On a lonely island, wreathed in mist, Ludmiła the two-spirit harvests the soft down of eider ducks for a living. Made an outcast because of their gender-fluidity, Ludmiła finds companionship in the most unlikely of places. With mad sailors, new-born ducklings, and reflections on queerness, this is a tale of friendship, love, and the celebration of our differences.
On a lonely island, wreathed in mist, Ludmiła the two-spirit harvests the soft down of eider ducks for a living. Made an outcast because of their gender-fluidity, Ludmiła finds companionship in the most unlikely of places. With mad sailors, new-born ducklings, and reflections on queerness, this is a tale of friendship, love, and the celebration of our differences.
Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!
Episode #4 out Sunday 14th March 2021 (14.03.21)
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Welcome to Stories From The Hearth, the podcast for tall tales and fantastical fiction, short stories the likes of which you might once have heard a wandering bard tell, to a group of villagers, gathered around the fire. Explore the history of storytelling in bonus series The Wandering Bard, or escape your surroundings with a brand-new story, written and performed by me, Calum Bannerman, on the last Sunday of every month. Historical, romantic, science fiction, or fantasy; these are tales to transport you, doorways into another world…
Hi, I’m Cal, and if you’re new to Stories from the Hearth, there’s a few things you might like to know. This podcast is an experimental artistic space, kind of like a painter’s studio or a DJ’s headphones – it is a place where I can try new things, make art, and share it with others in the hope that it might bring some comfort, value, and escapism to their lives. It is also a means to an end; after all, it has been my dream ever since I was wee to tell stories for a living; just like the wandering bards of old, who I read about in my history books and fantasy novels. Each episode of Stories from the Hearth features a stand-alone work of fiction, performed to an immersive soundscape, which allows you to lose yourself in the tale. Usually, the stories are short enough to be contained within one episode, but a handful of them are split over two. If this particular episode isn’t your jam, don’t worry – there are heaps of stories to choose from, and no two are the same. This podcast is also a safe and inclusive space for all, which means that its stories actively embrace queerness and otherness, right alongside more mainstream walks of life. If you’re enjoying it, then please do tell your friends and review it on your favourite podcast app, Spotify, or iTunes. If you’re really enjoying it, then you can support Stories from the Hearth on Patreon and help yourself to early access, behind-the-scenes insights, bonus content, physical copies of the stories, shout-outs and much much more. Just head to patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast or hit the link down below. And speaking of shout-outs, a huge thanks to these fine folks who help make Stories from the Hearth possible: my warmest thanks to Nick, Vivian, Jen, Charlie, Rob, Sandy, Jane, Ruathy and Mully.
Now, come and gather round the fire, for I’ve got a story to tell. This is Episode Three: Ludmila and the Duckling.
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Ludmiła watched the ducks fly out. Called to them with the puzzled canine howl that was the call of male eiders, and saw them bank in the air. A sharp curve, the flourish of an artist’s brush.
Now more set off, and there were the females; mucky brown plumage a lazy alternative to the crisp, clear-cut angles of the men’s black on white. A horde of them, nattering away, filling the skies above Three Islands’ Lake, over which they would pass en route to the sea.
The sky was a patchwork of white on grey, slivers of a shade too bright to look at betraying the hideout of the sun. Just yesterday, the Moon of Storms at Sea had turned, tipped past its zenith, and taken the first tentative step into its next phase. Still, the land about Ludmiła quivered and braced against a ferocious wind.
This part of the island was sheer and concave, cupped between an imposing slope of mountain, and the jut of granite atop which sat Ludmiła’s hometown of Eiderdown. It was not, typically, the sort of spot an eider duck would have chosen to nest. It was not, typically, the type of spot Ludmiła would have chosen for their work. And yet, here they were, duck and two-spirit, navigating their way awkwardly through the gale, which ran the land with all the determination of a child at a village fête.
Ludmiła carried baskets in both hands, deep-bowled and wicker closely-meshed, to ensure as little featherdown escaped as possible during the harvesting. Empty for the moment, however, they acted as sails, catching the gusts and threatening to yank the two-spirit’s arms from their sockets. Between the errant baskets, and the untamed hair which whipped and blinded, Ludmiła’s mood had grown considerably overcast by the time they reached the nesting sites.
Catching their breath, Ludmiła plonked themselves down in the lee of one of the structures – a waist-high house of stone. ‘Ah-ooo,’ they called. ‘Ah-ooo!’
They tilted their head back to rest against the slab, sweat of exertion cooling behind their ears, in the folds of their neck. Their breath coming heavy and laboured. From the flush of ducks ascending carried the females’ throaty korr-korrs, in response. In brief spurts, between the rapid rise and fall of Ludmiła’s chest, a smile stirred.
Running against the wind up the slippery slopes of the mountain, all in the name of soft bedding, was not their idea of fun. They were not the athletic twenty-something of former years. Long gone was the notion, that a hard body, and tireless stamina, would win the two-spirit some affection. It had taken only a few years of maturity to exhaust the sexual potential of a town the size of Eiderdown, and surface with the realisation that no matter how “valued” the two-spirit community was, that’s where appreciation of things two-spirit stopped. So, yes, perhaps they had allowed themselves to indulge a little more, in the offerings of cheese, and beer, and bread, and meat, customarily awarded their kind. Perhaps they had started to favour walking to the ducks, over the frenetic speed trials they used to set themselves. Just maybe, the trek from Eiderdown to eiderdown served, now, only as a reminder of the jiggle in their belly (arms, legs, ankles, neck, and back rolls).
Having said that, conversing with those soft, downy devils in ah-ooo’s and korr-korr’s was payment enough, every time.
Ludmiła had not chosen their line of work. Not that many, on the isle, could, they supposed. Butchers were mostly the sons of butchers, herders the daughters of herders, and so on. And yet, if you were shit with a cleaver, or, who knows, afraid of sheep, you could always appeal to your Elders, who would at least hear your case – might even actually find another role for you.
Not so for two-spirits. The mythical ones, the enlightened ones. The ones born of ceremony; born to uphold already long-upheld traditions; the ones with futures ordained. Those, in other words, weird and unorthodox enough to justify exiling to the fringes of society. No, for two-spirits the island over, there was no choosing of roles. There was only the learning of acceptance. Learning to accept that you were, and always would be, both celebrated and shunned, favoured and feared, depended upon and decided against.
In all their many years, Ludmiła had made but two non-two-spirit friends. One, a spinster, to whom they supplied down for to turn into the bedding Eiderdown was renowned for. The pair’s acquaintance largely rooted in a recurring joke, inspired by the profession of quilt-making, and the utter lack of under-quilt company kept by either of them. The other, a half-crazed fisherman by the name of Udvar Uspenskaya – the butt of jokes, such as ‘Ups-I’ve-lost-my-marbles’ and ‘Var-is-my-mind’ – who, legend said, had once circumnavigated the island thrice over, subsisting on nought but salt cod and seawater; hence the madness. Ludmiła had met him trading down in the town of Seaspray, the only customer who stopped to chat. The only person in the place who didn’t avoid their gaze, as if they’d never seen breasts beneath a tunic, before. As if Seaspray didn’t have its fair share of indeterminate-dressing peoples of indeterminate sex.
‘Ye know I was in the fightin’, when I was a laddie,’ the fisherman had begun, holding Ludmiła’s eyes with his own - screwed down at them over the end of his nose - glinting wildly. ‘Was considered a badness for the likes of your lot t’ take up arms. But did that stop ye’s!?’
Ludmiła remembered the way he frothed at the mouth, remembered the passion with which he put his question to them. They chuckled, recalling the speechlessness which had gripped them, unsure if Udvar expected an answer or not.
‘Of course it didn’t. Fightin’ all yer lives. Hellfyre if ye were goin’ t’ stop then.’ The old captain had paused, breaking eye contact for the first time, and for the first time Ludmiła had seen the depths of memory weaved into his greying irises. Saw the sadness there.
‘Lost a good number of your kind, too. Too many.
‘Always too many.’
Remembering their friend, the fisherman, Ludmiła looked out to sea. The last of the eider had flown the nests, and now the first of them were splashing down atop the waves. By virtue of the wind, as undecided in the direction of its gusts as it was with the strength of them, Ludmiła frowned to see a few of the birds corkscrew and crash, caught off guard by a rogue updraft. Thankfully, their worry abated. Soon the fallen ducks would surface, seawater sliding from the gossamer sheen of their feathers, their friends and partners quacking in jest and jibe.
Feathers. With a sigh, the two-spirit remembered their task. Climbing to their feet, hands on knees to help leverage the huge weight, they trudged to the front of the nesting house they’d been resting against.
All of the houses, and there were exactly eighty-four of them (all bar one occupied, this spring), were built south-facing. Though it was not impossible, in the wind-tunnel of Eiderdown valley, for northward gusts to work their way inside the units, building them so was the safest way to ensure their longevity. Ludmiła themself was responsible for the construction of three of the nest-houses, put up a few years back when the valley had played host to a record number of hatchlings. But there were structures on the hillside which outdated local memory. Some of the very oldest were said to have been built by the Ancients, a people somehow both ancestral to the current Green Islanders, and yet simultaneously alien.
On their hands and knees, Ludmiła peered inside. Luminous in the chill light, four delicate green eggs lay nestled, cosily surrounded by a thick wad of featherdown. Blue-grey, flecked often with white, the stuff was soft as a cloud, or baby’s breath, and warm to boot. The hen eider spent weeks pulling the feathers from her own chest and underbelly, meticulously constructing a blanket upon which her eggs could incubate safely and healthily, come rain or shine. And here was Ludmiła, two-spirit trickster, calling pleasantries to unwitting parents, flying out to sea to catch their morning meal; all the while conspiring to pinch the profits of their hard work.
So pondered Ludmiła, as they crammed handfuls of the stuff into their basket. Odd, they thought, to tussle with shame and yet feel none. In other parts of the isle, where the practice was opportunistic and sporadic – where eiders only nested out of desperation, perhaps separated from the main flush – it was normal just to take the down and go. There was no sense of compassion, nor care. Here on the west side, the people understood a greater sense of equality with the birds. They knew they had to preserve the ducks’ way of life, best they could, or suffer a life bereft of them. And so, as Ludmiła worked with one hand to pull away the down, with the other they took hay from a sack on their back, replacing the nest’s material so skilfully that they liked to think the little ducklings curled inside the eggs wouldn’t feel a thing.
Under the protection of the odd house, some of the eggs were already hatched, and there sat chirping the tiny, tiny children of Ludmiła’s eiders. Scraggly things, with fingernail beaks and awkward feet. The two-spirit was especially careful around these nests, so as not to leave their scent. Eiders were particular birds, and though often they shared in the care of their ducklings (like mothers and milk-mothers do) they would not stand human intervention. Ludmiła had seen it before, careless children allowed to go searching for hatchlings to pet, never knowing that the returning ducks would never take a baby back, which carried the smell of folk.
Having replaced soft eider with the warmer insulation of hay, Ludmiła instead watched from a distance, as the new-borns attempted feebly to walk, quack, test their matchstick wings.
After harvesting from only ten or so nests, the rains began to fall. The air electric with a fine mist of droplets, as if the clouds were waves breaking on the land; the rains were as sea spray, coating every inch of Ludmiła in a refreshing gauze.
Their thoughts turned to the painstaking process of drying wet down around an open fire, careful not to let the stuff catch aflame, whilst exhuming the damp as quickly as possible, to avoid the feathers spoiling. They had been coolly planning an afternoon walk along the shore; dreaming, as they worked, of an early night, so that they might set off for Seaspray early the following morning, catch up with Udvar, since he was on their mind. But their baskets were now heavy with water, and bringing the down back from the brink of ruin would keep Ludmiła awake ‘til early morn. They cursed into the wind.
Morning came and went. The going was tough: heather high-grown on the mountainside, prickly and tricksy, grabbing at the two-spirit’s feet as they navigated the shrubland. Ludmiła’s belly was rumbling something fierce by the time they came to the last of the nest-houses; a rickety old thing, most exposed to westerlies pouring off the sea. Scraping the last of the hay from their sack, they decanted two hefty baskets worth of soggy featherdown into it, tied it tight and returned it to their back. That way at least it would be easier to transport.
They turned at last for home. Squinting through lashing whirls of sodden mist - which moved as if alive; some demon bent on distortion - Ludmiła spied the grey shapes of town. In the valley between they and it, soft peat had turned to marshland. The two-spirit laughed. Beaming sunshine three days straight, and the day they chose for the harvest they get this. What was life if not absurdly comic. At least, they thought, waiting until today meant seeing the first of the hatchlings. That at least was not to be begrudged.
Just then, Ludmiła thought they heard something. Sensed, rather, a disturbance in the air, a new energy on the other side of the valley. Yes. Gentle as a whisper, there it was again, though they could swear this time it was closer. A high-pitch whine, or… squeak? For but a second the winds changed course, and in the short time it took them to rally a quietude befell the hill. Ludmiła strained, craned their neck, lowered their eyes, diverted all energy and attention to the minute composition of bones and cartilage and fluid either side of their head.
The inhale of a gust across the valley floor preceded the roaring return of gale, and the two-spirit almost gave up on whatever it was they thought they’d heard. But, just as sound swooped to fill the isle again, less than a yard from their foot came a weak, determined quack. Ludmiła jumped.
Tucked in the tangled roots of gorse, scratched and henpecked, a good distance from the nearest nest (a tremendous distance, for a life so small), was caught a duckling. It was laid up on its back, a twist of root pinning it to the streaming earth, so that waters dripping from the leaves above crashed in big splashes upon its head. With tired feet it paddled at the air, writhing in attempts at freedom, yet only entangling itself more. As the two-spirit stooped, the thing began a chorus of frantic bleats, and a wing, evidently broken, began jerking.
‘Shhh,’ cooed Ludmiła. ‘Shhh. It’s alright. I won’t hurt you. Hey, hey, shhh.’ They refrained from reaching out - though all they wanted was to free the poor thing - deciding it would have to calm, before it could be handled.
On closer inspection, it was not a duckling at all. Perhaps they had seen a duckling at first, since that’s what they had expected to find, or maybe that was just the image conjured by the frailty of its calls. It was, in fact, more like a yearling. Not long shed its down, it was probably an offspring of last year’s hatch. What’s more, the eider was like no eider Ludmiła had ever seen, and for a moment, their brain could not interpret the signals it received.
For they saw in it two ducks, drake and hen, male and female. What with the flapping, the gyrating and squawking, Ludmiła even turned away for a second, believing they had in fact stumbled upon a mating scene. But no, that wasn’t right, either.
The youngster in the heather was neither drake nor hen, but distinctly… both. Unmistakably, its head was that of the drake: yellow beak backing onto the sheer black cap, applied with the precision of ceremonial makeup: one block, covering the eyes and crowning the skull; a light, powdery green giving the white neck a handsome touch of colour. And yet, from the chest down, the eider was plain as muck. Stripes and mottling of brown on lighter brown on darker, right through to the tail feathers. Not in fifty Hogmanays of doing this, had Ludmiła ever seen such a sight. Nor had a bird like this featured in any stories they’d ever heard.
Inexplicably, the two-spirit felt their heartbeat quicken, and a warmth rise to their cheeks. The duck had settled some, more used to their presence, and now, as they leaned in to prize it free, it submitted to exhaustion.
The thing was badly hurt. On top of a broken wing, Ludmiła could feel the warm damp of blood through the feathers of its underside. One eye was missing, and there were scratch marks all along the beak, like Ancient carvings on cave walls. They brought it to their chest and there coddled it, crooning and singing their usual imitation calls. However, though calmed some, at hearing the two-spirit’s ah-ooo’s and korr-korr’s, panic suddenly returned to the yearling. It whipped its head about, searching for the threat, and struggled against Ludmiła’s grip.
Slowly, realisation dawned on the two-spirit, and with it an ugly sort of recognition. The heat in their cheeks rose to the corners of their eyes, and vision became a watery, difficult affair. The fist of the hand not holding the duck clenched, knuckles threatening to breach skin. Ludmiła brought their hand to their mouth and clamped down hard on a curled nub of forefinger. They grit their eyes shut, willing back the tears, then wiped dry their cheeks, and coughed to clear their throat. Ludmiła pressed the duck, its eyes wide, tighter to their chest. Bending their head down, they pressed lips into the crown of its head and kissed it firmly, softly.
Out at sea, eighty-three drakes and eighty-three hens ducked and dived below the surface, rising with mouthfuls of shimmering mussels, and silken crabs. Between meals they chattered and howled, playful and cheery. Eighty-three partnered parents, preparing catches for children newly hatched or soon to be. Not one wondered where the oddball, half-thing was, for had they not dealt with that problem, already? They only enjoyed the smooth undulations of the waves against their down.
In a ramshackle hut - set on a bluff just outside the town of Eiderdown - which leaked in too many places to count (no thatcher willing to touch the thatch), yet was at least warm for the fire, an aging two-spirit with an ailing heart and heavy limbs watched with a smile on their face, as a duck of two-beings waddled about the house.
Bedding itself in a nest of feathers drying by the hearth, it turned to Ludmiła, tilted its head, and quacked. Korr-ooo, kor-ooo.
‘I know, petal, I know.’ They lay down beside the bird, reached out and ran a finger up under its soft, downy chin. ‘But you’re home now. You’re safe.’
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Thank you for listening to this month’s Story From The Hearth. Thanks also for bearing with the poorer audio quality of these early episodes. I was younger and a podcasting noob, what more can I say? If you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, and website via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Additional episodes in The Wandering Bard historical mini-series will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.