The Last Tsar's Dragons

by Jane Yolen

  Anastasia screamed.

  But Alexandra showed them what they all should do, what a ruler needed to do to win the hearts of the people. She stood tall, threw her arms wide open, and welcomed the heat of paradise into her grieving heart.

  And the tsar first, then the girls, and Alexei at the last followed her lead into that furnace and were cleansed.

  Ah, don't look so surprised, and stop gawping up at me like a fresh-caught fish. Were you not listening? Did I not tell you exactly what I was capable of? Did you think this story ended any other way than with you bleeding out before me?

  It’s not your fault, of course. Tough, though, that you are the one who pays for it. And isn’t that always the way of it? You trusted too much the story of my innocent incompetence and not enough the parts about my ruthlessness.

  Your superiors are the ones who should have known better than to send a boy to guard a wily old fox like me. They thought there was nowhere left for me to run. They couldn’t have been more wrong. I’ll go to the Americans. Or the Germans. None of them like the Communists. I’m certain they’ll forgive my relatively minor crimes for the things I know.

  Though I doubt I’ll tell them the whole truth.

  I saved that for you poor, dying soldier boy.

  So in your last moments, take solace in the fact that you are one of the very few who know the truth. The absolute truth.

  About me.

  About the revolution.

  And certainly about the dragons.

  This is a work of fantasy fiction surrounded with—and drowned in—history. Much of it is true.

  Not the dragons, of course, but then you already knew that. Or else you took it for a metaphor for the Red Russians, as opposed to the White Russians, many of whom were prescient enough to have already headed for America and elsewhere. If that all sounds kind of Wonderlandish—well, so does the whole Russian Revolution.

  A couple of the characters are made up, but not the tsar’s family, Leon Trotsky, or Rasputin or his death. (Except for the dragons, of course.)

  Adam and his old band—Boiled in Lead—used to play a rousing version of the European pop disco Boney M’s “Rah, Rah Rasputin.” And Jane minored in Russian Literature and Religion at Smith College. Plus Jane’s grandparents on both sides were from Russian “states”—Ukraine and Latvia. So in some ways, this was a story bound to happen.

  The only main character we made up is the nameless functionary, the bureaucrat. And if you are sharp-eyed, you will have noticed that he is the only character in first person. And possibly the author of this novella. That’s because when all the leaders die, the functionaries, the bureaucrats, go on. Without them, things—well—stop functioning. They are the ones who decide what to keep and what to burn in the histories. Or they write the histories, much of which is made up. It’s our small joke.

  The brutal deaths of the entire Romanov family were not of course cleanly and quickly done by dragons. They were shot, bayoneted, and finally, one of the girls trying to crawl away was bludgeoned. The Russians were nothing if not thorough. Then the tsar and his family were buried in secret while the newly formed government spent years insisting the Romanovs were merely in exile. Repeat as often as necessary: there were no actual dragons.

  We had written a bunch of short stories together before writing “The Last Tsar’s Dragon.” Those stories were published in a variety of anthologies. We’d also written a young adult graphic novel trilogy, and four or five middle grade novels, so we had our mother-son partnership down pat. No real arguments but a lot of “forceful conversations” along the way.

  Then an invitation to a dragon anthology came to Jane in the mail. She thought she was done writing dragon stories. There was her There Be Dragons collection; the young adult Pit Dragon Chronicles (in four volumes); an Arthurian middle grade novel, The Dragon’s Boy; a graphic novel, The Last Dragon; lots of dragon poems; and a few dragon picture books. In fact, she was about to say no to the anthology, when two lines popped into her head. “The dragons were harrowing the provinces again. They did that whenever the tsar was upset with the Jews.”

  Now Jane had already published two novels about the Holocaust (The Devil’s Arithmetic and Briar Rose) and was about to start on a third (Mapping the Bones). Plus she’d written a book of poems about her father’s family’s immigration in the early 1900s from Ukraine because the tsar’s dragons—the Cossacks—had indeed been harrowing the Jews (Ekaterinoslav). So Jane guessed there was maybe one last dragon story in her. But not to write alone.

  She sent Adam the two lines that she had thought of and told him about the anthology invitation, saying: “Want to play?” And the dragon game was afoot.

  That story was finished in about four months and accepted and printed in The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy , edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Ace, 2009. But once it was published, both Jane and Adam began to think it was a bigger story, tried to interest someone in a novel version, decided after a couple of rejections that a novella was a better idea. And by that time, Jane was starting a wonderful new publishing relationship with Tachyon, which—surprise!—had a novella program.

  Then the hard work really began!

  The original short story had been 13,000 words. The novella needed to be closer to 30–35,000. Conversations between the two of us began. And after the first complete novella draft (25,000 words) was done, we burrowed into the history and horror and the astonishing and bloody success that the revolution had been.

  A success if you and your family lived through it, that is. Not all of our main characters do make it to the end, though except for Rasputin and the Romanovs and their bloody deaths, we only hint at the others in the novella. Bornstein (Trotsky) made it through the revolutionary years and about twenty years beyond, though he was first exiled from Russia and then escaped to Mexico, where one of Stalin’s lackeys (whom he mistook for a friend) took him out with an ice pick to the head.

  Along the way, we learned a lot about haemophilia, the mad monk, the uxorious but-not-particularly-smart last tsar, his unsung wife who really did do a lot for the poor in Russia, though she’d always been considered a foreign interloper who was called called “German Alix” by the courtiers.

  Jane felt bad for the murders of the Romanovs, though she always believed that Rasputin got what he deserved. Adam puts it a bit differently: “I feel bad for the children but am pretty solid on my preferred fate for dictators.”

  The dragons? Mostly, we made them up!

  —Jane and Adam

  Timelines

  1.

  The killing of the mad monk, Rasputin, on December 30, 1916 is the stuff of saints’ tales or Grand Guignol plays. But for years, the details of his death were exactly as described in our story. Except for the dragons, of course. But new examination of his bones in 2016 seems to show he was more reasonably executed by a bullet to the back of the head. His death, and the death of his influence, would help precipitate the downfall of the Romanovs—the tsar’s family. Frankly, we prefer to believe the mad monk was killed by dragons.

  2.

  As for the Romanovs, this is the actual timeline leading to their brutal murders.

  February 1917: Russian Revolution.

  After the revolution, the tsar and family are placed under house arrest.

  March 15, 1917: The tsar is forced to abdicate.

  August 1917: The tsar and family are taken to the Siberian town of Tobolsk.

  April 1918: The Romanovs (as the tsar and family are now called) are moved to the Russian town of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, to a smaller accommodation where the windows of their rooms are painted shut and Anastasia is even shot at when trying to open a window on one stifling summer day.

  July 17, 1918: At night, the Romanov family are led into a cellar and there shot, bayoneted, and battered with the barrels of guns. Death by dragons would have been swifter, cleaner, more merciful, so we gave that to them.

  For eight
years, the new Soviet leadership told lies about the fate of the tsar and his family, even hinting that they were alive and in exile. The Soviets only acknowledged in 1926 that the entire family had been murdered.

  In 1981, Nicholas II and his entire family—wife, daughters, and son—were proclaimed passion-bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. A passion-bearer is a saint killed not because of his faith, like a martyr, but one who dies in faith at the hand of murderers.

  1989: The bodies of Nicky and his family were exhumed and re-interred in St. Petersburg, joining most of his forebears back to Peter the Great within the walls of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

  2018: A hundred years after their deaths, the Romanovs were declared saints. Murdered for their faith. As The Guardian has put it: “Yurovsky, the commissar who planned and implemented the killing, was of Jewish background.” So it is possible that there was a whiff of anti-Semitism in the canonization.

  3.

  The Revolutionaries

  Trotsky, Lenin, and Borutsch (later Pavel Axelrod) all worked on the Russian revolutionary paper, Iskra, whose motto was “From a spark a fire will flare up.” Quite a bit on the nose once dragons are involved, but there you go.

  In 1903, at the historic Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, all three of the men’s philosophies diverged, and Borutsch ended up with the Mensheviks opposing Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Trotsky started with the Mensheviks but eventually switched his allegiance to the Bolsheviks. It didn’t end well for either of them.

  The entire minutes from this historic meeting, which lasted for months and had to be moved from Brussels to London partway through due to police interest, can be found online at https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903.

  Koba graduated from robbery, kidnapping, and protection rackets to become one of the most fearsome dictators in all of history, Joseph Stalin.

  There were actually two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The February Revolution overthrew the tsarist government and established a provisional government. Just eight months later, the famed October Revolution put paid to all that and established the Soviet government. We largely ignored the February Revolution for purposes of our story, because, well, it didn’t last very long and frankly, they didn’t have any dragons.

  And finally, a note about those larcenous Chinese eunuchs. Jane thought that was way over the top, but Adam showed her the evidence. Yes, larcenous Chinese eunuchs burned down a building in the Forbidden City to hide the fact of their embezzlements in 1923. Well, it was the customs house, not dragon barns. But nevertheless, it stayed in. History is strange enough—even without dragons.

  About the Authors

  Beloved fantasist Jane Yolen has been rightfully called the Hans Christian Andersen of America and the Aesop of the twentieth century. In 2018, she surpassed 365 lifetime publications, including adult, young adult, and children’s fiction; graphic novels, nonfiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, short-story collections, anthologies, novels, novellas, and books about writing. Yolen is also a teacher of writing and a book reviewer. Her best-known books are Owl Moon, the How Do Dinosaurs series, The Devil’s Arithmetic, Briar Rose, Sister Emily’s Lightship and Other Stories, and Sister Light, Sister Dark.

  Among Yolen’s many awards and honors are the Caldecott and Christopher medals; the Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, Golden Kite, and Jewish Book awards; the World Fantasy Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award, and the Science Fiction Poetry Grand Master Award. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates.

  Yolen lives in Western Massachusetts and St. Andrews, Scotland.

  Adam Stemple (www.adamstemple.com) is the author of eight novels, including Pay the Piper (with Jane Yolen), winner of the 2006 Locus Award winner for Best Young Adult Book. Of his debut solo novel, Singer of Souls, Anne McCaffrey said, “One of the best first novels I have ever read.”

  Stemple has co-authored two series of novels with Jane Yolen—the Rock ’n’ Roll Fairy Tale series, and more recently, The Seelie Wars. His short fiction includes a series set in feudal Japan featuring a samurai master and apprentice as a sleuthing duo, which was written for the historical fiction magazine Paradox.

  In addition to writing, Stemple is a musician, web designer, and professional card player. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.