The Last Tsar's Dragons

by Jane Yolen

  Like Jael in the Old Testament, who killed Sisera with a tent peg, I was left with no other recourse.

  But how?

  I felt the answer was down in the stalls with the dragons. A small shudder ran between my shoulders, but I nodded to the tsar’s son atop his peasant horse. Then, deciding not to give the monk any more of my time, I turned my back—which had only moments earlier been shuddering with fear—and delivered the cut direct, as they liked to say in English novels, and downstairs I went.

  What I hadn’t known then—because I’d never been down in the dragon barns before—was that one could smell the dragons long before one saw them. It is a ripe musk, which fills the nostrils and overflows into the mouth, tasting like old boots. But it’s not without its seductions. It has the smell of power. A smell that I could get used to.

  The door squealed when I pulled it open, and the dragons set up a yowling to match, expecting to be fed. It was a sound somewhere between a dog whistle and a balalaika.

  They were not at all what I’d expected, being black and sleek, like eels. Or maybe bats. Their long faces, framed with ropey hair, that made them seem as if they were about to speak in some Nubian’s tongue. I could almost imagine Araby issuing forth instead of curls of smoke.

  I remembered hearing that dragons are always hungry. That it had to do with the hot breath and needing fuel and sustaining their fires.

  Grabbing a handful of what appeared to be cow brains out of a nearby bucket—a disgusting mess dripping blood and a kind of acidic potion that made one’s fingers tingle—I flung the gruesome meal into the closest stall just to see what would happen.

  Three or four dragons seemed to be sharing a stall, possibly because it calmed them down. And then, with a quick rustling of their giant bat wings, they swooped onto my offering. It wasn’t a pretty sight. They were hardly dainty eaters. And they clearly did not share. The smallest dragon had little of the meat, which likely meant his chances of becoming a bigger dragon lessened at each meal.

  It could be that the dragons were not as bright as the Cossacks, and I might have to revise my previous notions about them. I’d seen the same behavior in wolves and dogs. Politicians, too. Possibly the peasants’ problem, as well.

  But the rebels? Would they share equally? There was the question. If I were the rebel chief, I’d promise equality but might not be able to—or want to—deliver it once a revolution was successful.

  The dragons in the stall looked up, expecting more.

  And that is the problem for any leader. Everyone is always expecting more. Especially the people at the top. The big eaters.

  I thought briefly of going back for a second handful of cow brains, but my fingers still stung badly and had a redness and an odd shine on them that made me wince just from glancing at them. I hoped I hadn’t damaged the nails for good. Finding a towel hanging on a nearby peg and, assuming it was to be used, I dried off my hands, though I was certain the smell of both towel and hands was a stench that would never leave me.

  Some of the solution had also dripped on my vest, burning holes across the watch pocket. I knew I was going to need to have a thorough wash and change of clothes before going to see Ninotchka, or she would never let me touch her this night.

  Before I turned to go, I took a moment to gaze into the eyes of the largest one I’d fed, careful not to look down or away, nor to show fear. Fear—or so I’ve heard—only excited them. Like lions and tigers. Prey shows fear.

  And I am no prey.

  Never prey!

  I stood taller, throwing my shoulders back, taking in a deep breath, and all but clicking my boot heels together like a damned Hessian, just so I wouldn’t show the dragons my fear. But perhaps they smelled it on me.

  I felt compelled to turn to look long in the eyes of the largest one. Perhaps I thought to tame it that way; the Lord only knows why I did it.

  Its eyes were dark, like the Caspian Sea in winter, and I began to feel as if I were swimming in them. And then drowning in them. Down and down I went, eyes wide open, mouth filled with ashy water.

  I knew in the sensible part of my brain that I was still standing by the dragon’s stall, feet on the coarse earthen floor. Then why was my throat filling with water? Why was. . . .

  I shook my head, forced myself to look away, and suddenly, as if in a sending from the Good Lord, I could see the future breaststroking towards me: hot fires, buildings in flames. The Russias burning. St. Petersburg and Moscow buried in ash. The gold leaf of the turrets on Anichkov Palace and Ouspensky Cathedral peeling away in the heat.

  It was too real not to be true. It was. . . .

  “Enough!” I cried aloud, not caring if anyone other than the beasts were there to hear me. “I am no mad monk baying at the moon or seeing prophesies in tea leaves or the future at the bottom of a glass of vodka. I am an educated man.”

  At that, I almost physically hauled myself away, finding the surface, breaking the spell. For spell it had to be.

  I addressed the dragon. “I will not be guiled by your animal magic. You do not know the name of this palace nor the name of your master, the tsar. You do not even know the word for your captivity. It is only my own fears you waken in me.”

  The dragon turned away, not a cut direct but a cut oblique, and nuzzled the last of the cow brains at its scaly feet.

  I grimaced, shook my head. I’d been wrong. There’d be no help from these creatures. And I’d be no help to them, either.

  Underground, the drachometer signaled the all-clear with a sound like cicadas sighing. Bronstein and Borutsch crawled out of the burrows and into a morning still thick with dragon smoke. The two squinted and coughed and nodded to the other folks who were emerging, besmirched and bleary, from their own warrens.

  No one exchanged smiles. Yes, they were alive and unharmed, but many houses had been burned in the incursion, businesses ruined, fields scorched through the snow. A stand of fine old white birch trees after which the town was named was now only charred and blackened stumps. And perhaps the next time the drachometers would fail and there would be no warning. It was always a possibility.

  Drek happens, as the rabbis liked to say.

  The men all grumbled and swore. Though it was not as if this pogrom against the Jews was unprecedented. Even before the dragons, there had been the tsar’s Cossacks. What they didn’t burn, they pillaged. At least the dragons didn’t rape the women and girls. Though if the tsar ordered it done, they were certain the dragons would find a way to make that happen, too.

  “May Tsar Nicholas’s own house be burned down!” whispered one man before he was shushed by the others. It was said, and not without reason, that the tsar had ears everywhere.

  The babushkas were not so full of bile. Their sighs could fill a scroll for the ark, Bronstein thought, though they were the true realists of the town. They reminded everyone of how awful the old times were before the drachometers, when tsars with names like “Great” and “Fearsome” savaged the lands with their armies. The dragons were only the latest of the tsars’ weapons. When they’d appeared on the landscape, as if by magic—for how else would dragons appear?—the Jews had been nearly wiped out.

  An old woman, still dusting off her black dress, raised a crooked finger and said, “May the Lord bless and keep the drachometers running,” which brought them all back to reality. The invention of the drachometer, just fifteen years earlier and a primitive device by today’s standards, had once again saved them.

  As Borutsch’s old grandmother often said, “We live in the better times.”

  “Better than what?” he would tease.

  Then the other old women joined in with a chorus of prayers and stories, the usual Jewish response to terror. Mrs. Morowitz told the Ukranian story of Dunay, who, in a fit against the wife he adored, killed her because she was a better bow shooter than he. And then killed himself in a greater fit of despair. “And where his dear wife fell,” said Mrs. Morowitz, “the River Nastsaya sprang forth. And where t
he hero Dunay fell, the River Danube.”

  Not to be outdone, old Mrs. Kahn, long a widow, told the story of a different sort of hero—Samson from the Torah. Though it ended as badly as Dunay’s tale.

  Hearing the old women’s stories, the children gazed around, shuddering at the wanton destruction, debating whether it was better for a hero to die by his own hand in remorse or to bring down an entire temple on the heads of his enemies as he killed himself, while their older brothers and sisters made proclamations of what they would or wouldn’t have done had they been faced with sudden, fiery death from above.

  But not Bronstein. He’d always listened intently to the stories. They were full of truths you had to tease out from the rhetoric. He tried to imagine what it had been like in the far-off days when there was no time to get safely underground and you had to face the dragons in the open, flame, tooth, and claw against man’s feeble flesh. Because he realized something the young men seemed not to: technologies fail or other technologies supplant them, and the contraption you count on one day can be useless the next.

  In this the rabbis are right, he thought. Drek really does happen. There was only one thing you could really count on, and it certainly wasn’t a cow-sized gadget that ran on magnetism and magic and honked like a bull elk in rut when a dragon came within twenty leagues.

  You can only count on power. He found himself nodding at his own sudden revelation.

  Those who have power stand on the backs of those who don’t, and no amount of invention or intelligence could raise a person from one to the other. And where was that thought going?

  He gave it a little mental push and then he had it: to get power, you had to grab it by force. And to hold it, you had to use even more force.

  We Jews, Bronstein thought, as he led Borustch out of town, are unaccustomed to force. Then frowning, Except for that which is used against us. It’s why so many have already run away—to Europe, to America. They know they can’t stand against the tsar and his mighty forces. And then carefully, he whispered to himself so no one else could hear, “But what if we can? The tsar, for all his might, is only a man. And tsars and kings and strong men have fallen before. What if we Jews choose to be David against Goliath?” That made him chuckle, since he didn’t believe in the Bible—its history or its religion.

  “What are you chuckling about?” Borustch asked.

  “The Bible,” Bornstein answered, knowing it would shut his friend up. “No more talk. You will need your breath to follow me. It’s a long hike.”

  Borutsch did not say anything more, not even to ask why he was supposed to follow or where they were going. He knew Bronstein too well for that.

  Bronstein mused, He thinks I am a dreamer like him, not a doer. But he will follow, and he will see.

  Borutsch followed.

  As they climbed the hills above the shtetl, both men began to breathe heavily, their breath frosting like dragon smoke in the chill December air. Borutsch shed his outer coat. Bronstein loosened his collar. They walked on.

  Entering the forest at midday, they moved easily through the massive cedars and spruce, grown so tall as to choke out the undergrowth and even keep the snow from falling beneath them.

  Bronstein led confidently, though there was no actual trail. Any of his earlier footprints would have been erased by the latest snow. Also, each time he came here, he took a different route. But even that didn’t matter. He would never be lost. He was as attuned to what he sought as a drachometer is to the wing beats of a dragon.

  He’d never spoken aloud to anyone in this country about what he was doing. Nor written it down. Taking Borustch along this time was a first and possibly dangerous next step. But he needed a next step, and he had a plan.

  If someone with the tsar’s ear discovers my machinations before I am ready. . . .

  The results were too dire to consider.

  Signaling a halt in a small clearing, he pointed to a fallen log. “Sit,” he said, then pulled a loaf of bread from his coat pocket and handed it to Borutsch. “Eat,” he said to the older man. “I go to see we aren’t followed.”

  “If I’d known the journey was so long, I would have brought more schnapps.”

  Bronstein smiled and reached into his other coat pocket, revealing a flask. “I’ll take it with me to ensure you’ll wait.”

  “Be safe, then,” Borutsch mumbled through a mouthful of bread.

  Bronstein was not only safe but quick as well, merely trotting back to the forest’s edge and peering down the slope. He could see the shtetl, still swathed in smoke, and beyond it, the thin strips of burning grain fields. There was no one working the fields at this time of year, though little enough was gotten from the harvest even when the workers labored there. The tsar’s kruks—the “fists” Borutsch had mentioned—took the lion’s share. He nodded to himself. And the lamb’s as well! Leaving them with barely enough to starve on.

  To be fair, Bronstein knew it was the same with the peasants, only the tsar did not set his dragons on them. He had a fondness for peasants. Not for Jews.

  It might come to bite him in the tuchus some day, Bronstein thought. Then he said out loud, “May that day come soon.” And he spit on the ground.

  Seeing nobody climbing the slope after them, Bronstein turned back to the forest.

  From field to forest. Grain to wood.

  “Up,” he said as he reentered the clearing and tossed the flask to Borutsch. “We are almost there.”

  Bronstein moved quickly now, and Borutsch struggled a bit to keep up. But as Bronstein had said, they were almost there.

  They came upon a brook running swift and shallow through snowy banks. Bronstein turned downstream and paralleled it, stopping finally at an old pine tree that had been split by lightning long ago. He paced off thirty steps south, away from the stream, then turned sharply and took another thirty. Flinging himself to the ground, he began pawing through a pile of old leaves and pine needles.

  “Grain and wood, Borutsch,” Bronstein said. “Two of the three things that give power in this land.” He’d cleared away the leaves and needles now and was digging through the cold dirt. The ground should have been frozen and resisting, but it broke easily beneath his fingers. “However, to get either one, you need the third.” Stopping his digging, he beckoned to Borutsch.

  Borutsch shambled over and stared into the shallow hole Bronstein had dug. “Oh, Lev,” he said his voice somewhere between awe and terror.

  Inside the shallow depression, red-shelled and glowing softly with internal heat, lay perhaps a dozen giant eggs. Dragon’s eggs.

  “There’s more,” Bronstein said.

  Borutsch tore his gaze from the eggs and looked around. Clumps of leaves and needles that had appeared part of the landscape before now looked suspiciously handmade. Borutsch didn’t bother to count the clumps but guessed there were many.

  “Oh, Lev,” he said again. “You’re going to burn the whole world.”

  Rasputin bore the child into his mother’s apartments. The guards knew better than to block his way. They whispered to one another when he could not hear them, calling him “Devil’s Spawn” and “Antichrist” and other names. But always in a whisper and always in dialect, and always when he was long gone.

  He went through the door carrying the now-sleeping child, for halfway along the “pony ride” he had felt Alexei slump, and, without stopping, he’d wrestled the boy off his shoulders and wrapped him in the soft blankets without the boy waking. It was an old trick but a good one, though the boy was getting too heavy for it to last much longer.

  The five ladies-in-waiting scattered before them like does before a wolfhound. Their high, giggly voices made him smile. Made him remember the Khlysty with their orgiastic whippings. What he would give for a small cat-o-nine tails right now. He gazed at the back of the youngest lady, hardly more than a girl, her long neck bent over, swanlike, white, inviting. “Tell your mistress I have brought her son, and he is well, if sleeping.”

&nb
sp; They danced to his bidding, as they always did, disappearing one at a time through the door into the tsarina’s inner rooms, the door snicking quietly shut after the last of them.

  It is the sound of a latch on a box of jewels. Meant to keep you out, but if you had the key. . . . He paused and let a momentary smile ghost across his face. Alexei is the key. The only key. His right hand, under the blanket, made a motion as if it held a key and was unlocking something.

  After a moment, Alexandra came through the same door by herself, her long face softened by the sight of the child in the monk’s arms. She was a handsome woman, knew how to dress, but he suspected she was cold in bed. He’d known a woman like that back in the village, found a way to warm her to life. She’d wept when he became a monk, but he guessed she now lived contentedly with a strapping young husband who was reaping the hours of Rasputin’s instruction.

  “You see,” he told the tsarina, “the child only needs sleep and to be left alone, not poked by so many doctors. Not given all those aspirin powders. They are from the Devil. The doctors and the powders. Empress, you must not let them at him so.” He felt deep in his heart that he alone could heal the child. He knew the tsarina felt the same. She told him so all the time.

  He handed her the boy, and she took Alexei from him, the way a peasant woman would take up her child, with great affection and no fear. Too many upper-class women left the raising of their children to other people. The monk admired the tsarina, even loved her, but really desired her very little, no matter what others might say. He knew that her abominable shyness made her cold, though in her own way, she was totally devoted to the tsar, that handsome, stupid, lucky man. Smiling down at her, he said, “Call on me again, Matushka, Mother of the Russian People. I am always at your command.” He bowed deeply, his black robe puddling at his feet, and gave her the dragon smile.

  She did not notice, though her ladies, coming back in a giggling group, did. One of them, the girl with the long neck, put a hand to her face, which was turning an inviting pink. He tucked that away for later, turning to watch the tsarina as she put the sleeping boy in her bed, not letting a single one of her ladies help her.