Dancing with Bears

by Michael Swanwick

  “Your papa’s staying with the neighbors, kid. The ones around to the rear,” the Neanderthal said. “You might wanna join him.”

  “Thanks, I’ll… I’ll do that.” He put down the armload of flowers. “These are the roses they wanted. That the Pearls requested, I mean.”

  Casually, then, he walked away and around the corner of the house, as if he were going to the Babochkins. He stood in the shadows waiting until he heard the guard knock the ashes from his pipe, gather up the roses, and go indoors. Then he went to the oldest and largest of the oaks. Nimbly, he climbed up it and took his station deep within its leaves, where he could see into the second floor.

  Arkady’s fingers bled from dethorning the roses, but his hands still smelled of their attar. He held them up to his nose and his heart soared nonetheless.

  For a long, enchanted timeless time, Arkady spied on the Pearls. Much later, he would learn their individual names and personalities: laughing Aetheria, shy Nymphodora, mischievous twins Eulogia and Euphrosyne, solemn Olympias, and scornful Russalka. Their ringleader, Zoesophia, he had already seen. They wore…Well, who was Arkady to say that they wore too little clothing? Their mothers certainly would. But not he. If the clothes were flimsy and habitually revealed their ankles, their stomachs, and their long white arms, and occasionally hinted that further revelation was at hand…Well. That was all Arkady could say.

  Their activities, it had to be admitted, were nothing like the fantasies he had conjured up in his mind. They played checkers and whist and charades. Nymphodora arranged the roses he had given the Neanderthal to deliver (and to Arkady’s dismay, pricked her finger on a lone thorn he had inexplicably missed), while the twins sang traditional Russian songs from sheet music they had found in a chest by his mother’s piano, and Olympias played accompaniment on the balalaika with such skill that when she put it down and remarked, “Not bad for the first time,” Arkady blinked in astonishment.

  But which one was his love?

  In an agony of delight and despair, he stared fixedly at each Pearl whenever she jumped to her feet and ran to fetch something, hoping to identify her by her walk.

  And then, at last, a serene vision of beauty floated to the window, a single thornless rose tucked behind one ear. She lifted her chin up to the moon, extending the line of a neck that was as pure and beautiful as any line Pushkin had ever written, and as she did the light from a nearby candle sconce flashed on an eye as green as jungle fire.

  Arkady caught his breath.

  Then the corners of her eyes wrinkled up with amusement. And he knew: It was her, it was her, it was her!

  “You may as well reveal yourself, young man. I can hear you breathing and smell your pheromones.” She looked straight at him.

  Arkady stood. As in a dream, he wobblingly walked forward along the branch, one foot before the other, until he was so close to the girl he could almost but not quite have reached out and touched her with an outstretched arm. There he stopped.

  “Whatever are you doing, perched up in a tree like a bird?”

  “In a magical moment I’ll remember forever,” Arkady said, “I raised my eyes and there you were-a fleeting vision, the quintessence of all that’s beautiful and rare.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly.

  Emboldened, Arkady added, “My voice, to which love lends tenderness and yearning, disturbs night’s dreamy calm, as pale at my bedside burning, a taper wastes away. From my heart there surge swift words, streams of love, that hum and sing and merge and, full of you, rush on, with overflowing passion.” He stretched out that arm that still could not reach his beloved, and she took a hasty step backward. “I seem to see your eyes, glowing in the darkness, meet mine… I see your smile. You speak to me alone. My friend, my dearest friend… I love… I’m yours…your own.”

  Giggles erupted, and, with a sudden jolt, Arkady realized that five more of the Pearls had crept up behind his beloved and stood listening silently while all his attention was on her and her alone. Now, seeing their amusement, he flushed with embarrassment, and they burst into outright laughter.

  Zoesophia, who had been lost in a book, suddenly snapped it shut and strode forward, scattering all the Pearls but one before her. “You’ve had your fun, Arkady Ivanovich-for who else could you possibly be?-but now it is time my girls were abed. Aetheria, come away from the window.”

  Aetheria turned back pleadingly. “Please, Zoesophia. The young man spoke so well. I would like to give him a small favor in return.”

  “You may not so much as lift a finger to do so.”

  Aetheria bowed in acquiescence. Then she curled one leg up behind herself and with delicate toes plucked the flower from her ear. Languidly, the rose descended behind her. Slowly her torso rose upright again. Then, with a snap of her knee, she flung the flower to the back of her hand. Without using her fingers, she lofted it out the window.

  Startled, Arkady reflectively snatched it from the air.

  When he looked up again, Zoesophia had slammed the shutters closed.

  Arkady had climbed up the tree a man in love. He climbed down it in the throes of passion.

  Above, he could hear Zoesophia clap her hands, gathering the Pearls about her. “Page fifty-five of your exercise books,” she said, and there were groans, followed by a rustling noise as the girls flipped through the pages.

  Arkady felt a twinge of pity for the virgins, forced by their strict mistress to spend so much time on musical or sewing or physical exercises, whatever they might be. But that sentiment disappeared almost immediately as his thoughts fled from their drear and passionless lives and back to Aetheria. Aetheria! However stern and forbidding Zoesophia might be, Arkady would be forever grateful to her for providing him with the name of his love. Oh, Aetheria, I would die for you, Arkady thought. If you ordered it, I would plunge a knife into my heart right here and now. Just to prove how I feel about you.

  Although he had to admit he rather hoped to prove his love in a different manner.

  As he wandered away into the warm and welcoming darkness, Arkady heard Zoesophia’s voice slowly fading behind him.“This exercise is called the Position of the Camel and the Monkey. It is particularly tricky, for it involves…”

  Almost randomly, he discovered himself at the front of the house. Only a dark smear of dottle on the front step remained to indicate that the Neanderthal guard had ever been there. An open window framed a tableau of dark figures crouched over the sickbed in the converted pantry. Arkady leaned against the sill, dizzy with emotion. He did not at first mean to eavesdrop. But the dull orange light drew his eye, and the night was quiet. So, perforce, he saw and heard everything.

  “There!” Koschei straightened from the ambassador. “I have massaged enough of the blood back to his brain for the prince to regain consciousness. My drugs will give him the strength to speak. Most importantly, I have prayed constantly to God to forgive us for impiously prolonging the life of an infidel. See-even now he struggles to awaken. In another minute, you may speak with your master.”

  “You are a miracle-worker,” Surplus said.

  Koschei stood, hands clasped, as if in prayer. “All miracles come from God. Use this one wisely.” He stepped back against the wall, where he was half-hidden in shadow, and stood watching silently.

  Prince Achmed opened his eyes. Only a robust and active man could have survived the long trek across Asia Minor, but now he looked nothing of the sort. His face was sunken and the skin about his eyes was as pale as milk.

  Darger knelt by the ambassador’s side and clasped the man’s hands in his. Across the bed from him, Surplus also knelt. They both bent low to hear his words.

  “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 i
s 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.”

  …3…

  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.”

  “Your words are proud,” Darger said, “and yet your tone is bitter.”

  “Yesterday I lost four warriors, and their kind cannot be replaced.” Gulagsky shook his head shaggily. “I have held this town together with my b
are hands. Now I wonder if it is enough. When I first started my patrols, twenty, thirty, sometimes even fifty good, strong men came with me at a time. And now…” For a moment Gulagsky was silent. “All the best men have died, torn apart by strange beasts or felled by remnant war viruses.”

  “Your son seemed eager to go out with you,” Surplus said. “Perhaps he could recruit among his friends.”

  “My son!” Gulagsky snorted. The sullen young man himself did not look up from his platter. “He and his generation are as weak as water. They-”

  Abruptly, Koschei broke out of his reverie and stood. “I am called to Moscow to set matters straight and put an end to its decadent ways,” he announced. “These heathen atheists and their vat-bred abominations are going to that cesspool of sin. Therefore they must take me with them.”

  Everyone stared at the strannik in astonished silence for a beat. Then Darger dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin and said, “The person to decide that would be Prince Achmed.”

  “Your ambassador will be dead within days.”

  “Yes, perhaps… but still… No, it is quite impossible, I am afraid. Even without the invaluable presence of a prince, we are a delegation, sir. Not a commercial caravan to which travelers might attach themselves.”

  The strannik’s eyes were two dark coals. “That is your final answer?”

  “It is.”

  He appealed to Gulagsky. “Will you not use your influence on your guests to alter their decision?”

  Gulagsky spread his arms. “You see that their minds are set. What can I do?”

  “Very well,” the strannik said. “In that case, I have no choice but to inform you that last night your son spent an hour up in a tree, first watching and then romancing one of the young women under your protection.”