A Lion Among Men (16 page)

But-martyrs roasting on an open fire!-Wend Fallows was ugly as sin. A furzy sort of brown nap coated the hillsides, like a mold that has died but refuses to stop clinging. On south-facing slopes, caterpillars had ravaged the spindly trees. Their leaves looked less lacy than skeletal. The water was brackish; the salt lick, licked out.

An arid good-for-nothing sort of landscape in which Brrr might as well make himself at home.

It was neither the place nor the time of his life in which he thought to find romance. Indeed, any expectation of intimacy initially sparked by his early friendships with Jemmsy or Cubbins seemed to have petered out, leaving nothing. He therefore hove into the sight of a tribe of-what were they-Ocelots?-without paying much attention. Almost devoid of the instinct for self-preservation now, he loped upon them and moved to pass through, looking neither left nor right at them as they lay, sprawled and unafraid, in the thin junk-woods that pestered the terraces and leveling slopes of the Wend Fallows.

He wasn’t so much displaying a proud profile as daring the Cats to be affronted, and to fall upon him with claws.

They did neither. A leader of some variety stood up and blocked his way. “It is poor manners in these parts to traipse through a party without stopping for a meal,” said the creature, a male.

“Didn’t presume to be invited,” said Brrr.

“You’re in such a hurry?” The tone was guarded, perhaps hostile.

“No hurry,” said Brrr, and then-a little hostile himself-“and no appetite to speak of, either.” He neither raised his brow to be superior nor lowered it.

“Stay a spell, then. Join your neighbor Cats in fellowship.” He flicked his eyes left and right, circling the pack in. “We are a family tribe called Ghullim, and I am the chief, known as Uyodor H’aekeem. We have not met you before, I think.”

Brrr decided to withhold his name for the time being. “I’m not from these parts.”

“Advance guard for your pack?” Uyodor sniffed the wind for further company.

“Traveling alone,” said Brrr. “By choice,” he added, which was mostly true.

“A rare creature, to brave the landscape on your own.”

“Not much of a landscape.” He couldn’t keep from adding, “And so not much bravery required.”

“Still, you’ve met a peaceable sort, we Ghullim. We don’t like strangers to pass through without getting to know them, for strangers can become enemies, but friends?-friends can never return to being strangers again. Don’t you agree?” He whipped his tail, aerating his punctuation. The wind hissed in Brrr’s eyes.

“Oh, quite,” said Brrr, “though a conscripted friendship is a conceit I’ve never encountered before.”

“No conscription,” said Uyodor H’aekeem, “no coercion: only conversion, and by affable means! Piyanta, Zibria, come escort our new friend to table.” He enunciated the word friend with a crispness and decorum that suggested something like a legislated honor.

Piyanta and Zibria rolled up on delicately articulated paws. They were maidens of a piquant variety, and in a human affectation their eyes were smeared with kohl.

“Follow us,” they purred, and led Brrr away-he was not protesting-to a shaded clearing up a small rise, where a pair of tree elves was busy stirring a pot over a fire. The smell of a savory stew enhanced the sense of welcome.

“You will be our guest,” said Uyodor from a distance. “Ghullim custom insists on it. Treat him well, young ladies.”

“Guest, schmest,” muttered one of the tree elves. “I call it indentured service, myself.”

“Me, I live to cook,” replied the other elf staunchly while looking around himself this way and that. Sotto voce: “Shut up, Twigg.”

“Shut up yourself, Stemm.”

Brrr paid them no attention. He had never seen tree elves before, but having heard of them, he considered them beneath regard. “Are you allowed to talk with me?” he asked his female consorts.

“To talk, to befriend, to enrapture,” said Zibria. Piyanta giggled and looked in one of Zibria’s ears, as if studying to see if she had any brains at all.

“Then I ask a question, if I might.”

“You might.”

“I don’t recognize your species. Your profile confuses me. You resemble Tigers in your musculature, but you are smaller. And your coats-like dried mint leaves, the markings, rather than stripes…”

“We’re a rare kind, we are,” said Zibria. “Perhaps a one-of-a-kind species. We have Spice Leopard in our Tiger makeup.”

Brrr raised his eyebrow. He hadn’t known interspecies generation ever to work. True, in the wide scope of society, it was inevitable that shady romances between members of separate species would occur from time to time, but they were frowned upon at best and rarely produced offspring in any event. Now, he thought, an aberration that had yielded a most sumptuous type of cat-look at Piyanta lying there, amusing herself by batting at a butterfly-a dollop of femininity curled upon itself, in a coat of golden-brown scallops. An exquisite she, a remarkable she.

“Does the Ghullim clan have a name?” he found himself asking. “As a species, I mean? I can’t quite place you.”

“We don’t need to name ourselves. Let others try,” replied Zibria.

“Merchants of Oppression?” offered Twigg. “Slaves to Your Glorious Past?”

“Soup’s nearly on!” sang out the one who’d been addressed as Stemm. “And yummers, is it a winner today, folks!” He brandished a ladle like a mace. “Who wants firsties?”

“The guest,” said Zibria. “Of course.”

“Not hungry,” said Brrr, thinking poison or the like.

“Still, it’s only polite to accept our humble fare,” said Zibria.

“Not as humble as all that,” said Stemm. “We been working on this batch since sunup. No rest for the weary, that’s what I say.”

“No rest for the idiotic,” said Twigg. “Dish up a portion, brother-at-arms, before I bash your brains in. Not that you have many.”

The tree elves conspired between them to carry a shallow bowl of the viscous liquid over to Brrr and set it down on the ground without spilling too much of it. Potatoes like soft stones gleamed in the broth.

“Garnished with elf spit!” cried Stemm, and made as if to prove it.

“That’s an elf joke,” said Twigg, cuffing him. “Go on, eat up. It’s good.”

“Please,” said Zibria.

“I couldn’t,” said Brrr.

“You should, please,” inserted Piyanta, “for Ghullim custom requires us to hold off our own meal until the guest has partaken, and I am particularly hungry this morning.” She loosed a sour-pink tongue between pearly dirks of tooth. Brrr nearly swooned. Whatever they called themselves, or resisted calling themselves, they were a perfect beauty of a tribe.

He obliged, in the name of courtesy. If he were poisoned and died today, what difference might it make? He’d have perished in golden company, and little complaint at that, among all else to fret over.

And the soup wasn’t bad, actually.

He finished his portion, and the elves then served Zibria and Piyanta-from the same pot, Brrr was pleased to note. He rolled over on his side and stretched his aching legs. He didn’t think Lions had been meant for hillside meandering, not the way his limbs felt today. But to lie here in a wash of faintly pulsing pain and watch those pretty tongues lap and lap…well, he could bear it just now.

Before the elegant pair of damsel Cats could return to conversation, though, a third creature walked through. At first Brrr thought it was Uyodor H’aekeem again, for the stance was regal and the attitude curt and guarded. Then he saw that the newcomer was a female.

He was on his feet at once.

“Scatter,” said the newcomer, and Zibria and Piyanta left, drops of soup raining to either side.

The ladycat sat herself down. The tree elves didn’t offer her a meal (perhaps there was none left). They clung to each other and hid behind the pot.

“First things first. I see you’ve been fed,” she said. “I am Muhlama H’aekeem. The daughter and only child of Uyodor.”

He waited to be urged to sit again, but she didn’t mention it, and after a while he didn’t dare.

As if continuing a postprandial colloquy, she commented, “You are a brave Lion, to waltz in among the inestimable Ghullim without introduction or apology.”

“I don’t know your Ghullim ways,” he replied. “I don’t fathom the ways of communities in general, come to think of it. I have lived a while among Lions, but I am not essentially one of them. You must forgive me the brutality of my manners. Ignorance, I promise you, not superiority.”

“Well, of course, not superiority,” replied Muhlama. Her eyes were anthracite-hard, fixed, aqueous-but her tone had the faintest uplift of irony. “Where are you headed?”

Brrr had no destination. In a sense, his life of motion and restlessness, in successive waves of unsuccessful campaigns, had washed him up, cast him ashore on the lip of this very morning, with no further horizon to crave or even imagine. “Where am I headed? I suppose I was headed here, although I didn’t know it.”

Muhlama turned her head. It dawned on Brrr that they were perched on a blunted promontory above the encampment. While he was more or less on display, an ornament on a ledge, so were the splendid cats arrayed below. It was a larger tribe than others he’d encountered in the wild. He could examine their social organization as if it were drawn out in a textbook diagram.

“Has the Ghullim clan a name?” he asked. “A species name, I mean?”

“We are the Ghullim family. We need no other designation among ourselves. But I have known others to call us Ivory Tigers, which seems to be a nod to the apparent Tiger among our ancestors as well as to the Spice Leopard markings, which to some look like angle-cut slices of vanilla pod laid in imbrications.”

Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tigress. And below, her father en couchant, his forearms set decidedly as andirons. Marmoreal, he rested upon an ornate carpet knotted in golds and green silks. Back and forth among the cool stand of ferns behind him, his Ivory Tiger tail moved, like the head of a Water Cobra.

Around Uyodor H’aekeem’s carpet churned the workings of a government more regularized than any that Brrr had witnessed in the Animal provinces. Several elder Ivory Tigers, ambassadors or senators of some sort, conferred among themselves in tones soft and serious. Other male Tigers, disarmingly casual, patrolled the perimeter of the camp. The Tigers weren’t dissolute like Bears or paralyzed by endless arbitration like humans, but regimented and alert. Brrr realized he must have been given clearance to stroll into this group.

Nearer, he could see Piyanta and Zibria and their cousins in a kind of open cloister, reclining behind a netting of pale golden gauze suspended from the branches of larch trees. The young females tended to one another’s needs with a simple affection that seemed both kittenish and provocative.

A few rapscallion youngsters were being taught the algebraics of pouncing by a seriously trim grandmother warrior. She was not afraid to draw blood with the cuff of her paw, though Brrr could hear no mew of complaint from the erring student.

“Is there a queen?” he found himself asking, thinking of Ursaless, that dowdy collapsing pillar of Bear.

“Are you referring to Ozma?” Muhlama nearly spit the word.

“I was not. I meant was your father blessed with a consort.”

“Uyodor H’aekeem does not take a mate for life,” said Muhlama. “Like so many tribes in Oz, we are a matriarchy. But if a Chieftess bears no female offspring, her oldest male cub becomes leader until he dies or is challenged successfully by an upstart. Uyodor, the son of our last Chieftess, has held sway since before my birth.”

“And you are in line, then, to lead the Ghullim when he dies.”

“I stand in no line,” she snapped, but that was a revelation she regretted at once. (She had a temper, he saw.) The rate of her breathing had changed; she was holding her breath-holding herself together, holding herself back. “You are correct. If tradition is followed, I am the next to rule.”

He decided to change the subject. “Since you mentioned her, I wonder if your clan believes that Ozma will return to rule Oz again?”

She snorted. “Ozma? Can you credit anything about the heap of gossip surrounding her? The washerwoman myths of a holy saint Ozma, our savior and our guide-hah! Those baby bones are halfway to dust now. The Wizard in the Emerald City is far too smart an operator to have sequestered that child somewhere off-site, where she could grow and thrive and command an army to return and reclaim her throne. We wait for no deliverers here, and we need none. We are in readiness when our terrain is threatened, and no Wizard of Oz nor any other agitator will co-opt our independence or receive our tribute.”

The vigor of her testimony seemed disproportionate, since his remark had been casual. This was a tribe that reveled in its iconoclastic identity with lethal earnestness.

“I only wondered,” he said. “It does seem to be an enduring story, that the baby Ozma was hidden somewhere when the Wizard accomplished his coup d’état.”

“Inane. What reason could that mad potentate possibly have for allowing a potential rival to survive?”

“I don’t know.” The Lion felt out of his depth when talking political strategy, especially if the discussion became heated. “I heard someone posit that if the Wizard were ever brought on charges for her murder, he’d be able to pull her out of hiding and prove his innocence. Other than that, I have no earthly idea.”

“I can see that.” She rolled over on her side and looked at him without blinking. He felt he had never been scrutinized up close so intimately, and it took every scrap of willpower not to flinch at her velvety appraisal. “You are a naïf who has traveled widely. I can tell by how you speak. It takes a certain kind of independent spirit to remain aloof when one has gotten around.”

“Independent spirit is a polite way to put it. I prefer to think of it as a character flaw.”

She laughed a little and her tail lashed against the stone beneath her.

He asked her, “Why did the Ghullim allow me to approach, when you clearly approve of your own independence?”

“You showed no sign of being a threat to our security.”

He had to acknowledge they had read him correctly, but still that seemed an incomplete answer. “Are you looking for something from me? News about the Emerald City, say? It is some years since I was in Shiz, where EC goings-on were always the hot topic.” He did not add, And I left in disgrace, but he imagined Muhlama H’aekeem was smart enough to guess his shortcomings.