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“For a lark, for a joke, to pass the time while armies are converging upon us…sure, what the hell.”
She reached her hand out, searching for his paw. He took it.
“The hunt for a Lion cub in the Great Gillikin Forest,” she told him. “Several decades ago, I’m guessing; I was never good at counting years. Male humans wanted a cub for experimental use in a lab of some sort. I saw a day of floating leaves. You know, the forest in the fall, all red and gold. I saw a circle of men closing in upon a pride of Lions. Most of them scatter, but there is a nursing mother, too tired to run, and her mate stays by her side. A family group. Around them come the men. Beating the bushes, using nets and snares, carrying for defense those hot charred stakes pulled from a portable furnace. Closing in, closing in. That Lion king, that paterfamilias, he is alert, leaping back and forth. The noose is tightening. The Lion family breaks up, hoping to cause confusion, diversion, hoping some might survive. The father and the cub escape before the explosion.”
Brrr is calmer than he’s ever been in his life. “And the mother?”
“The gelignite is lit. The rocks split and tumble skyward. The mother is crushed when they rain back to earth. She protects the other cub with the arch of her rib cage, though her spine is broken. The men take him away from her breast.”
Brrr says, “Umm—the other cub?”
“Yes,” says Yackle. “There are two in the litter. The escaped one is already looking like both the parents, with that tuft of dark fur at its chin. Did yours ever come in?”
“No.”
“I suspect it was scared out of you.”
“I suspect so.” His voice was exceedingly calm, almost as if he were still practicing to learn how to talk, with very very concentration.
“You have to leave the way you came in,” she finished. “That’s not just for me, Brrr. It’s for you, too. You arrived in a family, unlike me who arrived on a wing and a prayer. You are not supposed to be so alone.”
“I have no family.” No Cubbins, no Muhlama, no Piarsody Scallop, no Jemmsy, no allegiance to the yoke of his probation officer. Certainly no family feeling with a pride of tuft-chinned Lions who, it seemed, removed themselves to the Madeleines and saw fit to deny any relationship.
“You have time,” she told him. “It’s yours to do with what you choose.”
“They turned me out,” he said. “Again and again. They all did.”
“I have to wait for magic,” she said. “You don’t have to. Don’t wait for anyone else. Do it yourself.”
The light had moved on over the mauntery. Daylight, with its shifting dusty tremulous clarity, fell lengthwise down the shaft of the broad, foursquare stairwell. Yackle and the Lion and the glass cat. Elsewhere in the mauntery, a cold silence, patiently waiting for—for what was to come. Whatever it was.
“Come on,” she told him.
The stairs finished at a broad terrace that itself debouched through arches into a cloistered courtyard open to the sky. Favoring his shoulder, Brrr’s body leaned left, and his eyes trailed heavenward, noting the battalions of clouds that surged east. They were thick and grey enough to make the few blue patches look like water features—lakes, inlets, impossible seas—picked out in landmasses painted the grey of wet papier-mâché.
“It is a map of Oz,” he said, for a moment forgetting about the blindness of Yackle. But then he turned his attention to the structure in the center of the courtyard. “Sweet Ozma,” he growled, “that’s a stick of furniture and a half, en’t it?”
The Shroud of the Cowardly Lion
• 1 •
B RRR DELIVERED Yackle safely onto the cobblestones of the courtyard. He could feel the quickening of her pulse; it matched his own. He was aware of Ilianora standing to one side, neither demure nor deferential, just a handmaiden to her own life. The sun struck the silvery stitching in her veil. If she was a eunuchess, she was a striking one, coming forward to offer Yackle her arm.
“Well, there you are,” said the dwarf, poking his head out of a window halfway up. “Never known the gears to stick, ever. But I think I just fixed it. Maybe it was balking until you arrived. What took you?”
“A vision took me,” said Yackle in a theatrical voice.
“Visions, schmisions,” said the dwarf. “We got the corner on that market, darlin’.”
“This is quite an operation you got here,” said Brrr.
“The Clock of the Time Dragon, at your service. Well, not at your service,” said the dwarf. He pulled himself out of the window and scrambled down the side. “All this time we’ve been pulling history out of a hat, and we never crossed your path before?”
The thing was massive—mounted on a flatbed cart, three times as high as Brrr standing upright. From a distance, he guessed it would resemble a stupa of some sort, an ornately carved portable omphalos, but close up one could see the ticky-tack aspect.
“It’s due for a once-over-lightly,” admitted the dwarf, as if he could guess the Lion’s opinions. “Every little while we replace the fabric, do some touch-up work. But we’ve been on the road lately.”
“Can’t tell by me,” said Yackle, urging Ilianora forward with little twitchings on her sleeve. The elderly maunt reached out and stroked the folded leather wing of the dragon, whose head and forearms finished the steeple-top scare of it all.
