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Evacuating a sordid situation was beginning to become a habit.
During a night plagued by insomnia, he steeled himself to go. The sad dawn came, a soft-yolk sun blearing through vermilion clouds. Like an effect of the later period of the great la Chivarra. And there was a watery softness to the weather. Maybe it would be all right.
How old was he now? He pondered as he stretched the sleep-kinks out. Haven’t I earned the right to a decent life? Or could that ever be a right?
He had nothing to pack, no satchel, no clothes. He’d abandoned all his fine rags in Ampleton Quarters, Suite 1904. Naked as a brave Animal, he looked left and right across the clearing one final time. No one was awake but for a shy cub who was nuzzling a makeshift dolly in her mouth.
“I’m off, then,” he said to the little thing. She turned her head and closed her eyes as if she hadn’t heard.
“Don’t be such a little coward,” she purred to her fake baby.
• 2 •
W HAT A piece of work he’d become! He acknowledged that. A ludicrous figure padding his way overland, with no particular destination, nor much of a yen to settle on one.
Indeed, the farther he got from the pale of the Lions, the more desolate the landscape became, and he in it. The rises known in Gillikin as the Madeleines—for their gentle ridged shapes, like the spongy cake so beloved of schoolboys—were less appealing on the Munchkinland side of the border. Their name changed, too. The Wend Fallows. Wind-reddened, turnipy hills that, lower down, broke up into a network of arroyos, most running south by southeast. Beautiful to no one but the stray hermit or mendicant. What streams there were flushed into the mighty Munchkin River, which fed Oz’s largest lake, Restwater.
But—martyrs roasting on an open fire!—Wend Fallows was ugly as sin. A furzy sort of brown nap coated the hillsides, like a mold that has died but refuses to stop clinging. On south-facing slopes, caterpillars had ravaged the spindly trees. Their leaves looked less lacy than skeletal. The water was brackish; the salt lick, licked out.
An arid good-for-nothing sort of landscape in which Brrr might as well make himself at home.
It was neither the place nor the time of his life in which he thought to find romance. Indeed, any expectation of intimacy initially sparked by his early friendships with Jemmsy or Cubbins seemed to have petered out, leaving nothing. He therefore hove into the sight of a tribe of—what were they—Ocelots?—without paying much attention. Almost devoid of the instinct for self-preservation now, he loped upon them and moved to pass through, looking neither left nor right at them as they lay, sprawled and unafraid, in the thin junk-woods that pestered the terraces and leveling slopes of the Wend Fallows.
He wasn’t so much displaying a proud profile as daring the Cats to be affronted, and to fall upon him with claws.
They did neither. A leader of some variety stood up and blocked his way. “It is poor manners in these parts to traipse through a party without stopping for a meal,” said the creature, a male.
“Didn’t presume to be invited,” said Brrr.
“You’re in such a hurry?” The tone was guarded, perhaps hostile.
“No hurry,” said Brrr, and then—a little hostile himself—“and no appetite to speak of, either.” He neither raised his brow to be superior nor lowered it.
“Stay a spell, then. Join your neighbor Cats in fellowship.” He flicked his eyes left and right, circling the pack in. “We are a family tribe called Ghullim, and I am the chief, known as Uyodor H’aekeem. We have not met you before, I think.”
Brrr decided to withhold his name for the time being. “I’m not from these parts.”
“Advance guard for your pack?” Uyodor sniffed the wind for further company.
“Traveling alone,” said Brrr. “By choice,” he added, which was mostly true.
“A rare creature, to brave the landscape on your own.”
“Not much of a landscape.” He couldn’t keep from adding, “And so not much bravery required.”
“Still, you’ve met a peaceable sort, we Ghullim. We don’t like strangers to pass through without getting to know them, for strangers can become enemies, but friends?—friends can never return to being strangers again. Don’t you agree?” He whipped his tail, aerating his punctuation. The wind hissed in Brrr’s eyes.
“Oh, quite,” said Brrr, “though a conscripted friendship is a conceit I’ve never encountered before.”
“No conscription,” said Uyodor H’aekeem, “no coercion: only conversion, and by affable means! Piyanta, Zibria, come escort our new friend to table.” He enunciated the word friend with a crispness and decorum that suggested something like a legislated honor.
Piyanta and Zibria rolled up on delicately articulated paws. They were maidens of a piquant variety, and in a human affectation their eyes were smeared with kohl.
“Follow us,” they purred, and led Brrr away—he was not protesting—to a shaded clearing up a small rise, where a pair of tree elves was busy stirring a pot over a fire. The smell of a savory stew enhanced the sense of welcome.
“You will be our guest,” said Uyodor from a distance. “Ghullim custom insists on it. Treat him well, young ladies.”
“Guest, schmest,” muttered one of the tree elves. “I call it indentured service, myself.”
