A Lion Among Men (10 page)

A silence ensued. “She has a point,” said the clerk to Brrr. “You’ll have to leave.”

“This is unseemly,” said the schoolmaster. “There’s no need-”

“I insist, or I’ll summon the merchant defense,” said the clerk. “I can’t tell the boss that his shipment of deluxe Dixxi House dinner services got shattered in a brawl.”

“I don’t have the stomach for shopping today,” said Brrr at last.

The door closed behind Brrr. He could hear the angry click of the bolt against the strike. Apparently that honorable schoolmaster had elected solidarity with his fellow citizens.

“You choose to stand with the aggrieved,” said Sakkali Oafish admiringly.

“I choose no such thing,” snapped Brrr. He looked up the way, and down. He wanted to get out of Traum before things became more unpleasant. “I don’t suppose you know the way to Tennikin? Where the soldiers are?”

“The Wizard’s soldiers?” Sakkali Oafish spat at their name.

“I knew a soldier who was-” But Brrr couldn’t think of how to describe Jemmsy.

She was quick, that Sakkali. “You knew a soldier who betrayed his orders by befriending you?”

The local militia turned into the high street. A motley mob of overweight merchants, nervous teenagers, that same miserable minister with his beard. Some pitchforks, a rolling pin, several guns looking all too dangerous.

“I have a job to do,” said Brrr. “I’m sorry for your trouble with soldiers, but I can’t stick around and sort it out. I have an errand of mercy for the father of a dead friend.”

“You’re not going to leave us to face this human mob unarmed,” said Sakkali. “What kind of Lion are you, anyway?”

At which question the Lion discovered the rhetoric of silence.

In any case, the trolls were hardly unarmed, he thought to say (but didn’t); fellow Glikkuns were showing up from an alley here, a chapel gate there, supplied with pickaxes.

The local militia raised their muskets. The Glikkuns stooped to loosen cobbles from the roadbed. From the stove of some upper-story kitchen, out of sight, a teakettle hissed like a small storm of rain beyond the hills.

Once again, thought Brrr, my chief talent: wrong place, wrong time, wrong key. “Not my fight,” he tried to explain. “I have a promise to keep…”

Backing up, twitching his tail in consternation, he heard a holy sound of bells splashing from the steeple. Like the Lurlinists’ music, only pretty. Brrr had not heard such melodic resonance before, and it sounded notionally of resolution, somehow.

Yet all around the town square of Traum, the hands of worried citizens were clanging gates closed, making an iron music. Wooden garden shutters slapped into place and were barred from the inside: You could hear the oaken music of the slats dropping. The free passage of the high street and the market square, within moments, became a pen. A closed run for an enemy trapped within.

This is how a market town defends itself when it lacks an army garrison, thought Brrr, and only then did he realize he had been pad-docked, too.

Sakkali Oafish hadn’t bargained on this reception. Perhaps this was a new maneuver, invented recently. “You, Lion!” she bellowed. “You smash a wall before they slaughter us, every one!”

“But-but-I have business in Tenniken-” He wasn’t refusing, he wasn’t-so what was he doing?

A barred iron gate right before him in his face, and all the pitching against it, to no avail-for it was strong, and he only a cub-

Before he could shake the thought free, return to language, a shot rang out, or two. Brrr was lately familiar with gunshots in the woods, but here in the open, in a town built of stone and slate, the echo was terrible. Stupefied, he recoiled sideways, involuntarily, and he pitched into the stone arch of a covered well. Dizzied, dazed, he stood long enough to see Sakkali take a stone at her skull. She was brought solidly to the ground, like a sack of rice tilting over onto its side. He staggered and fell, and was sick on the cobbles.

“Here, here,” cried the other Glikkuns, a small citizenry of them in their gravelly tones. Sakkali-dead or alive?-no one could tell. Two small fierce trolls lifted her body with hoarse grunts like chortles. “Lion, to gate, to wall, for one, for all.” Two or three of them leaped upon him. They hauled Sakkali’s barrel-like form with them.

“No,” he murmured, hoping only they could hear, “play dead, play dead! It’s your only chance.”

He shook them off and rolled onto his back, showing them how, letting his forepaws fall limp upon his chest like the unbuckled ends of a belt.

The trolls battered down beside him, as if he were a rampart, but only for an instant. Rifles were being aimed from all directions, and a supine Lion was a useless Lion to the Glikkuns. They abandoned him, making a rush for the lowest and weakest-looking of the gates, where a single sharpshooter was able to pick out one, two, three of them, and then the others took Brrr’s advice too late, and played dead, and were taken into captivity.

Initially-that day, the next-the Traumanians went through a show of celebrating Brrr. His refusal to evacuate the Glikkun trolls was called brave; his collapse in the high street was deemed an act of public sacrifice. A masterstroke of mob-control strategy. Pacifism in the course of strike busting. Brilliant.

For a while Brrr believed the public relations campaign, until it dawned on him that the constant advertisement of his refusal to defend the Glikkuns diverted attention from those who had actually carried out the assault. Then he began to suspect that within any cry of applause may lie coiled a hidden sneer. Perhaps a well-deserved sneer.

He made plans to leave Traum as soon as it felt safe to do so, which was some weeks. He traveled by train toward Tenniken, afraid all the while that vengeful Glikkuns might dynamite the tracks. Run the carriages off the rails. Reclaim any cargo of emeralds in transport. Then hunt through the passenger cars to locate the Lion’s cowardly carcass and do to it what he had allowed to be done to the members of their tribe.

He found that his reputation preceded him. “Just my luck. The Champion Lion himself,” said a portly journalist in the dining car, scribbling notes on a stenographer’s pad. He looked fondly over the tops of his reading spectacles and lifted a glass of sherry to the Lion, who had been assigned the second dinner sitting and directed to the journalist’s table. “Have I heard that the grateful citizens of Traum pressed upon you a small purse, in gratitude for services rendered?”

“Yes,” said Brrr, with some reservation.

“Whatever funds they came up with would have been less than what they’d have had to pay the Glikkuns.”

“Indeed,” said Brrr. Some of which he had spent in the dry goods store, buying a vest in which to keep his cash. And a cane, to give him gravitas. “It was just a token honorarium.”

“As befits a token hero. And look at that simply glorious medal for courage, to celebrate your achievement.”

The twinkle in his eye was deadly. Brrr feigned an attack of indigestion and excused himself. Alone in a stinking loo, he found that his alibi of intestinal ailment had come true.

When he emerged, he didn’t return to the dining car but wandered in the opposite direction. Upon reaching the last car on the train, he opened the rear door and stood on the juddering platform. Out of sight of anyone else, he allowed himself an unseemly spasm of shame. Then, when the train rattled onto a trestle bridge, crossing some dark unpleasant lake, Brrr let the medal on its leather belt fly out to hit the water with a final gleam.

Now it is over before it has really begun, he thought, my quest for approval. Only for Brrr it was never over, not really. An accidental half hour in the wrong village. His curse.

The train stopped at Tenniken later that evening, but Brrr didn’t alight.

An onward pitch to his life now, a few arts and skills-rolling over, playing dead, making mistakes, making conversation-but no destination.

Trusting in the amnesia of Bears, in the incapacity of Ozmists to identify their constituent citizens, Brrr hoped that his mortification at Traum would be as quickly forgotten. He was not so lucky. He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

T HE
AIR
in the mauntery parlor seemed to have settled, as if nothing were alive but the past. “Not too much to say about the first years,” he concluded. The room had a funny buzz to it, though. Old granny vigor mortis was listening so cannily that the Lion began to wonder if he had shared more about his origins than the sentence or two he remembered speaking aloud. She’s a tricky one, he thought.

“Talented, rather than tricky,” she cut in. “But how did you come upon the name Brrr?”

“If you can read my mind,” he said, “-which frankly I find an abuse of my fucking privacy-then you know already.”

“I don’t read minds, and you haven’t got enough of a mind to browse through anyway.”

“What’s being an oracle, then, if you can’t read minds?”

She replied, “I can only guess at what you are thinking, and truth to tell, I’m not quite up to room temperature yet. Playing dead myself has caused me to lose a little of my usual concentration.”

“I don’t know who named me Brrr,” he told her, “and it doesn’t matter. Now you tell me of your own origins. For the record. For when I file my findings.”

“None of us knows our own origins. We only know what we’re told by our parents and the mythography of our national anthems.”

“Don’t hold out on me. Look, I gave you what you wanted. I offend you by being honest? Get used to it. Story of my life, which you can stay the hell out of.”

“I’m the last one to be offended at human behavior,” she replied calmly, “so a Lion’s petty moral conundrums mean even less to me. Besides, I’m no blushing spiritual nosegay myself.”

“Well, then, get on with it, will you? Why are you implicated in Madame Morrible’s journal? I haven’t got all day. I can’t read your mind, I can’t even read your expression, since your eyes are so screwed up. The Court doesn’t want minor philosophies. It wants the facts.”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

He mused. “A barter system. Like the Ozmists proposed, once upon a time. You want something of me, too. Don’t you? You must, since you’ve taken pains not to die till I got here. Well, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” He grunted. “You look like you got a mighty arthritic hunch on your back.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. Whatever could you do for me?”

“You tell me.”

She sat silent. He’d got her thinking. He was sure she was bargaining, too, though he didn’t yet know over what. He’d promise her the world to get this job over with. She wouldn’t live long enough to collect.

He slapped his notebook against his forehead as if to attract the attention of a simpleton. “I’m ready when you are.” He flipped the book open again. “It’s your relationship with the Thropp family that the Court is tracking down,” he said. If she called him on his dissembling-his peddling not a lie so much as a disguised truth-he’d have proof that she was the real deal, not a charlatan.

He was gratified at her response. In her chair she reared back a little, her dry, flaking nostrils flaring like those of a panicky horse.

“For what use does the Court want my deposition?” she demanded to know.

“When did you come to be involved with the Thropps of Colwen Grounds, Munchkinland?”

“Has she come back?” said Yackle. “Is she here?”

“Who?” said Brrr. He stifled a wince of triumph. It had worked. Even a seer could be startled, it seemed. “Which one do you mean?”

“Elphaba, of course,” said Yackle.

And, dullard that he was, Brrr could sense it: The mention of Elphaba, of her sorry history, had hurried a flush into Yackle’s old veins. Whoever she was herself, old Mother Yackle, death-defying crone, she was still human enough to be corrupted by feeling. After all these years, an ounce of regret or something else very urgent still tainted the bucketful of blood that seeped beneath her bunched, crepelike skin.

He saw this. He had her. He wasn’t as stupid as he thought.

“Has Candle been found?” she said. “And Liir?”

She had mentioned Liir before. Well, some folks just knew the wrong things to say. Liir was another thorn in the Lion’s own sore past, and he didn’t want to think about how casually he’d sauntered away from the homeless boy without a second thought.

Brrr flipped open his notebook again. “It’s your turn to talk, Yackle. And I got evidence from other sources to check your statement against, so don’t try slinging some phony hash at me, fair enough?”

She chewed on the nail of her little finger. It looked as if she were dining on the fin of a lake narwhal. Beyond the room, a gust of autumn wind rattled the drying ivy clinging to the shutters. “I hear a noise of marching,” she said at last.

“The Emerald City divisions are tramping their muddy boots into Munchkinland,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? On the grounds of retaliation. Self-defense by way of colonization, probably.”

“I never attended to human politics.”

“That’s sound practice. Stay far away. Very far away. Listen, you want the background? So far as I can pick up, our glorious Emperor asserts that he is the de facto Eminent Thropp, the satrap of Munchkinland. Because his great-grandfather was the Eminent Thropp those three, four generations back. Shell, the Apostle Emperor, claims a right to the manor house of Colwen Grounds, to the demesne, and even more so, to the governorship of the province. So he’s about to re-annex the Free State of Munchkinland.”

“But the Eminent Thropp had daughters, and the rights of inheritance pass down through the female line. Even I remember that much.”

“Ah, but Shell is the last of the line, and both his sisters, Elphaba and Nessarose, died without issue.”

“But did they?” cried Yackle.

“What do you know about it,” he asked, “and furthermore, to the point, why do you care?”

His voice was brutal, even in his own ear. He must be anxious, more than he wants to show, she thought. But she had no room for him right now, when her own tinderbox of memories was flaring to the strike. Her eyes, which had not yielded up moisture for a decade, went gummy, and her heart went hard and soft by turns.