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 How soon was his hope to deliver the news of Jemmsy’s death superseded by his hunger for the reward of gratitude?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 almost 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.
“Don’t mind them. They’ve spent the afternoon with a comb of fermented honey,” said Cubbins.
Brrr picked his passage on stones across the stream, taking care not to let the pads of his paws get damp.
“Oooh, a toady right from the git-go,” said one of the older Bears. “I oughta known it, a sissy missy, the way she goes mincing across those stones like she’s afraid of ruining her mother’s silk stockings.”
“Enough, Bruner O’Bruin,” said Cubbins. “This creature was kind to me.”
“What’s your name, Lord Lion?” asked Bruner O’Bruin.
“Brrr,” replied the Lion, shaking his mane, trying to make a theatrical shimmer out of word and name alike. “Who are you lot?”
“The last, best hope for Oz. Movers and shakers,” said Bruner O’Bruin mockingly. He got up and shimmied, his rump poking out. The others guffawed. Cubbins rolled his eyes and offered the Lion a sip of water from a battered iron ladle.
“We’re what remains of the court of Ursaless, the Queen of the North,” said Cubbins. “Fallen on hard times, but good at heart, I hope. That’s Ursaless over there.” He indicated the oldest one, who was getting up from her chair to stretch. She was immensely tall. Even at her apparent age, white whiskers and all, she towered over her companions. “Ursaless, say hello to our guest.”
The Queen had a ratty sort of coat, and no clothes to speak of but a tiara three sizes too small. A sash that read QUALITY LIQUORS AT INSANELY LOW PRICES rode from one shoulder to the opposite hip. She grimaced. Perhaps she was troubled by arthritis.
“Queen of the North?” asked Brrr.
“Queen of the Northern Bears,” Cubbins amended. “Not that there are many of us left in the wild. Our kin and cousins are easily seduced by the lure of human comforts—beds, running hot water, whist championships, you name it. Still, some of us hold on to the old folkways, and Ursaless is our leader.”
The Queen lumbered over on all fours. “The Lion comes to pay his respects,” she observed, looking him over through mild eyes. “It’s been some years since I’ve seen Lions in these parts.”
“You’ve seen a Lion around here before?” Brrr found a new reason for conversation: the examination of history. “How very marvelous! I’ve never met another Lion. Who was it? Where did they go? Did they happen to misplace a Lion cub, do you know? Did they look like me?”
“Don’t be tedious; I have no head for details,” said Ursaless. She examined her nails and frowned.
“Oh, but if you could remember a scrap!” he insisted. “A very scrap!”
She turned her head so only one eye rested on him. It looked cold. “Your Highness,” he added.
This relaxed her. “Sometimes I recall oddments without even trying. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, what brings you to our encampment?”
“I’m headed for Tenniken,” he replied. “The human settlement, where I understand soldiers are stationed. Soldiers loyal to the Wizard of Oz.”
“Tenniken,” she repeated, hummingly. “Do we know Tenniken?”
“Tenniken’s not to be worth knowing,” said Bruner O’Bruin, “if we’re not there making it worth the while to know.” His voice was confident but he turned his head away as he spoke, as if not wanting to meet the Queen’s glance.
The Queen continued. “Caraway Coyle? Bungler MiGrory? Shaveen Brioyne? Anyone remember Tenniken?”
“There’s so much past,” said the one called Shaveen, a female who sat picking nits from her armpits. “I don’t think Tenniken was worth remembering, if we ever knew of it. Otherwise we’d remember it.”
“She’s right as usual, our Shaveen,” said the males. The concert of their agreement seemed to satisfy the Queen.
Ursaless turned back to the Lion. “We can’t help you in this, either, I’m afraid. Tenniken means nothing to us.”
“Didn’t we go on a scavengey romp there?” asked Cubbins. “I was only a mite of a thing last spring, but isn’t Tenniken where the train engine scared us, racing by?”
“Don’t listen to yourself,” said Ursaless fondly. “You’re too young to have learned to forget what isn’t needed. If we can’t corroborate your assertions, there can be no useful truth to them.” She cocked an eyebrow at Brrr. “Would you care for some honey?”
The Lion shook his head. Their lopsided version of conversation was unnerving, and he was losing the confidence he’d been struggling to maintain. “I’ll just help myself to another sip of water and be on my way, then.”
“What way is that?” asked Ursaless.
“I’m going to Tenniken.”
“Never heard of the place,” she stated firmly. “Any of you bruisers heard of Tenniken?”
“Not I,” said Caraway Coyle. Bungler MiGrory put his head in his paws and began to snore. Shaveen Brioyne said, “I think we talked about this once before, but maybe I’m thinking of someplace else. Or that we talked about something else.” She absentmindedly ate a nit. “I like to talk,” she said, almost to herself.
Ursaless turned back to the Lion and asked, “What’s your name?”
“I thought I’d mentioned it,” said the Lion. “It is Brrr.”
“That’s a nice name,” said Ursaless. “Brrr sounds like a Bear. Do you have Bears in your background?”
“I very much doubt it,” said Brrr. “I may be mocked by some for the way that I walk, but I believe I am very much Lion.”
“Why did your parents give you a name so like a Bear, then?”
“I had no parents,” he replied. “Unless you’ve remembered seeing any around here? A pride of Lions on a march of some sort?”
“Someone gave you a name, or did you name yourself?”
This question hadn’t occurred to him before. He hadn’t named himself—so where had his name come from? “I don’t remember that I had parents,” he replied.
“All Bears have parents,” said Ursaless. “Caraway, you have a father and a mother, don’t you?”
“You’re my mother. No?” Caraway sounded dubious. It was Ursaless’s turn to cough and change the subject; she couldn’t answer authoritatively.
“Were I you, I would find my parents and ask them why they named me something like a Bear.” Ursaless hurried on. “Then you can come back and tell us.”
“Though chances are we won’t recognize you,” said Shaveen.
“Except Cubbins,” said Ursaless fondly. “You will, won’t you, fondness?”
Cubbins turned his head so she couldn’t see him rolling his eyes at her.
“I can’t find my parents, I don’t even know who they are,” said Brrr. “For all I know, they’re dead. Besides, I am on my way to Tenniken. A human town to the south.”
“Oh. Humans. Hmmm. I’ve never been convinced they exist, humans.”
“Of course they do,” inserted Bruner O’Bruin. “That’s where all our cousins go when they can’t stand their cousins anymore.”
“They go to be humans?”
“No. They go to human places.”
“Like Tenniken,” said the Lion, pushing it now, but unable to resist. “You know, Tenniken. The human settlement, where I understand soldiers are stationed. Soldiers loyal to the Wizard of Oz.”
“Oh,” offered Ursaless, attentive, “the great WOO.”
Cubbins intercepted that one for Brrr. “WOO. That’s what we call the Wizard of Oz. The Great and Wonderful WOO.”
“And if there is such a creature,” said Ursuless, “may he stay where he is and we stay where we are. Anyway, we’re not subjects of any Wizard. He doesn’t rule the Great Gillikin Forest.”
“Far from it,” said Caraway Coyle, belching.
“He’s never even been here,” said Shaveen.
“We’d tear him limb from limb, if he existed,” said Caraway Coyle. “Watch me do a three-quarter snarl. It’s so cool.” He obliged, looking suddenly like a hydro-encephalitic dog with a mosquito in its nose.
“I thought he was the Wizard of all Oz,” said Brrr, trying to bring them back to it.
“Anyone can name himself whatever he wants,” said Cubbins. “Wizard of Oz or WOO or the King of Beasts.”
“I know this much,” said Brrr. “He sends human soldiers into our forest.”
“A good reason to stay out of his way,” replied Cubbins. “Deep down, we wild Bears are unrepentant followers of Ozma, though she has been long disappeared from the public eye and is presumed dead. Still, we carry a torch for her. In her time, she was less hostile to beasts in the wild than the current administration is. May she come again. They say she will return to rescue Oz in its time of tribulation.”
“Who says?” asked Brrr.
“General prophecy. Common sense. I don’t know.”
“People who say it, say it,” barked Ursaless.
Cubbins continued. “Well, all I want to know is, what’s keeping her? It’s tribulating enough these days. Threat and panic everywhere you turn. We have to wait until it gets worse?”
“Listen to smartypants there. We never believed in Ozma,” said Ursaless. “I never did, so you never did either. I’m the Queen.”
“I don’t believe in you, so there,” said Shaveen, though when the Queen glared at her she pointed at Brrr.
“You have your hands full, governing this crew,” murmured Brrr.
“Well,” said Ursaless, “some say the brighter among us left for the human world. More possibilities for advancement, et cetera. Maybe they had more get-up-and-go. Personally, I think it takes character to stay here and hold down a court. Maintain a presence in the ancestral wild. The forest bucolic.” She made it sound like a paradise, the pestering flies, the drunken circularities repeated by an inbred family. “Anyway, when we bother to believe in her, we wait for the return of Ozma. No good comes of commerce with humans. Mark my words, you Lion.”
“But do they come back? Your cousins in the human world?”
“Cubbins, can you help our guest? I’m growing weary of giving an audience.” She let loose a flagrantly stagy yawn, and returned to the dollop of honey dripping off a wedge of comb the size of a small boulder.
Cubbins nodded to the others and jerked his head to the Lion: this way, friend. The Lion followed him, trying hard not to waggle his rump. As he passed, though, the Bears made remarks under their breath.
“Captivating family you have here,” said Brrr, when they were far enough away to avoid being overheard.
“Go easy on them,” said Cubbins. “They can’t really help it. It’s what happens to us Bears.”
“You go loopy on honey?”
“I don’t think the honey has much to do with it,” said Cubbins, “though I can’t really be sure. I don’t care for fortified honey yet, so I don’t partake. Still, I’ve observed that a taste for the stuff develops as Bears mature. In any case, I suspect it’s just that we don’t have much of a race memory, that’s all. Bears are creatures in the present. Any Bear who finds that the present just isn’t enough, well, that Bear strikes out for the human world—the Tenniken of which you speak, or other parts. Maybe they want to see if they can acclimate themselves to a weight of memory under which humans live and are pinned. I have no idea if they manage, for they never come back. Maybe the WOO gets them. Who knows?”
Perhaps that was what happened to Brrr’s parents. Maybe they entered the world of humans. But he didn’t want to talk about it to Cubbins: all this curiosity was a new thing. Likely born of hearing how lovingly his friend Jemmsy had remembered his own father as he lay dying. For the first time Brrr tried the gambit of changing the subject. “How did you come to be sheriff?”
“I’m just the youngest. The youngest is always everything important, except the Queen, of course. I’m the sheriff, and the bursar, and the accounts receivable department, and the chaplain and the social affairs committee and the historian. As soon as someone accidentally has another cub, I will yield my place to him or her. The youngest is in charge around here. We forget as we grow. Or did I already say that? It worries me when I repeat myself accidentally.”
“You’re fine,” said Brrr.
“You haven’t said why you’re leaving the wild for a human settlement.”
Brrr didn’t want to speak yet about Jemmsy. It was his secret. His mistake, maybe, or maybe the key to his own rare and beautiful future. In any case, he wasn’t sure if he wanted Cubbins coming along. Cubbins was a lot more adorable than Brrr. Cubbins might move into the cottage of Jemmsy’s father while Brrr was kept on a leash in the yard.
“I have some books to return to a library. For a friend,” he said, becking his head at the leather-bound stack of them.
“Books!” said Cubbins. “What are you doing with books in the Great Gillikin Forest, for crying out loud?”
“Returning them. As I said.”
“But where’d you get them?” Cubbins was riven with book-lust. “Let me see, may I? Three Treatises on the Liberty of Speaking Beasts. What’s that one with the faded gilt—Ozma Incognita. Oh, my. A trove. And chosen to appeal to the likes of us.”
“Well, don’t get your grubby paws all over them. They’re not mine to loan.”
“What’s this silvery emblem?”
“A medal,” said Brrr. In a softer voice, with a tone of hesitation, as if nearly too modest to continue: “A commendation for bravery, as it happens.”
“I’d never have guessed it,” said Cubbins, piercingly earnest, though his eyes were still on the books.
“If you don’t mind, I have a schedule to keep,” said the Lion. “It’s a busy life, mine. As I’m learning. Now, can you set me on any sort of a path that would be useful, do you think?”
“The Tenniken that we Bears have never visited and don’t believe in lies south by southwest,” Cubbins said without sarcasm. “The only way I can tell you for sure brings you uncomfortably close to Cloud Swamp. Though maybe you wouldn’t mind that the way we Bears do.”
“I never heard of the place.”
“Cloud Swamp? Oh, it’s a soupy section of the woods. A wetlands, I suppose you’d call it. Not all that far from here, most of the time, though it has a weird tendency to be migratory. Imagine not knowing about Cloud Swamp.”
“I had no parents to tell me about it,” said Brrr dryly.
“Well, it’s the haunt of the Ozmists.”
“Ozmists. Who are they? Secret defenders of the deposed line of Ozma that I’m learning about?”
“Good guess. But no. Ozmists are—well, for lack of a better term, I guess you’d call them ghosts. Or particles of ghosts.”
“Migratory ghosts.” Brrr tried to keep his voice level. “Ghosts ancient or modern?”
“I don’t know. We Bears avoid Cloud Swamp most of the time. Perhaps we give up our pasts, as you have seen, whether we like it or not. But ghosts—wow. Ghosts are nothing but pasts. Look, if your parents are dead, you might find one or both of their Ozmists in Cloud Swamp, and at least learn why they called you Brrr. And maybe why they went and died on you, and so forth.”
“I never said my parents were dead.”
“No, you didn’t, but where are they, then? Living the high life among other talking Animals and humans in the wonderful welter of Oz?”
“If they are ghosts—well—can ghosts hurt?”
“You mean, can they hurt you? I doubt it,” replied Cubbins. “They’re just notions, aren’t they? Dissolving shrouds of an individual? Still, to be fair, don’t take my word on it: For all I know, it’s ghosts who have spooked us Bears into being so forgetful. We can never remember if we ever accidentally ventured into Cloud Swamp. I only know we haven’t been there since I’ve been in charge. That’s all I’m sure of.”
Brrr wasn’t sure he relished the idea of meeting the nub of an idea without its mortal husk, though he couldn’t think how to say this.
Cubbins shrugged. “Just a thought. Maybe you don’t want to know if your parents are dead or not. If it doesn’t appeal to you, head on past. You’ll find your Tenniken. To the south, more or less. But I don’t know where it is exactly. Someone else will have to tell you.”
“Too bad,” said the Lion. “If you’d had better information, I might have paid you with one of these books.”
Cubbins looked disappointed, but he spoke with characteristic brio. “It’s okay. Anything I might read I would only forget sooner or later.”
“It must be hard to be the only Bear with a brain,” said Brrr.
“I’d love to come with you. But someone has to keep this passel of friends on the straight and narrow. If I didn’t remind them, they’d forget the answer to the tired rhetorical gibe, Does a Bear shit in the woods?”
Brrr didn’t want to share with Cubbins any final glory he might achieve in Tenniken, but on the other hand, if Brrr were accidentally to meet up with the Ozmists he intended to avoid, company in the form of a little Bear sheriff would be welcome. “If you walked away from here, your family would forget you in a minute,” said the Lion. “What kind of a loss is that? Don’t sacrifice yourself to them. They won’t even notice.”
“I get something out of this,” said Cubbins. “It doesn’t hurt to have a family, you know, even a troubled one. At least I know where I am. What are you looking for in Tenniken, anyway? You think your parents went there?”
Brrr snapped his mane. “It’s my own business,” he said.
“You really should start at Cloud Swamp and find out what you can, you know. It might help you narrow your search. Why spend time hunting for forebears if they’re dead?”
“Thanks,” said Brrr, “but no thanks.” Then he gave up his airy attitude. “Truth to tell, without a companion, I don’t dare venture into anyplace called Cloud Swamp.”
“Cloud Swamp? What’s that?” asked Cubbins, but when the Lion shot him a look, the cub’s eyes were twinkling in mischief. “You better get along now. My family party here is agreeable, but they can be disagreeable, too, and the mood can shift in an instant. Better make your way before they get suspicious that you’re going to kidnap me or something. One thing they do know is that they’d be lost without their baby cub to give their lives what little meaning and history it still has.”
“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.”