Dancing with Bears (6 page)

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 bare 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.”

“What?!” Gulagsky turned to his son with a terrible expression on his face.

“Further, later in the evening, he squeezed himself into the dumbwaiter in order to penetrate the girls’ sleeping quarters. Had he not been caught and ejected by one of the beast-men, who can say what else he might have done?”

Gulagsky’s face was contorted with rage. Arkady turned pale. “Father, listen to me! Your new associates…these horrible men…”

“Silence!”

“You have no idea what a monstrous thing they are about to do,” the young man said desperately. “I overheard them—”

“I said silence!” The room was suddenly full of argument and admonition. Only the pilgrim stood silent, hands clasped at his waist, watching all that transpired with a strangely benign expression. But Gulagsky’s voice rose above the clamor. “If you say but one more word—one!—I swear I will kill you with my own two hands.”

The room fell silent. Then Gulagsky said, with heavy emphasis, “You have committed an unspeakable breach of hospitality.”

Arkady opened his mouth to speak, but Darger, quick-thinking as ever, clapped a hand over it.

“Oh, you want to tell me your side of this story, do you? As if I didn’t already know,” Gulagsky said furiously. “Well, let me tell it to you instead: An inexperienced boy falls for a woman better than he will ever deserve. She’s young and foolish and a virgin to boot. All of nature is on his side. But who’s on hers? Not he! She is promised to another, greater and richer than he can ever hope to be. If he so much as touches her, I have been reliably told, she will burn. So if he wished the best for the young lady, he would keep his silence and leave her ignorant of his feelings for her. But he does not. So for all his passion, he doesn’t really care for her, does he? Only about his own sentiments. And what is he sentimental about? Why, himself, of course.”

The boy struggled to free himself from Darger’s grip.

“Well, this shall not be. By God, I swear—”

“Sir, do not be hasty!” Surplus cried.

“If anybody so much as touches one of the Pearls while they are under my roof—even if it is only with the tip of one finger, I swear that with my own two hands I will—”

“Think!” Surplus urged him. “
Think
before you make any rash oaths, sir.”

But now, unexpectedly, Koschei placed himself directly before Gulagsky, who angrily tried to shove him aside. Unheeding, the strannik seized his arms in a grip of iron and without visible effort lifted him bodily off the floor. Ignoring Gulagsky’s astonishment, he said, “You were about to swear that you would kill your own son if he crosses your will. That is the same oath that Abraham swore—only you are not so holy a man as he. God does not so favor you.”

He restored the man to the floor. “Now control yourself, and do not add blasphemy and filicide to the myriad sins which doubtless already blacken your soul.”

Gulagsky took ten ragged breaths. Then, somewhat unevenly, he said. “You are right. You are right. To my shame, I was going to promise something rash. Yet it must be said: If anyone in this village so much as touches one of the Pearls, he will be exiled—”

“For at least a year,” Surplus said, before his host could add “forever.”

Gulagsky’s face twisted, as if he had just swallowed something foul. But he managed to say, “For at least a year.”

He sat back down at the table.

Surplus felt a tension in himself ease. It was not good to allow absolutes to enter into one’s life. They had a habit of turning on one.

At that very instant, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and a Russian woman appeared in it. Gulagsky stood, chair toppling behind him, mouth open in astonishment. Then he recovered himself. “Lady Zoësophia. Forgive me. For a second, I thought you were…well, never mind.”

“In turn, you will, I hope, forgive me for borrowing these clothes, which I found in a trunk in the attic, and which I presume belonged to your late wife.” Zoësophia glanced down at her admittedly admirable figure. She wore a long and sturdy red skirt that brushed against the top of her oxblood boots, a russet-and-gold embroidered jacket over a white blouse, and kid gloves long enough that not a speck of wrist showed. An umber scarf was tied so artfully about her head that it took a second glance to realize that beneath it, a second, flesh-colored kerchief concealed her mouth and nose. “They fit me perfectly. She must have been a very beautiful lady.”

From an ordinary woman, such words would have sounded conceited. But not from a Pearl.

“Yes,” Gulagsky said, almost choking. “She was.”

“I thank you for their use. I must go out now, and I did not wish to draw undue attention to myself by wearing outlandish clothing.”

“Where, if I may ask, are you bound for, madam?” Darger politely queried.

“Monsieur de Plus Precieux and I are going to church.”

So saying, Zoësophia swept down the last few stairs, took the astonished Surplus’s arm, and led him away.

Though the town was small, there were enough people on the street— and they extremely curious about their exotic visitors—to discourage frank conversation. Children followed the couple, whooping. Adults openly gawked. So, although far more pertinent questions urged themselves upon him, Surplus merely said, “However did you manage to convince the Neanderthals to let you go out without a guard?”

“Oh! Whatever else they may be, the Neanderthals are still male—and it will be a sorry day when I cannot convince a man to let me have whatever I want from him. Also, with the prince indisposed, I am the embassy’s highest-ranking member.”

“Perhaps, then, you could arrange for our brawny friends to throw open the treasury-box. You and your Sisters in Delight have run up debts which—”

“Alas,” Zoësophia said negligently, “my authority has limits. Prince Achmed made very sure of that.”

The church (or cathedral as such were called here) was a handsome log building surmounted by an Orthodox cross. The interior was all a dazzle to Surplus. Partly this was due to the richness of its decoration, the extravagant number of lit candles and the pervasive smell of beeswax that made the air heavy and sultry, the unearthly beauty of the choir’s chanting, and the strangeness of a religious rite carried out entirely behind the iconostasis, so that it could not be seen by the faithful. But, chiefly, it was Zoësophia’s presence that distracted him.

It was a weekday and most of the congregants were black-clad crones who, being blessed with younger women in the house to be worked like serfs, could indulge their piety. Several women to the very front were being held up by solicitous friends or relations, and from this Surplus surmised that they were the new widows, praying for the strength to get them through the coming memorial services. So intent were all on their prayers that Zoësophia and Surplus managed to slip in with only a hostile glare or two thrown quickly their way. Nevertheless, to Surplus’s eyes, his companion stood out among them like a swan in a flock of grackles. Moreover, as they took places in the back of the church, rather than releasing his arm, she pressed herself more tightly against him, so that he could feel the warmth of her hip and one breast, and that, too, was distracting.

They had not been listening to the service long when, to Surplus’s absolute amazement, Zoësophia backed into a niche at the rearmost of the church and pulled him after her, where they could not be seen by the congregation.

The niche was small, and there was not entirely enough room for two people to avoid intimate contact. Surplus was so intensely aware of Zoësophia’s body as to be somewhat short of breath. She placed her kerchief-covered mouth by his ear and murmured, “I know that you are drawn to me. I can see it in your eyes. And in other places as well.” Her gloved hand passed slowly down his body, stopping at the fly of his trousers. “Perhaps you have also noticed that I find myself powerfully drawn to you in return. But as you know”—her voice caught in a marvelous oral simulation of a blush—“our feelings for each other cannot be consummated. For reasons you well understand.”

Surplus whispered back, “You surprise and delight me, O Flower of Byzantium. To think that one such as I…Well, I am quite overwhelmed.” Which was not entirely true. Surplus understood perfectly the power his unusual form had over the imaginations of adventurous women. But he knew better than to say so. “Nevertheless, I must turn our conversation to less pleasant matters.”

Finger by finger, Zoësophia’s hand closed about Surplus’s swollen member in a manner which, even through the interposing media of glove and trousers, was so exquisitely pleasurable as to have surely required many hours of practice. “Oh?”

“Yes. I must warn you that the ambassador has hatched a mad scheme to exterminate the Pearls before he dies.” Quickly, he sketched out the details.

“Ah.” Her hand tightened slightly. “I wondered if you were going to tell me.”

Reproachfully, Surplus said, “Madam, I am a gentleman.”

“You and I obviously have different understandings of what that word entails. But let that go. I have been reliably informed that you and your comrade have agreed to this plan.” Her hand tightened further, to the point that the pleasure Surplus felt was evenly balanced with pain. The creations of the Caliph’s geneticists, he recalled, were often inhumanly strong. Surely she wouldn’t…? “Tell me exactly what your part in this is, Gospodin de Plus Precieux.”