A Lion Among Men (34 page)

“The word you want,” said the dwarf, “is fink. Or, if you’re being fancy, collaborationist.”

Brrr felt he suddenly understood what it might mean if he said I am beside myself! The world contorting again, long after he had thought it possible to learn anything new. It was like being back in the Great Gillikin Forest, suddenly recognizing that the musical repertoire of humans that he was overhearing was in fact language, implying meaning, implying a secret world he might uncover. The bone-icing creepiness of realizing that an Animal can masquerade as an animal! He hadn’t known it possible.

“Oh, we all have our disguises,” said Shadowpuppet irritably. “You think only a big Cat can practice sedition?”

The Cat hissed at them all. The dwarf continued, “No need to get so worked up over it, Mister Lion. The episode depicted by the Clock didn’t involve you, far as I could see.”

“No, it didn’t,” said Brrr. “But I took on Shadowpuppet as my pet-”

“Hah,” said the Cat. “No, sir, I took on you as an assignment. To end my long career in a last bout of usefulness, and look-I’ve all but been thrown out on my ass.”

“Assignment for whom?” asked Brrr.

“The regimes change, the posts are filled and vacated and refilled. I can hardly remember the current personnel. Think you’ll take my deposition? Think again. Anyway, as if I owe you an explanation?”

“You do,” said Ilianora. “If you informed against the Witch, you were an agent in the death of Fiyero Tigelaar. And he was my father.”

“Was he now,” said the Cat. “Pity, that.”

“Nor?” said Yackle, turning her head toward Ilianora. “Nor Tigelaar? Fiyero’s daughter?”

“Nor was a girl, and that girl is dead,” said Ilianora. “That girl died in Southstairs Prison…I go by the name of Ilianora now.” She dropped her veil back from her forehead. “If a Cat can skulk around disguised as a cat, a girl can certainly disguise herself as a woman.” Her tone was cool and not particularly flummoxed.

Brrr had never known Fiyero, but long ago he had traveled to the Emerald City with the boy sometimes thought to be Fiyero’s illegitimate son. “Ilianora, listen: The Witch’s boy-Elphaba’s charge-was looking for you some years back. Did he ever find you?”

“Liir?” said Ilianora. “Liir, you mean? Is he still alive?”

“Twenty years ago he was,” said Brrr.

“Ten years ago he was still alive,” said Yackle. “He’d be, oh, twenty-nine or thirty by now. Excuse me for hurrying this along, but why don’t you ask the Clock?”

“It does no good to ask the Clock,” said the dwarf curtly. “The clock only reveals what it will.”

They all turned to look at it again.

“You’d be thirty-five then,” said Brrr. “Or so. You were older than Liir, right?”

She didn’t answer. Her face was in her hands. The news that someone had once hunted for her seemed to be seeping in.

“You have someone who cares for you,” said Brrr. “Somewhere. You don’t need to languish in thrall to a dwarf. You don’t owe him anything.”

“Don’t mind me,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “I didn’t snitch on any Winkie prince. I don’t take sides. I mind my own business. Little me and my own ten toes, each more blameless than the one next door.”

Y
ACKLE
WAVED
her hands loosely in the air, as if casting spells or shooing chickens. She began to get excited. “Open your trove, Mister Boss, and let me at it.”

“You’re off your rocker,” began the dwarf.

“Don’t deny me my last moment.” Yackle rubbed her eyes with her fists, impatiently. Brrr thought: She’d force her eyes to focus one last time, if she could.

“Show’s over,” growled the dwarf. “You’ve agitated my virgin missus. En’t that enough trouble for one day?” He began to slap up the hinged stages and secure the shutters. “We gave it a chance, and it’s paid us with a scrap of useless history. Who cares if that friable Cat once worked for ye olde Wizard of Oz? He’s long gone, and it’s Emperor Shell on the throne now. All that bunk of espionage and assault is ancient history and does no one any good, least of all the Cat, with its fragmented tail.”

The Clock disobeyed the dwarf and clattered its central stage open again.

“Huffy, are we?” said the dwarf. “Feeling our oats, eh? This is a strange turn of affairs.” But he backed off a little, nonplussed.

“Look,” said Brrr.

“Easy for you to say,” replied Yackle, tapping one dead eyelid with her fingernail.

The Clock’s machinery chirred with a sound like the tumbling of oaken dice. The hands of the dwarf fell at his side, but remained fisted, as if Mr. Boss would strike the equipment if it dared an impertinent display. Brrr shifted to get a better view. Ilianora and the boys watched, too.

Through a mist that suffused the stage from vents in the flooring, a tall figure emerged. It stood about ten inches high. It sported a long white beard and a tall velvet hat-like a witch’s hat but without the brim. The face was indistinct but furrowed with character; it looked like the business end of a pair of socks folded into each other. The face seemed pinched between the downward cone of the white beard and the upward cone of the black velvet cap. Stars and moons were picked out on the old gentleman’s robe.

“What’s happening?” asked Yackle. “This is no time to fall silent, you lot.”

“Sorry,” said Brrr, and he began to describe what he saw.

In his arms the figure hugged an oversize volume, a folio of russet leather clasping vellum pages of irregular cut. Oversize, proportionally speaking, of course: in actuality, the prop was about the heft of a roast-wren sandwich.

The figure set the book down on the ground. He looked to the left and to the right, as if checking to make sure he was alone. Then, alarmingly, he looked at the small audience and winked at them. It was almost salacious. Brrr felt in the presence of rough magic.

“It’s a book,” said Brrr. “A magic book, I bet.”

“The Grimmerie,” added Ilianora. “I knew it in my youth, back at Kiamo Ko.”

“The Grimmerie,” replied Yackle. “As I suspected. What about it?”

Brrr and Ilianora took turns describing the scene. The figure opened the cover of the book. It was only a simulacrum of a book, not a real book: its pages were not more than five inches square, if that. When the book was opened flat, at a central section of pages so the versos and rectos spread evenly in each direction, the bearded puppet made some arcane gestures above the gutter of the volume. He let his beard trail along the stitchery, which seemed a nearly obscene gesture, certainly an odd one. Then he curled his fingers up and lifted his gnarled hands-Brrr could tell his hands were gnarled even though they were papier-mâché puppet hands. He knitted a spell with his fingers. It was as if, Brrr thought, he were writing in the air above the book. “He’s…he’s conjuring something out of the book.”

“Of course he is. It’s the Grimmerie. Aren’t you getting any of this?”

“Don’t be so snarky,” said Brrr, but mildly; he couldn’t really fault Yackle. The air seemed to crackle and dry; his mane was going mad with static.

Yackle gripped each of her elbows and hugged herself. “What’s he calling up?”

Something began to lift off the page. It looked like origami being done by invisible fingers: a complicated fold of ivory paper twisted itself, unbent a limb, twisted again, uncorked a shoulder. Slowly the creature balanced on four limbs, then stood erect on two-the rear two limbs. A third pair of limbs scraped the air behind the creature, unfolding and unfolding until they were twice the height of the biped.

“Wings,” said Ilianora, in a gasp.

“A winged human,” said Brrr, “made out of paper, I mean.”

The creature stood to full height only once, and some trick in the folds of the face made a little gleam of light come out-as if a torch had picked up a glint of reflection made by a drop or two of dried glue. The figure was naked and magnificent, a hobbledy old winged woman with a mane of paper hair wild enough to make Brrr jealous.

Then the creature’s wings folded back, to pack into the woman’s shoulders like a broad deformity, a pair of humps. The weight of them curved her spine a little; she stooped, looking older. This caused her hair to drop over her forehead, giving her a shifty look beneath its unkempt locks. The light dimmed somehow; only now could Brrr see that the paper had been crumpled before being folded, so the dozens of wrinkles approximated the veined sheen of old flesh.

“It is an old woman,” said Brrr. His voice went quiet. “An old woman has just lifted out from the pages of the Grimmerie, and been deprived of the wings that helped her stand erect. The wings have folded heavily on her back, buckling her spine with the weight. And she is on her knees, now, and lying down, naked and old.”

“I know,” said Yackle tiredly. “Naked and old and newborn. And never knew a mother’s kiss. Tragic. But you’ve learned of your origins, Brrr, and I’ve learned of mine, too. Happy birthday.” Her voice sounded as proud as it did tired. “Now what?”

The crumpled woman who had sprung from the open folds of a magic book slid offstage, never waking, never stirring. The bearded puppet was left alone. He picked up the book. He looked here and there-hunting for something. A puppet can do anything. He turned at last, and a scroll of paper at the back of the stage wound a new backdrop behind him. An approach to a towering house, almost a castle-

“Kiamo Ko!” said Brrr.

Ilianora gripped his paw. “Wasn’t Kiamo Ko bigger than that?”

“Everything seems bigger when you’re young,” explained Brrr. “Anyway, this is a stage set, so how big can it be?”

“Give me my eyes,” said Yackle. She sounded like a crazy old lady, nothing more, but Brrr knew what she meant, and answered her. Brrr described what he saw.

The castle was painted gloomy and quaint, bats in the window and crossbones on the door: a bit over the top, if Brrr could rely on his own memory. But up came the magician, if that’s who he was, in his tall hat and his unrespectable beard; he delivered air-knocks on the castle wall, and then he laid the book down on the floor before the doors, which anyway were painted shut. Once he’d accomplished this, the magician puppet was yanked into the fly space by the Clock’s impatient gearwork.

“That’s how the Grimmerie came to be at Kiamo Ko,” said Ilianora, almost in a whisper. “I remember my mother telling us about it once. An old peddler or a mystic of some sort left it there, and years later Elphaba found it in the attic.”

The book sat on the floorboards. The rest of the stage set was bare. Nothing happened.

Shadowpuppet chose this moment to comment. “A tiktok entertainment leaves something to be desired in the way of dramaturgy. The plot has gone slow here. Are we to wait here and watch the cobwebs grow, while armies are approaching? If you call this a reliable witness, Sir Brrr, why don’t you just haul the Clock of the Time Dragon back to the Emerald City magistrates? Get it to deliver your deposition for you? If you trust it so much?”

“I’m not sure I’d take advice from you, Shadowpuppet,” snarled Brrr. “Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn’t it?”

“As long as we’re chatting,” said the Cat, “the name is Grimalkin. Malky for short. Shadowpuppet is just so…so you.”

Yackle threw her fists in the air and uncurled her palsied fingers as far as she could. “Enough! Will nobody do as I ask? Dragon, dwarf, lady, Lion, someone: Ask the Clock for the book!”

Brrr was stunned. “Ask where it is now?” he said.

“Don’t you understand? I have seen how my story ends. It’s here. It’s here. In the clock. Bring it out.”

“It was a play-action, it was a fake book,” Brrr reminded Yackle. Was she losing it at last?

“Shhh, old mother,” said Ilianora, stroking the skin pleating on Yackle’s trembling forearms.

Even the dwarf showed some remorse at getting Yackle all wound up for nothing. “I’m afraid they’re right, Mrs. Mysteriousness. We’re out of tricks. Show’s over. Nothing to see here. Move along. Keep to the left. Tell your friends. Blessing of Lurlina on you, and all that rot.”

But the Time Dragon had other ideas. It flexed a forearm and draped an accordion-pleated leather wing across the central display chamber. It lowered its head with a clanking sinuousness both sinister and noble. Its ruby-glass eyes bulged in their leathern sockets. Its gooseneck armature struck forward, pinning Mr. Boss to his ground. From its nostrils issued a smell of scorch that wrinkled their noses. Calamitously thick smoke spilled from the dragon sinuses, clouding the courtyard, watering every eye.

Brrr wanted to rub his eyes, but in his arms Shadowpuppet…Malky…was squirming to escape in the sudden fog. “Stop, or I’ll snap every limb off of you, one at a time,” Brrr rasped, coughing. He had to do with trying to rub his face into his forearm. When his eyes stopped streaming, the smoke was lifting. Everyone was suffering from the stinging soot. Ilianora was wiping her face with her silvery veil, the dwarf with his beard. The boys were clutching one another and whimpering: They had all of a sudden seen one revelation too many, and they wanted to go home. Yackle rubbed her eyes, too.

“Look,” she said, pointing. The dragon wing was lifting at an angle. Brrr stared: The Clock was taking orders from no dwarf. It had its own agenda. The second dragon wing had started to lift in the opposite direction, an effect like curtains parting at a window, before it dawned on Brrr that it had been Yackle who had told them to look. But he couldn’t even turn to see what her face was like now that-could it be possible?-her eyesight had been restored by the dragon smoke. He just obeyed her instruction, and looked.

A
SLIDING
PANEL
of stage flooring moved out, a wooden tongue on oiled bearings. In a drawer, on a carpet of green and gold silk, the Grimmerie waited for them.

Brrr didn’t need to describe it for Yackle anymore. He didn’t need Ilianora to identify it. It wasn’t a tiny stage prop. It was the real Grimmerie.

The volume sat half unwrapped in a traditional Vinkus hunting shawl, a fringed cloth with roses on a black background. There was something almost lascivious about the arrangement to Brrr, who had never admired books particularly. He didn’t remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.