A Lion Among Men Page 3

  “May I ask, what is a court reporter, Mr. Brrr?” Sister Hospitality pushed the drapes back to let in sunlight the color of old bandages.

  “Sir Brrr, when I’m at home,” he corrected apologetically. “Title awarded by Lady Glinda herself, at the conclusion of that little Matter of Dorothy.”

  “Beg pardon,” said Sister Hospitality, no tone of regret to stain her inflection.

  “Not that I use it,” he hurried on. “The house has fallen on hard times. I do pickup secretarial work to make ends meet. Now, to business. I am dispatched by the Lord High Magistrate of the Emerald City to make enquiries of a member of your—tribe? Flock? Whatever it is a body of maunts calls itself. You know, like a swarm of bees, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls.”

  “I’ve heard that lions consort together in a pride,” said Sister Hospitality.

  “Those that let others join,” interjected Brrr. “Let’s not go there.”

  “Call us a deference of maunts, if you must. And deferential, then, within reason, we’ll try to help. Do you know the name of the maunt you have come to ask about? Though we take new names as our obligations require, most of us remember what our original names were.”

  The Lion steadied the spectacles on his nose. Dander flecked the lenses; no wonder he peered and blinked at the small notebook in his paw. “I can’t read my own writing. Jackal?”

  “We have no Sister Jackal.”

  “Sister Quackle? No, perhaps a C. Cackle?”

  Sister Hospitality said carefully, “Oh, dear. I wonder if you could mean Yackle. She was laid to rest over a year ago.”

  “Was she an oracle?”

  “Sir Brrr. We are a convent of holy women. We don’t trade in prophecies. What would a seer be doing in a mauntery?”

  “You haven’t answered my question. Was she an oracle?”

  “I can’t possibly answer that question. I was not her confessor.”

  “Who was?”

  Sister Hospitality thought. “Actually, she didn’t have one. She wasn’t professed, I think.”

  “Would someone here know if Yackle was an oracle?”

  “The old Superior Maunt might have, but she’s gone too.”

  “Holiday?”

  “The Final Holiday.”

  “Sheesh. Occupational hazard in this place?”

  “Growing old? Yes.”

  Brrr explained. A knotty little concern in the courts had prompted a senior magistrate to call for a finding. Brrr had been dispatched by order of the Stamp of the Emperor to pursue the matter in any direction. From a side pocket he produced a notarized writ of entry flecked with bits of bread crust. He flattened it with a paw. The legal penmanship crosshatched the vellum into illegibility. “This authorizes any enquiry I want to make, as it happens.”

  “Are you bullying me, sir?”

  “I don’t need to bully the likes of you,” he replied, tapping the paper. “This is the bully.”

  “I haven’t the mind for this, nor the time,” said Sister Hospitality. “Nor am I the authority in the House; we are governed by a Council. But I can and must report to them what you say. Why don’t you tell me precisely what brings you here?”

  “Highly secret and hush-hush.”

  “I respect that. I’m Sister Hospitality, after all, not Sister Rumormonger. If hospitality requires confidentiality, I’m qualified.” She made a shushing gesture, tapping her forefinger against her pursed lips, then whispered, “I’m all ears.”

  The Lion muttered to himself a little, weighing his options. Finally he allowed this much: He had recently spent a week in the Gillikinese city of Shiz, going through the deposit library of Shiz University. He had required to see the papers of a onetime governor of Crage Hall, long since departed into the Afterlife, rest her soul. A Madame Morrible. The frumpy little scholaresses at the desk had put up an argument, but he’d prevailed.

  “And what did you find, pray tell?”

  The Lion appeared to be governing a small temper, as if he thought Sister Hospitality’s curiosity unseemly. When he spoke, though, his tone was even enough. “Since you ask so nicely: Cryptic notes in what looked like the deceased headmistress’s hand identified a questionable personage known only as Yackle. An entity of some sort, but what sort? An agent of whom? If an oracle, was she a charlatan or a savant? And the way these investigations go, don’t you know, one thing has led to another. The Motherhouse of the order of Saint Glinda, in Saint Glinda’s Square in the Emerald City, had known a Mother Yackle but had sent her away for retirement. To a mission chapel, a benighted outpost in the Shale Shallows. And so, as they say in the pantomimes, ta-da!”

  The white cat settled in a patch of sunlight and began to clean itself. It all but disappeared.

  “I do so wish you’d come sooner,” said the maunt. “There’s a little thing called armed conflict going on locally.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “You ought not to have bothered. There’s nothing I can do for you now. Whoever Yackle was—an ancient madwoman older than sin itself—she’s passed away, and to the best of my knowledge she was never an oracle anyway.”

  “Think again!” said a voice at the door.

  They turned.

  “I knew you’d be here sooner or later,” said Yackle, “but it took me the better part of the season to get up the stairs. Glad I’m in time.”

  The Lion, not knowing precisely what he was seeing, merely gaped. Sister Hospitality sloped to the floor with the clop of a collapsing ironing board. “You seem to have killed her,” said the Lion to the newcomer, affably enough.

  “All those months that I couldn’t manage to kill myself, and I slay the righteous with my first remark?” said Yackle. “There’s gratitude for you.”

  The Lion cocked out a sleeved elbow. She gripped it. He guided her to a chair. Her voluminous winding sheets were unstained by ordure or blood; they were merely dusty from having been trailed through the basements. He could detect no stink of corruption. “The odor of sanctity,” said Yackle peremptorily.

  “You are an oracle,” said Brrr. “You’re the one I hoped to find.”

  Shadowpuppet sniffed around the edges of Sister Hospitality, who came around and sat up. “You’re blind, not to mention dead, Mother Yackle,” sputtered the maunt. “How could you make your way upstairs?”

  “My inner eyesight seems to have been improved with my little reprieve from the distractions of dailiness,” Yackle admitted. “I could remember every step taken to cart me downstairs, and how high the door handle was, and so on.”

  “No time like the present,” said the Lion, extracting from another pocket a pen and a small pot of ink with a cork stopper. “The tides of war go backward as well as forward, and some army might wash up here by teatime. I’d never be able to concentrate if there were men ballyhooing about. Distractible that way, but there you are.”

  “You have no business leaving your bier and barging in here as if this is some sort of a—a saloon,” insisted Sister Hospitality in a honking voice, but they banished her and set to the task.

  • 5 •

  H E DIDN’T like the look of Mother Yackle. Who could? She was a walking cadaver. Her eyes rolled, ungovernable but to the spectacle of her inner sight. Her lips were thin as string. Her nails had kept growing while she was interred, and they made a clacking sound like a set of bamboo blinds being lowered against the noonday sun. When she went to scratch a place on her scalp, she misjudged the angle of approach and nearly punctured her own eardrum.

  It’s been a long time since I have seen Death this close up, he thought. This is Death refusing to die. She’s a centerfold for a mortuary quarterly.

  “I was quite a looker in my time,” she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know that she must be hideous?

  “Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”

  “A comedian,” she observed. “I come back from the very gates of death to be interviewed by a vaudeville wannabe.” r />
  “Let’s get started.” He flipped open his notebook. At the top of the page he wrote a note to himself: Interview One. Don’t vomit.

  She paused so long that Brrr thought perhaps she’d expired. My timing, he thought. Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

  But then she exhaled again. “What do you want from me, kind sir?” Her vowels were lengthy, as if she intended to wring out of her words every drop of nuance they might supply.

  “I’m conducting an investigation,” he said. “Official business. Consider the codes quoted and the documents flashed at you. You’re blind, you can’t read them anyway, so take it on faith. We don’t have a lot of time. I’m chatting up anyone who had anything to do with a Madame Morrible. Your name has come up.”

  “That’s no answer,” she said. “My name comes up everywhere if you dig deep enough. I want to know why Madame Morrible’s archives are being combed. Why are you bothering?”

  “The Courts are building some kind of case, and I’m preparing a background paper.”

  “A court case with Madame Morrible as a lead witness? I knew she was talented, but if she can give sworn testimony from beyond the grave, she has better connections than I thought.”

  He snorted at this, and while his guard was let down, she jabbed at him, “Or are you sniffing around here for the young fellow named Liir? Last I heard, he’d disappeared into the lawless lands.”

  The Lion started but hoped she hadn’t picked up on it. Once in his regrettable past he personally had known someone named Liir, a ragamuffin boy who had lived out west with the famous Witch. But Brrr would keep his own counsel. He sang softly in a lullabye voice, “I need to take your deposition, good granny. Don’t you worry your tired noggin over poor little me.”

  “I needn’t answer you merely because you ask,” she said. “‘In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.’ Isn’t that what the old bastard, our dearly departed Wizard, used to say?”

  He hadn’t figured on her sass. “Perhaps you’ve been comatose through the current troubles. Oz has an Emperor now. One with an iron will, as it happens.”

  “Threats don’t work on the chronically dead,” she replied, “which is close enough to what I am to make no difference. So try again, mister. You tell me something about yourself first. I want to know who I’m talking to before I decide. And what you’re really after. And for whom you’re working. And what immunity from prosecution I might be afforded. My testimonial privileges. Then we’ll see if I feel like rewarding you by answering your questions.”

  He took a breath in. “And don’t lie to me,” she continued. “I can be vexed when I find I have been lied to.”

  Where to start? Always the question. “Well, for one thing, I am a gentleman sporting a very fabulous weskit,” he said, partly mocking, and to see just how blind she was. But he regretted the gambit at once. If she leaned forward to feel his vest, she’d rip it to shreds with her nails, and it wasn’t in such good shape to begin with, actually. Secondhand, if not fourth-hand.

  “Not a spot of mange?” she asked. Did she know he was a Lion, not a man?

  “I’m not talking about my own hide. I mean I’m decked out in a gentleman’s item. A bespoke article. It swims on me a bit, since I’m leaner than I once was, but it’s a Rampini original. Teck-fur detailing, with a kind of red highlight. Can you see color?”

  “No, but I can smell it,” she said. “Yellow, yellow, yellow.”

  The cozy old invalid was sneering at him. He unsheathed his claws, just for a moment. Let her droopy ears catch the release of each horny talon from its velvet socket.

  “A shame to start off on the wrong foot, don’t you agree?” he said. Plaintively, almost a miaow, to the castanet shuffle of his claws sliding against one another.

  She heard his feline assertion. “You are a Lion,” she said, and whispered theatrically: “the king of the forest, no less!”

  She used just the perfect phrase designed to poke the embers of his childhood into flamed memory despite his resistance. The King of the Forest. He shuddered involuntarily, hoping she couldn’t hear his jowls jiggle.

  She pressed her advantage. “I’m neither a judge nor a jury. I’m a witness. Tell me who you are, Sir Brrr, and how you got here. And tell me the truth. Then maybe I’ll comply. You weren’t already weaselly when you were young, were you? Even weasels aren’t very weaselly at first.”

  With elegant steps, looking sore of paw, Shadowpuppet paced to the legs of Brrr’s chair and purred to be picked up. Brrr obliged. The cat calmed him down.

  Taking this deposition would be one campaign he wouldn’t screw up. For the love of Ozma, wasn’t he the equal of this crazy old coot draped in a tablecloth? And he had his writ in hand, permission to take her into custody if need be. He would get the goods if they were to be gotten.

  If it was to be cat and mouse here, he had the genetic qualifications to play the cat. He had the motivation. He had the might of the bloody Court to back him up, too, if need be. He would redeem his reputation among the great and the good of Oz, and he’d wipe the smirks off their goddamn faces with his own beribboned tail.

  “You’re an oracle, I’m told,” he said. “You ought to be able to see my youth, if you want to.”

  “I like to hear it told,” she replied. “I have an appetite for childhoods. Insatiable, as it happens.”

  The Nursery in the Forest

  • 1 •

  T HE PARTICULARITY of other folks’ youthful memories always mocked Brrr. The first visit to Grandmama’s! When the coconut fell on the teacher’s head! The time that baby Albern almost choked! How we laughed, how we cried. How we remember. Together.

  His first and oldest past was undifferentiated. Unending forest. Unremarkable seasons. Loneliness without hope of relief. How could Brrr imagine relief from loneliness when he hadn’t found companionship yet? What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

  Brrr didn’t know if his mother had died in childbirth, or been stricken with amnesia. Or maybe she just lit out because she was an unnatural mother. A loner or a schizo. Or maybe she was drummed out of the pride for low behavior. He used to care which it was.

  Though of course he didn’t take it in at the time, he also grew up without the benefit of a tribe of his own. No aunties to fill in the blanks about what his mother had been like, and where she had gone, and why. No growly father hiding a whiskered grin of affection even as he set to cuff his darling cub, raising him up right in the ways of the family.

  His earliest memories—gluey hazes—involved skulking about the Great Gillikin Forest north of Shiz like—like a skunk, like a grite, like one of those creatures who can become repellent even to their own kind. Like a human.

  In later years as an arriviste in the Emerald City—having sat through a number of poetry readings—he found a way to characterize the Great Gillikin Forest. After a second sherry he could wax most convincingly about shrouds of spiderwebs. The dank naves suggested by rows of diseased potterpine, slatted with bars of cold yellow light. The forest floor carpeted with thornberry prickle. The stupid fecundity of the spring, the swift and unrewarding summer, the gloomy autumn, and—oh hell—the bone-taxing winter. What damned Lioness would bother to deliver a cub just to abandon him there, of all benighted places?

  People nodded politely as they inched away.

  The trees creaked as if the whole world were constantly flexing its muscles, about to pounce. A fern could unfurl with a snap that knocked you six steps toward a sanitorium. Owls, bats, forest harpies, badgers. A wild turkey in the undergrowth, startled into flight, making a noise of small explosives. To say nothing of fog. He hated fog. And poison ivy. And don’t even mention snakes.

  Or elves. Or any beast larger than a runtling pig.

  The first humans he could remember coming upon were the mad Lurlinists. Brrr spied on them from behind screens of bracken. They dabbled in heathen rituals. Smoke and incense, sin
ging in minor thirds. That sort of thing. He’d deduced language from them, language of a sort: an orotund pitch derived from religious prosody. Somewhat off-putting, as it turned out. It hadn’t helped him to act the part of an alley cat later on, when he’d wanted to flee into the demimonde.

  But he had loved the contrapuntality of discussion even before he quite understood that words possessed dedicated meanings. Eavesdropping on two travelers arguing over which way to go: savory plum nectar to him, blanket and kisses and mother’s milk to him. The lilt of human voices in conversation, the nasal sonority, the fermata silences—he learned to hold himself very still in dappled shadows for the reward of it. Rhythm and tempo came first, vocabulary followed—but he never practiced, except to himself in secret bowers. As a young Cat he was still larger than a human, and if he spoke stupidly he might identify himself as nothing but a big lummox.

  How had he survived his early years? He’d eaten nothing but forest turnips, shallots, the pinker of the edible fungus. He’d stalked human travelers and eavesdropped on their campfire chats to try to pick up anything that approximated street smarts, though he didn’t even know what streets were yet. Watching occasional romantic exercises in the firelight, he’d learned more. Not that he’d been able to put theory into practice very often. More’s the pity.

  “Your childhood,” said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn’t chosen to retail at drinks parties.

  Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

  • 2 •

  H E DIDN’T exchange a word with a mortal soul until he was nearly full grown, which for a Lion takes about three years. Therefore, he was slow to pick up on the concept of hunting, even though he’d heard it mentioned.