“He’s not ensnaring Griselda!” The baron yanked out a dagger. “Kill hi—!”
“Oh, hurt him, baby! Hurt him for the rest of your lives!”
The baron leapt forward as one guard kicked him in the crotch, while the other elbowed him in the throat. Fevered, they fell upon him, stripping his armor, kneeing his ribs, pinching his skin.
Loefwyn wiped his fingers clean and stood over the struggling Baron.
“A shame you don’t understand the art,” Loefwyn said, “Then you’d understand just how hard it is to concentrate on two people at once. Especially when you don’t even like men. But I once mastered an elephant.” He shook his head. “Actually, I’m not proud of that. But regardless, you were right: if I’d truly wanted to enspell Griselda, I would have.”
The guards didn’t look up as they plucked the baron’s beard-hairs out, root by root.
“I should tell them to kill you, but I’m done with murder. Which means it’s time I told Lady Griselda of your plans. And then quit the profession. And then probably run for my life.”
Then he glanced at the hourglass. “And how about that, Dad? I beat your best time.”
“THE LADY WILL SEE you now,” the butler said.
Loefwyn rose, fidgeting, from the rich sofa of Griselda’s waiting room. His father also rose, mopping off flopsweat with a doily he’d swiped from underneath a vase of flowers.
Loefwyn waved his father back. “Just stay here, Dad.”
“You sure?”
“I need to talk to her alone.” And not have you interfere, he thought.
“It’s not too late to turn this into a show of strength, son!” Dad said, gripping Loefwyn’s robe. “Tell him you were showing off. Hand over Griselda, and he’ll probably laugh it off once he realizes how useful you’ll be!”
“And Griselda?”
“Gratitude never wears as well as revenge, son. She might throw us a few coins; the baron will hire assassins. And even if she’s suffused with gratitude today, well, she’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Think it through, my boy.”
“I’ve thought it through. Long and hard.” He shook off dad’s grip—which was difficult, as the old man had lost none of his fabled hand strength. The butler discreetly ushered him into the lady’s quarters as though nothing had happened.
The Lady Griselda sat, veilless, on her throne.
Her unformed eye quivered in her socket, like a rotting egg yolk. And yet something about her snaggle-toothed smile filled Loefwyn with adoration. She placed a finger by her dry lips coquettishly.
It was the look he’d always imagined just before he lost control.
Loefwyn knelt, averting his eyes. “Milady,” he said. “I have come to report a threat upon your life—”
She stepped down to cup his cheek, lifting his gaze to hers. “It’s over, Loefwyn.”
“What?”
“The baron took his life an hour ago, I’m afraid. He disbanded his armies, gave his possessions to the poor, then begged forgiveness for his faults before covering himself in butter and leaping head-first into the king’s moat. I’m told the alligators made quick work of him.”
“That’s so…out of character…”
The Lady smiled, then directed Loefwyn’s gaze to her tubs of raw oysters and ground rhino horns.
His eyes widened. “You mean to say you’re a…a…”
“I felt your command,” she chuckled. “What did you want of me? Oh, that’s right; ‘Do it for me, baby.’ I figured if I’d be having orgasms at your command, I might as well put them to good use.”
“But you’re a woman…”
“Silly boys,” said Griselda, oddly demure for her age. “Thinking the magic’s all yours. But who’s really the master of the craft? The male who loses desire as they get older, or the woman who gains it? The mage who casts one spell and collapses into slumber, or the mage who can cast spell after spell all night long, then hunger for more?” She flung her robes wide. “I dare say at the age of seventy, you’ll find no greater spellcaster.”
Loefwyn clapped his hands over his mouth to stifle his giggles. “So you…”
“The ugliness helps, of course,” she admitted. “The men I accidentally summoned to my bedroom thought twice once they looked me in my eye. So I stayed unsullied.”
“But the town,” Loefwyn said, confused. “The town is thriving—”
“Because our power can be used both subtly and wisely.” She lifted him up off his knees. “You can force a king to hand you his throne…or you can suggest that lowering his brutal taxes will allow his people to thrive, implant ideas that nations should work out their differences peacefully. You don’t have to destroy people.”
But Loefwyn barely heard. Our power, he thought, and a grin touched his face. She’d said “Our power.” He entwined his fingers with hers, amazed by how soft her hands felt in his.
“Your hands are beautiful,” he muttered, unused to anyone touching him.
“My lips are not,” she replied. “Yet still, they long to be kissed.”
He did. It was glorious. So he did it again.
“So what now?” he wondered, as she led him to her boudoir. “One final gasp for both of us before we give up the pink?”
She stopped, giving him a confused look. “What do you mean, ‘give up’?”
“My dad…once he found pleasure at the hands of another, he never could…manage…”
“That would be the traditionally male way of doing it, yes. Give your power to someone without them returning it in kind, and yes, you will lose it forever.”
“So to retain the magic, you just have to make your partner…?”
“Let’s just say the usual masturbantic traditions don’t leave its students attentive to others’ needs.”
Loefwyn felt whole new worlds opening up before him, then frowned. “But I…Hell, my whole sex life has been predicated on speed runs. And I—I’ve spent weeks fantasizing about you, and twenty years without a woman’s touch.”
“And I’ve spent thrice that long waiting for someone to touch me,” she smiled, pulling him down onto the bed. “Trust me, Loefwyn. We’re perfect for each other.”
Which they were. And so, together, they ruled the world single-handedly.
OF MAT AND MATH
Anatoly Belilovsky
Arquímedes Hidalgo Ibarruri fit the profile perfectly.
He traveled alone, having bought his ticket only hours before the scheduled departure of his flight. He had no luggage save a battered laptop computer. His red-rimmed, wide-open eyes looked not so much at people as through them, and seemed to spin in their sockets as he muttered incoherently to himself. And, though written guidelines never mentioned such features as grounds for suspicion, he drew the guards’ attention with his sallow olive skin, his disheveled mop of black curly hair, and a nose that would have made a raven pale with envy.
The guards should not be too harshly censured for the ease and mental athleticism with which they leaped to the inevitable conclusion. Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport was on high alert at the time due to a half-deciphered intercept mentioning plans to bring down the Moscow to Barcelona flight, and in fact there were two Catalan militants in queue directly behind Arquímedes, each carrying one component of a binary nerve gas. In the guards’ defense it should be said that no screening test ever devised could reliably distinguish between a terrorist and a mathematician—and Arquímedes was, in spite of any doubts he may have harbored, most definitely the latter.
This is not to say that his career in mathematics had been, up to that point, a success. In fact, it was dismal to a degree that went past failure into the realm of the legendary fiasco. Having, after that morning’s final debacle, briefly considered self-immolation, Arquímedes had settled for going home.
The pockets of his charcoal pinstripe suit were empty except for a credit card, an electronic ticket for the three o’clock Iberia flight to Barcelona, a valid passport, and a sm
all amount of lint. His tie sat askew on the collar of his sweat-stained white cotton shirt, his black wingtip shoes displayed a fractal pattern of road salt from drying slush, and if his socks matched, it was only because he had never owned any that weren’t black.
Arquímedes Hidalgo Ibarruri’s only wish was to see his mother in her tiny, book-lined apartment off La Rambla. He wanted her to make him a cup of coffee. He wanted to sit in front of her, look her in the eye, and say, “Mamá, I am a complete dolboeb, and my life is a total pizdets.”
There are historical precedents for what happened to Arquímedes then. On the last day of his life, as he prepared for the duel that would end it, Evariste Galois made a breakthrough in group theory that paved the way for quantum mechanics. Likewise, Srinivasa Ramanujan’s discoveries in number theory, as recorded in his “lost notebooks,” came to him in mystical visions from the goddess Namagiri as he wasted away, days before he died of malnutrition, tuberculosis, and dysentery at the age of thirty-two. So too, on that day of epic failure, amid the rubble of his once stellar career, Arquímedes saw a glimpse of nothing less profound than the Unified Theory of Everything.
It was, therefore, not apprehension that widened his eyes even further as he came face-to-face with the head screener at the boarding gate. It was not fear that made his breath catch with an audible gasp; it was not horror that made sweat pour down his face and drip onto his suit. Having stood for what seemed like an eternity on an infinite line moving infinitesimally slow, on what was already the worst day of his life and shortly would get worse, Arquímedes Hidalgo Ibarruri chose the least propitious time to have the first glimmer of a mathematical epiphany.
“Blyaaaaa…” he whispered into the screener’s face, staring through her at the mysteries of the universe as they unfolded before his mind’s eye.
The screener ground her teeth, her face darkening to the hue of an apoplectic thundercloud.
The Practical Dictionary of Russian Mat has this to say:
Blyad’, n. Literally: “whore,” but rarely used in a literal sense. The entire word may used as an expletive, generally following a discrete annoyance of short duration such as a stubbed toe. In situations of continuing profound astonishment (e. g. following a parachute malfunction) it is often elided to the long-vowel “Blyaaaaa!”
THE SCREENER WAS NAMED Marchella, after a famous Italian actor whose own name honored Marcellus, the Roman general whose war with Carthage resulted in the death of Arquímedes’ famous namesake, Archímedes of Syracuse, perhaps the world’s most celebrated collateral casualty. Arquímedes’ Semitic features that had first brought him to Marchella’s attention were themselves a legacy of Carthaginian ancestors who colonized, over two thousand years ago, the Catalan homeland of Arquímedes’ mother.
Marchella was an expert on mat, conversing in it fluently with trenchant passengers and recalcitrant co-workers, but rarely had she been sworn at without provocation. Her training overrode her instinctive reaction, which would have consisted of a left jab, a right hook, and a left uppercut. The effort, however, caused her jaws to lock.
“I’ll need to see that,” she said in Russian through her teeth and reached for Arquímedes’ laptop without waiting for an answer.
“Ot’ebis’ ot moih uravnenij,” Arquímedes growled and swatted at her hand.
LIKE MANY LEGENDS that grew around Arquímedes Hidalgo Ibarruri, the story that “Eureka!” was the first word he ever uttered is a half-truth.
Arquímedes was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in the same hospital in which Albert Einstein had breathed his last some decades previously. That, and his parents’ joint appointments to the faculty at Princeton University, may have raised the expectations they had for Arquímedes, but by the time he was three-years-old he had yet to utter his first word, and the Hidalgo y Ibarruri family had settled down to a life of dignified disappointment.
The family celebrated his third birthday with a small, quiet dinner. A cake with three candles was offered, the candles were duly extinguished, and Arquímedes was conducted to bed and left there. The adults—and one adolescent—present continued with their dessert.
Approximately an hour later, their conversation was interrupted by Arquímedes toddling down the staircase to the living room shouting: “Hey, Rika!”
Frederika “Rika” Stravinskaya, his Russian au pair, stared at his diminutive frame as he descended, one stair at a time, a dripping diaper in one hand and Perelman’s Elementary Calculus in the other.
“Rika, eb tvoyu mat’, u menja ne balansiruet eto ebanoe uravnenie!” Arquímedes continued in a high, penetrating voice.
Professor Diógenes Hidalgo and Professor Maria Elena Ibarruri froze in incomprehension, having, until that day, heard not a single word from Arquímedes, in either his father’s refined Castilian, his mother’s genteel Catalan, or what passed for English in New Jersey. Rika’s aunt, Professor Messalina Erastovna Holmogorova (Astrophysics), sprayed a surprisingly fine sparkling Freixenet Brut over her third helping of flan. Blinking tears from her eyes, she peered at a small, naked boy who had, if her ears had not deceived her, just yelled, “I can’t balance the motherfucking equation!” to her niece in flawless, if unprintable, Russian.
Rika recovered first. “Pizdets,” she whispered. “He forgot about infinitesimals!” With that, she swept Arquímedes into her arms and raced upstairs to restore his hygienic and sartorial dignity.
Professor Hidalgo broke the silence. “More…wine?”
“Yes, please,” said Professor Holmogorova, her emphasis on the words matched by the speed with which she proffered her glass for a refill.
Upon Rika’s return to the dinner table she was subjected to a cross-examination. Standing at rigid attention, she admitted to moonlighting, in Arquímedes’ earshot and over a webcam connection, as a mathematics tutor to upperclass cadets at the Higher Staff Academy of the Russian Naval Forces.
To prevent further damage to Arquímedes’ psyche, Hidalgo y Ibarruri summarily discharged her the following morning.
It was too late.
TRYING TO CATCH the breath that had been beaten out of him by the guards, Arquímedes lay in the puddle of sleet into which they had thrown him, a garbage dumpster within arm’s reach on one side, his cracked and dented laptop somewhat farther away on the other. The vertigo induced by his flight, far shorter than the one for which he had bought his ticket, caused the waning moon in Moscow’s winter sky to precess, reminding him of his father shaking his head as he read The Practical Dictionary of Russian Mat.
While Arquímedes’ parents were married, the dictionary held pride of place on their bookshelf, within easy reach of the most frantic hand. It always fell open to the same page, the one that his parents consulted most often:
Derived from root: -eb- (impolite reference to sexual intercourse):
Naebat’: v., to con, to play a practical joke, to evade capture. “Iago naebal Othello.”
Proebat’: v., to miss (as one may miss a bus), to lose foolishly (an object of value, a game). “King Lear proebal his kingdom.”
Sjebat’sja: v., reflexive, to run away, to leave, to elope. “Macduff sjebalsja before Macbeth could make pizdets (q. v.) of him.”
Zaebat’: v., to bother, to nag. (Unlike the English equivalents, the Russian verb is in the perfective aspect, meaning that the action of the verb is carried out to completion, or its maximum extent.) “Lady Macbeth zaebala Macbeth.”
Ot’ebis’!: imperative; almost exactly equivalent to the English “Fuck off!” “ ‘Ot’ebis!’ shouted Macbeth to Lady Macbeth.”
Ebanutyi: adj, insane. “Your noble son is ebanutyi; ’tis true, ’tis pity, and pity ’tis ’tis true.”
Ebanye: adj., past imperfective participle of “-eb-”, here in plural conjugation, used the same way as the gerund “Fucking” in English. “Out, out, ebanyi spot!”
Dolboeb: n, a fool with initiative and perseverance. “Polonius is a Dolboeb.”
Eb tvou mat’!: Literally, an i
mpolite reference to incest. Often used to convey surprise, astonishment, admiration, adoration, profound gratitude, and other strong emotions, or uttered in a moment of epiphany. See also: Blyad’, Blyaaaa.
All of which is to say that Arquímedes’ apparent instructions to the guard Marchella on the day of his abortive flight to Barcelona were very rude indeed.
WAS IT ONLY THAT MORNING that Arquímedes sustained the latest in the series of failures that punctuated his life? He had rehearsed his dissertation defense countless times in front of the mirror, translating the unprintable terms in which he thought of mathematical concepts into the proper Russian words.
His speech went well, as had the expected questions from his thesis adviser, Professor Tomsky. But the old pizdobol Milutin, the department chair, had to go and ask in his chalk-on-glass voice, “But what about the even-numbered power terms of this series?”
To which Arquímedes replied, “I have already shown that this huynya tends to infinitesimal, five steps ago.”
“I am not convinced,” said Milutin. “Show me again.”
The door creaked open, and everyone rose as the Dean came in. “Please,” he said and waved everyone back to their seats. “We’ll need the room shortly for a lecture. What are you doing that’s taking you so long?”
“Huyem grushi okolachivayem,” said Arquímedes.
And that was the pizdets of his graduate education.
BY THE TIME PROFESSOR Diógenes Hidalgo (PhD, Classics, Sorbonne) and Professor Maria Elena Ibarruri (PhD, Romance Languages, Sorbonne) decided to divorce, they had amassed between them a considerable library as well as a small amount of other property. Only one item led to contention: a small, dog-eared book called The Dictionary of Russian Mat. Maria Elena insisted, reasonably, that since she was to keep custody of Arquímedes, she should hold on to the dictionary as well.
With great reluctance, Diógenes agreed. He picked the book up gently, opened it at random, then turned a few more pages.
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