A Lion Among Men (28 page)

T HE
DAWN
was a masked one, clouds making modest the exhibitionist sun.

Brrr, whose sleep had been erratic, sat up. In the corner, as yet un-struck by light, Shadowpuppet looked like watery milk. A small heap of shit, its tapering point like the head of a worm, lay coiled nearby. Brrr couldn’t imagine how a transparent creature could produce opaque offal, but if this was a philosophical question in disguise, he wasn’t up to considering it before breakfast.

He stood and tried to press the wrinkles out of his coat. Not that the humble maunts nor the blind oracle would care.

He couldn’t see out the window; what an appetite a window awoke. He wanted to look down on the terrain, to observe the nearer wheat fields and the oakhair forests farther off. To plot, if he could, the movement of opposing militias. To note if the chimney of that small farmhouse in the wheat was issuing the smoke of kitchen fires, or had the crusty residents finally abandoned their homestead during the night?

Lacking the window, though, his eye veered inward for a last, involuntary lurch toward his most private possession, the memory of Muhlama.

She’d gone, bounding with energy away from him, up an escarpment of rocks the color of pearlfruit rinds. Now that his whiskers were starting to whiten, he could imagine all too well some male Ocelot lurking beyond the rocks. Or maybe even a Fell Tiger-someone who fit Muhlama better, both in character and in the congress of sexual organs, than the stout and Cowardly Lion.

One thing was certain; she hadn’t been unpracticed at the art of receiving sexual advances. She worked herself to her satisfaction with a talent that Brrr had first mistaken for his own glorious technique. Later-again with the laters-he’d mused on her expertise. Lover in the underbrush somewhere?

Felinity. You never knew, as he was the first to admit.

“Come on, Shadowpuppet,” said Brrr, nudging the old cat with a sheathed paw. “Time to finish our interviews. Unriddle the riddles at hand, not the ones out of reach.”

The cat purred, and Brrr purred back. The best part of these late days was in their purring wordlessly together. The closest to companionship he got.

Then, hitting the society of crabby, tired, black-clad maunts on their way toward morning devotions, the best part of the day was behind them.

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire were hotly arguing on a landing. They turned at his approach.

“Ladies,” he said, “I thought charity ruled in a house like this one.”

“Mind your own business,” said Sister Doctor.

“That’s your answer to everything,” snapped Sister Apothecaire. She held her hand to her side, as if she had a case of stitches; perhaps she’d been running. In any case, she was a stout little thing, and the staircase had not been built with Munchkinlander legs in mind.

“Anything I can help with?” His tone sounded grand this morning; maybe just remembering Muhlama once in a while had a tonic effect.

“You can finish your work and be on your way,” said Sister Apothecaire.

“You can join us in chapel to pray for those who died last night,” said Sister Doctor.

His ruff went up. “Not Yackle?”

“No, but if she keeps refusing to die, we can put her coffin on wheels and slide her into Kellswater like-like-” Here Sister Doctor, who was one hard cookie, lost a startled little tear from the outside of each of her eyes. The drops rolled slowly down, like glue, as if astonished at their liberation.

“Don’t be wet,” snapped Sister Apothecaire, and then gave a nervous snuffle. Inadvertently she’d made a joke of some sort. Sister Doctor glared with hatred at her.

Brrr had no use for either of them. “But what? A new military maneuver? A rash broken out among the novices? What are you talking about?”

“We have had news of last night’s engagement,” said Sister Doctor. “An itinerant dwarf came to our door early this morning for food, and told us what he knew. In the middle of the night, the Munchkinlander militia surrounded a contingent of Emerald City Messiars and drove them down the slope of a bluff. The dwarf saw it all, he said. The Munchkinlanders herded the hapless soldiers right off the strand of sour pebbles and into the dead reaches of Kellswater.”

“It is impossible,” said the Lion.

“They kept shooting, a volley of arrows and scattershot alike-I don’t know the terms of the military trade-and the soldiers were driven deeper, waist-deep deeper; and eventually dove down to escape the onslaught.”

“But Kellswater is poison water,” said Brrr. “That’s what is said. Nothing grows there; no animal drinks at its shores.”

“That’s what is said, and that’s what is meant,” said Sister Doctor. “And there is a good reason. The soldiers came up dead-their bodies began to rot once they were immersed. They bobbed like so many carcasses. Not a single soul taken hostage, no mercy shown to any man jack among them.”

“Well,” said the Lion. “A military operation that worked, then.”

“The Munchkinlanders were unnecessarily cruel,” said Sister Doctor. “With their penchant for thoroughness, they did in an entire regiment that might have surrendered.”

“You take a lofty point of view.” Sister Apothecaire, being a Munchkinlander herself, was denied loftiness of any sort. “The Emerald City forces have invaded Munchkinland to annex the other lake-the big lake, the good lake. An illegitimate exercise from every angle. Why shouldn’t the Munchkinlanders defend their territory any way they see fit?”

“Good water and bad,” said the Lion, wanting to avoid taking sides here. “One lake is dead-a depthless basin of venom as far as anyone knows-and the other lake, only miles away, is the fount of life for the greatest green basket of arable land that Oz has. How can water display such variety in character?”

“You can be of help, Sir Brrr,” said Sister Apothecaire. “If you will. The dwarf tells us that the Munchkinlanders suffered heavy casualties on the ground before they conceived of this maneuver. We have had all our cart horses and donkeys requisitioned by one militia or another over the past several weeks. We have no way of pulling a cart for the collection of suffering bodies. Would you oblige us?”

He looked at Sister Doctor, imagining she would disapprove of offering succor to wounded Munchkinlanders, since she disapproved of their tactics. But she disappointed him; her cold dispersal of mercy, such a mercy as it was, was unequivocal.

“I think we have a cart in whose harness you would fit,” she said. “An embarrassment, I know-an indignity-but this is war, Sir Brrr.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” he said. “For one thing, there is the matter of an old injury to my spine. I try not to complain of it, but it makes some sorts of labor quite out of the question.”

“I have many liniments useful at reviving sore muscles,” said Sister Apothecaire. “I keep a full stock of balms and lotions.”

“Then there is the deeper matter of my obligation to the Crown,” continued Brrr over her remarks. “I need to finish up my enquiries and be on my way to file my report.”

“You will be lucky to get out,” said Sister Doctor. “If what the dwarf tells us is true, then the Emerald City Messiars will launch an even more virulent campaign against the Munchkinlanders, and this quiet hermitage sits right in the path from one camp to another.”

“I will do what I must,” said the Lion.

“I will pray for the souls of my countrymen,” said Sister Apothecaire.

“I will hold grudges,” said Sister Doctor to them both, and she swept down the stairs. The glass cat, which had been silent throughout, hissed.

B
RRR
RETURNED
to the interrogation parlor, but Yackle wasn’t there. She was in chapel, listening to liturgical music about flights of angels escorting the lucky dead to their rewards, a good rest among them.

The well of dark in which Yackle lived was something unlike what her companions assumed. Her blindness sometimes seemed to have little to do with vision. It seemed instead a kind of lack of desire, or of the desire that she imagined others felt. She experienced anticipation without the expectation of release-rather like what she assumed the libido of a eunuch might feel like. Or the spiritual ambitions of, say, a bedbug.

So in the chapel, as the maunts prayed for the drowned EC Messiars, Yackle didn’t listen to the devotional longing of the spinsters around her. She who didn’t seem able to die believed in death, as an article of faith-the only article of faith, and out of her reach!-though the notion of an Afterlife filled her with revulsion. Imagine the boredom of an Afterlife! All that undifferentiated yowling of praise. Yet the maunts, who had feared rape and murder or at any rate inconvenience by an occupying army, seemed ready to warble their hopes that forgiveness and everlastingness be granted to their predators. They were good women. They were nuts.

Rather than pray, Yackle trained her memory to recall the faded frescoes of angels that had adorned the higher reaches of the chapel walls and the vaulted ceiling. For all she knew, the images had been whitewashed over by now, angels having gone out of fashion somewhat-but beyond the hedge of her blindness Yackle could picture the paintings well. Gamine female angels in trailing robes, arching their ankles and pouting their mouths as if in perpetual erotic bliss. Wings like mattresses-imagine being an angel prettily taken against the soft resistance of her own feathery appendages. The male angels hardly less vulnerable.

How tedious to be an angel: So much holy vigor, and all directed to the Unnamed God who, without form or name or provable substance, could hardly be expected to enjoy the attentions that angels seemed eager to supply.

Probably those images had been whitewashed over. While the mission settlement of this outpost was conveniently distant from the spiritual governance of the EC, the self-appointed Holy Emperor of Oz had wielded his influence upon the varied religious and agnostic traditions of the nation. Probably the bosomy nymphs and rosy-bottomed angel boys above had been banished beyond the cloud of unknowing, a lime wash swirled with a brush. Oh, the happy memories that the soft-bristled brush must cherish!

She was working herself into a state of agitation.

She tried to concentrate for a moment on the music.

But sacred music-another anomaly. If in the Afterlife every good thing coexists eternally, then music cannot exist. Music is the stuttering of adjacent noises in sequence-stress, discord, complaint, resolve: then release-and sequence means timing. If the sound of music is simultaneous, all notes sounding at once, forever, then it is just sound. A mothy blur of noise. A sea of aural fuzz.

“Yield up, yield up,” sang the maunts, in a dirge written, surprisingly, in waltz time. Yackle remembered it and tapped her toes.

“Yield up your souls

To singe the air.

Yield up, and mount the heavenly stair.

Yield up, yield up,

You’re almost there.

You’ve dropped your bones in the sod.

Yield up, yield up, yield up your souls

To the darksome, nameless disappearance:

The heart of the Unnamed God.”

When Sister Doctor approached the podium to offer a eulogy for the dead soldiers, Yackle stood up and rambled away.

S HE
WAS
almost back to the chamber where Brrr was conducting his interviews when she was interrupted by an unfamiliar smell. In the corridor’s chill stony breath, a mild, milky reek of tubers. At about the level of her thighs.

“Who is it?” she said, thinking: A dog? A raccoon? A Munchkinlander she hadn’t met yet? (Sister Apothecaire was the only Munchkinlander in residence, and her musk was redolent of rotting tea leaves, no matter how much lavender she doused herself with.) Then Yackle thought: I’m a bit potty-I imagine this to be old what’s-‘er-name, the Glikkun from the Lion’s past. Sakkali Oafish. A Glikkun would smell of root vegetables; they all live underground.

But it was a male voice that replied. “Sticky trickle, who’d have guessed this? You old thing? Still? What’s propping you up?”

She knew the voice, from years and years back. “Making trouble again?” she snapped at the dwarf.

“I never make trouble,” he protested, chuckling. “I make way for trouble.”

“What are you doing here? In a cloister of religious women, of all unseemly places?”

“Not my first choice,” he admitted. “But small and incidental as I am, no more than a straw in the floods of history, I am pushed ahead of the approaching Messiars. The Emerald City will be catching news of the attack this morning. Retaliation time. Of course it’s all in the cards, don’t you know? The armies are already here, prepared for the next provocation. What an obvious game, what a tedious one. But I agree: I don’t like being washed up on the banks of a religious establishment any more than you do, I suspect.”

“Well, get out of here, then,” she said. “I want nothing to do with your meddling.”

“But I don’t meddle,” he repeated. “I don’t even comment. I simply perch and watch. Keep my own counsel. Lips sealed, eyes open. How have you managed to stay alive, you old heathen?”

“One gasp at a time. And I have no time to grant you an audience just now. Get out of my way, you imp. You hobgoblin.”

“My feelings are hurt.” His voice wheedled, almost affectionately. “And we go so far back.”

“So far back, and no further forward,” she said. “Get out of my way.”

“You haven’t run into a Lion slouching along these corridors, have you?”

She rounded on him. “What is your game, you miscreant?”

“Oh, you know me, Missus Madame Maenad. You think you’re the only one with an eye to the future, but I take my marching orders from a pretty terrific instrument on wheels. I was led to believe I’d find a Lion about here. Times being what they are, I suppose I need another conscript, maybe one with claws.”

“You-you stay away from him. If you find him. He’s on a mission.”

“You defending some craven beast? Say it ain’t so. I thought you were never out for any but yourself.”

Yackle didn’t answer. She just saw in her indeterminate way a kind of shadow of the Lion, slump-spined, bejowled, bewhiskered. A hat rotating in his hands, a stain on his vest. Afflicted with the twitch of always looking over his own shoulder. “The Lion’s not in play here,” she said.