Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

And then, as if that light suddenly shone through my own window, I understood what was truly afflicting me: it was an unsuspected fear. The powerful are like dragons. Friend or foe, if their gaze is fixed upon you, you are likely to get burned.

I would not sit here where any passerby could see my weaknesses and calculate how to destroy me. Where any gossip could begin that would be my end. I had not climbed this far up to become prey. I reminded myself of my intellect, my ability for camouflage, my strength. And when I put my hand over my breast pocket, the crackle of paper reminded me that I still had major cards in my hands.

I stood, shoulders back, head up, and went straight to my apartment. Even if I could not put any spring in my steps, I could more than manage to look like a man about important business, a man of determination and strength. Which I was. Which I am.

And at least—I reminded myself—I did not have a long way to go.

Some twelve feet below the frozen Russian surface, two men sat smoking their cigarettes and drinking peach schnapps next to a blue-and-white tiled stove. The tiles had once been the best to be had from a store—now long gone—in the Crimea, but in the half-lit burrow, the men did not care about the chips and chinks and runnels on them. Nor would they have cared if the stove were still residing upstairs in the house’s summer kitchen. They were more concerned with other things now, like dragons, like peach schnapps, like the state of the country.

One man, Borutsch, was tall, gangly, and humped over because of frequent stays in the burrow, not just to escape the dragons, either. He had a long beard, gray as a shovelhead. With the amount of talking he tended to do, he always looked as if he were digging up an entire nation. Which, of course, he was.

The other, Bronstein, was short, compact, even compressed, with a carefully cultivated beard and sad eyes behind rimless eyeglasses.

Borutsch threw another piece of wood into the stove’s maw, his long arms able to reach both the small woodpile and the stove without standing. Which he couldn’t fully do in the burrow anyway. The heat from the blue tiles grew increasingly hotter, but there was no smoke due to the venting system that piped the smoke straight up through ten feet of hard-packed dirt. Then, two feet before the surface, a triple-branching system neatly divided the smoke so that when it came into contact with the cold air, it was no more than a wisp. Warm enough for wolves to seek the three streams out, but as they scattered when there were dragons or Cossacks attacking the villages, the smoke never actually gave away the positions of the burrows.

“You ever notice,” Bronstein, began, “that every time we ask the tsar to stop a war—”

“He kills us,” Borutsch finished for him, his beard jumping. “Lots of us.” Bronstein nodded in agreement and was about 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 mazzikim who think they’re descended from the sun god keep it. Russia is big enough. Why try to 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 the dust from one side of the lenses to the other with an old handkerchief. “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. France 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,’ those damned Cossacks—” He spit the words out, then actually spit, sending sputum to sizzle on the hot tiles. “The Fists have stripped the other half clean of anything of value. While we Jews are stuck in the middle again….”

“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 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 Borutsch was frowning into his schnapps now, as if it had disagreed with something just said.

“Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Pinchas.” Borutsch looked up at his name, his eyes sorrowful and just slightly bleary from drink. Bronstein went on. “I’ve got an idea.”

Borutsch’s lips curled upward in a quiet smile, but his eyes remained sad. “You always do, Lev. You always do.”

“It’s more than an idea this time,” Bronstein said. “I’ve taken action.” Borutsch’s face seemed caught between curiosity and apprehension, and yet Bronstein hesitated. Maybe I shouldn’t tell him. I can go on by myself for a bit longer.

But he knew that wasn’t true. For what he wanted to do, he needed allies. He needed helpers. He needed friends. And he needed to start gathering them as soon as possible.

While Bronstein argued internally, curiosity finally won out with Borutsch. “What is this idea then, Lev? Tell me what have you ‘taken action’ on?”

Bronstein found that tone irksome. This is who I want to share my dream with? A disapproving old man who talks and talks and never acts—never does anything!

But he had to admit that this thought was neither charitable nor true. He knew the work Borutsch had done with the Black Repartition party and the Emancipation of Labor party, and he’d worked at Iskra with him in England, writing Marxist news and smuggling it into Russia.

He has always been a friend to the worker and, I have to admit, a friend to me. It’s not his fault that he has grown old and his defeats hang on him like stubborn leaves on a winter tree. Frowning, he came to a decision. He may disagree with the methods I have adopted, but he can’t argue that his methods haven’t failed.

“I won’t tell you,” he said. But before Borutsch could ask “why not?” Bronstein continued, “I will show you.”

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.