Split Heirs (4 page)

“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 babies, 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!
”

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, somewhere, 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.