Fantasy. Diot attends her new charges: four little kittens, only a few days old.
Rated T, Gen. Diot, a ten-year-old girl, is taken by Vikings to sell amongst some other Mercian slaves, but when she escapes their clutches and flees into the nearby woods, she is rescued by the healer who lives there. Lefsi, her Norseman saviour, is a healer who lives alone with his frighteningly huge cats, and after chasing off her captors, he decides to take Diot in as a new apprentice.
Chapter Two
Fjor Dalgaard feels so bad for her and how she’s crying and hoarse from yelling for Lefsi that he insists on driving them to the edge of Lefsi’s woods in his cart, and Diot sits between Fjor, who is a big and muscular man with a thick braided beard, and Lefsi on the way there, and she tries very hard not to cry any more, but she keeps crying again, because it’s just so horrible, and she doesn’t understand how anybody could do it, and why they would do it.
All of the kittens are alive, but they were so cold when she picked them out of the water that they weren’t even trembling, and after checking each of them over sort of professionally and calmly and coolly and drying each of them off, Lefsi had opened his cloak and then opened his shirt. As they ride along, he has them nestled right against his skin with a blanket across his lap, and after a few minutes they start to make more noise, and it’s louder than it had been before.
“Stay calm,” Lefsi tells her quietly. “Keep breathing in, keep breathing out.”
That was how he’d talked to her even while he was taking them out and drying them off, telling her how to breathe and timing her breaths as Mother Gytha wiped her face and gave her a cloth to wipe her tears away and blow her nose.
They look like grubs, almost, like beans that have just been shelled – they’re all so small, barely fill the palm of Lefsi’s hand, and they look unfinished. They make their squeaks and whimpers, and they’re all high-pitched and small compared to the noises Rusla and Elan make, or that other cats she’s seen make, and their eyes don’t open and their ears are so tiny and don’t stick out very much and they barely move, all their legs so close to their bodies.
“Why would somebody do that?” Diot asks. “I hope they go to Hell. I hope they go to Hell and burn there for a thousand years.”
“The mother probably had the kittens and they didn’t want four more cats about the place,” Lefsi says quietly. “I know it’s cruel, I know it’s upsetting. I want to warn you, Diot: we can bring these kittens home, and I will prepare milk for them, but it is you who will have to take on the brunt of their care in the absence of their mother. They will need to be fed little and often, and you will have to encourage them to toilet the way their mother would; you will need to care for them, check on them. And even through all this, they may still die. One of them, two of them, all of them.”
“Why will they die?” Diot asks. “If I feed them and look after them?”
“Some creatures die removed from the mother who bore them, girl,” Fjor rumbles – his voice is very deep and low, but his tone is gentle. He’d been talking a lot with Lefsi tonight, not in the sauna, but afterwards, in the tavern. “Some of these kits might even have died had they stayed at their mother’s tit. Some creatures just lack the strength to live – it is not the fault of those who would care for them, merely a sad happenstance of the stars under which we walk.”
Diot must be staring at him, or her face must look strange, because Lefsi says, “Fjor’s father was a famous skald – even when he does not speak in verse, poetry is his first tongue.”
“Don’t flatter me, God-Guarded,” Fjor says, although he is smiling in a small and private way that seems very out-of-place on such a big and burly man. “Such sweet words ill-suit your cold and haughty features.”
Lefsi laughs very quietly, and it makes the kittens miaow more softly now, sort of happily, she thinks – they’re making a strange noise that she can scarcely hear over the turn of the cart wheels beneath them.
“Thank you, Fjor,” Lefsi says when he comes to a stop as near to Lefsi’s home as he can, and his fingers linger on Fjor’s shoulder over Diot’s head before they move outside and go into the house.
“Thank you,” Diot echoes dully, and pats Fjor’s horse on her way up the path.
* * *
“These kittens are a few days old, I would estimate – they are not newly born, but have yet lived a few days, not far off a week,” Lefsi says after they have folded blankets into the inside of a crate. They sit together on the floor beside the fire, illuminated by both the hearth and the lamps lit above them, and Rusla and Elan are right beside them.
It makes Diot nervous, for Rusla and Elan to be so close when they’re seated on the floor like this, because it makes it feel like they’re as big as she is, but they sit shoulder to shoulder either side of Lefsi, and as Lefsi strokes one of the kittens, Rusla leans forward and sniffs at the kittens in the crate.
Diot is scared she’s going to bite hold of one of them, that Rusla and Elan are going to devour these poor little things alive, but Rusla just licks the top of one of their heads and makes a sort of rumbling miaowing noise, a mrrr, glances at Lefsi.
“Good girl,” Lefsi says quietly. “Good girls, both of you. I’ll show you how to make this mixture in the next few days – this is Abbi’s milk, and I’ve mixed in an egg yolk from one of the ducks. Feed this cloth through a pipe from the bottle like this, see how I’ve twisted it and pulled it through? It makes a sort of nipple. Pour a little milk down the tube, enough to wet the cloth, let the kitten sniff at it, suckle… There, see how he latches on, see him drink? Watch the movement of his throat, he’s drinking greedily, and so I’ll let him decide on the bottle’s position… Hold him at this angle, to keep him from choking this is the position he would be in were he suckling from his mother still.”
Of the four kittens, two are tabby grey, one is white with small grey patches, and the one in Lefsi’s hand is black. With her hand trembling and shivering, which is so frustrating, she picks up the other little leather bottle – they’re mini drinking skins, and Lefsi usually uses them to decant potions or perfumes, but he’s put the goat’s milk and egg mixture inside.
She puts the little leather pipe at the bottle’s neck like Lefsi has shown her after twisting the bit of cloth into a nib, feeding it through, and then fastens it in place. With a tilt of the bottle, she watches the cloth soak through with the liquid, and then quickly tilts it to the side after it drips onto her knee.
Reaching into the crate, she eases her fingers under one of the tabby ones – this one has more white marking on its chest than the other. The three kittens are huddled in a little pile, stacked on top of one another, and this one squeaks pitifully as she pulls it away from its siblings. She stares at the inside of its pink mouth, its miniscule tongue and its itty-bitty tiny teeth, just little white spots at the edges of its jaw, as it cries out, and then its mouth closes around the makeshift nipple.
It doesn’t stop making noises, but the noises change in pitch, deepening a little, and as it slurps greedily from the bottle, it digs its tiny little feet into her hand, and it almost hurts a little.
Rusla leans in and Diot automatically makes to flinch away as she feels Rusla’s big ruff coat rub against her side, bracing herself for Rusla to bite her or claw at her, but she doesn’t do that. She just licks the top of the kitten’s head as it keeps digging its paws into her hand, and she wrinkles her nose a little, because it digs its paws harder, and it’s making grunting little noises, and also sort of… vibrating.
It’s drinking, though, and that’s important. She can see its throat moving as it swallows, and its little ears twitch back and forward as it drinks.
Elan tries to climb into the crate, but she’s too big to fit, and Diot bites her lip because she thinks she’s going to crush the kittens, and she circles twice and then circles the other way, and then she kind of folds herself down really small and square like a loaf in a tin, so that she’s next to the kittens.
They wiggle like maggots to get closer to Elan, and they try to nuzzle in against her belly, and their little heads move around and push through the fur on her belly, and Elan actually shifts to let them.
“Do they think she’ll give them milk?” Diot asks.
“Oh, at this age, they’ll hope anything warm and nearby will give them milk,” Lefsi says wryly. “I’ve known kittens to suckle from fabric, from men and women, from cats, from dogs. From one another. My mother still laughs about a boy cat she hand-reared after he was rejected by his mother as the runt – he used to suckle on himself.”
“On himself?” Diot repeats, and Lefsi laughs and sort of gives a look downward, and she doesn’t get what he means at first, and then she feels her face screw up. “Urgh, that’s disgusting!”
“It used to be quite embarrassing for her,” Lefsi murmurs. “My sisters and I were quite young, none of us was older than you are now, and we found it terribly funny, but a priestess doesn’t like to explain to high-ranking visitors – nobles and king’s men and storied warriors and skalds – why one’s cat looks so pleased with himself whilst holding his own genitals in his mouth.”
Diot can’t help but laugh, screwing up her face some more and shaking her head, making sure she keeps the bottle at the right angle as the tabby keeps suckling from the bottle.
“Why is it jabbing me like that? Digging its paws in?”
The others are doing it as well, she realises – the black one that Lefsi is holding is moving its front legs back and forth, digging its claws in.
“We call it kneading – it’s the same as the work a baker might perform, the way one pushes and moulds a piece of dough into bread. Massaging the gland about their mother’s breast encourages milk to flow, more so than merely sucking. You’ve seen me milking Abbi, and I’m sure you’ve seen other goats or cows or other animals milked.
“Most milk is formed of the same texture, but there’s a richer, thicker milk that we call the hind milk – because it’s thicker, it takes more suction to pull forward, to travel through the tiny little pipes that make up the breast. Remember I was talking to you about bloodletting, how we push and squeeze on the flesh to encourage the blood to flow? It’s a little like that.”
“How does the kitten know that?”
“It doesn’t,” Lefsi says, and then furrows his brows a little, tilting his head slightly to one side, pressing his lips together. “Or, they have a knowledge of sorts, but I don’t think it’s so specific or practical as that. If you were to fall into water, you would stretch out your arms and legs, you would automatically begin to paddle, to swim, and to save yourself, yes? When a wolf or a cat spies movement, it stiffens, readies itself to lunge or to pounce; if I were to extend my hand toward a pot, not realising it was still hot, my hand would retract before I knew it was burning me. These are instinctive motions, reflexive ones. They come from a deeper part of ourselves than our thinking minds. They may not know what the kneading accomplishes, only that it is good for them to do as they drink – but they carry it with them as they grow older. My mother’s boy, Thor, he kneaded on his own belly, and most cats will knead and purr in moments of comfort or contentment, or to attempt to soothe themselves in moments of stress.”
Diot strokes her fingers down the back of the tabby kitten’s back, so very small and so very warm, and watches as Lefsi returns the black cat to the crate and takes up the other tabby. Settled in against its sibling, the black cat crawls closer to the other kitten and to Elan, and Elan reaches over and begins to nuzzle and lick at the top of its head with her barbed tongue.
“Purr,” she repeats.
“That noise they’re making – the vibrations from the midst of their chests. Not just the kittens – Rusla and Elan as well. Do you hear it?”
She does. She hadn’t thought about it, separated it out, but with Rusla leaning up against her side with her head bowed forward and her focus on the kitten, her gaze very intent, Diot can feel her purring and hear it a little, just like she can feel the little vibration of the kitten in her palm.
“All cats do it – even great cats, like lions and tigers, I have heard from Africans travelling through, although that might have just been a tall tale told to an unwitting foreigner.”
She replaces the tabby kitten and scoops up the last of the kittens, the mostly white one, and this one is much stronger than the tabby – it wraps its little paws around her fingers and almost drags the bottle closer, and Diot laughs quietly.
“Do you, um, do you still think they’ll die?”
“We can’t be certain one way or the other,” Lefsi says quietly, “but the four of them are very motivated, and they’re eating well, which does bode well. They do strike me as very thin, though – kittens, like many young, are often born a bit pudgy with the fat from their mother, but these lack as much of that as I would like to see. It’s possible that their mother died or went missing, or that these kittens were found after she’d abandoned them somewhere. Some kittens will even wander away from their mother’s nest, although these ones strike me as a little young for that.”
After they feed the kittens, Lefsi shows her how to hold the baby kittens over some screwed up fabric to encourage them to pee and poop, to massage their bellies and wipe wet cloth over their bumholes – Rusla and Elan even try to lick under their tails, which is gross, but Lefsi says it’s normal.
It’s all sort of disgusting, the way the pee dribbles out of them and how you have to like, help them do it, but after they’ve peed and pooed and been fed, they settle down and they all sleep on top of each other, and Diot keeps the crate beside her by the fire as Lefsi works.
Lefsi had bought her some wool in the week, and she’d already washed it and let it out to dry, and now she sits and cards it as Lefsi carves out some stones and puts together poultices and packages. One is for a woman in town, to help her fertility, and another is to go in between some bricks in the foundation of a house they’re starting to build on the edge of town, to bring people that live there good luck.
It does seem uncomfortably close to witchcraft, but people get priests to bless their houses, or put in special statues and stuff, or have nuns and priests sit with them and pray over them when they’re sick.
Rusla is sitting with the kittens – she can’t scrunch herself small enough to fit into the crate like Elan was able to, so she sort of wraps her big body around the box and dozes with her chin rested on the corner of the crate wall, so that if her eyes open she can see them. All four kittens are up against the edge of the crate wall, pressed up against the bits of Rusla’s fur that are sticking through the slats.
Diot shifts back uncomfortably when Elan tries to shove her way into Diot’s lap and to stand on her legs, because she’s so heavy and so big, and she doesn’t get what she’s trying to do, because she’s purring but also sort of shoving her face into Diot’s chest.
“She wants you to brush her, she doesn’t know the difference between the carding brushes and the ones I use for them,” Lefsi says, and leans over and pulls out a drawer and pulls out another brush. The carding brushes she was using had lots of teeth made from thin tacks, but this one was broader and wider, and had a mix of teeth and bristles.
Diot takes it, and after a second of not really knowing how to approach it, she drags the brush over Elan’s back. She tries to nudge her back so she’s not actually standing on top of Diot, but Elan keeps getting back on top of her, and eventually Diot gives in and just lets her, and she’s amazed at the sheer weight of Elan’s muscular body on top of her legs as she drags the brush down her back and tries to follow the grain of her fur.
She’s so fluffy, so hairy – it’s a very different sort of texture to deer or donkey, is more like wolf skins she’s touched, is so downy and thick and layered. There aren’t many tangles and there’s no dirt or mud or grime in most of her fur, just in the bits around her legs, but so much extra hair comes off in the brush that she almost can’t believe it, ends up having to put it aside in a pile.
“Can I spin with this?” she asks, looking at the fist-sized ball of hair that she’s ended up with after only a few minutes of brushing. Elan is purring so loudly and so happily, and she is kneading powerfully into the blanket over Diot’s lap, her knuckles moving so that Diot can see her claws coming out and going back in again. The fur is all different colours instead of the white-grey of the wool she’d been working with, mostly orange and yellow, with bits that are black or grey or more a brown colour.
“Yes, if you like,” Lefsi says. “It isn’t as coarse as the wool is, though – I wouldn’t advise using the wheel to spin it, you’ll be better off using one of the lighter drop spindles. Feel how sleek her fur is compared to the heavy coil of a sheep’s coat? It won’t adhere to other fibres very well. If you want to spin with it, you’re best off combining it with your wool – it’ll add some colour and additional warmth.”
“Is that what you do with it? When you brush them?”
“I tend to just put it on the fire, or I leave the excess out for birds to nest with in the spring,” Lefsi says idly. “Some people are cursed, you know, and come over with a sickness when exposed to the hair of cats or even dogs – this applies not only to the beasts themselves, but even things touched by them, or made of them. The Widow Grimvald, who lives east of us some few miles on a homestead with her sons and their wives, she and her eldest boy both have this affliction. I never visit her home if it can be avoided – I bring them out in sneezes and coughs.”
“Do you think your Frigg has cursed them like that?” Diot asks as she slowly settles her hand into Elan’s fur, feeling how warm it is, how much give there is in the layers of her coat. Elan presses her head back and into Diot’s fingers, rubbing her cheek against Diot’s fingertips and purring loudly, her eyes closed tight.
Diot doesn’t find her very frightening right now. She wonders if it’s the purr – maybe that’s why even tigers purr, so that they can trick you into relaxing with it, like a sort of ensorcellment, and then bite you when you aren’t expecting it.
“Perhaps,” Lefsi says. “There are a great many things I do not understand – do the gods understand them themselves? Did they wreak them, cause them? Are they the product of man, or the gods, or spirits, or something else entirely, something random and unexpected? I could not say. I can only observe, take note, and respond accordingly. Higher understanding is made for loftier men than me – great scholars and philosophers, mathematicians.”
“I think you’re pretty lofty,” Diot says, and she doesn’t exactly mean it as a compliment. Lefsi seems to know a bit about basically everything, which is probably very good for her as his apprentice, but she thinks it annoys other people in town – not Mother Gytha, and not Fjor Dalgaard, but people besides them.
“Perhaps,” Lefsi says. “I hope you realise that once you’re done with Elan, Rusla will demand her turn. Look at her, pretending she isn’t watching to see when your lap is free.”
Diot laughs, because Rusla is looking over kind of side-long, and then looking away again, and it is like she’s pretending, like she’s trying to look without Elan or Diot seeing that she’s looking, although Diot doesn’t think that she can have Rusla in her lap as well.
In the end, she turns her legs away so that Rusla has to sit beside her instead of on her, and as Diot brushes down the dark fur of her body, she can see the little gingery bits in amongst the black and grey of her fur, and Rusla purrs her rumbling purr and leans her big body against Diot’s side, and curls her big brush-like tail against Diot’s back, and nuzzles against her knees, and even nibbles at her – doesn’t bite, but grazes her teeth against her knees through her leggings, and it tickles every time, and makes her laugh.
That night, when Diot carries the crate of kittens carefully into her boxbed to sleep, after feeding them again, she sleeps with them beside her, and wakes after a few hours to a sliver of light coming in through the cabinet door because Rusla has pulled it open with her big paws, and is waiting expectantly and staring at her.
“Yes, I know,” Diot tells her, carrying the box of kittens out, and she tiptoes through the cold of the room to prepare more milk and egg, with Rusla leading the way in front of her, and Elan behind her like she’s holding guard.
They fall into a routine like that, the three of them, and Lefsi barely feeds the baby kittens at all in the coming days. Diot manages – with her two feline assistants – almost all on her own.
And all the kittens live – all four of them.
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