“I don’t think I like you,” she said, “but since this is nearly a posthumous tea party to which I’ve been invited, maybe it doesn’t matter if I like you or not.”

“You came from your coffin to talk to me,” he reminded her. “You must have had something to tell me now, right? Got some beef you’re eager to turn into hash. I’m your willing audience. I’m all ears, I am.”

She cocked her head sharply. She wasn’t befuddled in the slightest. She just didn’t like him. It showed loud and clear. Not that he cared. He was only doing his job. “Get on with it, before those army boots start tramping back this way,” he said.

Was she ready to talk? She thought it over. Would she inadvertently give something away before she had finished vetting the Lion for a possible ally? So far he didn’t look promising. Sitting before her, waxing his mane with spittle, twirling it into points. She could hear the motion, her ears were that keen. He was behaving like a pantomime villain training his mustachios.

Maybe he was only a ruse, a warm-up. Maybe she’d emerged from her clammy bier for the one who would follow this oily character.

Oracle though she was, she couldn’t see in front of her own nose.

2

B RRR TAPPED his pencil. Patience wasn’t his strong suit. Still, he was trying to listen to her with the severity of attention she had paid to him.

W ITH A plain demeanor, I could sidle by unnoticed. I had no charm to speak of. The older woman talking to herself in some gutter isn’t an uncommon sight, and passersby rarely bother to interrupt her.

I found it useful staying a bit unwashed. No one wants to look too closely at someone wrapped in strong body odors. That made it easier to sidle along in the background, to watch slit-eyed and sideways at the goings-on of a crowd. To size up a mark. To pick up what I could about this mystery of my existence.

So I stumped about Shiz. I kept my eyes down and my ears open and, for the time being, my big mouth shut.

These were the days before the Wizard arrived-yes, get your pen, I’m going to be as specific as I can, though the patterns of politics always eluded me. But now I know enough to realize that I emerged from my first sleep into the halcyon last days of the line of Ozma. Though halcyon is never so sweet as memory makes it.

Vain Pastorius was squatting upon the throne as the Ozma Regent. He ruled in the Emerald City in the stead of his infant daughter, the Ozma Tippetarius. He was a piece of work. Dim, bullnose-chinned Pastorius. What is this in human time? Fifty, fifty-five years ago? Being born without any childhood to speak of-my “olden days” have a different meaning than yours!-I never could master time. It seems a long while ago, anyway. Pastorius, that old fool. Both sybaritic and syphilitic. Cocooned in silk, drunk on compliments warbled by his ass-licking courtiers. Those were days of expensive balls in the court proper, and of bawdy carnivals of patriotic sentiment outside the palace walls. To distract the urban poor from the deprivations of the Great Drought, about which no one could do a thing.