A Lion Among Men Part 18

The long lean form of Muhlama H'aekeem extended in his dream-thoughts, stretching elegantly, as if she'd just awakened from a nap by a jungle pool. He licked her spine as she arched it, each vertebra articulating in a sensuous fold one at a time. The goodly form of an Ivory Tigress- In his dreams she was in estrus, and the smell was like a firecracker in his chest, creaking and ticking to detonate; the firecracker, as if it were something he'd swallowed, moved down, to burn his loins and swell his Lion's scepter. (King of the Gillikin Forest. In his dreams.) She lashed at him with her tail lovingly, tauntingly: Mount me, mount me now. Her head turned slightly back toward him, the smile like a snarl, the snarl like a smile, and her eyes half-closed, and the rhythm of her rocking causing the obsidian opacity of her eyes to seem splashed as with sea spume, were there such a thing as a sea.

He growled and moaned in his dream, and woke himself up before the accident of release, so he was left pitiably alone. For an instant, a kind of ghost-image of the dream lingered on the inside of his eyelids: The sight of Muhlama H'aekeem prancing away across an outcrop of limestone. She was too far for him to fall asleep and catch her again, and finish his conquest. Too far for him to tell if she was hurt and bleeding-if it was that time-or if she was still the young tempestuous Cat, the runaway from her royal family.

He rolled over on his side, unwilling to look and see if Shadowpuppet had witnessed his midnight indiscretions.

Sleep did not come back. All that unintended testimony he delivered to himself, at Yackle's canny questions, had brought Muhlama back into his catalog of defeats. He had buried so much. Like a kitten hiding his little birch-twig feces, he had dug in the sand and buried the memories of so many calamities.

Where would she be now, if she had lived?

It wasn't that I loved her, he told himself. She never let me know enough about her to know if I could love her or not.

Neither, he whimpered to himself, neither did I let her know myself.

Old, old Brrr, crouching in a cold room. Thinking about a saucy Cat from his salad days. What a sad picture of a creature he was! Poorer in every way, except broader of imagination about the treacheries we practice upon one another.

For instance-he nearly smiled at the cleverness of it-he had grown quite capable of thinking opportunist opportunist of others. After all, perhaps Muhlama had never loved him. Perhaps she had sized him up (quite literally) and invented a strategy designed to make her ineligible to rule after her father, old what's-his-name. Yuyodoh. Uyodor, that was it. of others. After all, perhaps Muhlama had never loved him. Perhaps she had sized him up (quite literally) and invented a strategy designed to make her ineligible to rule after her father, old what's-his-name. Yuyodoh. Uyodor, that was it.

If her birth ca.n.a.l was ripped, bled out, scarred, inoperative, she could not bear young to carry on the practice of leadership of the Ghullim. She could abdicate without the tribe's objection. She could name herself ineligible. Theirs, after all, was a matriarchy, he remembered.

Across the room, the ancient cat spit as if it could imagine what Brrr was stewing over. He had to suppress an urge to fist up his paw and smash it to shards.

He looked at the squares of blackened-turquoise sky punching into the chamber, and the paler turquoise stars twirling on their invisible stems. A moon was rising, bleaching out the stars: Thank Lurlina! He was sure he heard a clock tick, though he had seen no clock on any wall or table. He counted the steps into time that the ticks made, one at a time, until he fell asleep again and could count no longer.

This time he did not dream.

One of the few mercies afforded us.

- 2 -

ROOMS, MOODS, tenses away, Yackle sat on the floor, her legs stretched out at right angles to each other and to her spine. She was spry from ankles to the bottom of her rib cage; above that, her torso was boled and contorted. Much like the beleaguered Glikkuns with their humps, she guessed. As she imagined them, anyway. tenses away, Yackle sat on the floor, her legs stretched out at right angles to each other and to her spine. She was spry from ankles to the bottom of her rib cage; above that, her torso was boled and contorted. Much like the beleaguered Glikkuns with their humps, she guessed. As she imagined them, anyway.

She didn't sleep, though. Sleep was no blessing to her, not until it was the final sleep. Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

She didn't sleep because she didn't need sleep. She didn't, it seemed, need to see, or really to eat. She hadn't required to move her bowels nor relieve her bladder in over a year. Everything seemed to come and go through her lungs.

So she sat and clasped her knees, stretching her backbone. She listened to the sound of ticking. She hadn't remembered the maunts being much for clocks; after all, they lived as much as they could manage in holy time, which was an anomaly, a contradiction, a tautology: the time in which time has no meaning. A paradox. What was the word?

She wasn't losing language, was she?

She couldn't be losing touch.

An oxymoron, that was it. Holy time. Hah.

Though how she longed to slip into it, even though she didn't-couldn't-believe in such a notion. This must be, she guessed, how the young felt about the nonsense stories of fantasy that their grandmothers told them-the youngest of three daughters to lose her way in the forest. The little copper fish in the mythical blue sea. The funny one about the quill pen that made wishes come true-verbatim. Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them. We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls....

And anyway, here she was doing the same: imagining herself inside a clock, the sprock-sprock sprock-sprock of the mechanism inching along the circ.u.mference of an hour. The play of the gears, the lunge of the pendulum, the creep of the hands, the aperture of of the mechanism inching along the circ.u.mference of an hour. The play of the gears, the lunge of the pendulum, the creep of the hands, the aperture of now now simultaneously opening and closing at precisely the same ratio forever. But there were no clocks in the mauntery except for the sundial, which spoke its moon-hours as silently as its sun-hours. Of this, the more she thought about it, the more sure she became. simultaneously opening and closing at precisely the same ratio forever. But there were no clocks in the mauntery except for the sundial, which spoke its moon-hours as silently as its sun-hours. Of this, the more she thought about it, the more sure she became.

Is it the heart, my old heart, she thought-or whoever's old heart lives in my old chest? Can I now hear it ticking like a timepiece?

Or has the mauntery itself become a clock, a tall, rooted old stone clock, and the maunts, in their nervous twitchy sleep, the little mice that ran up and down its shifting weights, hickory-d.i.c.kory mice?

But this was fancy; she was succ.u.mbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before. How novel. She'd start seeing ghosts next, if she was lucky. Always a treat, always a hoot, this burden of living beyond the range of one's life expectancy!

She turned her head toward the window. From this point on the compa.s.s, her room faced a mounting bank of clouds, and what to the Lion looked like turquoise would have seemed, to someone in Yackle's room, a swollen sludge of violet. Yackle, though seeing nothing, imagined a sky with an octopus-ink tide rolling in, snuffing out young stars. Her instincts were still sharp, sharper than she knew.

Had she learned enough of Brrr to trust him?

She didn't need to know every t.i.ttle and jot of his mortification. What she had deduced was that, despite his many abrasions, his lop-cut life, he was still not beyond shame. And that excoriating lash that whips us all has some little benefit: It motors our aspirations to avoid its next hissing strike.

She had listened to his memories, as much as she could-some of them spoken aloud, though he may not have realized he was speaking; others of them rehea.r.s.ed in silence-but her ears were good. She had found after a day that he seemed to have an endless capacity for mucking things up. Perhaps his history of f.e.c.klessness provided him the perfect alibi to be the treasurer of what she knew, and was hiding within her still.

Could she trust him with what she knew? And then, perhaps, die?

Or was this a temptation that she should avoid at all costs-even at the price of giving up the mortal death promised us all?

Then, a nervous spasm caught in her throat for an instant, and she found herself thinking on what the Lion had asked her. That old Brrr. His raw manner didn't fool her for an instant. He was no more a hardboiled truncheon than she was. What had he asked? If she perhaps possessed an other other life, one too deep down in her memory to experience it, so all her protestations were only that: the crazed defense of a crazy woman. life, one too deep down in her memory to experience it, so all her protestations were only that: the crazed defense of a crazy woman.

No, she thought; no, it can't be. I have entertained that possibility eight hundred times before, and I've always turned away from it: no. Brrr had been right to suppose that something small would have given her former life away: a spoon, a string of celery caught in the teeth, the way clouds can look like octopus ink. Something would have caught in an earlier memory, if there had been one. But no random spark of dailiness had ever connected with any life predating the time that she woke up, born an old woman naked in a daybed.

Brrr was there before her in her mind. She couldn't picture him exactly, but whatever she could envision was rolling his eyes and fiddling with a pen he could scarcely govern. "Why did you take such an interest in Elphaba?" he wondered aloud. "Why would the story of Elphaba and Nessarose have caught at you so?"

"You tell me," she rattled back, in her mind, giving testimony at midnight. Or was she withholding it?

"The mentally deranged have no capacity for memory," he said. "You're the mad Aunt Sophelia, maybe. Lady Partra's other daughter; Melena's older sister; the aunt of Elphaba, Nessarose, and Sh.e.l.l, who is now Emperor of Oz. The real Thropp Descending."

"Were I to believe that, I'd be guilty of delusions of grandeur," she said, "then I would truly be mad, and if anyone could find a way to put me away even further than a crypt, they'd be correct to do so at once."

"I've never heard proof that Sophelia died," said Brrr, "and your age would just about conform, I guess, with how old she would be if she still lived."

"That's nuts," she replied. "You're insane." insane."

"Not I." He smiled as he began to fade from her mind. "You, after all, are having this conversation with yourself. I'm off asleep somewhere else."

"d.a.m.n," she said aloud, in the cold bedchamber.

She traced it out some more-just the highlights. How she had moved about Oz, in thrall to the idea of the two Thropp sisters. She'd begun to feel anointed, if that was the word-or condemned-to the task of living on the sidelines. To the extent that she had developed genuine powers of prophecy, she had tried to read what was happening, what might happen, and to place herself in Elphaba's way, where she could do some good.

She got a great deal wrong, of course. Infallible she was not. There she'd been at a grotty den of s.e.xual escapades, collecting cash at the window, having read the signs that Elphaba would come by that night. She thought she could protect Elphaba from some dreadful experience. The Philosophy Club! She could remember that. The dwarf at the door, a rotten little bounder: That was where their paths had crossed for the first time. He had been d.o.g.g.i.ng Elphaba's steps, too, it seemed, though she had not been able to determine why.

He was as wrong as she was, that night. Elphaba had proved elusive, often swifter than Yackle's powers of prediction could track. True, Elphaba's college chums had shown up: Avaric, Boq, Fiyero. A few others. But not Elphaba or Glinda. Instead, those two best friends had ducked away that night, and gotten out from under Yackle's distant and watchful eye-it worked back then, the eye, both eyes-and they had hightailed it to the Emerald City for their famous interview with the wonderful Wizard of Oz.

And Yackle had taken years to pick up the trail again. Elphaba had gone underground, a kind of freedom fighter with questionable ethics. She had been d.a.m.ned slippery-who would have thought a green-skinned girl could make herself so invisible? It had taken the best of Yackle's talents to track her down again. But find her she did, after several years, and this time her reading had been more accurate. She could see that Elphaba would turn to the mauntery (though not why, not that she would arrive with the blood of Fiyero on her wrists); and Yackle had presented herself at the door of the establishment earlier, to be there, to be ready when Elphaba arrived: and so she had been.

Yackle had kept her own counsel, nodding in her blankets like a gaga grandmother, but she'd watched. She'd slipped a hand to Elphaba, a set of gnarled fingers in the green palm, as if she were looking for help up some stairs: She had tried to squeeze strength and courage through that wordless communique. Who is to say it didn't help somewhat?

Had Yackle known what she was doing when she gave Elphaba the broom?

She could no longer remember.

Then, when the time was right, Sister Elphie had left for the West, to the mountaintop seat of the Tigelaars, the ruling Arjiki family. For all her life an upstart, the grit in the eye that makes it water, Elphaba had hoped to become a hermit. Hoped for forgiveness from Fiyero's widow, hoped for solace from the mountain loneliness.

But the dwarf had come back into the picture, and had delivered to Elphaba an old looking gla.s.s she had had in childhood. Elphaba had reheated the gla.s.s and modeled it into a globe-turning a mirror into an eye-and who knows what she had been able to see in its depths. The girl was talented.

Talented enough to sidestep everything except, in the end, her own death.

Though perhaps, like Yackle, death was what she had wanted the most.

Yackle groaned. The notion of being Aunt Sophelia, loopy Aunt Sophelia: curse that the idea had roosted in her! Now she'd have to disprove it to her own satisfaction. Still, it made some mad kind of sense: Why else had she spent these weird extended decades of old age stepping around the skirts of someone else's life? She had never known where the compulsion had come from. Perhaps something as simple as blood.

The house ticked, neither in sympathy nor in accusation.

When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

Yackle couldn't see the dawn, but she could hear in the brush of movement, the wind against roofing tiles, and in the swell of birdsong that light was rising. She was tired without exhaustion, or exhausted without weariness-it was hard to put into words.

Still, she asked herself: If I am not mad Aunt Sophelia Thropp, and never was, then who put me here? Who had enough influence to knock me into a somewhat human figure in a world of more fully human creatures as well as Animal figures-and bystanding dwarves? And prophetic clocks?

If I were appointed to generate change in Elphaba's life, who had generated the change in mine? The legendary source of evil amongst us, that old she-demon, the k.u.mbric Witch? Or the grand, dim, fusty, decayed deity, G.o.ddess of creation, Lurlina Herself? Or the Unnamed G.o.d, more sober because more secretive? (And did unnamed unnamed mean mean un-nameable un-nameable or "once named but name revoked"? All these years among unionist maunts and she had never asked a single theological question. What was or "once named but name revoked"? All these years among unionist maunts and she had never asked a single theological question. What was that that proof of, besides obduracy?) proof of, besides obduracy?) Who gave Lurlina or any other deity her power?

The very children, maybe, who were now hearing the story of Elphaba only as the cautionary fable of the Wicked Witch of the West-her rise and fall-and believing it? Cutting their schoolyard morals to conform to the cheap lessons of a propagandized biography?

She couldn't know. Her head hurt to try to imagine. The closest she came to sleep these days was a kind of slipping sideways into a vision, and this is what she saw: The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again.

Everything was not merely relative, it was-how to put it?-relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

- 3 -

A MILE OR MILE OR two on, no more than that, and the underbrush was pestered with the movement of small creatures. The company could read the escape routes of the beasts of the forest floor. "The EC division that was approaching from the north beach of Kellswater is headed this way," decided the sergeant-at-hand. "Lads, look sharp; they've stolen a march on us. We want to cross their path before they get here to cross ours. If we're not careful we'll rub noses with them." two on, no more than that, and the underbrush was pestered with the movement of small creatures. The company could read the escape routes of the beasts of the forest floor. "The EC division that was approaching from the north beach of Kellswater is headed this way," decided the sergeant-at-hand. "Lads, look sharp; they've stolen a march on us. We want to cross their path before they get here to cross ours. If we're not careful we'll rub noses with them."

"We'll blow them to kingdom come!" cried one of the boys, excitable but dull. His pals didn't bother to remind him they traveled without firearms. Their only defense was the dread that the oracle could inspire in the gullible. Though they had no idea how gullible the soldiers of an invading battalion could be, or if they would stop long enough to discover gullibility in themselves.

"Heave now, heave," called the dwarf, but even he tried to keep his voice down.

The birds of the oakhair forest, who had settled for the night, revived their twitter. Ilianora thought again of the birds in the hall, on the night she had first scribbled a fanciful tale as a stay against discovery. Sing your hearts out, she thought: Let us know from which direction the danger is strongest.

But alone of the company, she walked without much fear. She cared for her companions, in a modest way, and hoped they would survive. Certainly she didn't want them to suffer. But she had a prerogative of calm, in that she alone had no obligation to the oracle or to the future they all muscled in favor of or against. Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

They couldn't continue without light now; the night had truly arrived. The dwarf lit torches and gave her one to carry. "Go front, if you've the heart for it," he mumbled to her. She knew the lads would be emboldened by her prominence, and that they couldn't risk affixing lanterns to the cart lest a stray bullet smash a gla.s.s chimney and the whole kindle box explode in flames.

Though what a sight that would be! Another kind of release, she supposed.

She did as she was bidden. She had a decent instinct for finding a way. The floor of the forest was fairly level, here between the lakes, and for that they all were grateful-though who could know for sure they weren't driving themselves directly into the line of fire of the Munchkinland resistance coming from the east?

Riding up top, the sergeant-at-hand had no need of a whip. Four of his beauty boys, as he called them, in a kind of jerry-rigged harness, dragged the clockwork oracle along. The other three put their shoulders to the back of it, helping it through ruts and over the roots of oakhair trees. The wind had died down, which was unfortunate: As the company made its way through the strung verticals of the oakhair nuts, they set weird shimmering chords to vibrate around them. It sounded like piano strings long out of tune being scampered upon by mice.

Surely if the EC forces were to come upon their left flank, the soldiers would be playing their own entrance theme?

If the acolytes of the Clock stopped, and let all the oakhair strands fall silent, they might hear where else in the forest a cacophony was being struck. But the boys were now zealous and slightly mad with fear, and wouldn't respond to the sergeant-at-hand's proposal that they pause for a moment to listen.

The wagon met a gentle but longer slope than usual, and the boys grunted at their work. Though he weighed little, the sergeant-at-hand leaped from his perch to lighten the load. He came forward to walk beside Ilianora. He stood only half as tall as she did, when he was standing upright. She thought, not for the first time, This little man, these seven boys: It sounds like a story I might have made up, back when I was writing down such fancies This little man, these seven boys: It sounds like a story I might have made up, back when I was writing down such fancies.

"I've been through this way before," he said. "We'll level off for a bit, and unless the undergrowth is fuller than usual, we ought to be able to see Kellswater down to our left."

"You've been everywhere in Oz," she replied.

"Sure seems like it, after all this time." He knew enough not to ask her about her own travels. She wouldn't answer. Waste of breath.

"How far to the northeast was the Munchkinlander encampme-"

"Shhh-"

They were reaching the flattening crest of the long slope, and the first missile flew by-not a rifle shot, as they'd expected, but an arrow. It buried its head in a tree trunk, and a second followed, and a third.

"We're in it," he hissed. "Boys, drop!" Ilianora clamped the cap on the lamp to extinguish it, to buy them a minute or two. But four more arrows, and the shouts of a force thrashing up the left flank of the rise: It would be only a moment before they were captured.

The moon cruelly opened her eye from behind the mounded cutouts of cloud, and they could see the silhouettes of soldiers against the steel-white water of the lake below.

"We'll plead neutrality, see where it gets us," said the dwarf, dragging at Ilianora's hand to pull her to her knees. "Boys, you imbeciles, get down!"

Being lower down, the soldiers were at a disadvantage, but they were trained. Ilianora could see the crossbow aiming, could see the glint of bayonet. They swarmed-thirty, forty, fifty-a half mile out. The sound of crushing underbrush, the strum of advancing men. "Hie, on the narrow," cried one; the voice was businesslike as it carried, like a professional herder of cattle. "Hist, second volley," called another. "Grade and scale," said someone nearish; "b.l.o.o.d.y unlikely," came the reply. A shot rang out.

"We fly no emblem!" cried the sergeant-at-hand, but another shot muddied the sound of his words. "f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, we offer no resistance!" he yelled, irritated enough that his voice rattled into a falsetto shriek.

The Clock had other ideas about this. The great dragon head lifted from its mechanical sleep and rotated like a swan, and eyes with a dull carmine spark shifted in the dark. The leather nostrils dilated and the tin scales sc.r.a.ped upon one another as the armature of the wings stretched like two sails in the woods. It was, perhaps, just enough to cause the closest EC Messiars to halt, as they tried to work out what huge creature waited, glowering and creaking in the dark. The light shifted.

"Keep going!" cried the sergeant-at-hand to his pony-boys. "Mischief is having her own say!"

The nostrils flared. Coils of steam-grey smoke fell out in slow hanks, unrolling as they dropped, thickening like gelatin beads in water. Within a moment, the Clock was shrouded in a fog that smelled of yeast and mud.

"Grade and lower!" cried a commander. "Pox on my eyes," cried an advance scout, quite close; they could hear him breathing and swearing, and he fell to the ground.

"I mean to keep on," said the sergeant-at-hand. "Walk the way forward, Miss Trip-Through-the-Trees, and pluck our way out of here, strand by strand if you must."

The hilltop was smeared with fog, no less troublesome to Ilianora than to the Emerald City division, but she'd had the advantage of reaching the summit before their attackers, and she had seen a bit of how the land went. Along a ridge, and then down a scalloped recess; she could get them that far. She reached out and plucked a wry song out of the struts of the forest. A pizzicato progress. The company kept close behind her, and the dragon trawled a breathy cloak that did not quickly thin.

They were well away, perhaps as much as a mile, before the oakhair trees gave out, and a grove of taller stag-head oaks crowned the next gentle hump. There the company paused to rest and judge by the moon whether they had strayed too far east. The dwarf's destination was due north. Clearest route out of the danger was due north. The dragon's eyes had gone dim and the bellows of its nostrils now trailed only faint, acrid wisps. Its wings settled back in their customary place, folded across their mount with reticulated wrist-claws pointing straight up like spear heads.

"It's a bad night to be wandering in the woods," said the sergeant-at-hand. "Unlucky for some, though not for us. Hide your eyes lest the glint give us away."