“And you went out hunting for blueberries on your own.”
“One misdemeanor a day is enough, I suppose.”
“It’s been a mighty pleasure,” said the Lion, and he meant it. He was sorry to leave Cubbins. “Good luck to you. If I ever make it into the human world, I will hope to run into you there someday, too. You deserve better than this.”
“Life is unpredictable,” said Cubbins. “I don’t imagine we’ll meet again, but who knows. I’ll look for a Lion with a sway in his swagger. Just kidding.”
“If I wanted to avoid Cloud Swamp, now,” said the Lion, “which way would I go?”
“From this point on the streambed, you may choose left or right. If you can just keep to the uplands, you’ll skirt it entirely,” said Cubbins. “Good luck to you, very Brrr.”
• 4 •
URSALESS, THE Queen of the Bears, had said it straight: Sometimes I recall oddments without even trying. Who knows when memory, unbidden, will burst out and take hostages? Clearly the question of Yackle’s had snapped some ancient chains Brrr had used against all this.
And this wash of recollections had become a slick along which Brrr careered, like it or not. Brrr’s recall of what had happened before seemed limited to apparent causes of what had happened next. The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
But his intention, starting out, had been to avoid Cloud Swamp. Hadn’t it? His curiosity about possibly meeting his spirit-ancestors was more than mitigated by the fear of coming across the ghost of Jemmsy. Wasn’t ready for that. Not until he had delivered the medal to Jemmsy’s father. Not until Brrr deserved his own personal medal for courage that a grateful pride of grieving soldiers might press upon him. Not till he could show his missing clan that he had survived on his own. Survived and triumphed. Cloud Swamp could wait until then.
Though wherever Tenniken might turn out to be, Brrr couldn’t seem to get there without tending downslope. Every path that he found leading upland reversed its grade, perversely, around the next stand of houndstooth hedge or outcropping of granite. Leaving the path also proved futile: he’d met an interlocked network of chalky cliffs, too sheer to climb. The chasms that he came across proved too wide to leap. And again with the houndstooth hedge.
Eventually, despite his hopes to avoid any lowlands, hunger drove him downhill, as in the moist gloom he could see knuckles of cobbleberry vine displaying their sweet green fruit like so much vulgar jewelry. Brrr fell on the treat avidly. The aftertaste of the cobbleberries was tart, reminding him that the berries were in second growth. The spring was moving on.
He became possessed by the notion that time might harbor a hunger of its own, a hunger it fed by gobbling up long strings of minutes, courses of hours, harvests of seasons one after the other. This notion, too, was probably born of watching those Bears in their eternal present, unaware of time passing, unaware of cobbleberry vines forcing out a last, tangy collation of the season.
A few moments later, Brrr wondered if perhaps the berries he’d gobbled down had begun to ferment. His usual gingerish footing became a bit heavier, even clumsy. His head grew dense, and a miasma of undecipherable impressions closed in on him like marsh gas. Not long thereafter he fell to his chin and rolled over onto his back, dozing with open eyes. The stars lifted their myriad eyes to watch him wince over the clenching of his intestines.
If the stars showed, it must be nighttime. No cloud of ancestors on the horizon to obliterate the constellations.
Very few forest creatures were out and about tonight at their nocturnal chores and hobbies. In fact, he could detect no motion but the papery rustling of wind in sedge-grass. No frog dove into the stagnant ditchwater. No mockingbird traced her alibis into the gloaming.
There weren’t even any mosquitoes, which was not only pleasant but impossible, especially in a swamp.
A swamp it certainly was; perhaps a rising one. The small hillock on which Brrr had settled seemed ringed by a steely salver of water—so calm that the constellations were reflected in it perfectly. You couldn’t make out the seam where the water ended and the sky began. It was more like being aloft among the heavenly bodies than adrift below them. The air was uncolored, characterless, neither sweet nor cold, neither clear nor moving.
Poison cobbleberries? Maybe, he thought, I have died, and so all life around me has died, too, for what proof have I that life should go on when I do not? After all, what kind of a life is it that is not pestered by insects? A perfect one, and since life is not perfect, this cannot be life.
With a sense of calm, or was it a paralysis, he realized the stars were moving toward him, very slowly, growing infinitesimally larger but no more distinct. At first he thought: Maybe these are the ghosts of trees that have rotted in Cloud Swamp, for that’s where I must be, like it or not.
Then it seemed like a host of shimmering midges in a corps de guerre. (Was this where all the insects had gone? Magnetically drawn to the hollow-in-life that a ghost colony might be, filling in the vacuum with the smallest fleck of indivisible yet visible living matter?)
Now they were airily shaping themselves into bouquets, like giant heads on tapering necks, like volutes of blossom on slowly spiraling stems. Nearing and nearing, possessed of both presence and distance.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Brrr, to himself or to them, or both. Hoping they might be offended and leave.
They began to circle about him. The nearer they drew, the more of a family feeling they took on. Was it because, once a creature became a ghost, it shirked off the differentiations of biological diversity and, uniqueness annihilated, became just shades of life? Footfalls of the past?
“I have the distinct feeling I’m not in Oz anymore,” said Brrr. Now he was speaking aloud to keep up his courage—such as it was.
The specters wreathed themselves around him. As they tightened the circle, their separate margins began to merge. Before he was swallowed up in a blancmange of foggy apparition, he gave out a thunderclap of a roar. It appeared to make no impression on the creatures, but he was glad he could still roar. It meant he wasn’t dead. Presumably.
“Excuse my volume; I have no self-control,” he said. Well, why not talk to the phantoms? He had meant to avoid Cloud Swamp at all costs, but opportunity was presenting itself. And conversation was his only skill.
“Begging pardon for the intrusion. Frightfully thoughtless of me,” he went on. “Is there a spokesperson among you who can answer a question or two? If you’ve time to spare?”
There was a sort of drumming in the air, as if a billion miniature throats were clearing themselves. Languidly the sound resolved, its pitch rising and consolidating toward a common note. But it died out, bearing no word for Brrr upon its pressured breath.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said more forcefully. “I am, in actual fact, the King of the Forest.”
No reply. The apparent lack of interest on the part of a congress of ghosts shamed Brrr. It also frightened him. Of course they would realize he was no kind of king at all. He organized his thoughts with more honesty.
“I didn’t come here to disturb your rest,” he stated. “Indeed, I hoped to pass without pestering you. Shall we just nod courteously and say ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Piss off’ or whatever’s appropriate and then breeze on our separate ways?”
The assemblage of ghosts seemed to hover, listening, or drumming its fingers against its forearms, so to speak. Tacit. As yet uninvolved.
“Wait,” said a voice, not Brrr’s, but a normal worldly voice. Jemmsy? The Lion swiveled his head, not certain from which direction the sound approached.
Cubbins blundered down the side of an invisible bluff, snapping the branches of an invisible birch tree to break his descent. He splashed through the vision of ghosts and arrived at Brrr’s side with slicked thighs. Under one arm dripped a wedge of honeycomb.
“I forgot to tell you that you need to of
fer a tribute if you want to speak with the ghosts,” said Cubbins.
Another little secret about conversation. How did folks learn to get on in this tricky verbal negotiation called chat? How much had it cost him to grow up without the banter of family life?
Still, Brrr was glad to see the boy sheriff. (Out on his own again, the little dickens!) Almost as glad as if Jemmsy himself had coalesced out of a matrix of midges, free of an iron snare, smiling a soft-cheeked hello at his final friend, allowing Brrr to grin back at his first. But Cubbins was decent company, and Brrr felt both enriched and a little traitorous to the memory of Jemmsy to like Cubbins, too, and so quickly.
He said, hiding his gratitude, “How do you know you need to offer the ghosts a gift if no one in your tribe believes in ghosts?”
“I asked Ursaless. She claims never to have seen the Ozmists, but she insists this is the way it’s done by long-standing custom.”
The Lion raised an eyebrow. “Don’t ask,” said Cubbins, sighing. “I don’t expect to follow her line of reasoning. I just listen and obey.”
“But you’re not allowed to go running off alone,” said Brrr. “Isn’t one disobedience a day enough?”
“You are brave enough to strike out on your own,” replied the cub. “And ten minutes after you left, no one could remember you had been there. So I realized you were right. What is there for me in the court of Ursaless?”
“They’re your family!”
“They’re not the whole world. I can always come back if I want.”
Brrr spoke cautiously. “What if you can’t find them? What if they have moved on?”
Cubbins laughed. “Move? That’s the whole point of the Northern Bears. They never move on. So I’m taking a cue from you…”
He put the comb of honey on a rock in the clearing. The midges swarmed nearer it. In the act of crowding together their apparition took on a more coherent aspect. Not a human face, perhaps not even a face at all, but something with an enriched identity.
“Are ghosts bugs?” whispered Brrr.
“Who knows? Next time you squash a roach, you might be doing in old Auntie Groyleen again. Or maybe bugs are the largest part of life without individual character, so they’re useful vessels for ghosts. I have a theory—”
All at once, words were spoken in the clearing. It was like the echo of a sound divorced from its original imprint. The Ozmists spoke in one voice.
Barter, said the chorus ominously.
“‘Barter’?” whispered Brrr. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Another word for chat, I think,” Cubbins replied. “I’m guessing they will tell you what you want if you tell them what they want.”
“Is this more advice from Ursaless?”
“Common sense. Which as you know doesn’t come from Ursaless. Shhh, let’s find out what they want.”
Brrr cleared his throat. “All right, then,” he started. “As long as you have granted me an audience, I would like to ask about the possible ghost of a Lion or Lioness who might have joined your, um, ranks. Or even a whole pride of Lions. Not just any spare Lions, but mine. My kin.”
When a certain velocity had been reached, the Ozmists trained their vibrations nearer to a common key, if not a single note. They managed to communicate a message in some fashion that was neither words nor music, quite. Still, the Lion and the Bear cub listened closely.
We note your query, they managed to communicate. By way of payment: You tell us first—Is the dreadful Wizard still on the throne of Oz?
“You should know more than I do,” said Brrr, playing for time. How embarrassing to be asked a question he couldn’t answer. “You’re ghosts, after all: you’re spirit and transcendence. I’m just plodding along with my nose to the ground here, wet behind the ears and a long way to go.”
We have no more experience of the future than the living do, they said, but their voices went out of keen registration, and it sounded like hundreds of voices intoning the same thought at once. W-w-w-e-e-e ha-v-v-ve n-n-n-o-o-o mor-r-r-r experienshchshe…
“And you hunger for future history,” said Brrr.
This day you live in today is the impossible future to us, said the Ozmists. Is the Wizard still squatting upon the throne? We crave to know the future.
“All well and good,” said Brrr, “and what I know, I will share gladly. I recently met some soldiers in the forest—one special soldier particularly—serving in the forces of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. So I can answer that much, if not more: The Wizard of Oz is on the throne of Oz. Do I get an answer in reply? Are fragments of my ancestors figured among your midst?”
The Ozmists glowed, small cyclings in place. We stir, we steep, we sift, we shift among ourselves for clues to your question, they said.
Brrr waited. They said no more.
“Are they taking inventory?” whispered Cubbins.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, tell me this, then,” went on Cubbins excitedly. “While you’re figuring out whether his parents are among you Ozmists, perhaps you can tell us about who is not there. Is the missing queen of Oz, Ozma, among your kind? Was she murdered in her infant cradle, as some have said? Or is her spirit still abroad in its human form?”
The Ozmists reared—twenty, thirty feet in the steamy air.
“Scratch that last question,” Brrr called in a loud voice. “Never mind. We’ll soldier on as we are. You are dismissed.” Hoping that he and Cubbins could be dismissed, too.
But the Ozmists replied, There is little time left—the act of our compressing into community unsettles the vapors. You ask the impertinent question all Bears ask, and you will pay the price. Ozma is not dead. But you bring us no news of our lost Oz—you break the contract. You will pay.
Cubbins’s small jaw dropped. “News!” he remembered. “News of the Northern Bears.” But he was young: nothing in the life of the Bears had changed since he could remember.
Brrr wanted to say, Lie to them, tell them anything! But he didn’t dare. The Ozmists were everywhere and could apprehend the faintest whisper.
“News,” said the Lion, trying by his tone to communicate an instruction to fabricate—another first—“Cubbins, give them, you know, the news. The newest news!”
Cubbins looked wildly about as if trying to see modern history in the making among the jeweled rash of phantoms. His eye fell on the stack of books that Brrr carried, and he grabbed the top one. “I have—to hand—the latest news—here!” He read the title: “Ozma Initiata: The Birth of the Throne Line.”
But even Brrr could tell this was history, not current events.
“Or…or…” Cubbins tore through a second book. “Animal Magic, or, The Secret Spell of Language.” He whipped pages filled with charts. “A grammar textbook. You know, language is always changing, they say: ever new. Refreshing itself—”
As if a compression of thunderclap had been unpacked, a low sound began from the center of the wheel. The Ozmists swayed their rotating mass laterally across the marshy ground, passing over and (it seemed) through the Lion and Cubbins until the Animals were in the center of the swarm and the noise became deafening.
Bear, if you don’t believe in keeping your bargain, we thrust you out before we make you one of us!
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said the Lion, trying to stand before the small cub—but the Ozmists were everywhere, and there was not enough Lion to encircle Cubbins. The sound of the Ozmists raked through them both, but Cubbins held his paws over his ears. Then the Ozmists disappeared into the rising vapors from a visible marshland. In their place rose curtains of brainless flies and midges, deterred for a moment by the honey but ready, Brrr guessed, to turn and attack them.
Cubbins was already scrabbling up the slope, which now seemed to permit it. With flummoxing of limb and tail, the Lion followed. Soon he’d overtaken the young Bear.
This is what it feels like to be a piece of shit, thought Brrr; being pummeled on all sides by the world, forced f
orward, outward, into naked stink and light. But he and Cubbins danced as they ran, a sense of relief and escape energizing them. They avoided the steam of salt geysers that were sprouting up through invisible fissures, but they couldn’t avoid the hot rain that pelted down.
His eyes closed against the sting, Brrr smacked into boulders and tree trunks and clawed his way through brambly growth. By the time they emerged from Cloud Swamp, day was dawning in the teeth of an ordinary rainstorm.
“What did we get from that exercise?” he asked Cubbins, once he felt able to speak without his voice breaking.
“Wet,” said Cubbins.
“Well, yes. But from the Ozmists?”
Cubbins looked at Brrr. “I don’t believe in Ozmists,” he said. “Bears don’t, you know.”
The Lion snarled, as if to say: No time for your funning, Cubbins! The Bear’s eyes looked back at him, flat, less glossy than before. Perhaps it was the overcast sky.
“They said Ozma is still alive somewhere,” ventured the Lion.
“People can say all sorts of things,” said Cubbins. “Where did you get those books?”
“From…” But he couldn’t finish. Didn’t Cubbins remember?
Cubbins was pawing them and looking at the spines. “Ozma Incognita. That sounds interesting. What are you doing with these books?”
“I don’t know,” said the Lion after a while. “I don’t have much use for them.”
“I’ll take them off you. I like the idea of books,” said Cubbins. “Here’s another one with color plates—look! Lurline and Preenella: A Fairy Tale of the Poor. How stupendous! We don’t see books around the Great Gillikin Forest often, you know.”
“You don’t say.” He tried to keep a wobble out of his voice.
“If books show up anywhere in the woods, they’re usually not far from a trap of some sort. Bait, you know. Humans plant books in the woods, hoping to attract the urban talking Animals who have gone to ground here, escaping the Wizard’s laws against them. I suppose you’re aware of this?”
“I suppose.” He sighed.
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