The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Actually, I’m very vegetarian,” said the Lion, proud of the actually. Is this how conversation was supposed to go? Your turn.

  The young man reached again, for what must have been the ten thousandth time, to try to open the trap by force, but the thing was built to hold. He hadn’t the strength by himself, and the trap wouldn’t yield.

  “You pull that side and I’ll pull the other,” said the fellow. “Together we can open it. Then, maybe you could cart me to a settlement, or at least to a stream. I’ve been rotting here with nothing to drink but the dew I could lick off the vegetation.”

  But the Lion found the teeth of the trap alarming. “That’s a very iron mouth,” he observed. “Far too very dangerous. Look what it’s done to you.”

  “It’s sprung, it can’t spring again. Hunter’s traps don’t work like that.”

  Brrr shook his head.

  “You imbecile. You flathead. I’m begging you—”

  “I can’t risk it. There are those who rely on me for support,” said the Lion, thinking: Myself, for one, and one is enough. “Besides, I haven’t those curving shrimplike fingers you have. I can’t just purr the thing off you, you know.” He was trying for a jocular tone, but it seemed to lack smack, and the hunter’s distress was, well, distressing. Brrr pawed about, keeping a fair enough berth, sniffing and tossing his mane. “So this is a hunter’s trap, and you’re a hunter. And I’ve just put the two concepts together. Aren’t you a little bit very ashamed of yourself?”

  “I’ll give you anything. Every nickel florin I own. My father’s cottage—it’s freehold, no mortgage, running water, two fireplaces, stunning views.”

  “A cottage among very human cottages?”

  “Nicely done up. You wouldn’t even have to redecorate.”

  “Cottages filled with the fathers of hunters? I don’t think so.”

  The man fell back, stunned into silence, and then began to weep. Quietly, noxiously. The Lion was appalled and faintly offended. This wasn’t quite as much fun as he’d imagined. The human raised himself on an elbow and managed quaveringly to say, “You have a pride nearby—someone old enough to know how to show mercy to a stranger in your kingdom…”

  “I’d go for help,” said the Lion, “but I’m afraid no one is very near.”

  “Help is near enough. If not from your clan, then from mine. I just got separated from my pals. Not long ago, really. They probably only made it back to the base camp by now. And look, in case the base camp has pulled up stakes, there’s a small cadre of the Wizard’s forces stationed at Tenniken. I’m one of their number—hunting with my mates on behalf of the regiment. They’re loyal to the Wizard of Oz! They will come for me if you tell them where I am. Soldiers don’t abandon their own.”

  “A soldier-hunter.” A new concept. “A lesson for us all,” said the Lion cautiously. “Wish I’d had a soldier for a mother, then. Loyalty to the pack: what a thought.” But that was rumination, not conversation. He tried again. “Have you enjoyed visiting this very neck of the woods?”

  “Are you tormenting me?” The lad—he was hardly more than that—sat up as far as he could. “Am I hallucinating all this? Kill me or save me, as you wish, but for the love of the Unnamed God, do it soon. I’m all alone.”

  It was this last remark that moved the Lion to pity, or pity of a sort. He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.

  He padded forward and put his big head down on the man’s chest. The man swooned in fear or disbelief, whereupon the scattershot snare in his chest slowed to a more stately thud.

  The Lion considered creeping off. The whole thing was so embarrassing. Yet he remembered conversations usually concluding with “Good night” or “So long” or at least “Piss off.” He didn’t want to be rude and leave without the correct valediction.

  He wrinkled his nostrils and sorted out the ribbons of odor. The pheromones of panic and anxiety (the young soldier’s and the young Lion’s, both). The salty sting of male sweat, and the cinnamony reek of human feces. Dried urine (faintly aphrodisiacal), dried blood (an astringent to the curled outer segments of Brrr’s olfactory fissures). And mold, but not common leaf mold. This was mold on parchment that had been sized with bleaching.

  Brrr had few words for those apprehensions, which were nonetheless tantalizingly distinct. He followed his nose and discovered a satchel of four books. They were dropped a few yards beyond the trap. He picked them up in his mouth and brought them forward to the soldier. He smelled the ferrous note of the belt buckle and then its complement, the tooth-sting of processed tin. The soldier wore a medal on his chest. Even in forest gloom the shine on it was enthralling.

  The Lion fell in love. He sat down with front paws laid out together, like a sphinx, until the felled hero began to stir.

  “I brought you your books,” said Brrr.

  “Oh. I hoped you were a dream,” murmured the soldier, which Brrr first took to be a compliment.

  “I thought you’d want them.” He walked the parcel over to the soldier and he didn’t mean to drop it on his head. “Whoops. Sorry.”

  “They’re not mine, you monster,” complained the young man. “They’re for you.”

  “I have no learning,” said the Lion, “or I’d be happy to read aloud to you to pass the time.”

  “You mock me for someone else’s crimes. Lion, I throw myself on your mercy.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “What do you think? I don’t want you to return these books to the library!” yelled the soldier. “I want help! Go for help, you cretinous beast!” He was quite pretty, weeping.

  “Wait here. I’ll bring you some water to drink.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, ’cept to the breast of Lurlina if you don’t hurry.” The soldier ran his fingers over his shaven scalp. “I wish the bugs would wait until I was fully dead.”

  The Lion returned. It was hard to balance water in a scooped-out gourd, and most of it had spilled, but a few drops moistened the soldier’s parched lips.

  “Since you can’t wrench this iron mouth off my leg, please go get my comrades,” said the soldier. “If they’ve given up on finding me, they’ll reconnoiter at the barracks in Tenniken. Tell them that Jemmsy sent you. They won’t forget their Jemmsy. I’m their favorite. I’m like their little brother.”

  “Jemmsy, is it? Jemmsy, I can’t have anything to do with soldiers! Soldiers and their campaigns, Jemmsy. Really.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” said Jemmsy. “Everyone sleeps with the soldiers, in the long run.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, Jemmsy, you were among that troop a few nights ago, Jemmsy, boasting about bagging pussy and all that? Weren’t you, Jemmsy?”

  “You totally don’t get it. But this is my punishment? To be lectured to death by a talking Lion?”

  It was at this remark that Brrr first surmised that not all Lions could speak.

  “You’re raving, perhaps from starvation,” said Brrr. “Jemmsy, let me find you some food at least.” He lit out in the direction of Tenniken, in the direction that the fallen man suggested, and when he came across a slope of ripe strawberries he picked several quarts with his mouth and brought them back, delivering them one by one with a roll of his tongue.

  The water had revived the soldier enough to be more aware of his pain. “Don’t stop to feed me,” he groaned, cramming the fruit in his mouth. “Don’t come back with a salad course. Just get my mates. Get me some fucking help. Don’t I merit that much mercy?”

  “I can’t actually tell. What’s your medal for, Jemmsy?”

  “Courage in the line of fire.” Jemmsy began to bite his nails.

  “And why do you wear it, Jemmsy?”

  “To give myself courage.”

  The circularity of this was beyond Brrr.

  “You want it? The medal? Take it. I don’t deserve it anymore, anyway. Going to pieces like this.” He unpinned it from his jacket. “You can fix it to the belt lashing those books toge
ther, and wear it around your mighty thigh.”

  Brrr had to keep from stealing a look to see if his thigh was all that mighty. “I haven’t earned it,” he said. “Jemmsy.”

  “It will be your passport in Tenniken. No one will harm you if you come in aid of a soldier of the Wizard’s army. If you deliver the news of my incapacity to my brothers-at-arms, they won’t forsake me. Soldiers take care of their own. Low ranking though I am.”

  Brrr came forward and accepted the token by opening his mouth and gumming Jemmsy’s hand almost up to the elbow. It tasted lettucy, watery, unwashed. The hand was limp on Brrr’s tongue, and for a moment neither of them moved.

  Then, extruding the hand through closed lips, and ejecting the badge onto the pile of books, Brrr said softly, “Pin it there on the belt, as you suggested. When I go, I’ll take the books with me, too.”

  “Bless you,” replied Jemmsy. “If I were not to survive, would you tell my fellows to remind my father I loved him until the end? And forgive me my crimes against you and your kind.”

  “I have no kind,” said Lion. “But okay, sure. If it’ll make you happy. What crimes might those be, Jemmsy?”

  But Jemmsy had rolled over on his side, and he put the saliva-wet hand into his groin and drew his knees up, as far as the trap would allow. He didn’t speak again.

  Gratitude, thought the Lion. He gripped the satchel belt in his mouth and left. He found, though, that the farther away he got, the less he could be confident of the small association that had sprouted between him and Jemmsy. Did a conversation constitute a friendship? If so, this was his first friendship, and he wasn’t sure how fragile it might prove to be. How could he abandon the fellow, just like that? What if Jemmsy fell asleep and had a bad dream, and cried out, as the Lion had so often done?

  He circled back, then, but by old habit he settled out of sight in a shadowy clot of fallen and rotting tree limbs. He watched his friend sleep, and struggle against the trap, and grow still. Brrr reviewed the matter as best he could, inventing rhetorical forensics from the ground up.

  On the one hand, Jemmsy and his companions had set that very trap. Or things like it. They were hunting him, or his kind. His kind. Right? Right? So now the soldier had him. Jemmsy had caught himself a Lion, just perhaps not in the way he had intended.

  On the other hand, maybe experience—of any sort—was only valid if it caused you to redefine your terms. Courage, for instance. The courage to go versus the courage to stay? Which was more very couragey?

  Any decision he made, Brrr realized, would affect his friend’s future one way or the other.

  His heart burned with affection when, in a fever, the man called out, “Lion. Friend Lion! Have you forsaken me?”

  It’s good that I am in your heart to give you hope, thought the Lion, hope unto death. He lay as close to the soldier as he dared, to keep the man warm at night until there was nothing left of him to warm. Even when Jemmsy died, and the smell grew worse, the Lion hated to leave the body.

  “Now I’ll go for help,” he said to the carcass. “You’ve been very patient.”

  Jemmsy didn’t reply.

  “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” said Brrr, but his tone sounded off and he closed his mouth.

  My first conversation, he thought, and his bound had a new spring to it. He was nearly giddy. Of course, the finish had been awkward—death is a real stifler of repartee—but on the whole he thought it had gone rather well.

  A conversation and a friend. Jemmsy had called out “Friend Lion!” So the friendship had been short-lived but real; now that it was dead, it couldn’t be revoked. It was preserved inviolable in his heart. And the medal shone like a portable compliment. The medal advertised Brrr’s own courage as he headed to Tenniken to keep his promise. He would deliver the news of the fallen Jemmsy to those grieving companions-at-arms. And through them the news could go on to Jemmsy’s father, that puzzle of a creature, for being capable of abandoning his son to the care of the army.

  “THE HEART OF a Lion,” murmured Yackle, almost purring herself. Brrr resisted the temptation to imagine she was being snide, but he couldn’t resist the domino-patter of memories, one after another, that had concluded his childhood. The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

  • 3 •

  SO THE next memory toppled forward, a tremor following upon a tremor. Jemmsy. His body seeping into the ground like a pudding at room temperature. How long had it been since Brrr had thought of Jemmsy? The scab torn off, after all this time; a smell of earth leaching from that opened wound. The smell of those childhood woods from as far back as his mind could pick its way.

  When was his unspoken pledge to Jemmsy hijacked by ambition? How soon was his hope to deliver the news of Jemmsy’s death superseded by his hunger for the reward of gratitude? Or had it not happened as baldly as all that?

  He couldn’t now remember. Only the terror and giddy release at having a destination at all. Tenniken. Tenniken, a garrison town, and nearby, a soldier’s grieving father. A brick hearthside where Brrr might curl up like a house cat, like a surrogate son, purring, domesticated, basking in the warmth of approval.

  He felt perverse and new, flayed by raw luck. For the first time, he felt naked. He felt he could outrun his timidity just by doing the job right.

  Getting to Tenniken. Returning Jemmsy’s medal of honor. Exchanging the tin ikon for the real thing: a sensation of righteous bravery he could own for himself.

  It was going to take a while, though. He had to venture beyond the paced edges of his territory. Like all creatures who mark their boundaries, he could tell when he passed into the treacherous unknown. The musk of the undergrowth seemed foreboding.

  The pictures in his mind grew more lovely, perhaps to distract him from the fear of being afraid. The cozy garrison settlement, and a place to eat. With any luck it would be a beer garden. Flowers, stripped of their nettles and thorns, madly fomented in pots set on window ledges and stoops. Candy-colored birds in silver cages, birds who didn’t threaten like forest vultures with those nerve-jangling cries, but who actually sang. On pitch. And trilling maidens at the town well, picking up the melody and embellishing it. That sort of thing.

  It would have been hard to say just how this picture came into his head. It must have been cobbled together from bits and pieces of things he had heard in the woods, long before he could understand them. Though what a pretty picture! The maidens with their scuttles and pails, and every cobblestone glistening, and every windowsill laden with fresh fruit pies cooling, and every housewife generous with her pies, and every schoolchild blithe and gay. And every father appreciative, especially Jemmsy’s father. Brrr could hardly wait to get there.

  He rehearsed these visions to put himself to sleep at night, troubled upon a bed of foreign moss.

  He’d gone six days or more, practicing conversational gambits aloud—“Hello, I’m very new in town”—“Hello, are you very in need of a new friend, one with prior experience?”—when he crossed through a thicket to the edge of a blueberry patch. The fruit hung heavy, cobalt and black and pink, and a small creature, perhaps the size of a human cub, was driving its snout through the offerings.

  Brrr couldn’t help himself. “You must be very brave out here all alone in the woods,” he began. The cub froze and turned an eye like a blueberry upon the Lion. Brrr straightened his shoulders and tossed his head to aerate his mane into magnificence, whereupon the cub fell to the ground on its back, its small stained paws cupped below its furry chin.

  “Sweet Lurlina,” said Brrr, “I’m slaying them right and left with my conversational wit.” He went up to look closely. The cub wasn’t dead, but shamming: Brrr could see it shaking like a butterfly in a draft. “What are you doing? I won’t hurt you.”

  “Just my luck,” said the Bear cub, for that’s what he had turned out to be. “I break the rules and go off on my own, and the King of the Forest arrives to devour me.”

  Brrr a
lmost turned around to see the King approaching. “You don’t mean me? How very droll. Get up, I won’t hurt you. Rise. Why are you lying there as if you’ve had a very cardiac episode? It’s unsettling.”

  The Bear cub sat up. “If you insist. You promise you won’t hurt me?”

  “I’m very promising. Why did you collapse like that? Do I look like a hunter to you?” Brrr was more curious than offended.

  “It’s what you do if you’re facing long odds,” said the Bear. “You play meek and helpless in front of a sterner foe, and that kick-starts a sense of noble mercy in them. That’s the theory anyway. I never had need to practice it before, but it seems to have worked. My name is Cubbins.”

  His placid delivery sounded mature, though his voice strayed trebleward. Brrr replied hopefully, “Lost and alone and very abandoned by your clan?”

  “Just taking a break from the endless hilarity of it all. They’re downslope a ways at the stream’s edge. You’re not here to scatter us to kingdom come?”

  “Hardly. I need some directions.”

  “The King of Beasts needs directions?”

  “Will you stop with that?” said Brrr. “I’m not even a very local celebrity. Just passing through and minding my own very business.”

  “Well, with that medal and all,” said Cubbins. “You look official. Is that why you say very so very often?”

  Young as he was, he was ribbing the Lion. “Take me to your leader,” said Brrr, exerting very control. “Please.”

  “Such as she is,” said Cubbins obligingly. “Actually, I’m the boy-sheriff of our group, but since you stumbled upon me and showed me mercy, I’ll oblige. Follow me.” The Bear cub led Brrr along a ridge and down a trail to the edge of a broad, shallow stream. “Look who found me when I was lost in the woods,” called out Cubbins.

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” said the others. There were five or six of them, full grown: some burly companions at play and an aging old thing resting in kind of a shabby bath chair, half-in, half-out of a pool.