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here in the open, in a town built of stone and slate, the echo was terrible. Stupefied, he recoiled sideways, involuntarily, and he pitched into the stone arch of a covered well. Dizzied, dazed, he stood long enough to see Sakkali take a stone at her skull. She was brought solidly to the ground, like a sack of rice tilting over onto its side. He staggered and fell, and was sick on the cobbles.
“Here, here,” cried the other Glikkuns, a small citizenry of them in their gravelly tones. Sakkali—dead or alive?—no one could tell. Two small fierce trolls lifted her body with hoarse grunts like chortles. “Lion, to gate, to wall, for one, for all.” Two or three of them leaped upon him. They hauled Sakkali’s barrel-like form with them.
“No,” he murmured, hoping only they could hear, “play dead, play dead! It’s your only chance.”
He shook them off and rolled onto his back, showing them how, letting his forepaws fall limp upon his chest like the unbuckled ends of a belt.
The trolls battered down beside him, as if he were a rampart, but only for an instant. Rifles were being aimed from all directions, and a supine Lion was a useless Lion to the Glikkuns. They abandoned him, making a rush for the lowest and weakest-looking of the gates, where a single sharpshooter was able to pick out one, two, three of them, and then the others took Brrr’s advice too late, and played dead, and were taken into captivity.
Initially—that day, the next—the Traumanians went through a show of celebrating Brrr. His refusal to evacuate the Glikkun trolls was called brave; his collapse in the high street was deemed an act of public sacrifice. A masterstroke of mob-control strategy. Pacifism in the course of strike busting. Brilliant.
For a while Brrr believed the public relations campaign, until it dawned on him that the constant advertisement of his refusal to defend the Glikkuns diverted attention from those who had actually carried out the assault. Then he began to suspect that within any cry of applause may lie coiled a hidden sneer. Perhaps a well-deserved sneer.
He made plans to leave Traum as soon as it felt safe to do so, which was some weeks. He traveled by train toward Tenniken, afraid all the while that vengeful Glikkuns might dynamite the tracks. Run the carriages off the rails. Reclaim any cargo of emeralds in transport. Then hunt through the passenger cars to locate the Lion’s cowardly carcass and do to it what he had allowed to be done to the members of their tribe.
He found that his reputation preceded him. “Just my luck. The Champion Lion himself,” said a portly journalist in the dining car, scribbling notes on a stenographer’s pad. He looked fondly over the tops of his reading spectacles and lifted a glass of sherry to the Lion, who had been assigned the second dinner sitting and directed to the journalist’s table. “Have I heard that the grateful citizens of Traum pressed upon you a small purse, in gratitude for services rendered?”
“Yes,” said Brrr, with some reservation.
“Whatever funds they came up with would have been less than what they’d have had to pay the Glikkuns.”
“Indeed,” said Brrr. Some of which he had spent in the dry goods store, buying a vest in which to keep his cash. And a cane, to give him gravitas. “It was just a token honorarium.”
“As befits a token hero. And look at that simply glorious medal for courage, to celebrate your achievement.”
The twinkle in his eye was deadly. Brrr feigned an attack of indigestion and excused himself. Alone in a stinking loo, he found that his alibi of intestinal ailment had come true.
When he emerged, he didn’t return to the dining car but wandered in the opposite direction. Upon reaching the last car on the train, he opened the rear door and stood on the juddering platform. Out of sight of anyone else, he allowed himself an unseemly spasm of shame. Then, when the train rattled onto a trestle bridge, crossing some dark unpleasant lake, Brrr let the medal on its leather belt fly out to hit the water with a final gleam.
Now it is over before it has really begun, he thought, my quest for approval. Only for Brrr it was never over, not really. An accidental half hour in the wrong village. His curse.
The train stopped at Tenniken later that evening, but Brrr didn’t alight.
An onward pitch to his life now, a few arts and skills—rolling over, playing dead, making mistakes, making conversation—but no destination.
Trusting in the amnesia of Bears, in the incapacity of Ozmists to identify their constituent citizens, Brrr hoped that his mortification at Traum would be as quickly forgotten. He was not so lucky. He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
• 6 •
T HE AIR in the mauntery parlor seemed to have settled, as if nothing were alive but the past. “Not too much to say about the first years,” he concluded. The room had a funny buzz to it, though. Old granny vigor mortis was listening so cannily that the Lion began to wonder if he had shared more about his origins than the sentence or two he remembered speaking aloud. She’s a tricky one, he thought.
“Talented, rather than tricky,” she cut in. “But how did you come upon the name Brrr?”
“If you can read my mind,” he said, “—which frankly I find an abuse of my fucking privacy—then you know already.”
“I don’t read minds, and you haven’t got enough of a mind to browse through anyway.”
“What’s being an oracle, then, if you can’t read minds?”
She replied, “I can only guess at what you are thinking, and truth to tell, I’m not quite up to room temperature yet. Playing dead myself has caused me to lose a little of my usual concentration.”
“I don’t know who named me Brrr,” he told her, “and it doesn’t matter. Now you tell me of your own origins. For the record. For when I file my findings.”
“None of us knows our own origins. We only know what we’re told by our parents and the mythography of our national anthems.”
“Don’t hold out on me. Look, I gave you what you wanted. I offend you by being honest? Get used to it. Story of my life, which you can stay the hell out of.”
“I’m the last one to be offended at human behavior,” she replied calmly, “so a Lion’s petty moral conundrums mean even less to me. Besides, I’m no blushing spiritual nosegay myself.”
