A Lion Among Men (30 page)

She appeared to look out the window. “I think of her often,” she said. “I liked the young girl. She was braver than most.

“Braver than you,” she continued.

“That’s not saying much,” said Brrr.

“I can smell a lie,” she said, “and I believe that you still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

“I have,” he said. “We’re looking for Liir, don’t you know? To make sure the Munchkinlanders don’t rally behind him as the proper Eminence. To make sure that Shell’s claim to the breadbasket of Oz isn’t challenged-”

“There is no more time to lie,” she told him, rather peacefully. If she could have found his huge paw and patted it for comfort, she would have. “You haven’t really come here to find out about Liir and Trism and Candle and all. You knew most of that already. You knew about Liir and how he would suffer, thinking that Trism and Candle had fallen in love. Fine for him to love two-not so fine for him to watch two others loving in turn.”

“I take a lot of notes,” said Brrr, “but I don’t pay attention to that aspect of people’s lives.”

“You don’t want to,” she noted, “because it is too close to home, I suspect.”

“None of your business,” he growled. “If you are so ornery and right all the time, then how am I lying? What have I come for that you haven’t yet told me? Tell it to me now and we’ll have done with this interview. I can smell death frying up in the skillet alongside the lunchtime bacon. Let’s finish up.”

She stood and with unerring accuracy she pointed a bony finger right along the seam of his nose. “You want to find out the location of the Grimmerie,” she said. “You want the great book of magic. Sure you’d be glad enough to learn where Liir is, and his little circle of oddities. But Liir isn’t the firebrand that Elphaba was; he’s nothing without that encyclopedia of spells. The Emperor has dispatched you here to see if I can tell you where the book is. Elphaba’s magic book, and someone else’s magic book before it was hers. You’ve been lying all along. Liir is only part of it. You want the book.”

He sat very still for a long long time. The glass cat watched with an unblinking eye.

“If you’ve known that all along,” he said softly, “then you must also know where it is.”

“Ah, no, not that,” she said. “Your comrade-at-war, then a mere commander, blinded me, and I have lost what powers I had. Tell General Cherrystone to come back and rip out my heart and fry it alongside your lunchtime bacon, and then we’ll see if I can lose the rest of my powers-like breathing, and thinking, and remembering, and hating. I should be glad to let go of some of these functions.”

“Let go of the drama, why don’t we. Tell me why you can’t just have a vision and find out where the Grimmerie is. That’s all I want. To get out of here with some hard information. We’re counting in hours now, not days, before this place becomes a militarized zone. Madame Morrible’s notes suggested you were Elphaba’s sentry angel. No one has a better chance of knowing where the book went but you.”

“An angel!” She began to laugh. It was a hideous sight, her eyes rolling about in her skull. She clutched her ribs and bent over. “Oh, that’s rich! An atheistic angel.”

He had to wait for her wheezing to peter out. “Please,” he said. “What must I promise you in exchange for the location of the Grimmerie?”

“It’s hopeless,” she said, her voice giddy now, as if having abandoned all hope. “One doesn’t have visions on demand. And even if I knew, dear Brrr, how could I tell you? We’re at cross-purposes. The EC would use it against-”

But she went from breezy hopelessness to a sudden frenzy; her face contorted.

“Are you all right?” he said. She shook her head. It wasn’t a pang of death-nothing as useful to her as that-but a grief mortal enough to carry away anyone less immortal than she continued to be.

“Stop,” he said. “It’s not that bad. It can’t be.”

“What will you do if you can’t locate the Grimmerie?” she asked at last. “Who is your next witness?”

“I have none.” He slapped his notebook closed. “Madame Morrible’s papers turned up precious little, actually. She was a bit of a sorceress herself-you must have figured that out-and she was sharp enough to have known exactly what to discard. Even her references to you were cryptic-more in the line of deducing your existence by a kind of magical algebraics. And learning your name through the agency of a mechanical spy named Grommetik.”

“All that lead-up, and I’ve given you precious little. What will you do next?”

“Assuming I can get overland without being molested, I will have to return to the Emerald City with what I’ve been able to gather. The Court won’t be pleased with me, but I’ve done my best.”

“They won’t drop you into Southstairs?”

“They won’t. My plea bargain has sorted that out, at least.”

“You trust the Court not to revoke its understanding?”

After this review of how his life had run so far? Only one answer. “No. I don’t trust the Court at all.”

“Then that’s the first evidence of good sense I’ve witnessed in you.” She twisted her fingers ghoulishly. “I will trust you, and hope that when you leave here you might come to your senses. The Emerald City will never take you in. You’re too raw and obvious for them. Look, I have no other option. I’m not going to trust any dwarf with this matter; his allegiance is already pledged. You will have to do. You are a creature bedeviled with foolishness and bad luck, but if you’re finally smart enough to be skeptical about the honchos in the EC, well, I suppose there is some hope.”

“Let me save you from making a mistake,” he said. “You are too smart to trust in me.”

“I need your help,” she replied. “There’s no one else. It’s come down to that. I have to trust you whether I should or not.”

Well, that was it, wasn’t it? For her, for him, for anyone? Being needed? The sorry old approval game? Either it would work or it wouldn’t: She had no choice.

“All right, then, tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you have to tell me. Maybe if I become rehabilitated in the EC, I’ll be in a position to help sometime.”

“You haven’t given up, have you?”

“Look, if you’re going to trust me, you’ll have to trust me. I’ll do with your information as I see fit. And you know I don’t see very fit.”

“You see better than I do at this point.”

“A matter of opinion.” He closed his notebook. “I’m putting my pencil away. Just tell me.”

“It isn’t Liir,” she said. “It’s Liir and Candle together-it’s-their child. I need you to stand for her, if she needs standing for. As no one ever stood for you.”

“Their child,” he said.

“Born in Apple Press Farm, while Liir was absent. Nine years ago. When Candle left with that bundle, it was to draw the watching eyes away from the newborn. She left the baby for Liir to find; she swifted away to draw the hounds off scent.”

“So that is why you locked Candle in the tower with Liir? So she would have sex with Liir and perhaps conceive a child? Why would you care? Was it because you were never nine? No, not that. It was because you would never conceive a child yourself. You were too old when you were born. You were all dried up before you even got going.”

“Very sharp of you. I suppose I deserve this. I can tell you have had many dinner parties with cognoscenti who amuse themselves at guessing the motivations of others. But my motivation doesn’t matter. The thing happened, and now there is a child, a girl. And I have realized that this is why I can’t die. I was present at her conception: I was her godmother, in a sense. But I haven’t arranged for a guardian for her in my absence, as I tried to be one for Elphaba.”

“Why should she need a guardian?” The Lion’s voice was cold. “Some of us didn’t get any guardians at all.”

“And you would recommend that, based on your own experience?”

“I suppose she is special,” he said venomously. “History belongs to her, right? The next Munchkinlander Eminence in her minority? Prophecies tremble on her little shoulders? What did you say of Elphaba, that time you took a swig of the joy juice and had your first vision? Something like This child belongs to history, was it? Good and ill hangs in the balance, right? So she must be protected at all costs, right? She’ll save us all, just like little dead Ozma? The little darling? Right?”

Yackle could not take umbrage at his tone. She understood the rage masked as sarcasm. She rubbed her shoulder blades as if they were too heavy for her own spine. When she answered, her old lips quivered.

“It’s not that she is special,” said Yackle. “It’s not that she is chosen. It’s that she is ours. That’s all.”

He knew what the possessive pronoun meant. She is the one who is here, special or no. Whether to be glorified by history or abandoned by fate-to be accident’s victim or to be prophecy’s chosen child: It makes no difference. She’s the innocent on board. That was all. It came down to no more than that.

“They go to war, back and forth,” said Yackle. “The smallest indivisible part of a nation worth defending is not a field, a lake, a city, an industry, but a child.

“The child would be nine,” said Yackle in a softer voice, almost to herself. “A nice age for a child.

“That is,” she continued, “I have always assumed it might be. I myself was never nine. As you know. Still, it sounds a pleasant age.”

Brrr thought that none of his ages had been particularly pleasant. Still, at this remove, he wouldn’t have relinquished a moment of any of them.

“There, there,” he said. “Don’t get soppy on us. I’ve said I would listen, and I have listened. I’ve heard what you said. I didn’t write it down. I’ve put it”
he tapped his chest
“right here.”

The glass cat turned its head so quickly that the light winked from its ear tips. Brrr was rising from his chair and then dropping to his knees, awful creaking in his joints. He was curling up on the floor at the feet of the trembling old harridan. She was weeping into the edge of her shroud. He was purring, and rubbing his head against her ankles.

A
KNOCK
AT the door. Brrr sprang to a more dignified position at the arrival of Sister Apothecaire. “You must forgive me,” she said in tones that brooked no dispute in the matter. “Sister Hermit, walled up in the cenobitic tower, has broken her silence to drop down a message in a basket. An army vaster than she knows how to describe is fording the Gillikin River west of here.”

“I don’t follow,” said Brrr. “Which army, which direction?”

“West to east, so it must be the EC Messiars,” said Sister Apothecaire. As she was professed to neutrality, her tone was curt, but her sympathies lay with her own countrymen, so her eyes snapped like coal fire. “But there’s also a blaze happening to the south. Perhaps a band of the Messiars is burning the forest so as to destroy the blinds that can conceal snipers and guerrillas. They’ll force a Munchkinlander retreat to the south. In any case, the Messiars are meeting no resistance so far and will be here by sunset.”

“I am on their side,” said the Lion, to no one in particular-to himself, then.

“Bully for you. You can make the tea and crumpets for eight hundred.” Fear was turning her waspish. She continued in a rush. “The administrative troika of the mauntery has called an emergency Council-I mean, Sister Doctor of course, and her two assistants-of which I am not one, not in the business of governance. They will propose how we shall meet the ruthless invaders.”

“Hardly invaders,” Brrr corrected her. “This mauntery is not in Munchkinland.”

“In my book, an army intent on invading is an invading army no matter which side of the border you view it from. Sister Doctor may view things differently; that’s her prerogative. I’m simply staff.” Her head turned to the hall, and she called out, “Aren’t you attending? Please. You can come in here, if you will.”

“We have company?” said Yackle.

“We have no time for company,” said Brrr.

“You have no say in the matter,” said Sister Apothecaire. “Do you forget you’re a guest here? A Council is called, and Sisters Hospitality and Cook are required to attend. So I have arranged a cold luncheon for all strangers who have sought sanctuary here. You can eat together. We will dismiss you when and if the Council decides that would be a prudent course of action.”

“I can’t work under these conditions,” said Brrr.

“Courage,” said Yackle. “Who knows what you can or cannot do?”

Sister Apothecaire made no move to help the novices, who came in with flasks of water, slit husks of pearlfruit, ham sandwiches, and a bowl of blue olives. The young women set the repast down on a sideboard and fled.

Into the room traipsed a dwarf, a woman in a plain veil, and a few muscle boys sporting tangerine tunics and leggings as well as shaved heads, which looked tangerine-ish by association.

“I’ll let you make your own introductions,” said Sister Apothecaire. She elevated her chin till her nose was nearly as high as her forehead. The gesture proved she could be taller than a dwarf-which was lost on no one.

“We don’t trust louts loose among the novices,” she continued briskly, “and as I mentioned, we have an emergency Council to convene. So forgive me the indignity of this key-it is a necessity in these wartimes, and signifies no disrespect.” She departed, closing the door with a decisive slam. They all listened to hear the key turn in the lock.

“We’re being held hostage by sisters in a mauntery?” asked Brrr.

“Hey, I got weak kidneys,” said one of the skinheads.

“Piss out the window,” called Sister Apothecaire through the door. “Don’t think me rude. We just can’t have beefsteak lads wandering about the cloisters and hiding in the novices’ wardrobes, waiting to provide them a midnight surprise. I’m sure you understand.”

“You again,” said Yackle, dilating her nostrils as a horse might.

“Me again,” agreed the dwarf. “We seem destined to spend a holiday together.”

“Well, one of us should know about destiny,” said Yackle, “though I confess that I didn’t see this coming.”

“There’s a lot more to seeing things coming than meets the eye,” said the dwarf. “The proverbial eye, I mean, not your wonky pair. But what do I know? It always takes some-”

“I’m on a government exercise here,” interrupted Brrr. Well, he sure was, compared to a dwarf, anyway. He waved with his notebook. “I suppose for the record I should jot down your names, and so on. Material witnesses in case this next section of my deposition is questioned by the Courts.”