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He couldn’t tell why they stood back and let her pass unrestrained. Perhaps they realized she was still spitting mad. Perhaps they saw that Brrr was calming her.
Muhlama led the way. She had a seriously keen sense of smell and followed a track through sweeping clusters of vine until, after a few minutes, she had reached the edge of a pool. Here she laid herself down, reclining her hindquarters fully, her chest torquing into an elegant curve, so her head reared back upon her neck. Nacreous shadow behind her, blue and lavender and mauve. Her eyes lowered. Her ears lowered. “There is no one trailing us,” she said. “I would hear them if they were.”
He sat down close. Not too close. Close enough that he could feel the heat from her pelt. Musk of a rare sort; he’d never apprehended such a naked barb of invitation. A scorched-pecan, apricoty, humid sort of appeal.
“You are so royal, you can bring on estrus at will?” A bold thing to say and would have been crude said to anyone but a princess; and indeed he meant it as a compliment.
“I am talented,” she replied, lifting her tail another parabolic sweep higher, “but you give me too much credit.”
They didn’t speak for a while, as the evening birds exchanged their bulletins, as the bullfrogs dove into the water out of a surfeit of modesty. A hummingbird, a whipping blossom, came along and perched on Muhlama’s ear, until it realized its mistake and fled.
“You can’t be so kind to me,” said Brrr after a while. “It isn’t possible. No one ever has. I don’t fit in.”
“It’s I who don’t fit,” she said, “I with my strong-minded ways, my temper, my appetite to leave the very home that I am tethered to. I look a princess, I know; but I am a slave here, no less than the tree elves, no less than you are. I don’t belong.”
She angled her rump, and the movement of her tail changed. It became the pendulum on a metronome, counting the slow moments until she pushed her pelvis higher and threw her head back, nipping at Brrr’s throat as he covered her beautiful coat with his own.
When he could think in words—was it then, was it later, he didn’t know—it was simply this: Now I fit in.
His reverie was delicious. Eyes closed. He was partly conscious of the floating strings of the world, its selvages restitching themselves into a prettier apprehension. Some might call it afterglow. For Brrr it was as if a new appetite was just beginning to stir out of his dreamy slumber. But it was interrupted by hissing alarums. He hardly knew what was closing in on him until it was over and done with.
The discovery in flagrante by Ivory Tiger scouts. The forced return to the camp. The accusation of Uyodor, his recitation of Brrr’s offenses against the noble line of the Ghullim camp. Was this an attempt to thwart Uyodor’s regime? Was Brrr a stooge of the Wizard of Oz, working his way in here, seducing the daughter of the chieftain of the Ghullim?
“There was no seduction, sir!” Brrr was aghast. He glared at Muhlama, looking for testimony. Muhlama neither concurred with her father nor protested his accusations. She couldn’t speak. For anger, for regret? Then he saw what they had seen already. She had begun to bleed. The iron stench of it, a wound too large to hide. A rivulet of orangish blood that wouldn’t stop.
It seemed he hadn’t quite fit in, but she’d let him try anyway.
With a cold resolve, she hectored him, too. “Go. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? Go, before they have your head on a trophy backboard. You’ve done quite enough.”
Perhaps because she was still Uyodor’s daughter, they let him go. Though Uyodor declared, as Brrr backed away, “You are no creature of the wilderness, Lion; you do not belong here. Should we come across you again, or should our allies, you are fair game for the predator. A marked beast. You have ten minutes before we enact our promise to seek vengeance.”
So he pelted away, but ever after he wondered why. Was it just to preserve his own life? His life had a tinny cast to it, an artificial quality, hardly worth preserving. Or had he left not so much to save his own skin as to avoid having to see Muhlama’s life bleed out of hers?
In any case, he was gone. Not for the first time, nor the last: an ignoble retreat from a fray that had grown too hot for him.
Back into the wild, back into woods, back into exile. And this time he would endure a loneliness made more cutting by the recent experience of consanguinity. Or call it love, if you must.
Exiled, even unto himself, until and unless something came along to redeem him.
What came along some time later—days, or was it weeks?—near where the Wend Fallows petered out into the Corn Basket, was that toothsome morsel known as Dorothy. Another rare and delicate human, a girl this time, improbably making her way along the stretch of Yellow Brick Road that originated in central Munchkinland.
• 4 •
I T WAS an accident of the light, nothing more, that caused the little girl and her pair of noodnik companions to leap in terror at the sight of him. Or had it been too long since his most recent wash-and-set? In any case, he steeled himself for the inevitable interview, and wondered how much of his sorry history he could gloss over. Maybe they had some provisions to share.
Dorothy, though, was not riven with wild curiosity. She seemed to take his bowdlerized biography at face value. She asked no probing questions. She just smoothed the edges of her apron and consoled her quivering little pup. “Oh, Toto, have you ever imagined a Cat so big in your wildest nightmares? I hope you don’t lose your lunch.” She nuzzled her face against her dog’s in a way that might cause some citizens of Oz to question her sanity.
Still, he found to his surprise that he felt some small measure of sympathy for Dorothy. He was no longer inclined to consider human beings warmly, but maybe he was able to make an exception because she was so clearly a foreigner. Brrr imagined she was an orphan like himself, as humans didn’t usually leave their young to wander the high road alone. And no half-decent parent of any species would hire a Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman as chaperones and aides-de-guerre.
“Come with us,” said the girl. “We’re headed for the Emerald City.”
Propitious words.
One doesn’t know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one’s life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime. A lost girl in a blue gingham skirt and a white pinafore hardly seemed a likely ambassador to a rosier future: still, stranger things had happened.
He considered joining them. What else did he have scheduled? He couldn’t risk running into the Ghullim again. Neither the nabobs of Shiz, nor the Bears nor the Ozmists, nor the Glikkuns with their dirks, nor any affectionate soldier boys astray in the Great Gillikin Forest.
It seemed there was nothing in the wild for him; it was civilization itself that must be tamed. Perhaps this was his lucky break. It sure was about time.
