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Getting to Tenniken. Returning Jemmsy’s medal of honor. Exchanging the tin ikon for the real thing: a sensation of righteous bravery he could own for himself.
It was going to take a while, though. He had to venture beyond the paced edges of his territory. Like all creatures who mark their boundaries, he could tell when he passed into the treacherous unknown. The musk of the undergrowth seemed foreboding.
The pictures in his mind grew more lovely, perhaps to distract him from the fear of being afraid. The cozy garrison settlement, and a place to eat. With any luck it would be a beer garden. Flowers, stripped of their nettles and thorns, madly fomented in pots set on window ledges and stoops. Candy-colored birds in silver cages, birds who didn’t threaten like forest vultures with those nerve-jangling cries, but who actually sang. On pitch. And trilling maidens at the town well, picking up the melody and embellishing it. That sort of thing.
It would have been hard to say just how this picture came into his head. It must have been cobbled together from bits and pieces of things he had heard in the woods, long before he could understand them. Though what a pretty picture! The maidens with their scuttles and pails, and every cobblestone glistening, and every windowsill laden with fresh fruit pies cooling, and every housewife generous with her pies, and every schoolchild blithe and gay. And every father appreciative, especially Jemmsy’s father. Brrr could hardly wait to get there.
He rehearsed these visions to put himself to sleep at night, troubled upon a bed of foreign moss.
He’d gone six days or more, practicing conversational gambits aloud—“Hello, I’m very new in town”—“Hello, are you very in need of a new friend, one with prior experience?”—when he crossed through a thicket to the edge of a blueberry patch. The fruit hung heavy, cobalt and black and pink, and a small creature, perhaps the size of a human cub, was driving its snout through the offerings.
Brrr couldn’t help himself. “You must be very brave out here all alone in the woods,” he began. The cub froze and turned an eye like a blueberry upon the Lion. Brrr straightened his shoulders and tossed his head to aerate his mane into magnificence, whereupon the cub fell to the ground on its back, its small stained paws cupped below its furry chin.
“Sweet Lurlina,” said Brrr, “I’m slaying them right and left with my conversational wit.” He went up to look closely. The cub wasn’t dead, but shamming: Brrr could see it shaking like a butterfly in a draft. “What are you doing? I won’t hurt you.”
“Just my luck,” said the Bear cub, for that’s what he had turned out to be. “I break the rules and go off on my own, and the King of the Forest arrives to devour me.”
Brrr almost turned around to see the King approaching. “You don’t mean me? How very droll. Get up, I won’t hurt you. Rise. Why are you lying there as if you’ve had a very cardiac episode? It’s unsettling.”
The Bear cub sat up. “If you insist. You promise you won’t hurt me?”
“I’m very promising. Why did you collapse like that? Do I look like a hunter to you?” Brrr was more curious than offended.
“It’s what you do if you’re facing long odds,” said the Bear. “You play meek and helpless in front of a sterner foe, and that kick-starts a sense of noble mercy in them. That’s the theory anyway. I never had need to practice it before, but it seems to have worked. My name is Cubbins.”
His placid delivery sounded mature, though his voice strayed trebleward. Brrr replied hopefully, “Lost and alone and very abandoned by your clan?”
“Just taking a break from the endless hilarity of it all. They’re downslope a ways at the stream’s edge. You’re not here to scatter us to kingdom come?”
“Hardly. I need some directions.”
“The King of Beasts needs directions?”
“Will you stop with that?” said Brrr. “I’m not even a very local celebrity. Just passing through and minding my own very business.”
“Well, with that medal and all,” said Cubbins. “You look official. Is that why you say very so very often?”
Young as he was, he was ribbing the Lion. “Take me to your leader,” said Brrr, exerting very control. “Please.”
“Such as she is,” said Cubbins obligingly. “Actually, I’m the boy-sheriff of our group, but since you stumbled upon me and showed me mercy, I’ll oblige. Follow me.” The Bear cub led Brrr along a ridge and down a trail to the edge of a broad, shallow stream. “Look who found me when I was lost in the woods,” called out Cubbins.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” said the others. There were five or six of them, full grown: some burly companions at play and an aging old thing resting in kind of a shabby bath chair, half-in, half-out of a pool.
“Don’t mind them. They’ve spent the afternoon with a comb of fermented honey,” said Cubbins.
Brrr picked his passage on stones across the stream, taking care not to let the pads of his paws get damp.
“Oooh, a toady right from the git-go,” said one of the older Bears. “I oughta known it, a sissy missy, the way she goes mincing across those stones like she’s afraid of ruining her mother’s silk stockings.”
“Enough, Bruner O’Bruin,” said Cubbins. “This creature was kind to me.”
“What’s your name, Lord Lion?” asked Bruner O’Bruin.
“Brrr,” replied the Lion, shaking his mane, trying to make a theatrical shimmer out of word and name alike. “Who are you lot?”
“The last, best hope for Oz. Movers and shakers,” said Bruner O’Bruin mockingly. He got up and shimmied, his rump poking out. The others guffawed. Cubbins rolled his eyes and offered the Lion a sip of water from a battered iron ladle.
“We’re what remains of the court of Ursaless, the Queen of the North,” said Cubbins. “Fallen on hard times, but good at heart, I hope. That’s Ursaless over there.” He indicated the oldest one, who was getting up from her chair to stretch. She was immensely tall. Even at her apparent age, white whiskers and all, she towered over her companions. “Ursaless, say hello to our guest.”
