“You ever notice,” the taller man, Bronstein, began, “that every time we ask the Tsar to stop a war—”
“He kills us,” the other, Borutsch, finished for him, his beard jumping. “Lots of us.” Bronstein nodded in agreement and seemed ready to go on, but Borutsch didn’t even pause for breath. “When he went after Japan, we told him, ‘It’s a tiny island with nothing worth having. Let the little delusional, we’re-descended-from-the-sun-god-and-you-aren’t bastards keep it. Russia is big enough. Why add eighteen square miles of nothing but volcanoes and rice?”
Bronstein took off the oval eyeglasses that matched his pinched face so well and idly smeared dust from one side of the lenses to the other. “Well, what I mean to say is—”
“And this latest! His high mucky-muck Franz falls over dead drunk in Sarajevo and never wakes up again, and all of a sudden Germany is a rabid dog biting everyone within reach.” Borutsch gnashed his teeth at several imaginary targets, setting his long beard flopping so wildly that he was in danger of sticking it in his own eye. “But why should we care? Let Germany have France. They let that midget monster loose on us a century ago; they can get a taste of their own borscht now.”
“Yes, well—” But Borutsch was not to be stopped.
“How big a country does one man need? What is he going to do with it? His dragons have torched more than half of it, and his ‘Fists’ have stripped the other half clean of anything of value.”
“Wood and grain,” Bronstein managed to interject. The only things worth more than the dragons themselves, he thought. Wood in the winter and grain in the spring—the only two seasons Russia gets. The nine aggregate days that made up summer and fall didn’t really count.
“Yes. So he sends us to fight and die for a country we don’t own and that’s worth nothing anyway, and if we happen to survive, he sends us off to Siberia to freeze our dumplings off! And if we complain?” Borutsch pointed his finger at Bronstein, thumb straight. “Ka-pow!”
Bronstein waited to see if the older man was going to go on, but he was frowning into his schnapps now, as if it had disagreed with something he’d just said.
“Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Pinches.”
Borutsch looked up, his eyes sorrowful and just slightly bleary from drink.
“I’ve got an idea,” Bronstein said.
Borutsch’s lips curled upward in a quiet smile, but his eyes remained sad. “You always do, Lev. You always do.”
THE mad monk was not so mad as people thought. Calculating, yes. Manipulative, yes. Seductive, definitely.
He stared speculatively at himself in a gilded mirror in the queen’s apartments. His eyes were almost gold.
Like a dragon’s, he thought.
He was wrong. The dragons’ eyes were coal black. Shroud black. Except for the dragon queen. Hers were green. Ocean green, black underwater green, with a lighter, almost foamy green color in the center. But then the mad monk had never actually been down to see the dragons in their stalls, or talked to their stall boys. He didn’t dare.
If there was one thing that frightened Rasputin, it was dragons. There had been a prophecy about it. And as calculating a man as he was, he was also a man of powerful beliefs. Peasant beliefs.
He who fools with dragons
Will himself be withered in their flames.
It is even stronger in the original Siberian.
Not that you can find anyone who speaks Siberian here in the center of the Empire, the monk thought. Which is where I belong. In the center. He’d long known that he was made for greater things than scraping a thin living from the Siberian tundra, like his parents.
Or dying in the cold waters of the Tura, like my siblings.
Shaking off these black thoughts, he made a quick kiss at his image in the mirror.
“Now there’s an enchanting man!” he said aloud.
His own face always did much to cheer him—as well as cheer the ladies of the court.
“Father Grigori,” said a light, breathy child’s voice in the vicinity of his hip. “Pick me up.”
The mad monk was not so mad as to refuse the order of the Tsar’s only son. The boy might be ill, sometimes desperately so. But one day soon, he would be Tsar. The stars foretold it. And the Lord God—who spoke to Father Grigori in his dreams of fire and ice—had foretold it as well.
“As you wish and for my pleasure,” he said, bending down and picking up the child in his arms. He bore him carefully, knowing that if he pressed too hard, bruises the size and color of fresh beets would form and not fade for weeks.
The boy looked up at him fondly, and said, “Let’s go see Mama,” and Father Grigori’s mouth broke into a wolfish grin.
“Yes, let’s,” he said. “As you wish and for my pleasure.” He practically danced down the long hall with the child.
SO having been balked once again of my chance to persuade the Tsar of the foolishness of his plans, I thought to go back to my apartment and visit with my young wife. We had met not a year earlier at the Bal Blanc, she in virginal white, her perfect shoulders bare, diamonds circling that perfect neck like a barrier. I was so thoroughly enchanted, I married again, less than a year after my last wife’s death. It was only much later that I discovered the diamonds were her sister’s. It was only much, much later that she discovered how little money I actually have.
Now, early afternoon, she might be napping. Or she might be entertaining. I hoped she would be available and not with some of her admirers. The problem with taking someone so young to wife is getting one’s turn with her. Nights, of course, she is always mine, but who knows what she is doing during the day.
Suddenly realizing that I didn’t want to know, I turned abruptly on my heel, my new boots on the tiled floor making a squealing noise that was not unlike the sound a sow makes in labor. I have watched many of them at my summer farm.
I’d made a decision, and I made it quickly. It’s one of the things the Tsar likes about me since he has so many ditherers around him. Old men, old aristos, who cannot come down on one side or another of any question. Much like the Tsar. I think it’s in the bloodlines, along with the many diseases. Inbreeding, you know.
This was my decision: I would go down to the stalls and visit the dragons. See if I could figure them out. There is a strange‚ dark intelligence there. Or maybe not exactly intelligence as we humans understand it, more like cunning. If only we could harness that as well as we have harnessed their loyalty—from centuries of captivity and a long leash. Much like the Cossacks actually. With a bit of luck, I might figure out this harrowing business. The Tsar might finally make me a Count. New blood might appeal to him. He’d listen to my plans. Then my young wife, Ninotchka, would be available in the afternoons, too. I strode down the hallway smiling. Making decisions always lifts my spirit. I breathed more deeply; my blood began to race. I felt fifty years old again.
It was then that I saw the mad monk, halfway down the hall and coming toward me, carrying the young prince. He’s the only one who dares do that without soft lambs’-wool blankets. That child’s skin is like old china. It can be smashed by the slightest touch.
“Father Grigori,” I said, my hand to my brow in salute. He may be just a muzhik by birth, he may be as mad as they say he is, but I would be madder still to neglect the obeisance he demands. He has the ear of the young Tsar. And the young Tsar’s mother, Alexandra. Maybe more than just her ear, if you believed the rumors.
He glanced at me, my name ashes in his mouth. He never uses my title. Then he smiled, that soft, sensual smile that drives the women wild, though to me it looks like a serpent’s smile. “Commend me to your young wife.”
It was then that I knew what I had only feared before. My own Ninotchka had fallen under his spell. I would have to kill him. Alone or with others. For Ninotchka’s sake, as well as my own.
But how?
The answer, I felt, was down in the stalls with the dragons. So, down I went.
YOU always smell the dragons long before you see them. It is a ripe musk, fills the nostrils, tastes like old boots. But it’s not without its seductions. It is the smell of power, a smell I could get used to.
The door squalled when I opened it, and the dragons set up a yowling to match, expecting to be fed. Dragons are always hungry. It has to do with the hot breath, and needing fuel, or so I’d been told.
I grabbed a handful of cow brains out of a nearby bucket and flung it into the closest stall.
There was a quick rustling of their giant bat wings—three or four dragons share a stall because it calms them down. I wiped my hands on the towel hung on the peg for just that purpose. I would need to wash before going back to my apartment, or Ninotchka would never let me touch her tonight.
The Tsar’s dragons were slimmer and more snakelike than the Great Khan’s dragons from whom they’d been bred. They were black, like eels. Their long faces, framed with ropy hair, always looked as if they were about to speak in some Nubian’s tongue. One expected Araby to issue forth instead of curls of smoke.
I gazed into the eyes of the largest one, careful not to look down or away, nor to show fear. Fear only excites them. Prey show fear. His eyes were dark, like the Crimea in winter, and I felt as if I swam in them. Then I sensed that I was starting to drown. Down and down I went, my eyes wide open, my mouth filled with the ashy water—when suddenly I saw the future breaststroking towards me: hot fires, buildings in flames. The Russias were 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.
“Enough!” I said, hauling myself away, finding the surface, breaking the spell. “I will not be guiled by your animal magic.”
The dragon turned away and nuzzled the last of the cow brains at his feet.
I’d been wrong. There’d be no help from these creatures. And I’d be no help for them.
THE dragons finally gone, the drachometer signaled the all clear, 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; they were alive and unharmed, but houses had been burned, businesses ruined, fields scorched through the snow. A stand of fine old white birch trees, after which the town was named, were now 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 babuschkas were not so full of bile, but they were realists, too, as they told of the old times before the drachometers, when Tsars with names like “Great” and “Terrible” savaged the lands with their dragons and their armies. The Jews had been nearly wiped out then, and only the invention of the first drachometer—a primitive device by today’s standards—had saved them. Borutsch’s old grandmother often said, “We live in the better times.”
“Better than what?” he would tease.
Hearing the old women’s stories, the children shuddered at the wanton destruction while the young men scoffed and made chest-puffed 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 and tried to imagine what it was like in the far-off days when you had 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 that the other 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 sheep-sized gadget that ran on magnetism and magic and honked like a bull elk in rut when a dragon came within ten miles.
It was power.
Those who have it 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. No, 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 Borutsch out of town, are unaccustomed to force. Then, frowning, Except when it’s used against us.
As they climbed the hills outside 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, despite seeming to follow no trail. Each time he came here, he took a different route. But it didn’t matter. He was as attuned to what he sought as a drachometer to the wings of dragons.
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 beneath his coat 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 goin’ to be 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 it was little enough they got from the harvest even when they did. The Tsar’s kruks—the “Fists” that Borutsch had mentioned—took the lion’s share and the lamb’s as well, leaving them with barely enough to starve on. It was the same with the peasants, only the Tsar did not set his dragons on them.
Seeing nobody climbing the slope after them, Bronstein turned back to the forest.
From field to forest, he thought. 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 Borutsch over.
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 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 them, but there were many.
“Oh, Lev,” he said again. “You’re going to burn the whole world.”
THE monk carried the child into his mot
her’s apartments. The guards knew better than to block his way. They whispered to one another when he could not hear him, 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.
Rasputin went through the door, carrying the sleeping child.
The five ladies-in-waiting scattered before him like does before a wolf-hound. Their high, giggly voices made him smile. Made him remember the Khlysts, 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.”
They danced to his bidding, as they always did, disappearing one at a time through the door into the Tsaritsa’s inner rooms, the door snicking quietly shut on the last of them.
After a moment, Alexandra came through the same door by herself, her plain face softened by the sight of the child in the monk’s arms.
“You see,” he told her, “the child only needs sleep and to be left alone, not be poked by so many doctors. Empress, you must not let them at him so.” He felt deep in his heart that he alone could heal the child. He knew that the Tsaritsa felt the same.
He handed her the boy, and she took the child 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 Tsaritsa, even loved her, but desired her not at all, no matter what others might say. He knew that 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 service.” He bowed deeply, his black robe puddling at his feet, and gave her the dragon smile.
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