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Whatever else was barked and bellowed, Loyal Oz saw no return to the Animal Adverse laws. In fact, those hoary old containment strategies were retired in ceremonies dripping with public symbolism. COME HOME TO OZ read the full-page government advertisements.
“Ha,” said Brrr to Flyswatter. “Come home to Oz. That’ll be the day.”
“What day would that be, sir?”
Brrr explained. The Animals who had emigrated to Munchkinland or to the outback of the Vinkus remained cautious about emerging from their obscurity. Hardly better integrated into the Free State of Munchkinland, where the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws had landed a weaker blow, many Animals nonetheless lived in relative tranquility. “Exiled for a generation now, some of them, they go largely unmolested about the rural reaches of the Hardings and the Fallows. They keep to themselves. They’ve found their safe haven and they’ll stick to it. Smart of them, too, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
Brrr thought it over. Few Animals tried to reinvent themselves in Shiz or the Emerald City as he had done. Abroad—in Fliaan, in Ix—it was another matter, but the sands that surrounded Oz made it likely that anyone who managed to survive an oversand trek to a foreign country stayed there.
Oz—Loyal and not—remained, in all its own breadth and vitality and distance, isolated from anything like a comity of nations. The vessel had yet to be built that could sail the desert sands on sledge runners, though inventors and madmen had imagined such a thing for generations.
“Troops amassing on the Munchkinland border, they say,” he murmured to Flyswatter once. The valet was giving him a whisker trim. “That long-anticipated strike against Munchkinland’s life support?”
“What life support would that be, sir?”
“The lake called Restwater. Huge thing. Don’t you read the papers?”
“I keep to myself, sir.”
Brrr turned to the financials. It looked as if Shell, the human Emperor of Oz, had run his treasury bankrupt by building up the military for the possible invasion.
“That’s enough for now, Flyswatter.” Brrr decided to get to the bank. He’d seen that the Emperor’s chancellor had ordered an audit of the banks, hoping to find pennies of taxable profit.
The bank manager was too busy to see him. He came home and watched the matter unfold in the papers, listened to the gossip in the clubs.
Hold on, cried the auditors. What’s this? Shiz deposits draining into the breakaway state of Munchkinland?
Possibly funding the military of that upstart nation?
And in a time of social unrest, what with the labor shortage, the drought still upon them, the tax base eroding as incomes fell?
Fie, cried the chancellor, and the bankers shrugged, and the fie! rolled off their shoulders. It lay like a judgment upon the shoulders of Brrrr.
Or perhaps Flyswatter turned him in. In any event, the constabulary showed up one morning and the valet had bolted, so Brrr answered the door himself. He was wearing a regrettably adorable robe, beige satin woven with stripes of darker beige, and pink piping, very cuddly, very oh-what-a-night—and his mane went every which way. Bumblebee advocates of the new journalism—on-the-spot flash-lit photogravures—were waiting behind th
e shoulder of the constable to ambush the Lion.
“Aiding and abetting the enemy,” said the constable, as if pronouncing a sartorial crime. “Is that a Rampini knockoff?”
“It’s an original,” said Brrr, letting it drop to the floor. The nakedness of Animals always made humans profoundly uncomfortable. It was the best he could do as a protest, given such short notice. “Am I allowed to dress myself?”
“We’re gentlemen here. Make it snappy, though.” CLAP HIM IN CHAINS said the caption that evening, and IF SIR BRRR LIKES STRIPES SO MUCH, WE CAN SHOW HER SOME STRIPES IN A PRISON GARMENT.
Clap some more as he is led to prison, was the point, and we go free for the virtue of our fingering him.
“I am only a delivery service,” Brrr declared to the court registrar. “You want the bankers, not me.”
The registrar raised her eyebrow. Brrr knew she was saying: Bankers are always pure. Bankers are purer than priests. Something about money insulates them in virtue.
“I charge you with fraud, to start with,” said the first magistrate he saw in Shiz, known as the doorbell magistrate for his job of cobbling together the initial court definition of an indictment. “You’re a villain.”
“I charge you with exaggeration,” shot back the Lion. “I’m a fall guy.”
The accusation of fraud was entered into the register—fraud perpetrated not against the victims, for some reason (who regards victims?), but against the banks themselves. Fraud in the service of treason. (Had he been turned in by one of his pool-hall cronies?) The complaints were written in such convoluted language that Brrr couldn’t follow them. Nonetheless, his gizzard seemed cooked, but good.
His offer to pay back to the banks any funds deemed to have been illegally skimmed off the released Animal accounts was met with “no comment.” The court wasn’t in a mood for bargaining. Brrr spent a few weeks in a holding pen, no worse a lodging than that old ministerial croft in which Professor Lenx and Mister Mikko were entering their dotage. One night the Lion was bundled into a special convicts’ train that traveled at midnight from Shiz to the capital. Within a mile or two of the Emperor’s Palace, Brrr knew, hunched Southstairs, the underground prison carved on the site of a megalithic tomb. He imagined the place as a massive mouth of Oz. It ground its stony gullet, waiting for Brrr’s carcass.
