Free Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick

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...
    T he 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 rainbow. As modesty dictated, only their flashing eyes were left uncovered, but if a vagrant breeze now and again pressed the silk so close to here a breast or there a thigh as to leave no doubt of the sweet desirability of their bodies…well, it was a passing thing no man could be entirely sure he had seen in the first place.
    “I feel like Tamburlaine, riding in triumph through Persepolis.” Surplus threw a handful of chocolate coins wrapped in gold and silver foil from the window of his carriage. He wore a dazzlingly white turban such as would have been the envy of any Commedia dell’arte sultan, decorated with a tremendous glass ruby. The crowds cheered lustily at the sight of him and (thinking the coins real) dove frantically for the largesse he scattered.
    “It is fine, is it not?” Though Darger sat at his friend’s side, he leaned back against the cushions, in the shadows, in order to remain unremarked from the street. “Even Arkady