Archive of Our Own ^beta

His mother's laughter woke him up. Lauha raised her heavy head from his lap to glare at his mother and father and though she did not growl — she would never growl at the family — her tail did not wag. Tapsa Niskanen carefully slid away from her so that he could crawl out without disturbing the six puppies. Sated and sleepy, they scarcely stirred as he slipped away and Lauha laid her head down on her rough blanket in the doghouse.

“I did what you said, Mama,” he told her hastily, crawling out and scrambling to his feet. “I stayed all the way over there, but she took my hand and dragged me in.” He held up his little hand as if they could see the sheepdog's jaws closed gently around it.

“Well then, you're one of her puppies,” his father replied, smiling.

The smile told him he was forgiven, but his five-year-old mind was still a little unclear on the concept of jokes. He looked down at his most unpuppyish body and asked in confusion, “I'm a puppy?”

“No, no, Lauha just thinks so. You're a little boy. Our little boy.” His mother turned a quelling look on his father. The man often forgot how literal-minded their son was. “But if it makes her happy to have you with her puppies, and it makes you happy to be with them, then you can come over here any time you don't have chores.”

Tapsa had a lot of chores, caring for the chicken coop, tending the orphan lamb, and fetching and carrying anything within his strength, but he was a hard worker and made sure that he had several free hours every day to join Lauha and his puppy siblings.

Puppies grow faster than little boys and by the time Tapsa was six, the puppies were full-grown and old enough to work. They were excellent sheepdogs, so clever that they understood most instructions after only a repetition or two. The village didn't need six more sheepdogs, good as they were, so they were traded to other island villages.

Tapsa understood that. The chicks and piglets that he cuddled, the lambs that he cared for and played with, might end up on his plate, and his puppy siblings might have to go live somewhere else among strangers. That was the way of things; the village lived too close to the bone for sentiment. The dogs were, however, rather damp about their heads after his goodbyes.

By then there was another litter and Lauha firmly believed that Tapsa was a part of that as well. Those puppies, too, grew up to be excellent sheepdogs, and his parents did not overlook the pattern.

“Tapsa, get cleaned up. We have guests for supper.” This was a rare occasion; it was not that his parents lacked friends but that they rarely had their son join their guests at the table. When there were guests, he was normally sent off with a plate of food so that he would not annoy the adults with questions, for Tapsa was curious about everything.

At this meal, however, the boy was unwontedly quiet. Their guests were Ensi Hotakainen, one of the earliest mages anyone knew of, born at the height of the Great Dying, and her friend Hilja Järvinen, a somewhat younger mage. Ensi was the strictest adult in the entire village; no mere child would dare draw her annoyed attention. She regarded Tapsa with a disconcerting intensity that made him wonder what he could possibly have done to anger her, but she said nothing to him.

After supper, Hilja took him aside to talk about Lauha and the latest litter of puppies. He enthusiastically described each puppy's personality, likes, and dislikes, but her questions occasionally puzzled him. Of course he knew where the puppies were without looking at them, for they made plenty of noise and besides that they did have something of an odor. Of course he could direct them without words; they understood gestures as well. He thought she was annoyed at his answers but couldn't imagine why. At last he was sent off to bed but, of course, he sneaked back to listen to the adults talk.

“I didn't detect a trace of magic,” Ensi said. “Did you?”

“No, nothing. He doesn't seem to have any special power over the dogs,” Hilja replied.

“But look at the results. Those are not the usual dogs,” his father argued. “I've raised a lot of sheepdogs, and I've never seen anything like those two litters. An occasional dog like that, yes, but not two full litters. It's got to be the boy.”

“Animal magnetism,” Hilja suggested. Tapsa frowned at that. He knew about magnetism; the village had a small magnet which the children were permitted to play with. He knew that magnets attracted some metals but not others, and certainly not animals. Anyway, animals weren't pulled to him like metal to a magnet, it was just that he loved them and they knew it and loved him back.

“I wonder …” That was his mother.

“What is it?” Ensi snapped. She felt that if you had something to say, you should say it, and if not you should keep quiet instead of mumbling something partially thought out.

“Well, I wonder how he would do with kittens. The dogs are valuable, certainly, but if he could affect cats the same way, maybe they'd be more useful dealing with rashlings.”

Tapsa, crouching against the wall, winced at that. The village had two cats, a tom and a queen, both born sterile as so many cats were. Though the cats were superb at finding rashlings, they had to be harnessed when they were taken out searching since they had the feline instinct to throw themselves into battle against any rashling that they could reach. The village's other tom had been killed the previous Spring attacking a rash-otter, and the queen was missing a foreleg from tangling with a rash-dog a couple of years earlier. Supposedly cats could be trained out of that behavior back on the capitol island, but trained cats were too expensive for their little village.

“If we could get a good breeding pair …” his father began.

“Don't be an idiot. The village couldn't afford a good breeding pair,” Ensi cut him off impatiently.

“My sister,” his mother began, and then had to stop for a moment. Even after thirty-five years, it was hard for her to speak of family members who had disappeared during the Great Dying. “My sister loved cats. She had eleven once; she took in strays, cats that nobody wanted or cared about. She had to have them surgically sterilized so she wouldn't end up with even more.”

There was a moment's silence as the older adults remembered and the younger tried to imagine a world with so many cats that one woman could have eleven of them, so many cats that they had to be sterilized. Though cats were immune to the Rash, and apparently always had been, they had been affected by the Rash, no doubt about it. Before the Rash, cats had bred freely, too freely even. Modern cats bred almost as slowly as people: one or possibly two kittens in a birth, one birth every couple of years. Not infrequently, they were born sterile. Moreover, cats had suffered mortality worse than human beings during the Great Dying due to their instinctive hatred of the infected and continued to perish for that reason. Cats in general were therefore expensive, and fertile cats even more so.

“Yes, well.” Ensi answered. “We're not going to get eleven cats into the village. We might get a fertile tom.”

“That's no use,” Hilja objected. “The cats we have don't seem to have been affected by the boy even though he spends plenty of time with them. We need a female to have a kitten that he can interact with from birth, just like the puppies.”

“We've got five good young sheepdogs —” his father began.

“Not enough,” Ensi stated definitively.

“Maybe,” his father began again. “with five good sheepdogs, we could trade for a female kitten — no, let me finish. Okay, we can't get the mother cat. But if I took Tapsa to wherever the mother is and he stayed there with the kitten until she was old enough to be weaned, he'd have his effect on the kitten just as he has on puppies. And if she turned out to be fertile …”

“Wait, are you proposing to take my son off to some other island for two or three months?” Tapsa was a very late child, born in the twenty-eighth year of the Rash when his mother was forty-six and his father fifty-two. The first child, his sister eighteen years his senior, was a widow who lived next door with her son, Ilmari, just a year younger than Tapsa. The next child, a son, had perished in a freak accident, falling from a tree, and the third, a daughter, had succumbed to an infection, untreatable since antibiotics were no longer produced. Those two had died before Tapsa was even born, and his mother clung fiercely to this, her last child.

“He'll be all right, Raina. I won't just leave him …”

“Too right you won't! I'm going with him!”

That seemed to settle the matter, and the adults fell into a boring discussion of which village could use a sheepdog and which might have a kitten and how the trades could be worked out, and Tapsa lost interest and sneaked away to his cot. But he might go to another village! And he might have a kitten!