A Lion Among Men (3 page)

Her breasts, loosened from their cotton corset, itched; they rolled outward, toward her biceps. Absentmindedly she caressed first one and then the other with the back of her hand. Then she untucked the sash that secured her skirts. She hung the skirts on nearby branches, further curtaining herself from mortal eyes, should any be open.

Before she stepped into the still water, she ran the fingers of her right hand along the scar between her legs. This was not for pleasure-there was no pleasure left-but as a test of assurance that the seal had not been broken.

Solitude, continence, silence: custody of her own history; custody of any future that might have descended from her, squawking and looking to suck.

Satisfied. More than satisfied, relieved, she arched a foot to enter the water. But before she did, she saw in the flat green of the pond’s surface a reflection of a moon. At first she thought: Now there’s a surface safer to write upon than paper. The circular page of the moon in the water-words written in water are sure to wash away, and the moon itself no wiser.

Lowering herself to her haunches, preparing to bathe, she realized she was not entirely unobserved. She could see upon the water a curlicued sort of growth like a backward question mark. She knew it for the reflection of the head of the dragon to whose service she and the others were committed.

The dragon’s eye was red, red in the green water. Red, unblinking, unblinkered.

You, you can look all you want, she thought, but even so she slipped into the water hastily.

What words she had thought to write on the face of the moon were washed away from her as she submerged, trying to disturb no one, nothing. Trying not so much as to interrupt a current, even trying not to shatter into soft-edged platelets the green moon in the reflection. Trying to sidestep having any influence at all, now and till the end of her life.

A T
DAWN
Sister Hospitality was summoned to the back door of the mauntery when the medical team returned, accompanied by a tall, stooped figure.

“We are not housing soldiers,” hissed Sister Hospitality. “You know I made that perfectly clear at Council, Sister Doctor.”

“Whatever this fellow is,” said Sister Doctor, “he is not a soldier.”

The chap was wearing a traveling cloak with a hood finished with bristles of greasy fur-or that is how Sister Hospitality saw it at first. When the visitor dropped the hood, she realized the fringe of fur was an unkempt mane, and the man in need of sanctuary was in fact a Lion.

Sister Hospitality snapped, “Who is this, then? What class and category of aberration? A deserter? A conscientious objector? A visitor from the press?”

“An emissary on a neutral mission,” replied Sister Doctor, removing galoshes caked with gore better left unidentified. “He is taking advantage of the safe passage here allowed by the forward front of the EC Messiars. And we welcome him, Sister Hospitality.” She spat out the name.

The Lion studied the floor as if expecting to be turfed out. An unlit cigar dangled in his mouth, a pad of paper projected from his vest pocket, and a pair of spectacles fitted with green-glass bifocal lenses hung on a chain from his velvet lapel. Sister Hospitality noticed some greying mane hairs stuck to the front of his cloak. His posture…well, it made Sister Hospitality square her own shoulders in a superior way.

“Brrr,” said the visitor.

“Let me fetch you a warming cocoa,” said Sister Hospitality, without much enthusiasm.

“No,” he replied, “cocoa disagrees with me. Brrr, I was introducing myself. Brrr, the name.” He handed over a card on which was scribbled an illegible note to himself. “Sorry, other side.” There it was:
BRRR
, three rs.
COURT
REPORTER
TO
THE
EMERALD
CITY
MAGISTRATES
.

Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire hung up their own robes-Sister Apothecaire using a lower hook. Sister Doctor stumped off in her stocking feet without further comment. Her diminutive associate blushed by way of apology. “Sister Doctor and I must enter our activities in the Log of the House,” said Sister Apothecaire to their guest. “Please excuse me, too. Sister Hospitality will see to your needs.” She left the Lion standing among the cleaning buckets, the barrels of cornmeal, the bins of dried beans.

Sister Hospitality went to hang the Lion’s traveling cloak in a clothes press. When a pocket twitched, Sister Hospitality recoiled with a shudder and she tried unsuccessfully to disguise her curse as a cough.

“Oh, my guard cat has scared you good,” said the Lion-almost approvingly, thought Sister Hospitality. “Nearly forgot about my little kitty-thingy. It’s been following me since Shiz. I must be the first Lion it ever saw, and it’s become smitten. Look at it, the little dollop.”

The cat may have been white once, but it was old enough for its fur to have thinned. “I never saw such a thing,” said Sister Hospitality. “It’s distinctly offensive. Creepy. Almost transparent. Male or female?”

“That much isn’t transparent, I’m afraid. Everything else is.”

“What ailment does it suffer from?”

“Cats don’t usually last as long as this one clearly has,” said Brrr. “That’s my guess. A cat gets old, its fur goes white, it dies. This one’s got some years on it, looks like, and if cat fur is white to start out with, how much paler can it go? Look.” He rubbed the cat’s arthritic spine, and a net of hairs came off on the pad of his paw. He held them out. Each hair looked like nothing so much as a thread of glass.

“Revolting,” said Sister Hospitality, charitably enough.

“Look, it hardly has a shadow,” said Brrr, and this was almost true; the morning light of the vestibule slanted through where the cat stood, stretching arthritically on the flagstones.

“What name does it answer to?”

“Have you ever known a cat to answer to anything?” said the Lion. “But I call it Shadowpuppet, for old as it is, it still enjoys the game of stalking prey.”

“If it’s as fragile as glass, it will be pleased to learn that our own mousers have recently fled,” said Sister Hospitality. “Cats can be so territorial. Present company excepted,” she continued, leading him up the stairs toward a receiving parlor.

“Oh, I’m territorial enough,” said the Lion. “Still, Shadowpuppet never leaves me, and I think I can scare off your convent cats if they come back.” He lifted Shadowpuppet, because the stairs were too steep, and Sister Hospitality would not pause even for a cat of advancing years.

“May I ask, what is a court reporter, Mr. Brrr?” Sister Hospitality pushed the drapes back to let in sunlight the color of old bandages.

“Sir Brrr, when I’m at home,” he corrected apologetically. “Title awarded by Lady Glinda herself, at the conclusion of that little Matter of Dorothy.”

“Beg pardon,” said Sister Hospitality, no tone of regret to stain her inflection.

“Not that I use it,” he hurried on. “The house has fallen on hard times. I do pickup secretarial work to make ends meet. Now, to business. I am dispatched by the Lord High Magistrate of the Emerald City to make enquiries of a member of your-tribe? Flock? Whatever it is a body of maunts calls itself. You know, like a swarm of bees, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls.”

“I’ve heard that lions consort together in a pride,” said Sister Hospitality.

“Those that let others join,” interjected Brrr. “Let’s not go there.”

“Call us a deference of maunts, if you must. And deferential, then, within reason, we’ll try to help. Do you know the name of the maunt you have come to ask about? Though we take new names as our obligations require, most of us remember what our original names were.”

The Lion steadied the spectacles on his nose. Dander flecked the lenses; no wonder he peered and blinked at the small notebook in his paw. “I can’t read my own writing. Jackal?”

“We have no Sister Jackal.”

“Sister Quackle? No, perhaps a C. Cackle?”

Sister Hospitality said carefully, “Oh, dear. I wonder if you could mean Yackle. She was laid to rest over a year ago.”

“Was she an oracle?”

“Sir Brrr. We are a convent of holy women. We don’t trade in prophecies. What would a seer be doing in a mauntery?”

“You haven’t answered my question. Was she an oracle?”

“I can’t possibly answer that question. I was not her confessor.”

“Who was?”

Sister Hospitality thought. “Actually, she didn’t have one. She wasn’t professed, I think.”

“Would someone here know if Yackle was an oracle?”

“The old Superior Maunt might have, but she’s gone too.”

“Holiday?”

“The Final Holiday.”

“Sheesh. Occupational hazard in this place?”

“Growing old? Yes.”

Brrr explained. A knotty little concern in the courts had prompted a senior magistrate to call for a finding. Brrr had been dispatched by order of the Stamp of the Emperor to pursue the matter in any direction. From a side pocket he produced a notarized writ of entry flecked with bits of bread crust. He flattened it with a paw. The legal penmanship crosshatched the vellum into illegibility. “This authorizes any enquiry I want to make, as it happens.”

“Are you bullying me, sir?”

“I don’t need to bully the likes of you,” he replied, tapping the paper. “This is the bully.”

“I haven’t the mind for this, nor the time,” said Sister Hospitality. “Nor am I the authority in the House; we are governed by a Council. But I can and must report to them what you say. Why don’t you tell me precisely what brings you here?”

“Highly secret and hush-hush.”

“I respect that. I’m Sister Hospitality, after all, not Sister Rumormonger. If hospitality requires confidentiality, I’m qualified.” She made a shushing gesture, tapping her forefinger against her pursed lips, then whispered, “I’m all ears.”

The Lion muttered to himself a little, weighing his options. Finally he allowed this much: He had recently spent a week in the Gillikinese city of Shiz, going through the deposit library of Shiz University. He had required to see the papers of a onetime governor of Crage Hall, long since departed into the Afterlife, rest her soul. A Madame Morrible. The frumpy little scholaresses at the desk had put up an argument, but he’d prevailed.

“And what did you find, pray tell?”

The Lion appeared to be governing a small temper, as if he thought Sister Hospitality’s curiosity unseemly. When he spoke, though, his tone was even enough. “Since you ask so nicely: Cryptic notes in what looked like the deceased headmistress’s hand identified a questionable personage known only as Yackle. An entity of some sort, but what sort? An agent of whom? If an oracle, was she a charlatan or a savant? And the way these investigations go, don’t you know, one thing has led to another. The Motherhouse of the order of Saint Glinda, in Saint Glinda’s Square in the Emerald City, had known a Mother Yackle but had sent her away for retirement. To a mission chapel, a benighted outpost in the Shale Shallows. And so, as they say in the pantomimes, ta-da!”

The white cat settled in a patch of sunlight and began to clean itself. It all but disappeared.

“I do so wish you’d come sooner,” said the maunt. “There’s a little thing called armed conflict going on locally.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You ought not to have bothered. There’s nothing I can do for you now. Whoever Yackle was-an ancient madwoman older than sin itself-she’s passed away, and to the best of my knowledge she was never an oracle anyway.”

“Think again!” said a voice at the door.

They turned.

“I knew you’d be here sooner or later,” said Yackle, “but it took me the better part of the season to get up the stairs. Glad I’m in time.”

The Lion, not knowing precisely what he was seeing, merely gaped. Sister Hospitality sloped to the floor with the clop of a collapsing ironing board. “You seem to have killed her,” said the Lion to the newcomer, affably enough.

“All those months that I couldn’t manage to kill myself, and I slay the righteous with my first remark?” said Yackle. “There’s gratitude for you.”

The Lion cocked out a sleeved elbow. She gripped it. He guided her to a chair. Her voluminous winding sheets were unstained by ordure or blood; they were merely dusty from having been trailed through the basements. He could detect no stink of corruption. “The odor of sanctity,” said Yackle peremptorily.

“You are an oracle,” said Brrr. “You’re the one I hoped to find.”

Shadowpuppet sniffed around the edges of Sister Hospitality, who came around and sat up. “You’re blind, not to mention dead, Mother Yackle,” sputtered the maunt. “How could you make your way upstairs?”

“My inner eyesight seems to have been improved with my little reprieve from the distractions of dailiness,” Yackle admitted. “I could remember every step taken to cart me downstairs, and how high the door handle was, and so on.”

“No time like the present,” said the Lion, extracting from another pocket a pen and a small pot of ink with a cork stopper. “The tides of war go backward as well as forward, and some army might wash up here by teatime. I’d never be able to concentrate if there were men ballyhooing about. Distractible that way, but there you are.”

“You have no business leaving your bier and barging in here as if this is some sort of a-a saloon,” insisted Sister Hospitality in a honking voice, but they banished her and set to the task.

H E
DIDN’T
like the look of Mother Yackle. Who could? She was a walking cadaver. Her eyes rolled, ungovernable but to the spectacle of her inner sight. Her lips were thin as string. Her nails had kept growing while she was interred, and they made a clacking sound like a set of bamboo blinds being lowered against the noonday sun. When she went to scratch a place on her scalp, she misjudged the angle of approach and nearly punctured her own eardrum.

It’s been a long time since I have seen Death this close up, he thought. This is Death refusing to die. She’s a centerfold for a mortuary quarterly.

“I was quite a looker in my time,” she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know that she must be hideous?