Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

As I strode down the hallway, I could feel a great grin wreathing my mouth. Making decisions, even hasty ones, always lifts my spirit. I took several deep breaths, could feel my blood began to race. There was another stirring down below. Good Lord, I felt twenty years old again.

I even began to whistle, which, if any of the royals had been in the hallway, would have been a terrible breach of protocol….

And then suddenly there was the mad monk with the tsarevitch on his back.

The whistle died on my lips.

At least the two were paying me no mind. The boy riding on Rasputin as if the old man were a horse.

All the child needs is a whip . I could probably find one for him.

Just as quickly, I thought: If the monk stumbles… if the boy slips off his back… I could be a hero.

I began moving toward them quickly, walking more on the balls of my feet, swinging my arms.

Rasputin is the only person—noble or servant—who dares carry the child without soft lambs-wool blankets wrapped about him. I knew the boy’s skin was like the oldest porcelain. It could be smashed by the slightest touch.

Well before they reached me, I saluted the monk, saying conversationally, “Father Grigori!”

He nodded back, interrupting his flow of words to the boy only briefly to call out, “Kozzle!” though it wasn’t my name, only sounded somewhat similar. Then he was back to telling the tsarevitch he was a strong and just young prince and would someday be a great tsar like his father. All lies, of course, but something in his big, peasant voice made you believe it. You could read all of Siberia in his speech, and though they weren’t deep thinkers, the moujiks of the steppes weren’t liars, either.

Rasputin, it was rumored, was both.

All the while I was really ready to seize the child if necessary, thinking: Rasputin may be just a moujik by birth, and he may really be as mad as they say, but I would be madder still to neglect the obeisance he demands. He has the ear of the tsarevitch. And the tsarevitch’s mother, Alexandra. Perhaps more than just her ear, if you believe the rumors.

But my mind shuddered at going that far. Besides, the tsarina was much too fastidious for any such thing. She was, after all, the granddaughter of the Upright Queen, as Victoria of England was known hereabouts. Probably stiff as a board in bed. But then that was said of all the English.

Though I suspect Victoria was upright only because her stays were too tight and because who would want to fumble in the dark with her? It’s a wonder that randy German prince could get that many children on her. It was another small joke I would never dare say aloud, even to my few intimate friends. Because that kind of loose talk—even if meant as a joke—gets out and ruins careers, even if it is humorous. The tsar is besotted with his wife and will hear nothing bad about her, even in jest. In fact, no jests about her beloved grandmother, either. I wonder if the tsar has any sense of humor at all. Possibly it was removed at birth, like the Jews removed the foreskins of their sons.

As Rasputin came nearer, he gave me a sullen glance. Peasant to the base, but—I had to give this much to him—possessed of a kind of sardonic wit.

Still, the memory of my almost-name so recently in his mouth seemed to turn everything to ashes. As if the monk had cursed me. And me with no ability to curse him back.

Suddenly my head was filled with too many passing thoughts, all jumbled together: The man is a monster, a peasant, and a lecher. He never addresses me by my title, but this time he looks at me with that slow, sensual grimace that drives all the women of the court wild. I wonder if it’s true that he touches the louche men of the court as well with that throb of a smile. To me it looks like a serpent’s smile. I trust it not at all. It has no warmth, no fellowship in it, only menace.

As he drew even to me in the hall, he finally left off his tale-telling to the boy and whispered sharply to me, “Commend me to your young wife, she of the swan neck and the drawer full of fake pearls.”

Yes, I admit I was startled at what he said.

And then, to compound the insult, the young tsar on his back tittered, as if he understood what had been implied.

At first, I thought that the monk had brought the boy inside while he did his dirty business. But I forced myself to coolly dissect what Rasputin had said. The boy would surely have reported back any such thing as an entry into someone’s apartment to his mother or nannies. At his age, he would know little about the backstairs of life, though I highly suspected his sisters did.

But because of how Rasputin had phrased his taunt, I now knew what I’d only feared before. Even my own naïf Ninotchka may have fallen under Rasputin’s spell. If she’d been dallying with a princeling, all could have been forgiven. But not with this Siberian monstrosity. If it was true—if it was believed by the court to be true, I would have to kill him. My legs got shaky again, but there was nowhere to sit that was close enough. I willed them to stop wobbling. Willed my mind to slow down.

My heart roiled with bitterness as I realized that soon I would be the laughingstock of the court. If indeed I was not already. Maybe this was why the tsar hadn’t listened to me. It could explain everything.

My dear Maman had said, often enough, “Don’t blame the hen when the rooster crows. The fault lies with the sun.” I am not certain I understood that little saw ’til this very moment. Not really.

But Maman, who could grow old sayings in the dirt outside our house, had never had any words for what I was feeling now: this cold anger thrusting its bitter hands into my heart. For honor’s sake, whether he’d had her or not, I would have to kill Rasputin. Alone or with the help of others. For Ninotchka’s sake as well as my own. If word of this got around the court, I would lose my standing altogether, unless I divorced her.

Like Jael in the Old Testament, who killed Sisera with a tent peg, I was left with no other recourse.

But how?

I felt the answer was down in the stalls with the dragons. A small shudder ran between my shoulders, but I nodded to the tsar’s son atop his peasant horse. Then, deciding not to give the monk any more of my time, I turned my back—which had only moments earlier been shuddering with fear—and delivered the cut direct , as they liked to say in English novels, and downstairs I went.

What I hadn’t known then—because I’d never been down in the dragon barns before—was that one could smell the dragons long before one saw them. It is a ripe musk, which fills the nostrils and overflows into the mouth, tasting like old boots. But it’s not without its seductions. It has the smell of power. A smell that I could get used to.

The door squealed when I pulled it open, and the dragons set up a yowling to match, expecting to be fed. It was a sound somewhere between a dog whistle and a balalaika.

They were not at all what I’d expected, being black and sleek, like eels. Or maybe bats. Their long faces, framed with ropey hair, that made them seem as if they were about to speak in some Nubian’s tongue. I could almost imagine Araby issuing forth instead of curls of smoke.

I remembered hearing that dragons are always hungry. That it had to do with the hot breath and needing fuel and sustaining their fires.

Grabbing a handful of what appeared to be cow brains out of a nearby bucket—a disgusting mess dripping blood and a kind of acidic potion that made one’s fingers tingle—I flung the gruesome meal into the closest stall just to see what would happen.

Three or four dragons seemed to be sharing a stall, possibly because it calmed them down. And then, with a quick rustling of their giant bat wings, they swooped onto my offering. It wasn’t a pretty sight. They were hardly dainty eaters. And they clearly did not share. The smallest dragon had little of the meat, which likely meant his chances of becoming a bigger dragon lessened at each meal.