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The ladycat sat herself down. The tree elves didn’t offer her a meal (perhaps there was none left). They clung to each other and hid behind t
he pot.
“First things first. I see you’ve been fed,” she said. “I am Muhlama H’aekeem. The daughter and only child of Uyodor.”
He waited to be urged to sit again, but she didn’t mention it, and after a while he didn’t dare.
As if continuing a postprandial colloquy, she commented, “You are a brave Lion, to waltz in among the inestimable Ghullim without introduction or apology.”
“I don’t know your Ghullim ways,” he replied. “I don’t fathom the ways of communities in general, come to think of it. I have lived a while among Lions, but I am not essentially one of them. You must forgive me the brutality of my manners. Ignorance, I promise you, not superiority.”
“Well, of course, not superiority,” replied Muhlama. Her eyes were anthracite—hard, fixed, aqueous—but her tone had the faintest uplift of irony. “Where are you headed?”
Brrr had no destination. In a sense, his life of motion and restlessness, in successive waves of unsuccessful campaigns, had washed him up, cast him ashore on the lip of this very morning, with no further horizon to crave or even imagine. “Where am I headed? I suppose I was headed here, although I didn’t know it.”
Muhlama turned her head. It dawned on Brrr that they were perched on a blunted promontory above the encampment. While he was more or less on display, an ornament on a ledge, so were the splendid cats arrayed below. It was a larger tribe than others he’d encountered in the wild. He could examine their social organization as if it were drawn out in a textbook diagram.
“Has the Ghullim clan a name?” he asked. “A species name, I mean?”
“We are the Ghullim family. We need no other designation among ourselves. But I have known others to call us Ivory Tigers, which seems to be a nod to the apparent Tiger among our ancestors as well as to the Spice Leopard markings, which to some look like angle-cut slices of vanilla pod laid in imbrications.”
Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tigress. And below, her father en couchant, his forearms set decidedly as andirons. Marmoreal, he rested upon an ornate carpet knotted in golds and green silks. Back and forth among the cool stand of ferns behind him, his Ivory Tiger tail moved, like the head of a Water Cobra.
Around Uyodor H’aekeem’s carpet churned the workings of a government more regularized than any that Brrr had witnessed in the Animal provinces. Several elder Ivory Tigers, ambassadors or senators of some sort, conferred among themselves in tones soft and serious. Other male Tigers, disarmingly casual, patrolled the perimeter of the camp. The Tigers weren’t dissolute like Bears or paralyzed by endless arbitration like humans, but regimented and alert. Brrr realized he must have been given clearance to stroll into this group.
Nearer, he could see Piyanta and Zibria and their cousins in a kind of open cloister, reclining behind a netting of pale golden gauze suspended from the branches of larch trees. The young females tended to one another’s needs with a simple affection that seemed both kittenish and provocative.
A few rapscallion youngsters were being taught the algebraics of pouncing by a seriously trim grandmother warrior. She was not afraid to draw blood with the cuff of her paw, though Brrr could hear no mew of complaint from the erring student.
“Is there a queen?” he found himself asking, thinking of Ursaless, that dowdy collapsing pillar of Bear.
“Are you referring to Ozma?” Muhlama nearly spit the word.
“I was not. I meant was your father blessed with a consort.”
“Uyodor H’aekeem does not take a mate for life,” said Muhlama. “Like so many tribes in Oz, we are a matriarchy. But if a Chieftess bears no female offspring, her oldest male cub becomes leader until he dies or is challenged successfully by an upstart. Uyodor, the son of our last Chieftess, has held sway since before my birth.”
“And you are in line, then, to lead the Ghullim when he dies.”
“I stand in no line,” she snapped, but that was a revelation she regretted at once. (She had a temper, he saw.) The rate of her breathing had changed; she was holding her breath—holding herself together, holding herself back. “You are correct. If tradition is followed, I am the next to rule.”
He decided to change the subject. “Since you mentioned her, I wonder if your clan believes that Ozma will return to rule Oz again?”
She snorted. “Ozma? Can you credit anything about the heap of gossip surrounding her? The washerwoman myths of a holy saint Ozma, our savior and our guide—hah! Those baby bones are halfway to dust now. The Wizard in the Emerald City is far too smart an operator to have sequestered that child somewhere off-site, where she could grow and thrive and command an army to return and reclaim her throne. We wait for no deliverers here, and we need none. We are in readiness when our terrain is threatened, and no Wizard of Oz nor any other agitator will co-opt our independence or receive our tribute.”
The vigor of her testimony seemed disproportionate, since his remark had been casual. This was a tribe that reveled in its iconoclastic identity with lethal earnestness.
“I only wondered,” he said. “It does seem to be an enduring story, that the baby Ozma was hidden somewhere when the Wizard accomplished his coup d’état.”
“Inane. What reason could that mad potentate possibly have for allowing a potential rival to survive?”
“I don’t know.” The Lion felt out of his depth when talking political strategy, especially if the discussion became heated. “I heard someone posit that if the Wizard were ever brought on charges for her murder, he’d be able to pull her out of hiding and prove his innocence. Other than that, I have no earthly idea.”
“I can see that.” She rolled over on her side and looked at him without blinking. He felt he had never been scrutinized up close so intimately, and it took every scrap of willpower not to flinch at her velvety appraisal. “You are a naïf who has traveled widely. I can tell by how you speak. It takes a certain kind of independent spirit to remain aloof when one has gotten around.”
“Independent spirit is a polite way to put it. I prefer to think of it as a character flaw.”
She laughed a little and her tail lashed against the stone beneath her.
