Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

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.

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.