Dancing with Bears

by Michael Swanwick

  Olympias sniffed the air. “I smell smoke. Is there a building on fire? Is that why there’s nobody here?” “That is none of our concern,” Russalka said. “Let us go to our royal husband.”

  With Neanderthals to their front, back, and either side, the Pearls entered the palace and swept up the great staircase to the Georgievsky Hall. There were no guards at the door and the hall was empty. Lanterns burned unattended. The silence was so absolute it seemed to reverberate.

  “Maybe we shoulda sent word we was coming,” Enkidu said uneasily. “Hush,” Russalka snapped. “We go through those mirrored doors over there.” They pushed into the octagonal Vladimirsky Hall and came to a halt. For this room was not empty. Shaggy members of the Royal Guard slouched in delicately carved chairs that were surely worth more than they were, smoked cigars and spat on the floor, leaned against pristine white walls which would doubtless require cleaning as a result. Two were on their knees, shooting dice.

  “Cease this scandalous behavior!” Russalka commanded. “A palace is no place for such slovenliness. Our royal husband will be outraged when we tell him about it.”

  The guards stared. Those who were seated or kneeling rose to their feet.

  “Excuse me for pointing this out, Gospozha,” said their leader. “But you’re not supposed to be here at all. Much less ordering anybody around.”

  A Neanderthal stepped forward. “My name’s Enkidu. These are my boys.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Somehow, I seem not to have caught your name.”

  The bear-man’s lips curled back in a snarl. “Captain Pipaluk, of the Royal Guard.”

  “Well, Captain Pipaluk, I think you oughta treat these ladies with respect. They come all the way from Byzantium to marry your boss-man. They can cause you a lot of trouble.”

  All the bear-guards laughed coarsely. “Marry the duke?” their leader said. “Impossible!”

  “He’s in the Terem, right? Through that door there?

  Deadly serious again, Captain Pipaluk said, “He was the last time we saw him. But we’re not going through that door until we’re sent for-and neither are you.”

  Enkidu smiled brutishly. “In that case, we’re just gonna have to go through you guys.” As he spoke, the Neanderthals and the bear-guards all casually arrayed themselves for a fight.

  “Well, well, well,” Captain Pipaluk said. “This is a clash for the records. The gene vats of Byzantium against those of Russia. The old culture versus the new. Decadence against youth. Come to think of it, you’re even dressed for the part, with those pansy outfits and those silly little hats. I believe what we have here is a genuine passing-of-the-torch moment.”

  “You know what?” Enkidu said. “You speak real good. I don’t got no doubt you’re smarter than we are. Maybe you got better reflexes, too. Who knows, you might even be stronger. Stranger things have happened. But we still got one big advantage over you.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

  Enkidu cracked his knuckles. “We got you outnumbered three to one. In my experience, that means we win.”

  With a roar, the two groups surged into each other, fists flying.

  “Men!” Aetheria said. “Honestly.”

  “Oh, I know,” Euphrosyne said. “They look nice enough-but they’re always fighting and starting wars and the like. I think they’re just trying to impress one another.”

  “Well, they’re certainly not impressing me,” Eulogia said.

  “Meanwhile,” Russalka pointed out, “the way to the Terem Palace is open. Let’s just go.”

  “Oh!” gasped Nymphodora. “Can we?”

  “Fortune favors the bold,” Russalka said, and strode straight for the door. The other Pearls hurried in her wake.

  Anya Pepsicolova had had a home once. To return there was unthinkable, for it would bring the full weight of Chortenko and the underlords down upon her parents. In her new and nightmarish life, she had made many enemies but no friends. She had slept in a constantly changing series of cheap flats where she had kept only the most utilitarian of possessions. Fleeing, there was, in all of Moscow, only one possible destination.

  Chortenko’s mansion.

  Chortenko lived right off of the Garden Ring. From his front step, five separate fires were visible. But his mansion, unlike so many others, was not ablaze.

  Well…that could be remedied.

  Now that her head was beginning to clear, Pepsicolova was all but certain that she was not Baba Yaga anymore. Which meant either that the massive overdose of drugs she had taken was wearing off or that she’d fallen into a lower spiritual state, shedding her supernatural aspect and becoming merely human once again. She was not at all sure which interpretation she would have preferred, given the choice.

  If she was only human, however, that meant she would have to use cunning and guile, things her discarded witch-self would never have bothered with. Pepsicolova entered the mansion through the front door and walked calmly and unhurriedly to the records room. There Chortenko’s two dwarf savants were poring over a mountainous heap of files. Igorek picked up a report, flipped through it committing its contents to memory, and then handed it to Maxim, who did the same. After which, the report was carefully placed atop a roaring fire in the fireplace.

  The dwarfs looked up incuriously as she entered.

  “I am going to set fire to this building,” Pepsicolova said. “Your master will want to know this information. Go immediately and tell him.”

  Igorek and Maxim rose and left the room.

  Pepsicolova scooped up an armful of documents and one of the reading lanterns. Then she went to the top floor and set fire to all the curtains. That would start the house ablaze well enough, and by the time the fire burned down to the basement, she expected to have completed her business here.

  When enough time had elapsed for those on the ground floor to smell smoke, a servant came running up the stairs with a carafe of water in his hand. “Tell your master that Anya Alexandreyovna has come home,” Pepsicolova said. “Also, the building is on fire. It contains much that he values, so I’m certain that he’ll want to know.” To her own ear, her words sounded mild and reasonable. But something in her tone or expression made the servant turn tail and run, water spraying with each long stride. Not long later, she heard somebody outdoors banging a hammer on an iron fire triangle.

  Back down to the first floor she went.

  Throwing the mansion’s front doors wide open, Pepsicolova dropped a single folder on the mat. A few paces inward, she dropped a second folder. Leaving a line of reports behind her like a trail of breadcrumbs, she made her way down to Chortenko’s basement study, where he had once kept her in a cage.

  For her, this was where it had all begun.

  Here, it would end.

  Pushing open the door, she found herself in a room she knew only too well. At her entrance, the dogs leaped and barked and bayed in their cages, throwing themselves desperately against the bars. Already, they could smell smoke from the upper floor. It imbued the air with a tinge of madness.

  Closing the door behind her so that the final file was wedged under it, half on the landing and half in the study, Pepsicolova studied the dogs dispassionately. Had they been human beings, she would have left them in their cages without a second thought. She did not much like people. In her experience, they deserved pretty much whatever happened to them. But these were dogs and hence as innocent as she had been when the secret police had first brought her, naked and weeping, to this room. She could not let them die here.

  Pepsicolova drew Big Ivan, the least favored of her knives, from her belt, and, using his hilt as a hammer, systematically smashed all the locks one by one.

  The dogs leaped and danced as she released them, hysterical with freedom and fear. Some of them bit her, but they didn’t really mean it and so she didn’t mind.

  She had just broken open the last of the cages when she heard footsteps on the stairs. “Don’t do this, please,” a woman’s voice pleaded.
“Please, Sergei Nemovich. Let me go.” If there was a reply, Pepsicolova could not hear it.

  Then Chortenko kicked open the basement door. He had the files she’d strewn about in the crook of one arm, and pulled an elegantly dressed society lady after him with the other. Her he threw into the room. Whipping off his glasses, he turned his bug-eyed gaze on Pepsicolova. His face was flushed with anger. But as always his tone was mild and controlled. “You have crossed a line, little Annushka,” he said. “So I-”

  The dogs attacked.

  Chortenko fell backward as he was swarmed and overwhelmed by the newly freed animals. The society lady darted into a corner, shrieking with fear. But the dogs did not attack her. They were all rabid to tear the flesh from their tormentor’s living body. Snarling and snapping and foaming at the jaw, they fought each other to get at Chortenko. But if the male dogs were savage, the bitches were even worse, ripping and tearing at the spymaster with unholy glee.

  Foremost among them was Pepsicolova herself.

  Her knives were forgotten. She used only her jaws and nails. The sound that Chortenko made as her teeth sank into his throat-a high-pitched sort of scream, more of a squeal, actually-was almost as good as the taste of the flesh she ripped from his struggling body.

  Arkady, meanwhile, was staggering through the ruins of the Terem Palace, half-blinded by his mask. He was not precisely clear how he had found his way here. But the fragmentary decoration was familiar to him from his schoolboy history texts. The Duke of Muscovy must surely be here somewhere! Yet nowhere in this shambles could he find any trace of that great man.

  Icons crunched beneath his shoes. He tripped over an enamel stove and fell flat on his face. When he regained his feet, a staircase opened up before him and all in a rush he found himself down at its bottom.

  At last, Arkady stumbled into the Golden Porch, an antechamber of sorts into which a passage from the Great Kremlin Palace debouched. This room, unlike all the others he had seen, was at least intact. But it too was deserted.

  Disheartened and exhausted, Arkady sank down at the top of a short flight of stairs overlooking the antechamber. In daylight, assuredly, it would have looked splendid. Now, however, lit by only two guttering candle-lanterns, one to either side of the stairs, it was cavernous and dark, a palace of shadows at the end of time. Was everybody else dead and only he alive? Had he somehow outlived humanity, dooming himself to eternal desolation and despair? Or was he himself dead and inexplicably condemned to search through the ruins of his life, forever seeking and never finding?

  Such were his confused and incoherent thoughts when the Pearls Beyond Price flowed through the doorway into the Golden Porch, chattering and laughing. Only to come to an abrupt halt at the sight of him.

  The Pearls’ sudden unease was perfectly understandable. In a mirror across the room, he could dimly make out an eerie sight: a man in a lavishly brocaded surcoat, wearing a helmet with a smooth silver facemask, topped by a crown covered over with diamonds, sat brooding heavily and in perfect solitude. It was himself. In the unsteady lantern-light, surrounded by the reds and golds of the highly decorated walls, he might have been a hand-colored illustration in a children’s romance. King Saladin resting after his victory over the Zengids, perhaps, or Ivan the Terrible wracked with guilt after murdering his son.

  The Pearls clustered together. Then Nymphodora stepped forward and timidly said, “Sir?”

  Arkady looked up. Several of the Pearls gasped. Apparently they had not all been absolutely sure he was alive.

  “Sir, I must ask. Who are you?”

  “I…?” There was an answer to that question, he was sure of it. Arkady sought for it in the reeling corridors of his mind. It was all terribly confusing. But then he remembered his quest, his duty, the sacred errand that had sent him out into the terrible streets of Moscow on this most horrific of all nights. He must find the Duke of Muscovy. He had a message for the Duke of Muscovy. He must warn…

  “The Duke of Muscovy.”

  With screams of delight, the Pearls converged upon him.

  Chortenko’s body was not recognizable by the time Anya Pepsicolova and her new friends were through with it. She stood, shaking her head, trying to will herself to think clearly and rationally. The basement door was open and the society lady gone-fled, doubtless, in horror of what she had seen. Already, some of the dogs were bounding up the stairs toward the open front door and liberty. Others, however, cowered, afraid to pass through the smoke-filled air that choked the rooms above.

  “Hush now, don’t be afraid,” Pepsicolova said soothingly.“You don’t have to go upstairs if you don’t want to. There’s another exit right over here.”

  She unlatched, unbolted, and threw open the door into Chortenko’s secret tunnel system. Several dogs streaked past her as she stepped through it.

  Pepsicolova had no good memories connected to these tunnels. But they opened into not just the Kremlin but several buildings, public and private, along the way. She was considering which exit to take when she saw something in the tunnel ahead. It was, strangely enough, a piece of furniture. A kind of surgical table or cot which was used in hospitals, what was it called? A gurney. As she drew closer, Pepsicolova was astonished to see none other than the Englishman, Aubrey Darger, strapped down helpless upon it.

  “Well!” she said, inexplicably amused. “Somebody expended a great deal of effort strapping you down.”

  With a twitch of her wrist, Saint Cyrila appeared in her hand.

  A relieved smile appeared on Darger’s face. “Good girl!” he cried. “Well done! Cut me free and we’ll-”

  Then, as the knife moved not toward the straps but toward his groin, Darger said, “Um…excuse me, but… If I may ask… Exactly what are you doing?”

  Which was, Pepsicolova felt, an extremely astute question. She considered its answer carefully, all the while staring down at Darger, hard and unwavering. “Something I’ve been wanting to do,” she said at last, “for a long, long time.”

  Saint Cyrila cut through Darger’s belt as if it were made of paper.

  Diving and soaring with a life of her own, the blade moved up and down and up again. Humming to herself, Pepsicolova proceeded to cut away first Darger’s trousers and then his shirt. Darger had a great deal to say during the process, but she didn’t bother listening to any of it. When he was completely naked, she kicked off her shoes, shucked her trousers, and climbed atop his prone body.

  By now Darger was clearly convinced she was crazy. Which, Pepsicolova had to admit, was entirely possible. Eyes wide with fear, he babbled, “My dear young lady! This is certainly neither the time nor the place for such actions. You mustn’t… mustn’t…”

  But Pepsicolova bent low over Darger and, tapped the flat of Saint Cyrila’s blade warningly against his lips. “Shhhhhh,” she whispered. Then she spat out a tooth and grinned.

  “Giddy up.” She dug her heels into his sides. Savoring Darger’s protests, Pepsicolova rode him like a stallion. This day just kept getting better and better.

  Yevgeny and his crew were engaged in blasting down burning houses in order to create a fire break to limit the spread of the conflagration.

  “Awaiting your order, sir,” the sergeant said. “Fire,” Yevgeny said miserably. “Fire!” the sergeant barked.

  The gun fired.

  Thus did his men (and, temporarily, his women) show their displeasure with his indecision earlier. Everything was being done strictly by the book. There was no slack, no swagger, no camaraderie, none of the easy give-and-take natural to a well-run crew. Only a stiff adherence to the minutest detail of military protocol.

  “Shall we load and fire again, sir?” The sergeant stood as straight as a ramrod, eyes unblinking and unforgiving.

  “What is your advice, Sergeant?”

  “Sir! No advice, sir!”

  “Then we shall move the piece down the street to demolish the next house.”

  There was the slightest pause. Enough to let Yevgeny
know that he had guessed wrong-that he should have put another round into the smoking rubble or else moved the gun in the other direction-before the sergeant said, “Sir! Yes, sir!”

  It was all Yevgeny could do to keep from weeping with humiliation.

  Then, breaking with the script, one of the men shouted and pointed up into the sky. Turning, Yevgeny saw the most amazing sight of his entire life: a naked giant looming over the buildings before him. The unsteady light from the flames below reflected off its skin, making it shimmer. For the briefest instant he wondered if he were experiencing a mystic vision of one of the demons from the Pit.

  The giant shifted against the stars. Moving slowly, it turned onto Teatralny proezd. It was coming straight toward Yevgeny’s gun crew.

  A horse reared in terror. Several of the soldiers looked like they were ready to run. One of them had actually thrown down the swab he was holding and was about to bolt.

  “Stay at your posts, damn you!” Yevgeny shouted, grabbing the panicky soldier and flinging him back toward the cannon. He drew his sword. “I’ll kill the first mother-violating one of you who breaks and runs. Sergeant, are you in control of your men or not? Get that gun swung around. Give me an elevation. Are you all hares and hyenas? Stand and fight like the Russians you pretend to be!”

  “Sir,” the sergeant said, “there’s not the time for a precise-” “Do it by eye, then.” The gun was aimed and its elevation adjusted. “On your command, sir.”

  “Let it get closer. We’ve only the time for the one shot.” “Now, sir?” “Not yet.” “We’ve got a good shot, sir.” “Just a little…” Yevgeny murmured.

  “He’s getting pretty fucking close, sir.”

  “Not until my command,”Yevgeny said. He waited until the last possible instant and then forced himself to count silently to three. “Fire!”

  They fired.

  The Duke of Muscovy’s great heart was hammering so hard it was about to burst. He had no illusions on that front. His body had been designed for a prone and sedentary existence. He could not long survive standing up and walking about like one of his own minuscule subjects. Already his mighty bones had sustained hundreds of small fractures from the stresses of his stroll through the city. His internal organs, crushed by forces they were never meant to withstand, were failing. In just a few seconds his heart would stop.