A Lion Among Men (4 page)

“Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”

“A comedian,” she observed. “I come back from the very gates of death to be interviewed by a vaudeville wannabe.”

“Let’s get started.” He flipped open his notebook. At the top of the page he wrote a note to himself: Interview One. Don’t vomit.

She paused so long that Brrr thought perhaps she’d expired. My timing, he thought. Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

But then she exhaled again. “What do you want from me, kind sir?” Her vowels were lengthy, as if she intended to wring out of her words every drop of nuance they might supply.

“I’m conducting an investigation,” he said. “Official business. Consider the codes quoted and the documents flashed at you. You’re blind, you can’t read them anyway, so take it on faith. We don’t have a lot of time. I’m chatting up anyone who had anything to do with a Madame Morrible. Your name has come up.”

“That’s no answer,” she said. “My name comes up everywhere if you dig deep enough. I want to know why Madame Morrible’s archives are being combed. Why are you bothering?”

“The Courts are building some kind of case, and I’m preparing a background paper.”

“A court case with Madame Morrible as a lead witness? I knew she was talented, but if she can give sworn testimony from beyond the grave, she has better connections than I thought.”

He snorted at this, and while his guard was let down, she jabbed at him, “Or are you sniffing around here for the young fellow named Liir? Last I heard, he’d disappeared into the lawless lands.”

The Lion started but hoped she hadn’t picked up on it. Once in his regrettable past he personally had known someone named Liir, a ragamuffin boy who had lived out west with the famous Witch. But Brrr would keep his own counsel. He sang softly in a lullabye voice, “I need to take your deposition, good granny. Don’t you worry your tired noggin over poor little me.”

“I needn’t answer you merely because you ask,” she said. “‘In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.’ Isn’t that what the old bastard, our dearly departed Wizard, used to say?”

He hadn’t figured on her sass. “Perhaps you’ve been comatose through the current troubles. Oz has an Emperor now. One with an iron will, as it happens.”

“Threats don’t work on the chronically dead,” she replied, “which is close enough to what I am to make no difference. So try again, mister. You tell me something about yourself first. I want to know who I’m talking to before I decide. And what you’re really after. And for whom you’re working. And what immunity from prosecution I might be afforded. My testimonial privileges. Then we’ll see if I feel like rewarding you by answering your questions.”

He took a breath in. “And don’t lie to me,” she continued. “I can be vexed when I find I have been lied to.”

Where to start? Always the question. “Well, for one thing, I am a gentleman sporting a very fabulous weskit,” he said, partly mocking, and to see just how blind she was. But he regretted the gambit at once. If she leaned forward to feel his vest, she’d rip it to shreds with her nails, and it wasn’t in such good shape to begin with, actually. Secondhand, if not fourth-hand.

“Not a spot of mange?” she asked. Did she know he was a Lion, not a man?

“I’m not talking about my own hide. I mean I’m decked out in a gentleman’s item. A bespoke article. It swims on me a bit, since I’m leaner than I once was, but it’s a Rampini original. Teck-fur detailing, with a kind of red highlight. Can you see color?”

“No, but I can smell it,” she said. “Yellow, yellow, yellow.”

The cozy old invalid was sneering at him. He unsheathed his claws, just for a moment. Let her droopy ears catch the release of each horny talon from its velvet socket.

“A shame to start off on the wrong foot, don’t you agree?” he said. Plaintively, almost a miaow, to the castanet shuffle of his claws sliding against one another.

She heard his feline assertion. “You are a Lion,” she said, and whispered theatrically: “the king of the forest, no less!”

She used just the perfect phrase designed to poke the embers of his childhood into flamed memory despite his resistance. The King of the Forest. He shuddered involuntarily, hoping she couldn’t hear his jowls jiggle.

She pressed her advantage. “I’m neither a judge nor a jury. I’m a witness. Tell me who you are, Sir Brrr, and how you got here. And tell me the truth. Then maybe I’ll comply. You weren’t already weaselly when you were young, were you? Even weasels aren’t very weaselly at first.”

With elegant steps, looking sore of paw, Shadowpuppet paced to the legs of Brrr’s chair and purred to be picked up. Brrr obliged. The cat calmed him down.

Taking this deposition would be one campaign he wouldn’t screw up. For the love of Ozma, wasn’t he the equal of this crazy old coot draped in a tablecloth? And he had his writ in hand, permission to take her into custody if need be. He would get the goods if they were to be gotten.

If it was to be cat and mouse here, he had the genetic qualifications to play the cat. He had the motivation. He had the might of the bloody Court to back him up, too, if need be. He would redeem his reputation among the great and the good of Oz, and he’d wipe the smirks off their goddamn faces with his own beribboned tail.

“You’re an oracle, I’m told,” he said. “You ought to be able to see my youth, if you want to.”

“I like to hear it told,” she replied. “I have an appetite for childhoods. Insatiable, as it happens.”

T HE
PARTICULARITY
of other folks’ youthful memories always mocked Brrr. The first visit to Grandmama’s! When the coconut fell on the teacher’s head! The time that baby Albern almost choked! How we laughed, how we cried. How we remember. Together.

His first and oldest past was undifferentiated. Unending forest. Unremarkable seasons. Loneliness without hope of relief. How could Brrr imagine relief from loneliness when he hadn’t found companionship yet? What goes unnamed remains hard to correct.

Brrr didn’t know if his mother had died in childbirth, or been stricken with amnesia. Or maybe she just lit out because she was an unnatural mother. A loner or a schizo. Or maybe she was drummed out of the pride for low behavior. He used to care which it was.

Though of course he didn’t take it in at the time, he also grew up without the benefit of a tribe of his own. No aunties to fill in the blanks about what his mother had been like, and where she had gone, and why. No growly father hiding a whiskered grin of affection even as he set to cuff his darling cub, raising him up right in the ways of the family.

His earliest memories-gluey hazes-involved skulking about the Great Gillikin Forest north of Shiz like-like a skunk, like a grite, like one of those creatures who can become repellent even to their own kind. Like a human.

In later years as an arriviste in the Emerald City-having sat through a number of poetry readings-he found a way to characterize the Great Gillikin Forest. After a second sherry he could wax most convincingly about shrouds of spiderwebs. The dank naves suggested by rows of diseased potterpine, slatted with bars of cold yellow light. The forest floor carpeted with thornberry prickle. The stupid fecundity of the spring, the swift and unrewarding summer, the gloomy autumn, and-oh hell-the bone-taxing winter. What damned Lioness would bother to deliver a cub just to abandon him there, of all benighted places?

People nodded politely as they inched away.

The trees creaked as if the whole world were constantly flexing its muscles, about to pounce. A fern could unfurl with a snap that knocked you six steps toward a sanitorium. Owls, bats, forest harpies, badgers. A wild turkey in the undergrowth, startled into flight, making a noise of small explosives. To say nothing of fog. He hated fog. And poison ivy. And don’t even mention snakes.

Or elves. Or any beast larger than a runtling pig.

The first humans he could remember coming upon were the mad Lurlinists. Brrr spied on them from behind screens of bracken. They dabbled in heathen rituals. Smoke and incense, singing in minor thirds. That sort of thing. He’d deduced language from them, language of a sort: an orotund pitch derived from religious prosody. Somewhat off-putting, as it turned out. It hadn’t helped him to act the part of an alley cat later on, when he’d wanted to flee into the demimonde.

But he had loved the contrapuntality of discussion even before he quite understood that words possessed dedicated meanings. Eavesdropping on two travelers arguing over which way to go: savory plum nectar to him, blanket and kisses and mother’s milk to him. The lilt of human voices in conversation, the nasal sonority, the fermata silences-he learned to hold himself very still in dappled shadows for the reward of it. Rhythm and tempo came first, vocabulary followed-but he never practiced, except to himself in secret bowers. As a young Cat he was still larger than a human, and if he spoke stupidly he might identify himself as nothing but a big lummox.

How had he survived his early years? He’d eaten nothing but forest turnips, shallots, the pinker of the edible fungus. He’d stalked human travelers and eavesdropped on their campfire chats to try to pick up anything that approximated street smarts, though he didn’t even know what streets were yet. Watching occasional romantic exercises in the firelight, he’d learned more. Not that he’d been able to put theory into practice very often. More’s the pity.

“Your childhood,” said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn’t chosen to retail at drinks parties.

Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

H E
DIDN’T
exchange a word with a mortal soul until he was nearly full grown, which for a Lion takes about three years. Therefore, he was slow to pick up on the concept of hunting, even though he’d heard it mentioned.

The memory stung still. He crossed his legs, as if the old witness sitting there in her death-linens could hear the vascular effort of his veins trying to retract his testicles. He smoothed the Rampini coat over the little loaf of his stomach.

Hunting…well, it was what he was doing now, too, wasn’t it? No handgun in his vest pocket, true. Just the privileges of the law, notarized by EC heavies.

He remembered the first time he’d heard the noise of rifle-shot. From far enough away, it had sounded like a distinct filament of thunder, a single flayed nerve of it. Brrr knew tree rodents to be smart; if they were careering away from the retort, there was good cause.

He lay low, in a kind of declivity-not a Lion’s usual response to aggression, but how was he to know? Before long a quartet of uniformed men came near. They pitched their tent, and lit their campfire, within a few yards of where he had dropped like a felled potterpine. It took the Lion a few moments to realize they were responsible for the portable thunder. The rifles leaned against one another, reeking still of burnt gunpowder.

He was afraid his body odor would give him away, or the rumbling of his stomach. The hunters were noisy from drink, though, and he had nothing much to fear from them except what he learned about hunting. They traded tales of knocking off deer, skinning and mounting ocelot, tanning the hide of elk, beheading lions and having their skulls stuffed with sawdust and their teeth waxed. And spheres of polished onyx inserted in the emptied eye sockets.

Brrr’s blood went slow, as if turning to gelatin. Even when the last hunter had nodded off, and the campfire collapsed into bright char and hiss, his whiskers never twitched. Were the hunters to sniff him out, stand over him and give him a head start at the count of ten, he wouldn’t have been able to move. The bombast of hunterly boasting had hexed his limbs into basalt.

The hunters woke before dawn. One of them all but pissed on Brrr, but the guy was sufficiently hungover not to notice. They kicked sand over their campfire and hoisted their rifles and packs, and crashed like rhinos away from Brrr’s sanctuary.

He resigned himself to living in hiding for the rest of his life: to remain a rogue, unattached and unnoticed. And safe. Though what kind of a life would that be? He remembered with the instant nostalgia of youth the Lurlinists singing their anthems, the rare hikers chatting over landmarks, the lovers twisting by firelight against each other, as if trying to relieve a fatal itch. The choice of renunciation he was making was gloriously disappointing and refreshingly sad.

It was his first adult decision and therefore almost immediately revoked. A few days later he stumbled-literally-across the inaugural test of his mettle.

Evening. Brrr had been on the lookout for a growth of sweet forest pumpkin, which he especially favored. He hadn’t seen the fellow on the ground, and he’d stepped right on him. The pressure of his paw had awakened the hunter out of a torpor of pain. “Help,” said the man. Brrr leaped back, as terrified as he was surprised.

It was the youngest of the four hunters, the least offensive, though no saint either, by the stench. The fellow’s leg had been all but snapped off in a trap of some kind. Flies were making a banquet of the pus.

“Open the trap,” begged the poor sod. “Let me free, or else eat me at once. I’ve been here days beyond telling.”

Surely it can’t be more than three days, thought Brrr, but he didn’t contradict.

“I can’t bear another night,” claimed the fellow.

“The very dark,” said the Lion. This didn’t seem enough, so he added, “Isn’t it very very fright-ful?” It was his first remark to anyone other than himself, so it was the first time he heard himself sound like a pantywaist. What was that all about?

“I beg you. Mercy, for the love of the Unnamed God.”

The Lion backed up, his rump high in the air, his whiskers a-twitter.

“Release me or do me in-one or the other,” said the man, and fell to moaning. “Kill me and you can chew this wretched leg off my torso at last.”

“Actually, I’m very vegetarian,” said the Lion, proud of the actually. Is this how conversation was supposed to go? Your turn.