Dancing with Bears

by Michael Swanwick

  Pepsicolova tied up the skiff at the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. Here, dim streaks of lichen provided some feeble light. As she always did, she paused at the bronze statue of a young man and his dog to touch a snout already rubbed shiny. “For luck,” she explained and, to her surprise, Darger did the same. “Why did you do that? This is my superstition, not yours.”

  “A man in my profession by necessity courts Lady Luck. Nor do I sneer at any superstition, lest there be some practical reason behind it, as in the well-observed fact that a man walking under a ladder is far more likely to have a hammer dropped upon his head than one walking cautiously around it, or that breaking a mirror necessarily entails the bad luck of enraging its owner.”

  “Exactly what is your profession?”

  “Right now, I am searching for Tsar Ivan.”

  “Lenin.”

  “Of course.” Darger unfolded a map of Moscow. “We are now directly below-here? A brief walk from the Resurrection Gates?”

  “That is correct.”

  Darger got out his book, flipped to a page midway through it, and nodded with satisfaction. Then, repocketing the tome, he said, “We shall extend our search into the underground passages below the south wall of the Kremlin and above the river.”

  “The south wall? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should be aware that most people think that the tomb is buried somewhere under Red Square.”

  “Which is precisely why nobody has found it yet,” Darger said with an infuriatingly superior smile. “Shall we go on?”

  They were coming into Dregs territory. Pepsicolova closed her lantern so that only the merest slit of light shone out. More than that would have identified them as rank outsiders, and thus enemies. Moving in total darkness, as the Dregs themselves did, would have identified them as strangers who knew their way around, and thus both enemies and spies. The territory between the two identities was extremely narrow, and there were times when she suspected it existed only in her mind.

  She pushed through a rusty metal door which squealed as it opened and slammed shut noisily behind them. They boomed down a short flight of iron stairs. The air here felt stale and yet she could sense a great openness before her. The light from her lantern did not reach to the far wall.

  They walked forward, dead cockroaches crunching underfoot.

  “This is the largest space we’ve been in so far.” Darger’s voice echoed hollowly. “What is it?”

  “Before it was built over, it was something called a motorway-a road the ancients built for their slave machines to carry them along. Now hush. We’ve made more than enough noise already.”

  There were whole tribes of people living in the darkness under Moscow. These were the broken and the homeless, the mentally ill and those suffering from the gross reshapings of viruses left over from long-forgotten wars. The more competent among them went aboveground periodically to scrounge through garbage bins, shoplift, or beg on the streets. Others sold drugs or their bodies to people who would, as likely as not, soon end up living down here themselves. As for the rest, no one knew how they managed to stay alive, save that often enough they didn’t.

  The Dregs were reputed to be the oldest and maddest of the tribes in the City Below. They lived in abject fear, and this made them dangerous.

  From the darkness ahead came the sound of one metal pipe being steadily and rhythmically struck by another.

  “Shit,” Pepsicolova said. “The Dregs have spotted us.”

  “They have? What does that mean?”

  She put down her lantern on the ground and closed its shutters completely. The darkness wrapped itself around them like a thick black blanket. “It means that we wait. Then we negotiate.”

  They waited. After a time, there was the scruff of feet on pavement and then a wavering quality to the darkness before them. Out of nowhere someone said, “Who are you, and what are you doing where you don’t belong?”

  “My name is Anya Pepsicolova. Either you know me or you’ve heard of me.”

  There was a quiet murmur of voices. Then silence again.

  “My companion and I are searching for something that was lost long ago, before any of us was born. We have no reason to disturb you, and we promise to stay away from your squat.”

  “I’m sorry,” the voice said in a tone utterly without regret. “But we’ve made a treaty with the Pale Folk. They leave us alone and we defend their southern border. I’ve heard you are a dangerous woman. But nobody goes back on a promise to the Pale Folk. So you must either turn back or be killed.”

  “If it’s any help-” Darger began.

  “Shut up.” Anya Pepsicolova stuck a cigarette in her mouth. Then, narrowing her eyes almost shut, she struck a match. Briefly revealed before her were eight scrawny figures, wincing away from the sudden flare of light. They were armed with sharpened sticks and lengths of pipe, but only three of them looked like they could fight. She noted their positions well. Then, waving the match out, she raised her voice: “I’ve eaten with the Dregs and slept in your squat. I know your laws. I have the right to challenge one of your number to individual combat. Who among you is willing to fight me? No rules, no limits, one survivor.”

  A new voice, male and husky and amused in the way that only somebody sure of his own strength could be, said, “That would be me.” By its location, the voice belonged to the biggest one of the lot. He was standing just right of center before her.

  “Good.” A flick of the wrist brought Saint Methodia to her hand. Swiftly, before her opponent could move from where she’d seen him standing, Pepsicolova sent her flying straight and hard into his gut.

  The man screamed and fell to the ground, blubbering and cursing. There was a ripple in the darkness as the others converged upon him.

  “I’ll need my knife back, thank you.”

  After a slight hesitation, somebody threw Saint Methodia to the ground at her feet. Pepsicolova picked her up, wiped her on the front of one trouser leg, and returned her to her sheath.

  “Tell the Pale Folk that Anya Pepsicolova comes and goes as she pleases. If they want me dead, they can do the work themselves without involving the Dregs. But I don’t think they will.” She held up a pack of cigarettes. “Where do you think I got these?” Then she laid it down on the ground, and a second atop it. “This is my payment for our passage. Every time we pass through your territory in the future, I’ll leave another two packs.”

  Pepsicolova picked up the lantern and opened its shutters, revealing a clutch of ragged figures desperately trying to patch up their fallen comrade. “He’s not going to survive a wound like that,” she said. “The best you can do for him now is to roll him over and stomp down hard on his neck.” Then, to Darger: “Let’s go.”

  They walked down the center of the motorway away from the Dregs. With every step, she expected an iron pipe or a brick to come flying out of the darkness toward the back of her head. It was what she would have done in their circumstances. But nothing happened, and at last the sounds made by the dying man faded to inaudibility behind them. Pepsicolova released a breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding in, and said, “We’re safe now.”

  She waited for Darger to thank her for saving his life. But he only said, “Don’t think I’m paying for those cigarettes. All expenses are covered by your salary.”

  The three stranniks walked through the Moscow underworld as they would have the true Underworld-with their shoulders back and their heads high, secure in the strength of their own virtue and the unwavering support of a loyal and doting Deity. Because Koschei was the first among equals, he led. Chernobog and Svarozic followed a half-step behind, listening respectfully as he talked.

  “When I was a boy, there was a metal girder sticking up out of the ground in the woods outside my village. If you pressed an ear to it, you could hear voices, many voices, sounding very small and far away. And if you closed your eyes and held your breath and concentrated as hard as you could, you
could make out what they were saying. These were the demons and mad gods that the Utopians had in their folly created and released into their world-straddling web, of course, but the village brats did not understand that. They understood only that if you took a younger child there and forced him to listen, he would hear things that would terrify him. Often he would cry. Sometimes he would piss himself.

  “Then, of course, they would laugh.

  “I was a saintly child, obedient to my parents, uncomplaining at my chores, happy to go to church, devout at prayer. So it was with sadistic glee that these snot-nosed, plague-pocked, half-naked sons of Satan led me to the girder and shoved my face against it.”

  “Children should be beaten regularly,” Chernobog said, “to control their unnatural impulses.”

  Svarozic nodded in agreement.

  “I did not want to do as my cruel and faithless sometime-playmates commanded, and so they hit me and kicked me with feet that had never known shoes and so were hard as horn, until finally, reeling, I felt my ear strike the metal. There were voices, tiny as those of insects and almost impossible to hear. But when I closed my senses to the outer world, I could just barely make them out. Abruptly, they all ceased. Then a single small voice said: We know you are listening.

  “I jerked away with a cry. But the others slammed me back against the girder so hard that my skull rang and blood trickled down my cheek.‘Tell us what it says!’ one of the boys commanded.

  “Fearfully I obeyed. ‘It says it knows there are seven of us. It says when it gets out of Hell and into the real world, it will kill us all.’ Then it told me how we would die, in slow and careful detail. I repeated every word to the others. They stopped laughing. Then they turned pale. One burst into tears. Another ran away. Before long, I was all alone in the woods. I clutched the girder tightly to keep from falling down from the shock and horror of the blasphemies I heard. But I kept listening.

  “I was as terrified as any of the other children had been. But I knew that what I was hearing was not merely the babble of demons. It was the true voice of the World. I realized then that existence was inherently evil. From that moment onward, I hated it with all of my heart. And I went back regularly to listen to the demons so that I might learn to hate it better. That was the beginning of my religious education.”

  “Hatred is the beginning of wisdom,” Chernobog agreed.

  Svarozic seized Koschei’s hands in his and kissed them fervently.

  They came to one of the stations on the underground canal and paid a boatman to take them to the Ploshchad Revolutsii docks. There, an ash-pale wraith emerged from a side-passage, lantern in hand. It bowed.

  This was Koschei’s first encounter with one of the Pale Folk. He studied the scrawny figure with disapproval, but said nothing.

  “Are you here to lead us to the underlords?” Chernobog asked.

  The pallid thing nodded.

  “Then do so.”

  Deep, deep into the darkness they went, through service tunnels strewn with garbage and down rough-hewn passages carved into the bedrock and smelling of shit and piss. (Koschei, who knew that all of the sinful world was odious to the nostrils of the Divine, felt a twinge of satisfaction at this momentary revelation of its true nature.) After a time, whispery shadows of footfalls sounded behind them. “We are being followed,” Koschei observed.

  Svarozic smiled.

  “Yes,” said Chernobog. “Doubtless the border-guards of one of the outcast settlements. They will have sent somebody ahead to alert their executive committee of our coming.”

  They proceeded onward until they came to a narrow and railingless set of stairs that followed the curving interior of an ancient brick cistern. This they descended, the lantern casting a crescent of light on the wall before them. The cistern had been breached ages before but was damp to the touch from the mingled and condensed exhalations of the undercity. At its bottom was a miniature slum city where the squatters had made their camp. From crude shelters built of discarded shards of timber, old blankets, and packing crates, the last few stragglers emerged and joined those already waiting. These ragged folk lifted up their hands in joyful obeisance.

  “This is a settlement so small it has no name,” Chernobog said. “I have been here before. Its inhabitants are all drug users or mentally afflicted, and, living so near to Pale Folk territory, their numbers have been dwindling in recent months.”

  A toothless crone whom, despite her decrepitude, Koschei shrewdly estimated to be but in her thirties, clutched him about the waist and cried, “Have you come to bless us, holy one? Have you come to relieve our suffering?”

  Gently, he raised the hag up and enfolded her in a hug. Then he peeled her off of him. “Do not fear. The day of your liberation is almost at hand.” He gestured, and the squatters gathered before him in a semicircle. “Today I have come to feed you not with food which passes down the gullet and through the digestive organs and then squeezes out the anus and is gone forever, nor with wine which is drunk in an hour and then pissed away in a minute, but with wisdom which, once taken in, stays with you forever.”

  Koschei bowed his head, thinking, for a minute.

  Then he spoke: “Blessed are the diseased, for theirs is the kingdom of the flesh. Blessed are those who seek death, for they shall not be disappointed. Blessed are those who have nothing, for they shall inherit the void. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for vengeance, for their day is fast in the coming. Blessed are those who have received no mercy, for no mercy shall they show. Blessed are they who stir up strife, for all the world shall be their enemies. Blessed are those who have been abused without reason, for theirs is the kingdom of madness. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and speak all kinds of evil against you, for your hearts shall burn with passion. Blessed above all are the lustful, for they shall know God. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is not only in the spirit and the future, but in the body, and we have come to give it to you now.”

  Koschei stretched out his hands in blessing then, and Chernobog said, “Rejoice, for we have brought God to dwell within you for a space.”

  Then Koschei, Svarozic, and Chernobog passed through the crowd, moving their thumbs repeatedly from vials to tongues, until all present were ablaze with the sacred fire of the rasputin. After which they resumed their pilgrimage, leaving these most wretched creatures in all of Russia ecstatically coupling with each other in their wake. Briefly, one of their number rose up from the tangle of bodies to call after them, “We are forever in your debt, oh holy ones!”

  Without looking back, Koschei raised a hand in dismissal. To his brothers-for their wan guide did not count as an audience-he observed, “All debts will one day be called in, and then they shall be repaid in full.”

  Some time later two of the Pale Folk emerged from a side passage and fell in step with the stranniks. Over their shoulders they carried a metal pole. From it hung a woman, tied head and foot, like game being brought back from the hunt. She struggled furiously and finally managed to dislodge her gag.

  “Holy pilgrims! Thank God!” she gasped. “You must free me from these monsters.”

  “What wickedness did you do, my daughter, to find yourself in so dire a situation?” Koschei asked.

  “I? Nothing! Those ass-fucking Diggers betrayed me. They-”

  Svarozic restored and tightened the gag and then kissed the woman on the forehead. “If you have done no evil,” Koschei said, “then be comforted, for I am sure that you will die in a state of grace.”

  At last the narrow ways opened up into a cavernous space, at the far end of which was an enormous doorway, three times the height of a man and made of smooth and unstained metal, such as could not be replicated today in any forge in the world. The door appeared at first to be shut. Only as they neared it could they see that it gaped slightly ajar, just wide enough for one person to pass through it at a time. The gap was guarded by another pale-skinned individual who favored them with neither word nor nod
but merely stood aside to let the two Pale Folk, their captive, the three pilgrims, and the guide pass within.

  Thus did the strannik Koschei complete his long journey from Baikonur.

  Darger was driving Pepsicolova mad with his little book. He referred to it often, though not as one would a reference work, nor again as (quite) a map, nor yet as one would an inspirational tome such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Machiavelli’s The Prince. He treated it almost as if it were Generation P or the I Ching or some other traditional book of divination. Yet, despite his humoring her small superstitions, Darger was clearly a rationalist. Pepsicolova could not imagine him believing in such mystic claptrap.

  “If you would only be a little more open about the methodology of your search,” she said, “perhaps I could be of more help.”

  “Oh, no need. We’re doing quite splendidly as it is.” Darger removed the book from his inner pocket, flipped quickly to a place in its center, and snapped it shut again. “In fact, I dare say we’re ahead of schedule.”

  “What schedule are you talking about? And what’s in that book you’re always looking at?”

  “Book? Oh, you mean this thing? Nothing of any importance. Sermons and homilies and the like.” He put a hand flat on a section of brick wall. “Does this seem particularly weak to you?”

  “No, it does not.”

  “The bricks are soft and crumbly, though. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to give them a try.”

  “As you command.” So common had Darger’s demands for demolition become that Pepsicolova had taken to carrying a pry-bar with her, almost like a walking stick. She hoisted it level with the wall and thrust forward hard.

  The bar punched straight through the brick. When she drew it back, there was a hole through to a space on the other side. “Enlarge it! Quickly!” Darger urged her. Then, when the hole was big enough, he began tugging and pulling at the bricks himself, yanking them free, until the opening was sufficient for them to clamber through and into the room beyond. Lanterns first, they entered.