The first breakfast took place in the Halls of Gibbon. Sunlight peered through the gaps in the leaves, desperately straining to reach the endless dark of the castle’s floors where ferns and moss roiled and gnawed in the deep. Above them squatted the scrubbers and dusters, above THEM scurried the toilers and makers, and above THEM sat the High Table of the High Court, and above all of them forever and ever sat the great pendulous bulk of the Lord Highest Brachiator, the Primate Primate, the Gibbon Supreme, Great Gibbous.
It was a complex breakfast, but then again she was a complex being.
First came the little leaves filled with cups of morning dew flavoured with plum juice, then a bowl filled with water from the least river, for cleaning. A toast was offered to the High Table of the High Court, and then came the main course of small and tender skinless animals impaled on long sticks, followed by bowls of water from the lesser river, for cleaning. Then came the eggs of birds of many sizes, followed by bowls of water from the greater river, for cleaning. Finally a woven basket of butterflies was presented to the Gibbon Supreme, who would devour it whole before rinsing her hands in a bowl of water from the greatest river, for cleaning.
Each bowl of cleaning water was poured down into the Halls of Gibbon, where it splashed past the toilers and makers and over the scrubbers and dusters and flowed down to feed the dank and sporous depths. They grew very well from it.
***
The second breakfast took place some few leagues away, in the trembling earthen burrows of things that were small and squeaky. They shuddered in their burrows at the distant hooting raucousness of the first breakfast, and many mothers counted their children carefully and cried a bit when the numbers came up short. They fed their remainders on milk and pets and murmurs into their soft downy fur.
The children whose mothers hadn’t come home were quiet, to save energy. They had no breakfast. They would never have another breakfast. They did not know this and that was what would comfort and cradle them.
It was not a long breakfast, but it gave you a particularly kind of slow time to think, in between pulses and throbbing at the veins, tugging on instincts found in even the mildest and shyest of creatures. So when one mother who had only one child remaining came to her feet early and set out into the burning sunlight, others followed in their hundreds because they felt it too.
***
The third breakfast was old ground oats turned into new soft porridge and a fresh fruit from the flowery tree that grew outside the charcoal-burner’s front door. She took her time with it, slow and steady. A charcoal-burner knew not to try and rush things. That was how you got bad charcoal and worse burns.
In the distance the throaty song of the first breakfast was reaching a crescendo. The charcoal-burner shivered and took an extra-big bite of the fruit, to stop the thoughts, and chewed her loudest so her teeth could drown out the singing.
Because of that, she couldn’t hear the tiny noises of sharp teeth cutting into her charcoal pile.
***
The fourth breakfast was consumed by the scrubbers and the dusters of the Halls of Gibbon, halfway from the canopy and halfway to the floor. They were too small or too timid or too loud or too ugly or too quiet or the wrong shape, so they were kept out of sight of the noble first breakfast to scrub and dust and flinch as the bowls of cleaning water from the rivers least to greatest poured over them mingled with the red juices of the meal.
When the waters ceased, they scrubbed away the effluent. And when the effluent ceased, they swung away in their ones and twos to the big knotted hull of a dead tree whose branches had once scraped the edge of the sky.
Now it was mostly a trunk, and mostly a missing trunk, so it was Half-Trunk. But it held ledges and grips and crouching-spots and its hull was filled with the spoiled fruit that was difficult to eat but easy to find that kept the bellies of the scrubbers and dusters moving for just a few days longer. You ate what you could and you shared what you couldn’t and when the fruit had to come out you swung outside first.
The first to swing outside first came nose to snout with the lead member of the second breakfast, who was clinging quietly to the dead branches. The scrubber (fourth class of the major underchambres) yorped and yodled and almost fell as he came to realize the hate in her eyes and her fur and her claws and her mouth and clutched in the fiery bright coals held in her scorched feet, but he was too frightened to run and too downtrodden to fight and that helped him, because she didn’t fight him at all but bared her sharp teeth and chittered her sharp words and all around the dead broken thing of Half-Trunk came the grind and cackle of a thousand tiny fangs holding a thousand tiny sparks asking the same question a thousand times so that all the takers of the meager fourth breakfast could hear them:
Are you in?
***
There was a fifth breakfast.
It was a surprise, but received by those who could not be surprised so maybe it wasn’t. Their heads were fiddleheads and their tails were horsetails and their mats were thick sweet moss.
They swayed and sang down there, and as they spun in soft circles water came from above, water well after the cleaning of the first breakfast. It was redder and thicker and stronger than anything they’d ever known, choked with ash and soot, and they drank it with a thirst to stiffen root, stalk, stem, and soul.
On a meal like that, you could topple trees. But they were in no rush. There would be time.
A slow, strong morning. They grew exceedingly well from it.