Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

Conversing, they traveled back the way the caravan had originally come. After several miles, the road crossed a barren stretch of rocks and sand and Gulagsky said, “This is the turnoff.”

“But it is no more than a goat trail!” Surplus exclaimed.

“So you would think. These are terrible times, sirs, and my townsfolk have carefully degraded the intersection in order to keep our location obscure. If we follow the track for roughly half a mile, we will come upon a recognizable road.”

“I feel better,” Darger said, “for missing it earlier.”

In less than an hour, the new road had dipped into a small, dark wood. When it emerged, they found themselves in sight of Gulagsky’s town. It was a tidy place clustered atop a low hill, gables and chimneypots black against the sunset. Here and there a candle glowed yellow in a window. Had it not been for the impenetrable military-grade wall of thorn-hedges that surrounded it, and the armed guards who watched alertly from a tower above the thick gates, it would have been the homiest sight imaginable.

Darger sighed appreciatively. “I shall be glad to sleep on a proper mattress.”

“My town has few travelers and thus no taverns in which to house them. Yet have no fear. You shall stay in my house!” Gulagsky said. “You will have my own bed, piled high with blankets and pillows and feather bolsters, and I shall sleep downstairs in my son’s room and he on the floor in the kitchen.”

Darger coughed embarrassedly into his hand.

“Well, you see…” Surplus began. “Regrettably, that is not possible. We require an entire building for the embassy. A tavern would have been better, but a private house will do if it has sufficient rooms. In neither case, however, can it be shared with any other person. Not even servants. Its owners are straight out of the question. Nothing less will do.”

Gulagsky gaped at them. “You reject my hospitality?

“We have no choice,” Darger said. “We are bound for Muscovy, you see, bearing a particularly fine gift for its duke-a treasure so rare and wondrous as to impress even that mighty lord. So extraordinary are the Pearls of Byzantium that a mere glimpse of them would excite avarice in the most saintly of men. Thus-and I do regret this-they must be kept away from prying eyes as much as possible. Simply to prevent strife.”

“You think I would steal from the men who saved my life?”

“It is rather hard to explain.”

“Nevertheless,” Surplus said, “and with our sincerest apologies, we must insist.”

Gulagsky turned red, though whether from anger or humiliation could not be told. Rubbing his beard fiercely, he said, “I have never been so insulted before. By God, I have not. To be turned out of my own house! From anyone else, I would not take it.”

“Then we are agreed,” Darger said. “You truly are a generous fellow, my friend.”

“We thank you, sir, for your understanding,” Surplus said firmly. In the town above them, church bells began to ring.

Arkady Ivanovich Gulagsky was drunk on poetry. He lay on his back on the roof of his father’s house singing:

“Last cloud of a storm that is scattered and over,

“Alone in the skies of bright azure you hover…”

Which was not technically true. The sky was low and dark with a thin line of vivid sunset squeezed between earth and clouds to the west. In addition, the winds were autumn-cold, and he hadn’t bothered to don a jacket before climbing out through an attic dormer window. But Arkady didn’t care. He had a bottle of Pushkin in one hand and a liquid anthology of world poetry in the other. They came from his father’s wine cellar. The cellar was a locked room in a locked basement, but Arkady had grown up in that house and knew all its secrets. Nothing in it could be kept from him. He had slipped through a casement window into the basement and then, up among the joists, found the wide, loose board that could be pulled open a good foot, and so squeezed within and, groping in the dark, stolen two bottles at random. It was an indication of his characteristic good fortune that the one happened to be the purest Pushkin, just as it was an indication of his extreme callowness that he had chosen to drink it in tandem with a poorly organized selection of foreign verses and short prose extracts in mediocre translations.

The bells began ringing from every church in the town. Arkady smiled. “How it swells!” he murmured.“How it dwells on the future!-how it tells of the rapture that impels to the swinging and the ringing of the bells, bells, bells”-he belched-“bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells-doesn’t this ever end?-rhyming and the chiming of the bells! I wonder what all the fuss is about?”

Arkady struggled into a sitting position, losing his grip on one bottle in the process. The Pushkin went bouncing down the roof, spraying liquid poetry, and shattered in the courtyard below. The young man frowned after it and brought the other bottle to his lips and drank it dry. “Think!” he told himself sternly. “What do they ring bells for? Weddings, funerals, church services, wars. None of which apply here or I should have known. Also to welcome home the prodigal son, the errant wanderer, the hero from his voyages… Oh, damn.”

He staggered to his feet. “My father!”

The dirt square before the city gates was thronged when Ivan Arkadyevich Gulagsky rode through the great thorn-hedge wall into town with three brightly-painted caravans in tow, a mounted stranger to either side, and the battered remains of a cyberwolf dragged on a rope behind him. His back was straight and his grin was wide, and he waved broadly to one and all. From the rear of the crowd, Arkady scowled with admiration. The old blowhard knew how to make an entrance-you had to give him that.

“Friends!” Gulagsky cried. “Neighbors! Townspeople!” Then he launched into a long-winded account of his exploits, to which Arkady paid little attention, for he was distracted by the sight of narrow win-dow-slides snapping open in the sides of the caravans. It was dark inside, but there was a shimmer of movement. What was in there? Prisoners? Animals of some kind? Freaks of nature or the gene vat? Arkady slipped lithely through the crowd, bent over almost double so as to avoid drawing attention, until he was crouching by one of the wagons, just beneath a slide. He straightened to look inside.

A huge hand clamped itself over his face, and he was thrown back onto the dirt. He found himself staring up at an enormous beast-man.

“Think you’re pretty cute, dontcha, chum?” the mountain of muscles snarled. By his accent, he’d acquired Russian from a tutorial ale. “Well, get this: You so much as touch the wagon and I’ll rip off your hand. Peek inside and I’ll squeeze both eyes out of your head and feed ’em to you for breakfast. Understand?”

Arkady nodded meekly and made no attempt to rise as the behemoth strode scornfully away. “Things are in the saddle,” he muttered when he deemed himself safe again, “and ride mankind.”

Poetry made all things bearable.

But then a dark-robed figure reached down and effortlessly hauled Arkady to his feet. He found himself staring up into the fierce and unblinking eyes of Koschei, the strannik-wanderer, pilgrim-who had come to town out of the wastelands a few weeks ago and who so far showed no signs of ever leaving. This close, his body odor was overwhelming.

“God does not love a cowardly little sneak,” Koschei said. “Sin boldly, or not at all.” Then he spun about, robes swirling, and thumped away, lashing angrily at the earth with the great staff he so obviously did not need for support.

Arkady stared after him until the apparition disappeared in the crowd. Then he turned away and found himself face to face with his father, newly descended from the wagon and surrounded by men who were pounding his back and shaking his hand. A great surge of emotion washed through Arkady. He threw himself into his father’s arms.