PodCastle 610: Charlemagne and Florent

* Author : Ranylt Richildis

* Narrator : Dominik Parisien

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

*

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First published by Myths Inscribed.

Rated PG.

Charlemagne and Florent

By Ranylt Richildis

This is what happened to les deux bretons before I met them, back in the 70s when they were boys in Vannes. One was abandoned at nineteen months (no one knows why, or by whom), the other orphaned by a car wreck at age three. I should say he was orphaned in a car wreck, strapped to a safety seat in the car in question. The fact of the child safety seat indicates the degree of his late parents’ love for him; baby seats were indulgences in 1971. He was brought to the same agency as the foundling, where someone had the kindness to put them together in the same bassinet. Or — it might just as easily be said — someone made the mistake of placing them together.

The fair boy was registered under the unlikely name of Charlemagne Kermorgant, the dark one attached to the much less remarkable Florent Edig. Florent remembers the occasion of their meeting, just as he remembers the car wreck that erased his alternate life. He sees, when he tries, a characterless room, a lurking nurse, a dreary olive drape, and a toddler with matted white hair crawling up to peer at his eyes. A scent, one part applesauce, one part diaper. Children’s squeaks and squalls. A pain in his left leg and another on the right side of his head. A rather stunning absence, quickly filled.

Charlemagne was so named by at least one of his derelict parents. The name was inscribed on a note taped to his wrist. There was no family name, of course, so Kermorgant became his surname, as it became the surname of all the ciphers left on the steps of the eponymous hospice. An interim label, it stuck to him through to the age of majority and sticks to him still.

Being younger and very blond, and possessed of magnanimous blue eyes that flattered the standards of time and place, he might have found replacement parents soon enough. But les deux bretons were freakishly canny and made themselves loathsome during viewings with nose-picks and worse. Prospective adopters turned from him with regret and left him bent under Florent’s arm. Wards of the state, they forged a family from their separate parts. They were each other’s reassurance, even then.

They came of age together in their blue-and-white world in Vannes, sipped in sea air, and wet their heads each summer in the Gulf of Morbihan. They wrote themselves a history of first shaves and first tattoos, of afterschool lessons in Breton and savate, of footsteps salting cobbled streets as the sea breeze salted roofs, of Florent’s vigilance, of Charlemagne’s restlessness that sent him bouncing off the world’s surfaces as they raced through streetlets that mapped their trail between school and foster home.

Yes, a foster home. Together. Well, eventually, once the state accepted that Charlemagne and Florent were easier to deal with as a set than as units. Such had been their design. On the surface, it was Charlemagne who seemed to be more willful when separate routines or separate towns were proposed as options. His will was a symptom of his dynamism, staff believed, and the trouble he caused was manifest.