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This way, Brrr made his slow progress southeast through Munchkinland until he’d reached the hardscrabble district known as the Hardings.
The Squirrel had been accurate in his description. In the towns of Three Dead Trees, Rush Margins, and the inappropriately named Center Bounty (Center Spite was more like it) the hounded creatures had hunkered down and made the best of a bad situation.
By now he was finally beginning to understand what had happened to the Animals in Oz. The professionals—the chattering classes, also the twittering, clucking, nickering, and braying classes—had gone underground. Some of them literally (Moles, Rabbits, Badgers), some symbolically. As a rule, many of them were so long removed from any kind of manual labor that they hadn’t fared at all well when trying to take up again the practices of their ancestors.
They made their living, such as it was, in the townships of southeastern Munchkinland—the stony dales and blackened, brackish rills, the treeless hills supporting only gorse and broom and the occasional weary flock of sheep, for their weary wool, or peppermilk colts, for equally wearying cheese. The Animals crowded, cheek by bristly jowl, or wither by wen, in stone crofts and stone hovels and stone lean-tos and stone corncribs built in a more hopeful time.
Brrr continued his career in down-market picaresquerie. A month in Three Dead Trees, two weeks in Broad Slope Town, then a longish stint, almost a year, in Rush Margins, the surface of Illswater glinting with a hard beauty in the occasional shock of sunlight. More often the skies were streaked with grey. It never grew very warm here, even in spring, what with the winds constant as tidal wash. They endlessly speckled the windowpanes with sand carried in from the eastern deserts.
But eventually even Rush Margins grew unbearable, too, and Brrr forged his way against the wind, ever farther south. He wondered if he harbored a secret compulsion to leave Oz entirely, to enter the trackless desert from which, it was said, there was no return. To dig himself a grave in the largest sweep of cat litter nature could provide, bury himself like a turd there. Outside the legal reach of Oz itself, outside its memory if he could only arrange that, too.
One evening on the south slope of Illswater, not far from Stonespar End, Brrr came upon a neglected parsonage. It had been dedicated to the use of a unionist minister—Brrr recognized the symbols carved over the lintel. He nearly passed it by, having no more use for the blandishments of piety than he did for political capital. A voice called from an open window, though, offering a firkin of water, and one didn’t turn down a drink even if it came at the cost of a spiritual seduction.
It was an ancient Ape in a quilted velvet smoking jacket so old and frayed that it betrayed no clue as to its original color. He beckoned with palsied knuckles. He called himself Mister Mikko. He shared digs with a Boar named Professor Lenx who, due to deteriorating hips, was confined to a wheeled cart that the Ape could only barely manage to maneuver in and out the garden door.
Both of them were too elderly to do much but remember the good old days when they were tenured lecturers at Shiz.
“Tenured,” insisted Mister Mikko, “until we were untenured.”
“Sacked,” said Professor Lenx. “Pass the saffron cream, will you, old darling?”
A joke of sorts. Saffron cream was a thing of the past for these two.
They housed the Lion equably enough, making certain he understood it was only temporary. Brrr tried to resist the urge to scoff at their fusty mannerisms. The way they insisted on offering him two-thirds of whatever they had in the larder was unctuous and superior. He ate it anyway.
“You’re looking for a home, but we have only the two sleeping chambers here,” observed Mister Mikko. “We’re gentlefolk of a certain generation, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t bed down in shared quarters like cattle.”
“Certainly not,” said Professor Lenx. “Never think of it. The very idea.”
“Too cozy. Not our style.”
“You assume I care.” Brrr managed to sound offended, obscurely.
“Well, a Lion on his own…” The way their voices trailed off. Suspicious, they meant. “At loose ends.”
“My end is anything but loose.”
They didn’t like that style of badinage. “And food is in short supply, of course. Had we gardens like the ones in College now, it might be another matter. The vegetables! Do you remember the vegetables, Mister Mikko? The sweet summer scallions, the tomatoes, the blue runner beans! And when the corn was ripe! Hallelujah season.”
“Indeed I do remember it well, my dear Professor. Though also I was partial to the formal walking gardens, the parterres, the flowering cherries, the borders of myccasandra and iris…”
“Shiz could do gardens well. Here, alas, if we get eight potatoes a season, we’re lucky.”
“The gardens of Crage Hall! I do remember. The year that the transplanted termite ivy from the Lesser Kells went wild! It took the staff five years to root it all up. They even needed to demolish an ancient Lurlinist shrine because the migrating root ball had lodged itself there.”
“Would that we had a problem with invasives now.”
“We do. We’re being invaded by dirt.”
They laughed. It was as if Brrr were no longer there. Their memories were stronger than the present moment. Brrr felt as if he were the new invasive.
“I have been to Shiz myself,” he ventured.
“Oh well, dear boy, many go to Shiz,” said Mister Mikko.
“And many leave it,” said Professor Lenx.
They looked at each other as if they were discussing the deepest philosophical principles. Then they laughed at the same instant. “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” Their simultaneity was cloying but kind of sweet.
