A Lion Among Men (24 page)

“The place was turned inside out,” said Avaric. “Or so I understood. Nothing left there but an old family retainer and the monkeys. No, the guess is that someone took the Grimmerie from Kiamo Ko. But who-and why-is a mystery-and where it is now is an ever bigger mystery.”

“To whom does it actually belong?” asked Brrr. “I mean, if Liir actually is the Witch’s son, I suppose it is his book, really.”

“It belongs to the government,” said Avaric. “I hope I haven’t misplaced my trust in you, Brrr.”

“Not at all. I was merely making conversation. Wondering if perhaps Liir had found it after all, somehow.”

“I don’t think he has,” said Avaric. “Because the betting parlors have it nine to one that when or if the Grimmerie falls into Liir’s hands, he would find a way to use it against the Emperor.”

“Is our national security policy governed by the odds in betting parlors?”

“You’re funny,” said the Margreave in a voice that betrayed little evidence of amusement. “Liir led a sort of protest of sorts against the Emperor seven or eight years ago. He commandeered a huge armada of Birds and they flew over the Emerald City. He had the Witch’s broom and her cape. If he gets his hands on her book, too, there’s no telling which corner the trouble will start in. The fact that things have been so quiet this past decade suggests he is looking for it as hard as we are.”

“Maybe he isn’t,” said Brrr. “Maybe he’s melted away like his so-called mother. He’s done his conscientious objection-”

Avaric started.

“I mean his rabble-rousing,” continued Brrr. “And if the rabble refuses to rouse itself further, why bother? Maybe he’s retired to the country to take up croquet.”

“He’s certainly gone to ground,” agreed the Margreave. “But it isn’t Liir we want, specifically. It’s the Grimmerie. Keep your eyes on the matter at hand. My advice is to start with Madame Morrible. She was, apparently, engaged by the Wizard to keep Elphaba under some sort of surveillance. She died two decades ago, but her effects are archived in the college of Shiz University, where she was headmistress. Crage Hall, it’s called. Start there.”

When they were about to take their leave of each other, Brrr asked, “How will you have me report?”

“I trust you,” said Avaric. He pulled his cloak about his shoulders. Despite the spring efflorescence, a cold wind had sprung up, smelling of old ice. “You are the Cowardly Lion, dear fellow. You will fulfill your commitment to the Throne or find your pardon revoked. One can always trust a coward to behave in a certain manner; they are predictable as rust. That’s why you’re so useful.”

“You are too kind,” said Brrr.

Avaric laughed. “You can’t even do obsequy with any conviction. The perfect spy. Here’s hoping for your sake, and for ours, you can carry it off.”

Freed to wander about again, though without his glad clothes. Brrr was reduced to seconds bought off the rack at the Poor Fair Boutique in the Burntpork district. A Lion snatching for a Rampini knockoff and fighting over it with a toothless gentleman who wanted it, he said, to make purses out of. Brrr won the tussle but lost his dignity. Well, as if he had any left to lose.

Supplied with a sheaf of writs and a small purse for expenses, Brrr headed back to Shiz. It was eerie to be middle-aged, tramping about the quadrangles as a functionary of Secret Affairs, where once as a dandy he had sprung along the graveled walks in an opera cape and a daringly rose-scented cologne. Everything now looked as seedy as he felt. He didn’t know if this was the aging process-the retreat from insouciance-or if the university was falling on hard times.

He’d met the archivist, Miss Greyling, a stoic in sensible shoes, and he decided that she was nuts. She couldn’t work the latch on the casement window, or remember with which hand to shake Brrr’s paw-nor whether touching the felted pad of an Animal was gauche or daring or illicit or morally profound. How could she deduce what the half-a-spell was saying? It would be a half-magic not worth the coin, he guessed. Her credentials, in addition, seemed dubious. But she was devoted, and flustery, and her cheeks grew pink if he let his language get coarse, which he did now and then, to remind her that he was, after all, an Animal.

“Oh, sir,” she’d say, “muffins at Lurlinemas, I shall scream!”

He was amused, and also chagrined. So it comes to this. I say naughty things to aging spinsters, to get a rise out of them. What a wolf I am. What a loser.

She found him the name of Yackle, though, and in time, with worryingly few other leads scrawled in his notepad, Brrr made to leave that hothouse atmosphere.

A glass cat had been sitting, grooming itself at the porter’s lodge. Perhaps unused to seeing a Lion in the streets of Shiz, the cat had gone all devotional and even romantic, purring up a storm in its aging larynx. So this is what it’s like to have a pet, thought Brrr, and while he didn’t encourage the creature, he didn’t kick it away, either. It had been too long a time since anyone, creature or human or Animal, had purred in his presence.

Why did the cat cross the Yellow Brick Road? To reach the Lion waiting on the other side.

Brrr had accepted the companionship. It was a novelty. He named it Shadowpuppet for its bright transparency, for its tendency to skulk in the shadows as if to keep from being overheated by the sun.

Going overland again-into the part of Oz most likely to see military activity-was no picnic. Until the first sign of battle, though, he preferred imminent danger to the froufrou of cottage guest rooms for hire. The lavender sachets, the geranium-mint teas, the caged songbirds embellishing the air with the pretty sound of their distress. Spinsters can decorate their own hearthsides with handiwork and camouflage, but to the Lion it seemed another sort of prison.

However, he was striking out in a new direction, and that had some merit. He had always relished the look of a virgin horizon. He headed due south, bypassing the EC, southwest toward the place where the dead lake called Kellswater most nearly approached the great reservoir of Restwater. The provinces of the Vinkus and Gillikin met here, and the Free State of Munchkinland to the east nudged up against them both. It was, quite possibly, the hottest spot on the map just now, due to the need for fresh water.

The various biddies from their porches agreed: Just north of the oakhair forest he would find the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. He nodded and kept on. With luck the old bitch, Yackle, would still be clinging to life. If she’d survived to this unholy age, she’d be a pushover. He wasn’t worried about it.

He would pursue any lead he could to learn from Liir, or from any source, the whereabouts of the fatal book of magic known as the Grimmerie. Even daring to dart about a landscape gone noisy with the movement of infantry divisions. Where, in a slightly horrifying night, he had come across Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire tending the wounded, and persuaded them to let him and Shadowpuppet accompany them back to the mauntery.

HE
SAT
IN the darkening room. Early evening was always the hardest to negotiate. He tried to concentrate on the immediate. The wind had died down a little; the oakhair forest moaned less strenuously. A moon was rising; it would be ducking in and out of clouds tonight. The world first in shadows and secrets, then in naked prominence.

Nothing in his own life was worth remembering, really. Every turn had promised reward, and delivered something less. So in truth, searching out the twists of someone else’s life-be it Madame Morrible’s, or the wretched Liir’s, or even old Yackle’s-was a downright comfort. A welcome distraction. It was diverting to consider lives that had been as hobbled as his own troubled existence.

From a witch’s familiar to a collaborationist of the Wizard to this: a civil servant yoked to the information agencies. Abhorred by the right and the left alike, as Avaric had said. In some ways, rounded upon by everyone, Brrr had nothing left to be, to become, but himself.

How limited, even sour a prospect, though.

One may, oh, cook poorly, or be socially graceless, or invest unwisely, or fail to achieve the best of personal hygiene. But one doesn’t want to live wrong-from breath to breath, from start to finish, to get it wrong, so wrong, so fully wrong, that one has never had the glimmer of an idea that it might be better. Or does one? Maybe if you’re going to get it that wrong, it’s better to get it all wrong. The proverbial stupid ant crawling on the hat brim of the prophet, eager only for the shade behind the prophet’s left ear, and ignorant of the civilization-altering sermon it is witnessing.

T HE
ACOLYTES
of the Clock of the Time Dragon banged cooking utensils into dirty kettles, tying up their sleeping rolls. Their anxiety at the sound of distant cannon was obvious through their overeager laughter. Boys in the neighborhood of war.

“We’re pulling up stakes here, Missy Morosey,” called the sergeant-at-hand, but when she didn’t arise to hurry to them, he just cursed under his breath and continued knotting ropes to secure the carriage. There was too much to be done to waste his breath trumpeting at her when she decided to go deaf.

Her back was turned to them, her head bent as if listening to an interior argument. She was alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, are alone. Had she a mirror to study her own features, she’d have noted with approval the early silvering of her hair, the spatter of liver spots on the edge of her temple. These would have helped her overlook that her skin still glowed, almost as if backlit, with the enviable sheen of youth.

But she wouldn’t have a mirror. She cared to see in her own face neither shades of the hopeful child she’d been nor glimpses of the schemingly wanton maiden she’d become. In recent years, she had bridled at compliments-“How like a sylph you are! How maidenly!”-as if the efforts to survive her calamities and do useful work had proven incapable of maturing her.

The clearing was striped with oakhair strands. They’d been vibrating earlier, but as night drew near, the winds lapsed, the music stilled. It was almost time for a candle, but she didn’t want to go back to her cohorts at the wagon. Bellow though they might, they wouldn’t leave without her.

She balanced a pen in her hands, musing.

She had been trying for years to write, but even when she managed a line or two, she couldn’t or wouldn’t use the personal pronoun. The habit of alibi prevented her. Anyway, she was no longer convinced that she possessed a character so resolved it could boast about itself: I, I, I! When she did write it, it was followed by a period. I. It might as well be her initial, as in “I. sat alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, sit alone.”

Her reservations weren’t rooted in aesthetics. She knew little about that branch of opinion, and cared less. Beauty and its refinements. Hah! If she had to consider her aversion to the unslakable I in terms of theory, she supposed she would speak about the elegance of justice: Your I and my I are of equal weight. Or about the central paradox of equality: The I, the singular first-person pronoun, had to be eradicated in order to sustain the argument about justice’s brash lack of interest in individual history-even as justice existed to champion the rights of such histories to exist. I and I and I and I, all the land over.

The dwarf barked at her. “Dizzy Lady Lollipalazy! We may have to break camp before our scout returns with news of those pesky troop movements! Skedaddle before we know whether we’re making ourselves targets or skirting the skirmish! Put away your notepaper unless you prefer to be swallowed up in cannon smoke. Though whether it’s the cannon of the EC professionals or the stumpy little guerrillas, we can’t yet tell. Are you listening, Twit-Twit-of-the-Mountaintops?”

After a while she uncorked a bottle of dark red ink and wrote a few words.

The madder the battle, the saner the peace.

She didn’t know if this was true. She wrote to ask herself questions. Was there any reason that peace should ever be sane? Perhaps war was too mad an endeavor for the world to survive intact; perhaps its aftermath was always corrupted. The I. who considered this was not without corruption, she knew.

She thought, but didn’t write: The louder the cannon, the deafer the peacemakers.

This was nearer to what she wanted, but it was not right.

She sighed. Given how the writing impulse had first emerged, no wonder it was so hard to get the correct words.

Some years before signing on as a nurse to a dirty old coot, she had taken up a position as a gentleman’s comfort in the squat industrial Gillikinese town of Red Sand. She learned her trade, mastered it, to useful effect. One evening she maneuvered herself from a shadowy nook in the Hall of Salt Fountains right onto the lap of a northern Gillikinese supplier of iron ore. He gave his name as Serbio, which she knew to be false. No matter; she used alibis in her line of work, too.

After a brief and teasing carriage ride, she ended up in his bed in a lodging house in one of Red Sand’s seedier streets. The smell of hot refuse, brimstone, and tarnish entwined, issued from the drapes; the factories were working overtime.

Her client was drunk and handsome though tending to portliness, and he had a wife at home who wouldn’t let him have his way with a riding crop. While I. could pretend abandon with a finesse verging on the uncanny.

Her client had left her there naked in the brownish lamplight while he answered the lodge keeper’s knock at their door (the interruption seemed to stoke rather than quench his ardor). The lodge keeper complained. Would Master Serbio please see to the inconvenient visitor at the street door as the lodge keeper was retiring-again, and this time for good?

She had expected the interruption-it was why she was here-though she hadn’t figured on the beating. But if she could deliver the goods, the unexpected welts on her naked skin might be seen as badges of honor.

As soon as Serbio left the room and trotted down the hall of the rented chambers, she rose flinching from the bed to accomplish her task.

Her backup team having worked out the scheme properly, she was ready. They’d had word that while Serbio was visiting from the western edge of the Glikkus, a munitions manufacturer in Red Sand was hoping to make a secret negotiation with him. The deal would need to be sealed before Serbio headed home to the slopes of the Scalps, site of the iron-ore mines. She needed to find out: How much blue iron ore was Serbio selling to the arsenal in Red Sand? And how often? Only certain kinds of firearms were prized in infantry maneuvers-the Pollinger redoubler, especially-and the iron ore used in the casting of Pollinger gun barrels was derived primarily from Glikkun sources. So figuring out which factory was producing the bulk of Pollinger artillery, and how frequently, would give a clue as to how the Emerald City generals planned to prosecute an invasion of Munchkinland.