Brrr and Muhlama disagreed from time to time, and she even lashed out at him, but he took no offense. Disapproval was better than invisibility.
He’d been with the Ghullim a month, or even two, when the equilibrium was shattered. One night, after a feast of braised loin of warthog served with mushrooms, Uyodor H’aekeem awoke with a start. He claimed he had been snared in a bad dream. (It seemed that Ivory Tigers rarely dreamed, but when they did, it was a bad sign.) The truth was, though, that the raw terrain was being washed with high winds and cracking branches. The chief had probably been startled by the fall of a tree nearby.
Dreams were always warnings. But what did it mean? Unfamiliar with the conventions of dream, Uyodor called Brrr to his side.
“The dream had human men in it,” said the Ivory Tiger, pacing back and forth in the teeth of the dry gale. “You’ve lived in the world of men, you say. Tell me how I should interpret the dream. Tell me why I have had it now.”
“The storm unsettled you,” said Brrr. “With your sharp ear, you heard a cry of alarm from some pitiless creature hurled through the high winds. Give it no mind.”
“It was a dream,” Uyodor insisted. “Where did it come from?”
“Perhaps the mushrooms were off?” But this was too glib. Uyodor glared and repeated what he could of his murky midnight vision. It was less clear than ever; it had dangerous men in it. Cats, Brrr thought, could have no more revealing dreams than socks or mustard could.
But he didn’t care to make things up. “Have you considered perhaps dismissing your chefs?”
“Are you proposing poison?”
“Heavens! No.” Brrr wanted no more blood on his paws, not even the thin silly blood of tree elves. “Perhaps your palate needs a change—your indigestion a result of a kind of curiosity for something new…”
The wind snatched at one of the golden veils and flew it away.
“Perhaps you need to move camp,” said Brrr. “Maybe the dream was calling a warning to pack up and leave here before a disaster stronger than a storm should strike.”
This was more like it. The chief retired to spend the rest of the night sleepless, and Brrr crawled back into the nook he’d been designated, a cleft under a protruding slab of pinkish granite. A moon was up and the skies were clear, and Brrr could see that the tree elves had climbed into their iron pots to keep from being blown away.
At dawn Uyodor H’aekeem convened a council of elders. He gave out his orders on the legitimacy of the Lion’s advice. They would retreat to a new campsite at once, cull food from fresher sources, avoid some disaster that must be coming their way at the place they were about to abandon.
His tribe reacted with the usual politesse and immediacy. Everyone except Muhlama, who without comment disappeared into the forest.
Brrr went to the cooking station to find out what to think about all this.
“Uyodor H’aekeem, the brave Chief of the Ghullim! This is a rare instance of superstition, for him,” Twigg observed. “He prides himself on being above that kind of thing.”
“This lot stays put until there’s a reason to move,” agreed Stemm. “But, Twigg, it’s not your job to judge how Uyodor H’aekeem makes his decisions. Some leaders do it with entrails, some with tea leaves, some with the knucklebones of pigs. He does it with dreams of storms, or storms of dreams. Same difference.”
“Do the Ghullim move often?” asked Brrr.
“We lose track,” said the tree elves simultaneously. “One forest glade is the same as any other to us,” continued Stemm. “We’re doomed to servitude our lives long, so we take no interest in our surroundings.”
“Why don’t you just leave?” asked Brrr. “You aren’t shackled in any way that I can see, and half the time no one is paying any attention to you.”
They seemed offended at that. “Really!” said Twigg. “You don’t know much, do you, Brrr? They’d be lost without us, lost. None of them have opposable thumbs. How could they possibly do a roasted leg of forest goat with a side of ivory ferns and a saltberry pudding? I mean, really!”
“Besides,” said Stemm, “where would we go? It’s not as if there are dozens of tree-elf colonies sprouting up all over the place like, like…some sort of problem in forest population control.”
“We go where we’re told,” concluded Twigg, “and really I imagine, Brrr, so will you. Haven’t you learned anything about the sacred performance of your duties? You’ll come along with us. Unless our employers decide that your presence drew the storm from the sky and the dream upon the Chief. In that case you will need to be sacrificed, bled, roasted, sliced, and served on a leaf of buttercup lettuce.”
“With marinated shallots,” said Stemm, rubbing his hands.
“No, that’s so high summer. Let’s go autumnal. Grocer’s gourd stuffed with minced hazelnut in a chanterelle reduction and a wild rice pasticcio.”
“Will you stop?” said Brrr. “I’m not going anywhere. I mean into any cooking pans, thank you very much. And you’re lucky I was around to save you from the same fate.”
“We should have let ourselves be blown to kingdom come when we still had a chance.”
While the Ghullim began to break camp, Muhlama seemed stalled in a state of high dudgeon, huffing and hissing at anyone who came near. Brrr kept his distance, too. He saw that the tree elves were the ones who scampered aloft and untied the gauzy curtains from their boughs, and stacked the cooking utensils in wooden crates, and rolled up Uyodor’s patterned carpet, and collected scraps and bits and souvenirs. What the Ivory Tigers provided the elves, he guessed, was some sort of security, but the elves did all the work.
Most of it, that is. A ramshackle old cart came out of storage from somewhere, and Brrr was asked to push. Twigg and Stemm would sit up top and steer.
So Brrr set his shoulder against the sloping rear panel of a human cart. This required his head to cock at an angle, and he hoped to find Muhlama looking at him with a measure of gratitude. He was earning his way, see, just like the tree elves. She didn’t favor him with the pleasure of a glance, though. He worked without reward or even much assistance.
Muhlama’s tone was saturated with rancor. “Where are we going? The moon? Uyodor, do you intend to march us all the way up the slopes of the Scalps? Just how big was that dream anyway? I’m not going another step!” She seemed to have forgotten her requirement of obeisance toward her father. “Or was this so-called dream just a ruse? Had you been planning on relocating us to the highlands anyway, and forgot to tell us? Are you mincelings just going to tramp along without saying a word?”
She had to spit in disgust, which was an elegant thing and, Brrr thought, had a certain sort of sweet sexiness to it. Though his neck and shoulders were aching.
Perhaps she wore her father down, for he selected a new campground before dusk. Brrr found it impossible to estimate how far they had gone, but it couldn’t have been five or six miles, not with the cart bumping and scraping over every inch. The downed limbs, the mess of storm. In one place an entire pool had been emptied of its water; turtles were emerging from the mud and blinking at the novelty of air.
“That’s a pretty talented storm system,” observed Brrr, as conversationally as he could. Trying to lighten the mood. Muhlama paid him no mind and addressed her father, who remained confirmed about his premonitions because they had been illustrated with wind damage.
“Is this our final lodging?” she said. “Or is this just nighty-night? You get spooked by another hurricane, and tomorrow will we continue on toward the Glikkus or the over-harrowed Corn Basket? Make our home in domesticated fields like so many cowering field mice?”
His eyes flashed, but she was his daughter and he wouldn’t upbraid her in public. She would rule the Ghullim sooner or later. He couldn’t be seen to erode her authority even as she questioned his.
Brrr watched. The strange flexing arrangement that fathers exert over their children. It awed him.
He also saw that the tree elves were being
directed to unpack the cart, so perhaps this really was the chosen camp for the next indefinite period. If they were marching again tomorrow, the elves wouldn’t be bothering to decorate the clearing with such swags and scrims as Ivory Tigers admire.
While the hunters skulked off to hunt down a supper, which Brrr supposed drearily would be served without anything by way of sauces or savories, he managed to straighten out the kinks in his shoulders enough to hobble up to Muhlama and look her up and down.
“What are you giving me the once-over for?” she snarled.
“You’ve spent an awful lot of time being furious today.”
“So what.”
“So”—(here it came)—“I can’t help noticing fury becomes you.”
She backed up several steps; her tail snapped. “You—you pack Lion! You menial…beast! How dare you! You have some nerve!”
“I have little nerve,” he replied. “But after my work on behalf of your tribe, I’m too tired to lie. Why shouldn’t I tell you that you are more provocative than ever when you’re so vexed?”
“You—you and your deciphering some dream of the chief’s—making us move camp by your auguries.”
“Oh, stow it,” he said, flumping down in some leaves. “I’m the only one who talks to you. I might as well talk to you honestly.”
He knew there was a sting of truth in his words. She became frozen with reserve, though her tail couldn’t stop itself from switching back and forth.
He pressed his advantage. “Why didn’t you want to leave? Are you just angry at your father for his unilateral dictates? If what everyone says is true, those powers will be yours one day.”
“I don’t want to rule. Haven’t you sussed that out yet?”
“Why not? Everyone will look up to you, take you seriously.”
“Are you an aberration to your species?” she cried. “Cats don’t look for approval!”
He didn’t reply. Her words were cutting, but she hadn’t convinced him of anything yet, except that he could be cut by words. And he already knew that.
“I have no use for this guarded life, this wreath of security around us all the time, this…myopic servitude to ourselves,” she said more slowly. “I have other ambitions than to be the indentured princess of an autocratic father.”
“Then why don’t you just leave?” he asked. “You are sleek enough. You could outrun any number of hunters.”
“And I’d end up like you, wandering aimlessly through the woods?”
“Things could be worse. As it seems you know. Why don’t you leave?”
“Because it would break his heart,” she replied, voice lower still. “It’s all he lives for. Not me, not them, but for the inebriation of being ruler, and passing it on. Fathers want one single thing: that their power will outlive them. It’s his only gift to me, after all.”
He wasn’t sure if he believed her rationale. Nonetheless, he believed her distress. She wasn’t just playing at being fussed.
“What is it you want?” he said again, more privately, hoping that she would surprise him with intimacy. “Are the tree elves right? Did you have some lover-Cat in the near vicinity, and is that why you balked so at leaving?”
“Did they say that?” Her head whipped around so fast he could only see the circumference of the circle described by the tips of her erect ears. He was afraid she would lunge off and slaughter the elves.
“No,” he quickly replied, rising. “I was fooling. It was my own thought, actually. Though I hope I was wrong.”
“You are so wrong at everything that if you ever started being right…” But she couldn’t finish her thought. She glared at him with perhaps the coldest look ever, but he imagined he saw a fringe of possibility flaring.
“You hope you are wrong,” she repeated. She took a step back, still looking at him. It was as if she were seeing him for the first time. He wished he’d had time to comb his mane. But in all his disarray, he preened for her anyway, tossed his head with a jerk at the neck. That usually got the human crowd, but good. She didn’t flinch. She moved an inch closer.
“Brrr,” she said. “Oh, Brrr. I’ve been rather a selfish thing today. You doing all this work, and just to get my attention. Now I see it. Now I see.”
“I like to work,” he lied.
“And they took advantage of you. That’s like them, you know. My kin. They make servants of guests. You realize of course that three Ivory Tigers could have pulled that cart easily enough from the front, if the elves had harnessed them into the leathers. But no, they all took advantage of your brute strength.”
He liked the way she said brute strength, even though his muscles were so tired that his back haunches were trembling. He hoped he was standing at such an angle that she couldn’t see. From some perspectives he actually didn’t look all that ineffectual, he guessed. He hoped.
“It was an honor to help,” he said again.
“Are you all right?” she said. “You look ill.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “It would be good to lie down and rest a bit. It has been a long day.”
“We’ll go for a walk,” she said. She turned and snarled at the nearby sentries, “We are going for a walk. Got it?”
He couldn’t tell why they stood back and let her pass unrestrained. Perhaps they realized she was still spitting mad. Perhaps they saw that Brrr was calming her.
Muhlama led the way. She had a seriously keen sense of smell and followed a track through sweeping clusters of vine until, after a few minutes, she had reached the edge of a pool. Here she laid herself down, reclining her hindquarters fully, her chest torquing into an elegant curve, so her head reared back upon her neck. Nacreous shadow behind her, blue and lavender and mauve. Her eyes lowered. Her ears lowered. “There is no one trailing us,” she said. “I would hear them if they were.”
He sat down close. Not too close. Close enough that he could feel the heat from her pelt. Musk of a rare sort; he’d never apprehended such a naked barb of invitation. A scorched-pecan, apricoty, humid sort of appeal.
“You are so royal, you can bring on estrus at will?” A bold thing to say and would have been crude said to anyone but a princess; and indeed he meant it as a compliment.
“I am talented,” she replied, lifting her tail another parabolic sweep higher, “but you give me too much credit.”
They didn’t speak for a while, as the evening birds exchanged their bulletins, as the bullfrogs dove into the water out of a surfeit of modesty. A hummingbird, a whipping blossom, came along and perched on Muhlama’s ear, until it realized its mistake and fled.
“You can’t be so kind to me,” said Brrr after a while. “It isn’t possible. No one ever has. I don’t fit in.”
“It’s I who don’t fit,” she said, “I with my strong-minded ways, my temper, my appetite to leave the very home that I am tethered to. I look a princess, I know; but I am a slave here, no less than the tree elves, no less than you are. I don’t belong.”
She angled her rump, and the movement of her tail changed. It became the pendulum on a metronome, counting the slow moments until she pushed her pelvis higher and threw her head back, nipping at Brrr’s throat as he covered her beautiful coat with his own.
When he could think in words—was it then, was it later, he didn’t know—it was simply this: Now I fit in.
His reverie was delicious. Eyes closed. He was partly conscious of the floating strings of the world, its selvages restitching themselves into a prettier apprehension. Some might call it afterglow. For Brrr it was as if a new appetite was just beginning to stir out of his dreamy slumber. But it was interrupted by hissing alarums. He hardly knew what was closing in on him until it was over and done with.
The discovery in flagrante by Ivory Tiger scouts. The forced return to the camp. The accusation of Uyodor, his recitation of Brrr’s offenses against the noble line of the Ghullim camp. Was this an attempt to thwart Uyodor’s regime? Was Brrr a stooge of the Wizard of Oz, working his way in here, seducin
g the daughter of the chieftain of the Ghullim?
“There was no seduction, sir!” Brrr was aghast. He glared at Muhlama, looking for testimony. Muhlama neither concurred with her father nor protested his accusations. She couldn’t speak. For anger, for regret? Then he saw what they had seen already. She had begun to bleed. The iron stench of it, a wound too large to hide. A rivulet of orangish blood that wouldn’t stop.
It seemed he hadn’t quite fit in, but she’d let him try anyway.
With a cold resolve, she hectored him, too. “Go. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? Go, before they have your head on a trophy backboard. You’ve done quite enough.”
Perhaps because she was still Uyodor’s daughter, they let him go. Though Uyodor declared, as Brrr backed away, “You are no creature of the wilderness, Lion; you do not belong here. Should we come across you again, or should our allies, you are fair game for the predator. A marked beast. You have ten minutes before we enact our promise to seek vengeance.”
So he pelted away, but ever after he wondered why. Was it just to preserve his own life? His life had a tinny cast to it, an artificial quality, hardly worth preserving. Or had he left not so much to save his own skin as to avoid having to see Muhlama’s life bleed out of hers?
In any case, he was gone. Not for the first time, nor the last: an ignoble retreat from a fray that had grown too hot for him.
Back into the wild, back into woods, back into exile. And this time he would endure a loneliness made more cutting by the recent experience of consanguinity. Or call it love, if you must.
Exiled, even unto himself, until and unless something came along to redeem him.
What came along some time later—days, or was it weeks?—near where the Wend Fallows petered out into the Corn Basket, was that toothsome morsel known as Dorothy. Another rare and delicate human, a girl this time, improbably making her way along the stretch of Yellow Brick Road that originated in central Munchkinland.
• 4 •
IT WAS an accident of the light, nothing more, that caused the little girl and her pair of noodnik companions to leap in terror at the sight of him. Or had it been too long since his most recent wash-and-set? In any case, he steeled himself for the inevitable interview, and wondered how much of his sorry history he could gloss over. Maybe they had some provisions to share.
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