Split Heirs

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Queen Artemisia nodded, satisfied with Spurge’s progress. What was so difficult about the message, after all? These pages always made a fuss about nothing. At the mirror, Spurge forged ahead: “Therefore—uh—therefore send one Silver Hart by your swiftest messenger that the White Doe may make of a Silver Hart a Rosy Hind and…and…and…Oh, plague take it! How in the name of cold fried slaw can anyone turn your heart into your behind I don’t know. Nor want to.” Spurge sighed. “Bring on the wolverines.”

  “No, no, gentle Spurge, do not despair!” cried Queen Artemisia, scrambling to her feet. “You have the message perfectly. Well, as perfectly as you ever will have it. These are chancy times. We must make do. Now go, and hasten back with the Black Weasel’s reply! Oh, and pass me the prince, would you?” She gathered the sleeping babe gratefully from the page’s arms, only to discover that her cherished daughter was in need of changing as well as exchanging.

  She thought of having Spurge take care of the nasty business—after all, with his intelligence he might not notice that the “prince” was singularly underendowed. And if he did manage to notice, he might assume that royal boy-babies sort of... acquire such things later on in life, at about the same time they win their first sword.

  But with the keen instinct of males everywhere when the chance of having to change a diaper loomed, Spurge was long gone.

  * * * *

  “Halt! Who goes there?” cried a voice from the thickest part of the old oak’s crown.

  “Where?” yelped Spurge, turning around in his saddle and peering into the underbrush in an access of panic.

  “Nowhere, you dope.” The voice from amid the leaves sounded fed up. “I mean, yes, somewhere. There. Where you are. You. Who are you?”

  “Me?” Spurge made it sound like one of the Seven Great Unanswerables of Old Hydrangean Philosophy (Number Three was: Why is it that nothing you do, unto the conquest of countless kingdoms, is ever enough to satisfy your mother?)

  “You see anyone else around?” the tree replied. It was mighty nasty for an oak. At its foot, a thicket of gorse snickered cruelly. “Well, come on, talk! Tell us who you are and what business you’ve got here or…or…”

  “Or we toast his kidneys for our tea!” the gorse bush shouted enthusiastically.

  “Yuck,” said the oak. “That is so gross that no one would ever take it seriously. And what good’s a threat if nobody believes you’re gonna do it?”

  The gorse bush was miffed. “’Sbetter than any threat you ever come up with. Hunh! Best you done was tell that wandering peddler that if he didn’t swear loyalty to the Black Weasel, we’d smack him.”

  “The…the Black Weasel?” Hope lit Spurge’s beady eyes. “You veggers know the Black Weasel, brave and dashing heroic leader of the Bold Bush-dwellers?”

  “‘Veggers’? What’s ’at?” the oak demanded.

  “Um…you know, plants. Growing things. I mean, I heard as how the Black Weasel, braveanddashingwhatsit, was the master of the jolly greenwood, but I never knew he had a bunch of vegetables on his side.”

  “Who you callin’ a vegetable?” There was a loud rustling from the old oak’s crown, then a flurry of leaves as a small, dark object plunged from on high. It landed in the gorse bush, which yelped, “Get off me, Mole, you idjit! Ow! Ow! That’s my eye!” Further tussling in the prickly foliage followed until at last the thick stems parted and the gorse bush yielded up a pair of the dirtiest, scruffiest, sulkiest lads Spurge had ever seen. One was taller and more wiry than the other, dark-haired and dark-eyed; his friend was blond, under a layer of leaf mold, with blue eyes and a sturdier build. Apart from these minor differences, the boys were equally young, filthy, and sullen.

  They were also heavily armed with longbows which they handled with disturbing expertise. Arrows nocked, bowstrings taut, both weapons were aimed at Spurge’s heart.

  “We may be vegetables,” said the blond with an evil grin, “but you’re dead meat.”

  It was shortly thereafter that Spurge found himself relieved of his horse and conducted on foot into the presence of the Black Weasel. He had heard tales and songs about this freebooter of the forest—quite a startling number of them, considering that the Black Weasel had not been in the forest freebooting business for more than three years at most.

  The queen’s messenger looked around him, gaping at the wonders of the Bold Bush-dweller’s stronghold. The tales had not lied. There stood the king-tree, an enormously aged beech which was the central rallying point of the Black Weasel’s forces. At its gnarled roots stood a gilded throne, likely plunder from some luckless Gorgorian merchant’s stock, and lounging crosswise upon the silken cushions reposed the Black Weasel himself.

  He was dressed all in black, of course, a fact which should have surprised no one of moderate intelligence. (Spurge was astonished.) In his gloved hands he cupped a golden goblet and sipped from it with a courtier’s practiced manner. Flanking the throne were a score of youths, none among them much older than Spurge’s captors. Although their jerkins, tunics, and hose were of leafy green and barky brown, the patches of flaming crimson acne dappling nearly every cheek made them poor candidates for camouflage maneuvers. They all looked peeved.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” the Black Weasel drawled, slinging his legs around and sitting up straight.

  “Lunch,” suggested Spurge’s fair-haired guard, and laughed until his voice cracked.

  “Please, Your Weaselship, I—yow!” cried Spurge, falling to his knees before the throne to discover rather sharply that a forest floor is a bit rockier than your common Old Hydrangean reception room. Holding back tears he said, “I’ve got a message for you. From—uh—the White Buzzard. No, wait, the White Wolver…no, no, there’s a behind in it someplace.”

  “Indeed there is.” The Black Weasel arched one sooty brow and waved his men away. “I would hear what this dolt has to tell me in private. Go, my hearties, get you gone.”

  The Black Weasel’s youthful honor-guard stayed put. “Get us gone where?” one demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” The Black Weasel was impatient. “Anywhere. It’s a big forest.”

  “Yeah, and there’s nothin’ to do anywhere in it,” a second spindly-legged Bold Bush-dweller pointed out.

  “It’s boring,” a third affirmed.

  “Why don’t you go out and waylay some passing merchants?” the Black Weasel suggested.

  “We done that,” the first lad said. “Took all their goods an’ stripped ’em of their breeches besides.”

  “We always strip ’em of their breeches,” said the second boy.

  “It’s boring,” the third repeated.

  “Well, then, why don’t you go have archery practice? Shoot at the butts.”

  “Done that, too,” said a fourth.

  “While them merchants was runnin’ off.”

  “Booooooooorrrrrrrriiiiinnnnnnng!”

  The Black Weasel scowled. The boys scowled back. With a snort that rippled his magnificent black beard and moustache, the Black Weasel set down his goblet, cupped his hands to his mouth and bawled, “Tadwyl! Tadwyl, get your worthless shanks over here at once!”

  “Coming, coming!” The glade resounded with the sound of a perfectly pitched, well-modulated voice which heralded the appearance of the first full-grown adult, besides the Black Weasel, that Spurge had yet seen in the forest. He was of middling height and slim, with a merry face, trailing brown locks, and the high brow of a poet (Old Hydrangean sages agree that it took more brainpower to come up with a rhyme for “orange” than to perfect the potion for curing the common cold). “You bellowed, Black Weasel?” he inquired, holding his guitar to one side as he made a graceful bow.

  “Listen, Tadwyl—”

  “Ah, ah, ah!” The gentleman waggled a violet-gloved finger at his leader. “That’s not the name I’m known by here and now.”

  “Your pardon, Purple Possum,” the Black Weasel replied. “Behold the prisoner that my able scouts, the Gre
en Mole and the Scarlet Shrew have captured.” He gestured at Spurge. “He says he has a message for me, but I can not seem to make my men understand that I wish to be alone to hear it. Do you think you might possibly…?”

  “He always keeps all the best secrets to hisself,” the first stripling complained.

  “’Snot fair!”

  “I wanna hear the message!”

  “Me, too.”

  “Aw, who cares? It’s probably boring.”

  “Everything’s boring here,” the expert on boring things chimed in. He was the skinniest and gangliest of the crew, with a complexion that must have glowed in the dark. “I hate this stupid forest. I hate this stupid bow. I hate my stupid name! Everyone else got a good name like the Blue Badger or the Fuschia Ferret. How come I got stuck being the M’genta Marmot, huh? I don’t even know what’s a marmot. Nor what’s m’genta, neither! I bet it’s somethin’ dirty, an’ that’s why everyone else is always laughing at me. I hate this whole stupid game!” He wiped his nose on the back of one hand and commenced sniveling. “I wanna go home!”

  The Purple Possum clapped the weepy boy on the back. “There, there, lad, don’t fret,” he said cheerfully. “Why, I’ve just now finished composing the latest song in the epic cycle of the Adventures of the Black Weasel, brave and dashing heroic leader of the Bold Bush-dwellers.”

  “So what?” the boy asked bluntly.

  “So…it’s called ‘How the Magenta Marmot Rescued the Black Weasel from a Fate Worse than Death’ is what.”

  “What?” The Black Weasel was livid, but his shout of outrage was swallowed whole by a chorus of eager cries from the Bold Bush-dwellers.

  “Wow! A new one orready? Keen!”

  “You gonna sing it for us, P.P.?”

  “An’ it’s the Marmot who saves the Black Weasel this time? Neat!”

  “Gee, I wish I was the Magenta Marmot.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Green Mole, you already got to save the Black Weasel’s life in ‘The Battle of the Milfeen Bridge’.”

  “One limerick, big deal.”

  “How come I don’t ever get to rescue the Black Weasel, huh? All I ever get to do is shoot stupid love-poems through the fair Lady Indecora’s window. I don’t even like the fair Lady Indecora. She’s only twelve and she’s got pimples.”

  “So do you.”

  “Do not!”

  “Do too!”

  “Do not!”

  “Do too!”

  “Do not!”

  The debate ended in a pummeling match which the Purple Possum broke up in short order. Then, strumming the first bars of the ever-popular “Ballad of the Black Weasel and the Crone with the Really Big Daughter,” he led the boys away into the trees.

  “Good old Possum,” said the Black Weasel. “I don’t know what I’d do without him. We were at school together, you know. He’s a miracle for keeping those little hellspits in line. Now—” he rested his hands on his knees and regarded Spurge with a wolfish grin “—the message?”

  “Gork,” said Spurge. He was still staring after the wake of the Purple Possum. “Is that—is they—are them—I mean, in the songs and all, I always got the idea that the Bold Bush-dwellers was…was…sort of older than that.”

  “Surely you don’t believe that those juvenile hobbledehoys are the whole of my fearless forces for the Hydrangean Resistance, do you?” the Black Weasel asked, a superior half-smile curling his lip.

  “Well, nnnnno, I guess not.”

  “Because they are.”

  The Black Weasel smiled no more. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a really good Resistance Movement going in this land? Especially at harvest time. Most adult males are family men. They can’t spare the time to go hanging out in a forest, ever ready to strike dread and trembling into the hearts of our brutal oppressors, when they’ve got a wife and kiddies to feed at home. And any man who does volunteer to join us is usually a ne’er-do-well, a lout so lazy that no decent woman would have him, a shiftless beggar who’ll turn tail in a fair fight but show up early on payday.”

  “Oh,” said Spurge.

  “So I make do with the young’uns,” the Black Weasel continued. “Get ’em young, train ’em up the way you’d like to have ’em, and there you are with a band of picked fighters fit to strike terror into the miserable hearts of the Gorgorians. Someday. The good thing about recruiting boys of this age is that they’ve got a whole lot of pent-up natural viciousness and an absolute passion for fooling around with weapons. I know I wouldn’t want to run into a bunch of ’em on a dark night.”

  “Don’t their folks object?” Spurge asked.

  “Not likely. Glad to get ’em out of the house, most are. And as long as good old Tadw…I mean, the Purple Possum comes strolling through their home villages every few weeks to sing about all the happy adventures the sprats are having in a wholesome atmosphere of simple food, fresh air, and hearty camaraderie, their mothers are content.” He stretched his long limbs luxuriously and added, “Now give me that message before I let the little slime-hounds have a bit of open-hearth cookery practice on you.”

  Spurge took a deep breath and launched himself upon the multicolored sea of the queen’s message. The Black Weasel listened carefully to his sister’s sending, even when Spurge hit the occasional clunker and had to double back several lines to correct himself. When at length the page had finished, the Black Weasel stroked his moustache and said, “I see.”

  “Do you?” Spurge was impressed.

  “I was wondering what had happened to the babies. Old Ludmilla’s a dear, but she always was a little thick.”

  “Oh, so it’s old Ludmilla who’s the White Doe? Or the Silver Hart’s behind?”

  The Black Weasel ignored the question. Instead he reached into a beautifully carved wooden box that stood beside his throne and removed writing materials. Having dashed off a note, he took the brass-bound hunting horn from his belt and blew a long blast.

  His summons went unanswered. A second blast had as little effect, and a third. In the end he gave up and just hollered off into the woods, “POSSUM!” The Purple Possum reappeared, the rest of the Bold Bush-dwellers in tow.

  “You shrieked, O Black Weasel?” he inquired brightly.

  “Who is our best archer?”

  The Purple Possum considered. “That would be the Puce Mongoose.”

  “Well, here.” The Black Weasel flicked the note at his comrade-in-arms. “Have him send this to my sister.”

  Spurge watched with growing dismay as the message was plucked from the forest floor and passed to a bandy-legged redhead with a bad case of adenoids. “Just a minute!” he objected. “If that’s a message for the queen, well, I’m a messenger, after all.”

  “Correction,” said the Black Weasel. “You were a messenger. You are a Bold Bush-dweller.”

  “Am I?” Spurge was at an utter loss.

  “Sorry about that,” said the Purple Possum, patting him on the back. “It can’t be helped. You weren’t blindfolded when they brought you here, so you know the way to our woodland hideout. If you went back, you might reveal it.”

  “Toldja to blindfold him, Mole!” The blond half of Spurge’s enforced escort gave the dark-haired half a nasty shove in the ribs.

  “Ahhh, shuddup, Shrew!” The dark-haired lad responded with a shove of his own. “I’m not the one went an’ blew his nose in our ’fficial Bold Bush-dwellers’ regulation blindfold.”

  “I wouldn’t say a word, honest!” Spurge protested. “Look, ask anyone who knows me, they’ll tell you I’m lucky if I can remember a word!”

  The Black Weasel shook his head. “It’s remarkable how much more dependable one’s memory becomes with the application of a little basic Gorgorian torture. I think it involves wolverines.” He shrugged. “Welcome to the Resistance, noble patriot.”

  * * * *

  Queen Artemisia had just gotten the baby down for another nap when the arrow came zipping in through the window and lodged itself with
a resounding thwang! in the headboard of the royal cradle. Cursing fluently, the queen yanked the missile free with one hand, using the other to jiggle the cradle in a fruitless attempt to lull the baby back to sleep.

  It was not until two earsplitting hours later that Artemisia was at last free to read the missive which had been lashed to the arrow’s shaft:

  “Unto the White Doe does the Black Weasel, brave and dashing heroic leader of the Bold Bush-dwellers, send greetings and regrets. The Dun Buzzard never got here. As to the fate of the Golden Eaglets, your guess is as good as mine. And what in the name of Prunella’s Humiliation was all that side-blather you were dishing out about Silver Harts and Rosy Hinds? Look, I’ve got my own problems, running this open-air madhouse. Next time you have to get in touch, keep it simple and use a messenger capable of out-thinking cheese, all right? Now I’m stuck with him. Give my nephew a kiss, burn this message, and try to slip a knife between Gudge’s ribs if you’ve got a minute. The Purple Possum says hello and remember all the fun we had that last summer in the haymow. I don’t remember any haymow, but never mind. Keep smiling, and death to your husband.” It was signed with a badly drawn impression of a weasel’s paw that looked more like a splatted spider.

  Artemisia re-read the letter, hoping against hope to find it telling her a different tale. It was no use: the fatal words remained. Ludmilla had never reached the Black Weasel’s camp. The princes were gone, none knew where.

  The baby snuffled and began to cry again. This time Artemisia did not curse the racket. She gathered up the wailing infant in her arms and held her close. “Oh, my poor daughter,” she murmured as her tears ran down to mingle with the infant’s own. “Oh, my poor, darling little girl.”

  Chapter Five

  The hayrack tottered, swayed, and then slowly, with the magnificent grace of a plump dowager crossing a ballroom, it fell forward, leaving a trail of chaff floating on the gentle spring air and making a stately descent toward a black and loathsome mud puddle. Atop the wooden frame Wulfrith howled in terror and delight, flailing his arms as if he thought he could somehow propel the structure upright again, thereby sending showers of hay in all directions.