The school was ramshackle. In winter, icicles formed high on the indoor beams under the attic where the roof leaked. The children would huddle around an iron pot with coals in it. There were fifty boys and about fifteen girls whose relatives thought them odd enough to need lessons. All but one of the girls were alien creatures, whose nurses always came with them. In winter, they brought their own iron firepots, too. The last girl was poor and came alone. She sat bolt upright in a clean ragged darned dress. Her hair was always clean, too, a long fair flag that hung down her back and onto the bench. The well-off little girls would not speak to her. They had remarked loudly to each other that she was a hussy, having no nurse to guard her. The poor girl remarked as loudly, to the air, that she, being virtuous and trustworthy, required no guard, as they plainly did.
Dro saw her twice a week, each of the two days that he came to the school, for three years. Then, one day when he was thirteen, he suddenly noticed her. She would play dice games with the boys, which she usually won, and run races with them, which sometimes she won. She would also climb trees, though not in company with the boys, for she expressed the opinion that this would be unseemly. The day Parl Dro noticed her was an evening in early summer. He came out into the field behind the school and saw her sitting in an apple tree. The sun spilled down her hair like molten honey. She was talking to herself, or to the birds, or the tree. He climbed an adjacent tree and sat and looked at her. She did not seem offended or abashed when she saw him. They began to converse quite easily. What they spoke about was unrecalled and meaningless. It might have been books or the state of the crops.
When he came back to the town on his next school day, he arrived early, and walked slowly by her house. It was a tiny hovel, held up mainly by two other hovels at either side of it. Yet it was the cleanest hovel for miles around. When she came out she did not seem amazed to see him. Her only kin was a grandmother, who that morning had been baking. The girl had two slices of warm crackling bread, spread with dripping, one of which she presented graciously to Parl with the compliments of the house.
She had a name, but he never called her by it. Her nickname, which her grandmother had given her for her hair, was “Silky.” Parl and the grandmother, but no one else, called her that.
Through the summer, they spent a lot of time together. Sometimes they played truant from the school. They roved about the hills. They talked of myths, legends bound up with the land, and ancient times when emperors had ruled empires there, and women with hot blood had ridden over it to battle. He showed her how to catch fish in the streams. She told him he was cruel to catch fish he did not need to eat. Later, when the grandmother suffered a setback in her meagre life style, Silky begged him to show her again how to catch fish. They took the catch back to the hovel together, the colour of river pebbles and fine to eat, particularly when starvation was the alternative. He stole bread for them, Silky and the grandmother, from the landowner’s ovens. When times grew fatter, Silky, by way of repayment, stole a knife for him from the steelsmith’s. Parl had a little trouble replacing it in the forge before it was missed. They were very young, and their sexuality was limited by their youth, their situation and their codes of honour regarding each other. But they learned certain lessons of fire together, light fierce kisses, the rapidity of a heartbeat, hands and bodies and the press of summer grass. There would have been more, if things had evolved differently.
When the harvest came due, the landowner called in all his workers to the fields. For three or four weeks, Parl would not see the school, the town, or Silky. They parted gravely, as if for a year, beneath the apple tree in the field behind the school.
The harvest went as it always did, which was back-breakingly, but well. The weather was hot and the sheaves like tinder, and men were posted to keep watch for fires. At night, Parl fell asleep in the open, the stars dazzling overhead. The air smelled of grapes and wine and scythed grain. Fireflies sprinkled the bushes. He hardly thought of Silky, comforted that he did not need to think of her, because she would be there for him when he returned.