A Lion Among Men (36 page)

“Slow down,” called Brrr. “Take a breath. You’ll pop a button or burst a spleen.”

“They’re advancing, oh sweet Lurline,” said Sister Apothecaire, in her panic reverting to pagan sensibilities, for Lurline had come from history and gone into myth long before faith in the Unnamed God had called maunts to live in community and service. So long ago that no one could ascertain the chronology of it.

“While we were in Council, and we left you locked up-oh-you’re out”
she noticed
“the Munchkinlanders have come up with a startling crew of backup patriots! Lord bless ‘em! But they’re converging from the east, and it looks as if a battle will indeed be joined right here, on the very skirts of our precincts. And the good sisters at last have fled, that toady Sister Doctor leading the gallop! I said I would hurry back to release you, once we had remembered about you, and no one protested. Who wants a blot like that in our copybooks? So here I am. Consider yourself released. Shoo.” She waved her hands. “Where’s Mother Yackle?”

“Safe,” said Brrr.

“You’re a brave woman, good Sister,” said Ilianora, starting to help the dwarf strap up doors, slotting the stages like drawers back into the bureau of clockwork.

“Brave or good, coward or bad, I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said. “Get out while you can. I have the keys and there is no governing Council or Superior Maunt to stop me. I’m going to open the doors to the Munchkinlanders and give them a fighting chance. Unless you want to be caught in here with them, take to your heels, at once!”

“Which way should we go?” asked the dwarf. “We have precious cargo.”

Do we? wondered Brrr. He supposed that Mr. Boss was referring to the Clock of the Time Dragon and the Grimmerie. All the rest of them-Ilianora among them, even the dwarf himself-were more or less dispensable.

Sister Apothecaire replied, “I don’t know which army would trouble you least. It’s your choice. Munchkinlanders are sweeping up in a shallow curve from the eastern edges of the oakhair forest. It’s a counterattack in advance of the arrival of the Emperor’s armies. We maunts evacuated to the northwest-deeper into Gillikin, whether I like it or not. The pincers are closing exactly upon this troubled house: It stands precisely where the East and the West will meet and have their bloodshed, and in a matter of quarter hours, not days. I have sung my alarum to you, now fly if you will; be it on your own heads if you won’t. I must be at the ready. I will offer flame and pitch from the ramparts to any EC soldiers, or sanctuary should the Munchkinlanders get here first.”

“You can’t rely on virtue and vice being so evenly distributed,” said Ilianora.

“I am not talking about vice. I’m talking about clan.”

A pride of maunts, thought Brrr, is rather a self-made thing, isn’t it? And temporary, if it could dissolve under pressure of war into the clans from which its members originated. Still, there is no law that says all decent things must be permanent. Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

Having delivered her ultimatum, Sister Apothecaire turned, but she was moving so fast that she couldn’t stop herself. Her foot twisted on a crack between the stones of the staircase, and she tumbled nine or ten feet to the ground, and there she lay still.

“She won’t be dead,” said Ilianora, but Brrr thought her statement more hope than prognosis.

The dwarf wouldn’t wait for a report. “Leave the little old fussbody for her countrymen to tend. We’ll be off and away with the fairies, as advised.” He barked orders to the acolytes to withdraw the bars from the main gate, and then to position themselves for flight.

Four boys put themselves between the shafts of the cart, and the others went behind to push. But Ilianora said, “Mr. Boss, we can’t be sure the Munchkinlanders will arrive first. If the Emerald City Messiars beat them to it, this maunt may be in danger. Lay her on the coachman’s seat, and we’ll study her situation when we can pause for a moment to breathe. Brrr, help me.”

“Oh, my Lady Lovely, are you planning to leave us? Are you nominating a successor? Or are we abducting a goodwife for me in my ripe old age? Such a cranky one! And won’t she be surprised when she wakes up. Sure, take her along.”

Brrr and Ilianora lifted Sister Apothecaire, who was heavy for one so small, and they settled her in a supine position. Her eyes were closed but, as far as Brrr could tell, she appeared to be breathing.

“Well?” said the dwarf, scrambling onto the buckboard, “you’re coming with us, Cowardly Lion?”

“Is that an invitation or a prophecy?”

“I came to get you, didn’t I? That’s what the Clock told me to do.”

“You came and found me, true, but maybe my use to you was only as bait. To draw the Grimmerie to Yackle so she could take her leave. And where are you going anyway? Are you converted to Elphaba’s old cause, to see her rise like that before us?”

“Elphaba’s dead and gone,” said the dwarf equably enough. “We stay neutral, we keep our nosey noses clean, we take no sides, and we watch our backs. So linger here and stew about it as long as you like. Send us a postcard from whichever military prison you end up in. Whee-up, gee-up, knees-up, boys.”

Brrr was stuck with the conundrum. His job was done. He had been ordered to find out what had happened to the Grimmerie, and he had done far more than that: He had located the very book itself. Why let it escape? He might as well go with them, keep them in range. When the time was right he could choose to turn them over to the Emperor’s army. Once he felt ready to make that decision. The proper number of the dwarf’s slurs and indignities having mounted up to legitimize it.

Think of the glories that might accrue to Sir Brrr if he arrived back at the Emerald City with the Clock of the Time Dragon, and the Grimmerie safely interred within.

Think of the possibilities if he did not. He could fall in with the company of the Clock now, and perhaps-if they escaped to the West, along the banks of foul Kellswater-he could trip the brakes on the dreadful apparatus and drown the tiktok dragon and its bullying prophecies in the deadening water. Then no one could ever again use the Grimmerie to learn how to attack another soul.

“Make up your mind, and on your own head,” said the dwarf as the Clock of the Time Dragon began its slow creaky exodus into its future.

Ilianora turned to him and held out her hand. “Don’t be bashful. You would make a good companion for the company of the Clock. You know as much as anyone does, now, about where it came from and why we tend it.”

“I don’t know why you tend it,” said Brrr, but he flipped his notepad closed and pocketed it. “That’s beyond my brief to care about, Ilianora, so don’t spend your breath. Let’s get out of here.”

They passed under the portcullis. The broad stretch of the Shale Shallows lay to the west and south, wheat fields to the northwest. On the horizon they could see emerald green pennants of the advancing army, though from this distance the wind masked the sound of their snapping. Had the EC battalions paused to reconnoiter? Load their cannons? Was some general busily braying a rallying oration?

“Why did that otherworldly magician bring forth Yackle to oversee Elphaba?” Brrr asked Ilianora. “If his goal was merely to hide the Grimmerie, he didn’t need to use it to meddle in the affairs of this world. Look at the harm it’s done.”

“All my thoughts about history are sifted through my own warped fate. I have no conclusions,” she replied. “I can’t imagine why Elphaba deserved an angel to hover on her sidelines, even a paper angel, when the rest of us have to deal on our own with what prison and torture befalls us.”

“Prison and torture?”

“I’ll tell you one day. But not while you’re on the payroll of the Emerald City, no thank you. Not when the EC has supervised the extermination of my kin.”

“They’re not all dead,” said the Lion. “Liir may not be dead. And he went looking for you, all the way into Southstairs, I’m told.”

“There is that,” she said.

“We could leave the dwarf to his misadventures,” said the Lion. “We could try to find Liir.” So was he signing on to Yackle’s hopes? Was he being seduced by her wily trust in him? Or perhaps he was remembering Dorothy’s long-ago request of him, that he remain a companion to Liir. “I’m not looking for much,” he continued, shrugging. “Not for romance, believe me. You and I are well matched in our hesitations. But romance isn’t the only thing that draws two individuals together.”

They walked more quickly, almost trotting, to catch up to the Clock of the Time Dragon, but still they hung back far enough to speak privately for another moment or two. The steep walls of the Cloister of Saint Glinda fell behind them, a stone cloak they were escaping. As the armies drew within earshot of each other, the doors of this holy keep would be opened to all.

“I don’t want your company while you are in the employ of the Emerald City,” she said at last. “Not when they were behind the stationing of your Cat as a spy. Not when they were behind the deaths of my father and my mother and all my siblings. Everyone.”

“Everyone but Liir,” he said again, trying to convince her of something. “Liir waits for you somewhere. We can find him.”

“Have you other work you must finish?”

There were so many campaigns he had left midway, out of shame and confusion. One couldn’t fix much in one’s messy past, of course. Perhaps none of it at all. He couldn’t stitch up history so that Muhlama returned to him. He couldn’t go back and pull the trap off Jemmsy’s leg. He couldn’t apologize to Dorothy for his failing to warn her against the wickedness of the Wizard of Oz.

“It’s hard to know what to do,” he admitted. “I look at that great book of magic, and all the mechanisms set up to guard it from eyes that would steal its secrets. So much fate seems wound up around it, including whole lives-yours, Yackle’s, maybe Elphaba’s, maybe mine. With so much written in magic, how can we hope to become agents culpable for our own lives?”

Ilianora laughed. It was the first time she had laughed in years, guessed Brrr, for even she looked surprised to hear the sound coming out of her mouth.

“You and I think alike,” she said. “How improbable. But I don’t put much faith in a magic book. For everything that is revealed, more is concealed. What good is that Grimmerie going to do us? A magic book can ingest a troublesome old crone: so what? An army can’t disappear into a book of magic.”

“Fair enough,” he admitted. “Can it bring a single dead soldier back to life?”

Ilianora was busy unlatching a satchel slung over her shoulder. She reached inside and withdrew a small notebook. “Look,” she said, opening it up, fanning its blank pages in his direction. “This is a book, too, and precious little is written in it. It’s just as accurate as the Grimmerie, and maybe more so. Don’t be chagrined by its blankness. Be liberated instead. Go on, it’s yours. I have never written a word in it worth saving, so what I give you isn’t magic or the benefit of my thinking, but my belief in the blankness of our futures. Charms only go so far. Here, take it. Whether you write your own story in it or not, that’s your affair.”

He took it from her, mostly because she seemed eager to release it to him.

“A blank book for a court reporter to take depositions in?” Was he teasing her, just a little? He was.

“Take your own deposition,” she said.

He looked sideways at her. Her veil came down farther over her forehead, hiding even the tendrils of hair that had been blowing across her forehead, but her chin was up. Her eyes were dry and true.

“You go on ahead, then,” said the Lion. “We’ll find a future uncharted by any tiktok charm. We’ll make our luck as we go along. When I get back.”

“Why?” asked Ilianora. “What are you doing now? Where are you going?”

He wasn’t sure even what his answer would be; he waited to hear the words from his own mouth.

“The cottage there.” They were passing a small stone hut with a roof of oakhair thatch. A kitchen fire was still burning in the chimney, and beyond, in the light, a field of wheat rustled like gold on water. “One of the maunts mentioned that an elderly couple lives there, and their sons have gone off to war. The rain will come soon, and the wind, and an army will trample this field by tomorrow. I have learned enough about prophecy to say that for sure: Its future is drenched in blood. Let me harvest wheat before the catastrophe. I’ve done some agricultural work in my time. I can bring in that crop for them. Better they should have something to sell to the mill when the battle is history and their sons are dead. Better that wheat should go for bread. No? No?”

“Go, then,” said Ilianora. “If you must. Someone might as well chase the schoolchildren away from the lightning-wreathed hill.” She didn’t look at him, but drew her veil tighter, and covered her mouth with it. Was she covering a smile-did she believe he was lying, out to betray the company of the Clock?-or did she think him a hero, for having so far-fetched a notion of charity?

Brrr bounded forward and pulled from the back of the Clock of the Time Dragon the shroud that Yackle had left behind. She wouldn’t need it now. He dressed himself in it. Not a white flag of surrender but an advertisement of his neutrality. A plea to let him pass.

“Go,” she repeated. “Bread for the aged and the desolate. It’s as good a job as tending the book. Maybe a better one.”

“We’ll look for Liir,” he said. “When I come back.”

“We’ll look for Liir.” She was trying the idea on for size: the idea that someone might be left to her, after all her losses. Her color was high, making her own veils look like the glazed white paper in which Shiz merchants wrapped freshly cut flowers. Which made her a kind of bouquet. “You and I together? You’ll catch up to me?”

“I’ll catch up to you.”

“Is that a promise?” But she wouldn’t have heard an answer even if he had given one. The dwarf was braying out that the boys should push, push, put their backs into it. The dragon’s sallowwood limbs were creaking and its leather wings fell to flapping in the commotion, like a bellows swung about in a circle. A mile or two off, the music of war went tintinnabulary. Clarion horns of the hunt sounding, thunder of horse hoofs on stony ground, shatter of artillery, the clamorous ringing of swords.