The Last Tsar's Dragons

by Jane Yolen

  He tried to twitch a finger, blink an eyelid. Nothing.

  I must rest. I will try again in the morning.

  The moon rose over the frozen Neva, a near perfect circle.

  I have perhaps two days, he thought, his body cold but his mind perfectly clear. Maybe three.

  The red dragons were no longer restless because, for the first time, they’d been led up into the night air. Long noses sniffed at the sky; wings unfurled and caught the slight breeze. But they were not loosed to fly. Not yet. Not ’til Lenin gave the word.

  The man in question, who had arrived just the night before, stood watching the dragons. His eyes were closed almost to slits, as if he stood in full armor, assessing the troops through the slot in his visor.

  Bronstein knew the Bolshevik leader had never seen dragons before tonight, but he was showing neither awe nor fear in their presence. On the contrary, he was eyeing them critically, one hand stroking his beard. Somehow, that unnatural calm made the man seem even more dangerous.

  At last he turned to Bronstein, the eyes no longer in slits, just a bit tired, with bags under them as if he didn’t get much sleep. “You are sure they will function, Leon?”

  Lenin meant him, Bronstein. He insisted on calling Bronstein by his revolutionary name. Bronstein realized just now that he didn’t much care for it. It was an ugly name, Leon. And Trotsky sounds like a town in Poland. He wondered how soon he could go back to the name he’d been born with. And he thought at the same time that taking revolutionary names was like a boy’s game. Such silliness.

  “Leon!” Lenin snapped. “Will they function?”

  “I . . . I do not know for sure,” Bronstein said too quickly, knowing he should have lied and said he was certain. Knowing that he had little capacity to say something was true if it was not. “But they are the same stock as the tsar’s dragons,” he added. “And those function well enough.”

  Bronstein was certain of that, at least. He’d traced the rumor of a second brood bred from the Great Khan’s dragons with the thoroughness of a Talmudic scholar. Traced the rumor through ancient documents detailing complex treaties and byzantine trades to a kingdom in North Africa. Traced it by rail and camel and foot to a city that drought had turned to desert when the pharaohs were still young. Traced it with maps and bribes and a little bit of luck to a patch of sand that hadn’t seen a drop of rain in centuries.

  Then he’d dug.

  And dug.

  And dug some more.

  He dug ’til he’d worn through three shovels and done what he was sure was irreparable damage to his arms and shoulders. Dug ’til the sun scorched the Russian pall from his face and turned it to dragon leather. Dug ’til the desert night froze him colder than any Russian would ever care to admit.

  Dug ’til he found the first new dragon eggs in more than a hundred twenty years. The tsar’s dragon queen hadn’t dropped a hatch of eggs in a century, nor was she likely to anytime soon. And even if she did, it would be years before the eggs brought forth young.

  Dragon eggs weren’t like other eggs. They didn’t need warmth and heat to produce hatchlings. They were already creatures of fire; they needed a cool, damp place to develop.

  Nothing colder and wetter than a Russian spring, Bronstein knew. So he brought them home in giant wooden boxes and planted them on the hillside overlooking his town, doing all the work himself.

  And another thing that set dragon eggs apart: they could sit for years, even centuries, until the conditions were right to be born.

  “And some would say,” Bronstein said to Lenin, “they should be more powerful having lain in their eggs for so much longer.”

  Lenin stared at him blankly for a moment, then turned to Koba. “Are your men ready?”

  Koba grinned, and his straight teeth reflected orange from the fire of a snorting dragon. The handler calmed the beast as Koba spoke.

  “Ready to kill at my command, Comrade.”

  Lenin turned a stern gaze to the moon, as if he could command it to rise faster. Koba glanced at Bronstein and grinned wider.

  A dragon coughed a gout of flame, and Koba’s eyes reflected the fire. Bronstein looked into those eyes of flame and knew that if Lenin let Koba loose the men before he—Bronstein—launched his dragons, then he had lost. There would be no place for him in that new Russia. The land would be ruled by Georgian murderers and cutthroat thieves—new kruks to replace the old, and the proletariat worse off than before. Not the Eden he’d dreamed of. And the Jews? Well, they, of course, would be blamed.

  “Lenin,” Bronstein said, as firmly as he could. “The dragons are ready.”

  “Truly?” Lenin asked, not looking back.

  “Yes, Comrade.”

  Lenin waited just a beat, nothing more, then said, “Then let them fly.”

  Bronstein nodded to Lenin’s back and practically leapt toward the dragons. “Fly!” he shouted. “Let them fly!”

  The command was repeated down the line. Talon-boys dashed bravely beneath broad, scaly chests to cut the webbings that held the dragons’ claws together.

  “Fly!” Bronstein shouted, and the handlers let slip the rings that held the pronged collars tight to the dragons’ necks, before scurrying back, as the beasts were now free to gnash and nip with teeth the size of scythe blades.

  “Fly!” the lashers shouted as they cracked their long whips over the dragons’ heads. But the dragons needed no encouragement. They were made for this. For the night sky, the cool air, the fire from above.

  “Fly,” Bronstein said softly as giant wings enveloped the moon, and the Red Terror took to the skies.

  The last of the beasts to take flight was the first hatched and the largest, the leader of the brood. Dragons, like modern man it seemed, led from the rear. As the beast stood poised on an outcropping, wings outspread and testing the night air, it craned its long neck back to look directly at Bronstein, who felt a wave of heat and fury wash over him, through him. The heat was the dragon’s, but he recognized the fury as his own. He wanted to burn the country as badly as the dragons did. He wanted to punish them for Siberia. For his people. For himself.

  The dragon bared its teeth in a reptilian smile and leapt into the air.

  Bronstein suddenly knew that he had indeed spent too long a time with the dragons. I have become them. Their rage. Their fire.

  He looked over to Lenin and saw hot fury in his slitted eyes as well.

  But he has spent so little time with them. . . . Another thought, more profound, pushed that one away: Some men are born dragons, and some become them.

  And the rest flee or are burnt to ash.

  He watched in horror as Lenin turned to Koba. “Release your men to do their duty, as well.” And Koba laughed in answer, waving his hand.

  Bronstein saw Koba’s men scurry away and knew for certain that Russia was lost. Releasing the dragons was a mistake; releasing Koba’s men was a disaster. Borutsch had been right all along.

  It will be years before we struggle out of these twin terrors from land and sky. What I wanted was a clean start. But this is not it. He shivered in the cold.

  I need warmth, he realized suddenly. By that he did not mean a stove in a tunnel, a cup of tea, schnapps. I want palm trees. Soft music. Women with smiling faces. I want to live a long and merry life, with a zaftik wife. He thought of Greece, southern Italy, Mexico. For if the Russian winter cannot quell the hot fury in me, perhaps some southern heat can mask it.

  The dragon wings were but a murmur now. And the shouts of men.

  In the blackness before dawn, the mad monk’s left index finger moved. It scraped across the ice, and the slight scritching sound it made echoed loud and triumphant in his ears.

  He’d lain unmoving for three days.

  A peasant child had thrown rocks at him on the second day, trying to ascertain whether the drunk on the ice was alive or dead. The mad monk was surprised when the child didn’t come out on the ice and loot his body. But then he realized why.


  The ice was melting.

  The days had grown warmer, and the ice was melting. Soon, the mighty Neva would break winter’s grip and flow freely to the Baltic Sea once more. Icy water was already pooling in his best boots and soaking his black velvet trousers. It splashed in his left ear, the one that lay against the ice, and he thought he could feel it seeping through his skin to freeze his very bones.

  Terror crept in with the cold as he realized that his attempted murderers would not need to kill him. The river would do their work for them. Drown him as his sister had drowned, or waste him away in fever like his brother. He would have shivered with fear or cold, but he could not move.

  Night fell, and for the first time, Father Grigori felt the terror of the mortals he’d ministered to. Through the night, he felt like Jesus on the cross, his iron faith wavering. Why hast thou forsaken me?

  The night brought no answer, just more cold water in his boots. More icy water in his beard. More cold seeping into his bones.

  But then, before dawn, the finger.

  If one finger can move, the rest can as well.

  And putting thought to deed, he moved the index finger on his other hand. Moved it as if he’d never been hurt, tapping it on the ice, once, twice, a third time. His spirits soared as the sun broke the horizon, and with a great effort, he bent up at the waist, levering himself to a sitting position. He was sore. He was cold. Every bit of his body ached. But he was alive. And moving!

  However, he was also very tired, and he decided not to try to stand quite yet. Facing the rising sun, he waited for the heat to reach him.

  “When I am warmed straight through,” he said, his voice calm despite the creaking and popping of his stiff limbs, “I shall go ashore and deal with Felix and the others.”

  Watching the sun rise and turn from red to gold, he saw a flock of birds pass before it. A big flock of birds, not just in size, but in number, hundreds of them, casting long shadows across the ice.

  What are those? he thought. Egrets leaving their roost? But it was winter. There were no egrets here.

  And the birds were too big.

  Even from far away, he could tell they were huge. Larger even than the Siberian golden eagles he had hunted with in his youth.

  Suddenly, he knew he was too late. He’d lain on the ice too long. And Lenin had come to loose the Red Terror on the land.

  Now staring in horror, he watched the flock move closer, revealing red scales and leathery wings, smoke curling from their nostrils.

  He made a small cry, like a rabbit in extremis, and struggled to stand. But the movement that had come so easily just moments before was a trial now. His limbs cried in protest and refused to budge. Despite straining and sweating, he’d only achieved an ungainly half-crouch when the dragons were upon him.

  The lead dragon swooped in low and swatted him aside with its forefoot. He went skittering across the ice, feeling his ribs shatter. Crawling for the shore, his fingernails broke on the ice as he dragged himself along far too slowly.

  Finally—finally—he was able to shiver. But this was in fear. He no longer felt cold. Terror rushed hot in his blood.

  A shadow enveloped him, and he looked up into the black eyes of a hovering dragon. Before he could react, the dragon’s talons shot toward him, and one long claw pierced him through the chest, pinning him to the ice. It looked as if it were laughing at him, its teeth filling its horrible great mouth. He tried to scream, but suddenly he had no breath. Lungs pierced, he could only stare stupidly as the dragon’s wingbeats slowed and it landed on the ice beside him, as gently as any songbird.

  But the dragon was no songbird, and the ice shattered under its weight. Water splashed the beast’s belly, and it roared its displeasure, flapping madly trying to get aloft. Then it belched out a lash of fire, which further melted the ice around itself and the ice below Rasputin.

  When the dragon managed to lift out of the water, it slowly shook itself free of water and prey at the same time. The wind from the dragon’s wings was so strong, it pushed Father Grigori Rasputin over the melting edge of ice and down into the dark water.

  We have put a rope through the nose of Leviathan, he thought as the waves closed over his head. He could still see the dragons, distorted by the water, hovering over the hole in the ice like terns. But he is king over all the sons of pride.

  And then like his sister, Maria, so many years before, his throat and lungs filling so swiftly with the cold water that he could not even cough, Father Grigori Rasputin drowned.

  When the tsarina was told about Rasputin, it was her husband who broke the news.

  He took her on his knee, as he had when the children were still young and asleep in the nursery, watched over by three different babushkas. “Old women never sleep well at night, so they will stay awake,” he had told her, as he had been told by one of his cousins when the first child was born.

  He held her tenderly in his arms and whispered to her, as if a prelude to their lovemaking. “Sunny, my darling girl, I have news I can barely make my lips speak.”

  She turned to him, eyes wide with fear. “Alexei. . . .”

  He shook his head. “Sleeping soundly. No, not about him.”

  She named each of the children in order except—of course—their dead daughter, already out of the reach of such terror.

  She stood. “Tell me standing. I am Victoria’s granddaughter; I am the child of Germans who was taught in the cradle to handle any bad news.”

  He stood, holding her at arms’ length. “It is Father Grigori,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No! No! He is not old. He has not been sick. He is on speaking terms with God.”

  He looked down at the floor, before gathering the courage to look once again in her eyes. “He was murdered,” he said. “Foully murdered.” He couldn’t stop himself now, and the words came out in a flood. “Shot, stabbed, poisoned, drowned.”

  She stared at him as if she had lost all reason. As if the world as she knew it had suddenly collapsed at the center. He wondered if she would look like that when he died.

  Then suddenly, she said in a voice as fierce as Baba Yaga’s, “Which thing killed him?” As if she would bring the miscreant gun or knife or bottle of poison—or river—to trial for the deed.

  “All of them,” he said, sounding as miserable as if he had been the one to raise a hand to the monk.

  She nodded. “It would have needed them all to tear him from the side of the Romanovs,” she said.

  He took her back into the cavern of his arms but didn’t mention the dragons. He didn’t dare.

  She slept all night in his arms, something she hadn’t done in years, so there was one thing he could bless Rasputin for.

  At the dawning of the day, the tsarina went into the children’s rooms to tell them about what had happened before the news leaked from unreliable sources, such as servants, into their innocent ears. When she returned from that awful task, the tsar was already in his own bedroom, where he was sequestered with his barber. She was not even out of her nightclothes, and her own hair seemed to have grown gray in places overnight.

  “You bastard!” she shouted, but in German so the barber would not know what she had said. “It was your own bloody dragons in the end.”

  He took a towel from the barber and wiped his face clean of the shaving soap. “The end of what?”

  Luckily, she knew him for the guileless fool he often was, and her anger was becalmed, a ship in troubled waters still, but the sails not flapping dangerously.

  She sat down on the nearest chair. “My saintly Father Grigori,” she said, her voice dangerously low and careful, “survived everything those bastards used on him.” She was still speaking in German, being careful that the barber did not understand what was being said. “And he had already made his escape, ’til the dragons came and drowned him in the Neva.”

  “That cannot be,” the tsar remarked, way too casually to be believed. In fact, he had his answers well prepared. “The
dragons are never released without my permission.” He tried to smile, feared it was a grimace. “You and I were at the theater. . . .”

  “Nevertheless, that is what everyone is saying,” she responded. Everyone being the servants, of course.

  He was too upset to continue in German and roared out in Russian, “Who is everyone?”

  She flapped her hands, too stunned to speak, for he had never before raised his voice with her. She turned and pointed to her rooms, where he could hear her women gossiping.

  When he turned to speak to the barber, to calm things down, the man had already fled.

  There’ll be no help from that quarter, he thought and looked back to his wife. She looked at him as cold as a St. Petersburg winter.

  In the time it took for Nicky to turn to the fleeing barber and back again, the tsarina remembered who and what she was.

  A German and a queen.

  “You made me turn Father Grigori away,” she said, coldly. In Russian now, so he couldn’t misunderstand her, easily forgetting the truth of the matter. “I turned him away, and now he is dead.” Her newly restored strength faltered. “He is dead, and now who will look after little Alexei?” She knew in her heart that the doctors were useless. Only God and Father Grigori had ever been truly helpful to her son.

  And now if he takes a turn for the worse? As he will, she thought wildly, as he always did. She shuddered to think of it, for there would be no one to help then. No one but God.

  And then she knew what she had to say, had to insist upon. Her son needed it. Her kingdom required it. History demanded it.

  “You will destroy them,” she said. She softened her voice, because soft words rather than shouted demands were the most effective tool with her husband. “Please, Nicky, you must.”

  Nicky looked confused. “Who?” he asked, no longer shouting.

  The tsarina knew that the Lord was a loving God, but a vengeful one, too. And if a servant of his had been killed—murdered!—then should not they be murdered in return?