Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [35]
Beside her Irina murmured, “I am never going to let a man touch me again. It would spoil the memory of this night.”
There were no words Arkady could have more greatly relished hearing. They stroked his vanity so emphatically that he had to fight down the urge to fling himself back onto the bed and show both ladies how much more he had yet to give.
“Why have you left us?” the baronessa mock-complained.He could hear her loving smile in her voice. “What are you looking at so intently?”
“I am watching the sun come up,” he said simply. “It struggles to rise above the horizon, and in doing so it makes the horizon seem to shift and move, like a sleeper’s eyelid when he strives to awaken. Yet though the enterprise looks difficult, it is inevitable; not all the armies in the world could delay it for the slightest fraction of a second.”
“You make it sound so profound.”
“It is! It is!” Arkady cried with all the certainty of a recent convert. “It seems to me that this is exactly like the merciful God trying to force His way into our night-bound, sinful lives—it seems so difficult, impossible even, and yet His will is indomitable and cannot be stopped. Darkness flees from Him. His light arises from within like the sun, and the soul is filled with purity, certainty, and serenity.”
“Oh, Arkady,” Irina sighed. “You are so very, very spiritual. But God does not enter into the lives of ordinary people in such a manner. Only for saints and people in books does He behave that way.”
Now Arkady flung away the robe and returned to the bed. He swept both women into his arms and addressed them by their pet names. “Ah, my beautiful Dunyasha! Sweet Irinushka! Do not despair, for God has found a way to break through the membrane separating Him from the mundane world.”
“Away, insatiable beast!” The baronessa pushed herself out of Arkady’s arms and then, when he did not move to grab her back, snuggled into them again. Irina rolled over weakly and touched her lips in a little pouting kiss to Arkady’s chest, though without any strength.
Now came the most delicate and important part of Arkady’s mission. “I was not always so vigorous, you know, nor so sure of God’s abiding love. Not long ago I was weak and riddled with doubt.” He paused, as if debating within himself whether to share with them a great secret. “My darlings! Do you wish to be as strong as I? To have my sexual stamina? That is nothing. That is the simplest thing imaginable. I can show you how it is done. But more importantly, you will feel the presence of the indwelling God as intimately as you have felt my caresses.”
“It sounds delightful,” Baronessa Avdotya murmured,“though improbable.”
“Invite me to your estate next weekend, when the baron is away, and I will bring what is requisite. We shall all three of us be made closer than lovers and stronger than gods.”
“I will come,” Irina promised. “But I must bring another friend with me—perhaps two—so that I can get some rest between your storms of lovemaking.”
“We’d best make it five,” the baronessa said.
It was that fleeting moment of golden perfection that comes in late September, which the Russians called “grandmother’s summer.” The parks and boulevards of Moscow drew lovers and idlers out from their houses and businesses. There were people boating on the river’s silvery waters. The view from the wooded heights of the Secret Garden was as picturesque as a hand-colored woodcut.
Simply being in the Kremlin, Surplus felt lifted above the day-to-day concerns of the groundlings in the city beneath him. It explained everything about those who governed from this high place: He felt himself not only physically but morally superior, occupying a higher, more spiritually elevated space, ethereal where the Muscovites were flesh-bound and sweaty, pure where they reeked of sausage and kvass. He shook his head in amusement at the whimsicality of these thoughts, but found he could not dismiss them. “Those poor