A Lion Among Men (21 page)

Brrr continued his career in down-market picaresquerie. A month in Three Dead Trees, two weeks in Broad Slope Town, then a longish stint, almost a year, in Rush Margins, the surface of Illswater glinting with a hard beauty in the occasional shock of sunlight. More often the skies were streaked with grey. It never grew very warm here, even in spring, what with the winds constant as tidal wash. They endlessly speckled the windowpanes with sand carried in from the eastern deserts.

But eventually even Rush Margins grew unbearable, too, and Brrr forged his way against the wind, ever farther south. He wondered if he harbored a secret compulsion to leave Oz entirely, to enter the trackless desert from which, it was said, there was no return. To dig himself a grave in the largest sweep of cat litter nature could provide, bury himself like a turd there. Outside the legal reach of Oz itself, outside its memory if he could only arrange that, too.

One evening on the south slope of Illswater, not far from Stonespar End, Brrr came upon a neglected parsonage. It had been dedicated to the use of a unionist minister-Brrr recognized the symbols carved over the lintel. He nearly passed it by, having no more use for the blandishments of piety than he did for political capital. A voice called from an open window, though, offering a firkin of water, and one didn’t turn down a drink even if it came at the cost of a spiritual seduction.

It was an ancient Ape in a quilted velvet smoking jacket so old and frayed that it betrayed no clue as to its original color. He beckoned with palsied knuckles. He called himself Mister Mikko. He shared digs with a Boar named Professor Lenx who, due to deteriorating hips, was confined to a wheeled cart that the Ape could only barely manage to maneuver in and out the garden door.

Both of them were too elderly to do much but remember the good old days when they were tenured lecturers at Shiz.

“Tenured,” insisted Mister Mikko, “until we were untenured.”

“Sacked,” said Professor Lenx. “Pass the saffron cream, will you, old darling?”

A joke of sorts. Saffron cream was a thing of the past for these two.

They housed the Lion equably enough, making certain he understood it was only temporary. Brrr tried to resist the urge to scoff at their fusty mannerisms. The way they insisted on offering him two-thirds of whatever they had in the larder was unctuous and superior. He ate it anyway.

“You’re looking for a home, but we have only the two sleeping chambers here,” observed Mister Mikko. “We’re gentlefolk of a certain generation, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t bed down in shared quarters like cattle.”

“Certainly not,” said Professor Lenx. “Never think of it. The very idea.”

“Too cozy. Not our style.”

“You assume I care.” Brrr managed to sound offended, obscurely.

“Well, a Lion on his own…” The way their voices trailed off. Suspicious, they meant. “At loose ends.”

“My end is anything but loose.”

They didn’t like that style of badinage. “And food is in short supply, of course. Had we gardens like the ones in College now, it might be another matter. The vegetables! Do you remember the vegetables, Mister Mikko? The sweet summer scallions, the tomatoes, the blue runner beans! And when the corn was ripe! Hallelujah season.”

“Indeed I do remember it well, my dear Professor. Though also I was partial to the formal walking gardens, the parterres, the flowering cherries, the borders of myccasandra and iris…”

“Shiz could do gardens well. Here, alas, if we get eight potatoes a season, we’re lucky.”

“The gardens of Crage Hall! I do remember. The year that the transplanted termite ivy from the Lesser Kells went wild! It took the staff five years to root it all up. They even needed to demolish an ancient Lurlinist shrine because the migrating root ball had lodged itself there.”

“Would that we had a problem with invasives now.”

“We do. We’re being invaded by dirt.”

They laughed. It was as if Brrr were no longer there. Their memories were stronger than the present moment. Brrr felt as if he were the new invasive.

“I have been to Shiz myself,” he ventured.

“Oh well, dear boy, many go to Shiz,” said Mister Mikko.

“And many leave it,” said Professor Lenx.

They looked at each other as if they were discussing the deepest philosophical principles. Then they laughed at the same instant. “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” Their simultaneity was cloying but kind of sweet.

Over dinner-a noxious potato porridge and sandwiches on stale bread-the subject returned to Shiz. Naturally. Brrr learned a good deal more about the Animal Adverse laws enacted during the Wizardic reign. Early on, when professional Animals could still quit their positions and freely cross the borders, Professor Lenx had fled too quickly to liquidate a sizable portfolio held by a Shiz fiduciary house. He assumed the funds had since been co-opted by the Wizard’s financial ministers, but he had no way of knowing.

“I daren’t write to enquire. I don’t care to give my location away, you see. Old-fashioned reticence about money matters, and cautious that way,” said the Boar.

“No one would call you cowardly, old darling,” said Mister Mikko, which sounded like a riposte in a disagreement between them that stretched back years. “A little mustard on your cheese butty? I think so. Let me spread it for you.”

Perhaps it was a thrill of sympathy for Professor Lenx having to endure that particular slur-cowardly!-or maybe Brrr was simply relieved not to be the target of the criticism himself. He found himself saying, “I actually had a profile in Shiz once-of a sort-and of course I am now formally a Namory, by order of Lady Glinda.”

“A Namory! And you didn’t mention it till now. You are too humble, Sir Brrr,” said Professor Lenx. “May I humble you further with another spoonful of pottage?”

“There’s a shortage of certain kinds of labor in the Emerald City these days,” said Brrr. “Domestic work isn’t yet open to Animals again, it seems, but there are other opportunities. The
WOO
is history, gentlemen. Your old stomping ground, Shiz, has become ringed with factories. I understand Dixxi House to the north of Shiz is begging for a workforce. The Animal Adverse laws are greatly relaxed, and the EC is making all sorts of overtures to exiled Animals.”

“Well, we’re far too old to enter the workforce,” said Mister Mikko.

“And I’m crippled,” said Professor Lenx. “Not to mention that my field was mathematics. I specialized in diluted equations.”

“Did you say deluded equations?” Mister Mikko posed this piously.

“Ha-ha, exceedingly ha. What a robust sense of humor you have. Too bad it isn’t equaled by your sense of history. Or perhaps you taught histrionics, I quite forget, as of course one would tend to.”

As much to smooth over the comedy of professional sniping as for any other reason, Brrr said, “If the EC’s ministers of labor are really interested in wooing back the Animal workforce, they would be smart to free up any funds appropriated from Animals who had to leave under the Wizard’s ‘courtesies.’”

“We didn’t have to leave,” said Mister Mikko. “I did teach history, young Sir Brrr, and I know that much. We could quite as freely have chosen to go to prison, you know. That option was never denied us. So we are considered to have departed of our own volition.”

“You know what I mean,” said the Lion. “The banks could institute an amnesty of sorts. If Animals were permitted again to invest and profit, they might be more likely to lend their shoulders to the wheel of industrial progress. The powers that be should consider this.”

“Well, I wouldn’t trust the current administration any more than I trusted the Wizard of Oz, may he rot in hell and all babies sleep well, thank you very much.” Professor Lenx worked at a bit of rind with his tongue and then spat the mess out of the side of his bristly mouth.

“Tut-tut. And I just swept that dung heap,” said Mister Mikko, and spat in concert.

“Oh, the Scarecrow’s not smart enough to be devious,” said the Lion.

“Stupidity is as dangerous as cleverness,” retorted the Ape.

“More so,” said the Boar.

Brrr looked at the two of them, noting their infirmities, their indignities, their brave courtesies to him. He didn’t like the old codgers, nothing so drastic as that. But if he had been of a certain class of urban Animal, he might have gone to Shiz University himself, once upon a time. He felt a tenderness at the idea. They might have been his very professors. For a moment he pretended they were, and he was a devoted student who had made good in the world, and was looking after their interests, the old dears, now that they couldn’t manage much for themselves.

“I attended a few lectures now and then,” he told them, playing at the fantasy. Well, attending lectures open to the public, that was true enough. “I once had a private practice trading in small original etchings under glass, the occasional watercolor. I grew to know quite a bit about old paper, and the fugitive qualities of certain pigments…”

“Oh, you don’t say! But how bizarre,” said Mister Mikko. “I don’t suppose you ever came across a Miss Quasimoda? She was a White Ape who taught drawing from life. Quite scandalous.”

“With you involved, I shouldn’t wonder,” intoned Professor Lenx.

“I mean the drawing from life,” huffed Mister Mikko. “The very idea!”

“No, no, I never did,” said Brrr hurriedly. “I don’t remember anyone’s name from that time, except for a headmistress of one of the women’s halls. Someone named…Madame…Madame Morrible.”

The silence could have been scraped with a putty knife.

“She was in cahoots with the Wizard,” said Professor Lenx shortly. “That’s what was said in the
SCR
, anyway.”

“Of course she was, she and that little tiktok agent of hers. Gramitic.”

“Grommetik.”

“All due respect. I am certain it was Gramatic. Gramitic.”

“Your certainty has more bare spots than your scalp does.”

Mister Mikko bared his old teeth at his colleague and turned back to Brrr. “Don’t mind Professor Lenx; his mind is going. I don’t suppose you ever came across a Doctor Dillamond? A Goat with expertise in several fields, history and science among them.”

“The history of science,” murmured Professor Lenx. “The science of history.”

“I never did. And I’m sorry for mentioning Madame Morrible. I didn’t meet her personally. She presided over teas for the visitors-community relations, that sort of thing, a town-and-gown tension-mitigation scheme. She lectured once or twice. I don’t remember the topic.”

He did, though. The Animal Adverse laws, and the Wizard’s mercy.

“Doctor Dillamond,” said Professor Lenx. “A fine scholar.”

“And an early admirer of Elphaba Thropp’s, as I recall,” added Mister Mikko.

Brrr took the chance that was presenting itself. “I don’t suppose you remember an occasion in which an infant Lion cub was brought into a laboratory in Shiz? For some kind of treatment?”

Professor Lenx and Mister Mikko exchanged glances.

“Much was done that is best not to remember,” said Mister Mikko softly.

“I think I might have been that Lion cub.”

A grave silence as, in the next room, a few coals fell from their little heap.

“We might all have been that Lion cub,” said the Boar.

The Ape got up to clear. The cups trembled in his hands. When he left the room, the Boar leaned forward. “We did not approve,” he whispered. “Please don’t speak of this again. He gets very upset, the old fool.”

“It was my life,” said Brrr.

“And this is ours, what’s left of it. Spare us, and save yourself. You’re young enough. Look: You have survived. Bless you, dear sir. Bless you, and shut up.”

As Mister Mikko cleared away, Brrr pushed Professor Lenx’s cart into the front parlor, where it took up half the room. The Lion stirred up the fire while the Boar sunk into a reverie about Madame Morrible and the last golden years of an integrated university life. When Brrr settled in a ratty old upholstered chair ( just covered with silvery Ape hairs), he didn’t speak but thought about Animals in exile and the need for a modern workforce in the factories.

There was an opportunity here. Staring him in the face. Rehabilitation of a sort, if he worked it right. If he had the mettle to do it.

During afters, Brrr made his proposal over a bitterroot sherry. He offered his services as a go-between. He would return to Shiz and present himself to the appropriate authorities as Professor Lenx’s agent. He would ask 15 percent of any funds he was able to locate and arrange to have released. Everything notarized and formalized.

“I know you’re young,” said Mister Mikko. “Well, youngish. But have you really the nerve to return to Loyal Oz?”

“I am a Namory,” he reminded them. “I once got a medal from the Wizard of Oz himself. And for a time I counted the Scarecrow, who sits upon the Throne, a personal friend.”

“We move in lofty circles, yet we wear such a nobly frayed jacket,” said the Boar, as gentle as he was wry.

Brrr pressed his case. “I ought at least to be able to get an audience with him, if the banks give me a hard time.”

Professor Lenx couldn’t control his trembling as Mister Mikko, with a more capable hand, labored over a contract engaging Brrr as a financial agent.

“Assuming on the Loyal Oz side of the border that the Shiz bank honors its terms, will the Eminent Thropp here in Munchkinland allow the funds transfer?” asked Brrr. “I don’t know much about monetary policy. And who is the current Eminent Thropp now, anyway?”

“With the deaths of both Elphaba and Nessarose, the title of Eminent Thropp ought to have reverted to Shell,” said Mister Mikko. “I mean, given the absence of the issue of the women of the line. For, like the descent of Ozmas, the Eminenceships descend with a matrilineal bias. But Shell is said to be a playboy in Emerald City gambling parlors. Also a regular visitor to girlie arcades. He’s shown no inclination to give up the high life and waltz back here to govern a rogue state. One suspects his political sympathies, if he’s ever developed any, would have conformed with the Wizard’s, anyway.”

“Who else has emerged?” said Brrr. “I mean, to pick up the county where Nessarose left it when she died?”