A Lion Among Men (15 page)

He looked the room over, in that way one does, pretending to expect to find one’s best beloved, or at least a crony, and readying to sigh loudly, a public display of regret, dash-it-all!-and at last it dawned on him that he was the only Animal in the room.

On reflection, walking home, he concluded that this had been the case, in the circles in which he traveled, for some time. He had never noticed.

Still, he didn’t yet have the wherewithal to know if he had become a laughingstock. He began to pay attention. Was including Brrr on a guest list a sleight-of-mockery to amuse the disdainful? An Animal in Society-in these days, in these hard times, with the Animal Courtesy acts!-had he become a joke? A beloved old joke? Was treating him like a hero a part of the joke? It might be just so. His allowing it to happen-showing up at dinner parties as the outré guest, dandified and powdered and beribboned-that was his part of the joke, people assumed. He had no shame. Good for him. He was a token of the Wizard’s clemency and understanding.

Perhaps they weren’t as cruel as they seemed. He pondered it. The Cowardly Lion? Sure, it sounded like a slur of sorts, but he’d looked on it as almost a kind of stage name, a title. He’d assumed they meant it affectionately. He had been very young when he’d made his name, after all.

Then, at last, and who knows how, the word began to get out that he’d been paid for playing dead all those years ago.

The Traum massacre. The journalist in the train’s dining car, all those years back, had coined a phrase, the Cowardly Lion. The tag was an insult in remission, ready to metastasize in the public consciousness now that Brrr had established himself as a public figure.

The Lion who wouldn’t fight. The pesky Glikkuns who were mowed down. The big old peaceable pussycat. The dead trolls. The wussums with his wittle Wion’s tears.

Ah, but Brrr would have survived the shame of it a little better had he not taken the purse.

He’d been too wet, too inexperienced, too damn hungry to think twice about accepting it. In the end, as the stink of a questionable past began to bloom around him, it wasn’t as much the cowardice people commented upon, but that Brrr had been paid handsomely.

We all make mistakes. But we’re not supposed to profit from them.

What could he do next? The rumors kept doubling the amount of the sum he’d been awarded. If he’d had anything like such an initial investment, he’d be the wealthiest Animal in Oz by now. In gossip, presumed wealth is always overestimated by garish exponentials. That in itself was a burden to him.

He couldn’t give the money back to the hard-up burghers of Traum; that would be to acknowledge some sort of wrongdoing, and he’d done nothing wrong except to be young and ignorant.

Besides, he could never afford to give back the amount of money folks now said he’d earned on his first day in human society.

In any case, giving publicly to charity was thought unseemly. He’d only be able to contribute anonymously. And while this might help his soul, it wouldn’t salvage his reputation.

He tore his mane out at nights, sleepless and distraught. But he kept accepting invitations, for suddenly to drop out of society might also signal a sense of failure, of guilt. The soirées became ugly but he kept showing up, in part to prove he wasn’t scared to show up.

Then one evening, as he stood under the stone portico of the Sir Chuffrey Opera Palace, waiting in a queue of the great and the good for the next available landau, Brrr was approached by a young blueblood. “The Cowardly Lion! You’re the Lion from the labs at Shiz University,” he said. “Aren’t you? The little orphaned cubling! Doctor Nikidik tried to sever your language stem. I was there. I remember.”

“I was never in Shiz as an infant,” he replied, affronted, though as he spoke he realized he couldn’t be sure of this. Who remembers their own infancy?

It was a Margreave’s son, deep in his cups, slurring his words and making a scene. “Brrr. Is that right? I remember-the doctor named you Brrr because you shivered like a kitten with the flu.” Only it came out “shivered like a shitten.”

“Nonsense,” said Brrr. “This is my first episode in Shiz. I should remember an earlier visit.”

“The cage,” prompted the inebriate, “a cunning little cage! I remember because your name was pronounced like the first syllable of berserk.”

Avaric Tenmeadows, the Margreave’s son, it turned out, had attended some classes with Elphaba. The dreaded Wicked Witch of the West, as she’d come to be known. On the day in question, she’d witnessed the dustup, swore the Margreave’s son. She had!

Heads turned. The Witch was big news just then, because her sister, Nessarose, recently had orchestrated the secession of Munchkinland from Oz. The Thropp family was in dudgeon, both sisters alike. No one yet had taken any measure of their baby brother.

Overnight-as the rickshaws and buckboards and broughams pulled sloppily into the rain-the Lion’s reputation was tarnished in another way. Suspicious through association. Complicit. A familiar…

The Witch had rescued the poor little cub from the experiment, said a letter to the editor, signed Anonymous (a pensioner).

No, it was a pair of fey boysies called Crope and Tibbett, said someone in a gossip column. The Witch actually wanted the cub killed so she could drink its baby Animal blood.

No, the Witch had hexed him, that poor little Brrr.

Are you kidding? He’d been hexed at Brrrth. Ha-ha.

I wish I’d been hexed with a trust fund like his.

Within a few weeks, vaudeville comics on the variety stages of Ticknor Circus were mocking Brrr’s precision in speech. When he made an attempt to talk street-thuggy, they mocked that even more.

What astonished him-when he had achieved the distance from the events to interpret them without rages-was the extent to which a comic accusation could, by dint of repetition, begin to be taken as received wisdom. The Witch, after all, was on her way to becoming feared and despised, but she was still only a distant threat. Whereas if the Lion was her familiar-hah! It made the threat of the Witch seem more like a joke.

When the joke faded, the sentiment remained. The bemused tolerance that had attended his myopic insistence on being a civilized Animal in Shiz began to evaporate. His silvered tray was empty of calling cards; the morning post brought fewer and fewer requests to call, to dine, to take a promenade through the Scholars’ Arbor, to attend a charity function at considerable cost. He was stuck with a stock of expensive old mettanite engravings he couldn’t shift, and he owed a bundle on them.

Miss Scallop began to be not at home to him, when, on her receiving afternoons, Brrr came to call.

In the week that no such invitations arrived, and the columnists grew snarkier in their insinuations, Brrr finally saw what others had seen many months, even years, before. Things were not going well for talking Animals in general, and for a talking Animal with a tainted reputation, for having been defended by the Witch, a known enemy of the state-well, if he didn’t get out soon, it would be his own fault.

One morning over coffee, a political cartoon showed a dandified Lion mincing along with banknotes stuffed in his beribboned mane. The caption read:

Quivery Brrrr.

What’s up with her?

What’s she prefer?

What makes her purr?

No loyal Cat

Should act like that.

The heart of a cur

In expensive fur.

The offending newspapers slapped to the floor, the Lion made his plans quietly-there were no friends to share them, after all-and then he disappeared from Shiz, leaving three months’ rent owed on Suite 1904.

He needed to avoid the Emerald City to the south, so he couldn’t go there. If anything the Animal Adverse laws were stricter in the capital. Yet, though some free Animals were said to be migrating westward into the Great Kells, the Lion could summon no enthusiasm for the wilderness outback of the Vinkus. He’d become too accustomed to his creature comforts. And he had no interest ever in revisiting the Ozmists or the Bears, or any other denizens of the Great Gillikin Forest. Shame? Been there, done that, as the wags said.

Instead, therefore, he made his way cross-country to the southeast. He wandered about, doing odd jobs and stealing from barns when hunger required it. In the best of times, a Lion can’t cause trouble in rural neighborhoods and get away with it for long. And these were not the best of times by a long stretch. So he lived in an unsettled way. He roamed the lower slopes of the Madeleines, hunger in his guts, burrs from hack-thistle in his pelt.

These were years of loping along, fits and starts. He would take a job on a farm-he wasn’t above hauling a wagon if it meant dinner-but the farmer was inevitably brutal, or stupid beyond tolerance, or offensive, or a sorry joke of a human being. Brrr didn’t think of himself as losing his jobs, but leaving them when the moment was ripe. (That moment so often came the moment he was fired.)

Once he discovered a pride of Lions trying to make a small conclave for themselves in some caves on the eastern slopes of the Madeleines. They had never been to Shiz, nor to anyplace more thrilling than the nearest market town. Nor had they any memory of abandoning a cub in the Great Gillikin Forest as Brrr had been abandoned. They were not his family, they attested. Far from it. None of their number could commit such a heinous act. Furthermore, they didn’t keep up with Lion tribes in other free-range zones.

At least, that was what they said at first. One evening on watch, a distinguished old auntie Lioness allowed that communiqués among the outlying prides had once been common. “There were human campaigns to separate prides of Talking Beasts from the rest,” she insisted. “The great
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has never trusted Animals. I heard from a relative in the Great Gillikin Forest that the usual single poachers were being joined by a more systematic cohort of army hunters. They were intent on eliminating the larger Animals who might get wind of the Animal Adverse laws and mount an attack in defense of their citified kin. The Forest is not all that far from Shiz, as you must know.”

“As far as I understood, Animals in the wild have little to do with their domesticated cousins.”

“Every pride is different, dear,” she answered softly, “as every Animal is.”

“Have you ever known a pride that abandons its young?”

“Not willingly. I did hear once of an attempt to cull Lion cubs from their mothers,” she continued, more blithely than he could have thought possible. “For use in laboratory experiments, whatever those are. One queries if said mothers relinquished their cubs in exchange for their own liberty. I never would of course.”

By now Brrr was cynical enough to look at her sharply. Was she revealing a hidden secret of this pride? Might they all have been lying to him? Could she herself…?

But this pride, to the last one of them, was marked by a dark tuft of fur at every chin, and he had no such marking.

So all she was revealing was the capacity of a Lion even to entertain the thought of such a betrayal, even if by someone else.

He didn’t bid the auntie good night, for he didn’t think it would be one; and it wasn’t.

Still, he learned from this pride of tuft-chinned Lions a certain coherence of attitude. A Lion pride could be a kindly casual crowd. They didn’t indulge in aimless ancestor worship, but unlike the court of Queen Ursaless, they didn’t forget each day as it happened, either. They were wary of others and tended to avoid large groups of nomadic Animals, even those they might easily disperse by a show of claw. Not precisely pacifists, but not the fierce Lion of human legend, either.

For quite a while they admired Brrr and treated him like a respected cousin visiting from the glamorous, dangerous city. He amused them with tales of goings-on, quite a few of them true. He settled with them, a raconteur-at-large, a personality that brought their humble forest lives some distinction. He made an effort to court a few young Lionesses (one at a time, of course), but his overtures were rebuffed. He was too foreign, too silver of tongue, for them to take seriously. He thought he could wear them down-wear them all down-by his amused tolerance, his capacity for sticking around. He could make himself indispensable.

But eventually the Lions began to mock his drawing-room parlance, and not in an affectionate manner. He was too gilded a lily for their rustic clan. If he could not mate because none would mate with him, he would be bound sooner or later to fight for tribal dominance, and-oh, the idea of it-they could never allow a dandy such as Brrr to lead their pack. He should think of moving on. Soon.

So once again he would have to get up and leave, before things got ugly.

By the time this thought occurred to him he had been with the pride of Lions some few years, and the departure was more painful to contemplate than he’d imagined.

Evacuating a sordid situation was beginning to become a habit.

During a night plagued by insomnia, he steeled himself to go. The sad dawn came, a soft-yolk sun blearing through vermilion clouds. Like an effect of the later period of the great la Chivarra. And there was a watery softness to the weather. Maybe it would be all right.

How old was he now? He pondered as he stretched the sleep-kinks out. Haven’t I earned the right to a decent life? Or could that ever be a right?

He had nothing to pack, no satchel, no clothes. He’d abandoned all his fine rags in Ampleton Quarters, Suite 1904. Naked as a brave Animal, he looked left and right across the clearing one final time. No one was awake but for a shy cub who was nuzzling a makeshift dolly in her mouth.

“I’m off, then,” he said to the little thing. She turned her head and closed her eyes as if she hadn’t heard.

“Don’t be such a little coward,” she purred to her fake baby.

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A piece of work he’d become! He acknowledged that. A ludicrous figure padding his way overland, with no particular destination, nor much of a yen to settle on one.

Indeed, the farther he got from the pale of the Lions, the more desolate the landscape became, and he in it. The rises known in Gillikin as the Madeleines-for their gentle ridged shapes, like the spongy cake so beloved of schoolboys-were less appealing on the Munchkinland side of the border. Their name changed, too. The Wend Fallows. Wind-reddened, turnipy hills that, lower down, broke up into a network of arroyos, most running south by southeast. Beautiful to no one but the stray hermit or mendicant. What streams there were flushed into the mighty Munchkin River, which fed Oz’s largest lake, Restwater.