AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But remembering what had happened in Traum—even thinking about it today—had been a mistake. Living with amnesia, the way those cretinous Bears in the Great Gillikin Forest did, was the only sensible strategy.
The word lionized had more than one meaning.
His youth, his stupidity, had been no more than that. Stupidity was forgivable in the young. But when he’d lain down and played dead in Traum—it had been no more and no less than a collapse of his enfeebled sense of himself—he’d made himself into an emblem of complicity. “Remember the cowardly Lion,” the humans had said in Traum. “He laid down his life for us.”
Sunk in a fug of self-loathing, he’d bypassed Tenniken entirely. Paid the conductor extra to stay on to Shiz. (No other Animals rode the train that day, though, sealed into his own mortification, he hadn’t noticed. Later, he wondered if some good burgher of Traum had bribed the conductor to allow Brrr to board at all, just to get him out of the vicinity.)
Still, the sight of the outskirts of the ancient university town caught Brrr’s attention, drawing him out of his funk. He peered through the grimy train windows. First, the great manufacturing plants. Brick factories with glass transoms, spewing noxious plumes out of zigzaggy smokestacks. Closer to the city-centre, terraced housing for millworkers. Their laundry yards swarmed with small human cubs, at play with their skipping ropes and stones.
And then into the close, gnarled, ancient university center of Shiz. Its separate colleges in promiscuous adjacency. Each boasted an ivy-clawed gatehouse through which passersby could glimpse serene quadrangles…brilliant chapels, lecture halls…science labs chasing the latest developments in two dozen separate branches of enquiry.
The Lion had taken stock of the smart little city, the jewel of the province of Gillikin. He’d explored its nests of colleges and its clubs and its manicured parks and canals, and then he’d set himself up in a better class of residence. Not far from Ticknor Circus, with its array of bistros and bathhouses. A sunny, top-floor den in a purpose-built brick mansion block called Ampleton Quarters. Suite 1904. Fully furnished and featuring the most up-to-the-tiktok in water closets.
Was he aware that he might be trading on a reputation as the very Lion who had inadvertently advanced the Wizard’s plans in the emerald trade, helping to squelch the spontaneous labor revolt? Innocent as he was, it would have been hard for him to discern the ways in which he was receiving undue advantage. His first time in a city—or the first time that he could remember. No other Lions seemed to live in Ampleton Quarters; but then, he tended to hurry to his flat, and avoided the biweekly tenants’ meetings because he didn’t want to be bullied into serving on any committees.
He kept his mouth closed as much as possible. And compa
ratively speaking, a Lion cuts a fine figure; the world admires a glossy mane, a sultry-surly growl. One can make an impression without saying much, and Brrr learned that he was not bad-looking, as Lions go.
But being good-looking has its own penalties. The public will not let a comely face walk by anonymously; it must find out who owns it. By the end of his first social season in Shiz, Brrr had made the grade. He enjoyed the occasional off-night, back-alley shenanigans but he built a more formal life on the strength of his reputation as a hero.
He didn’t consider marriage. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Instead, he invested his little nest egg in a portfolio of diversified stocks managed by a Shiz bank called the Gold Standard. In the first few years it swelled agreeably. While the rest of Oz was still suffering the effects of the long drought, and farmsteads in Munchkinland were being repossessed for back taxes, the industrial base of Gillikin allowed waistlines to amplify and chins to double. Brrr grew prosperous, and lived like it. He kept to himself. Cultivating the reputation of a mystery presence about town, he avoided close contact of a genuinely intimate nature, and therefore—he hoped—he might be excused for failing to see the social coercion, the repression on which the Shiz haut monde was built.
He took in shows. He meandered through galleries. Without much attention to the topic at hand, he attended the occasional public lecture at Three Queens College or Briscoe Hall; it seemed to be something the well-heeled did in a university town like Shiz. He never took notes, although sometimes he tried mentally to assess his compounded interest for the quarter while the lecturer was nattering on.
Brrr especially enjoyed those presentations on the subject of art history, not least because the lights would go down when the gloriously colored illuminatums were to be cast upon a white plaster wall. In the darkened hall, no one could notice if Brrr was paying attention or not. Thus, freed of anxiety, he found he did appreciate the lectures. And he stayed awake, unlike some.
His earliest love was for manuscript pages. “A singularly fine example of the monk known to us now only as the Ur-Scribe. This from Shiz’s most antique bound codex,” droned the master. “Notice the three-ply wreathing adorning the left margin. Green foil made from the crushed talons of dragons, very rare; and observe the flecks of gold as well: a hint that the artist still possessed Lurlinist tendencies, though the early unionist text posits the Unnamed God’s superior station.”
“And the blue on the third strand?” asked a woman of a certain age, decked out in blue furs herself, fluffing a storm cloud around her chin.
“Perhaps a kind of alibi color, to throw those sniffing for heresy off the scent,” replied the master. “We can only speculate.”
“Perhaps he liked blue,” said the aging dilettante. Her eye was bright and, yes, blue. “I certainly do. I find it…stimulating.”
“If we might proceed,” said the master wearily.
Brrr talked to the woman at the reception hour. “He’s so distinguished, our guest scholar,” she gushed, “but he thinks me crass. He won’t find time in his research schedule to visit my newly decorated salon—oh, it’s divine, eighteen panels of bleached pearlwood—and help me decide on what to hang. And where. I’m so cross with him.”
“Have you a fine collection?” asked Brrr.
“I’ve no eye to decide if it’s fine or not,” she replied. “Why don’t you come have a look, tell me what you think?”
When he said he would, she introduced herself as Miss Piarsody Scallop. She was rather long in the tooth to be a Miss, and he wondered if he might have been invited to her home for reasons other than art appreciation. Nonetheless, he took a risk, and discovered Miss Scallop to be genuinely rich, and genuinely interested in—if paralyzed by—the ambiguities and obscurities of art.
Thus he finally found out that he did possess a native skill, that mysterious commodity known as a good eye. Cousin, perhaps, to perfect pitch, or a sixth sense. He became adroit at buying and selling small prints and sketches and advising ladies of leisure about the works gracing the walls of their salons. He could turn a tidy profit in the bargain, and he did. He lived off his interest and never touched his capital.
One evening, in the magnificent diamond-paned lectorium nestled next to the Deckens College chapel, he heard a titter in the room and sensed faces turning his way. He blushed without knowing why and waved a little, as if to show he had been paying quite close attention, thank you very much. He did try to concentrate for the next few minutes, to deduce what had happened. The lecturer, a Madame Morrible from Crage Hall, was treating the audience to the benefit of her impressions of—what was it?—the Animal Adverse laws (or the Animal Courtesy acts if you used the jargon of punditry)—as they pertained to higher education at Shiz.
“Exceptions are always possible,” insisted this Madame Morrible, fluttering one hand to simulate the sparkle-dust of mercy while waving the other hand in the Lion’s general direction. “The Animal who serves our beloved Wizard is accorded all the privileges he so richly deserves. The creature called cowardly by some has had the courage to accept the epithet. Another name for cowardice is the courage of no convictions. A true hero can tolerate being called a coward for one’s country. No?”
He wasn’t quite able to follow the gist of this. He wasn’t ashamed. He’d had no education, after all; it was a miracle he could walk into a place like this and hold his head up! He applauded with the rest of them, but he couldn’t think of a single remark to make during the Q-and-A period.
He got up to stretch, collect his greatcoat and huge bespoke dove-grey evening gloves. He turned to mumble appreciatively to the lady on his left and he saw that she was moving away quickly as if to avoid having to chat. He turned again, and the gentleman on his right was doing the same.
He looked the room over, in that way one does, pretending to expect to find one’s best beloved, or at least a crony, and readying to sigh loudly, a public display of regret, dash-it-all!—and at last it dawned on him that he was the only Animal in the room.
On reflection, walking home, he concluded that this had been the case, in the circles in which he traveled, for some time. He had never noticed.
