you never said a word. Never a word!” He was not hungry, but he nervously took one of the self-heating food canisters from his pack and began to eat from it. She followed his example, except that hers was a refrigerant package. He knew the symbolism was accidental, but it spurred him to another effort.
“Let’s forget what has happened between us,” he said. “It—there is too much to overcome. Too much of shame. Let’s wipe the slate clean and begin from this point. I want to know about you.” She did not respond. “Please.”
She demurred. “A slave may not—”
“Damn slavery! You’re the woman I should have married, and I want to know.”
She was shaking her head mutely.
Aton looked at her with embarrassed exasperation. She had never seemed recalcitrant before—but of course he had not questioned her about herself before. Surely the circumstances negated any token convention. Unless—
“I have it,” he said. “You told me that no one dies on Idyllia. That’s not rhetorical, is it? That must mean that the clients are watched all the time—and not only by their faithful slaves. Are we under observation now?”
She lowered her eyes.
“And if I had not caught you, there at the cliff, some contraption would have popped out of the stone, thumbed its mechanical nose at me, and whisked you away…Answer me!”
“Something like that.”
“And you’ll be demoted to dog-walking detail if you say a word.”
“Some of them are very nice dogs.”
“Well, if you persist in this foolishness, I’ll just have to clamber up that cliff again, jump off, and force that thing to nab me in midair before I splatter. Then where would your precious job be?”
“Please,” she whispered.
“I should have brought LOE,” he remonstrated dolefully. “ ‘Had we but world enough, and time’—”
“I may be coy,” Coquina said, this time with some spirit, “but I’m not your…”
She was lying in the leaves, her hair matted in them. Aton lay down beside her, propped on one elbow. He picked away the bits in her hair. “I was too quick to set aside convention. I did not appreciate the enormous wisdom of the elders’ choice.”
“No,” she said. “That shame is forgotten now.”
“I will redeem it. I promised to marry the daughter of Four—”
“No!”
The shell was closed.
The pace was more leisurely after that. Magnificent vistas spread out below as they toiled near the summit. Aton had to admit that he felt better than he had in some time. Coquina’s cheerful mien and quiet strength of character collaborated with the beauty of the scenery to make life once more a worthwhile experience.
He was almost sorry when they reached the top. He would have preferred to go on climbing as they had been, never stopping, never thinking, never facing the complex problems of life beyond this mountain; just breathing the scented breeze and listening to the crackle of dry debris underfoot. Malice, for the moment, was little more than a sinister shadow. So much stronger, now, was the living vision of Coquina—pert without affectation, asking nothing, her short curls bobbing as she walked.
On impulse, Aton put his arm around her. She frowned but did not withdraw. Together they mounted the final incline to the summit.
Aton had been expecting a special view, but the scene that met his eyes here exceeded his anticipation. The mountain turned out to be not single but double; a massive split separated the halves, plunging down half a mile to become a narrow crevice between them. The walls on either side were sheer. He retreated a step, repelled by his own attraction to the chasm.
“This,” Coquina said, poised alarmingly near the brink, “was once a field and rill—”
“Rill?”
“Stream. And a field is a flat clearing.”
“I won’t interrupt again,” he agreed.
“Long ago the mountain rose out of the ground. But the rill was older, and it would not move aside. It cut through the rising mass. After a little while—an eon or two—the mountain became annoyed. It ascended more rapidly, until the river could not keep up. The water gave up and went around the mountain after all. Now we have the river bed a mile above the river, and the mountain has two peaks.”
“If I had been that river,” Aton said, “I would have tunneled through that upstart hillock.”
“You would have been sorry. The river did try that, and there is a hole at the edge of a pond, leading into the base of the mountain. But the water that goes in one side never comes out the other. So most of the river backs up and stays away from that area.”
“I don’t blame it. It’s a good thing you warned me; you may have kept me out of bad trouble.” He stood behind her, watching the wind from the cleft fluff back her hair and catch at her hiking skirt.
“The song is gone,” he said.
Coquina turned slowly to face him. “Aton.”
The shell is open, he thought. All it takes is the touch of genuine love.
Gravely he removed the hvee from his hair and tucked it in hers. She smiled quizzically, her eyes shining. They stood at arm’s length, gazing at each other in silence, waiting for the hvee.
Then she was in his arms, sobbing against his shoulder. “Aton, Aton, hold me. You are the first…”
He pressed her close, savoring an emotion that was real, that had not been contaminated.
She stepped back from him, once more silhouetted against the midmorning sky. She was radiant. “So new,” she said. “So beautiful. Kiss me, Aton, so I can believe…”
He put his two hands on her shoulders, bringing her close slowly. As her face approached a cloud seemed to pass before it. A shimmering, a fading…
…And it was the face of the minionette. Hair the color of the living flame surrounded it, twining in serpentine splendor, in and out. Black-green eyes stared into his. The red lips parted. “Kiss me, Aton…”