A Lion Among Men (13 page)

I snorted to be polite, yet not so loudly as to impugn my colleague, may she rest in peace. Whatever that might be like.

“Still,” said the Nanny, continuing to rummage about, “who of us really can see our own deaths coming?”

I didn’t know back then that this would be a problem of mine decades hence: that I couldn’t find my own death. “Have you got anything in there?” I asked.

The Nanny withdrew some prettily carved beads, ivory or the like, and a golden garter worked with repoussé trim. “The beads were made by Melena’s husband, the minister,” she said. “They’re inscribed with symbols of the Unnamed God, I’m told. To me they look like denomination emblems from foreign monetary systems, but what do I know. Like I said, I haven’t traveled much.”

I took the beads. They felt cool and aloof in my hands, and spoke nothing to me. If I’d hoped for a jolt of spiritual connection, I was disappointed. “Let’s see the garter,” I said. “And this belongs to your Ladyship?”

“Did. Does. That is…” And here the Nanny began to blush, remembering I was supposed to be a truth-teller. “I came away with it in my belongings, somehow, last time I visited,” she admitted. Meaning she stole it. I nodded without disapproval; I wasn’t above theft myself, though it was the edible thing rather than the beautiful that I usually lifted.

I felt it, to little benefit. The woman who wore such a decorated legging expected her legs to be explored by admirers. That was all, and I’d already figured out as much. I handed it back. “Is there nothing else?”

“Oh, you are good,” said the client. “Here you go.” Next she fished out a small bottle made of green glass with a cork stopper in it. It stood so-high, about, and a paper label was affixed to the front. Yes, I remember what it said; give me a moment. It read
MIRACLE
ELIXIR
.

“You have miracle elixirs, so what are you coming to me for?” I asked.

“I need all the help I can get,” she replied.

I picked at the label with my finger and some of it came off. A scrap of paper at the end of the word, showing part of the ornately inscribed X and
IR-XIR
, it looked like, or-
LIR
. I examined the dried glue on the back, as if it might be a pale word in a secret language. It was a glob of dried glue, no more, no less.

Still, the client wanted theatrics, and I think I was more alert than I’d ever been. I found a porcelain mortar and I burned the scrap of paper, and looked to see if I could read words forming in the arabesques of smoke. I couldn’t. I mashed up herbs and crystals and added some oil of gomba, and heated the whole mess in an alembic. I counted backward by seventeens. All the usual party tricks.

Then I popped off the cork and took a swig of the miracle potion.

I’m not a poet, and despite my profession I’m not particularly good at description. The taste burned and stank, and I felt the liquor in my eyes stew. Waves rose and fell in half formation, like apathetic ghosts, like anemic fogs. I could almost see-I reached, mentally-I could almost read what it meant. But it was shapeless as most dreams really are; we put onto our dreams the shapes we think with during the day, depriving our dreams of the message they are trying to deliver. Such it was with me. There was so much life, it was so vivid: but I could only think of it with the experience of life I had already had. And despite my evident age, that wasn’t much experience at all. It was like a five-year-old, upon learning the alphabet, being presented with a copy of the annotated Great Morphologies of the ancient tutorix Gorpha vin Tesserine. A child might be able to count the numbers marking off the footnotes, but not much more than that.

Nonetheless, I put my hands flat on the table and felt the surface of the wood grain, and tried to release my mind. The wood meant “usefulness in death” to me; the wood meant “you may be dead and you may still serve.” I had never tried to read the lifelines of a piece of timber before.

“Are you quite all right?” asked the Nanny, beginning to gather up her things, including the bottle. Apparently I looked as if I were about to expire, or explode.

“You have to leave the way you came,” I said to her.

“I only saw the one staircase,” she asserted.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what I did mean, or if it had anything to do with her at all. “History waits to be written, and this family has a part to play in it.”

H AH,”
SAID
the Lion. “You have to leave the way you come in? So what did you mean by that? You have to go out of the world the way you came into it? Imbecilic and diapered?”

Yackle didn’t speak. He pressed his point. “Did you decipher your own gibberish? You’ve been trying to die as a human, but if you never were born as a human, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ha-ha.”

She was silent for a long time. Her hands moved as if she were picking up the green glass bottle in her mind, all over again. When she spoke, her voice had an opacity to it.

“So you did have something to give me after all,” she said. “You come in all rough edges and smarmy clothes, and it seems you have something to say.”

He shrugged. He didn’t know what she meant.

“That’s why I’ve been down in the crypt for a year without having the plea sure of a visit from a gentleman caller named Master Death. My first prophecy, and I read it wrong. ‘You have to leave the way you came.’ That was for me. Not for that Cattery Spunge.”

“Don’t look at me,” he said. His paws went up and flat like the palms of a human hand, protesting. Like a Bear cub playing dead. “I’m not certified.”

She was shaken. She left the chairback and meandered to the window. She stood there for a long time. Then, as if trying to change the subject, she said, “Someone’s got a cook fire down there. One of the houses to our west.”

“You can see now? Or are you ’seeing’ it?”

“I’m smelling it, you blasted bog-wart. The wind is pressing up from the west, and I remember a few stone cottages out that way. If we’re in as much of a skirmish moment as you say, I’d have thought the residents of the small farms that supply the mauntery would be huddling in our great hall for protection. That’s the origin of this establishment in the first place, after all-a keep.”

“Apparently whoever lives out yonder isn’t scared, though.”

“Not scared of war? Hmmm.”

“Or maybe more scared of starvation. It’s harvest season, and the troops have been tromping their bloody jackboots all across the country. Flattening whatever modest crop of autumn wheat the locals can manage to eke out of this unforgiving soil.” He walked to the window and stood next to her. “I’m right. Their house stands amid three small fields of grain ready for harvest. If they leave that harvest too long, the armies will trample the fields for a camp, or bloody it with an encounter.”

“Still, if the farmers become the next casualties of war, they’re not going to be able to enjoy their wheat rolls. So why stay and guard their useless harvest? They should get out of the way while they can.”

“Maybe they’ve had enough of life. Maybe they’ve had their share.”

“Who has had enough of life?” she said.

“You did,” he answered. “You laid yourself down to die.”

“I laid myself down to go,” she corrected him, but then she began to cry. He assumed she didn’t really know what she meant. It must be no fun being an oracle for everyone else and being clueless about yourself.

Before they could return to their chairs to continue, a bell rang in the mauntery. The glass cat slept on. “It is time for prayers before dinner,” said Yackle. “Shall we take a break now?”

“You’re going to pray?” he asked.

“I remember the old ways of this place. I’m going to find a cleaver and trim these pesky nails, for one thing. Then I’m going to sit in a chapel among people who pray,” she replied. “You may have a writ from the Emerald City, but I suspect it doesn’t require me to reveal the metes and bounds of my religious doubt.”

He shrugged again. “Will you join me?” she said, aggressively.

“We have hardly started,” he said. “You’ve told me about meeting the Nanny, and how you came to learn about the Thropps. That’s just scratching the surface. Tell me something more about that Elphaba-the Wicked Witch-before you go. For all I know you’ll be assumed bodily into the Afterlife at the end of prayers tonight.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she replied and headed for the door.

Then she turned. “The Nanny had come for advice about her employer, about that Melena Thropp-the mother of Elphaba and, eventually, the mother of Nessarose and our current benighted Emperor of Oz, Shell, too. I supplied her with something, some pinlobble leaves cut with milkflower or something. I don’t even remember. Useful, though hardly magical. I never met Melena or her husband the minister. I never met Nessarose or Shell. And that Elphaba-that green girl!-well, we know what happened to her. I was on hand for bits and pieces of that, too.”

“Go on,” he said.

“I’m out of here,” she said, scraping her hand in the air, hunting for the doorknob. “But don’t you see what I’m saying? I had had my first genuine vision, even if it was induced. Something about possibility. All that misty apprehension, those swirls of image trying to form into something intelligible…in all that, I perceived force and hope alike. And I saw that I would be a real oracle, whatever kind of oracle I could manage to be. My calling wasn’t just a joke.”

“Elphaba’s tools of the trade,” he urged her. “The broom. The crystal ball. And wasn’t there a book, some book of magic?”

She wasn’t taking the bait. “The elixir had awakened in me the potential to read for meaning. I would read for meaning. It’s as simple as that. You see, I had been waiting for something to focus my attention. I needed to find something in order to sense a meaning to my life, in this earthly prison of Oz. Maybe I was like the orphan duckling who has to find a friendly dog or a hen or something that might serve as a surrogate mother.”

“Take it from me,” said Brrr, “not everyone who is devoid of a mother seeks out a surrogate.”

“Tell it to the judge,” she replied and left the room.

Like many a blind person, her spatial memory seemed keen. She creaked and tottered away toward the chapel. He listened to the hem of her winding sheet whispering along the floorboards.

It would be fun to hear the scream of some young novice who hadn’t yet heard the news that Yackle had risen from the nearly dead. All he could hear, though, was the arpeggios of melody in the oakhair trees.

NOT
MANY
MILES
to the south, on the banks of the Vinkus River, a stand of young deciduous trees grew fairly close together. A forest fire some eight or ten years earlier had leveled the foliage, so what had sprung up in the ashes was of first growth, and all roughly the same height. Had Brrr possessed a spyglass, and had he thought to train his eyes in that direction, he might have caught a glimpse of a strange and troubled head swimming above the tips of the adolescent trees. It had ears like a dragon, and eyes like a dragon, but its tread was continuous, more like a serpent dragging its huge tail than like a quadruped galumphing along. But Brrr had no such spyglass.

T HE
CLOCK
was moving rather slowly; the lads who pushed and pulled it were struggling across the terrain. It felt as if they were hauling the wagon over a series of railway ties without the benefit of steel runner rails, since the ground was fretted with half-submerged roots of oakhair trees.

The dwarf and his new recruit walked ahead, picking out the best route. They would need to stop before long, as the sky was paling.

“We shall want to take special care, Lady Lucky,” said Mr. Boss. “Usually we like to sidestep troublesome neighborhoods, but our advice this time is to thread our way among contentious populations of nasty, armed men. Reach a safe haven just between them-a tall stone house where custom requires we be granted sanctuary.”

“Sanctuary comes at a cost, however hidden,” she replied.

“Oh, our private Missy Prissy condescends to comment!” The dwarf skipped in place. His mockery was affectionate, but it knew no restraints. “Do tell, darling.”

“I mean nothing by it. Just-just that no rescue comes free.”

“You’re sulky, you’re surly, because we impressed you into service after we saved you from that dolorous tower. That’s the thanks we get. My feelings are hurt.”

She shrugged. Perhaps she did mean that. Some weeks ago, in her life before now, her aging employer had locked her in the top floor of a stone turret. She’d been retained as a nurse, but he wanted more than medical care, and she had refused to yield to his advances. (Well, she couldn’t even if she’d wanted.)

He had gloated at her from below, by turns cajoling and threatening, until one morning, when a grape had become lodged in his windpipe. She couldn’t throw herself out the high window to revive him; the drop was too steep. She couldn’t beat the door down (she had tried that). She watched him stagger to his knees and clutch his throat, and look up at her. He couldn’t speak. She had all she could do not to sing down to him, “Did you take your tablets before your meal?” When he fell, his body made a shadow and then a stain on the terrace.

She feared starvation, but scarcely a day later the dwarf and his crew came along with their awesome Clock. The Dragon had stretched its armored swanlike neck nearly as high as her windowsill, and she had been able to escape, exchanging one affectionate fiend for another. But at least the dwarf and his toothsome boys had sworn against sex with a woman, so they were a better company to keep for the time being.

Mr. Boss deduced that his reticent recruit was in a perplexed mood. He asked, “What were you doing in the service of that Grandpa Ogre, anyway?”

She looked hither and yon. Though the boys were far enough ahead not to hear, she didn’t want to talk about most of it. She said, “My invalid master professed that in exchange for chores I could perform, I could barter for my freedom. I had three years to go when he became cross with me and locked me in that tower. It was too high to escape from, unless one wanted to jump to one’s death. Once in my childhood I had thought I could fly-but I had no wings of my own. It took your dragon with its own wings to reach its neck up so I could crawl on top of it, and scramble to safety. Did the dragon tell you I would be there, or was it just my luck?”