Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [24]
They stared at each other for a long time, until finally Surplus concluded that the man was adamant. “I see we have no choice,” he said with a sigh.
“We will depart in the morning.”
“And I,” Koschei said, “will come with you, to look after the boy’s moral education.”
“Oh, for the love of God!” Surplus exclaimed involuntarily. But a dark look and a clenched fist on Gulagsky’s part silenced any further exposition.
“Precisely.” Koschei smiled piously. “For the love of God.”
The caravans left at dawn. In stark contrast to their festive arrival, nobody turned out to see them off. Darger and Surplus rode horses, while Arkady and Koschei strode along on foot.
Surplus cantered back and glared down from his mare at the strannik. “This is all your doing, you rascal! You manipulated Arkady’s exile in order to force us to take you to Moscow.”
“Blame God, not me. He has work for me there. He made it possible for me to go. That is all.”
“Pah!” Surplus spurred his horse forward again.
Not long after, the caravan trundled past the field where Prince Achmed’s body had been flung. Crows covered it, fighting for bits of flesh. Surplus turned away from the sad spectacle. Riding beside him, Darger said, “Wasn’t this the same field where the cyberwolf was supposed to be thrown?”
“I believe it is.”
“Then where is it?”
Strangely enough, the corpse was nowhere to be seen.
“An animal might well have scavenged the carcass,” Surplus suggested.
“But then there would be machine parts left behind—as there are not. No man would desire such a thing, nor would anybody bury it. Who, then, or what, could have taken it away? It makes no sense at all.”
The town—whose name, Surplus abruptly realized, he never had learned—faded behind them, and that for them was the last of Gorodishko. Save for one small incident, barely noticed and almost immediately forgotten.
On a low hillock, far across the fields, a lone man stood in silhouette against the rising sun, watching them leave. Was it only Surplus’s imagination that, just before he disappeared in the distance, the man fell to all fours and trotted away?
...4...
The parade rumbled down Tverskaya ulitsa, as splendid as thunder and infinitely more costly. Three weeks the company had spent camped in the ruins of Rublevka to the west of the city while merchants and messengers came and went, lines of credit were established with all the major banks in Muscovy, an appropriate building was found for the embassy, and an entrance was prepared which, under happier circumstances, would have satisfied even the late, notoriously hard-toplease Prince Achmed.
First came a marching orchestra, performing Ravel’s Shéhérazade, followed by a brass band playing “The Great Gate of Kiev,” from Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, so that the tunes tumbled over one another, clashing and combining in a way that suggested an exotic and barbaric music evoking both Muscovy and Byzantium.
That was the theory, anyway.
In actual practice, the music shrieked and disharmonized, cat-wailing and whale-groaning like the collective denizens of the Caliph’s House of Penitence and Forgiveness being taught to accept responsibility for whatever crimes they might eventually be accused of. The Muscovites loved it, however. It fit their conflicted ideas of Byzantium, which they despised as savage, pagan, and vulgar and yet whose heirs they considered themselves to be.
The parade included flightless griffins with gilded beaks and claws, spider-legged elephants, three-headed giraffes, and even a small sea serpent in a tank of cloudy water, all rented for the day from a local circus, whose tumblers, aerialists, and other performers had dug deep into their costume trunks to re-create themselves as Byzantine lords and courtiers. A team of African unicorns as white as bed sheets and bulkier than water buffalos pulled a float on which the Pearls Beyond Price stood, sat, or reclined, each according to her whim, wearing flowing silk chador in a variety of bright pastels, so that collectively they formed a sherbet