Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

“Most of all, live life with all your heart and nerve and sinew. If you can talk with the common bloke without putting on airs and walk with the nobs without letting them relieve you of your watch and wallet… If you can enter a strange city dead broke and leave with your pockets stuffed with cash…Why, then, old son, you’ll be a confidence man, and all the Earth and everything in it will be yours.”

Face screwed up with disgust, Kyril turned and left without saying a word.

“Well,” Darger murmured. “I thought I understood young boys. But clearly I do not.” His hand hesitated over the Telegonia, but instead moved on to the papers. Kyril had brought both major dailies, the Moscow Conquest, and the New Russian Empire. Darger carefully read through the social notes in each. There had been time enough for the Muscovy officials to approach Surplus with plans to catch his errant secretary and claim the library for themselves. As soon as they did, Surplus was supposed to announce a masked ball.

But there was still no news.

Chortenko came out to greet the carriage personally. “Gospozha Zoesophia! What a delightful surprise.” He took her gloved hand and kissed the air above it. Then he offered Surplus a hearty, democratic handshake. “I have informed the duke you are coming, and he looks forward to the meeting with his usual attentiveness.”

“He does not seem to get out of the Kremlin much,” Surplus observed, retrieving his walking stick from the carriage.

Chortenko’s mouth quirked upward, as if he were secretly amused. “The great man’s work is his life.”

At that moment, a door opened and closed somewhere in the mansion so that briefly the yelping of hounds could be heard. “You have dogs!” Zoesophia cried. “Might we see them?”

“Yes, of course you shall. Only not just now. I have arranged for the Moscow City Troop to escort us to the Kremlin, and they are forming up on the other side of the building at this very moment. Shall we take my carriage or yours?”

“I am always keen for new experiences,” Zoesophia said, “whether they be large or small.”

But every hair on Surplus’s body was standing on end. His hearing was acute, as was his sensitivity to the emotions of his dumb cousins. Those dogs were not barking out of ordinary canine exuberance, but from pain and terror and misery. Surplus’s ears pricked up and his nostrils flared. He could smell from their pheromones that they had been extremely badly treated indeed.

Chortenko’s spectacles were twin obsidian circles. “You look alarmed, my dear fellow. Has something startled you?”

“I? Not at all.” Surplus turned to his coachman and with a dismissive wave of his paw sent their equipage back to the embassy.“Only, sometimes I am struck by sudden dark memories. As a man of the world and a sometime adventurer, I have seen more than my share of human cruelty.”

“We must trade stories someday,” Chortenko said amiably.“Those who appreciate such matters say that if you have not seen Russian cruelty, then you do not know cruelty at all.”

Chortenko’s carriage was painted blue-and-white, like his mansion, so that it resembled nothing so much as a Delftware teapot. When it was brought around, Zoesophia and Surplus were given the back seats, while Chortenko and his dwarf savants sat facing them.

Bracketed by horsemen, they started for the Kremlin.

“Tell me, Max,” Chortenko said, turning to the dwarf on his left. “What do we know about the tsar’s lost library?”

“In 1472, the Grand Duke of Moscow Ivan the Third married Princess Sofia Paleologina, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Andreas, more rightly known as the Despot of Morea. Despotism is a form of government where all power is embodied in a single individual. The individual self does not exist. As her dowry, Sofia brought to Moscow a wagon train of books and scrolls. Moscow was founded by Prince Yuri Dolgurki in 1147. Soddy podzolic soil is typical of Moscow Oblast. It is apocryphal that the books were the last remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria.”

“Of course, anything labeled apocryphal may also be true,” Chortenko mused.

“The Italian architect Aristotle Fioravanti was commissioned to build a secret library under the Kremlin. Fioravanti also served as a military engineer in the campaigns against Novgorod, Kazan, and Tver. Kazan is the capital of Tartarstan. Tartar sauce is made from mayonnaise and finely chopped pickled cucumber, capers, onions, and parsley, and was invented by the French to go with steak tartare. The last documented attempt to find the library was made by Tsar Nikita Khrushchev.”

“Yes, well, we seem to have gotten off the subject.” To Surplus, Chortenko said, “Have you heard the rumors? They say that the library has been found.”

“Really? That would make a splendid present for the Duke of Muscovy, then. One worthy of a Caliph.”

“That is true. Yet one cannot help wondering what would happen were the secret of the library’s location in private hands. Surely that lucky person-whoever he might be-would find himself in a position to claim an enormous reward, eh?”

“Unless he was a government official. Then, of course, his reward would be the simple knowledge that he had done his duty.”

“Indeed. Yet a private citizen would not be in a position to know whether the reward he was being offered was worthy of his heroic discovery. Perhaps the best possible arrangement would be a partnership involving somebody highly positioned within the government and somebody who was not even a citizen of Muscovy. A foreigner, possibly even an ambassador. What do you think?”

“I think we understand each other perfectly.” Surplus settled back into the cushions, warmed by the abrupt conviction that all was right with the world. “I think also that it is about time that the embassy had a masked ball. I shall advertise the event in the newspapers just as soon as I get back.”

The troops clattered up the great causeway to the Kremlin, driving before them businessmen, mendicants, office-seekers, and assorted riffraff unfortunate enough to have chosen that day to petition favors from the government. At the Trinity Tower gate, they were halted and then, their jurisdiction extending so far and not an inch farther, turned back. After an examination of credentials, the carriage was allowed to pass within, accompanied by an escort of Trinity Tower Regulars. At Cathedral Square they alit and, after their papers were presented again, the Inner Kremlin Militia escorted the party to the entrance of the Great Kremlin Palace. There, the Great Palace Guards assumed responsibility for the party, led them up a marble staircase, and directed them onward.

“It seems odd we must go through one palace to get to another,” Surplus remarked.

“Nothing is straightforward in this land,” Chortenko replied.

They passed under twin rows of crystal chandeliers in Georgievsky Hall, an open, light-flooded room of white pillars and parquet floors in twenty types of hardwood, then through its great mirrored doors to the octagonal Vladimirsky Hall with its steep domed ceiling and gilt stucco molding. From whence it was but a short walk to the entrance of the most splendid of the Kremlin’s secular buildings, Terem Palace.

Two eight-foot-tall guards, whose genome was obviously almost entirely derived from Ursus arctos, the Russian brown bear, loomed to either side of the entrance. The blades of their halberds were ornamented with ormolu swirls, and yet were obviously deadly. They bared sharp teeth in silent growls, but when Chortenko presented his papers (for the fourth time since entering the Kremlin), they waved the party within.

Surplus took one step forward and then froze.

The walls were painted in reds and golds that were reflected in the polished honey-colored floor, leaving Surplus feeling as if he were afloat in liquid amber. Every surface was so ornately decorated that the eye darted from beauty to beauty, like a butterfly unable to alight on a single flower. Somewhere, frankincense burned. From one of the nearby churches he heard chanting. Then, small and far away, a church bell began to ring. It was joined by more and closer bells, climaxing when all the Kremlin’s many churches joined in, so that his skull reverberated with the sound.