No: That was his own nerves attacking him, a case of the humors. Or, as some called it, paranoia. As much to shake himself up as anything else, Brrr roared. The boys started. The dwarf did not.
The Lion tensed and sprung, rolling his spine forward and sideways, to take the brunt of the impact on his shoulder rather than his skull.
There was a gratifying thud, a shriek of splitting wood, and an echo, but the door did not split. The old oaken planks ran in two depths on the bias, they were laid tongue-and-groove and reinforced by iron braces. And the doorjamb was stone.
“Good one,” said the dwarf. “Very nice, that. Expected no less.”
“In words of one syllable or less,” said the Lion, “first: ow. Next: shut up. You want to take a turn, be my guest.”
Ilianora came up to Brrr to press her hands on his shoulder muscles. “Your old auntie needs help,” she said. “Wasn’t that Munchkinlander maunt who locked us in here a healer? An apothecaire? We must find her.”
“You don’t understand. If Yackle is failing at last, the last thing she wants is help,” said the Lion, shaking Ilianora off. “But I’ll try again.”
Three, four times at the door.
“Who’s in a hurry?” said the dwarf. “Not me. I can’t see the army approaching through that high window. I’m too short. So I’m totally unconcerned. I think I’ll sit here and teach myself to count in a foreign language. One, two, three, fuck, fuck, six, seven, eight, nine, fuck.”
“Mr. Boss,” said Ilianora.
“Hey, look at the see-through pussy,” said one of the boys. “She having the genuine hissy fit?”
“Hair ball, more likely,” said another.
“Glass hair ball? Ouch.”
Brrr thought: It’s as if Shadowpuppet is as alarmed by the loss of the writ as I am. Attuned to my jitters. Some sweet, small consolation.
In protection of Shadowpuppet, if no one else, the Lion made another half-dozen lunges at the door. Eventually the wood split along the grain, and the iron doorknob and lock hung at a drunken angle. It appeared that Sister Apothecaire had left the key in the keyhole. They had some job reorienting the lock to line up, but eventually they managed, and opened the remains of the door.
“Are you coming?” said the dwarf.
“She’s not in a condition to be moved,” said Ilianora. “You go, get things in order. We’ll follow as soon as we can.”
They pelted away. Their footsteps retreating down the stone stairs made an isolating sound. The mauntery echoed like a mausoleum.
Still Yackle twitched, like a blind fish unable to see the string coming out of its mouth or the fisherman overhead, but responsive to every tug. Ilianora kept one hand on Yackle’s shoulder or at her wrist.
“You have a talent for comforting the sick?” said Brrr.
“None,” she replied. “Why don’t you go with them? Nothing is holding you here.”
He had no answer so he offered none. “What’s your answer to that same question?” he said.
“By long habit,” she replied, “I don’t answer questions.”
“Could we get her on my back?” said Brrr. “Maybe I could carry her down the stairs?”
“She’s too brittle, and she’s still being bothered by a spell of something.”
“Maybe she’ll wake up and find herself an infant this time,” said Brrr, almost to himself. “With a cowardly Lion and a whatever-you-are for parents. What are you?”
“I’m the handmaiden of the Clock, I suppose,” said Ilianora.
“That tells me less than I want to know.”
“Are you taking notes?”
“No,” he said, “and that’s a promise.”
She drew her knees up to her chin. She looked like a small Ice Monkey, almost, in her white veil. With Yackle in her white, too, they might be Granny Ice Monkey with Granddaughter. Two weird characters in their matching shrouds.
“Are you Mr. Boss’s daughter, or are you married to him?” asked Brrr. “I can’t see why anyone would commit herself to a clockwork oracle, unless it was the family business.”
“I am not married, and will not be so,” said Ilianora. “I’m no longer fit for bearing children.”
“You have white hair, but you aren’t that old…”
“I had myself closed,” she said, “after having heard enough of human iniquity to despair of the species. Closed. So I tread the world lightly, lightly as possible, and I bring no infants forward to suffer as I have done. I worked with the underground vigilantes who struggle against the tyrant on the throne of the Emerald City—our Emperor Apostle—until I learned that in the service of their honorable goal they are capable of actions as dishonorable as the Emperor’s—then I gave myself up for lost. I wandered without aim or ambition, a sad folly of a way to spend one’s life.”
“I wouldn’t know, being drenched in accomplishment each time I open a new door—”
She laughed at him; a bell-like sound so devoid of malice that it made his ears ring. Brrr pressed her to continue, not just for the story but because he was blushing. “And the Clock found you and took you hostage?”
“You could say that,” she said, “if you believe in oracles. Since I don’t believe in fate, it can’t hurt me. Its capacity to predict my days is nil. I have apprenticed myself to the Clock’s company, and I serve as a kind of watchdog of its prophecies. The dwarf is unscrupulous, just doing his job; he doesn’t care what mayhem is rucked up by the Clock. The boys who cycle through the company for months or even years at a time join because they are young and scared of the possibilities of life. A belief in preordained history is consoling to those with few prospects, and the boys generally come from the families of blue-coal miners or serfs. They see a little of Oz, watch the Clock tell its predictions and stir up trouble, and do the dwarf’s bidding. I suppose they think it is a way to secure a brighter future.”
“Perhaps the boys know more than you do,” said Brrr. “Maybe believing in the Clock is its own reward. You’ve never seen it tell your future for you?”
“I have no future. It wouldn’t dare.”
“You sound very cynical.”
“You’ve seen enough of life to suggest I should be otherwise?” she asked.
“As I said, a bed of roses and a walk in the park, that’s my life story. But look, here comes Yackle blinking back to life. She is an oracle without a bevy of spies or a clockwork instrument. She’s the real goods. What might she say to you, if you asked her?”
“I wouldn’t listen to it, and anyway I wouldn’t ask her,” said Ilianora. “Regularly I ask blank paper, and in all my life I’ve never known magic writing to appear on its blank surface.”
• 6 •
Y ACKLE GROANED and made to sit up; Ilianora on one side and Brrr on the other helped her. She murmured unintelligibly. Then she spit on the floor, something thin and bubbly—liquid lace.
“I thought you were dead,” said the Lion.
“More’s the pity,” she replied, “not yet, but I may have seen my way out at last. I’ve had a Sighting, and maybe the truest one I ever had. But you have to help me. Get us out of this hell-nook.”
Brrr glanced at Ilianora and raised an eyebrow. “Lucky you,” he said to Yackle. “I’ve already cleared the doorway.”
“It’s very quiet here,” observed Yackle. She turned to Ilianora. “Where are your friends? They haven’t left without you, have they?” She became alarmed and turned back to Brrr. “It depends on them—on the Clock—I have seen it.”
“Don’t worry; they won’t have left without me,” Ilianora replied. “Give me your arm, old auntie.”
Yackle was irritable with fretfulness. “Are the sisters still in Council, or have they fled in advance of the approaching army? Help me on these steps, will you? I seem to have caught a tremble in my knees.”
“We’re here, on either side,” said Brrr. Yackle reached out her dry twiglike hand and squeezed the muscle of his right forward limb.
“W
ell, go ahead, you, and stop them if they are trying to flee without me,” said Yackle. “I’m not going to miss this omnibus!”
Brrr and Ilianora glanced at each other. Brrr nodded, and shifted his arms so he could support Yackle, supplying both a handhold and a backrest. Ilianora hurried down the steps ahead of them.
Shadowpuppet stuck close to Brrr’s side.
“I must rest a moment—a stitch in my side,” said Yackle. She leaned her forehead upon the stone wall and closed her sightless eyes.
“Was it upsetting? Your Sighting?”
Yackle said, “You gave it me.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You told me. You cued me to that line—‘You have to leave the way you came in.’ You told me that was for me. And I saw that it was true—it is true for me, and it is true for you as well.”
“None of this will hold up in a court of law.” But he knew that she would hear the sweet mockery in his voice as encouragement.
“I’ll tell you what I saw as it pertains to you. If you want.”
“For a lark, for a joke, to pass the time while armies are converging upon us…sure, what the hell.”
She reached her hand out, searching for his paw. He took it.
“The hunt for a Lion cub in the Great Gillikin Forest,” she told him. “Several decades ago, I’m guessing; I was never good at counting years. Male humans wanted a cub for experimental use in a lab of some sort. I saw a day of floating leaves. You know, the forest in the fall, all red and gold. I saw a circle of men closing in upon a pride of Lions. Most of them scatter, but there is a nursing mother, too tired to run, and her mate stays by her side. A family group. Around them come the men. Beating the bushes, using nets and snares, carrying for defense those hot charred stakes pulled from a portable furnace. Closing in, closing in. That Lion king, that paterfamilias, he is alert, leaping back and forth. The noose is tightening. The Lion family breaks up, hoping to cause confusion, diversion, hoping some might survive. The father and the cub escape before the explosion.”
Brrr is calmer than he’s ever been in his life. “And the mother?”
“The gelignite is lit. The rocks split and tumble skyward. The mother is crushed when they rain back to earth. She protects the other cub with the arch of her rib cage, though her spine is broken. The men take him away from her breast.”
Brrr says, “Umm—the other cub?”
“Yes,” says Yackle. “There are two in the litter. The escaped one is already looking like both the parents, with that tuft of dark fur at its chin. Did yours ever come in?”
“No.”
“I suspect it was scared out of you.”
“I suspect so.” His voice was exceedingly calm, almost as if he were still practicing to learn how to talk, with very very concentration.
“You have to leave the way you came in,” she finished. “That’s not just for me, Brrr. It’s for you, too. You arrived in a family, unlike me who arrived on a wing and a prayer. You are not supposed to be so alone.”
“I have no family.” No Cubbins, no Muhlama, no Piarsody Scallop, no Jemmsy, no allegiance to the yoke of his probation officer. Certainly no family feeling with a pride of tuft-chinned Lions who, it seemed, removed themselves to the Madeleines and saw fit to deny any relationship.
“You have time,” she told him. “It’s yours to do with what you choose.”
“They turned me out,” he said. “Again and again. They all did.”
“I have to wait for magic,” she said. “You don’t have to. Don’t wait for anyone else. Do it yourself.”
The light had moved on over the mauntery. Daylight, with its shifting dusty tremulous clarity, fell lengthwise down the shaft of the broad, foursquare stairwell. Yackle and the Lion and the glass cat. Elsewhere in the mauntery, a cold silence, patiently waiting for—for what was to come. Whatever it was.
“Come on,” she told him.
The stairs finished at a broad terrace that itself debouched through arches into a cloistered courtyard open to the sky. Favoring his shoulder, Brrr’s body leaned left, and his eyes trailed heavenward, noting the battalions of clouds that surged east. They were thick and grey enough to make the few blue patches look like water features—lakes, inlets, impossible seas—picked out in landmasses painted the grey of wet papier-mâché.
“It is a map of Oz,” he said, for a moment forgetting about the blindness of Yackle. But then he turned his attention to the structure in the center of the courtyard. “Sweet Ozma,” he growled, “that’s a stick of furniture and a half, en’t it?”
The Shroud of the Cowardly Lion
• 1 •
B RRR DELIVERED Yackle safely onto the cobblestones of the courtyard. He could feel the quickening of her pulse; it matched his own. He was aware of Ilianora standing to one side, neither demure nor deferential, just a handmaiden to her own life. The sun struck the silvery stitching in her veil. If she was a eunuchess, she was a striking one, coming forward to offer Yackle her arm.
“Well, there you are,” said the dwarf, poking his head out of a window halfway up. “Never known the gears to stick, ever. But I think I just fixed it. Maybe it was balking until you arrived. What took you?”
“A vision took me,” said Yackle in a theatrical voice.
“Visions, schmisions,” said the dwarf. “We got the corner on that market, darlin’.”
“This is quite an operation you got here,” said Brrr.
“The Clock of the Time Dragon, at your service. Well, not at your service,” said the dwarf. He pulled himself out of the window and scrambled down the side. “All this time we’ve been pulling history out of a hat, and we never crossed your path before?”
The thing was massive—mounted on a flatbed cart, three times as high as Brrr standing upright. From a distance, he guessed it would resemble a stupa of some sort, an ornately carved portable omphalos, but close up one could see the ticky-tack aspect.
“It’s due for a once-over-lightly,” admitted the dwarf, as if he could guess the Lion’s opinions. “Every little while we replace the fabric, do some touch-up work. But we’ve been on the road lately.”
“Can’t tell by me,” said Yackle, urging Ilianora forward with little twitchings on her sleeve. The elderly maunt reached out and stroked the folded leather wing of the dragon, whose head and forearms finished the steeple-top scare of it all.
“Don’t fondle the merchandise,” growled the dwarf.
“You are going to start it up,” said Yackle.
“I don’t take orders,” he replied.
“Do what the lady says,” growled Brrr.
“I’m not giving you an order, Mr. Boss,” Yackle told the dwarf. “It’s a prophecy. You’re going to start it up for me before you leave here. If you’re anxious to be on your way, and who isn’t, I might add, you’ll get it up to speed pretty damn zippy.”
“You may as well,” said Ilianora to the dwarf. “She might be right.”
“You’re the one don’t believe in prophecies. What’s got a hold of you, Missy Malarkey?” said the dwarf, but affectionately enough. He petted Ilianora’s hand a little.
“Come on, Mr. Boss,” said one of the boys, “armies on the way and all that. We’re getting wanderlust.”
“Oh, is that what you call it, boy genius? Well, the gear’s unstuck, so we’ll push off then.”
“Wind it up,” says Yackle. “I know more than you do, today at least, and it knows more than I do.”
The dwarf made a rude gesture he knew blind Yackle couldn’t see.
Brrr swelled his chest. “Mr. Boss, I didn’t throw out my shoulder and crash down the door so we could linger here exchanging pleasantries. I want to get out before the armies arrive, too. Now, I notice there is a well in the corner of the courtyard that is far too large for me to hide in but would accommodate you nicely, if you’re scared of soldiers.” Then he did something he’d never done before and, sweet Ozma, hoped he’d never have to do again. He opened his mouth a
nd picked up the dwarf by the largest, densest part of his body—his considerably broad shoulders—and he began to carry him, as a mama cat would her kitten, across the courtyard.
“Oh, all right,” growled the dwarf. “Everyone’s going nasty on me.”
“We’re on edge,” said Ilianora. As if to authenticate the worry, the boom of cannon was heard in the distance.
A moment later the cannon sounded again, four, five times in sequence, and a hail of roof tiles rained into the courtyard. “Sister Hammer is going to be none too happy,” said Yackle, ducking her head. “But have the maunts all fled?”
“Fled, and left us locked up like that? The nerve,” said the Lion.
The dwarf climbed a small rack of stairs to the base of the Clock and disappeared inside a low painted door. Above the bartizans of the mauntery, above the Clock, new clouds of gunpowder smoke smudged a darker aspect across the celestial map of Oz. Brrr could smell the stink of saltpeter.
“Oh, for the eyes I once had,” said Yackle. “You’ll have to tell me what’s happening, Sir Brrr.”
“I don’t read omens,” he said, “en’t that your job?”
They fell silent. The dwarf could be heard moving about, setting pendulums free from their catches, winding trip-gears, muttering to himself. Stumbling. “Ow. Damn it.” Then he reappeared, breathing a little heavily and brushing some sawdust off his elbows. “Well, that’s that; she’s cooking. Let’s see what the old gal comes up with this time. I hope it en’t a nice little tragic-comedy about the beheading of several boys and the skewering of a Lion by any advancing army or such.”
“You don’t know?” said Brrr. “You didn’t set it up?”
“Of course I don’t know,” he snapped. “I’m the servant here. When did you ever know a dwarf to be in charge?”
They watched. Slowly the interior clockwork built up its reserves of power. Sounds of ticking and switching emanated from the depths of the cabinetry. There was a moaning, almost as of an orchestra tuning up, adjusting the parameters of its harmonies so as to accord.