“Very well, then,” she went on. “Ludmilla is careless, but not stupid. She will have to feed and change the babies soon enough, and then she’ll discover her mistake. She’ll turn right around and come back here to swap one of the princes for Princess Avena before long and everything will be the way we originally planned it. Good. Fine. So if Gudge comes bulling his way up here before Ludmilla can return, all I’ve got to do is present the princess to him as the prince! All babies look alike above the belly-band, and unless Gudge offers to change the infant’s diapers there is no way he’ll ever know that his son is really his daughter.”
Queen Artemisia smiled. There was more chance of the sun rising in the west, plaid, with purple fringe trim and shaped like a bullfrog, than of Gudge even getting near a dirty diaper. Or a clean one, for that matter.
“There, that’s all taken care of,” she told the sleeping infant. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought. Everything will be fine, Aven—I mean Arbol. Yes, that’s a good name for a prince, Arbol is.” The baby whimpered in its sleep. “Oh, don’t fuss, my love, you won’t have to put up with the name for long. Just until your Nana Ludmilla gets back. We can wait, can’t we? Yes, we can. We can wait…”
Fortunately for Artemisia’s current peace of mind, she had no idea just how long they would have to wait.
Chapter Three
Ludmilla sat by the side of the road, resting her weary legs, and looked back the way she’d come. The pearly pink towers of the Palace of Tranquil Thoughts were gloriously backlit by the declining sun. Doves swooped and soared among the battlements. Golden pennons fluttered and snapped from the topmost pinnacles. These banners were all freshly embroidered with the new badge of the kingdom: On a field of gold, the sallet (an Old Hydrangean heraldic beast one third deer, one fourth dormouse, one eighth capon, and anything left over equally split between rabbit and poodle) was being used in a most painful and humiliating fashion by the Great Sacred Ox of the Gorgorians. Taken all in all, it was a heart-lifting spectacle.
“Hmph!” said Ludmilla to the royal babies. “We’re not clear of that hogwallow a moment too soon, my precious pixikins, and no mistake! Oh, I can’t help but pity your poor brother, stuck back there to be raised amid the nasty temptations of palace life while the pair of you will have all the advantages of a fine up-country education. Why, I came from the Fraxinella Mountains myself when I was a mere slip of a girl just—ah—neveryoumind how long ago.”
She reached into the huge basket resting on the grass beside her and lavished a fond smile on the two sleeping infants within as she adjusted their blankets.
A cold, black shadow fell across the babies. Ludmilla raised her head and looked up into a haphazard arrangement of yellow-brown eyes, greenish snaggle teeth, matted black hair and a nose like a dumpling that had been dropped on the outhouse floor. A charitable person might call it a face.
“Here, now, what’ve you got in there Granny, eh?” demanded the Gorgorian man-at-arms. Squat and bandy- legged from a lifetime in the saddle, obviously he had been demoted to footsoldiering as part of King Gudge’s mountain patrols and he wasn’t at all happy about it. Gorgorians were very good about sharing things with their newly conquered fellow-countrymen, the Old Hydrangeans; things like vermin, infections, bruises and bad moods. This squint-eyed chap looked like no exception, and he was backed up by four more equally unhorsed and unhappy comrades. They gathered around old Ludmilla and the babies like sharks around a hunk of bloody beef.
Ludmilla straightened her shoulders. “And who is it wants to know, you rude creature?” she demanded. Although she had abandoned her gorgeous court dress of dragon-scale silk and phoenix-point lace for the simple brown homespun tunic and apron of a Hydrangean countrywoman, she refused to put aside her spirit.
Backbone and backtalk usually had no place among a real peasant’s possessions—they didn’t help the crops a lick and they tended to cause unforeseen things like sudden death when exercised in the presence of the upper classes. Since absolutely everyone alive—and quite a few dead—outranked the typical Old Hydrangean peasant, Ludmilla’s show of courage startled the Gorgorian badly.
“Hoi! Never mind who wants to know,” he replied, getting a little red above the gills. Then, grabbing hold of his aplomb with both hands, he blustered on, “It’s me as wants to know, Granny, and that’ll have to do you. Else we’ll do you, eh, me hearties?” He winked companionably at his men, although given the number of old scars and new sword cuts hashing his face, it looked more like he was suffering some sort of spasm.
“Uhhrr…orright, chief.”
“If you says so.”
“I ’sposes.”
“We’ll do her what?”
The patrol leader scowled, which looked measurably worse than his smile. He drew a short-handled cat-o’-nine-tails from his belt and laid about his unenthusiastic followers with the butt end. “Look, when I say we’ll do her, the least you blunderation of misborn nanny goats can do is back me up! What’s wrong with you lot these days? Back when we was roving the plains or riding the wild wastes of the Litchi Plateau and I said ‘There’s a helpless villager; let’s do him good and proper for the honor of all Gorgorians,’ did you stand about with your thumbs up your arses asking ‘Do him what?’ and acting like you never seen a length of your enemy’s guts steaming at the end of your lances on a bright, fresh, frosty morning?”
The patrol, to a man, looked at the ground and made stupid noises in their throats. This enraged their leader even more, a bad idea.
“You did not!” he roared. “You sailed right in and you did the bugger, that’s all! Whatever happened to that old team spirit, hey?”
“S’norses,” said the youngest of the men.
His leader’s bristly hand darted out, closed around the young Gorgorian’s windpipe, and reeled him in. “What?”
“I said, sir—” his hapless captive gasped as a fine bluish patina crept over his stubbled cheeks “—I said that it’s not the same without the horses.”
“Think I don’t know that?” the leader bellowed in his face, then batted him into one of his comrades with the whiphandle.’Course it ain’t the same without the horses! It’s lonelier of a cold night, for one. But these mountains is sheep country. If we bring horses too much farther upcountry hereabouts, the land’s so steep and rocky and the paths is so narrer that we’d spend more’n half our time walkin’ the poor beasts ’stead of ridin’ ’em like civilized men. And even so, every time we’d turn ’round there’d be another sorry nag with his leg broke and no hope but a quick death at sword’s point. So what’s the use of draggin’ horses along?”
“Wull…we’d eat better, cap’n.”
The Gorgorian officer let fly with the business portion of the cat, deftly removing half the outspoken gourmet’s beard with one flick of the wrist. “My salty rump we would!” he shouted. “You ever tasted the ruination what these Hydrangean fibbity-fobs does to a good, honest slab of horsemeat? ’Senough to make a grown man cry.”
While this discussion was going on, Ludmilla pulled herself creakily to her feet, smoothed down her skirt, and picked up the basket with the babies. “Excuse me, young man,” she said, pushing past the Gorgorian soldier who had been so summarily shaved. “This has all been quite charming, but I have business to attend to. However, if you should ever find yourselves in the capital, do stop by the Duck and Crusty Things Inn. I have strong reason to believe that the cook there knows just what to do with a good slab of horsemeat. He calls it beef and sells it at veal prices, that’s what. Good day.”
“Now wait just a minute!” The Gorgorian captain lunged after Ludmilla and seized her by the elbow, making the basket swing wildly. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, Granny.”
Ludmilla regarded him coldly. “Obviously not. You are a very rude person and I shall complain about you to King Gudge as soon as practicable.”
“Haw! You complain ’bout me to His Majesty? There’s a laugh! Why, an old bit o’ leatherwork like yo
u wouldn’t get into the city gates, let alone the palace. ‘Course—” his eyes got smaller and nastier “—there’s good chance as you might get into the palace after all, on my say-so. The palace dungeons!”
His threats cut no ice with Ludmilla. She merely sniffed once, delicately: a mannerism intended to express her disdain for him and all his ilk. Unfortunately it was likewise a mannerism that compelled her to smell him and all his ilk. The aged handmaid turned pale and sat down with a thud. The sudden jolt woke both the babies, who began to cry.
“Hoi! What’ve we got here?” the Gorgorian captain inquired jovially. He grabbed the basket away from Ludmilla and peered inside. The infants bawled lustily, squirming in their swaddlings.
“Cheeses,” said Ludmilla shortly, and yanked the basket back.
The captain did not let go of his grip on the handle. Ludmilla was old, but she was wiry, and her unexpected recovery came so strongly that when she jerked the basket handle down to her level, she brought the captain down with it. He hit the ground on his stomach, driving the full weight of his thick leather belt and ponderous ornate gilded buckle sharply into his solar plexus.
“Gar!” exclaimed one of the patrol, observing his captain’s subsequent bout of roadside retching. “Woss brought that on?”
“Think as it must’ve been that brunch what we ate,” opined the second.
The third man disagreed. “Naaah. Onliest time it’s dangerous to eat a brunch is when they hasn’t been proper cleaned and cooked. ’Sonly the subcutaneous membrane what’s poison, and once that’s removed…”
His fourth comrade looked at him suspiciously. “Subcuwhat? Here! What kind of language is that for a soldiering man? Got too pissing many syllabubble…sillybib…sullabull…’Sgot words what’s too damn long, ’swhat! You been having it on with that Old Hydrangean hedge-trollop up to Stinkberry village again?”
The patrolman so accused blushed. “She’s the onliest one as gives a military discount hereabouts. And it’s part o’ the Old Hydrie tradition for the jolly-girls to have a little, y’know, mutually enriching conversation and instruction with their esteemed clientele as a, what-d’you-call-’em, intellectual prelude to subsequent physical interaction.”
The captain rose from his knees just in time to deal his glib underling a sound buffet to the skull just below the rear brim of his short-helm with the cat. His victim was knocked from his feet and sat rubbing the back of his head in an aggrieved manner.
“There’ll be none o’ that sort o’ talk in my patrol!” the captain thundered. “And from now on you’ll keep clear of the Stinkberry slut. Good fighting men catches things that way, y’know.”
“Like an education,” old Ludmilla put in, unasked. “You wouldn’t want that to happen.” She was on her feet again and strolling calmly away up the mountain path for a little ways before the Gorgorian patrol overtook her a second time.
“Now you hold it right there, my fine old toad!” the captain commanded, laying a hand on her shoulder. “The penalty for lying to your natural overlords is death by eatin’ a badly cleaned brunch! What’s all this pigflop about what you’ve got in that basket, hey?”
“I told you,” Ludmilla said, keeping her voice unruffled. “They’re cheeses.”
“That explains as why our chief was took so bad, then,” one patrolman whispered to his fellow. “Cheese gives him the heave-ho something desperate.”
The captain reached for the basket handle, thought better of it, and settled for yanking aside the blanket covering the infants. They were still crying. “Cheeses, eh?” he sneered.
Still cool as a duck’s bottom, old Ludmilla replied, “I take it, then, that for all your talk of being familiar with King Gudge’s palace, you have never seen an authentic Old Hydrangean Weeping Cheese?” She said this so sweetly, with such easy confidence and condescension, that the captain was taken aback. Ludmilla had never received any formal combat training, but she was experienced enough in the ways of the world to know when to follow up an advantage on a stunned opponent.
“But of course you wouldn’t,” she went on. “The Weeping Cheese is a delicacy reserved for only the highest of the highborn, and then served solely on occasions of the utmost sanctity. The custom dates back to the time when child sacrifice was just beginning to be thought in rather bad taste, particularly since it was the practice for the reigning monarch to eat whatever portions of the victims the gods rejected as not lean enough. Queen Jargoon the Dyspeptic is credited with substituting a specially made cheese for the babies previously offered, although it remained for her great-grandson, King Scandium the Decorous to perfect the rite by the inclusion of crackers and a dry white wine.”
By this time the Gorgorian captain was blinking like an owl at a firefly convention. His tiny eyes went from Ludmilla to the babies and back, desperately seeking some inspiration for a counterargument. “Uh…if they’s cheeses, what’s this, eh?” He passed a horny finger over one infant’s cheek and showed the glimmer of wetness.
“Whey,” the old retainer replied.
“But—but they looks just like babies! Look, all them tufts of fuzz and a nose, and eyes, and—”
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Ludmilla beamed proudly at her two young charges. “A triumph of the cheesemaker’s art in every detail. We haven’t had a single complaint from the gods from the first day we substituted the Weeping Cheeses for the real infants.” She lowered her voice and added confidentially, “Between you and me, sometimes the gods aren’t too bright.”
The horrified Gorgorian made the sign of the sacred oxhorns at the old woman’s blasphemy. His voice cracked just a bit when he said, “Yerrrr, but…but…but they’re noisy! What kinda cheese, never mind how pretty it’s made, makes a sound like that?”
Ludmilla sighed. “If they did not make that noise, we would have called them Quiet Cheeses. In the cheesemaking process, a good deal of air is trapped with the curds. All you are hearing is the normal sound of that air escaping.”
“Oh.”
The patrolman who had lost half his beard now came forward to help his captain in what was fast becoming a tight spot for the wrong people. “Just a minute!” he declared. “If they’re cheeses, how come they’re wriggling about like that, hm?”
Before Ludmilla could come up with an answer, the captain stepped in and growled, “Oh, there’s a fine question to be asking! Make us all look like a bunch of moonwits, why don’t you? Or greenhorns as never saw the inside of an honest Gorgorian messtent. Tell me this, me wide-eyed virgin tifter: Ain’t you never seen good food move?”
“Wull…there was that load o’ bread we got last week. It was rough going, keeping it from getting away ’til it was proper eaten.”
“’Course it did have all them legs,” one of his companions prompted. “From the weevils.”
“Natural!” the captain concluded, triumphant. “And if we can have us eats what brings a little action to the table, think these high-and-mighty Old Hydries won’t? Why, I’ll wager they was being served chicken-neck stew what was crawling off the plate while we was still galloping over the Litchi Plateau living on oxtail soup and brunches!”
The half-shaved Gorgorian looked dubious, but refrained from further comment. He ventured to take a look at the cheeses under discussion. It was then that an unmistakable aroma, even more pungent than his own, reached his nostrils.
“Agh!” he exclaimed, fanning the air as he backed away. “That settles it. Cheeses is what they be all right.”
“Like I told you,” his captain concluded smugly. To Ludmilla he said, “Now be on your way, Granny, and get them Weeping Cheeses where they’re bound. Judging from the sound they’re making, I’d say they’re just about ripe.”
Ludmilla dropped him a pretty curtsey. “It’s always such a pleasure dealing with a real man of the world,” she said, and sashayed off.
She was really too old to sashay very far. It wasn’t a gait that lent itself to long distances carrying a basket full of bab
ies, especially when the babies were still bawling and definitely needed to have their diapers changed. Ludmilla reflected bitterly that she had lost a lot of time on the road with the Gorgorian patrol. The plan she and Queen Artemisia had worked out called for her to spend the first night in the home of her distant cousin, Gowena, a widow whose loyalty to the Old Order was the best that money could buy. Now it didn’t look as if Ludmilla would reach the prearranged safe haven. It grew dark earlier in the mountains; already the shadows along the road were fading into the general gloom.
Ludmilla clucked her tongue. “No help for it, I suppose,” she said aloud. “We must make what shelter we can, my dollybits, and go on to Gowena’s house in the morning. Stinkberry village is hereabouts; we’ll try for that.”
She continued up the road, which soon became a poorly paved path, which in turn devolved to a dirt track that grew progressively narrower the further she went from the lowlands. “How odd,” Ludmilla said, panting as she trudged on. “I don’t recall the way to Stinkberry village being this rough, and I ought to know! I was a girl there scarcely, oh, not a handful of years since.” It did not trouble her conscience at all that she’d have to substitute the word “decades” for “years” to get within spitting distance of the truth.
The babies didn’t care how badly Ludmilla lied about her age. They were hungry and wet and soiled and tired of being passed off as dairy products. Ludmilla thought to assuage them with a sugar-tit, but when she searched the bottom of the basket for that pacifier it was gone, most likely fallen out during her recent tug-o’-war match with the Gorgorian captain. The children didn’t care about excuses. Both of them had excellent lungs and used them nonstop. The effect was rather wearing on their aged nursemaid.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” she muttered, peering into the dusk with eyes not all that sharp in full sun. “Is that a light I see? Perhaps I was closer to Stinkberry than I thought. There, there, my poppets,” she spoke softly to the wailing babes. “Soon you’ll have a nice warm place to stay and all the comforts. Look, my lovies, that light’s the lantern out in front of the village tavern or I’m a goose, and there’s the blacksmith’s shop next door, just as I recall it, and—whoops!”
Split Heirs Page 3