Chapter 29 #3
On the third day Father invited Eldest to his office. She stood with her arms held close to her sides, worried she would knock scrolls off shelves or ink off the desk in the cramped and crowded space.
“Let’s see if we can’t teach you your letters, Mol.” Father beckoned her closer. “I could do with some help around here.”
“Wouldn’t Rebekka be better? She knows so much—”
“Bek’s going to the Academy soon. She’ll be busy there.”
Eldest knew that people studied hard at academies. Maybe this copy work would be beneath her sister. “I can try. I know a little bit.”
Father rubbed his kind, tired eyes, put his glasses on, and drew the first letter. “Give this one a go.” He turned the scrap of stained parchment around and laid the quill beside it.
Eldest copied the alpha, doing her very best to be true to the lines Night-Father had drilled into them. She wanted her real father to be proud of her.
“Hmmm.” Father studied the letter. “Very good.”
“Here.” He wrote five more letters, dipped the quill, and wrote a word in cursive.
Eldest copied those too.
Father turned the page, his eyebrows lifting. He brought the candle closer, his frown deepening.
“Did I do something wrong?” Eldest knew she must be making mistakes that only a scribe could see.
Of all the children at the mansion, though, she had been by far the best writer.
It was a skill she shared with Day-Father, much as she disliked the idea that they had anything in common.
But she did have a sure hand, both with the quill and the knife.
“Try this.” Father bent over the parchment and with furious concentration filled the remaining space with several lines of the classic poem “Hegda on the Bridge.” He wrote with speed, spotting ink only in one place, trembling some of the loops but in all a clean piece.
“Fast as you can.” He turned the parchment over to expose a new face and thrust it at her along with the quill.
“Quick as I can…” It would slow her to turn the parchment to check the words every so often, and Father couldn’t have wanted that. But luckily it was a piece she knew. Day-Father had made them memorize many poems and tested them regularly. Children who performed badly missed a meal.
Eldest bent to her task and wrote out the stanza in a clear, flowing line. She finished faster than her father had and sat back smiling with the ink still glistening on the parchment. She’d thought her smile would be echoed, but her father looked almost angry.
“That’s enough. Go down and help Myra.” He crushed the parchment in his fist as she left.
On the fourth day after breakfast, Mother took both sisters to the Sun Market, the best one for fruit and vegetables, named for the square it was held in.
They went from stall to stall, watched over by a weathered statue of Apollo.
Mother seemed snappy and impatient with them, but compared to the monster in the basement and to torture in the dark it was a small thing, concerning only because it signalled some unhappiness Eldest didn’t understand and couldn’t mend.
It was a new kind of hurt, small but deep.
Eldest wore one of Rebekka’s old smocks, grey and fraying but a big improvement on the stinking rags that Mother had burned the first morning.
She had no shoes, as they had sold Rebekka’s when she grew out of them, but her feet were well wrapped in strips of parchment, offcuts from her father’s work.
Eldest kept her head down, meeting no one’s gaze for fear of finding herself face to face with Day-Father. The numbers, though, were such that any worries seemed far-fetched, and this was just one of the city’s many markets, Mother said, and a smaller one at that.
Eldest watched as her mother, who looked thinner, greyer, and more drawn than the mothers of other children at the market, counted out her coins with a miser’s care, buying only small amounts of the least interesting staples: potatoes, carrots, barley for thickening the meatless stews she served.
Eldest compared the concern creasing Mother’s face to the joy bubbling beneath her own tensions.
She worried now that rather than her return answering her parents’ prayers as it had her own, it might have added to their burdens.
“Mother looks sad,” Eldest whispered to her sister.
“She was sad before you came back.” Rebekka took Eldest’s hand and squeezed it. “Father doesn’t make much money…And they worry that I’m sick.” Rebekka looked sad now too and Eldest felt her own joy wilting, as if sorrow were a disease that had spread between them.
They followed Mother home, passing a statue of an older sun god, Helios—deity of the dark sun, whose fire is time, the blaze in which humanity burns.
His legend tells that the day-sun is his mouth and one day it will open to consume all the planets.
Eldest kept her head down, carrying the rope bag containing the vegetables.
She spoke to Rebekka in a low voice as they trailed their mother.
“Father said you’re going to go to the Academy. I don’t want you to leave.”
Rebekka coughed and looked grim. “I’m not pleased about it either. It’s a bad place.” She tried a smile. Eldest recognized it for the strained sort of grimace she herself had manufactured for the smallest children many times before. “At least Mother and Father will still have you.”
“I want to come too.” Eldest wasn’t sure that she did, but she didn’t want Rebekka to be alone.
“You really, really don’t. It’s worse than you can imagine,” Rebekka said, deadly serious. “Don’t say it again. Certainly, don’t let Father hear you!”
Later Rebekka went out with a basket of scrolls and papers to deliver to the various concerns that employed their father.
“That’s why he calls me Bek,” she said to Eldest at the door. “I’m at his beck and call.”
“Bek suits you better,” Eldest said. “It’s to the point. Like you are.”
Mother said Eldest should stay home because the city was a big place that she was no longer used to, and they had lost her in it once before.
The afternoon passed in chores while shadows lengthened outside.
Eldest helped her mother in the kitchen, all the while looking to the front door for Rebekka’s return.
When the stew was ready, Mother took a bowl up to the attic, where Father worked through the day.
Eldest told herself it was something in the slow climbing of those stairs that made her follow, to find out what sadness it was that weighed her mother down.
Surely it wasn’t something as small as the iron pennies in her purse? Eldest could eat less, do more chores…
She told herself it was concern for her mother that made her climb so stealthily behind her and listen at the foot of the attic ladder.
But she knew there was another side to that coin.
Mistrust had been scored into her, deep as the darkness had.
It was something she’d brought with her out of the mansion, and hate it though she might, it had its hooks in her.
“…don’t need to send Rebekka…the Academy…” Mother’s voice.
“Nine marks, nine hundred pennies!” Father.
“Cocran!”
“We can’t afford to have the healer round again—”
“But…when he comes—that one…he’ll give us something, won’t he? He’ll want the girl back.” A pleading in her mother’s tone. Eldest’s whole body clenched like a fist. It was the taint of mistrust, the dirt inside her, that was making this happen. If she hadn’t listened, they would still love her.
“Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, there’s no contract.” The sound of shuffling papers. “Are you going to argue with him?”
“No…but…”
“And if he does throw a few pennies at us…it’s not like the healer can stop it, just slow things—”
“He can try. There are medicines…”
“Medicines we can’t afford. Even nine marks would get eaten up by what they charge!”
“But—”
“If she gets any sicker they won’t take her. And if the Academy spends that much on her they’ll pay for medicines too. And when she leaves there, she can have anything she wants, take anything she wants!”
“She won’t leave, though. You know what they do—”
“Enough. It’s already done. I sent the letters yesterday.”
Eldest had until this moment been paralysed with shock.
The words “He’ll want the girl back” ran through her mind like a bramble tearing at everything, filling her skull with blood.
They couldn’t have done it to her, not her mother whose arms were a haven, not her father with his kind eyes and hard work.
They couldn’t have given her away back then.
They couldn’t be doing it again. Not for mere money.
At last, she found the strength to release her death grip on the ladder. Rebekka chose that moment to return, racing up the stairs at a run as Eldest turned to go down them.
“There’s a man…” Rebekka’s eyes were wild in the white of her face. “He’s coming.”
“Did you—What does he look like?”
“His smile…that grin. He saw me and smiled. I just ran.”
It was enough of a description to remove all doubt.
Day-Father, Night-Father, it didn’t matter.
He was here. Her family had given her up.
Again! Eldest sank to her knees. An expert in pain had hurt her many times, but this…
this came from inside, there was no escaping it, no surrendering to it, a kind of suffering she had formed no calluses against.