Ludmilla tripped over a sheep.
The basket went flying, the babies’ yowls for food turned to shrieks of excitement to find themselves airborne. They landed a short distance away in the tall grass of the finest grazing lands on that side of the capital. They also landed smack in the middle of a herd of plump, fluffy sheep who took to their heels with bleats of terror at this sudden invasion from on high. It was purely a miracle that the royal infants weren’t trampled.
“Oh my,” said Ludmilla, and then, querulously, “Children, come back here.” By this time it was full dark, with no moon worth mentioning. The babies were still just as hungry and just as wet, but their recent diversion had taken their minds off every thought except hoping for another such exhilarating ride in the near future. They lay in the grass chuckling to themselves.
Poor Ludmilla looked all around her and saw nothing. The light which had lured her into believing that she saw Stinkberry village was still there. In fact, it seemed to be coming closer, which was not the way a decent tavern lantern ought to behave, in her opinion. There was only one explanation.
“Black wizardry!” she shrieked. “Oh, it’s the ghosts of all the poor wizards as was slain so cruelly by King Gudge, and now they’re hot for the blood of the living! Please, oh please don’t take my babies!” she cried into the dark.
“Huh!” came the unwizardly snort from the approaching light. “Why’d I want to do a damfool thing like…Ludmilla?”
The beam of a shepherd’s lantern flooded old Ludmilla’s eyes. She gazed up into a face—ancient, sunbrowned, wrinkled, thatched and bearded with gray—that she hadn’t seen in…neveryoumind how many years.
“Odo?” she breathed, hands folded over her withered bosom.
Some time later, after having located the babies with Odo’s help, Ludmilla got them cleaned up, changed, and bedded down with two makeshift bottles of sheep’s milk in a corner of Odo’s hut. Duty done, she returned to the rickety table where Odo was still wolfing down a simple dinner of bread, cheese, and wild onions. Lots of wild onions.
“I still don’t see where you got them babes,” Odo remarked between mouthfuls. “When you left Stinkberry, you wasn’t even pregnant. Not by me, anyway.”
“Not for your lack of trying.” Ludmilla settled herself comfortably close beside him on the one bench in the place. “It has been a few years since then,” she said coyly. “Things happen.”
Odo regarded Ludmilla with just a touch of skepticism in his flat brown eyes. “So they’re yours, are they?”
“You might say that,” Ludmilla replied. “Or you might not. But then again, you might. And you might be right about it if you said so. Or wrong.”
“Oh.” Odo munched another wild onion. “So…you still like sheep?”
“That depends.” She arched one brow. “Do you still have the biggest shepherd’s crook in the Fraxinella Mountains?”
Odo looked over to where he’d left his badge of shepherdly office propped against the doorframe. “I dunno,” he said, all honesty. “I could give it a measure.”
Ludmilla patted Odo’s hand. “You never change, do you?” she said tenderly.
“I do too!” Odo took umbrage. “I put on my new tunic on Prunella’s yearly feast day, like any good shepherd, and I changes my smallclothes once every three full moons, weather permitting, and…”
“I only meant—” Ludmilla edged nearer so that her thigh rubbed against his, like a pair of sticks trying to get a fire started, “—that you’re still the same dear Odo I knew when I was just a slip of a girl.” She plucked aside the stringy curtain of his iron-gray hair and tickled his earlobe with her tongue. “Do you remember?”
Odo frowned. “When was you just a slip of a gir…gir…gir…oh my lambs and lanolin!”
For all her years, and all of Odo’s too, Ludmilla was still good at stirring up more than memories. With a rough, inarticulate exclamation, Odo leaped from the table with the spryness of a man of sixty, clasped Ludmilla to him in an embrace that reeked of sheepskin and wild onions, and swept her up in his arms.
Then he put her down again and clapped both hands to the small of his back, groaning. Ludmilla clicked her tongue, shook her head, and led her former swain to the fleece-covered pallet near the hearth.
The babies, warm, dry, and full of milk, slept soundly and thus missed a unique educational experience. They did not hear the muffled sounds of aged joints cracking and popping as Odo and Ludmilla sought to recapture their youthful passion. They remained undisturbed by Ludmilla’s gasped instructions to Odo concerning certain complex techniques she had picked up while in the royal service. They slumbered on despite Odo’s grunts, Ludmilla’s moans, and the swiftly accellerating tempo of both. What was truly astonishing was that they managed to sleep through the joyful yodel that ultimately burst from Ludmilla’s throat.
This was followed by a hiccup, a gurgle, and a final exhalation.
“Anthrax take it,” Odo murmured. “She’s dead.”
At first, Odo simply lay there, too consumed by passion, grief, and confusion to have any idea what he should do. Eventually, however, he thought to pull up his pants and look the situation over more logically, as well as more warmly, while sitting on the edge of the woolly pallet.
There was no question about whether any spark of life remained in Ludmilla. Although an impartial observer might have thought she looked rather corpselike before, the difference now was quite unmistakable. Odo had seen death often enough before to have no doubts—admittedly, he usually saw it in sheep rather than women, but the effect was really very much the same.
He had never had a woman die in his arms before, but then, he had almost never had a sheep die in his arms, either.
“Her heart must’ve gave out,” he muttered to himself. He tugged at the drawstring of his pants. “I suppose I must’ve improved with practice.” He glanced at Ludmilla, and added, “And she warn’t as young as she let on, I’d wager.” That realization took a weight from his mind; he guessed that he needn’t worry about younger women’s hearts.
Not that he ever had a chance to find out, these days. He wasn’t all that young himself any more, and the girls of Stinkberry didn’t seem eager for his company.
“Don’t know what they’re missing,” he growled, looking at the foolish grin that was Ludmilla’s final expression.
She was dead. The question now was what he should do about it.
Well, he couldn’t bring her back to life. It was just a matter of what to do with her remains. When one of the sheep died that meant dinner for the next week or so, unless it died of something nasty, but Odo knew that wasn’t done with people. Ludmilla looked pretty stringy, anyway, he noticed—when she was still moving under her own power it hadn’t been as obvious.
So he’d have to bury her.
He sighed. That was hard work for a man his age.
Maybe there was somebody he could palm it off on; did she have any relatives who might want to claim the body?
Odo scratched his head, dislodging a few of its arthropodal occupants and wedging still more black grease under his fingernails.
The truth was, he didn’t know anything about Ludmilla’s background. She had turned up in Stinkberry as a mere girl, or at any rate as a reasonably young—well, youngish—woman when he was a boy, and one night after they both got drunk at the Shearing Festival she had come back to the mountaintop with him and stayed the night—for several months.
Then she had disappeared, and he thought that was the end of it, but she’d turned up in Stinkberry again when they were still both young—he thought he might have still been in his thirties at the time, and she couldn’t have been past fifty, sixty at the outside.
She had spent another few months on the mountain with him, and then run off with that peddler, and that was it until tonight.
He tried to remember if she had ever said anything about having family or friends. Nothing came to him.
She must have known somebody, so
mewhere, judging by her last few words. A woman didn’t think up suggestions like that on her own, did she?
Actually, Odo had no idea what women might think up; as often as not he wasn’t any too sure what he was thinking himself. Still, Ludmilla hadn’t conjured those two babies out of thin air…
Babies.
He had almost forgotten them in his excitement. What the faradiddle was he going to do with the babies?
Whose babies were they, anyway?
He got himself upright, discovering in the process that his back had suffered more damage than he had previously realized, and crossed to the corner where the infants slept.
“Young’uns,” he remarked to himself.
He considered looking for notes or messages, but there wasn’t any hurry; he couldn’t read one if he found it, after all, and he wasn’t about to go looking for a scholar in the middle of the night. They were both quite small, with a rather squashed appearance and very similar faces.
All newborn babies look pretty much alike, but Odo thought it was more than that.
“Twins, they is,” he said. He sucked on his lower lip, inadvertantly drawing a curl of beard into his mouth and forcing an innocent young louse to seek new lodging. He hadn’t seen a lot of babies, but he knew lambs, and he supposed the basics held for both species. “Can’t be more’n a few days old,” he concluded. “They’ll need nursing.” He looked up.
Ludmilla wasn’t going to nurse them, and Odo didn’t know of a wetnurse anywhere in the area, but they had seemed pleased with the sheep’s milk Ludmilla had fed them. That had come from poor little Audrea, who’d lost her lamb.
Well, why couldn’t Audrea nurse them, then?
Odo was not an educated man, but he remembered hearing at his mother’s knee the tale of Remulo and Rommis, ancient heroes of Old Hydrangea, who had been raised by wolverines. He remembered it well—after all, he had heard it every day for fourteen years, since his mother had been a great believer in bedtime stories but only knew the one.
If those two could be raised by wolverines, then why couldn’t this pair be raised by sheep?
Odo’s heart swelled with pride. Maybe he would raise himself a pair of heroes! Maybe, centuries from now, people would remember the stories of this pair, raised by Odo and his sheep before setting forth upon lives of adventure!
Of course, Odo would be dead by then, but it might be nice to be remembered. And meanwhile, when they got a bit bigger, he could get some work out of them; there was plenty to do around the mountain.
And they would need names.
Remulo and Rommis were the obvious choices, and he had seen that they were both boys when Ludmilla had changed their nappies, but Odo had a ram by the name of Rommis already. He frowned, and sucked on the wisp of beard in his mouth.
It uncoiled down his throat and choked him, sending him into a prolonged coughing fit, the sound of which woke the babies. When Odo had extracted the treacherous whiskers and regained his composure, he devoted himself to trying to quiet the boys, using a moistened finger as an impromptu pacifier.
It didn’t work.
In desperation, he took a lantern and set out to find Audrea, despite the utter darkness outside. The babies lay wailing in one corner of the cottage, Ludmilla lay dead in the other, and once outside Odo seriously considered not coming back.
But that, he thought, wouldn’t be right; his sheep were depending on him. He squared his shoulders, lifted the lantern high, and trudged onward.
By the time he dragged Audrea into the cottage, ignoring her bleats of protest, both babies were blissfully asleep again. Odo glared down at them, then tethered Audrea to the leg of his only table and sat down on the fleecy pallet.
“Trouble,” he said, “these two’ll be trouble.” He sighed. “Like those two uncles of mine that got hanged down in Lichenbury.” He looked down at the tiny red faces and squinty closed eyes. “They even look like ’em.” He poked gently at the boy on the right. “Guess I’ll call you after Uncle Dunwin,” he said, “and t’other after Uncle Wulfrith.”
The newly named Wulfrith cooed softly.
Chapter Four
“Listen to me, you stupid earwig,” said Queen Artemisia, pearly teeth clenched almost to the splintering point. “What is so precious hard about remembering one paltry message?”
“Nothin’,” replied the hapless page. He stared at his shoes and tried to get his voice up above a whisper. “’Cept the words of it, m’lady.”
Artemisia uttered a sound not meant for human lips to emit nor ears to receive. In the several weeks since Ludmilla’s departure with the twins, she had learned an awful lot about uncanny, unearthly, unholy, downright nerve-shattering sounds from her infant daughter. The princess (No, no: the prince! I must always think of her as the prince, Artemisia thought furiously. Both our lives depend upon it.) had a healthy set of lungs and an unhealthy case of the colic.
“Very well, nit,” said the queen. “I will try just once more, and if you fail to memorize my message then, I will summon my lord King Gudge and say that you tried to ravish me. You won’t like what happens next. I think it will involve wolverines.”
“Yes’m,” the page replied miserably.
His name was Spurge, and his Old Hydrangean pedigree was impeccable. Artemisia felt certain that she could rely on his loyalty and discretion when she chose him for this most delicate of missions. Alack, although the lad’s qualifications looked good on parchment, showing a noble bloodline that was almost as blue and inbred as Artemisia’s own, in her case the result was fine bone structure, fiery temper, and a congenital tendency to decorate with too much lace, while in his the end product was a mind like a sieve, a nose like a spatula, and feet like a pair of roasting pans, with the rest of his bones poking out at awkward angles all over his body like a complete set of silver utensils concealed in a pastry bag.
Spurge didn’t look capable of ravishing a newt, but even he was sharp enough to know that King Gudge’s idea of justice didn’t hold much truck with physical evidence. Not when there were wolverines to be exercised. “I’ll give it another go.” Closing his eyes and summoning up all seven of his brain cells, Spurge began to recite:
“Greetings unto the Black Weasel, brave and heroic dashing leader of…”
“‘Brave and dashing heroic leader,’” the queen prompted.
“Oh? Oh. Orright. Um…” Spurge tried to recapture his daisy-chain of thought, but the petals were long since blasted from their stems. “Urrrrh—Greetings unto the Black Wolverine—no, wait, that’s not…Greetings unto the Black Weasel, brave and dashing heroic wolverine of—Ooohh!” Spurge writhed like one in pain and began to gibber. His bleats of agony woke the baby who began to wail.
Murder flashed in the queen’s bloodshot eyes. “That did it,” she pronounced with awful finality. “It took me four blessed hours to get that child to go to sleep, and now you’ve gone and done it. I’m summoning the king. When I get through telling him about you, you will pray for wolverines!”
Poor Spurge emitted a squeal of pure terror and bolted for the tower window. Perhaps he intended to cheat Fate, and any spare wolverines, by hurling himself to his death. Perhaps he actually believed what everyone always told him, which was: “Spurge, your head’s so full of air that if you jumped out a tower window, you’d float!”
Whatever the case, it would remain a mystery. The royal cradle stood between him and the window, and as if by instinct, one of Spurge’s unwieldy feet jerked out with a life of its own to snag itself in the cradle skirtings. Spurge fell flat on his face, the cradle toppling after, the baby airborne, and Queen Artemisia paralyzed with the certainty that her precious infant was going take a headfirst landing. (King Pyron the Goosefooted was the only Old Hydrangean king for whom there was documentary evidence to confirm that he had indeed been dropped on his head as a child, and no royal mother in her right mind wished to risk a similar fate befalling her offspring. His abbreviated reign was still spoken of with cold dread as t
he “Hundred Days of Metal Implements and Pudding.”)
What the queen did not know was that clumsy Spurge had the sharpest set of reflexes in the kingdom. It was a matter of survival. As a lad at home he had broken one priceless, unique, irreplaceable art object after another, under the horrified eye of his mother, Neurissa of the White Hand. The White Hand was also the Heavy Hand, which was why Spurge had developed the automatic reaction of moving fast—no, really fast—no, even faster than that—just as soon as his brain got the message: Aaaargh! We did it again!
There was blur of livery, a flash of leaping page, and the infant was plucked from midair by Spurge’s huge, occasionally capable hands. Cuddled securely to Spurge’s chest, the baby gurgled with joy, eyes bright. On bended knee, Spurge proffered the contented child to his queen, saying, “Um…yours, m’lady.”
The queen fainted.
Artemisia regained her senses to the words, “—Weasel, brave and dashing heroic leader of the Bold Bush-dwellers. The White Doe sends to learn—to learn whether the Bun Duzzard—no, perish it all, that couldn’t be it—the Dun Buzzard has yet placed the—uh—the brace of Golden Eaglets in your care.”
She sat up slowly and turned towards the sound of the voice. It was Spurge, still holding the baby, and pacing back and forth before the queen’s dressing-glass as he rattled off her secret message. “Yet does the White Doe mean you to know that one of the aforesaid Golden Eaglets is not the—come on, Spurge, you better do this right, those wolverines have got teeth on ’em!—not the Rosy Hind she fancied, but the matched Silver Hart of the other.” He looked at the baby. “Does that make any sense to you, Your Royal Highness?” The baby gurgled. “Nah, nor to me, either. Oh well.” He shrugged and plowed on. “It is well known that the Dun Buzzard has the brains of a Squashed Frog. Thus we lay this error to her charge. If the Dun Buzzard yet roost among you, we grant you the freedom to rearrange her pinfeathers; look to’t.”
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