The Oldest Hunger

She did not scream. They rarely did, once the cold had settled into their limbs and the fog had done its quiet work on their minds. He had learned, across more winters than he cared to number, that the body surrenders before the will does. It is a mercy, perhaps.

His teeth were already in her neck before he registered the taste of copper and iron and something faintly sweet beneath. Yes, the particular sweetness of youth, of a body that had not yet begun its long argument with time. He noted it the way a man notes the quality of wine. He swallowed.

The village below breathed its dim, oblivious breath. Candlelight trembled in two or three windows. A dog complained at something in the dark and then thought better of it. He fed without ceremony.

He was almost certain there had been a time when this act had carried weight. When his hands had shaken. When he had spoken to them, his victims, as though apology were a currency that purchased something. He could not recall precisely when he had stopped. The years had a way of dissolving such frivolities.

She made a small sound. He adjusted his grip with the absent attentiveness of a craftsman.

The fog thickened off the moor and rolled through the lane in long, unhurried ribbons. He was, he supposed, a part of the landscape by now. Just another feature of this valley's particular darkness, catalogued alongside the black water of the mill pond and the ruins of the old chapter house and all the other things the villagers had learned to walk past without looking at too carefully. There was a comfort in that. He had not always thought so.

When he had taken enough he stepped back and regarded her slumped body against the stone wall. She was breathing, alive, her pulse small and stubborn.

He straightened his coat.

The walk back to the estate was twenty minutes along the ridge. The cold did not touch him, the dark was no impediment, and he moved through both with an ease of long familiarity, thinking of nothing in particular. His clothing would need the blood washed out. There was a letter he had been meaning to read. The scholar had left a book open on the library table, which was a habit he found mildly irritating.

He thought of the woman only once more, briefly, at the crest of the hill. There was some ghost of a sensation. A draft from a room he no longer entered.

Then the estate rose up from the treeline and the thought of her vanished as he stepped inside.

The candles were the wrong color.

He simply felt the wrongness of it, a splinter in the mind, until he turned and saw that Aldric had set out a beeswax taper rather than the usual tallow. Yellow instead of grey. Warm instead of cold. A small domestic error. It did not matter.

And then it did.

The smell reached him a half-second later and he was no longer in the estate.

He was in a room above an apothecary in Brachen, and it was winter, and his wife was sitting at the table with her back to him, and every candle was beeswax because she could not abide the smell of tallow. She had opinions about small things with a conviction that had always delighted him. The weight of a good candle. The proper way to fold linen. The particular shade of blue that was acceptable for a front door and the several shades that were not.

He remembered her hands. That arrived without invitation, the way the sharpest things always did. Her hands moved over the edge of a letter, smoothing it flat. The knuckle of her right index finger that sat slightly crooked from a childhood break that had not healed well. He had noticed it the first time he took her hand and she had laughed and said yes, I know, I am uneven.

He stood in his study and did not move.

She had been dead for one hundred and sixty-three years. The number had ceased to mean anything. What was one hundred and sixty-three years to him now but a corridor he had already walked, door after door closing quietly behind him.

He could no longer recall her face with any confidence. The hands, yes. The voice’s rhythm more than its register. But the face had blurred at the edges long ago and now existed only as an impression, a suggestion of a face, like a portrait left too long in a damp room.

He had loved her. He was nearly certain of that.

The candle guttered. The smell shifted. The room above the apothecary dissolved and he was back among his stone and his dark and his accumulated silence.

He stood there a moment longer.

Then he went to his chair and picked up the letter he had been meaning to read. It was a dull letter, a correspondence about a land dispute from a solicitor in the city who did not know what he was writing to. He read it twice without absorbing a word.

Instead his mind returned to the lane. To the cold and the fog and the particular sweetness beneath the copper. The way the dark had felt like a garment fitted to him. The clean, uncomplicated aliveness of the moment. More alive, he realized, than anything this memory had produced. More present. More felt.

His wife's hands. The hunt.

He held them beside each other for a moment, weighed them, and found the result quietly appalling.

***

Aldric was awake, as he always was, regardless of the hour.

This was not loyalty so much as constitution. The old man had not slept properly in years, a condition he attributed to his age and which his master suspected had older causes. Decades of service leave their marks. Aldric's were worn on the inside, which made them no less permanent.

He was in the kitchen when his master came down, sitting with a cup of something that had long gone cold, reading by the guttering end of a candle that wanted replacing. He looked up without surprise. He had stopped being surprised a long time ago.

“You fed,” he said. Not a question.

“I did.”

Aldric nodded and looked back at his book, which was a courtesy they had developed over the years. He did not ask after the particulars. He had learned, early and permanently, that the particulars were not something he was equipped to carry.

His master sat across from him. This was unusual. Normally he retired directly, moving through the house like weather, present and unreachable. Aldric closed his book.

“She'll live,” his master said, though Aldric had not asked. “The woman in the lane.”

“They usually do.”

“Yes.”

A silence. The candle threw their shadows large against the stone wall, two men of vastly different ages engaged in the ancient business of sitting together in the dark.

“You were a physician,” Aldric said, eventually.

“I was many things.”

“You were a physician longest. Before.” Aldric wrapped both hands around his cold cup. “I think you still think like one, sometimes. The ones who live, I mean. I think you keep count.”

His master said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

Aldric had been seventeen when he entered service. He was past seventy now, a fact that seemed to mildly astonish him on a daily basis, as though he had not noticed the accumulation. He was, his master had long thought, the most human person he knew. Which was either a comment on Aldric or on everyone else.

“Do you still dream, my lord?”

The question arrived carefully, the way Aldric's more serious questions always did. His master recognized the approach and did not resent it.

“No,” he said. “Not as I did.”

“You used to. You'd come down some evenings and there'd be something on your face. I never asked.”

“It was Brachen, mostly. The years before.”

Aldric nodded slowly. “And now?”

“Now I sleep like a stone sleeps.” He paused. “It is restful.”

Aldric turned his cup in his hands. Outside, the wind found a gap somewhere in the old stonework and made its presence known. Aldric did not know a time before that sound. It had long since passed from nuisance into furniture.

“I don't say this to unsettle you,” Aldric said, carefully.

“I know.”

“Only that the dreaming seemed to matter to you. Once.”

“Many things mattered to me once.” He said it without bitterness, which was somehow worse than if he had. “I’m not declining, Aldric. That is simply time. You will understand it yourself, eventually.”

Aldric looked at him for a moment with an expression between sorrow and perhaps the dignity of a man who has decided not to argue a point he knows he has already lost. It was clear his master still thought of him as seventeen.

His master rose, straightened his coat out of old habit, and moved toward the door. He paused at the threshold, though he could not have said why.

“The candle needs replacing,” he said. “The one in the study.”

“I'll see to it in the morning.”

“See that it's tallow.”

He did not wait for a response. His footsteps moved away down the corridor, and Aldric sat alone in the kitchen with his cold cup and his guttering light and the wind in the walls. He did not open his book again for quite some time.

***

A scholar had arrived at the gate just past midnight, which suggested either profound ignorance or profound desperation. His name was Petyr and he claimed his horse had thrown a shoe somewhere on the moor road and he had walked the remaining distance in the dark. He relayed this affair with boyish indignation, as though the moor had been personally rude to him. He was perhaps twenty-five, with ink-stained fingers and the lean, slightly gaunt look. A leather satchel that clung to him clinked faintly when he moved. Books. Of course.

The master had opened the gate himself, which he rarely did. He had not decided to. He had simply found himself doing it.

I could kill him. He considered it like a shortcut on a familiar road. There was no relish, or reluctance, simply the mild arithmetic of effort and outcome. The hunger was quiet, sated from the woman, and so the consideration was almost abstract. Academic. He simply found himself noting that the option existed, and that he regarded the noting of it with no particular feeling. The absence of anything around it is what snagged him. No recoil. No shame.

He let Petyr in and had Aldric bring food and the message that he was welcome to the library. Perhaps Aldric thought this was due to mercy, but again, he was simply not hungry.

Had they ever been different things?

He should have retired. Instead he found himself in the library an hour later, drawn by the sounds of someone actually using it. The soft percussion of volumes pulled and replaced, the occasional murmur of a man reasoning with himself all rattled throughout the estate, if one had the ear for it.

Petyr looked up without startlement when he entered. “Your collection is extraordinary. The Aldenmoor Bestiary, here, I thought there were only three copies. And you have the Verencia commentaries bound together, which I've never seen done. Whoever organized this had a remarkable mind.”

“I organized it myself.”

Petyr blinked. “Then you have remarkable taste.”

“So I've been told.” He moved to the shelves, drew out a volume he knew without looking. “Though taste is a complicated virtue. It tells you what to want. It says nothing about what wanting costs.”

Petyr considered this with the seriousness it deserved, which was gratifying. Most men his age received aphorism as performance and applauded accordingly. This one actually turned it over.

“You sound like Verrath,” Petyr said. “The moral naturalist. Do you know his later essays?”

“I knew his earlier ones when they were not yet essays. When they were arguments he was having with himself in letters he sent to anyone who might argue back.”

Petyr stared at him. His master held his gaze and offered nothing further, and after a moment the scholar made the quiet decision to accept the strangeness of the evening wholesale and move on, which elevated him considerably in his host's estimation.

They talked for the better part of an hour. Petyr was sharp beneath the enthusiasm. His mind moved quickly, doubled back, found the load-bearing assumptions in an argument and pressed on them without cruelty. He had opinions about the moral naturalists, about the later Drevish historians, about whether beauty was discovered or constructed, and his opinions were not simply the opinions of his tutors worn at a slight angle. He had thought. He was, in the old sense of the word, alive.

His master found himself enjoying it and genuinely present in the conversation, reaching for ideas the way he had not reached in a very long time.

At one point Petyr laughed at something he said and the master thought, there it is. That is what I have missed.

The pleasure was real. The connection was real. And somewhere beneath it was the knowledge that Petyr's blood was moving quickly through him. That’s what excitement did to people. He was not hungry now, but he would be again, and that the same mind he found so compelling would be, on another evening, simply sustenance.

Both things were true simultaneously. He could hold both without discomfort.

That he did not enjoy noticing.

He brought the conversation to a close, blaming the hour, and Petyr accepted it with good manners and genuine warmth and said it had been the finest evening he could remember. Which his host received with a smile that cost him nothing.

He told Aldric to see that the scholar had breakfast and safe passage to the nearest village in the morning, and a coin for the horse's shoe.

Then he climbed to his room and stood at the window and watched the moor exhale its cold fog into the dark, and thought about the difference between a man who would not harm someone and a man who simply had no reason to yet.

He was no longer certain he was the former.

***

He kept the chapel out of habit, which was the least holy reason to keep a chapel and probably the most common.

It was the smallest room in the estate, tucked behind the eastern staircase as though the architect had been embarrassed by it. A stone altar. A wooden cross on the wall that had warped over the years into something slightly asymmetrical, leaning a few degrees off true, which the master had never corrected and could not entirely explain. It felt honest, perhaps. More honest than straight.

He had performed this ritual for long enough that the words had worn grooves in him. Long enough that he had once been able to say them and feel them simultaneously, which he understood now to have been a gift he had not recognized as one.

He lit the candles and began.

The words were Latin, very old, from a rite the living church had long since revised out of existence. He had kept the original because the revision had struck him as a softening, and he had never had patience for softened things. The old words were harder. They had once demanded more than he was sure he could give, which had been the point of them.

He reached the midpoint about, “What have you done with what was given?” and paused on it the way he always paused, out of respect for what the pause had once produced. Contrition. The specific weight of it and how it had pressed down on him like a hand on the crown of his head.

He waited.

The candles burned. Nothing pressed down.

He finished the rite correctly, precisely, every word in its place. Discipline does not require feeling to function. That was perhaps its chief virtue. Perhaps its chief danger.

When it was done he stood in the silence and conducted a brief, honest inventory.

Nothing. Not the blunted ache of a thing felt and suppressed. Not the hollowness of absence. Simply nothing. The words had moved through him and moved on, like wind through a room with open doors at both ends.

He thought about the chapel in Brachen where he had been married, which had smelled of beeswax and his wife's particular lavender perfume, and how he had stood in that place and felt so much that the excess of it had embarrassed him. He had been a physician, a man of reason, and feeling had always struck him as something to be managed. He had not known then that management was only possible when the feeling was there to manage.

He would have given a great deal, he thought, to be embarrassed by feeling now.

He blew out the candles.

The dark was complete and familiar and asked nothing of him, and he stood in it comfortably, and that was the whole of it.

Then, beneath the silence came the ever encompassing hunger.

Small at first. A pressure rather than a demand. But real, and growing, and the most honest thing in the room.

He straightened his coat.

The moor would be cold. The fog would be up. The village dark and still. He would move through it without difficulty, without hesitation, without whatever it was that used to slow him down.

He left the chapel without looking back.

The door opened. The cold received him.

He walked out into the dark.