The Last Tsar's Dragons

by Jane Yolen

  Bronstein rode to the station in his second-best suit, his beard trimmed, his eyeglasses wiped clean as laboratory glass. When he reached the city, and the smell of coal and crowds hit him, he suddenly realized how much he missed the big cities of Europe.

  I was happy in Vienna. In London.

  He would have stayed in either place, writing his stories, running his newspapers. Stayed but for the lure of dragons and the power they brought.

  He wondered if there was something to what Borutsch had said. That men who stayed too long around dragons started to think like them.

  A man would surely know if he had changed so much.

  But he was not so sure he remembered what he’d been like before Siberia. Before leaving his wife and child behind to ride a hay wagon through the snow to freedom. If he hadn’t believed the stories of a lost brood of eggs that old Chinese man had drunkenly spilled, would he even now be living in such a harmonious and pastoral—if a bit frozen—land?

  The screech of the steam train braking brought him out of his reverie, the cloud of smoke not unlike that which dribbled out of the young dragons’ noses.

  He realized with sudden clarity that it didn’t matter what choices he might or might not have made. Lenin’s lieutenants had arrived, and it was time to be about the work of the people.

  I had been thinking about the plan all day. All week. Weeks now. Fining it down, refining it. And now I admitted what I had not dared before—that it was a masterful plan. Especially since my presence would be necessary for its execution.

  Execution! I giggled at the play on words, and Ninotchka glanced at me coldly. Her face was as powdered as her hair, which suddenly made her look surprisingly old. I giggled again. Old and haggard. While I felt young, virile and . . . well, alive! I wondered how I’d never before noticed how old cosmetics can make some women look.

  “Did I say something to amuse you, my husband?” Her voice was disinterested, uncaring, the word husband ashes in her mouth.

  Thinking back over the past few weeks, I realized she had grown increasingly distant.

  Possibly, I thought, due to my spending long hours pulling together the threads of my plot into a web that Rasputin cannot possibly escape. He can neither refuse the invitation to dinner from a noble nor survive the meal I’ve planned for him.

  I suppressed another giggle. And I will be there. Nothing can keep me from seeing the look on his arrogant face as he realizes I am the architect of his destruction. Did he think he could cuckold me without a response?

  For a moment, I turned my back on Ninotchka to regain control of my face, my shaking hands.

  When I was once again facing her, she looked astonished, eyes wide, as if she had guessed. But of course she could not have guessed. I am the perfect keeper of secrets. I have destroyed better men than Rasputin in the service of the tsar. Occasionally, I have even killed them on the tsar’s orders. Not with my own hands, of course. Never my own hands.

  Knowing the right men for such tasks was my job. A word in the right ear, a bit of money passed carefully, a hostage to keep the killer in line. I am very good at what I do. If the monk’s mad eyes seemed to look through me whenever we met in the palace halls—well, that would not last long. Soon I would see them closed forever.

  “No,” I said to Ninotchka. “You have not the wit.” Having planned to dispose of Rasputin on her behalf, I now was suddenly tired of her constant sniping. A man does what he must to protect his spouse and thereby his own good name. And—if she was especially unappreciative of his efforts—he may very well find himself a new wife who was.

  I looked deeply into her eyes, reminding her who was master here, and emphasized each word. “No, you say nothing that amuses me these days.”

  Taking pleasure in a second, even wider look of surprise that she gave me, I spun smartly on my heels and quick-marched from the sitting room, boots tip-tapping a message to her with every step.

  “After all,” I whispered to the empty hall, “I have a group of aristos to shore up. Just in case . . . just in case the poisoned borscht doesn’t kill the monk on the first go-round. Unlikely, but one never knows.”

  To survive in this world, one must always make backup plans to one’s backup plans.

  That thought was followed immediately by an even pleasanter one.

  I must look to the ladies at court. It would be good to have someone in waiting when it is time for Ninotchka to go.

  The tsarina had sent a note to Rasputin in French. She’d never quite mastered the Cyrillic. Her elegant handwriting hid the meanness of the message. He assumed she meant it to. He got the gist of the beginning but the rest was too difficult for him.

  The tsarevitch Alexei will not be able to see you this week.

  The tsarina had even left off her signature, which made it unclear if she had written it herself or had someone else do it for her. Possibly something the tsar had dictated. He could not believe the tsarina—who was so devoted to him and so thankful for his tender care of her son—he could not believe she would ever cut him off like this. But the tsar, perhaps. He had been cold to the monk since his return from the front.

  Of course he can treat me any way he wishes. He is the tsar. And the monk would never deign to suggest how God’s ruler on Earth should comport himself. But God may judge him harshly if he mistreats such a valuable messenger of His Word as myself.

  He needed a much better read of the letter to determine who was behind his exile from the tsarina’s good graces. Since his French was—at best—simple phrases, he would need to find someone else to read the message for him so that he understood it completely. He settled at last on the beautiful Ninotchka, the wife of that silly bureaucrat whose name always escaped him.

  She read it eagerly, her small breasts heaving up and down as she translated, which he took for a sign that she might be willing for a tumble in her capacious bed.

  Her voice was light, a bit silly, but silliness had never put him off.

  “The tsarevitch Alexei. . . ,” she read, “will not be able to see you this week. The doctors have agreed he needs full rest from his latest bad turn. . . . A nursing staff is in charge. You excite his blood too much, dear Father Grigori. Those trips—that started with the visit to the dragons—must be ended. All other visitations with him will be chaperoned. It is the tsar’s wish, and mine as well.”

  Ninotchka finished, bit her lower lip prettily.

  “This is just between us, my child,” Rasputin said and took the paper back from her, careful not to touch her hand. He suddenly dared not let a spark travel between them. There were too many other women about, and it was too dangerous. Besides, he was stunned by the coldness in the tsarina’s letter, which the “dear Father Grigori” did nothing to disguise. He had to think about what it meant. And who had written it.

  So he gave Ninotchka one of his well-practiced smoldering looks and departed with the note crumpled in his hand.

  Back in his rooms, he smoothed out the note with a warm iron and read it himself with much difficulty, hearing it in Ninotchka’s light voice as he did, thinking about the delightful afternoon tryst he’d been forced to forgo. The note’s contents did not improve with a second reading.

  Had he overplayed his cards? He was usually good at such games. A champion at Eralash and Siberian Vint. But politics had been the game he played best. ’Til now.

  He repeated it out loud and bitterly. “’Til now.”

  The red dragons were restless that evening in their burrows, snapping at their keepers and tugging at their leads. Bronstein tried to keep them in line—he was the only one they really listened to—but even he was having trouble with them that night. Others might have thought to use a whip. A cat-o-nine tails was always close to hand, and a buggy whip as well. But Bronstein eschewed the rougher methods, leading the dragons with a firm hand and a firmer voice. Usually it worked.

  “Why do they act this way?”

  “And why do you not stop them? You have a whip.”


  The speakers were Koba and Kamo, two middlemen sent by Lenin to oversee the training of the beasts. Or the “Red Terror,” as Lenin had dubbed them. That was so like him, trusting no one. Not even his own handpicked men. He’d told them nothing beside the fact that they would be underground. They’d assumed they were to be spies. And they were, of a sort.

  Though they looked quite different—one strikingly handsome with windswept hair and a disarming smile, the other a frog-eyed caricature of a typical Georgian peasant—Bronstein couldn’t tell Koba and Kamo apart. Something in their manner made them identical in his mind: arrogance compounded by . . . by. . . . He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  “The dragons are bred to the sky,” he said archly, “and this stay underground irks them. To beat them will only make them tenser, more dangerous.”

  “Then why even have the whips?” asked perhaps-Kamo.

  “It makes me calmer,” Bronstein told them, with a bit of self-deprecating humor in his voice. That neither of them laughed was another dark tick against them.

  Bronstein fixed one of them—the handsome one—with a glare. Koba, maybe. “And you may try to stop them if you wish.” He realized he was trying to train the two men as he trained the dragons, with a combination of strength and cozening.

  Maybe-Koba looked at the dragons for a moment as if considering it. He didn’t look hopeful. But he didn’t look frightened, either.

  Bronstein snapped imaginary fingers. That was it! Arrogance compounded by blind stupidity. They didn’t know enough to be afraid of the dragons. Or of Lenin. Or—he considered carefully—of him. The dragons were smarter, but Koba and Kamo served a different master. He wondered if that made the difference.

  “My apologies, Comrade Bronstein,” Maybe-Koba said, his voice flat.

  He didn’t sound sorry. The man is an entire library of negatives, Bronstein thought.

  Maybe-Koba went on. “We shall let you return to your work. Comrade Lenin will be here within days. Then we shall release the Red Terror to cleanse this land. Lenin has said it, and now I understand what he means. Come, Kamo.”

  Koba it is, then, Bronstein thought, adding aloud, “Cleanse it of what? Of Russians?”

  Bronstein knew that Koba—or maybe Kamo, does it really matter?—had been a Georgian Social Democrat and nationalist and some whispered a separatist before joining Lenin to free the entire working class. Some said Koba—or maybe Kamo—still was. The fractures in the revolution made Bronstein’s head hurt. Without realizing it, he rubbed his cigarette-stained fingers against his temples.

  Koba stared at Bronstein with no trace of emotion on his face. “Of the tsar. And his followers. Are you feeling ill?” As if a headache dropped Bronstein even further in his estimation.

  Despite his flowing hair and soft brown eyes, there was something hard about Koba, Bronstein decided, like his innards were made of stone or steel rather than flesh and blood. But the men followed him. Followed him without question. Not that the men who followed Koba asked a lot of questions. They might fight for the workers, but they looked like idlers and ne’er-do-wells to Bronstein.

  Are these the professional revolutionaries Lenin envisioned when he split the party?

  Bronstein decided that ne’er-do-well was too kind a term to apply to these fellows. They looked more like thieves and murderers, and most likely anti-Semites.

  But maybe those were the kind of men you needed to win a revolution.

  He remembered when that was a philosophical question. Back in England, when he and Lenin and Borutsch all worked at Iskra, the revolutionary paper. He’d sided with Borutsch then, averring that education, enlightenment, and just a touch of propaganda would turn the entire working class to the revolution’s side. There’d be no need for war or violence, and certainly no need for dragons.

  But that was before his forced education in Siberia. Before his enlightenment on Bloody Sunday. He knew now that revolution was a dirty business. A bloody business.

  He grunted. So was tyranny.

  “I will provide the dragons, Koba, and you provide the men. Together we will free this land.”

  “Comrade Lenin will be here soon. He will say if there will be freedom or not.”

  Bronstein shuddered, but only inwardly. Outwardly, he was ice. Freedom was not a bargaining chip. It was the sole purpose of a revolution. What on Earth is Lenin thinking?

  Is he mad?

  He swore to himself that his dragons would make a meal of Koba and Kamo if they tried to corrupt the revolution. He would chop them into bite-sized pieces himself. He imagined feeding the dragons from a trough full of Koba-Kamo bits while Lenin asked him where his lieutenants had gotten to.

  “Why Comrade Lenin, I have no idea. But I never trusted them. Never believed they were truly committed to the revolution.”

  “Be sure his dragons are ready,” Koba said, interrupting his reverie. The Georgian turned sharply and headed up the tunnel with Kamo right behind.

  His dragons? Do they mean Lenin’s dragons? Bronstein’s hand twitched. They are not Lenin’s dragons! Who stayed up nights with the beasts? Who imprinted them? Who fed them by hand?

  How he would have loved to wring the necks of these interlopers. He briefly revisited his trough fantasy, but it was no longer a comfort. Just made him think again about Borustch’s warning.

  Did I have these violent fantasies before I became a dragon-keeper?

  He was an intellectual, a writer. Not a bully. Not a murderer. He shuddered, trying to turn his mind away from blood and violence. But one of the dragons chose that moment to bite off the finger of a young man who was grooming him, and Bronstein had to run and help retrieve the digit from the dragon’s mouth before it was swallowed.

  Lenin will be here soon, he thought, smacking the dragon on the top of its stone-hard head until it opened its mouth. The finger was still on the creature’s tongue. For a second he stared at it, as if it were a piece of meat. Then he snatched it out before the dragon’s jaws snapped shut.

  He tossed it to its bleeding and howling former owner before wiping his hands on his shirt. Perhaps the doctor could sew it back on. Perhaps not.

  Fingers, dragons, revolutionaries, his thoughts cascaded. There’s no way we’ll be ready in time.

  And yet they had to be.

  Rasputin looked in the great mirror and saw the effects of two weeks of self-administered flagellations and hours of kneeling in prayer. He decided he was wolf-lean and wild-eyed, but still handsome. Still, what did that matter when he had never discovered who it was who had engineered his exile, for exile it was, weeks without a summons to attend the tsarina or her son, or even another note. He had finally turned to God to explain the silence from the palace and for the first time in his life had received naught but silence from Him as well.

  He had howled in his apartments as the cat bit into his back, threw prayers skyward at the top of his lungs, but still nothing.

  Then finally today, a letter. An invitation. But not from the tsarina. . . .

  He grimaced at his reflection, his teeth ice-white compared to the smiles of the peasants he had known. Brushing his fingers through his beard, he loosened a few scattered bits of bread stuck in the hairs.

  Always go to a dinner full, his mother had warned. The hungry man looks like a greedy man. He had no desire to look greedy to these men. Hard, yes. Powerful, definitely. But not greedy. A greedy man is considered prey.

  An intimate supper in Prince Yusupov’s house in Petrograd at 9, the invitation had read.

  Perhaps it was to be the end of his estrangement from the royal family. Or at least a new way back in.

  He knew that Yusupov’s palace was a magnificent building on the Moika, though he’d never before been invited to dine there. He and the prince had parted company some time ago; he never quite understood why.

  He’d heard in the gossipy servants’ quarters that the prince’s great hall had six equal sides, each guarded by a large wooden door. He wo
ndered which door he was to enter through, which door he would leave from. These things mattered.

  “Let me go through the door to Heaven,” he muttered to God, part of an ongoing conversation about his new place in the world. “Let me enter and leave in glory.”

  His grimace turned to a beatific smile as he felt more than heard the Word of God.

  Yes. Glory.

  That morning, after receiving the invitation, he’d played the tarot cards and saw that six would be a number of change for him. He was ready. But then, he was always ready. Didn’t he always wear his charm against death by a man’s hand? He never took it off, not in the bathhouse, not in bed. A man with so many enemies had to be prepared. He was delighted that Prince Yusupov was no longer one of them.

  And really, Yusupov is but a boy in man’s clothing.

  Rasputin was pleased to be in God’s grace again. He knew that Yusupov had gotten his place at court through marriage. He needs me now more than I need him. Still, going to the palace would give him the opportunity to meet the prince’s wife, the tsar’s lovely niece, Irina of the piercing eyes. He had heard many things about her and all of them wonderful. Rasputin had not yet had the pleasure. Well, it would be her pleasure, too.

  That dog Vladimir Purishkevich was picking him up in a state automobile. He supposed he could abide the man for the time it took to drive to the prince’s palace. Then he would turn his back and mesmerize the princess right there, in front of her husband and his friends. They’d make a game of it. But it would not be a game. Not entirely.

  Really, he felt, no one can stop me now. God had returned to him. Like Isaac or Job or Abraham, he had passed the trials God had set before him. With his whip and his prayers, he had triumphed, and God had returned and given him this gift. This passage back into grace. He began to laugh. It began softly but soon rose to almost maniacal heights.

  A knock on the door recalled him to himself.

  “Father Grigori,” his man asked. “Are you choking?”