A Lion Among Men (18 page)

“Is this our final lodging?” she said. “Or is this just nighty-night? You get spooked by another hurricane, and tomorrow will we continue on toward the Glikkus or the over-harrowed Corn Basket? Make our home in domesticated fields like so many cowering field mice?”

His eyes flashed, but she was his daughter and he wouldn’t upbraid her in public. She would rule the Ghullim sooner or later. He couldn’t be seen to erode her authority even as she questioned his.

Brrr watched. The strange flexing arrangement that fathers exert over their children. It awed him.

He also saw that the tree elves were being directed to unpack the cart, so perhaps this really was the chosen camp for the next indefinite period. If they were marching again tomorrow, the elves wouldn’t be bothering to decorate the clearing with such swags and scrims as Ivory Tigers admire.

While the hunters skulked off to hunt down a supper, which Brrr supposed drearily would be served without anything by way of sauces or savories, he managed to straighten out the kinks in his shoulders enough to hobble up to Muhlama and look her up and down.

“What are you giving me the once-over for?” she snarled.

“You’ve spent an awful lot of time being furious today.”

“So what.”

“So”
(here it came)
“I can’t help noticing fury becomes you.”

She backed up several steps; her tail snapped. “You-you pack Lion! You menial…beast! How dare you! You have some nerve!”

“I have little nerve,” he replied. “But after my work on behalf of your tribe, I’m too tired to lie. Why shouldn’t I tell you that you are more provocative than ever when you’re so vexed?”

“You-you and your deciphering some dream of the chief’s-making us move camp by your auguries.”

“Oh, stow it,” he said, flumping down in some leaves. “I’m the only one who talks to you. I might as well talk to you honestly.”

He knew there was a sting of truth in his words. She became frozen with reserve, though her tail couldn’t stop itself from switching back and forth.

He pressed his advantage. “Why didn’t you want to leave? Are you just angry at your father for his unilateral dictates? If what everyone says is true, those powers will be yours one day.”

“I don’t want to rule. Haven’t you sussed that out yet?”

“Why not? Everyone will look up to you, take you seriously.”

“Are you an aberration to your species?” she cried. “Cats don’t look for approval!”

He didn’t reply. Her words were cutting, but she hadn’t convinced him of anything yet, except that he could be cut by words. And he already knew that.

“I have no use for this guarded life, this wreath of security around us all the time, this…myopic servitude to ourselves,” she said more slowly. “I have other ambitions than to be the indentured princess of an autocratic father.”

“Then why don’t you just leave?” he asked. “You are sleek enough. You could outrun any number of hunters.”

“And I’d end up like you, wandering aimlessly through the woods?”

“Things could be worse. As it seems you know. Why don’t you leave?”

“Because it would break his heart,” she replied, voice lower still. “It’s all he lives for. Not me, not them, but for the inebriation of being ruler, and passing it on. Fathers want one single thing: that their power will outlive them. It’s his only gift to me, after all.”

He wasn’t sure if he believed her rationale. Nonetheless, he believed her distress. She wasn’t just playing at being fussed.

“What is it you want?” he said again, more privately, hoping that she would surprise him with intimacy. “Are the tree elves right? Did you have some lover-Cat in the near vicinity, and is that why you balked so at leaving?”

“Did they say that?” Her head whipped around so fast he could only see the circumference of the circle described by the tips of her erect ears. He was afraid she would lunge off and slaughter the elves.

“No,” he quickly replied, rising. “I was fooling. It was my own thought, actually. Though I hope I was wrong.”

“You are so wrong at everything that if you ever started being right…” But she couldn’t finish her thought. She glared at him with perhaps the coldest look ever, but he imagined he saw a fringe of possibility flaring.

“You hope you are wrong,” she repeated. She took a step back, still looking at him. It was as if she were seeing him for the first time. He wished he’d had time to comb his mane. But in all his disarray, he preened for her anyway, tossed his head with a jerk at the neck. That usually got the human crowd, but good. She didn’t flinch. She moved an inch closer.

“Brrr,” she said. “Oh, Brrr. I’ve been rather a selfish thing today. You doing all this work, and just to get my attention. Now I see it. Now I see.”

“I like to work,” he lied.

“And they took advantage of you. That’s like them, you know. My kin. They make servants of guests. You realize of course that three Ivory Tigers could have pulled that cart easily enough from the front, if the elves had harnessed them into the leathers. But no, they all took advantage of your brute strength.”

He liked the way she said brute strength, even though his muscles were so tired that his back haunches were trembling. He hoped he was standing at such an angle that she couldn’t see. From some perspectives he actually didn’t look all that ineffectual, he guessed. He hoped.

“It was an honor to help,” he said again.

“Are you all right?” she said. “You look ill.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “It would be good to lie down and rest a bit. It has been a long day.”

“We’ll go for a walk,” she said. She turned and snarled at the nearby sentries, “We are going for a walk. Got it?”

He couldn’t tell why they stood back and let her pass unrestrained. Perhaps they realized she was still spitting mad. Perhaps they saw that Brrr was calming her.

Muhlama led the way. She had a seriously keen sense of smell and followed a track through sweeping clusters of vine until, after a few minutes, she had reached the edge of a pool. Here she laid herself down, reclining her hindquarters fully, her chest torquing into an elegant curve, so her head reared back upon her neck. Nacreous shadow behind her, blue and lavender and mauve. Her eyes lowered. Her ears lowered. “There is no one trailing us,” she said. “I would hear them if they were.”

He sat down close. Not too close. Close enough that he could feel the heat from her pelt. Musk of a rare sort; he’d never apprehended such a naked barb of invitation. A scorched-pecan, apricoty, humid sort of appeal.

“You are so royal, you can bring on estrus at will?” A bold thing to say and would have been crude said to anyone but a princess; and indeed he meant it as a compliment.

“I am talented,” she replied, lifting her tail another parabolic sweep higher, “but you give me too much credit.”

They didn’t speak for a while, as the evening birds exchanged their bulletins, as the bullfrogs dove into the water out of a surfeit of modesty. A hummingbird, a whipping blossom, came along and perched on Muhlama’s ear, until it realized its mistake and fled.

“You can’t be so kind to me,” said Brrr after a while. “It isn’t possible. No one ever has. I don’t fit in.”

“It’s I who don’t fit,” she said, “I with my strong-minded ways, my temper, my appetite to leave the very home that I am tethered to. I look a princess, I know; but I am a slave here, no less than the tree elves, no less than you are. I don’t belong.”

She angled her rump, and the movement of her tail changed. It became the pendulum on a metronome, counting the slow moments until she pushed her pelvis higher and threw her head back, nipping at Brrr’s throat as he covered her beautiful coat with his own.

When he could think in words-was it then, was it later, he didn’t know-it was simply this: Now I fit in.

His reverie was delicious. Eyes closed. He was partly conscious of the floating strings of the world, its selvages restitching themselves into a prettier apprehension. Some might call it afterglow. For Brrr it was as if a new appetite was just beginning to stir out of his dreamy slumber. But it was interrupted by hissing alarums. He hardly knew what was closing in on him until it was over and done with.

The discovery in flagrante by Ivory Tiger scouts. The forced return to the camp. The accusation of Uyodor, his recitation of Brrr’s offenses against the noble line of the Ghullim camp. Was this an attempt to thwart Uyodor’s regime? Was Brrr a stooge of the Wizard of Oz, working his way in here, seducing the daughter of the chieftain of the Ghullim?

“There was no seduction, sir!” Brrr was aghast. He glared at Muhlama, looking for testimony. Muhlama neither concurred with her father nor protested his accusations. She couldn’t speak. For anger, for regret? Then he saw what they had seen already. She had begun to bleed. The iron stench of it, a wound too large to hide. A rivulet of orangish blood that wouldn’t stop.

It seemed he hadn’t quite fit in, but she’d let him try anyway.

With a cold resolve, she hectored him, too. “Go. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? Go, before they have your head on a trophy backboard. You’ve done quite enough.”

Perhaps because she was still Uyodor’s daughter, they let him go. Though Uyodor declared, as Brrr backed away, “You are no creature of the wilderness, Lion; you do not belong here. Should we come across you again, or should our allies, you are fair game for the predator. A marked beast. You have ten minutes before we enact our promise to seek vengeance.”

So he pelted away, but ever after he wondered why. Was it just to preserve his own life? His life had a tinny cast to it, an artificial quality, hardly worth preserving. Or had he left not so much to save his own skin as to avoid having to see Muhlama’s life bleed out of hers?

In any case, he was gone. Not for the first time, nor the last: an ignoble retreat from a fray that had grown too hot for him.

Back into the wild, back into woods, back into exile. And this time he would endure a loneliness made more cutting by the recent experience of consanguinity. Or call it love, if you must.

Exiled, even unto himself, until and unless something came along to redeem him.

What came along some time later-days, or was it weeks?-near where the Wend Fallows petered out into the Corn Basket, was that toothsome morsel known as Dorothy. Another rare and delicate human, a girl this time, improbably making her way along the stretch of Yellow Brick Road that originated in central Munchkinland.

I T
WAS
an accident of the light, nothing more, that caused the little girl and her pair of noodnik companions to leap in terror at the sight of him. Or had it been too long since his most recent wash-and-set? In any case, he steeled himself for the inevitable interview, and wondered how much of his sorry history he could gloss over. Maybe they had some provisions to share.

Dorothy, though, was not riven with wild curiosity. She seemed to take his bowdlerized biography at face value. She asked no probing questions. She just smoothed the edges of her apron and consoled her quivering little pup. “Oh, Toto, have you ever imagined a Cat so big in your wildest nightmares? I hope you don’t lose your lunch.” She nuzzled her face against her dog’s in a way that might cause some citizens of Oz to question her sanity.

Still, he found to his surprise that he felt some small measure of sympathy for Dorothy. He was no longer inclined to consider human beings warmly, but maybe he was able to make an exception because she was so clearly a foreigner. Brrr imagined she was an orphan like himself, as humans didn’t usually leave their young to wander the high road alone. And no half-decent parent of any species would hire a Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman as chaperones and aides-de-guerre.

“Come with us,” said the girl. “We’re headed for the Emerald City.”

Propitious words.

One doesn’t know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one’s life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime. A lost girl in a blue gingham skirt and a white pinafore hardly seemed a likely ambassador to a rosier future: still, stranger things had happened.

He considered joining them. What else did he have scheduled? He couldn’t risk running into the Ghullim again. Neither the nabobs of Shiz, nor the Bears nor the Ozmists, nor the Glikkuns with their dirks, nor any affectionate soldier boys astray in the Great Gillikin Forest.

It seemed there was nothing in the wild for him; it was civilization itself that must be tamed. Perhaps this was his lucky break. It sure was about time.

And who better to serve as his escort back into society but this Dorothy? She possessed a writ of safe passage from Lady Glinda, who had met the foreign girl when investigating the sudden death of Nessarose, the most recent Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland. It took Brrr several weeks to pry the whole story out of Dorothy, about the tornado, the plummeting house, the glittering shoes. By then he deduced that Glinda was moving the girl out of harm’s way, because Munchkinland was up for grabs now that its governor was dead. Would Nessarose’s sister, Elphaba, come back to Colwen Grounds and rule the seceded nation?

Every step away from Munchkinland would be a step away from the Wicked Witch of the West, Brrr figured. Accurately or not, his name had been linked to her before; he wanted no reunion, thank you very much.

And once in the Emerald City-well, there was the famously reclusive Wizard of Oz to meet! The WOO! If Lady Glinda’s offices were as well connected as she had attested to Dorothy.

“Oh, do join us. Lady Glinda is so good,” said Dorothy. “I’m sure the Wizard will honor her request and see us. After I’ve come all this way-and through that dreadful storm, no less. A thousand miles from any outhouse. I won’t tell you what I had to do while aloft; it was revolting.”

Laboriously Brrr figured the dates backward and concluded that the great twister carrying Dorothy to Oz was the same storm that had given Uyodor H’aekeem nightmares and begun the sequence of events leading to Brrr’s expulsion from the Ghullim. He spent a few moments over a dark fantasy of revenge against Dorothy. But she hadn’t orchestrated that storm into being; she was a victim of fate as much as he was. So he let it go.