For a moment, Cuthbert pictured his father, swilling lager in the old sitting room, raising his battered Spode mug from the queen’s coronation, and belting out the words never never never never shall be slaves as the Proms blared on television. So much for lionhearted.
Still, Cuthbert felt a serious sympathy for the lions. Their images still ennobled pound coins, chocolate bars, passports, treacle tins. He himself knew every detail of the three Plantagenet lions passant on England’s football jersey. Then there were Landseer’s pigeon-shite-speckled quartet of bronze males at Trafalgar Square, supporting Great Britain’s public imperial phallus. A thousand drainage-spigots shot through lion mouths on churches. Countless misericords, crests, hallmarks on wedding bands—the country was overrun by an animal which had not been native to its soil since the Pleistocene. Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, and even Tehran, one might argue, held legitimate claims on the image. Rome could offer a certain logic for leophilia, perhaps. But London? Since Henry Plantagenet had housed his lions in Tower Menagerie, in 1235, the lions had lent England muscle it could not find in itself, at least not until the massive remilitarization under Harry9. And in the country’s last zoological project, its lions lived in a cramped, bewildering terrace covered in dirt. The case for change was strong.
“In one way or another, we have been the clawed scepter of all your kings and queens, and surely, with the great King Henry, our time has come.”
“Oi’m mulling it,” Cuthbert had told them. “If it’s good for the king and country, and all that. You do sound like you’ve been . . . in the wars,” he said, echoing his doctor, whose ministrations seemed so far away now. It was all he knew to say. The lions just seemed too large a problem to deal with, for now.
“Where would you go, if I was, somehow, to let you lot out?”
“We’ll go to war for you,” Arfur said. “Against the republicans, against the religious fanatics, against fallen demons from the sky. We’ll fight in the streets, in the hills, in the fields. We’ll never surrender.”
“Oh, that’s bloody innovaytive, that,” said Cuthbert. “But let me think about it all. Do you think King Henry would approve?”
“We are King Henry, and he is us. But this is no time for ease,” he answered. “It’s time to dare.”
“Get off my wick.”
Cuthbert felt hard-pressed to make a decision, or at least to tell Arfur what he had long planned.
“I supposed I might as well say that I’ve mostly made up my mind. It’s going to be the jackals first. They’re the closest things to dogs, aren’t they? And I owe the dogs of this world, for my evil to them as a child. I owe ’em. Then we’ll . . . see.”
“Jackals?” gasped Arfur. He guffawed showily in Cuthbert’s ears. “Starting on a rather tenuous note, if you ask me. Good god, man. How will you save the English?”
“But my mind’s made up, and I won’t change.”
With that, Arfur and the other lions let out a loud and most pained chorus.
cuthbert’s grotto
CUTHBERT NOW LOWERED HIMSELF TO THE ground and moved toward his grotto, dragging his stomach over the damp soil. A foot or two more, that was all. Hazelnuts from last summer, now brown and soft like tiny rotten cabbages, rolled under his big abdomen. He stuck his head into the small cavern in the vegetation he had chosen so capably. Years of sleeping rough had given him an intuitive skill at finding hiding places in the midst of the metropolis. The city possessed countless nooks, hanging flanges, recesses in Victorian brick, but almost none went unused or uninspected, if only by other rough sleepers. You had to know what you were doing to find a quiet, safe, free place to sleep in London.
At last, his head ruptured one final net of twigs, and he poked it into his grotto. It was a perfect if messy lacuna, rounded and silent as an egg. He crawled forward on his hands and knees. He collapsed in fatigue. He was a very old man—far too old and too fat for this.
The grotto was like a zoological exhibit of its own—the parkland lair of an unhoused English urban Homo sapiens. There was an air of disgrace and commercialism about it. Weathered debris—soft-drink bottles, Flōt orbs, silvery torn-open Hula-Hoops, and Golden Wonder and Alga-Bite bags—lay on the ground and jammed into the branches of the shrubbery. Dark, shiny garden snails clung to the leafy walls of the space. They were the same sulfurous yellow-brown as the decomposing leaves on the ground from last autumn. A slight depression in leaves and embankment, formed only by Cuthbert’s recent sometime habitation, made it look like a one-man version of some Iron Age hill fort.