“We thank you, sir, for your understanding,” Surplus said firmly. In the town above them, church bells began to ring.
…2…
Arkady Ivanovich Gulagsky was drunk on poetry. He lay on his back on the roof of his father’s house singing:
“Last cloud of a storm that is scattered and over,
“Alone in the skies of bright azure you hover…”
Which was not technically true. The sky was low and dark with a thin line of vivid sunset squeezed between earth and clouds to the west. In addition, the winds were autumn-cold, and he hadn’t bothered to don a jacket before climbing out through an attic dormer window. But Arkady didn’t care. He had a bottle of Pushkin in one hand and a liquid anthology of world poetry in the other. They came from his father’s wine cellar. The cellar was a locked room in a locked basement, but Arkady had grown up in that house and knew all its secrets. Nothing in it could be kept from him. He had slipped through a casement window into the basement and then, up among the joists, found the wide, loose board that could be pulled open a good foot, and so squeezed within and, groping in the dark, stolen two bottles at random. It was an indication of his characteristic good fortune that the one happened to be the purest Pushkin, just as it was an indication of his extreme callowness that he had chosen to drink it in tandem with a poorly organized selection of foreign verses and short prose extracts in mediocre translations.
The bells began ringing from every church in the town. Arkady smiled. “How it swells!” he murmured.“How it dwells on the future!-how it tells of the rapture that impels to the swinging and the ringing of the bells, bells, bells”-he belched-“bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells-doesn’t this ever end?-rhyming and the chiming of the bells! I wonder what all the fuss is about?”
Arkady struggled into a sitting position, losing his grip on one bottle in the process. The Pushkin went bouncing down the roof, spraying liquid poetry, and shattered in the courtyard below. The young man frowned after it and brought the other bottle to his lips and drank it dry. “Think!” he told himself sternly. “What do they ring bells for? Weddings, funerals, church services, wars. None of which apply here or I should have known. Also to welcome home the prodigal son, the errant wanderer, the hero from his voyages… Oh, damn.”
He staggered to his feet. “My father!”
The dirt square before the city gates was thronged when Ivan Arkadyevich Gulagsky rode through the great thorn-hedge wall into town with three brightly-painted caravans in tow, a mounted stranger to either side, and the battered remains of a cyberwolf dragged on a rope behind him. His back was straight and his grin was wide, and he waved broadly to one and all. From the rear of the crowd, Arkady scowled with admiration. The old blowhard knew how to make an entrance-you had to give him that.
“Friends!” Gulagsky cried. “Neighbors! Townspeople!” Then he launched into a long-winded account of his exploits, to which Arkady paid little attention, for he was distracted by the sight of narrow win-dow-slides snapping open in the sides of the caravans. It was dark inside, but there was a shimmer of movement. What was in there? Prisoners? Animals of some kind? Freaks of nature or the gene vat? Arkady slipped lithely through the crowd, bent over almost double so as to avoid drawing attention, until he was crouching by one of the wagons, just beneath a slide. He straightened to look inside.
A huge hand clamped itself over his face, and he was thrown back onto the dirt. He found himself staring up at an enormous beast-man.
“Think you’re pretty cute, dontcha, chum?” the mountain of muscles snarled. By his accent, he’d acquired Russian from a tutorial ale. “Well, get this: You so much as touch the wagon and I’ll rip off your hand. Peek inside and I’ll squeeze both eyes out of your head and feed ’em to you for breakfast. Understand?”
Arkady nodded meekly and made no attempt to rise as the behemoth strode scornfully away. “Things are in the saddle,” he muttered when he deemed himself safe again, “and ride mankind.”
Poetry made all things bearable.
But then a dark-robed figure reached down and effortlessly hauled Arkady to his feet. He found himself staring up into the fierce and unblinking eyes of Koschei, the strannik-wanderer, pilgrim-who had come to town out of the wastelands a few weeks ago and who so far showed no signs of ever leaving. This close, his body odor was overwhelming.
“God does not love a cowardly little sneak,” Koschei said. “Sin boldly, or not at all.” Then he spun about, robes swirling, and thumped away, lashing angrily at the earth with the great staff he so obviously did not need for support.
Arkady stared after him until the apparition disappeared in the crowd. Then he turned away and found himself face to face with his father, newly descended from the wagon and surrounded by men who were pounding his back and shaking his hand. A great surge of emotion washed through Arkady. He threw himself into his father’s arms.
“Ah me!” he cried. “Thou art not-no, thou canst not be my sire. Heaven such illusion only can impose, by the false joy to aggravate my woes. Who but a god can change the general doom, and give to wither’d age a youthful bloom! Late, worn with years, in weeds obscene you trod; now, clothed in majesty, you move a god!”
“You’re drunk,” his father said in disgust.
“And you were dead,” Arkady explained. He punched his father in the chest. “You should have taken me with you! I could have protected you. I would have thrown myself in the wolf ’s slavering jaws and choked him with my own dying flesh.”
“Take this fool away from me,” his father said, “before I do him a violence.”
In a kindly manner, one of his father’s new friends took Arkady by the arm. “If I may,” he said.
One shrewd glance told Arkady that the fellow’s face was covered with fur and that his ears, snout, and other features were distinctly and undeniably canine. “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,” he declaimed. “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”
“Young sir, there is no need for this hostility.”
Arkady flung his arms wide.“You! hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable,- mon frere!”
“Come now, that’s much better,” the dog-man said. “Only, you must call me Surplus.”
Arkady smiled broadly and extended his hand. “And you in turn must call me Ishmael.”
The procession, merry as a holiday carnival, wound its way up twisting streets lined with sturdy log houses, all beautifully decorated with millwork in the Preutopian style. Which was, Arkady acknowledged, backward-thinking and anachronistic. Yet they were vastly more handsome than the modern one-room shanties inhabited by the poor, which were grown from the ground like so many fairytale gourds. So this was probably the best aspect of his hometown to show these strangers. The throng flowed upward, concluding at the very center and highest point in the town, atop what would not be deemed a hill in any place less flat than this. There stood his father’s stone mansion, the grandest house of all, a full three stories high and topped with peaked roofs and multiple chimneys, its walls blackened with time and soot and yet its interior gleaming bright and warm through the windows. It was surrounded by oaks at least a century old and had a courtyard sufficiently large to hold all three wagons and enough outbuildings to house the Neanderthals as well. So at least his father’s hospitality would not bring disgrace upon them both.
Three beast-men went into the house and disappeared there for a time. When they reappeared the first of them growled, “Safe.” Then he and his comrades intimidated all bystanders away from the first caravan, donned their silk gloves, and politely knocked on the door. They stood aside as it opened from within.
Arkady watched with intense interest.
One by one, human figures emerged. Though they were clad head-totoe in chador, their slim forms were undeniably female. A breeze rippled through the courtyard, pressing cloth to bodies, and every man present sighed. One of the townswomen spat angrily on the ground.
A grin split Gulagsky’s beard, and he nudged Darger with his elbow. “Oho! So those are your precious Pearls! They are your treasure!”
Darger pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing. “Alas, sir, it is only too true.”
“All this fuss over mere women?” Arkady’s father said with amusement.
