The death of Jemmsy. The taunts of the Bears. The dismissal by the Ozmists. The Traum Massacre. The lovely but brutal sex with Muhlama, and his subsequent exile from the Ghullim.

And then the taunts. Coward. Witch’s familiar. “Little Miss Sissy” in one popular musical parody that was all the rage the season he fled from Ampleton Quarters. Lord Low Plenipotentiary, for the love of Lurlina. Collaborationist.

A Lion, even a lily-livered one, can roam about an unfriendly landscape more easily than, say, a Badger or a slow-moving Cow. The Lion was shunned but not otherwise abused. He kept to himself. He could get little work in Munchkinland; farmers husbanded their farm chores zealously.

One night he fell asleep on the edge of a cornfield, and dreamed of a happier past. When he woke up to take a leak, he heard his own voice muttering in his ears. He had been talking to the rangy scarecrow set up to frighten predators. It was an odd thing, nothing like his erstwhile pal. Neither male nor female, Animal nor human, the creature had a woman’s apron, a farmer’s soft felt hat-for-chapel, an Ox’s collar, and a cunningly arranged strap of sleigh bells. Its head was a gourd of some sort, softening in the back, and the seeds falling out of an abrasion in the vegetable skull were being nibbled by field mice. “Get away from my man Jack!” roared the Lion, but when the mice scattered in terror, he had to weep. He’d come to this: lording it over dumb mice in drought-slackened fields. And talking to a dummy, the best he could claim as a friend.

He crossed the border from Gillikin into Munchkinland near the southern edge of the Madeleines. He wanted to steer wide of the Ghullim, so he headed southwest toward the spot where the Yellow Brick Road breached the Munchkin River across a span of nine murth-stone arches. On the far side, the terrain lay down and refused to move, not even a wrinkle in the dustland. Suitable for little but subsistence farming. None of the great Munchkinland bounty you’d find in the Corn Basket farther north. Just scrappy farms worn grey with wind and regret.

One job he could take, and he did without mortification, was the carting of manure from farm stables. In this wasteland, farmers couldn’t manage a decent yield of crops without manure. So the stables were shit factories. Whether the Animals were glad enough for their oats to shit on demand, Brrr didn’t know, and he took pains not to ask. Coming face-to-face with a Stallion in tethers, Brrr behaved as if he were a mute Lion, or perhaps ignorant of basic Ozish. He had no doubt the Stallion could see right through the ruse, but it still seemed correct to feign being dumb.

He got the job done, was paid in innards and offal.

He slept apart, alone, and stayed until his insomnia flared up again, at which point he moved on to the next farm. A constantly changing horizon seemed the only prophylactic against his obsessive review of his grievances.