The Last Tsar's Dragons

by Jane Yolen

We will make this sacrifice to the Lord our God, and Alexei will be spared.

  She knew it was right and true and was shocked that Nicky could not see it as clearly. But she also knew how to handle him to get her way.

  “The dragons, of course. They killed the only man—the holy man—who might have healed our baby boy.”

  He stared at her for a long moment before saying, “I give you everything, my darling. My heart, my kingdom, our children. You lack for nothing. Please, please do not ask for this.”

  “I am not asking. A tsarina does not beg,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes.

  “When it is necessary,” he said, in a voice equally steely, one she almost didn’t recognize as his, “a tsar will. I ask, no I beg you to consider this: the dragons are our only protection. The family’s own protection.”

  “They bring death to both the unholy and the holy,” she told him, her voice low, controlled. “They are indiscriminate. They will kill us if they can.”

  “Never,” he said, but the shudder in his voice gave him away.

  The tsar would hear none of it, but the tsarina was relentless. Sometimes raging, sometimes coldly quiet. I watched her worry him like a terrier with a rat for days.

  She was not subtle. She spoke about it in public so even functionaries like me heard her anger, her pain. I knew it was a foregone conclusion from the start. He may have been the most powerful man in Russia, but like most men, he was powerless against her. He was like an ordinary man being blown about in the wind.

  And she was the wind.

  It went on for a week, and the entire court watched it happen, whispered about it, wondered. I could all but hear them think: “Well, she is a German, and you know how they are.”

  But I, who was faceless and nameless to so many of them, understood what they did not. This had nothing to do with her being German. It had more to do with him being a man too caught up in love. Never a good idea for an ordinary man. Worse for a prince. Disaster for a tsar. I blame his parents for letting him become weak.

  So it was no surprise when he sent for me to gather the dragon boys and meet him and a small contingent of soldiers down in the pens.

  He made a hash of it, of course, sending the soldiers in first to shoot the beasts, then changing his mind before they could raise their rifles.

  By that point, the dragons were suspicious—they are not foolish creatures. And when the dragon boys went in with their sharp knives to dispatch their charges humanely, they were met with claws and teeth and no small amount of flame. The soldiers had to open fire to save the boys, which, as you might imagine, had mostly the opposite effect.

  The barns ran black with dragons’ blood. A dozen dragon boys died in the slaughter.

  Standing at the half-closed door to the barns, I escaped the worst of it, but even I was blooded. Even now, my face bears scars from those hot flames. Though I tell people now I got the scars in the war. And in a way, I suppose, I did.

  Few dragons died easily. None died silently. The palace walls rang out with their death cries.

  The remaining dragon boys wept for both their brethren and their dragons.

  The tsarina seemed jubilant and claimed that God had been appeased and her children were safe.

  I knew differently. For as the tsar slaughtered his best weapons of war, a messenger came to the palace and passed me a note.

  A rebellion had begun. And the rebels had brought their own dragons.

  I didn’t pass the message along. There was no time.

  I ran to my apartments but did not wake Ninotchka.

  All is falling apart, I thought. She will need her sleep.

  Prying open the old desk where I kept my treasures, I filled my pockets with gold coinage, my real certificate of birth, my other papers, several strands of rare pearls, my mother’s diamonds, my father’s gold watch and fob. Small reward for the time I had given to tsar and country, but it would have to serve. I left Ninotchka what paltry jewels she had. I had bought them for her, and I knew how little they were worth.

  She will need them, I thought. Alas, the tsar will not look kindly on me and mine once the full story of the mad monk’s death comes out. And come out it will. The prince and those other fools will have boasted in private. It’s in the blood. Servants can be forced to tell what their masters will not. I sighed. Better to leave Ninotchka to what fate her beauty can buy her.

  Most importantly, I grabbed the stolen plans for the drachometer. Those, more than any money or jewels, would buy me a place in the new order of things.

  I planned to cross the lines, find the men who held the new reins of terror. Without dragons, the tsar cannot win. History shows us that. And only a fool fights to the very last in a forlorn hope.

  I am no fool. I am a man of action, not inaction. I read history. Every wheel turns and turns again. Revolution is a messy business. But history demands the surefooted.

  I said aloud—but not too loud, for I only needed to confirm it for myself before I took the giant step into the unknowns of revolt and revolution—“There is always a need for a good functionary, a secretary, a man of purpose.”

  I thought: If necessary, I can kill. My hand can wield a knife. I have done it once, can do it again. My plan had succeeded, even before the dragon coup d’etat.

  Yes, I am someone who has much to offer, to moujik or tsar. And I will let it be known—I work equally well with men and with dragons.

  It took only a few weeks for Russia to fall. The red dragons saw to that. They didn’t terrorize the countryside, but the palaces and houses of the aristocrats. Many of the aristos fled the country with no more than the jewels on their backs. Some had houses elsewhere—in Europe if they were lucky. They carried their titles with them to be sold when they could. But most, the ones who were property-poor, ended up with nothing.

  It took much longer for the tsar to admit defeat, but on the 15th of March, he finally abdicated his throne. For the safety of his family, he agreed to the rebel terms. He knew that he was now only citizen Nicholas Romanov and practiced that name in front of any bit of mirror he could find. If there was gall in the breath it took to say it, he did it for the children’s sake, and his wife’s. Not, he thought, my own.

  But all the while, he tried to send messages to their many cousins ruling in the safe kingdoms of Europe and the United Kingdom.

  He got no answers in return.

  That silence is as sharp as the spear in our Savior’s side, he thought but kept it to himself. And the bitterness compounded when Sunny scolded him for not letting them leave weeks earlier for Germany.

  Soon, Citizen Romanov and his family were moved out to Tsarskoye Selo and placed in protective custody by the provisional government at Alexander Palace. Again he stayed silent for the family’s sake. Making what few bargains he could for better food, or an easier place for the children and Alexandra to sleep. For himself, he found it no longer mattered.

  They stayed but a short time at Alexander Palace, and then—after a long and unpleasant boat trip—wound up in a dismal place called Tobolsk in Siberia, a town of twelve thousand peasants. Two thousand miles from Petrograd. More miles from the capital. From the society of their friends. From civilization.

  I do not miss civilization, the tsar told himself, or at least not nearly as much as I thought.

  “Maman,” the girls whispered to her in French, sure that none of their guards could understand it. “We are under guard, underfed. . . .” And Anastasia added, “underappreciated.” It was not meant as a joke, but still the girls giggled.

  The tsarina (ex-tsarina, she reminded herself, Citizen Alexandra Romanov, a name she was coming to loathe) worried less about the girls and more about Alexei.

  The trip had been extremely hard on him, especially as it began on his thirteenth birthday. By the end of the first day’s excitement—because the actual reasons for the trip were being kept from the rest of the family—Alexei was exhausted. And exhaustion was never his friend.

/>   The girls had, early on, figured out something was not right, because there were few amenities on the boat, and the boatmen—unlike those on the royal yacht—were rough and grizzled and, frankly, mean.

  But it was Alexandra who bore the brunt of the worries, especially as it was likely there would be no competent physicians out there in the back of beyond to heal Alexei.

  She worried: What if he should start bleeding again? What if he falls down and breaks a bone . . . or hits his head and there is a bleed in his brain? He is such an active child. If only he were a quieter, more serious boy. But, though small for his age, and knowledgeable about his illness, he always wanted to be as boisterous as other boys. Her head spun with fears, and with the knowledge that nothing was now under her control, and that surely God had abandoned her.

  The one blessing was that Alexei seemed to be taking the trip as an adventure. None of the rest of them had the heart to tell him otherwise.

  She could tell the girls understood the dangers. They held back tears in public, but with her below deck, they were weepy and inconsolable.

  Citizen Alexandra kept reminding herself of her German ancestors, which helped her stay—at least outwardly—steady, calm, and strong. But it was a struggle.

  On the second day of the journey, the boat of exile passed by Pokrovskoye, the birthplace of the much-mourned Father Grigori. One of the other ladies pointed out his house, and it was exactly as he had often described it, and easy to identify among the izbas.

  She was holding her son’s hand when they sailed past the house, and she suddenly remembered something Rasputin had said to her, several months before he was murdered. They had been speaking of illness in general, and death in particular. And he had stared at her with those mesmerizing eyes. She thought at that moment that his eyes were like whirling planets. Indeed, he had looked quite, quite mad. She’d realized then that he was no longer there with her, but somewhere else, somewhere in time, in space.

  Oh, his body had been standing before her, but he was not there really. In a voice both like and unlike his own, he spoke in a harsh whisper. “Tsarina, to be clear—my death will be your death.”

  And then suddenly, the prophet had disappeared, and dear Father Grigori was back. His eyes normal. He had even winked at her, which was the oddest thing of all.

  Remembering this, her fingers tightened around her son’s hand so hard that Alexei cried out. When they both looked down, bruises—already the size and shape of her fingers—were brightening on his hand.

  “Oh, my little tsarevitch,” she said, dropping to her knees and kissing each bruise as if she could kiss them away.

  “It is nothing, Mama,” he said in a voice that was already starting to roughen, like a man’s.

  They had a few months of relative quiet in Tobolsk, a time that seemed endless to them all. Once they settled in, the bourgeois people of the town treated them as if they were still great folks, not plain Nicholas Romanov and his desperate family. Not “German Alix,” as the tsarina had so often been called, and her unmarried daughters. Not “that poor boy who will never be tsar.” They tipped their hats to the tsar and Alexei, waved handkerchiefs at the girls and the tsarina. They brought the family and their few servants fresh fruit and vegetables in season.

  If the family thought this was to be their long-term fate, they resigned themselves to it with a certain grace. But the government decided to punish them further by taking away milk, butter, sugar, coffee, and cream. In another country, that might not have seemed much punishment. To Russian aristos, it felt like doom.

  And then in April, a man called Jakolav came to the town, and the girls immediately giggled, and one of them called him a “ jackal.” He did not understand the English and so took no offense.

  His visage was like a demon’s, a long nose, and hair that never flattened down around his ears, leading the tsar to whisper to his wife: “Perhaps they are pointed!”

  She responded in her own whisper, “Perhaps he is Koschei the Deathless,” meaning that character from Russian folklore that had so frightened the girls when they were little, whenever he appeared in puppet plays and ballets and stories, though Alexei—even as a sick child—seemed to enjoy it all.

  But the demon, the jackal, brought them nothing to enjoy. He had basically come with their death warrants. He wanted Citizen Romanov to come with him, to leave without the family. What little protection they had was being stripped from them.

  Nicholas stood, trembling with rage. “I will not go anywhere,” he said, his voice hoarse with courage.

  Alexandra rose from her own chair and made her way over to him, placing her hand in his.

  Jakolav protested: “I beg of you not to refuse. If you do not go with me, they will send a less scrupulous sort of man to take my position.”

  Anastasia said to her sisters, again in English, “Sending a lion to take the jackal’s place!” But this time, none of them laughed. They suddenly understood the seriousness of their situation.

  The jackal added, “If you do not want to go alone, you could take with you the people you desire. Be ready; we are leaving tomorrow at four o’clock.”

  He clicked his heels and left, and no sooner had the door closed than the tsarina began pacing between the tsar and the chair, muttering, “Oh, God! What a ghastly torture! This is the first time in my life that I am not sure what I should do.”

  The tsar was stunned. He’d never seen her in this state. It all but unmanned him, as if he’d only had strength borrowed from her all these years.

  Then he snapped, “You need to do nothing, it is I—”

  And that seemed to decide her. “‘I will not let you go alone. That man, that jackal,” and she smiled bravely at the girls who giggled back, “did you see that nose, that hair? He is not to be trusted.” Then she added, “We are a family. I will go with you. The children will follow after.”

  He did not contradict her.

  The details of how they all got to where they ended up matter little. But where they ended up was in a small, barricaded house.

  None of them could see the sky from inside the house. The barricades reached the second floor, the windows were all painted shut. No one could look in. No one could look out.

  Anastasia, the most daring of the girls, was driven to despair by the lack of a horizon and managed once to open a window to look out. A shot rang out, hit somewhere close. She saw that the bullet lodged in the woodwork of the window frame and slammed the window back down. She was shaken by the shot, so near, but understood then that the sharpshooter had wanted it there in the frame, not in her heart. He could have just as easily killed her on the spot.

  None of them even walked by a window after that.

  They were searched almost daily, a hard thing for the tsar and tsarina to endure, but the girls were even more mortified by being touched by the guards who were the same ones who leered at them as they walked to and from the single toilet. In fact, the guards wrote scurrilous messages and ribald verses on the walls of the toilet.

  The girls—princesses no longer—learned to cloud their eyes as they walked by, heads still held high.

  Perhaps worst of all, the family was allowed but five minutes a day to walk in the garden, breathe the air, see the sky.

  Sometimes, if Alexei was doing poorly, the tsar would carry him out in his arms or on his back, almost as if he didn’t want the child’s feet to touch the bitter earth.

  The tsarina rarely left the porch. She complained of aches and pains. Each day, the girls found even more gray hairs in her once luxurious crowning glory.

  One Sunday, they were allowed to go to Mass. Alexei looked around at the saints’ faces in the icons. It was a small, poor church so there were only a few treasures. The girls sat shivering, four of them in the pew, not from the cold—it was the middle of July—just that something seemed ominous about the whole thing. The tsar sat forward, his elbows on the next pew, his head in his hands. The tsarina sat bolt upright, like a warrior or
a martyr, hands together. But if she was praying, no sound came from her closed lips.

  The following Tuesday, they were let out into the garden for their usual five minutes.

  There was a kind of buzz in the air, too loud for bees, too quiet for thunder.

  The tsarina looked up, hoping, praying that planes were coming to rescue them. She whispered to herself, Maybe my German cousins are at the controls.

  For the first time in weeks, she moved out into the garden to see.

  Not planes, but birds. Giant birds.

  Then she shook her head: not birds.

  Looking at the tsar, who was playing with Alexei, at the girls pulling small flowers from the ground to wind in their hair, she whispered in a desperate voice, hope and fear entwined: “Nicky, beloved. It’s your dragons! Your dragons! Coming to rescue us.”

  She thought wildly, even happily, He must not have killed them as I demanded. God stayed his hand and let them live. And now they repay us with release!

  The buzz of the giant beasts came closer.

  The guards were screaming, howling. Some fired into the air, but either the dragons were too fast for them or their skin too tough.

  The tsarina began to dance like a madwoman.

  The tsar, still holding his son, came close. “No my darling, Sunny. My black dragons are all dead. I watched them die. I stood boot-deep in their blood. Those are red dragons. Red. Not mine.”

  “Red dragons?” As she said it, she remembered how Father Grigori had died. How the revolutionaries had won. Remembered the priest’s ghost saying, “My death will be your death.”

  She understood now. He did not mean it as a metaphor. It was true.

  She looked again at the sky, into the death that Father Grigori had prophesied, a fire she did not fear. God had not abandoned her. He had sent a different kind of release. It would be a quick dying for all of them, not this slow descent into madness. Into dirt.

  “Fire cleanses. Releases,” she told them. “Welcome it. It will make martyrs of us all.”

  They turned as one and stared at her—her husband, her daughters, and little Alexei as well. Their faces wore masks of fear, horror.