Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick Read Free Book Online Page A

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, Zoësophia, 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...
    D awn.
    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