In any other city, at any other time, such an offer might make a woman on her own nervous: but not there, not then. My hosts’ idea of “something different” was simply to get out and mix with the crowds pullulating in the Bundesplatz: so we did.
Down at the bottom end of the Bundesplatz, where the Schauplatzgasse runs into it, stands an interesting piece of sculpture: a big shambling bear made all of golden pine, apparently caught in mid-shamble on his way to the Bundesrat across the road. He wears an affable grin, and altogether looks like someone wandering through his town with nothing to do on his day off. Near him is an outdoor “giant” chessboard, where city people or visitors play games of great intensity which are watched by equal intensity by the passers-by. Along with my hosts, I got myself a drink from one of the nearby cafes and joined the crowd of kibitzers, watching a young man with long fair hair and studded leathers playing an older, silver-haired, stubbly man smoking an astonishingly foul cigarette in a peculiar J-shaped holder.
We watched them play for the better part of an hour. They meant business. It might have been the middle of the night in a neutral country long after the frost melted off the Cold Wars, but you couldn’t have told it from these two: they played as if empires depended on the outcome. Towards the end of the hour it became plain that the older man with the foul cigarette was pushing his younger counterpart toward checkmate, though how long it would take, I couldn’t tell—no more than twelve or fifteen moves, anyway. One of the couples I had come down with had left earlier, pleading hunger, but I knew better—the female half of the couple had been making increasingly risqué jokes as the game progressed, and her boyfriend finally gave in gracefully. Now the second couple was spotted from across the square by some other people they knew, and went off to join them. I stood with the third couple for a while more, watching the net close around the younger player. In the middle of a particularly bloody exchange of bishops, someone bumped into me from behind.
I looked over my shoulder—and laughed out loud. From down around waist level, a bear looked up at me: one of the city’s golden bears, it looked like, as opposed to the crowds of grizzly bears, polar bears and teddy bears which populated the square. “Hey, lady,” it growled, in English, “you come here often?”
I recognized the voice behind the hoary pick-up line, and laughed again. “Ran? I thought you said you were being posted to Stockholm.”
“I was. I’m back. Want a drink?”
“Sure.”
I said good night to the remaining couple and followed Ran off to one of the nearer terrace-bars, where (for a miracle) there was a table open. Ran went on all fours, shambling. The walk was very close indeed to the usual gait of the bears in the Bärengraben: I wondered how long he had been practicing it. Other people, watching us pass, pointed and applauded. Ran nodded to them, and clambered up on the chair across from me, sitting in it rather awkwardly, as a bear would: overflowing it, somewhat, but that was the costume.
A waiter showed up almost immediately. “Gurten?” Ran said to me, and when I nodded, said to the waiter, “Zwÿ Gurtnbier bitte, Rudi; miy konto.”
“Jaja, Herr von Zair’ngen,” said the waiter, produced a tab slip for Ran to sign—it took some doing, in the costume—and then went off.
“I thought I might run into you somewhere around town,” Ran said: “you mentioned you were coming back around now.”
“Good guess. I was half wondering whether you might be here, too, though spotting anybody under these costumes takes some doing. Did you see that lady dressed as a peacock?”
“Yes. Wonderful piece of work: must have cost her a fortune.” The beers arrived: we didn’t bother with glasses—no one else was. We picked up the bottles. “Zum wohl,” Ran said: “Viva,” said I.
We drank. “You’ve been down in Romansch-speaking country again,” he said. “More research?”
“Dictionary-hunting,” I said. “I had to go to St. Moritz.”
“Nice excuse,” he said.
I chuckled. “Yes, well. It beats skiing. But we got to see S-chanf, this time, and Val Mustair.”
“Aha. The National Park. See any of my ‘relatives’?” He waved a paw.
I shook my head. There are few parks on Earth so rigidly controlled as the Swiss National Park...the controls mostly making sure that no human can affect this piece of ground in any significant way. Humans in the Park must stay on certain marked paths and not venture off them: pets are not allowed, not being native to the local ecology. Here only, in all of Switzerland, fallen trees are left to lie where they fall, instead of being cut and stacked for firewood. Touching any plant, interfering with any animal, is strictly forbidden. Even shouting is against the rules. The only way you get to see wildlife in the National Park is if it wanders within viewing distance of the walking paths...and not much does. But in the silence, you can hear, far off, the cough of the lynx, the moan of the bear...if you’re lucky. I had seen nothing but trees, and the silence had been unbroken.
“Speaking of your relatives,” I said. “I finally put two and two together.”
“I thought you might,” he said, “when you saw the business card.” His voice was amused.
I was glad about that. I had met a few people in Austria and Germany who had been just very slightly miffed at my seeing the “von” or “zu” in their names and not immediately understanding the connection to nobility, ancient or modern: for there, as here, people are (quietly) proud of such things. Well, “von” is a little watered down these days: “zu”—the noble “of”, as in “Elizabeth of England”—is more indicative. In Ran’s case, though, it was less the “von” that attracted my attention, than the family name itself: Zahringen. Finally I had recalled why my memory itched a little when I saw it. Berchtold von Zahringen had been the name of that first Duke who found the pretty, wooded hill, very defensible, rising out of that long loop of the Aare, and sent his hunting party off to find the beast which would give his new city its name.
“How direct is the connection?” I said. “It’s got to be a lot of generations, now.”
“Twenty-two,” Ran said, “counting me. And twenty-three is on the way.”
“Hey, congratulations! Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl yet?”
“Not yet. Betta will have the amniocentesis in a few weeks.”
“That’s great.” We drank again, to the twenty-third generation. “But I gather there’s no castle.”
“Oh, no, not any more...everything directly associated with the name passed into other hands a long time ago. The government, mostly.” His look was wry.
“Still,” I said, “there must be a lot of family history that remains to you. They can’t take that.”
“No,” he said, looking thoughtfully at the beer bottle and the bear strolling happily across the Gurten logo with its tongue lolling out: “no, they can’t.”
We chatted for a little while, slightly aimlessly, about the Zahringen family’s doings down through time, especially their involvement with Bern’s great “imperialist” period, when they were at their most territorially aggressive (Bern remains one of Switzerland’s largest cantons), and when their soldiery, native and exported, was the terror of Europe. “The dirty Swiss,” other countries called them—meaning by this that Bernese mercenaries, having once sold their services to a given power, stayed bought and refused to re-sell their contracts to higher bidders after the fact. Such behavior was most unusual, in the Renaissance, and much reviled, especially by those unfortunate enough to have to fight the Bernese. The red and yellow banner with the grinning, shambling black bear was wooed, and loathed, from Rome to Copenhagen and from Calais to Vienna.
“But war,” Ran said, leaning back and shaking his head, “statesmanship, all that, everything comes down finally to what people do in tight situations.” He pushed the beer-bottle around on the table with one clawed paw. I found myself, suddenly, studying those claws. They looked fairly sharp.
“Like the commodities markets,” I
said, for when we last met we had been discussing the rules for how to prosper in those markets, and Ran had boiled it all down to one simple principle: Know when the traders are greedy: know when they’re scared. Then act accordingly.
“That’s right,” Ran said. “That too....” He pushed the bottle around some more.
“Family history,” he said. “Let me tell you a piece of it that never made it out into the history books. Old Berchtold the Fifth, my twenty-one-times great whatever...he didn’t just send the hunters out. That wasn’t his style: he was hunting-mad, Berchtold. He went out with them.”
“And shot the chicken. Or the frog.”
Ran laughed, and the laugh was half growl. “Maybe. That, the family version of the story doesn’t tell. But they did find the bear, finally. Duke Berchtold wouldn’t let them simply shoot it. He went to kill it himself, with a spear, a boar spear, as it happens. And he did kill it, though not before it wounded him.”
He paused. I watched him rather curiously.
“Bit him, actually,” Ran said.
“Oh,” I said. “So after that, every month, when the moon was full—”
Ran looked at me, and smiled.
No mask designed for a high-budget SF movie, not with any four or five or ten people from the Muppet Creature Workshop working it from behind, could possibly have moved with the mobility and ease of the absolutely animal face grinning at me now—showing the teeth, the real, glinting bear’s teeth, in the most amiable manner. One eye closed in a wink. One brown eye. Not human. Wet.
I took a drink of beer: I needed it. My mouth was dry. “They did call him and his descendants ‘the bear-Dukes of Zahringen’,” I said. “Maybe I should have suspected the reference wasn’t just heraldic. Do all of you do it?”
Ran shook his head. “Only some. It’s a ‘double recessive’: apparently the damaged gene, if that’s what it is, takes a fair amount of reinforcing. But Swiss people are conservative, we tend to marry our own.”
“Meaning that Bernese marry Bernese,” I said, “after what you were telling me the other day about ‘mixed marriages’.”
“Yes. So, at present, there might be...” He looked thoughtful. “Oh, several hundred of us.”
“But some,” I said suddenly, “that aren’t as...functional as you?”
He looked at me and didn’t say anything for a few moments.
“‘Double recessive’ is one of those terms that sometimes gets used to describe translocated multiple-allele combinations,” I said. “And translocation of the gene usually involves loops and fusions of the chromosome. The gene gets further damaged.”
After a couple of seconds, Ran nodded. “The lucky ones,” he said softly, “have the change start to come on them in early adulthood, and transit back and forth without too much trouble, as long as they’re carrying enough weight to transform correctly. There’s pain, but—” He shrugged. “Like childbirth, you forget... Others make the change, but don’t survive. Not too many of them, any more: those particular genetic combinations seem to have largely bred themselves out of the pool. Though accidents still happen. We had a fellow who was doing high-energy work at CERN. One of his daughters—” He fell silent, then said, “And there are some who make the change...but get stuck.”
“What happens to them?” I whispered.
He smiled, a dryer look this time, and picked up his beer bottle. “We protect them,” he said, “from the government.”
I drank too: the last swig. “Ran,” I said, “why are you telling me this?”
Ran put his bottle down. “Who would believe you?” he said. “The story’s hardly the kind of thing that the Neue Zürcher Zeitung would print, even if someone there believed it. And, besides...it’s Fasnacht.”
I had to laugh at that, while still feeling fairly somber. “Thanks for telling me,” I said. “I’m sorry for your trouble...though you seem to be coping pretty well with a difficult situation.”
“Difficult,” Ran said, “oh, I suppose so.” He climbed down from the chair. “Especially with the franc as strong as it is. But taken all together, it’s not so hard. You know what’s really hard?”
“What?”
“Spending a whole night talking without moving my mouth,” he said, and winked again, and slipped away into the crowd in the square, where the shaggy brown-golden pelt got lost behind a screen of about a hundred semi-drunken people.
Blinking, I looked after him. The crowd parted for a moment, just long enough to show a glimpse of him, shambling along, on all fours again, to the delight of the people immediately around him: they applauded, they whooped, one of them bent down to offer him a drink from a bottle. I saw the big golden-brown head swing in that direction, eyes glittering in the light from the nearby restaurant, the expression in them hard to tell from this distance. Irony? Amusement?—Then the head shook from side to side, politely refusing, probably muttering something in Bärnerdeutsch: without moving his mouth. A sound of laughter, and the crowd closed again: he was gone.
I got up and went back to the chess game (still in progress, but moving swiftly toward an disastrous endgame reminiscent of that last Kasparov game against the computer). First, though, I asked the waiter who had taken care of us for a glass of pflumli, which I drank fast. A few minutes later the world was wobbling slightly, and the idea of bears who were also commodities brokers didn’t seem so bizarre. It must be nice, when you came right down to it, to have one night a year when you could come out in your own clothes, your own skin, and speak your mind. But that was always the idea, as far as Fasnacht was concerned. There would always be at least one night of the year when, fully masked, you could go up to anybody and let them know what you thought of them: and afterwards, no matter how insulted, the party you had so favored could not retaliate. Except there was at least one Bernese who, on these two or three nights each year, didn’t put the mask on: he took it off. And laughed, showing his teeth.
And what about the others? I thought, rather later, on the train to the plane home at noontime. Other cities have mascots, but few have held onto them with the tenacity of the Bernese, in these times of ruthless modernization and the systematic rubbishing of the “sentimental” and “outdated”. Now I suspected it was because the bears have help—”professional” help. How many other distant children of the Zahringen, wearing skins occasionally alien to them—dark quiet suits, business dresses—have pushed quietly, lobbied, speaking a word in a bar here, a local political committee meeting there, to make sure that the relatives who couldn’t now speak for themselves were properly taken care of? And not turned out into the wild for the sake of political correctness, either, but cared for and companioned by those who walked on two legs, and spoke a local dialect that they could at least partially understand. Bad enough to be a beast with only the distant echoes of humanity left at the bottom of your brain: worse still to be stuck with humanity that didn’t speak Bärnerdeutsch.
Let others, outsiders, think what they like. In Bern, at least, the family takes care of its own....and the figs and carrots are extra.
And now a fairy tale… somewhat spatially misplaced from the more typical European milieu. And a chance to indulge, not the Were thing this time, but a dislocated version of the Dragon thing— of which (as the readers of The Door into Shadow probably can guess) I have a pretty bad case.
The Queen and the Thief and the Dragon
When the dragon came out of the caves of Cumbre de la Vicente and started blackening the hills with its fiery breath, the Queen began to worry. She sat on her throne with her chin on her fist and her elbow on the throne’s arm, watching with mild dismay as her royal house began filling up with heroes. Magnificent specimens they were, none of them less than two yards tall. They came on splendid steeds (which they sometimes rode right into the hall, frequently fouling the sweet rushes strewn on the bright-tiled floor); they came in gold-damascened cuirasses, bearing spears hammered out on icy anvils, or supple swords forged in the fires of lost Toledo. The
y bore themselves with heroic grandeur, swirling their cloaks in their passing, speaking courtly phrases, bowing themselves double over her hand every chance they got. They drank a great deal of her wine, and, while not at their heroic feasting, they staged mock battles in the fields around the palace, trampling much green corn in the process. The Queen sat in her throne, considering all these things; also considering that it would soon be June, and the dragon, instead of just blackening hillsides and burning down crofters’ cots, would be starting huge brushfires as well. And finally she turned to her most trusted counselor, who stood by her throne chewing his graying beard and thinking similar thoughts. She crooked a finger at him, and Don Escalonzo bent near.
“Get me thieves,” the Queen said.
And since the Don was a prompt and conscientious man, with extensive connections throughout the Twenty Cities, he immediately got her thieves—all of them who were of any note—even making discreet withdrawals from several neighboring dungeons. From Los Encinos to Ciudad de la Santa Monica, the theft rate took a drastic plunge. Several professional fences imperiled their immortal souls by hanging themselves in despair.
The Queen was a noble hostess, no less so to criminals than to heroes when they were guests under her royal roof. She poured out many a bottle of the blood-red wines of the North for them, listening to their qualifications and asking them (with the guarantee of amnesty) many pointed questions about their careers. The thieves answered as courteously as the heroes, but more circumspectly, with much shifting of the eyes. And the Queen noticed that their fingers seemed to twitch a great deal when she wore jewelry. One by one she had them into her throne room, and one by one sent them away again, down the long halls hung with tapestries and ancient heirloom weapons, lined with tables covered with plate of gold and other precious things of marvelous workmanship. The thieves sweated greatly on these long walks, so Don Escalonzo told the Queen—for all that it was cool and shadowy in the royal house, and hardly late May as yet. She nodded at this.