A Lion Among Men (11 page)

“Tell me when you first became aware of them all,” he said. “Why not? It might help. You may be an oracle, but no oracle can know everything.”

At that remark of his, her sloppy tears did fall. When they dropped on her immaculate winding sheet, small tear-shaped holes burned through, showing shadowy flesh, rucked like flaky pastry.

“I will hold you to your promise,” she said, when she could speak, “or I will kill you.” Standing, she gripped the back of the chair as if she were at a Testimonial Pulpit. What was left of her irises rolled up into her head, slowly. It turned his stomach so far around he felt he could taste his own shit.

She didn’t begin to speak until there was nothing left but the whites of her eyes, like bloodshot stones embedded in her skull.

W
HEN
DID
I first become aware of them? Of the witches of Oz?

Y OU
CAN
start with your own origins.” He kept his voice soft, almost a purr. “Name, place, and date of birth. The usual jolly rigamarole.”

“Well, I don’t know my origins.” Her voice sounded faraway. Maybe she was speaking slowly because she was manufacturing lies, or maybe it took her a while to reclaim a notion of the past. “Lost in the mists of time, I’m afraid.”

“You mock me, you mock the Court.”

“I mock nothing and no one. First thing I can remember, I woke from a stupor and I sat up. Like a newborn I was naked, stupid, and without control of my bowels and bladder. But I was resplendently wrinkled and I wasn’t blind the way babies are. My breasts pointed at my toes. I wriggled my toes and I tried to wriggle my breasts. I smelled of ginger and pearlfruit jelly and I was devilishly hungry, so I got up and began to explore. I found a mirror on a wall and noticed that I had eyes, and I saw the flaccid skin barely managing to hold these eyes in their sockets. I had moles on my earlobes, and my hair was lank and grey, and my back hurt. I could talk, so I knew how to curse. I was already well on my way to bodily corruption, you see.”

“But where were you-in a room, on a bed? What district?”

“Some room, some bed. Some hostel for indigents, I suppose. I didn’t linger to find out. I stole a robe and some slippers from a cubby in the washroom and I tottered out the door. I found myself in the city of Shiz in northern Oz. I appeared older than most of the sentient life that waddled or cycled or ambled by.”

“Did you remember your name?”

“Those who don’t have a name can’t remember it, can they? Sir Brrr? If I’d had a name before, I didn’t know it anymore. So I had to name myself. In a marketplace stall I found a portfolio of rotogravure prints and I examined the pages. The collection advertised itself as artistic interpretations of characters of folklore. I saw gnarled old Kumbricia, I saw the fairy queen, Lurline, and her sidekick, Preenella. I saw the dragon who dreams the world and the tiny pixie-mites who afflict the undeserving with plague. Then I came across a page showing an elderly dame with a walking stick and a jackal on a leash. She carried the moon in a basket on her back. It was pretty. The script said ‘Yackle Snarling,’ and though I didn’t know the story she features in, nor any story, I liked her name. Yackle. I didn’t know if ‘Snarling’ was her second name or her occupation, so I left it off.”

“Didn’t you see a doctor? Anyone propose it might have been a stroke?” He wasn’t being tender, just comprehensive. “Probably your mental gears just slipped. It happens to the feeble.”

“Those who don’t know the concept of medicine don’t think to consult physicians.”

He tried a more soothing voice. It came out snide. “A little therapy, or a stiff drink, and maybe the memory of your past life would return.”

“Maybe,” she replied. “But I don’t believe in past lives.”

“Any twinges about your lost childhood? Snatches of déjà vu, that sort of thing? Did you ever pick up something silly and common like, oh, bootlaces or, or…butter rolls…and stare at them in case they jogged your mind about your past?”

“I didn’t imagine the past, yet, so I didn’t miss it. It was as if I was freshly minted as a senior. Some are born blind, some cranky, some superior. Some”
and she waggled a finger at him
“are born green. I was born old. Old I came into the world, and older still will I leave it, if I can ever figure out how.”

He wrote in his notebook: Claims to have amnesia about her youth. Dotty? Honest? Clever? Canny strategy to avoid her legal liabilities?

“We’re here to do some discovery about your relationship with the Thropps,” he said. “Can we continue?”

“I thought you said it was Madame Morrible’s connections you were tracking down.”

“Madame Morrible. The Thropp sisters. There is some overlap, as you bloody well know. Now just start where you can, and I’ll cut you off if you ramble.”

“I don’t think I like you,” she said, “but since this is nearly a posthumous tea party to which I’ve been invited, maybe it doesn’t matter if I like you or not.”

“You came from your coffin to talk to me,” he reminded her. “You must have had something to tell me now, right? Got some beef you’re eager to turn into hash. I’m your willing audience. I’m all ears, I am.”

She cocked her head sharply. She wasn’t befuddled in the slightest. She just didn’t like him. It showed loud and clear. Not that he cared. He was only doing his job. “Get on with it, before those army boots start tramping back this way,” he said.

Was she ready to talk? She thought it over. Would she inadvertently give something away before she had finished vetting the Lion for a possible ally? So far he didn’t look promising. Sitting before her, waxing his mane with spittle, twirling it into points. She could hear the motion, her ears were that keen. He was behaving like a pantomime villain training his mustachios.

Maybe he was only a ruse, a warm-up. Maybe she’d emerged from her clammy bier for the one who would follow this oily character.

Oracle though she was, she couldn’t see in front of her own nose.

B
RRR
TAPPED
his pencil. Patience wasn’t his strong suit. Still, he was trying to listen to her with the severity of attention she had paid to him.

W
ITH
A plain demeanor, I could sidle by unnoticed. I had no charm to speak of. The older woman talking to herself in some gutter isn’t an uncommon sight, and passersby rarely bother to interrupt her.

I found it useful staying a bit unwashed. No one wants to look too closely at someone wrapped in strong body odors. That made it easier to sidle along in the background, to watch slit-eyed and sideways at the goings-on of a crowd. To size up a mark. To pick up what I could about this mystery of my existence.

So I stumped about Shiz. I kept my eyes down and my ears open and, for the time being, my big mouth shut.

These were the days before the Wizard arrived-yes, get your pen, I’m going to be as specific as I can, though the patterns of politics always eluded me. But now I know enough to realize that I emerged from my first sleep into the halcyon last days of the line of Ozma. Though halcyon is never so sweet as memory makes it.

Vain Pastorius was squatting upon the throne as the Ozma Regent. He ruled in the Emerald City in the stead of his infant daughter, the Ozma Tippetarius. He was a piece of work. Dim, bullnose-chinned Pastorius. What is this in human time? Fifty, fifty-five years ago? Being born without any childhood to speak of-my “olden days” have a different meaning than yours!-I never could master time. It seems a long while ago, anyway. Pastorius, that old fool. Both sybaritic and syphilitic. Cocooned in silk, drunk on compliments warbled by his ass-licking courtiers. Those were days of expensive balls in the court proper, and of bawdy carnivals of patriotic sentiment outside the palace walls. To distract the urban poor from the deprivations of the Great Drought, about which no one could do a thing.

T
HOSE
DAYS
,” she asserted. “You wouldn’t remember. You weren’t whelped yet.”

“Tell me. I’m all ears.” He listened like a doe just noticing a leopard on a limb.

“You want the three historic segments of my earthly life? I’ve lived through a good deal of these modern times, if you can call it living. I’d arrived, preaged and preshrunk, a crone at birth, just at the end of the Ozma regency, before Pastorius was deposed by the Wizard and the infant Ozma was secreted away, probably murdered.

“Then came the Wizardic reign. Nearly four decades of the Great Head, as power consolidated in the Emerald City. Animals were disenfranchised of their rights; and the green shrike of a witch, Elphaba Thropp, flew the skies in agitation. Her sister, Nessarose, presided over the breakaway state of Munchkinland.

“Following the Wizard’s abdication of the Throne, the brief and blameless twin interregnums-first of Lady Glinda, that bottle blonde, and then of the so-called Scarecrow, who came to power and left it again faster than a pile of autumn kindling responds to a winter torch.

“The torch of piety, that is, as wielded by Shell, the Apostle Emperor. Younger brother of Elphaba and Nessarose. He swore he was divinely positioned by the Unnamed God. For all I know he is his, he is his-” She nearly gagged at the thought, and rotated her hand in the air, a forward roll. “He is history.”

Brrr didn’t want to lead her on, to give her anything to work with, if she was indeed an oracle. Let her show facility with those unholy talents. Yet he was curious, too; he couldn’t help saying, “The Emperor Shell is still on the Throne in the Emerald City. No opposition to his royal prerogatives allowed.”

“But of course. Who can gainsay a prince personally chosen by the Unnamed God?”

He nodded: go on.

I
HEARD
ABOUT
current events, naturally. Shiz is a university town from way back, and undergraduates reading history do blather so.

I minded my own business on the pavement-well, begging a little, picking pockets, too, for I saw that was how common folk fed themselves. I figured out that inventing little prophecies-doling out appealing lies-brought in some cash.

I bought my bread and beer from the small change I could earn by pretending to be a seer. I was persuasive enough, a competent liar, and I looked the part, so I developed a clientele. I wore a shawl, like Yackle Snarling. I had fun worrying my hair into a nest of scowls. When I had put a small purse aside I took a room above a tonsorial parlor and I invested in a line of herbal comforts. Limited-liability curses, bogus love charms and the like. I traded only in minor hexes, for I wanted no trouble with the constabulary.

It was fun for a while. I examined tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I studied the crow’s feet on either side of a spinster’s face and I made up some nonsense about strangers and romance. I never could figure out why romance is so desirable, having felt nothing of the sort myself. Maybe because I was desiccated in that department. With no eggs to hatch, I had no reason to kiss and canoodle, and no appetite for it, either. But those with an experience of canoodling seem reluctant to leave the possibility behind, even when their romantic prospects are limited due to the insults of aging. Onset of severe personal ugliness.

Then I got in a spot of trouble. A local brouhaha, nothing you need worry yourself about. I made a bad investment prediction and a couple of Shiz financiers who were trembling on the edge of ruin fell into it. When their goons came after me with a vengeance, I developed a sudden yen to see the other sights of Oz. So I considered lighting out for the Emerald City, which, while still being built, was already the biggest conurbation in Oz. Finding me there would take some doing, and I hoped they wouldn’t manage it. Still, you have found me. A goon on whose payroll?

B
RRR
THOUGHT: Is she just making this up because of my own admission of being morally obtuse as a cub? Trying to soften me up by saying, see, we’re equally untethered to conventions of right and wrong?

A court reporter’s first job, though, is to report what is said. Let someone else authenticate it. Someone with more to lose. Hah-as if there were such a creature.

“Very interesting,” he said, and made some notes. Then he regarded them dubiously. He had invented a shorthand all his own to compensate for his inability to hold a pen in the human style-wrong muscle groups for that. But sometimes he couldn’t read his own scrawl. He hoped he wouldn’t come a cropper when it was time to dictate to his transcriber back in the Emerald City court stenographers’ bullpen. She’d slap his face, and her colleagues would snort and titter. The flatheads.

“You haven’t answered my question,” he said. “I had asked about when and how you first came in touch with the Thropp family. When you became aware of them. And I’m trying to find out why your name was scribbled in the notes left in the archives of a clandestine Wizardic operative named Madame Morrible.”

“One has to start somewhere,” she replied. “Because I developed a reputation for clairvoyance in the demimonde of Oz, I attracted the attention of a family retainer of the Thropp contingent. It all goes back to that.”

“Still, can we get to the point? I haven’t been tracking the progress of the military units around here, but if the skirmishes around us heat up, the Emerald City Messiars or the Munchkinlanders may need to fall back to regroup. I wouldn’t be surprised if this House is commandeered for a garrison by nightfall. I plan to be finished up and on my way before that happens. I have no interest in hobnobbing with soldiers. Not my type.”

“Don’t bully me,” she snapped.

He straightened up. This was one of the nicest things that had been said to him since his release from custody. “The Thropp family,” he insisted.

“You next,” she said. “This is a bargain, remember? What happened when you debuted in property society? Civilization and its malcontents?”

The Lion’s voice was testy. “You are under order of the Emerald City Court of Magistrates to comply with my request for information. I don’t have to answer your nosy questions. I’m done auditioning for you. I’ve said all I have to say.”