A Lion Among Men (20 page)

He pulled away from her, uncomfortable with this consultation. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, gravely. She was waiting for a promise. There was something eerie about her gentle manner and her steely patience. Winds would wear a cliff down to a stony strand before she would change her mind about the goodness of the world.

He had to love her for it. He kissed her furrily. He knew she was taking this as a promise to regard Liir as his own family, but he was just getting rid of her. He wasn’t in a position to take care of a minor, not when he was so minor himself.

“Good-bye, Dorothy,” he said. “I hope they learn to love you at home as much as we love you here.”

“Well,” said Dorothy, standing up, “I’ll tell them they just better.”

W
ITHIN
A few weeks of Dorothy’s departure, Glinda formally took the Throne. Brrr was able to get an audience with her, and, after a little fawning and purring, he wheedled a title. Sir Brrr, Lord Low Plenipotentiary to the market environs of Traum. It was, as he thought and others joked, a cruel blow: about as undistinguished a peerage as it was possible to acquire. One could pick up higher honors going through the garbage. Lord Low Plenipotentiary was a title without an estate, a job without a salary, an honorific without a voting voice in the Council of Agreement, which Lady Glinda had promised to reconvene after a lengthy hiatus.

And Traum? Traum, of all places? Lady Glinda was depositing him at the site of his public humiliation. Had she meant to rub his nose in it? Or in her giddy innocence did she hope to give him a chance to return as a conquering hero? He didn’t know and he didn’t bother to visit his district and find out. Let them get on without him.

He drank too much during the day, and he lost track of that agitated kid, Liir. When the Lion learned that the Scarecrow had been nominated to succeed Lady Glinda to the Throne-the Scarecrow elevated to be the Head of Oz, while the Lion groveled, a Lord Low Plenipotentiary!-well, he lost more acreage of guts to stomach acids.

Anhedonia, a doctor said. Fear of pleasure.

He almost bit the doctor, for the pleasure of it.

He might have survived the indignity if he’d had a circle of companions. Anything like a confessor, a crony.

But Dorothy was gone, disappeared perhaps the way Ozma Tippetarius had disappeared, too. The Scarecrow was busy with regal affairs and rarely met his public. (Some said he wasn’t even the same Scarecrow, but an imposter. Brrr never got close enough again to venture an opinion on the matter.) And Nick Chopper was filled with the romance of labor rebellion, getting in bed with dubious sorts to hatch out schemes to organize the tiktok workers, the mechanized servants of Oz. Change was in the air, everyone said-change of every sort except spare change: not that kind. Times weren’t better, they were just-different. Times were hard in a new way. You could be grateful for the novelty of it, but only up until teatime, when dried rye brisks and plowfoot jelly made their baleful appearance on the table. Unless you were Palace, of course.

He might have survived it if he had never learned to read. But what else was there to do but hang out in cafés frequented by the demimonde, sip stale tea or watered-down plonk in the Burntpork district, and scrutinize the cast-off newsfolds?

THE
WORTHY
SCARECROW
HOLDS
A
PALACE
RECEPTION

Dateline: Emerald City

Peers of the realm, from the level of Minor Establisher and up, gathered in the glittering Ozma Arcade last night in one of the season’s most exclusive soirées-

See and Be Seen! Tizzy Splendthrift, society spy, reports on a very naughty party held last night in an undisclosed private residence in the tony district of Goldhaven, to which Oz’s glittera-muses, the great and the good from as far up the social pyramid as can be mounted, got up to no good-and we do mean up…

Whipping the pages so hard they tore. The financial columns and the editorial pages arguing about whether Nick Chopper was well connected enough to bring the Throne’s attention to a proposed scheme of merit-credits for the tiktok workforce…. Whether it would be any good for Oz…. The social obligations, if any, of rewarding clockwork for ticking on time…. The suffering of laborers and their families if a general strike was called….
NICK
CHOPPER:
BLEEDING
HEART
OR
BLOODY
HEARTLESS?

Brrr didn’t care. It was the parties he wasn’t invited to, the salons, the committee meetings dedicated to raising funds to repaper the libraries in imperial Ozma style, now that it was no longer forbidden to speak her name…. The drunken lunches of the newsmongers who laughed at the excesses of the high and mighty! He’d have been glad enough to rag on his former friends, had he been invited to do so.

Then some journalist, writing under a nom d’espionnage, published a column questioning the correctness of the Palace’s having awarded even so much as a Low Plenipotentiaryship to a Lion who had been, after all, a collaborationist. He’d worked at the Wizard’s bidding, hadn’t he-when more respectable Animals were imprisoned, or had fled into the outback?

A collaborationist. Working for the Wizard, who had done so much to oppress the Animals of Oz. When once Brrr had been tarred as the Witch’s familiar, now he was a lackey of her enemy. He was a turncoat for all seasons. You couldn’t win.

Perhaps, the argument went, if the Cowardly Lion were stripped of his honors, hardworking Animals would feel justified, at last, in returning to the cities and towns of Oz and entering the workforce again. Hadn’t Brrr been known as a Cowardly Lion? If he were all that brave, he’d surrender his honors himself, voluntarily, for the symbolism of it. His apology to the nation.

Let him be rehabilitated as a common citizen and join the Animal workforce that Loyal Oz hoped would soon be returning from exile-those who hadn’t been exterminated, that is. Bring back the Animals as a backup labor resource. Show the agitated millworkers they could be let go if they made trouble.

So off then, outa there, but good. Brrr tried not to think of the injustice of it, but of course the injustice greeted him daily. Was there any reason he should be so embattled other than the maliciousness of fate?

He didn’t avoid the thought of Dorothy; he didn’t need to. She evaporated out of Oz as successfully as the Witch herself had. One would have thought Dorothy had been brought from abroad for no other reason than to have her wet way with the Witch. But that was paranoia, wasn’t it? Fuck Dorothy. In a manner of speaking.

And as for his promise to keep an eye on Liir-well, Liir had his own history to follow. He had disappeared into the crowds of the Emerald City. Just another urchin on the make, a feckless little whippet cast aside by the powerful. Let him dodge his own fate as best he might; he was not the Lion’s cub, after all. Brrr had his own hide to protect.

Back to the wilds, once again, where the knowledge of his demotion by way of low promotion could prove less bitter, less public. He’d have to avoid the Ghullim, of course. If Muhlama H’aekeem had lived, she might be the Chieftainess now. And if the networking of the Ghullim was as keen as they boasted, they’d have heard that their runaway Lion had been marginalized by the indignity of petty honors. And tarred with the worst taunt of all. Collaborationist.

No, he’d avoid the Ghullim. Avoid them all. Avoid the whole damned mess of his whole damned life up to now.

A
FTER
DOROTHY
.

Brrr entertained the notion that he might go back and take up again with that pride of tuft-chinned Lions in the western Madeleines. As far as he knew, he was the first Lion with a title. Maybe the pride lived far enough from the EC to have missed the curse of “Collaborationist!” Maybe it would decide to be impressed. Reconsidering their early dismissal of him, they might conclude that they had been too provincial to recognize his merits first time around. Why not?

But these years on, the Lions had scattered. The outback of Gillikin hadn’t proved hospitable to Animals, even to those who had never forsaken their natural habitats in the wild. From smaller Animals who still lingered, reluctant to give up the old neighborhood, Brrr learned that the tuft-chinned Lions had migrated east into Munchkinland. “Though I’m told,” continued an opinionated Squirrel with a cleft palate, which made his words hard to grasp, “that times have been no easier for the Animals in the Free State of Munchkinland than they are in Loyal Oz. The Great Drought is blind to national borders. Larger Animals have had to withdraw into less salubrious quarters.”

“Like?”

“The more hardscrabble reaches south of the Yellow Brick Road. Nest Hardings, Wend Hardings, and the ghost hamlets on the banks of Illswater.”

“Ghost hamlets.” Not Ozmists, for sure; they maintained their haunts in the Great Gillikin Forest. Or had the Cloud Swamp been affected by the drought, and had the ghosts migrated, too?

“I mean the old farming villages in southeast Munchkinland-the last sorry bit before Munchkinland peters out into the uncrossable desert. Those desolate places that even humans have no more use for. Or that humans abandoned once the Animals began to move in.”

“I’ll head that way.”

“I’ll come with,” said the Squirrel succulently.

“Not if you value your nuts. Forget about it.” Brrr was done with finding mates on the road.

He headed east, learning to nurse his grievances like so many fond memories. To take them out in his drowsy hours, in his dreams. To fasten upon them in the doldrums of insomnia. He remembered how the frowzy Miss Piarsody Scallop had tended to her mysterious ailments with all the devotion of a postulant. He dedicated the same zeal to his rash of insults, kept them raw by constant attention.

The death of Jemmsy. The taunts of the Bears. The dismissal by the Ozmists. The Traum Massacre. The lovely but brutal sex with Muhlama, and his subsequent exile from the Ghullim.

And then the taunts. Coward. Witch’s familiar. “Little Miss Sissy” in one popular musical parody that was all the rage the season he fled from Ampleton Quarters. Lord Low Plenipotentiary, for the love of Lurlina. Collaborationist.

A Lion, even a lily-livered one, can roam about an unfriendly landscape more easily than, say, a Badger or a slow-moving Cow. The Lion was shunned but not otherwise abused. He kept to himself. He could get little work in Munchkinland; farmers husbanded their farm chores zealously.

One night he fell asleep on the edge of a cornfield, and dreamed of a happier past. When he woke up to take a leak, he heard his own voice muttering in his ears. He had been talking to the rangy scarecrow set up to frighten predators. It was an odd thing, nothing like his erstwhile pal. Neither male nor female, Animal nor human, the creature had a woman’s apron, a farmer’s soft felt hat-for-chapel, an Ox’s collar, and a cunningly arranged strap of sleigh bells. Its head was a gourd of some sort, softening in the back, and the seeds falling out of an abrasion in the vegetable skull were being nibbled by field mice. “Get away from my man Jack!” roared the Lion, but when the mice scattered in terror, he had to weep. He’d come to this: lording it over dumb mice in drought-slackened fields. And talking to a dummy, the best he could claim as a friend.

He crossed the border from Gillikin into Munchkinland near the southern edge of the Madeleines. He wanted to steer wide of the Ghullim, so he headed southwest toward the spot where the Yellow Brick Road breached the Munchkin River across a span of nine murth-stone arches. On the far side, the terrain lay down and refused to move, not even a wrinkle in the dustland. Suitable for little but subsistence farming. None of the great Munchkinland bounty you’d find in the Corn Basket farther north. Just scrappy farms worn grey with wind and regret.

One job he could take, and he did without mortification, was the carting of manure from farm stables. In this wasteland, farmers couldn’t manage a decent yield of crops without manure. So the stables were shit factories. Whether the Animals were glad enough for their oats to shit on demand, Brrr didn’t know, and he took pains not to ask. Coming face-to-face with a Stallion in tethers, Brrr behaved as if he were a mute Lion, or perhaps ignorant of basic Ozish. He had no doubt the Stallion could see right through the ruse, but it still seemed correct to feign being dumb.

He got the job done, was paid in innards and offal.

He slept apart, alone, and stayed until his insomnia flared up again, at which point he moved on to the next farm. A constantly changing horizon seemed the only prophylactic against his obsessive review of his grievances.

The next horizon, sometimes just the next farm, was always more promising, until it proved not to be so, after all.

This way, Brrr made his slow progress southeast through Munchkinland until he’d reached the hardscrabble district known as the Hardings.

The Squirrel had been accurate in his description. In the towns of Three Dead Trees, Rush Margins, and the inappropriately named Center Bounty (Center Spite was more like it) the hounded creatures had hunkered down and made the best of a bad situation.

By now he was finally beginning to understand what had happened to the Animals in Oz. The professionals-the chattering classes, also the twittering, clucking, nickering, and braying classes-had gone underground. Some of them literally (Moles, Rabbits, Badgers), some symbolically. As a rule, many of them were so long removed from any kind of manual labor that they hadn’t fared at all well when trying to take up again the practices of their ancestors.

They made their living, such as it was, in the townships of southeastern Munchkinland-the stony dales and blackened, brackish rills, the treeless hills supporting only gorse and broom and the occasional weary flock of sheep, for their weary wool, or peppermilk colts, for equally wearying cheese. The Animals crowded, cheek by bristly jowl, or wither by wen, in stone crofts and stone hovels and stone lean-tos and stone corncribs built in a more hopeful time.