Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

It could be that the dragons were not as bright as the Cossacks , and I might have to revise my previous notions about them. I’d seen the same behavior in wolves and dogs. Politicians, too. Possibly the peasants’ problem, as well.

But the rebels? Would they share equally? There was the question. If I were the rebel chief, I’d promise equality but might not be able to—or want to—deliver it once a revolution was successful.

The dragons in the stall looked up, expecting more.

And that is the problem for any leader. Everyone is always expecting more. Especially the people at the top. The big eaters.

I thought briefly of going back for a second handful of cow brains, but my fingers still stung badly and had a redness and an odd shine on them that made me wince just from glancing at them. I hoped I hadn’t damaged the nails for good. Finding a towel hanging on a nearby peg and, assuming it was to be used, I dried off my hands, though I was certain the smell of both towel and hands was a stench that would never leave me.

Some of the solution had also dripped on my vest, burning holes across the watch pocket. I knew I was going to need to have a thorough wash and change of clothes before going to see Ninotchka, or she would never let me touch her this night.

Before I turned to go, I took a moment to gaze into the eyes of the largest one I’d fed, careful not to look down or away, nor to show fear. Fear—or so I’ve heard—only excited them. Like lions and tigers. Prey shows fear.

And I am no prey.

Never prey!

I stood taller, throwing my shoulders back, taking in a deep breath, and all but clicking my boot heels together like a damned Hessian, just so I wouldn’t show the dragons my fear. But perhaps they smelled it on me.

I felt compelled to turn to look long in the eyes of the largest one. Perhaps I thought to tame it that way; the Lord only knows why I did it.

Its eyes were dark, like the Caspian Sea in winter, and I began to feel as if I were swimming in them. And then drowning in them. Down and down I went, eyes wide open, mouth filled with ashy water.

I knew in the sensible part of my brain that I was still standing by the dragon’s stall, feet on the coarse earthen floor. Then why was my throat filling with water? Why was….

I shook my head, forced myself to look away, and suddenly, as if in a sending from the Good Lord, I could see the future breaststroking towards me: hot fires, buildings in flames. The Russias 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.

It was too real not to be true. It was….

“Enough!” I cried aloud, not caring if anyone other than the beasts were there to hear me. “I am no mad monk baying at the moon or seeing prophesies in tea leaves or the future at the bottom of a glass of vodka. I am an educated man.”

At that, I almost physically hauled myself away, finding the surface, breaking the spell. For spell it had to be.

I addressed the dragon. “I will not be guiled by your animal magic. You do not know the name of this palace nor the name of your master, the tsar. You do not even know the word for your captivity. It is only my own fears you waken in me.”

The dragon turned away, not a cut direct but a cut oblique , and nuzzled the last of the cow brains at its scaly feet.

I grimaced, shook my head. I’d been wrong. There’d be no help from these creatures. And I’d be no help to them, either.

Underground, the drachometer signaled the all-clear with 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. Yes, they were alive and unharmed, but many houses had been burned in the incursion, businesses ruined, fields scorched through the snow. A stand of fine old white birch trees after which the town was named was now only 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 men all grumbled and swore. Though it was not as if this pogrom against the Jews was unprecedented. Even before the dragons, there had been the tsar’s Cossacks. What they didn’t burn, they pillaged. At least the dragons didn’t rape the women and girls. Though if the tsar ordered it done, they were certain the dragons would find a way to make that happen, too.

“May Tsar Nicholas’s own house be burned down!” whispered one man before he was shushed by the others. It was said, and not without reason, that the tsar had ears everywhere.

The babushkas were not so full of bile. Their sighs could fill a scroll for the ark, Bronstein thought, though they were the true realists of the town. They reminded everyone of how awful the old times were before the drachometers, when tsars with names like “Great” and “Fearsome” savaged the lands with their armies. The dragons were only the latest of the tsars’ weapons. When they’d appeared on the landscape, as if by magic—for how else would dragons appear?—the Jews had been nearly wiped out.

An old woman, still dusting off her black dress, raised a crooked finger and said, “May the Lord bless and keep the drachometers running,” which brought them all back to reality. The invention of the drachometer, just fifteen years earlier and a primitive device by today’s standards, had once again saved them.

As Borutsch’s old grandmother often said, “We live in the better times.”

“Better than what?” he would tease.

Then the other old women joined in with a chorus of prayers and stories, the usual Jewish response to terror. Mrs. Morowitz told the Ukranian story of Dunay, who, in a fit against the wife he adored, killed her because she was a better bow shooter than he. And then killed himself in a greater fit of despair. “And where his dear wife fell,” said Mrs. Morowitz, “the River Nastsaya sprang forth. And where the hero Dunay fell, the River Danube.”

Not to be outdone, old Mrs. Kahn, long a widow, told the story of a different sort of hero—Samson from the Torah. Though it ended as badly as Dunay’s tale.

Hearing the old women’s stories, the children gazed around, shuddering at the wanton destruction, debating whether it was better for a hero to die by his own hand in remorse or to bring down an entire temple on the heads of his enemies as he killed himself, while their older brothers and sisters made 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. They were full of truths you had to tease out from the rhetoric. He tried to imagine what it had been like in the far-off days when there was 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 the 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 cow-sized gadget that ran on magnetism and magic and honked like a bull elk in rut when a dragon came within twenty leagues.