Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

“I am dying,” Prince Achmed said.

“Say not so, sir,” Darger murmured reassuringly.

“I am dying, damn you! I am dying and I am a prince and either of those facts gives me leave to say whatever I wish.”

“Your Excellency is, as always, correct.” Darger cleared his throat. “Sir, there is a delicate matter we must discuss. The Pearls are incurring expenses that… Well, to pay for them, we must resort to the treasury-box, which, however, the Neanderthals will open only upon the ambassador’s direct orders.”

“That is of no importance.”

“Sir, even on our deathbeds, we must deal with the practicalities.”

“It is of no importance, I said! With my death, this mission comes to an end. It is a bitter, bitter thing that I could not fulfill it. But at least I can ensure that the Caliph’s present to his brother in Moscow is not cast at the feet of swine and defiled. Call in the captains of the Neanderthals. Call in Enkidu and Herakles and Gilgamesh, and I will order that the Pearls be killed.”

“That is a monstrous suggestion!” Surplus cried. “We shall be no part of it.”

“You would disobey me?”

“Yes,” Darger said quietly. “We have no choice.”

“Very well.” Prince Achmed closed his eyes wearily. “I know you two. Bring the Neanderthals before me so that I may command the death of the Pearls and I swear upon my honor that I will order them to open the treasury-box for you. Most of the mission’s wealth consists of promissory letters, and those only the ambassador can employ. But there is enough gold therein to bring you to Moscow, as you desire, and set you up there comfortably enough. Do we have an understanding?”

Reluctantly, Darger nodded. “We do.”

“Good. Then you must… must…”

Prince Achmed drifted back into unconsciousness again.

“Well,” Surplus said, after a long silence. “That didn’t go well.”

Arkady was horrified. Kill the Pearls? Aetheria had to be warned. And her friends as well, of course. He ran quickly back to the side of the house, only to be confronted by the firmly shuttered window. All the upper-story windows, in fact, had been shuttered, as he discovered when he ran around the building, looking for another way in.

Well, Arkady was not so easily stopped as all that. The kitchen door was latched shut, but he had learned as a boy that the latch could be opened from the outside, using a pasteboard holy card-and since he always carried St. Basil the Great’s image with him for luck, it was the easiest thing in the world to get inside.

Arkady slipped into the kitchen with its comfortable smells of bacon grease and cabbage. In one corner was the dumbwaiter that had been installed to bring food up to his mother during her final sickness. Arkady had only the vaguest memories of his mother, for she had died while he was a toddler, but he felt a great fondness for the dumbwaiter, because it was that device which had first taught him that the house was full of unintended secret passages.

He squeezed into the dumbwaiter and then slowly, silently, pulled the rope hand-over-hand, hoisting himself to the second floor.

Short though it was, the journey took a long time, for stealth was paramount. When at last the dumbwaiter reached its destination, Arkady remained motionless for twenty long breaths, listening. No light showed through the cracks around the door. The Pearls must all be asleep. Which meant that he would have to waken them with the greatest delicacy lest they be frightened out of their wits by an intruder in their midst.

With extreme care he pushed the door open. Slowly, he edged his feet over the sill. Hardly breathing, he stood.

A pair of tremendous gloved hands seized him by the throat, and a voice that could only belong to a Neanderthal said, “Got any last words, pal?”

Arkady gurgled.

“Didn’t think so.”

Arkady thrashed helplessly in the monster’s grip. “Please,” he managed to say, “I must tell-” Fingers as thick as sausages choked him silent again. His vision swam and pain exploded in his chest. He was, he realized with profound surprise, about to die.

A match scratched and an oil lamp flared, revealing the Pearls, clustered together in disappointingly modest flannel nightgowns. Their leader, Zoesophia, raised the lamp so she could see his face. “It is the young halfwit,” she said. “Hold off killing him until we have heard what he has to say.”

Dawn.

Surplus woke to the humble sounds of small-town life: the distant thump of the great green heart of the water pumping station contracting and expanding, birds singing, and the cries of sheep and goats and cows being brought out from their barns. “Fooood!” the sheep bleated and “Nowwww,” moaned the cows. Such animals had vocabularies of only five or six words, which hardly contributed much to interspecies communication. Surplus often thought that whichever bygone scientist it was who had thought it necessary for them to convey such obvious desires must have been an extremely shallow fellow and one, moreover, who had never owned an animal or been on a farm. But the past was the past and there was nothing to be done about it now.

He stretched, and got out of bed. The room he and Darger shared was small and located above the stable. There was no disguising the fact that it was normally used for storage. But they had been given sturdy beds and fresh linens and there was clean water in the washbasin on the nightstand. He had endured worse in his time.

Darger was already up and gone, so Surplus dressed and sauntered to the main house, whistling as he went.

Anya Levkova and her daughters Olga and Katia were in the kitchen, cooking vast amounts of food for their guests. White-gloved Neanderthals came and went, carrying heavily laden trays upstairs and returning to the kitchen with empty plates. Darger, looking atypically cheerful, as he always did when money was in the prospect, was at the dining room table alongside Koschei and across from Gulagsky’s son Arkady. The young man was silent and brooding, doubtless due to a perfectly appropriate embarrassment for his behavior yesterday. The pilgrim was muttering almost silently to himself, apparently lost in some variety of religious reverie.

Just as Surplus was sitting down, Gulagsky himself came roaring into the house.

“Anya, you slattern!” Gulagsky shouted. “Why is my friend Darger’s plate half empty? Where is my friend Surplus’s tea? Neither of them has a glass of buttermilk, much less kvass, and for that matter I myself am ravenously hungry and yet remain unfed, though God knows I spend enough on food for this household to feed every able-bodied man from here to Novo Ruthenia.”

“Such impatience,” the housekeeper said placidly. “You are not even seated and you expect to already be done eating.” Even as she spoke, Katia and Olga were dancing about the room, filling plates and glasses, and covering the table with as much food as it would bear.

Gulagsky sat down heavily and, forking up a sausage, two blini, and some sour cream, crammed them into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed and announced with evident satisfaction, “You see how prosperous we are here, eh? That is my doing. I have taken a town and made of it a kremlin.” (Surplus saw Arkady roll his eyes.) “You have seen the thorn-hedge walls surrounding us. Twenty years ago, I mortgaged all I owned to buy fifteen wagonloads of cuttings. Now they are eighteen feet tall, and so dense that a shrew could not make its way through them. Nor could anything short of an army force its way past.”

“Place not your faith in the works of man,” Koschei rumbled without looking up, “but in God alone.”

“Where was God when this town was dying? The countryside was emptying out when I planted the fortifications, and half our houses were abandoned. It was a true gorodishko then! I gathered in all who remained, created manufactories to give them jobs, and organized a militia to patrol the countryside. Everything you see here is my doing! I bought up every strain of poetry I could find at a time when it was out of fashion, and now every year hundreds of cases of it sell as far away as Suzdal and St. Petersburg. My cloneries have rare leathers-rhinoceros, giraffe, panther, and bison, to name but four-that can be obtained nowhere else on this continent.”