A Lion Among Men (12 page)

“You didn’t tell me if you ever found the soldier’s father. As you promised. Do you keep your promises? I’m merely asking.”

“You think you can shame me? You’ll have to work harder than that.”

“Shame you? Hardly. I have no capacity for that,” she said. “No capacity and no interest. I’m not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn’t have any such holiday called childhood. I’m merely curious.”

T
HEY
SAT
in silence, both of them unwilling to yield, and after a while a maunt came in. She carried a plate piled with rye brisks smeared with a paste made of ground tadmuck and onions. Neither Yackle nor Brrr thanked her-neither was willing to be the first to show the weakness inherent in courtesy.

While the maunt fussed about with napkins and condiments, Brrr listened to the world.

The Mauntery of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows sat only a little distance from a forest of oakhair trees. Brrr knew that the higher branches of the mature oakhair tree developed long tendrils. In early autumn, the tendrils produced dense little acorns that swung until, finally, they were heavy enough to snap off and drop to the ground for seeding. Before they fell, though, the weight they exerted pulled their long threadlike stems tighter and tighter. When the wind arose from the south, if it ran close enough to the earth, it could produce a sound as of thrummed harp strings. A kind of foresty moan. Lurlina, or whatever damn goddess was responsible for the development of flora in Oz, hadn’t bothered to tune the oakhair’s reproductive system. The sound was less like an orchestra agreeing on a common pitch and more like a bevy of banshees considering what creature to feast upon for their supper.

The sostenuto lingered. The transparent cat began to vibrate slightly, as if in sympathy, like the ringing of a wineglass struck with the blade of a knife. The noise an ornamental paperweight might make if it could purr.

The maunt left, closing the door soundlessly behind her, no doubt vexed that she’d been able to overhear nothing of the interview. The wind pulled longer, half-strangled moans out of the forest, until, to drown out the noise if nothing else, Brrr caved at last, and spoke first.

“I hate that sound.”

“What sound is that?” asked Yackle, pawing on the floor for a biscuit she had dropped.

“The oakhair chorus. Can’t you hear it? I thought the blind developed keener hearing as compensation.”

“I can’t hear it. I have other compensations,” she said. “Like a sense of taste. I don’t suppose that helpmeet supplied us with any gin? I found this little snack offensive.”

“Only water, I’m afraid. I could do with some ale.”

“You say,” said Yackle, “that your emergence into Traum was your first experience outside of the Forest. Are you sure of that?”

“No,” he replied. “It’s even been suggested to me that I could have wandered out when I was too young to perceive it. So what? That’s as good as if it hadn’t happened, right?”

“Perhaps,” she answered. “Or not.”

“You might well have had a childhood yourself,” he said. “Suppose you lived eighty years of some life choked with drama and feeling, and then you had a stroke or some other illness. When you came around, in that basement in Shiz, you were like a child again. The slate wiped clean. It’s been known to happen to the elderly, Animals as well as people.”

“No, no,” she replied. “Even those whose memories are corrupted by illness still have their pasts pocketed somewhere. But I have nothing to remember-no childhood to flee from. Don’t you understand? I think that’s why I can see the future-to the extent that I can. I suppose it’s your principle of compensation. I can’t remember the past, so I can remember the future.”

“All right, then. Prove it to me. Remember for me what is going to happen to me when I get back to the Emerald City with the information they want. Which you’re about to give me.”

He was playing with fire, but what was there left to lose? Not dignity-he couldn’t lose face with this harridan, who couldn’t see his face to begin with-or could see it all too clearly. One or the other.

“You don’t really want to know.”

“Or are you the scam artist that most oracles are? Look, I gave you my shame, which you asked for. Tell me about the Thropps, then. The Thropps.” He tapped his pencil on the notepad. “Or are you losing memory capacity so fast? The bucket leaking while we sit here? Your past draining away?”

“If I only had a past. I have no past.”

He grinned at her, wondering if she could intuit an expression. “And if I don’t get what I’m looking for, I have no future. So begging your pardon, can we hurry it up?”

H E
WATCHED
as she descended into what memories she had. The poor old macaroon. What possible good could come of her in the end? Of any of us, he amended.

Did her memories sting and surprise, as that sudden recollection of a cage had done, coming over him in Traum at the height of the troll massacre? And returning to him now. Always a cage, no?

I
REMEMBER
MORE
than you think.

I can’t always tell what it means, though. Every oracle is a scam artist, even those with talent.

My departure from Shiz. Under cover of night I packed up what little I owned and I spent my last coin on a midnight carriage to the Emerald City.

The journey-it means nothing to your investigation. But I do remember sucking on the edge of my lace shawl, to savor a taste of potato stew I had trailed the garment through. I was at wit’s end. I was spooked by the challenge of the Emerald City, but I desired it, too. I hoped I could glean something from some other old crone at a bingo parlor or a chapel testimonial. Maybe I could hear that someone else had been born old. Then I might learn why I was so blighted.

I can feel you sneering in sympathy. You think effeminate beasts are the only ones who don’t know their places?

So I came to the Emerald City to find my fortune, a toddler in the body of an octogenarian. I was astounded at the capital city’s noise and breadth and stink and lights and attitude.

The Emerald City, so called, wasn’t hugely emerald yet. It was more like a work in progress. Its name was a developer’s advertisement looking for investors. The green jewels being dug up in the Glikkus mines adorned only the Palace. The urban squalor around the Throne house looked like a heap of pigsties. Nonetheless, the Emerald City was beginning to practice the art of self-squawk.

Eventually, I saved up enough of my little pilferings and filchments to launch a new practice. I’d learned my lesson, though. No more financial advice. And I wouldn’t take on a client unless she-it is nearly always a she who cares about the future, isn’t it?-unless she promised not to call in the authorities if my reading provoked some catastrophe or other. In such an event, I declared, I’d consider myself released from our contract and I’d have to lower a chastening spell upon her.

I hadn’t any such talent at spells, mind you-I was never a witch of any stripe-but my talent for lying proved useful. Clients always acceded to my conditions. They were so greedy to know things.

And as I peered at them, and as I struggled to see the ways that they could lie to me as well as to themselves, I found out new things about them. And about myself.

Without a childhood, you see, I had to lightfinger an education from someone.

Don’t glare so. I can hear you glaring. Yes, the Thropps. I’m getting there.

In my third year at work in the EC-old Pastorius was still in power, parading his baby Ozma up and down the Ozma Embankment-I had a visit one cold autumn afternoon from a middle-aged domestic. Her name, she said, was Cattery Spunge, but she was known around the estate as Nanny. Well-upholstered in the rump and cushiony of bosom-professional attributes as a governess, I guess.

She liked saying estate, she adored saying she was known. She wore her affectations of gentility like so many foxfur castoffs of her lady employer.

It came out soon enough that this Cattery Spunge had served as overseer to several generations of a prominent family. The clan was headed by the Eminence of Munchkinland known at home as Peerless Thropp or, when in government circles, the Eminent Thropp.

Yes, we’ve reached the Thropp family at last.

Cattery Spunge brought with her a small pot of common ferns. She pushed it across the table toward me as I was clearing away lunch. Scraps of congealed tar-root and mash, I’m afraid. Proof of my humble station. “I don’t barter,” I said at the sight of the fern. “I take cash only.”

“It’s not a present,” said Cattery Spunge. “Nor a bribe. Nanny wouldn’t stoop to bribery.”

I left it where it was. Green things tended to wither in my company. Milk sours, children cry, cats develop hairballs. I’d have made one hell of a mother, believe me.

“Go on,” I said to her, refusing to touch the plant.

She fussed at the clasp of a garish carpetbag, making sure I saw the handsome obsidian rings on her chafed hands.

Not too old for romance, I guessed, though beyond child-bearing years. Not twitchy enough to be in legal trouble. Too stout to be vexed by a wasting illness. “An eminence named Peerless Thropp,” I said, to get a hold of anything. “I’m not quite sure about eminences. I have never been to Munchkinland.”

“An eminence is the senior member of the local governing family. Munchkinland has maybe a dozen or so established families, don’t you know, and the Thropps are the most prominent. The Eminent Thropp is superior in station to all other Munchkinlander gentry. I believe the term Eminence is specific to Munchkinland, though I can’t be certain. I have never traveled much. Happy at home, you see.” She grimaced. “Quite happy indeed.”

So we were getting somewhere. “Peerless Thropp is still alive-?”

“Yes. A widower. So he’s the Eminent Thropp. More or less the governor of Munchkinland. One daughter, Lady Partra, who married and bore two daughters of her own, Sophelia Thropp and Melena Thropp. I helped raise them both. The former went mad, in the most respectable way, and is housed offstage. The latter, Melena, I did with what I could. High spirits, that one.”

A decayed gentlewoman of loose morals, I inferred. “Go on.”

“Melena could have had anyone, but she suffered chronically from spite. To vex her family was her chiefest aim. She refused an alliance with another eminence’s son, as Lady Partra had proposed. Instead, Melena eloped with a minister of the unionist faith. The husband is far beneath her. Frexspar, his name. As if it matters. As if he matters. Stationed in the hardscrabble outback of Wend Hardings.”

Yes, I remember this all. As if it were yesterday. But you must consider that my mind wasn’t stuffed with eighty years of my own memories. There was little to displace.

The Nanny enjoyed reciting genealogies. “Melena is the Thropp Second Descending, you see-she will become Eminence when her grandfather and her mother are both dead. The honor passes through the female line, just as with the Ozmas. This is assuming, of course, that her mad Aunt Sophelia doesn’t rap out a claim to the title and the family seat, et cetera. Few think she’s capable,” observed Nanny, “but in any instance she has no issue, so sooner or later the title will revert to Melena Thropp.”

All this palaver. “Why have you come, Miss Spunge?”

“Call me Nanny.”

I resisted the invitation. She continued. “My sweet Melena, the Thropp Second Descending, is still young and fertile. I want some salve, some charm, some hedge to ensure that any second child would be born-without blemish.”

“The first child?” I said.

“Elphaba,” said Nanny.

A chill ran through me. I who hadn’t known chills before. I didn’t ordinarily deal in medical charms. “A serious blemish, I’m guessing, or you wouldn’t be here.”

She nodded. A tear fell, and I knew it to be genuine.

I continued. “They put the unhappy infant out of its misery, I assume.”

“Hardly. As if they could. That child has a will stronger than springtime.”

“Her infirmity, then? You must be blunt if I am to be of help.”

Nanny pushed the potted fern closer. “Green. Skin as rich as that. I brought this so you could see. The child is a year old now, poor dreadful thing. I don’t ask you for a corrective for her condition-only for a prophylactic to save Melena Thropp, her mother, against a repeat disaster. To benefit a second child, not Elphaba. Elphaba is condemned to sorrow.”

“Elphaba is condemned to nothing,” I found myself saying. “Nothing is written for her, which means everything is possible.”

I looked at the fern, which did not wither back at me.

“That’s a fancy opinion,” said the family retainer, but I could see she was a bit shaken. “Nanny expected something more in the line of an herbal remedy. Not a prophecy.”

“This is not a restaurant. You take what’s on offer,” I said, but I was surprised at my vehemence, too.

“As long as you’re feeling prophetic, why not push it a little bit further?” she asked. “I mean, a Nanny’s job is to prepare for all eventualities, so it would be useful to know what to look out for. Plagues, boyfriends, the rotten tread in the tower stairs, that sort of thing.”

I was torn at the audacious request. Who was I? A scioness of nothing-without an evident mother, I wasn’t even a bastard. Having anything to do with a prominent family seemed risky from the start. Still, I was intrigued. I wasn’t given to vaulty sorts of sentiments, but the report of a green girl had captured my attention. I felt a little bit of a one-off myself-perhaps there was a kinship effect.

“I will need to have something to hold,” I said, playing for time while my mind raced.

Nanny put her hands in her satchel. At first I thought she meant merely to remove them from the tabletop so I wouldn’t get any ideas. Then I saw she was fussing about. “I suspected as much,” she said. “I came prepared. This isn’t my first visit to an oracle, you know.”

“Why didn’t you go back to the oracle you’d seen before?”

“She died, alas, when a marble bust of Pastorius fell off its pillar and brained her.” The Nanny got to the punch line first. “Yes, yes, if she didn’t see it coming, one questions her professional skills. So she probably deserved to die.”