Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

Alexandra raised her arms wide, the flowers in her right hand. She had practiced a speech for three days before the mirror, but in that instant, forgot every word of it. All that came out was: “I love you. I love you, all the Russians. And I thank you for the love that comes back to me as well.”

Then there were roars of approval and great cheers. And she thought as she nodded to the audience, who were now on their feet, applauding and calling out her name, “I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.”

She turned and mouthed to her husband who was applauding as well, “The rest of my life.”

The mad monk lay on the ice. His chest hurt abominably where the knife had plunged in. He couldn’t move.

“I curse you,” he muttered, or tried to. His lips were frozen shut, and anyway, he wasn’t sure whom he should be cursing, not knowing who had set the blade deep in his chest. Instead, he cursed his old drinking companion, his betrayer.

Felix, may your world crumble.

A dead man’s curse is a powerful thing, and he knew that the Lord listened at that moment.

May every living thing you touch wither and die.

He could feel his curse take hold and bend the very fabric of the world.

And may you lose everything you hold dear.

The cursing done, he continued to take stock of his wounds.

His shoulder and the back of his head hurt, too, though not as badly as the hole in his heart. Oddly enough, his stomach and throat were burning as well. He wondered if the cakes—how many had he eaten?—had disagreed with him. Trust the courtiers to make stale and rotten cakes. His own mother could have done better.

And though he judged several of the wounds mortal, they did not worry him. He was wearing his charm, so men couldn’t kill him. Nor women, it turned out. The whore who long ago had slit him from stem to sternum had learned that. He would survive the wounds.

But the cold?

The Russian cold was not just death for a man. It was death for armies. For nations.

But it is not death for God, nor his chosen messenger!

He was cold, he decided, but he had been colder. The Lord knew how cold a moujik from Siberia could get without succumbing. And though these thoughts cheered him, they didn’t change the fact that he could not move. Moving warmed the blood. Moving warmed the soul. There was no life without movement. And it wasn’t just for himself that he worried.

How long ’til the full moon? he thought. How long ’til that fool Lenin arrives and lets the dragons out of their holes?

Dragons, when caught in their lairs, can be drowned, starved out, slaughtered by massed rifle fire—in fact, killed in any number of ways. It was why the tsar’s dragons’ stables were better guarded than his own home. In the skies, they were unstoppable: swift fire from on high and death to all who stood against them, like Jews and revolutionaries. But not now.

The fools haven’t killed me. But if I don’t recover before the moon is full, they will have killed Russia.

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.