The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Shut up yourself, Stemm.”

  Brrr paid them no attention. He had never seen tree elves before, but having heard of them, he considered them beneath regard. “Are you allowed to talk with me?” he asked his female consorts.

  “To talk, to befriend, to enrapture,” said Zibria. Piyanta giggled and looked in one of Zibria’s ears, as if studying to see if she had any brains at all.

  “Then I ask a question, if I might.”

  “You might.”

  “I don’t recognize your species. Your profile confuses me. You resemble Tigers in your musculature, but you are smaller. And your coats—like dried mint leaves, the markings, rather than stripes…”

  “We’re a rare kind, we are,” said Zibria. “Perhaps a one-of-a-kind species. We have Spice Leopard in our Tiger makeup.”

  Brrr raised his eyebrow. He hadn’t known interspecies generation ever to work. True, in the wide scope of society, it was inevitable that shady romances between members of separate species would occur from time to time, but they were frowned upon at best and rarely produced offspring in any event. Now, he thought, an aberration that had yielded a most sumptuous type of cat—look at Piyanta lying there, amusing herself by batting at a butterfly—a dollop of femininity curled upon itself, in a coat of golden-brown scallops. An exquisite she, a remarkable she.

  “Does the Ghullim clan have a name?” he found himself asking. “As a species, I mean? I can’t quite place you.”

  “We don’t need to name ourselves. Let others try,” replied Zibria.

  “Merchants of Oppression?” offered Twigg. “Slaves to Your Glorious Past?”

  “Soup’s nearly on!” sang out the one who’d been addressed as Stemm. “And yummers, is it a winner today, folks!” He brandished a ladle like a mace. “Who wants firsties?”

  “The guest,” said Zibria. “Of course.”

  “Not hungry,” said Brrr, thinking poison or the like.

  “Still, it’s only polite to accept our humble fare,” said Zibria.

  “Not as humble as all that,” said Stemm. “We been working on this batch since sunup. No rest for the weary, that’s what I say.”

  “No rest for the idiotic,” said Twigg. “Dish up a portion, brother-at-arms, before I bash your brains in. Not that you have many.”

  The tree elves conspired between them to carry a shallow bowl of the viscous liquid over to Brrr and set it down on the ground without spilling too much of it. Potatoes like soft stones gleamed in the broth.

  “Garnished with elf spit!” cried Stemm, and made as if to prove it.

  “That’s an elf joke,” said Twigg, cuffing him. “Go on, eat up. It’s good.”

  “Please,” said Zibria.

  “I couldn’t,” said Brrr.

  “You should, please,” inserted Piyanta, “for Ghullim custom requires us to hold off our own meal until the guest has partaken, and I am particularly hungry this morning.” She loosed a sour-pink tongue between pearly dirks of tooth. Brrr nearly swooned. Whatever they called themselves, or resisted calling themselves, they were a perfect beauty of a tribe.

  He obliged, in the name of courtesy. If he were poisoned and died today, what difference might it make? He’d have perished in golden company, and little complaint at that, among all else to fret over.

  And the soup wasn’t bad, actually.

  He finished his portion, and the elves then served Zibria and Piyanta—from the same pot, Brrr was pleased to note. He rolled over on his side and stretched his aching legs. He didn’t think Lions had been meant for hillside meandering, not the way his limbs felt today. But to lie here in a wash of faintly pulsing pain and watch those pretty tongues lap and lap…well, he could bear it just now.

  Before the elegant pair of damsel Cats could return to conversation, though, a third creature walked through. At first Brrr thought it was Uyodor H’aekeem again, for the stance was regal and the attitude curt and guarded. Then he saw that the newcomer was a female.

  He was on his feet at once.

  “Scatter,” said the newcomer, and Zibria and Piyanta left, drops of soup raining to either side.

  The ladycat sat herself down. The tree elves didn’t offer her a meal (perhaps there was none left). They clung to each other and hid behind the pot.

  “First things first. I see you’ve been fed,” she said. “I am Muhlama H’aekeem. The daughter and only child of Uyodor.”

  He waited to be urged to sit again, but she didn’t mention it, and after a while he didn’t dare.

  As if continuing a postprandial colloquy, she commented, “You are a brave Lion, to waltz in among the inestimable Ghullim without introduction or apology.”

  “I don’t know your Ghullim ways,” he replied. “I don’t fathom the ways of communities in general, come to think of it. I have lived a while among Lions, but I am not essentially one of them. You must forgive me the brutality of my manners. Ignorance, I promise you, not superiority.”

  “Well, of course, not superiority,” replied Muhlama. Her eyes were anthracite—hard, fixed, aqueous—but her tone had the faintest uplift of irony. “Where are you headed?”

  Brrr had no destination. In a sense, his life of motion and restlessness, in successive waves of unsuccessful campaigns, had washed him up, cast him ashore on the lip of this very morning, with no further horizon to crave or even imagine. “Where am I headed? I suppose I was headed here, although I didn’t know it.”

  Muhlama turned her head. It dawned on Brrr that they were perched on a blunted promontory above the encampment. While he was more or less on display, an ornament on a ledge, so were the splendid cats arrayed below. It was a larger tribe than others he’d encountered in the wild. He could examine their social organization as if it were drawn out in a textbook diagram.

  “Has the Ghullim clan a name?” he asked. “A species name, I mean?”

  “We are the Ghullim family. We need no other designation among ourselves. But I have known others to call us Ivory Tigers, which seems to be a nod to the apparent Tiger among our ancestors as well as to the Spice Leopard markings, which to some look like angle-cut slices of vanilla pod laid in imbrications.”

  Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tigress. And below, her father en couchant, his forearms set decidedly as andirons. Marmoreal, he rested upon an ornate carpet knotted in golds and green silks. Back and forth among the cool stand of ferns behind him, his Ivory Tiger tail moved, like the head of a Water Cobra.

  Around Uyodor H’aekeem’s carpet churned the workings of a government more regularized than any that Brrr had witnessed in the Animal provinces. Several elder Ivory Tigers, ambassadors or senators of some sort, conferred among themselves in tones soft and serious. Other male Tigers, disarmingly casual, patrolled the perimeter of the camp. The Tigers weren’t dissolute like Bears or paralyzed by endless arbitration like humans, but regimented and alert. Brrr realized he must have been given clearance to stroll into this group.

  Nearer, he could see Piyanta and Zibria and their cousins in a kind of open cloister, reclining behind a netting of pale golden gauze suspended from the branches of larch trees. The young females tended to one another’s needs with a simple affection that seemed both kittenish and provocative.

  A few rapscallion youngsters were being taught the algebraics of pouncing by a seriously trim grandmother warrior. She was not afraid to draw blood with the cuff of her paw, though Brrr could hear no mew of complaint from the erring student.

  “Is there a queen?” he found himself asking, thinking of Ursaless, that dowdy collapsing pillar of Bear.

  “Are you referring to Ozma?” Muhlama nearly spit the word.

  “I was not. I meant was your father blessed with a consort.”

  “Uyodor H’aekeem does not take a mate for life,” said Muhlama. “Like so many tribes in Oz, we are a matriarchy. But if a Chieftess bears no female offspring, her oldest male cub becomes leader until he dies or is challenged successfully by an upstart. Uyodor, the son of our last Chie
ftess, has held sway since before my birth.”

  “And you are in line, then, to lead the Ghullim when he dies.”

  “I stand in no line,” she snapped, but that was a revelation she regretted at once. (She had a temper, he saw.) The rate of her breathing had changed; she was holding her breath—holding herself together, holding herself back. “You are correct. If tradition is followed, I am the next to rule.”

  He decided to change the subject. “Since you mentioned her, I wonder if your clan believes that Ozma will return to rule Oz again?”

  She snorted. “Ozma? Can you credit anything about the heap of gossip surrounding her? The washerwoman myths of a holy saint Ozma, our savior and our guide—hah! Those baby bones are halfway to dust now. The Wizard in the Emerald City is far too smart an operator to have sequestered that child somewhere off-site, where she could grow and thrive and command an army to return and reclaim her throne. We wait for no deliverers here, and we need none. We are in readiness when our terrain is threatened, and no Wizard of Oz nor any other agitator will co-opt our independence or receive our tribute.”

  The vigor of her testimony seemed disproportionate, since his remark had been casual. This was a tribe that reveled in its iconoclastic identity with lethal earnestness.

  “I only wondered,” he said. “It does seem to be an enduring story, that the baby Ozma was hidden somewhere when the Wizard accomplished his coup d’état.”

  “Inane. What reason could that mad potentate possibly have for allowing a potential rival to survive?”

  “I don’t know.” The Lion felt out of his depth when talking political strategy, especially if the discussion became heated. “I heard someone posit that if the Wizard were ever brought on charges for her murder, he’d be able to pull her out of hiding and prove his innocence. Other than that, I have no earthly idea.”

  “I can see that.” She rolled over on her side and looked at him without blinking. He felt he had never been scrutinized up close so intimately, and it took every scrap of willpower not to flinch at her velvety appraisal. “You are a naïf who has traveled widely. I can tell by how you speak. It takes a certain kind of independent spirit to remain aloof when one has gotten around.”

  “Independent spirit is a polite way to put it. I prefer to think of it as a character flaw.”

  She laughed a little and her tail lashed against the stone beneath her.

  He asked her, “Why did the Ghullim allow me to approach, when you clearly approve of your own independence?”

  “You showed no sign of being a threat to our security.”

  He had to acknowledge they had read him correctly, but still that seemed an incomplete answer. “Are you looking for something from me? News about the Emerald City, say? It is some years since I was in Shiz, where EC goings-on were always the hot topic.” He did not add, And I left in disgrace, but he imagined Muhlama H’aekeem was smart enough to guess his shortcomings.

  “We have a network of informers, should we need a key piece of classified information. Anyway, it was I who gave the signal to let you in.” She rolled onto her back so he could see the bits of torn autumn leaf, red maple and lavender pearlfruit, caught in the hot white-gold of her under-trunk fur, spangling it like jewels, from her neck to her loins.

  “But why?” He found he had to lower his volume or he was afraid his voice might break.

  “Diversion,” she said. “Do you mind?”

  “How could I mind?” he replied. “I was going nowhere special, so I could hardly be diverted.”

  “I mean diversion for us. For me. A distraction from the daily efforts of our military readiness. A distraction from the threat of becoming the Chieftess, which is an obligation I have no wish to accept.”

  “Can’t you simply refuse?”

  “Refuse your duty to your father? To the tribe he governs?” She let her tongue hang out of the side of her mouth, playing corpse. “Only in death. Have you no concept of fathers?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Mine never remembered to come round.”

  “Lucky beast.”

  “Him or me?”

  She turned her head toward him; her chest was still exposed in the sunlight. It was all he could do to keep his eyes trained on her eyes. “If you have never enjoyed the paternal correction as administered by your own father and master, how will you qualify to be a father when it’s your turn?”

  “I didn’t know I would need to supply qualifications to become a father.”

  Again, she laughed. “I suppose there is really only one application procedure,” she admitted. “Touché. But in actual fact—what is your name?—I signaled you should be brought into the circle so that the subject might be changed. I was arguing with Uyodor H’aekeem about matters of state. Our words were sharp, and I didn’t want to lose my temper. In general it isn’t considered seemly among the Ghullim, and for a chieftain’s daughter to discredit her father’s position by second-guessing him—well, it isn’t done.”

  “You could just walk away, couldn’t you?”

  “I can be rude to you, but not to Uyodor H’aekeem.” Her tone remaining precisely neutral, she neither mocked her father’s name nor celebrated it. “Or did you mean I might strike out on my own?”

  “Some do. I did, of necessity.”

  “I knew I liked the look of you, at least a little. You have a silly swagger about you that is entirely unconvincing. Anyone brave enough to sashay through our territory like that is either a one-off nutter or an ally worth cultivating.”

  “I may be neither,” he said, and wanted to add, or I may be something else again. He tried to focus on her without blinking, though his tear ducts tended to empty at inopportune moments.

  She leaped to her feet as if she had caught wind of salacious thoughts. “I’m too full of energy, I can’t sit still for long,” she said to him. “I don’t want you to leave yet, for I have a lot to accomplish while you’re here, but I have to run, run my limbs to exhaustion, or I will claw myself to death.”

  “Highly strung, are we.”

  She bared her teeth at him. He went on more neutrally, “Are you permitting me to stay or prohibiting me from leaving?”

  She didn’t answer but went leaping down off the ledge, a wave of golden coins pulsing through the scatter of falling leaves.

  He did not feel he wanted to push his luck.

  The tree elves came out from behind their pot. He had forgotten about them.

  “She’s in a lather,” said Twigg.

  “Never seen her quite like that,” said Stemm.

  “Have we heard something we ought not hear?” said Twigg.

  “She’s too smart for that; she will have known we were quivering back here like mice,” replied Stemm. “But nobody trusts what we say anyway, so who cares?”

  “Is it like that?” asked Brrr. “Is Uyodor H’aekeem so driven? So unyielding? Would he care that much if his oldest daughter renounced her obligations?”

  “And do what?” asked Twigg. “Run a nursery school for malformed forest creatures? It’s inconceivable. Ivory Tigers live to thrive, and they thrive through keen military readiness. She can have no other notion for herself. It’s not allowed.”

  “She’s touched in the head,” said Stemm. “Of course, don’t listen to me, I’m a dolt-bolt, what do I know?”

  “Well, I know what they think,” said Twigg. “It’s all honor and tradition and how things are done. And how they’ve been done for the past twenty chieftainships. Their elegant history of independence weighs on them, their own style of yoke. Slaves to themselves. Do as well as we have always done! Don’t be the weak link in the chain of our ongoing history. What a lump of cold congealed pottage it all is, at least to me.”

  “Shall I leave or shall I stay?” It seemed demeaning to ask advice of tree elves, but Brrr was caught in indecision.

  “Makes no difference to us. Stay, enjoy our cooking. Leave without permission, and we have Lion stew on the menu for the evening. Your choice. It�
��s a free woods.”

  So Brrr allowed himself to stay and be courted by Piyanta and Zibria again, though they seemed less appealing now that he’d met Muhlama. In time he asked to take a nap, and he sent them off giggling and blushing back to their enclave.

  • 3 •

  WAS HE a guest of the Ghullim or a prisoner? He couldn’t answer the question for himself assuredly. If a guest, eventually he’d have to leave. If a prisoner, he supposed he ought to protest his incarceration. Still, what kind of incarceration was this? Exercise, the morning run, and rock-scramble with Muhlama and her companions. Hardly a punishment.

  Brrr relaxed; what else could he do? He enjoyed the meals, sometimes cooked by the tree elves, sometimes caught and served bloody raw by the Ivory Tiger hunters. (He’d abandoned vegetarianism when he’d arrived in Shiz, though he preferred the human custom of cooking the meat.) He took part in games of hide-and-seek at which he was always it, because he, alone among the Cats, couldn’t scale the bark of a tree nor hide in the foliage of its canopy. Even emaciated with hunger, he weighed twice what an adult male Ivory Tiger weighed.

  Afternoons—a Lion’s laziest time—he dozed a short distance away from where Uyodor H’aekeem held court. Muhlama disappeared. He wondered whether she was conducting her ablutions, or napping in a private boudoir, or—he tried not to visualize this—pursuing a dalliance with some other creature. It was none of his business. And he would never know: in her regal demeanor, she shone, and deflected close scrutiny, too, like a shellac.

  Still, the idea burned him and teased him a little.

  He had never expected to appeal to anyone. He didn’t much appeal to himself. He conceded the obvious: Perhaps he was being kept around as a spot of comic interest, like the dotty maiden aunt trotted out into the family parlor to amuse the neighbors and ensure that the conversation remained innocent and droll. But so what? He was growing used to Muhlama’s manner. Her high style and her higher disdain, which sometimes flowered into impatience.