A Lion Among Men (17 page)

“We have a network of informers, should we need a key piece of classified information. Anyway, it was I who gave the signal to let you in.” She rolled onto her back so he could see the bits of torn autumn leaf, red maple and lavender pearlfruit, caught in the hot white-gold of her under-trunk fur, spangling it like jewels, from her neck to her loins.

“But why?” He found he had to lower his volume or he was afraid his voice might break.

“Diversion,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“How could I mind?” he replied. “I was going nowhere special, so I could hardly be diverted.”

“I mean diversion for us. For me. A distraction from the daily efforts of our military readiness. A distraction from the threat of becoming the Chieftess, which is an obligation I have no wish to accept.”

“Can’t you simply refuse?”

“Refuse your duty to your father? To the tribe he governs?” She let her tongue hang out of the side of her mouth, playing corpse. “Only in death. Have you no concept of fathers?”

“No,” he admitted. “Mine never remembered to come round.”

“Lucky beast.”

“Him or me?”

She turned her head toward him; her chest was still exposed in the sunlight. It was all he could do to keep his eyes trained on her eyes. “If you have never enjoyed the paternal correction as administered by your own father and master, how will you qualify to be a father when it’s your turn?”

“I didn’t know I would need to supply qualifications to become a father.”

Again, she laughed. “I suppose there is really only one application procedure,” she admitted. “Touché. But in actual fact-what is your name?-I signaled you should be brought into the circle so that the subject might be changed. I was arguing with Uyodor H’aekeem about matters of state. Our words were sharp, and I didn’t want to lose my temper. In general it isn’t considered seemly among the Ghullim, and for a chieftain’s daughter to discredit her father’s position by second-guessing him-well, it isn’t done.”

“You could just walk away, couldn’t you?”

“I can be rude to you, but not to Uyodor H’aekeem.” Her tone remaining precisely neutral, she neither mocked her father’s name nor celebrated it. “Or did you mean I might strike out on my own?”

“Some do. I did, of necessity.”

“I knew I liked the look of you, at least a little. You have a silly swagger about you that is entirely unconvincing. Anyone brave enough to sashay through our territory like that is either a one-off nutter or an ally worth cultivating.”

“I may be neither,” he said, and wanted to add, or I may be something else again. He tried to focus on her without blinking, though his tear ducts tended to empty at inopportune moments.

She leaped to her feet as if she had caught wind of salacious thoughts. “I’m too full of energy, I can’t sit still for long,” she said to him. “I don’t want you to leave yet, for I have a lot to accomplish while you’re here, but I have to run, run my limbs to exhaustion, or I will claw myself to death.”

“Highly strung, are we.”

She bared her teeth at him. He went on more neutrally, “Are you permitting me to stay or prohibiting me from leaving?”

She didn’t answer but went leaping down off the ledge, a wave of golden coins pulsing through the scatter of falling leaves.

He did not feel he wanted to push his luck.

The tree elves came out from behind their pot. He had forgotten about them.

“She’s in a lather,” said Twigg.

“Never seen her quite like that,” said Stemm.

“Have we heard something we ought not hear?” said Twigg.

“She’s too smart for that; she will have known we were quivering back here like mice,” replied Stemm. “But nobody trusts what we say anyway, so who cares?”

“Is it like that?” asked Brrr. “Is Uyodor H’aekeem so driven? So unyielding? Would he care that much if his oldest daughter renounced her obligations?”

“And do what?” asked Twigg. “Run a nursery school for malformed forest creatures? It’s inconceivable. Ivory Tigers live to thrive, and they thrive through keen military readiness. She can have no other notion for herself. It’s not allowed.”

“She’s touched in the head,” said Stemm. “Of course, don’t listen to me, I’m a dolt-bolt, what do I know?”

“Well, I know what they think,” said Twigg. “It’s all honor and tradition and how things are done. And how they’ve been done for the past twenty chieftainships. Their elegant history of independence weighs on them, their own style of yoke. Slaves to themselves. Do as well as we have always done! Don’t be the weak link in the chain of our ongoing history. What a lump of cold congealed pottage it all is, at least to me.”

“Shall I leave or shall I stay?” It seemed demeaning to ask advice of tree elves, but Brrr was caught in indecision.

“Makes no difference to us. Stay, enjoy our cooking. Leave without permission, and we have Lion stew on the menu for the evening. Your choice. It’s a free woods.”

So Brrr allowed himself to stay and be courted by Piyanta and Zibria again, though they seemed less appealing now that he’d met Muhlama. In time he asked to take a nap, and he sent them off giggling and blushing back to their enclave.

W AS HE a guest of the Ghullim or a prisoner? He couldn’t answer the question for himself assuredly. If a guest, eventually he’d have to leave. If a prisoner, he supposed he ought to protest his incarceration. Still, what kind of incarceration was this? Exercise, the morning run, and rock-scramble with Muhlama and her companions. Hardly a punishment.

Brrr relaxed; what else could he do? He enjoyed the meals, sometimes cooked by the tree elves, sometimes caught and served bloody raw by the Ivory Tiger hunters. (He’d abandoned vegetarianism when he’d arrived in Shiz, though he preferred the human custom of cooking the meat.) He took part in games of hide-and-seek at which he was always it, because he, alone among the Cats, couldn’t scale the bark of a tree nor hide in the foliage of its canopy. Even emaciated with hunger, he weighed twice what an adult male Ivory Tiger weighed.

Afternoons-a Lion’s laziest time-he dozed a short distance away from where Uyodor H’aekeem held court. Muhlama disappeared. He wondered whether she was conducting her ablutions, or napping in a private boudoir, or-he tried not to visualize this-pursuing a dalliance with some other creature. It was none of his business. And he would never know: in her regal demeanor, she shone, and deflected close scrutiny, too, like a shellac.

Still, the idea burned him and teased him a little.

He had never expected to appeal to anyone. He didn’t much appeal to himself. He conceded the obvious: Perhaps he was being kept around as a spot of comic interest, like the dotty maiden aunt trotted out into the family parlor to amuse the neighbors and ensure that the conversation remained innocent and droll. But so what? He was growing used to Muhlama’s manner. Her high style and her higher disdain, which sometimes flowered into impatience.

Brrr and Muhlama disagreed from time to time, and she even lashed out at him, but he took no offense. Disapproval was better than invisibility.

He’d been with the Ghullim a month, or even two, when the equilibrium was shattered. One night, after a feast of braised loin of warthog served with mushrooms, Uyodor H’aekeem awoke with a start. He claimed he had been snared in a bad dream. (It seemed that Ivory Tigers rarely dreamed, but when they did, it was a bad sign.) The truth was, though, that the raw terrain was being washed with high winds and cracking branches. The chief had probably been startled by the fall of a tree nearby.

Dreams were always warnings. But what did it mean? Unfamiliar with the conventions of dream, Uyodor called Brrr to his side.

“The dream had human men in it,” said the Ivory Tiger, pacing back and forth in the teeth of the dry gale. “You’ve lived in the world of men, you say. Tell me how I should interpret the dream. Tell me why I have had it now.”

“The storm unsettled you,” said Brrr. “With your sharp ear, you heard a cry of alarm from some pitiless creature hurled through the high winds. Give it no mind.”

“It was a dream,” Uyodor insisted. “Where did it come from?”

“Perhaps the mushrooms were off?” But this was too glib. Uyodor glared and repeated what he could of his murky midnight vision. It was less clear than ever; it had dangerous men in it. Cats, Brrr thought, could have no more revealing dreams than socks or mustard could.

But he didn’t care to make things up. “Have you considered perhaps dismissing your chefs?”

“Are you proposing poison?”

“Heavens! No.” Brrr wanted no more blood on his paws, not even the thin silly blood of tree elves. “Perhaps your palate needs a change-your indigestion a result of a kind of curiosity for something new…”

The wind snatched at one of the golden veils and flew it away.

“Perhaps you need to move camp,” said Brrr. “Maybe the dream was calling a warning to pack up and leave here before a disaster stronger than a storm should strike.”

This was more like it. The chief retired to spend the rest of the night sleepless, and Brrr crawled back into the nook he’d been designated, a cleft under a protruding slab of pinkish granite. A moon was up and the skies were clear, and Brrr could see that the tree elves had climbed into their iron pots to keep from being blown away.

At dawn Uyodor H’aekeem convened a council of elders. He gave out his orders on the legitimacy of the Lion’s advice. They would retreat to a new campsite at once, cull food from fresher sources, avoid some disaster that must be coming their way at the place they were about to abandon.

His tribe reacted with the usual politesse and immediacy. Everyone except Muhlama, who without comment disappeared into the forest.

Brrr went to the cooking station to find out what to think about all this.

“Uyodor H’aekeem, the brave Chief of the Ghullim! This is a rare instance of superstition, for him,” Twigg observed. “He prides himself on being above that kind of thing.”

“This lot stays put until there’s a reason to move,” agreed Stemm. “But, Twigg, it’s not your job to judge how Uyodor H’aekeem makes his decisions. Some leaders do it with entrails, some with tea leaves, some with the knucklebones of pigs. He does it with dreams of storms, or storms of dreams. Same difference.”

“Do the Ghullim move often?” asked Brrr.

“We lose track,” said the tree elves simultaneously. “One forest glade is the same as any other to us,” continued Stemm. “We’re doomed to servitude our lives long, so we take no interest in our surroundings.”

“Why don’t you just leave?” asked Brrr. “You aren’t shackled in any way that I can see, and half the time no one is paying any attention to you.”

They seemed offended at that. “Really!” said Twigg. “You don’t know much, do you, Brrr? They’d be lost without us, lost. None of them have opposable thumbs. How could they possibly do a roasted leg of forest goat with a side of ivory ferns and a saltberry pudding? I mean, really!”

“Besides,” said Stemm, “where would we go? It’s not as if there are dozens of tree-elf colonies sprouting up all over the place like, like…some sort of problem in forest population control.”

“We go where we’re told,” concluded Twigg, “and really I imagine, Brrr, so will you. Haven’t you learned anything about the sacred performance of your duties? You’ll come along with us. Unless our employers decide that your presence drew the storm from the sky and the dream upon the Chief. In that case you will need to be sacrificed, bled, roasted, sliced, and served on a leaf of buttercup lettuce.”

“With marinated shallots,” said Stemm, rubbing his hands.

“No, that’s so high summer. Let’s go autumnal. Grocer’s gourd stuffed with minced hazelnut in a chanterelle reduction and a wild rice pasticcio.”

“Will you stop?” said Brrr. “I’m not going anywhere. I mean into any cooking pans, thank you very much. And you’re lucky I was around to save you from the same fate.”

“We should have let ourselves be blown to kingdom come when we still had a chance.”

While the Ghullim began to break camp, Muhlama seemed stalled in a state of high dudgeon, huffing and hissing at anyone who came near. Brrr kept his distance, too. He saw that the tree elves were the ones who scampered aloft and untied the gauzy curtains from their boughs, and stacked the cooking utensils in wooden crates, and rolled up Uyodor’s patterned carpet, and collected scraps and bits and souvenirs. What the Ivory Tigers provided the elves, he guessed, was some sort of security, but the elves did all the work.

Most of it, that is. A ramshackle old cart came out of storage from somewhere, and Brrr was asked to push. Twigg and Stemm would sit up top and steer.

So Brrr set his shoulder against the sloping rear panel of a human cart. This required his head to cock at an angle, and he hoped to find Muhlama looking at him with a measure of gratitude. He was earning his way, see, just like the tree elves. She didn’t favor him with the pleasure of a glance, though. He worked without reward or even much assistance.

Muhlama’s tone was saturated with rancor. “Where are we going? The moon? Uyodor, do you intend to march us all the way up the slopes of the Scalps? Just how big was that dream anyway? I’m not going another step!” She seemed to have forgotten her requirement of obeisance toward her father. “Or was this so-called dream just a ruse? Had you been planning on relocating us to the highlands anyway, and forgot to tell us? Are you mincelings just going to tramp along without saying a word?”

She had to spit in disgust, which was an elegant thing and, Brrr thought, had a certain sort of sweet sexiness to it. Though his neck and shoulders were aching.

Perhaps she wore her father down, for he selected a new campground before dusk. Brrr found it impossible to estimate how far they had gone, but it couldn’t have been five or six miles, not with the cart bumping and scraping over every inch. The downed limbs, the mess of storm. In one place an entire pool had been emptied of its water; turtles were emerging from the mud and blinking at the novelty of air.

“That’s a pretty talented storm system,” observed Brrr, as conversationally as he could. Trying to lighten the mood. Muhlama paid him no mind and addressed her father, who remained confirmed about his premonitions because they had been illustrated with wind damage.