Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [32]
“Bah! He beat me awake? What kind of a slug am I this morning? A good thing you came to get me.” Sasha jumped out of the bed-cupboard and snatched up the clothing that the servants had laid out for him. “You go do whatever it is you do, brother mine, and leave me to my foolery.”
Yasha laughed again, and gave Sasha a mocking bow before leaving.
Sasha had the smallest bedroom of any of the Princes. Even so, by the standards of the boyars, who slept two and four to a bed when they came on state visits, this was luxury. Because the room was so small, the bed-cupboard was a necessity or he’d not have had room to move.
But all his life, Sasha had loved his bed-cupboard. It had been a retreat, a sanctuary in the times when he had misjudged the acceptable level of foolery and been punished for it. It was a nest when winter winds howled around the Palace and there was scarcely any daylight. He’d had some changes made to it over the years, and now it was a kind of miniature room within a room, with a hanging lamp for reading and a set of shelves for the books and anything else he wanted to tuck in there.
Such as his instruments.
He went over them in his mind as he pulled on a fresh tunic and set of trousers. It was about time to sing prosperity again, and check for things that didn’t heed his warning to stay away. Especially with negotiations going forward for a bride for the Crown Prince. Time to burnish up an already shiny little Kingdom to speed things along.
He took the balalaika out of its storage shelf and unwrapped it from the layers of silk surrounding it. Slinging it over his back, he went hunting in the kitchens for some breakfast and a wash-up.
Then fed, clean, and ready to go to work, he strode out to face the day.
The sun was barely a sliver above the horizon when he made his first stop. Magic and The Tradition being what they were, it was often just as effective to use a symbol for something as the thing itself. And in this case, the Royal cattle herd stood for all the cattle in the kingdom.
It was, and had always been, possible to steer The Tradition through songs and stories. It was only that it was a bit tricky and took a lot of planning to successfully pull it off.
And you had to start with good material; in the case of a song, it had to be—well—singable. Memorable. Something that people liked to sing themselves of a winter night in a tavern.
Sasha had a talent for creating just that sort of song out of the most unlikely of subject matter, such as the health of cattle.
He stationed himself right inside the fence surrounding their pasture, made sure his instrument was in tune, and began the song he called “My Little Brown Cow.”
It was an absurd little piece, really. It was sung in the persona of a herdsman, boasting about his prize milchcow, and claiming more and wilder abilities for her with each verse, then turning it all around in a chorus that admitted that the claims might be stretching the truth a bit but that there was no doubt that this cow, and every cow in the Kingdom of Led Belarus for that matter, was the healthiest, happiest, most perfect specimen of its kind in all of the Five Hundred Kingdoms.
The cattle listened with bovine interest; the herdsmen sang along on the chorus. And once again, The Tradition was thwarted. Or at least, it was convinced to ensure that the cattle of Led Belarus were plump, fertile, and tractable.
From the cattle pasture to the sheep enclosure he went, with a variant on the cattle song. On the way there, he sang what he thought of as the “Perfect Day” ditty, in which he extolled the weather in Led Belarus, with the chorus suggesting that every day was a perfect day here with enough sun, enough rain, fall not coming too early, spring not arriving too late.
He had a song for every sort of livestock, actually, and he sang them as often as he could. He had found that each sort of herdsman was, in general, very proprietary about the animals he or she cared for,