Chapter 17
Eldest
There was a garden and Eldest had not been the one to find it.
A night garden where light never found its way.
It had been Milk-Eye who discovered the secret corner, and when with soft and infinite patience Eldest’s fingers had mapped out three firm stalks, three smooth caps, three undersides delicate with gills, she had understood the gift her sister had given her.
Eldest had never seen the door by which Father came and went, but when it opened, something changed in the house. The air shifted. Sometimes new scents filtered into the parlour. Several times she had heard the deep challenge of some kind of animal, and once: distant laughter.
The click of a lock reached her through the wood of the parlour door. “He’s gone.”
She moved her head back, breaking contact between her ear and the greying oak panel. With the outer door closed again the silence and the suffocation returned. But at least Father would be gone from the house for a while.
“Gone for sure?” Lip-Scar asked.
A slight hunching shrug showed him how sure she was.
“He’ll be back.” Lame gathered to her narrow chest the rag bundle that she said was her baby.
“You’ll stay here, Lame, so we know when.” Eldest walked away, not looking back to see if her order was obeyed. To do that was to admit the possibility of rebellion, which was practically to invite it.
Eldest thought of the street door as her hope, for she had long ago lost any other kind.
She looked back across her brothers and sisters, pressed together in a tattered clump.
Even the youngest of her siblings knew there was an outside, though opinions on what it contained varied.
On two things they were all agreed: none of them knew how they knew the outside existed, and none of them could remember ever having left the mansion.
“Ready?” Milk-Eye grinned. Though she had been in the mansion nearly as long as Eldest, she had more spirit left to her than any of the rest. She loved building traps, and though Father had yet to show any wounds, Milk-Eye always claimed on the next morning that she saw him favouring one side, or wincing when he reached to discipline someone.
One day, she swore, they would find him impaled on one of her carefully sharpened stakes.
For a short time they would have free run of the upper floors.
Eldest would direct her siblings, children who had no names but for the ones she had placed upon them in her loneliness.
They were many, and though she had been taught her numbers, the figure that Eldest reached when counting them never seemed to stay the same.
And when it shrank by one or two, she could never say who was missing.
The parlour was the best place for listening, but also the most dangerous.
Every other part of the house lay in darkness save for whatever whispers of daylight might creep down the chimneys.
In the parlour, however, a great wooden chandelier held a dozen candles far beyond reach, making the children’s eyes sting and weep.
Here the mansion’s decay revealed itself to more than just touch.
Torn and faded curtains failed to conceal bricked-up windows.
Furniture lay in tumbled disarray. There were books too, strewn in careless profusion.
Day-Father was the one who would fill the trough with the gruel that he brought in from the outside and leave buckets of water in the Dining Hall.
It was he who had, with the threat of hand and rod, taught them to read below the light and drip of high candles.
Day-Father was stern, and cold, but seldom cruel.
Night-Father, who wore the same skin, hunted them all, seemingly with no purpose other than to torture those he caught.
Eldest tried to organize her siblings into the business of barricading entrances and constructing traps.
She tried to find new and better places to hide, and to teach them all she had learned about erasing herself.
They went from the parlour to the dining room, where on the great table’s pitted surface the trough lay with its contents steaming.
None of them rushed for it, though other stomachs growled just as loudly as Eldest’s.
It was in the food. Whatever was being done to them was in the food.
All of them knew it, even the youngest. There was, in the gruel that Father slopped out for them each morning, something the opposite of edible.
It had been hidden in the mess, beyond the ability of any of them to pick out.
Hunger is the most relentless of foes. There’s no weakness more fundamental. Any mind that can resist hunger’s attack carries within it the option for self-destruction, and in so cruel an existence such an option is often a death sentence.
Famine changes the way people look at the world.
Things that would never have been considered foodstuffs become worth chewing on in the hope that they might be.
Old leather might carry the savour of the cow.
Perhaps what could be scraped from the bottoms of barrels in the pantry still remembered the grain or pulses that were stored there.
Even the obviously inedible: wood, for example, might be nibbled upon.
The small holes in the chair legs record the fact that something found sustenance there.
But there are other substances that remain the opposite of food—things that even a starving man would not place in his mouth.
Copper coins, cleaning salts, metal polish.
Whatever Father hid in the gruel was worse than any of that, though it carried no taste other than a wrongness that dried the mouth and set teeth on edge.
They ate. Forcing themselves to endure these moments in order that their bellies would pain them less during the long night ahead.
None of them spoke. No noise save the slop and drip of the gruel, and the swallowing.
Occasionally there was chewing, on rare bits of substance—gristle in the main, or blobs of fat.
Someone retched and for a moment Eldest struggled to hold what she had put into her belly.
Forgetting came next. Forgetting always followed after eating. One moment Eldest was scooping the gruel into her mouth. The next she was blinking in the quarter-light, disoriented, with her siblings standing around her, motionless until she shook them back into the now.
On the previous night Eldest had hidden for several hours in one of the attic rooms that had once housed servants.
When Dancer woke her for her time on guard, Eldest had sat with her head to one of the rafters, searching with her fingertips for the names she and others had carved into the wood.
She found the expected mix of familiar legends set there by her siblings, and older unknown names, perhaps of the servants themselves.
Time had crawled by and Eldest’s exploration of the rafters occupied her hands while her ears strained for the telltale creak of Night-Father’s approach.
She found her own name and remembered the blister that setting it there with an iron nail had earned her.
That had been months before, no hint of the callus remained.
One fingertip traced the letters, until…
a new name, the curl of its first letter just crossing over the final letter of hers.
Definitely over, rather than under. An S trespassing over the t ending “Eldest.” The new name led off, nearly at right angles to hers.
“Strong.” That was it, just “Strong.” It seemed like the sort of name that she would hand out to a sibling once they had shown enough of themself to earn one. Strong.
But she didn’t know any Strong. She had no brother or sister with that name.
That morning she had asked all her siblings.
None of them remembered Strong. None of them had carved the name on the rafters.
And yet there it was. A message? A cruel trick of Night-Father’s?
Or had they had a brother named Strong…it felt like a brother…
Eldest could summon no image of him, no memory, but her fingers remembered closing around a thick upper arm. Strong.
Sometimes the poison in their food would steal a day. Sometimes a week. And perhaps sometimes it stole a lifetime, so completely that not even those who hadn’t lived it could remember the person who had.
Now as she waited for the others to emerge from the trance that the mind-poison dragged them into, Eldest repeated the name of her lost brother.
Strong. She felt, for a moment, an arm around her shoulders.
With a snarl she began to carve the name into her flesh, scoring the letters with her fingernail, setting them on the inner side of her forearm above the tendons and veins.
With the S she gained a shadow of this missing sibling, an outline caused by his absence.
The t brought a sharp intake of breath above the hiss of her pain.
They had called him “Eldest” before her.
“Strong” was the name yet another “Eldest” had given him before that one vanished and ceded the title to Strong.
More letters, more torn skin, more blood leaking, black in the faint light reaching into the dining room from the parlour.
Eldest couldn’t see her brother’s face or hear his words, but she remembered the smell of him, the warmth of his strong body.
He had been brave. She knew that. Too brave. Perhaps that was what had doomed him.
Strong had been a promise. A promise that even with Night-Father hunting them and the unspeakable horrors of the cellar, he would somehow protect them from the worst of it.