Over the years and the generations, many children were born and brought up in the great house, and played in the wonderful gardens that surrounded it, but there were four in particular whose story became important for people who had never seen the house, or heard of the family’s name. Two of the children were sisters, called Darckense and Livueta; one of the boys was their elder brother, called Cheradenine, and they all shared the family name; Zakalwe. The last child was not related to them, but came from a family that had long been allied to theirs; he was called Elethiomel.
Cheradenine was the older boy; he could just remember the fuss when Elethiomel’s mother came to the great house, large with child, in tears, and surrounded by fussing servants and huge guards and weeping maids. For a few days the attention of the whole house seemed to be centred on the woman with the child in her womb, and – though his sisters played happily on, glad of the lessened watchfulness of their nannies and guards – he already resented the unborn infant.
The troop of royal cavalry came to the house a week later, and he remembered his father out on the broad steps leading down into the courtyard, talking calmly, his own men running quietly through the house, taking up positions at every window. Cheradenine ran to find his mother; as he ran through the corridors, he put one hand out in front of him, as though holding reins, and with his other hand slapped one hip, making a one-two-three, one-two-three clopping noise, pretending he was a cavalryman. He discovered his mother with the woman who had the child inside her; the woman was crying and he was told to go away.
The boy was born that night, to the sound of screams.
Cheradenine noticed that the atmosphere in the house changed greatly after that, and everyone was at once even more busy than before but less worried.
For a few years he could torment the younger boy, but then Elethiomel, who grew faster than he did, started to retaliate, and an uneasy truce developed between the two boys. Tutors taught them, and Cheradenine gradually came to realise that Elethiomel was their favourite, always learning things more quickly than he did, always being praised for his abilities developing so early, always being called advanced and bright and clever. Cheradenine tried hard to match him, and gleaned a little recognition for not just giving up, but it never seemed that he was really appreciated. Their martial instructors were more evenly divided on their merits; Cheradenine was better at wrestling and strike-fighting; Elethiomel the more accomplished with gun and blade (under proper supervision; the boy could get carried away sometimes), though Cheradenine was perhaps his equal with a knife.
The two sisters loved them both, regardless, and they played through the long summers and the brief, cold winters, and – apart from the first year, after Elethiomel was born – spent a little of each spring and autumn in the big city, far down the river, where the parents of Darckense, Livueta and Cheradenine kept a tall town house. None of the children liked the place, though; its garden was so small and the public parks so crowded. Elethiomel’s mother was always quieter when they went to the city, and cried more often, and went away for a few days every so often, all excited before she went, then sobbing when she returned.
They were in the city once, one fall, and the four children were keeping out of the way of the short-tempered adults when a messenger came to the house.
They couldn’t help but hear the screams, and so abandoned their toy war and ran out of the nursery onto the landing to peer through the railings down into the great hall, where the messenger stood, head down, and Elethiomel’s mother screamed and shrieked. Cheradenine, Livueta and Darckense’s mother and father both held onto her, talking calmly. Finally, their father motioned the messenger away, and the hysterical woman slumped silent to the floor, a piece of paper crumpled in her hand.
Father looked up then, and saw the children, but looked at Elethiomel, not at Cheradenine. They were all sent to bed soon after.
When they returned to the house in the country a few days later, Elethiomel’s mother was crying all the time, and did not come down for meals.
‘Your father was a murderer. They put him to death because he killed lots of people.’ Cheradenine sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the stone bulwark. It was a beautiful day in the garden and the trees sighed in the wind. The sisters were laughing and giggling in the background, collecting flowers from the beds in the centre of the stone boat. The stone ship sat in the west lake, joined to the garden by a short stone causeway. They had played pirates for a while, and then started investigating the flower beds on the upper of the boat’s two decks. Cheradenine had a collection of pebbles by his side, and was throwing them, one at a time, down into the calm water, producing ripples that looked like an archery target as he tried always to hit the same place.
‘He didn’t do any of those things,’ Elethiomel said, kicking the stone bulwark, looking down. ‘He was a good man.’
‘If he was good, why did the King have him killed?’
‘I don’t know. People must have told tales about him. Told lies.’
‘But the King’s clever,’ Cheradenine said triumphantly, throwing another pebble into the spreading circles of waves. ‘Cleverer than anybody. That’s why he’s king. He’d know if they were telling lies.’
‘I don’t care,’ Elethiomel insisted. ‘My father wasn’t a bad man.’
‘He was, and your mother must have been extremely naughty too, or they wouldn’t have made her stay in her room all this time.’
‘She hasn’t been bad!’ Elethiomel looked up at the other boy, and felt something build up inside his head, behind his nose and eyes. ‘She’s ill. She can’t leave her room!’
‘That’s what she says,’ Cheradenine said.
‘Look! Millions of flowers! Look; we’re going to make perfume! Do you want to help?’ The two sisters ran up behind them, arms full of flowers. ‘Elly…’ Darckense tried to take Elethiomel’s arm.
He pushed her away.
‘Oh, Elly… Sheri, please don’t,’ Livueta said.
‘She hasn’t been bad!’ he shouted at the other boy’s back.
‘Yes she ha-as,’ Cheradenine said, in a sing-song voice, and flicked another pebble into the lake.
‘She hasn’t!’ Elethiomel screamed, and ran forward, pushing the other boy hard in the back.
Cheradenine yelled and fell off the carved bulwark; his head struck the stonework as he fell. The two girls screamed.
Elethiomel leant over the parapet and saw Cheradenine splash into the centre of his many-layered circle of waves. He disappeared, came back up again, and floated face down.
Darckense screamed.
‘Oh, Elly, no!’ Livueta dropped all her flowers and ran towards the steps. Darckense kept on screaming and squatted down on her haunches, back against the stone bulwark, crushing her flowers to her chest. ‘Darkle! Run to the house!’ Livueta cried from the staircase.
Elethiomel watched the figure in the water move weakly, producing bubbles, as Livueta’s steps sounded slapping on the deck underneath.
A few seconds before the girl jumped into the shallow water to haul her brother out, and while Darckense screamed on, Elethiomel swept the remaining pebbles off the parapet, sending them pattering and plopping into the water around the boy.
No, that wasn’t it. It had to be something worse than that, didn’t it? He was sure he remembered something about a chair (he remembered something about a boat too, but that didn’t seem to be quite it either). He tried to think of all the nastiest things that could happen in a chair, dismissed them one by one as they hadn’t happened to him or to anybody he knew – at least as far as he could remember – and finally concluded that his fixation on the idea of a chair was a random thing; it just so happened to be a chair and that was all there was to it.
Then there were the names; names that he’d used; pretend names that didn’t really belong to him. Imagine calling himself after a ship! What a silly person, what a naughty boy; that was what he was trying to forget. He didn’t know, he didn’t understand how he could have been so stupid; now it all seemed so clear, so obvious. He wanted to forget about the ship; he wanted to bury the thing, so he shouldn’t go calling himself after it.
Now he realised, now he understood, now when it was too late to do anything about it.
Ah, he made himself want to be sick.
A chair, a ship, a… something else; he forgot.
The boys learned metalwork, the girls pottery.