Split Heirs

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Four hours later, while Wulfrith was explaining chapter 49 to Ubri all over the alcove carpet, the doors opened and King Gudge walked into the library. The Gorgorian monarch was still mumbling to himself—something about “Right shoulder, rain; left shoulder, luck. I still say it’s a load of ox apples!” He scanned the imposing rows of books and spat. “Look it up myself, the wench says. The facts are documented, she says. Documented my hairy bum. Documented where, I want to know? Damn. Should’ve brought one of those Old Hydries with me. I bet you’ve got to know how to read to find out where this right-shoulder-left-shoulder swill’s written up!”

  A dim spark of thought, solitary and forlorn inside Gudge’s skull, flickered with a memory: Libraries are where you look for documented facts—“I know that!” Gudge snapped. “Why else would I be wasting my time here?”—and librarians are who you get to do all the scut-work for you.

  “Oh.” That was an idea Gudge could use. He looked around the dusty shelves but didn’t see any librarians there. He gazed upwards, but none were hanging from the rafters. Then he heard some interesting sounds coming from an alcove. “Sounds like a librarian,” he decided, and went to fetch it.

  It wasn’t a librarian, but it was a sight to bring joy to a simple barbarian king’s fatherly heart.

  “That’s my boy, Arbol!” shouted Gudge, and scared poor Wulfrith all the way into Chapter Fifty-Two.

  Chapter Twenty

  “But…” Wulfrith said, as he tried to tie the drawstring of his breeches.

  “But nothing, Arbol,” Gudge told him. “If you think there’s any ‘but’ then you’ve been listening to that damned mother of yours too much.”

  “But…”

  “It’s about bloody time you became a man,” Gudge continued. “Why, you’re what, almost fifteen? I was…well…I was…” Gudge had never been good with numbers, but the memory did eventually surface. “I was scarcely fourteen! That’s two years I’ve been waiting for you, boy!”

  “But…” Wulfrith was too concerned with questions of mistaken identity to pay any attention to the royal grasp of mathematics.

  “Your mother probably hasn’t told you what comes next,” Gudge said. “Ox’s blood, she probably doesn’t even know, being a Hydrie, and a woman.”

  “Next?” Wulfrith had been desperately trying to find some way to tell the king that he was not Arbol that would not result in decapitation, or evisceration, or other impediments to further vitality, but Gudge’s latest words had entirely distracted him.

  Next?

  None of the books mentioned anything after Chapter Fifty-Two, unless you wanted to count washing up, or getting married, or disemboweling unfaithful wives, or any of that sort of thing.

  Well…some did mention a few things, but Wulfrith hadn’t really taken those seriously. And they didn’t agree with each other, anyway.

  Gudge clapped Wulfrith on the shoulder, staggering him, and announced, “Now, my boy…now we get drunk!”

  “Oh, your Majesty,” Ubri said from behind them. She had finally managed to get her skirt back to the general vicinity of her waist, and to get herself upright. “Your Majesty, I’m so pleased…”

  “Good! Just a beginner, and he’s already pleasing his women!” Gudge exclaimed, not looking back.

  “No, I mean I’m happy that your son…”

  “Me, too,” Gudge said, interrupting her, “but I won’t be if you don’t shut up. This is man talk.” His hand fell convincingly to Obliterator’s hilt, and Ubri stopped dead in her tracks and watched the two males depart.

  She sighed. It was progress, at any rate, and Gudge had certainly been feeling mellow. He’d given a warning first. She supposed she should feel lucky.

  Wulfrith was unsure whether he should consider himself lucky or cursed. Being mistaken for the prince even by Arbol’s own father, when he wasn’t even trying, was quite an accomplishment for an impostor—but he wished he could get away from the king long enough to find the real Prince Arbol. The idea of getting drunk with King Gudge was rather terrifying; everyone knew the attrition rate among the king’s drinking companions ran very high, and besides, if this “getting drunk” was a special occasion, what were all those rowdy, bellowing, bloodstained evenings that used up so many drinking companions?

  And just what would be involved in this “getting drunk”?

  He wished he could find some excuse to get away, but he couldn’t think of anything. His brain seemed to have shut down in panic, and his body was mostly interested in lying down somewhere and relaxing a little, not in slipping away.

  Not that the king was offering any obvious opportunities for escape.

  The first stop in “getting drunk” was the kitchen, where the king happily swatted various serving wenches on their respective bottoms and sent a steward down to the cellars for wine—“A little something to hold us until we get there,” Gudge explained, as the steward handed him an immense earthenware jug. Wulfrith nodded unhappily.

  Gudge pulled the cork with his teeth and gulped down approximately half a gallon, then handed the jug to Wulfrith. “Take a swig, boy,” the king commanded.

  Obediently, Wulfrith took a sip. He gagged, but kept the stuff down.

  It tasted…well, once, when one of the real prince’s Companions had taken a good whacking in fighting practice, he had soiled his pants, bled all over them, and fallen sitting into a mud puddle. Wulfrith happened to have seen the lad’s breeches on their way to the palace laundry; more to the point, he had smelled them as they were carried past.

  That was what the stuff in the jug tasted like. Only worse.

  Wulfrith was not stupid enough to say anything about the taste; for that matter, he was unable to say anything at all for several seconds.

  The second stop in “getting drunk” was the palace stable, where the grooms hurried to obey the king’s bellowed orders, fetching and saddling Gudge’s and Arbol’s favored mounts.

  Wulfrith had never played Arbol outside the palace before; this whole ordeal was growing steadily more terrifying.

  At the third stop, however, some of the fear subsided; Wulfrith finally discovered what sort of a celebration “getting drunk” was, in this context.

  “Getting drunk” consisted of marching into a tavern, loudly announcing one’s presence, and then proclaiming, “My boy’s a man today! Drinks for everyone!” Any arguments from tavern proprietors were cut short with Obliterator.

  Then the king would down a gallon or so of whatever the place served, while everyone else (including Wulfrith) drank a pint apiece. After that, Gudge held forth in lurid and increasingly fictional detail about his son’s amorous feats, gulping liquor between sentences.

  When the need to piss exceeded his thirst, Gudge would march out, splatter the tavern’s front wall, then jump on his horse and ride off to the next tavern, while Wulfrith struggled to keep up.

  When the taverns directly adjoined each other, as a few did, the riding hardly seemed necessary, but Gudge apparently considered it part of the ritual.

  With each tavern, the descriptions of the supposed Arbol’s amatory prowess grew more obscene and less coherent, but the king’s temper grew ever better. By the fourteenth stop, objections to the royal progress were no longer necessarily fatal; Gudge was too drunk to handle Obliterator with any skill, and instead simply punched anyone who did not immediately oblige his whims, usually aiming at the annoyance’s face, but not always hitting it.

  Wulfrith, harried and embarrassed, watched all this with growing amazement. He was convinced that he had seen the king imbibe several times his own volume in alcoholic beverage, and he did not quite understand how that was possible, even allowing for the amount that had then been distributed against various tavern walls. Gudge’s face had become a truly amazing shade of purplish-red.

  It had never occurred to Wulfrith how many taverns a city the size of the Hydrangean capital could hold; the number was well over a score, apparently.

  It was at the conclusion
of their visit to number twenty-two or twenty-three, a peculiar and nameless little place far up on the hill in the Old Hydrangean section that appeared to serve only peppermint liqueur, that Wulfrith, fairly intoxicated himself at this point, got up the nerve to ask, “Are we going to visit every tavern in the city?”

  Gudge, cheerfully pissing in the general direction of the tavern wall, turned a bleary grin on his son. “Tha’s gen’rul idea, yeah. ’Less we fall down firs’.”

  “Oh. After we’ve visited them all, what do we do then?”

  Gudge blinked. “An’ we haven’t fallen over yet? We start over again!” His grin grew impossibly wide, and he belched loudly.

  “How…how many…”

  Wulfrith had intended to ask how many taverns there were, in all, and maybe how the king came to know every single one of them, but Gudge was no longer listening; he was, instead, climbing onto his horse.

  Wulfrith provided a steadying hand before clambering onto his own mount.

  “Thanks, Arbol,” Gudge managed, as he wavered in the saddle. He shook the reins, dug in his heels, and his tired horse set out at a fast trot.

  Wulfrith hurried after, his head swimming with every step his horse took. He had drunk far more than ever before in his life, even if it was only a tiny fraction of the king’s consumption, and the effects were definitely making themselves felt. He was beginning to lose touch with the world around him.

  “Y’ a goo’ boy, Arbol,” Gudge called, grinning.

  “My name’s not Arbol, is it?” Wulfrith said. “’Snot Dunwin, either. It’s Wulfrith. I’m sure it is.”

  “‘Swhat?” Gudge, somehow forgetting that he was on horseback, turned to face his son. He was now sitting sidesaddle on a large horse trotting down a steep hill, over cobblestones.

  Wulfrith giggled. The king looked silly, swaying like that.

  “I’m not Prince Arbol,” he said, “I’m his food taster!”

  “No!” Gudge bellowed, and, still sidesaddle, tried to draw his sword.

  That was too much; the god who looks after fools and drunkards threw up His intangible hands in disgust, and Gudge toppled from the saddle. He landed headfirst on the cobbles, heavily as a sack of grain; he rolled several yards down the steep slope, then stopped and lay very still indeed.

  His amusement turned to horror, Wulfrith struggled to rein in his own mount. Dismounting, he hurried to the fallen Gorgorian, and felt for a heartbeat, for a pulse, for breath, for any sign that the king still lived.

  There was none.

  He looked around for help, and spotted three of the King’s Own Guards, as his old Gorgorian raiders were now called, at the foot of the hill.

  “Hey,” Wulfrith called from where he sat beside the late King Gudge. “Help!”

  He then realized this was probably not the cleverest thing he had ever done. Wouldn’t it have been better to get back to the palace and put his mask back on, and leave the king to be found by someone else? What if they thought he, Wulfrith, had murdered King Gudge? What did Gorgorians do to regicides?

  “Who’s there?” one of the guards called, and Wulfrith knew he’d wasted his chance.

  He wasn’t sure who he should claim to be just now, so rather than identifying himself, as the soldier probably expected him to do, Wulfrith called, “It’s the king! He’s fallen from his horse!”

  He saw the soldiers glance at one another; then all three of them came charging up the hill. A moment later they stood around, looking down at the dead king and the live boy.

  “That’s old Gudge, all right.”

  “Dead as a rock, ain’t he?”

  “Sure looks like it. I s’pose we should take him back and let a doctor make it official.”

  “And you’re the prince, aren’t you?” One of the guards squinted at Wulfrith’s face. “Hard to see in this light.”

  “Um…” Wulfrith wasn’t quite ready to claim to be Arbol; admitting he wasn’t, however, seemed like a very bad idea just now.

  “’Course it’s Prince Arbol,” one of the others said. “Ain’t you got eyes? Moon’s up, innit?”

  “Yeah, but…stand up, boy, let’s get a look at you.”

  Wulfrith got unsteadily to his feet.

  “That’s the prince, all right.” The three soldiers nodded. “Assuming the old king’s dead,” the tallest one remarked, “there’s no use in wasting time. I wanna be first to say it.”

  “Say what?” The other two looked at the speaker doubtfully.

  “Oh, come on, you know.”

  “So say it, then.”

  Wulfrith looked at their faces with no idea what the three were talking about. Then the tall one grabbed the boy’s hand, raised it over his head, and shouted, “The king is dead! Long live King Arbol!”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Just to the library?” Wulfrith pleaded with the guard. “I’ll come right back, I promise.”

  The guard, a Gorgorian from the roots of his lice-infested hair to the tips of his grime-imbedded toenails, snorted with laughter. Or perhaps he simply snorted. At any rate, the resulting gob that splatted to the floor of the tower chamber was impressive. “Yer Majesty’s got a good sense o’ humor, I’ll give you that. The libr’y! What for? It’s all books down there.”

  “Yes, well, um, I—” Wulfrith bit his lip. “I like books,” he finished rather feebly.

  The guard gave him the fish-eye. “Here! You sure it wasn’t you as plunked down on yer head on them cobbles?”

  “No, I’m sure—I mean, I’m pretty sure, but—”

  “Nice bit o’ business, that,” the guard added. “Gettin’ the old bastard drunk an’ then givin’ him a little push off the saddle, spong onto the stones.”

  Wulfrith was flabbergasted. “I did no such thing!”

  The guard just shook his head, smiling fondly. “Oh, don’t worry about it. If you ain’t the sort to brag, I’ll keep mum. ’Course it’s a fine old Gorgorian tradition, kings’ sons skrinking their dads. Not one you’d’ve been like to hear on. Some reason, the kings allus try t’ keep that branch o’ learnin’ from their boys.”

  “I’m telling you, I didn’t kill anyone! The king got drunk and he fell off his horse when I told him that I—”

  The guard wasn’t in a listening mood. He leaned on his spear and stared dreamily off into space. “Aye, now yer t’ be crowned king, you’ll be a right change fer us, an’ no mistake. Got a good bit o’ Gudge in you, but there’s that Hydrie strain as well.” He was one of the more thoughtful Gorgorian warriors. Had he but known, he was a rarity. In the days before the Hydrangean Conquest, most Gorgorian men were so busy looting, raping, and burning things that they didn’t have the time for pondering the future. Given the nature of their chosen profession, very few of them lived long enough to have a future.

  Wulfrith sighed and gave up, leaving the guard to his meditations. Back in the inmost room of his tower suite, he reviewed his own situation and found it ghastly.

  Ever since that ill-fated “celebration of manhood”, he had been kept confined to this suite of rooms in the Tower of Smug Reflection. The royal council, for once relieved of the danger of unexpected decapitations while in session, took over the instant that news of King Gudge’s death reached the palace. They were waiting for him in the courtyard when Wulfrith returned, accompanied by the patrol and Gudge’s corpse. Before the boy could escape to inform the real Prince Arbol of what had happened, they threw a heavy white velvet cloak over his head and bundled him away.

  It was decreed before a solemn assemblage of the Gorgorian chiefs that Prince Arbol would remain in isolation until all the proper coronation rites had been performed, Old Hydrangean style. The chiefs saw no harm in this, as long as one of Gudge’s bloodline wound up on the throne. They named one of their number—a Gorgorian worthy called Bulmuk—to be their representative and oversee the whole process.

  “Don’t wanna,” Bulmuk said. “I wanna go Gudge’s funeral.”

  His colleagues told
him that he had to stay with the Old Hydries, to look out for Gorgorian interests and make sure none of their fussy customs did anything to hurt Gudge’s only son and heir.

  “Who cares?” Bulmuk replied. “He dies, one of us get the crown. Lotta blood, more funerals. I wanna go Gudge’s funeral.”

  The other chiefs assured him that while they didn’t mind a little civil war now and then, they’d rather not have one just now. They also told him that if he refused, the first funeral would be his.

  Bulmuk drew his sword and moodily hacked an underbutler to pieces. “I’ll stay,” he said, pouting. It was very affecting to see the tears of disappointment in his eyes.

  His friends promised that when the funeral was over, they would tell him exactly what everyone there was wearing and who killed whom using what and how many warriors drank themselves to death and if there were any grave treasures buried with Gudge that might be worth stealing later. They also swore on the Sacred Gorgorian Ox that they’d bring him back a couple of leftover kegs and some fruit.

  Pacified, Bulmuk took his place among the Hydrangean nobles. From time to time he would come up to Wulfrith’s room to demand whether the lad knew anything at all about the upcoming coronation rituals.

  “Anything to drink there?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Wulfrith had to admit.

  “Stupid Hydries,” Bulmuk grumbled and went away until the next time.

  In spite of his recent bad experience with strong drink, every passing day made poor captive Wulfrith long for a snootful, if only to help him forget his situation. They hadn’t even let him out to attend the late king’s funeral, and they refused to let him communicate with anyone.

  Wulfrith sat in a sumptuous chair and stared at his hands. He was fairly sure that his magic could have unlocked the door, and he could have transformed the guards—though he couldn’t be sure what he’d get—but then what? He had no idea where to go, or what to do, if he got out of the tower room, and there would be guards and Gorgorians all over the palace, probably. He couldn’t transform them all before someone stuck a sword through him or did something equally drastic.