Chapter 23
Eldest
Tune found the petals in the cold and dusty clutch of the parlour grate.
Two white and one pale blue, shaken from a bird’s tail, Eldest said.
The blue, though faint, was as vivid a colour as had ever entered the mansion.
To repay Tune’s gift Eldest shared the secret of the garden with her, though the child was too clumsy to be allowed to touch.
They added a petal to each of the fungi and called them flowers, though none save Eldest, Tune, and Milk-Eye would ever know that they had bloomed.
“There were three sisters. Three terrible sisters. They were made to chide the gods, to chase them across the heavens should they transgress. Fashioned not by any being but by necessity. Necessity was their mother, and they are her invention.” Day-Father had the children gathered in the parlour.
He sat in the scarred, high-backed chair, his own back straighter than that of his seat, his black hair as ragged and unkempt as the children’s.
He had their gaunt and hungry look too, though who kept him from eating his fill they couldn’t say.
He held a heavy book open on his knees but did not read from it.
Instead, he watched them all with night-black eyes and spoke his words from memory.
“Humanity lay beneath their notice and stayed there for thousands of years. There are, however, creatures older than the gods, perhaps even older than the sisters and their mother. The titans were born of the sky and the earth, conceived where one touches the other, from the sunset or the sunrise according to their nature. They are many and various in their ways. Much of our world is fashioned from their corpses.”
Eldest longed to ask her questions, but the answer would be a slap. Had the mansion been built from the bones of titans? What killed them? Were any still alive?
“Theus,” Day-Father continued, “was clever and stupid at the same time. He liked to walk among men, as if he were a father to them all.” Day-Father glanced around at his children, seeking challenge.
All of them looked away, save Eldest, who watched him but kept her lips pressed tight together.
“Theus gave fire to humanity, and with that spark they burned the world.
The sisters noticed our kind then. Alecto—she of unceasing fury; Tisiphone—mother of revenge; Megaera—greatest among equals, she who has bathed in the rivers of memory and forgetting, she who swims in the currents of time, she who will never forget.
“They chased the wrongdoers, across continents, across oceans. No vault was so deep that they could not find the guilty, no door too thick for them to breach. They pursued those who woke the fire of the sun on our green earth, sought them across endless seas, even to the shores of Gog and Magog. The sisters are immortal, eternal, but the bodies they fashioned themselves to bring justice into the mortal world were not. And here, at last, on our shores, after centuries of war, those bodies fell.”
Eldest tried to imagine it. The three sisters running across the limitless ocean, the last scraps of humanity scattered ahead of them in a final armada, lashed by whips of flame.
Had the sisters been vast as titans wading the deeps?
Did they burn with the fire of their wrath?
And when at last they reached new land, had they sunk to their knees and fallen apart like the armour in the great hall?
“Their spirits returned to the heavens to hound whatever gods still dwelt there, and their flesh, all but incorruptible, lay untouched by wolf or raven until the land itself drew a veil across the remains. But what was lost can be found, and—”
Eldest blinked. She had been sitting with her brothers and sisters, listening to Day-Father’s story.
But now she stood by the long table with the tongue-shrivelling taste of the trough in her mouth and her vacant siblings on every side.
The meal always stole time from her, but today it had stolen part of the lesson they’d just had.
And she was the first to waken from it. Would the rest of them even remember that there had been a story?
Memory. That was what was being taken from them.
Without shaking the others back into the moment, Eldest stepped away from them, away from the table and the trough.
The understanding didn’t come in an instant, like the flint’s spark, kindling a greater light.
Instead, it seeped into her, a liquid knowledge soaking into parched ignorance.
Eat of my body. Drink of my blood. That was what the priests told the followers of the cross.
She had read it in one of the books strewn so carelessly across the parlour floor.
Of the various faiths Day-Father had said vied for power, the followers of the cross were not alone in consuming their deity, or at least believing that they were.
But here, now, in this mansion, Eldest and her siblings truly were being fed the remains of the divine, or of something that divinity had reason to fear.
And where did their power lie? Surely the heart for Alecto’s burning fury and Tisiphone’s icy revenge. But Megaera’s eternal memory would haunt the labyrinths of her brain.
Eldest returned to the table. She touched her fingers to the cold slop still lying an inch deep in the trough.
The urge to choke it all down seized her, to drink it as if it were the River Lethe itself, and drown in the oblivion, as unremembered as the brothers and sisters whose names scarred the attic rafters but left untouched the minds of those who remained.
Strong, there had been a Strong. A brother. Eldest before her.
“Eldest?” Tune’s voice broke the spell.
“Wake the others.” Eldest turned sharply and walked away into the gloom, carrying her own darkness with her, and another that had been put into her by the man who called himself their father.
Later, in the scant privacy of a corner, she forced fingers down her throat until the meal returned in a retching spew, emptying her stomach. The resulting hollowness soon turned into a hunger that gnawed at her all day.
She repeated the process after the next meal, imagining what pumped from her mouth in such a hurry wasn’t so very different from what she had so reluctantly swallowed shortly before.
With only water from the rain barrel to fill her, hunger became starvation more quickly than she had imagined it might.
By the seventh day she had raided wardrobes in the grandest bedrooms to add three scarves and a mouldering shirt to her ragged clothes, all to disguise her emaciation.
She could see the bones beneath the skin now, but she couldn’t let Day-Father see them too.
Her weakness began to draw notice. Lip-Scar cut her in the knife lesson and rejoiced in his triumph. Shrill began to watch her closely, the sly-eyed girl at least two years younger but always precocious in her ambitions.
The nights became harder, though she could still hide herself from Night-Father better than the rest of them could.
The eighth night of her fast was one of those rare occasions when unknown duties kept Night-Father from the hunt.
As ever, the children gravitated to Eldest, asking to hear stories.
This time she told them fantasies of a world outside the mansion’s walls and of lives where Mother and Father were not their parents but had been replaced by others.
For each child she imagined a new father and a new mother, ones who fed them food that made the mouth water and the stomach sing.
Eldest struggled to name specific meals, though her mouth could almost taste the wonders she conjured.
“Potatoes, and salt, and grain, wheat, butter, milk. Tune’s father would be a big man with a beard, and he would pick her up in his arms”—Tune whimpered in fright—“not to hurt her but to…cuddle…that’s the word, soft holding.”
Perhaps it was starvation that had infected her imagination, but Eldest’s mind bubbled with ideas, half-seen images, half-felt emotions. She carried on, spinning tales for her entranced audience, stories so full of colour and kindness that even Lip-Scar and Grumble made no murmur of dissent.
In the depth of her hunger she found a story about Strong falling from her tongue, each line a mystery to her until she spoke it aloud and turned it into revelation. She understood, as she held the other children captive with her tale, that this was memory, not invention.
“We had a brother called Strong. And a sister before him called Pierce who set that name upon him.” She told it like the storybook in the parlour told its stories, the book without a cover, now divided into a dozen cherished pieces, hidden from Day-Father.
She changed the type of language she used, even her voice.
It was easier to tell it as a story. To keep it at arm’s length where it might hurt her less.
“Strength, children, is often misunderstood because it is found in so many kinds. Every strong thing, if you turn it this way and that, will look like weakness from the right angle. And some things that are weak will show their strength in surprising circumstances. You might think that I am becoming weak, but there’s a different kind of strength growing inside me. ”
Lip-Scar made the gentlest of snorts at that but said nothing. Eldest pressed on, needing to speak this story in order to drag it from the depths of her forgetting.
“On the day that we all forgot there had ever been a Pierce, Strong promised to lead us and to protect us. If we swore to obey him, he would swear to be our king. A king in times of war had hard decisions to make, there would be sacrifices, the enemy had many advantages, but in the end we would triumph. Strong would take Day-Father’s chair and rule the night without terror.