A Lion Among Men (8 page)

The assemblage of ghosts seemed to hover, listening, or drumming its fingers against its forearms, so to speak. Tacit. As yet uninvolved.

“Wait,” said a voice, not Brrr’s, but a normal worldly voice. Jemmsy? The Lion swiveled his head, not certain from which direction the sound approached.

Cubbins blundered down the side of an invisible bluff, snapping the branches of an invisible birch tree to break his descent. He splashed through the vision of ghosts and arrived at Brrr’s side with slicked thighs. Under one arm dripped a wedge of honeycomb.

“I forgot to tell you that you need to offer a tribute if you want to speak with the ghosts,” said Cubbins.

Another little secret about conversation. How did folks learn to get on in this tricky verbal negotiation called chat? How much had it cost him to grow up without the banter of family life?

Still, Brrr was glad to see the boy sheriff. (Out on his own again, the little dickens!) Almost as glad as if Jemmsy himself had coalesced out of a matrix of midges, free of an iron snare, smiling a soft-cheeked hello at his final friend, allowing Brrr to grin back at his first. But Cubbins was decent company, and Brrr felt both enriched and a little traitorous to the memory of Jemmsy to like Cubbins, too, and so quickly.

He said, hiding his gratitude, “How do you know you need to offer the ghosts a gift if no one in your tribe believes in ghosts?”

“I asked Ursaless. She claims never to have seen the Ozmists, but she insists this is the way it’s done by long-standing custom.”

The Lion raised an eyebrow. “Don’t ask,” said Cubbins, sighing. “I don’t expect to follow her line of reasoning. I just listen and obey.”

“But you’re not allowed to go running off alone,” said Brrr. “Isn’t one disobedience a day enough?”

“You are brave enough to strike out on your own,” replied the cub. “And ten minutes after you left, no one could remember you had been there. So I realized you were right. What is there for me in the court of Ursaless?”

“They’re your family!”

“They’re not the whole world. I can always come back if I want.”

Brrr spoke cautiously. “What if you can’t find them? What if they have moved on?”

Cubbins laughed. “Move? That’s the whole point of the Northern Bears. They never move on. So I’m taking a cue from you…”

He put the comb of honey on a rock in the clearing. The midges swarmed nearer it. In the act of crowding together their apparition took on a more coherent aspect. Not a human face, perhaps not even a face at all, but something with an enriched identity.

“Are ghosts bugs?” whispered Brrr.

“Who knows? Next time you squash a roach, you might be doing in old Auntie Groyleen again. Or maybe bugs are the largest part of life without individual character, so they’re useful vessels for ghosts. I have a theory-”

All at once, words were spoken in the clearing. It was like the echo of a sound divorced from its original imprint. The Ozmists spoke in one voice.

Barter, said the chorus ominously.

“‘Barter’?” whispered Brrr. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Another word for chat, I think,” Cubbins replied. “I’m guessing they will tell you what you want if you tell them what they want.”

“Is this more advice from Ursaless?”

“Common sense. Which as you know doesn’t come from Ursaless. Shhh, let’s find out what they want.”

Brrr cleared his throat. “All right, then,” he started. “As long as you have granted me an audience, I would like to ask about the possible ghost of a Lion or Lioness who might have joined your, um, ranks. Or even a whole pride of Lions. Not just any spare Lions, but mine. My kin.”

When a certain velocity had been reached, the Ozmists trained their vibrations nearer to a common key, if not a single note. They managed to communicate a message in some fashion that was neither words nor music, quite. Still, the Lion and the Bear cub listened closely.

We note your query, they managed to communicate. By way of payment: You tell us first-Is the dreadful Wizard still on the throne of Oz?

“You should know more than I do,” said Brrr, playing for time. How embarrassing to be asked a question he couldn’t answer. “You’re ghosts, after all: you’re spirit and transcendence. I’m just plodding along with my nose to the ground here, wet behind the ears and a long way to go.”

We have no more experience of the future than the living do, they said, but their voices went out of keen registration, and it sounded like hundreds of voices intoning the same thought at once. W-w-w-e-e-e ha-v-v-ve n-n-n-o-o-o mor-r-r-r experienshchshe…

“And you hunger for future history,” said Brrr.

This day you live in today is the impossible future to us, said the Ozmists. Is the Wizard still squatting upon the throne? We crave to know the future.

“All well and good,” said Brrr, “and what I know, I will share gladly. I recently met some soldiers in the forest-one special soldier particularly-serving in the forces of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. So I can answer that much, if not more: The Wizard of Oz is on the throne of Oz. Do I get an answer in reply? Are fragments of my ancestors figured among your midst?”

The Ozmists glowed, small cyclings in place. We stir, we steep, we sift, we shift among ourselves for clues to your question, they said.

Brrr waited. They said no more.

“Are they taking inventory?” whispered Cubbins.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, tell me this, then,” went on Cubbins excitedly. “While you’re figuring out whether his parents are among you Ozmists, perhaps you can tell us about who is not there. Is the missing queen of Oz, Ozma, among your kind? Was she murdered in her infant cradle, as some have said? Or is her spirit still abroad in its human form?”

The Ozmists reared-twenty, thirty feet in the steamy air.

“Scratch that last question,” Brrr called in a loud voice. “Never mind. We’ll soldier on as we are. You are dismissed.” Hoping that he and Cubbins could be dismissed, too.

But the Ozmists replied, There is little time left-the act of our compressing into community unsettles the vapors. You ask the impertinent question all Bears ask, and you will pay the price. Ozma is not dead. But you bring us no news of our lost Oz-you break the contract. You will pay.

Cubbins’s small jaw dropped. “News!” he remembered. “News of the Northern Bears.” But he was young: nothing in the life of the Bears had changed since he could remember.

Brrr wanted to say, Lie to them, tell them anything! But he didn’t dare. The Ozmists were everywhere and could apprehend the faintest whisper.

“News,” said the Lion, trying by his tone to communicate an instruction to fabricate-another first-“Cubbins, give them, you know, the news. The newest news!”

Cubbins looked wildly about as if trying to see modern history in the making among the jeweled rash of phantoms. His eye fell on the stack of books that Brrr carried, and he grabbed the top one. “I have-to hand-the latest news-here!” He read the title: “Ozma Initiata: The Birth of the Throne Line.”

But even Brrr could tell this was history, not current events.

“Or…or…” Cubbins tore through a second book. “Animal Magic, or, The Secret Spell of Language.” He whipped pages filled with charts. “A grammar textbook. You know, language is always changing, they say: ever new. Refreshing itself-”

As if a compression of thunderclap had been unpacked, a low sound began from the center of the wheel. The Ozmists swayed their rotating mass laterally across the marshy ground, passing over and (it seemed) through the Lion and Cubbins until the Animals were in the center of the swarm and the noise became deafening.

Bear, if you don’t believe in keeping your bargain, we thrust you out before we make you one of us!

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said the Lion, trying to stand before the small cub-but the Ozmists were everywhere, and there was not enough Lion to encircle Cubbins. The sound of the Ozmists raked through them both, but Cubbins held his paws over his ears. Then the Ozmists disappeared into the rising vapors from a visible marshland. In their place rose curtains of brainless flies and midges, deterred for a moment by the honey but ready, Brrr guessed, to turn and attack them.

Cubbins was already scrabbling up the slope, which now seemed to permit it. With flummoxing of limb and tail, the Lion followed. Soon he’d overtaken the young Bear.

This is what it feels like to be a piece of shit, thought Brrr; being pummeled on all sides by the world, forced forward, outward, into naked stink and light. But he and Cubbins danced as they ran, a sense of relief and escape energizing them. They avoided the steam of salt geysers that were sprouting up through invisible fissures, but they couldn’t avoid the hot rain that pelted down.

His eyes closed against the sting, Brrr smacked into boulders and tree trunks and clawed his way through brambly growth. By the time they emerged from Cloud Swamp, day was dawning in the teeth of an ordinary rainstorm.

“What did we get from that exercise?” he asked Cubbins, once he felt able to speak without his voice breaking.

“Wet,” said Cubbins.

“Well, yes. But from the Ozmists?”

Cubbins looked at Brrr. “I don’t believe in Ozmists,” he said. “Bears don’t, you know.”

The Lion snarled, as if to say: No time for your funning, Cubbins! The Bear’s eyes looked back at him, flat, less glossy than before. Perhaps it was the overcast sky.

“They said Ozma is still alive somewhere,” ventured the Lion.

“People can say all sorts of things,” said Cubbins. “Where did you get those books?”

“From…” But he couldn’t finish. Didn’t Cubbins remember?

Cubbins was pawing them and looking at the spines. “Ozma Incognita. That sounds interesting. What are you doing with these books?”

“I don’t know,” said the Lion after a while. “I don’t have much use for them.”

“I’ll take them off you. I like the idea of books,” said Cubbins. “Here’s another one with color plates-look! Lurline and Preenella: A Fairy Tale of the Poor. How stupendous! We don’t see books around the Great Gillikin Forest often, you know.”

“You don’t say.” He tried to keep a wobble out of his voice.

“If books show up anywhere in the woods, they’re usually not far from a trap of some sort. Bait, you know. Humans plant books in the woods, hoping to attract the urban talking Animals who have gone to ground here, escaping the Wizard’s laws against them. I suppose you’re aware of this?”

“I suppose.” He sighed.

“And hunters, perhaps with guns, waiting nearby.” Cubbins was turning the pages. “If you picked these up from the woods, you’re lucky you didn’t get snared in some beastly iron-jaw thing with rusty teeth.”

“Guess luck is my middle name.” But it was too dreadful. “Will you know how to get back to your clan?”

“My clan?” said Cubbins.

“Don’t forget that part! Ursaless and the others. Bruner O’Bruin, Caraway Coyle. You know.”

At the sound of the Queen’s name, Cubbins grinned. “Oh yes! Of course! My mind had wandered for a moment. Well, I’ll take these books off you if you like, and be getting back to my kind. We admire books, you know, we Bears. We read them over and over.”

“Good.”

“We never get tired of them,” said Cubbins in a voice gone soft, as if the fact of his dimness was trying to dawn on him. “Because we forget them as soon as we finish them. We can start reading them over right away.”

“If you don’t mind,” said Brrr gently, “I will take the medal, though. I need to bring it to someone.”

“Suit yourself,” said Cubbins. “In fact, I’ll loop it around your neck on this leather belt. I can carry the books in my arm. There, how’s that?” His small brown arms reached up. In the effort to put the strap over Brrr’s head, he gave the Lion a bear hug around the cranium. The coarse Bear fur was slicked into tapering points and it rubbed agreeably against the Lion’s mane. “What is the medal for, anyway?”

The Lion couldn’t answer, Courage. He couldn’t speak for a while; he just turned and walked away. He glanced back only once. Cubbins was staring at a page of the book, and shaking his head, and wiping his eye with the back of his paw. Growing up, growing dead.

As he padded south, Brrr considered the all-but-fatal interview with the Ozmists. Maybe Bears who had genuine news they could barter were released unharmed. Maybe these were the Bears competent enough to take their chances in human society. If so, Cubbins had sacrificed his own ambitions in order to help Brrr summon the phantoms.

Still-on further reflection-had any of it actually happened? And why should Brrr presume that Ozmists, being ghosts, were telling the truth about anything? If they could be legalistic and harsh to a Bear cub as guileless as Cubbins, perhaps they could also lie-about whether or not Ozma was still alive, even about whether or not Brrr’s pride was among their particulated number.

The alluring stars in an apparently endless sky had, after all, been a disguise for the cloud of spirits. Ghosts perhaps could lie in death as well as creatures could lie in life.

Under a green bay tree he stretched out, thinking: If even the ghost of the past can harbor a motivation to dissemble, where can any ignorant Lion sensibly place his trust?

Perhaps nowhere. Perhaps lying down and playing dead, as Cubbins should have done with the Ozmists, was the only legitimate response to the villainy of life, the aggrandizement of very matter.

In any event, the Ozmists hadn’t spoken in the voice of Jemmsy, a new arrival in their midst. Neither to hector Brrr for his mistakes nor to hurry him toward his goals. So the Lion would continue to Tenniken to deliver to Jemmsy’s father this precious medal, and to deserve his own. On his own, unpartnered, but by the ghost of a chance, maybe, wiser than a day ago.

S
OME
WEEKS
later, when the Lion emerged for the first time from the Great Gillikin Forest into the world of human affairs, he paused to wash his mouth out with well water and straighten his mane as best he could. It wasn’t vanity so much as nerves. He’d never seen an entire hive of humans before.

The first people he saw gave him a bit of a berth, to be sure, but at least they didn’t run shrieking behind slammed doors. They kept their little toy noses in the air. Their little toy ankles, tucked in those little booties, kicked ahead in the best, most dismissive manner. He couldn’t fault the town citizens for self-possession.