A Coward for His Country

1

A LION AT rest.

How old was he now? Thirty-eight? Forty? How long had he been waiting to see some shade of the world other than grim yellow?

That oracle, who was blind with age, could see more than he could. Damn her.

Was she holding out on him? Running for the chapel just when they were closing in on the questions he most needed to ask? Where is the Grimmerie? Where was Elphaba’s rumored son, Liir-where had he disappeared to? If anyone in Oz might know, it had to be Yackle. Yackle wasn’t the only person who had cared about Elphaba-there was Lady Glinda, among others-but Yackle was the one who had been able to see into the darkness of Elphaba’s life.

A vision like that-what he wouldn’t give to have some…some sense of scope. Some perspicacity. But he could never see forward. Even the act of looking back-at how he had gotten himself hip-deep in muck, again and again-even that was hard for him to fathom.

Well, he wasn’t giving up this time. He’d proved useless at his earliest tasks, like finding Jemmsy’s father. A total loser and no mistake. He’d always run off at the first sign of trouble. But now there was nowhere left to run. It was this or prison.

So he let her see of him what she would, with her oracle’s inner eye; she didn’t need to hear him voice his reservations about himself out loud. There were things he would never say to any female, whether she was a Lioness or a human, a judge or an oracle, a petty whore or a pettier maunt.

A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him-so why bother?-but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible. Yackle would prove no exception, he was sure.

How different his life might have been if he had emerged from the Great Gillikin Forest right at the outskirts of the town of Tenniken instead of at Traum. Sure, now he knew: A talking Lion would have had a rough go of it anywhere under the Wizard’s jurisdiction. Yet if Brrr had been able to deliver the medal of honor back to Jemmsy’s father, he’d have had an early experience of reaching a goal. Of not being diverted.

But remembering what had happened in Traum-even thinking about it today-had been a mistake. Living with amnesia, the way those cretinous Bears in the Great Gillikin Forest did, was the only sensible strategy.

The word lionized had more than one meaning.

His youth, his stupidity, had been no more than that. Stupidity was forgivable in the young. But when he’d lain down and played dead in Traum-it had been no more and no less than a collapse of his enfeebled sense of himself-he’d made himself into an emblem of complicity. “Remember the cowardly Lion,” the humans had said in Traum. “He laid down his life for us.”