Split Heirs Read Free Page B

beheading gave you such upsetting dreams for months afterward that you didn’t really want to sleep all that much.)
    And then she had married Gudge.
    The Gorgorian chief kept her up until all hours of the night, insisting that his new wife join him for all royal council sessions. He said it was to show the Old Hydrangeans that there were no hard feelings and that they would still have a voice in the government. That would have been a flattering command, coming from a sane man — but this was Gudge.
    Artemisia soon learned that the real business of running the kingdom was transacted during the day. For the Gorgorian, nighttime council session meant long, sloppy drinking bouts with his cronies and any of the Old Hydrangean nobility stupid or unlucky enough to attend. Few of the native aristocracy survived some of Gudge’s more imaginative “Fun With Beer” games, especially the ones involving reptiles, squash, and holding your breath.
    After the invasion was finalized, the late King Fumitory’s former prime minister, Lord Desmodium, tried to make the best of a bad deal. He suggested that there might be something valid or interesting about Gorgorian culture; it only wanted to be studied. He then spent several months visiting the tents of those Gorgorians who had flatly refused to live within city walls, asking them to tell him all the old legends.
    There wasn’t one of them that didn’t include the gods getting disgustingly drunk just before perpetrating some unspeakably obscene and revolting “miracle” upon helpless humanity. About the time the seventy-third Gorgorian crone began the nasal chant, “The world came to be when Skufa, the Great Mother, needed a new place to void her blessed bowels and sacred stomach and holy bladder after drinking with her husband-son, Pog, Lord of Fermented Grain Products…” Lord Desmodium got the idea and retired to his country villa to raise goldfinches.
    So it appeared that Gudge was a man true to his gods. To do him justice, he was willing to accept new ones. The Old Hydrangeans had long ago perfected the fine art of brewery, and Gudge’s first pious act had been to commission one of the court poets to write an epic in which the Gorgorian god Pog, Lord of Fermented Grain Products, fell madly in love when he first beheld the beautiful Hydrangean virgin goddess Prunella, Lady of the Five Hundred Local Beers. Then he raped her.
    Gudge showed his religious nature by refusing to do anything at the nighttime council meetings until he had paid proper homage to Prunella. This he did by attempting to sample all five hundred of the Lady’s sacrosanct local brews. He made his council members do the same, and it wasn’t long before the moment of unparalleled horror came when the goddess’s influence convinced Gudge he had the best singing voice in all Hydrangea and yes he could so too sing the entire “Epic of Pog and Prunella” with a pitcher of beer balanced on his head.
    Artemisia begged off the nocturnal council sessions as soon as possible, but still she was cheated of sleep when her lord returned to the royal bedchamber and…
    Well, if it wasn’t Pog and Prunella all over again, it was a close blood relative.
    It didn’t bear thinking about. She had greeted her pregnancy as a rescue from Gudge’s rough affection, but pregnancy turned out to be just as big a sleep-cheat as Gudge, especially after the first three months.
    How wonderful it is to be able to lie on my stomach again! Artemisia mused between dreams. They were very pleasant dreams, mostly centering on the several futures of her children.
    First her imagination painted an idyllic picture of her tiny daughter Avena, being raised in the merry greenwood. The Black Weasel would of course have a Hydrangean court-in-exile, with all the old rites and refinements that poor, dear, decapitated da had enjoyed. The only difference would be that the Black