Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

You can only count on power. He found himself nodding at his own sudden revelation.

Those who have power stand on the backs of those who don’t, and no amount of invention or intelligence could raise a person from one to the other. And where was that thought going?

He gave it a little mental push and then he had it: to get power, you had to grab it by force. And to hold it, you had to use even more force.

We Jews, Bronstein thought, as he led Borustch out of town, are unaccustomed to force. Then frowning, Except for that which is used against us. It’s why so many have already run away—to Europe, to America. They know they can’t stand against the tsar and his mighty forces. And then carefully, he whispered to himself so no one else could hear, “But what if we can? The tsar, for all his might, is only a man. And tsars and kings and strong men have fallen before. What if we Jews choose to be David against Goliath?” That made him chuckle, since he didn’t believe in the Bible—its history or its religion.

“What are you chuckling about?” Borustch asked.

“The Bible,” Bornstein answered, knowing it would shut his friend up. “No more talk. You will need your breath to follow me. It’s a long hike.”

Borutsch did not say anything more, not even to ask why he was supposed to follow or where they were going. He knew Bronstein too well for that.

Bronstein mused, He thinks I am a dreamer like him, not a doer. But he will follow, and he will see.

Borutsch followed.

As they climbed the hills above the shtetl, both men began to breathe heavily, their breath frosting like dragon smoke in the chill December air. Borutsch shed his outer coat. Bronstein loosened his collar. They walked on.

Entering the forest at midday, they moved easily through the massive cedars and spruce, grown so tall as to choke out the undergrowth and even keep the snow from falling beneath them.

Bronstein led confidently, though there was no actual trail. Any of his earlier footprints would have been erased by the latest snow. Also, each time he came here, he took a different route. But even that didn’t matter. He would never be lost. He was as attuned to what he sought as a drachometer is to the wing beats of a dragon.

He’d never spoken aloud to anyone in this country about what he was doing. Nor written it down. Taking Borustch along this time was a first and possibly dangerous next step. But he needed a next step, and he had a plan.

If someone with the tsar’s ear discovers my machinations before I am ready….

The results were too dire to consider.

Signaling a halt in a small clearing, he pointed to a fallen log. “Sit,” he said, then pulled a loaf of bread from his coat pocket and handed it to Borutsch. “Eat,” he said to the older man. “I go to see we aren’t followed.”

“If I’d known the journey was so long, I would have brought more schnapps.”

Bronstein smiled and reached into his other coat pocket, revealing a flask. “I’ll take it with me to ensure you’ll wait.”

“Be safe, then,” Borutsch mumbled through a mouthful of bread.

Bronstein was not only safe but quick as well, merely trotting back to the forest’s edge and peering down the slope. He could see the shtetl, still swathed in smoke, and beyond it, the thin strips of burning grain fields. There was no one working the fields at this time of year, though little enough was gotten from the harvest even when the workers labored there. The tsar’s kruks —the “fists” Borutsch had mentioned—took the lion’s share. He nodded to himself. And the lamb’s as well! Leaving them with barely enough to starve on.

To be fair, Bronstein knew it was the same with the peasants, only the tsar did not set his dragons on them. He had a fondness for peasants. Not for Jews.

It might come to bite him in the tuchus some day , Bronstein thought. Then he said out loud, “May that day come soon.” And he spit on the ground.

Seeing nobody climbing the slope after them, Bronstein turned back to the forest.

From field to forest . Grain to wood.

“Up,” he said as he reentered the clearing and tossed the flask to Borutsch. “We are almost there.”

Bronstein moved quickly now, and Borutsch struggled a bit to keep up. But as Bronstein had said, they were almost there.

They came upon a brook running swift and shallow through snowy banks. Bronstein turned downstream and paralleled it, stopping finally at an old pine tree that had been split by lightning long ago. He paced off thirty steps south, away from the stream, then turned sharply and took another thirty. Flinging himself to the ground, he began pawing through a pile of old leaves and pine needles.

“Grain and wood, Borutsch,” Bronstein said. “Two of the three things that give power in this land.” He’d cleared away the leaves and needles now and was digging through the cold dirt. The ground should have been frozen and resisting, but it broke easily beneath his fingers. “However, to get either one, you need the third.” Stopping his digging, he beckoned to Borutsch.

Borutsch shambled over and stared into the shallow hole Bronstein had dug. “Oh, Lev,” he said his voice somewhere between awe and terror.

Inside the shallow depression, red-shelled and glowing softly with internal heat, lay perhaps a dozen giant eggs. Dragon’s eggs.

“There’s more,” Bronstein said.

Borutsch tore his gaze from the eggs and looked around. Clumps of leaves and needles that had appeared part of the landscape before now looked suspiciously handmade. Borutsch didn’t bother to count the clumps but guessed there were many.

“Oh, Lev,” he said again. “You’re going to burn the whole world.”

Rasputin bore the child into his mother’s apartments. The guards knew better than to block his way. They whispered to one another when he could not hear them, calling him “Devil’s Spawn” and “Antichrist” and other names. But always in a whisper and always in dialect, and always when he was long gone.

He went through the door carrying the now-sleeping child, for halfway along the “pony ride” he had felt Alexei slump, and, without stopping, he’d wrestled the boy off his shoulders and wrapped him in the soft blankets without the boy waking. It was an old trick but a good one, though the boy was getting too heavy for it to last much longer.

The five ladies-in-waiting scattered before them like does before a wolfhound. Their high, giggly voices made him smile. Made him remember the Khlysty with their orgiastic whippings. What he would give for a small cat-o-nine tails right now. He gazed at the back of the youngest lady, hardly more than a girl, her long neck bent over, swanlike, white, inviting. “Tell your mistress I have brought her son, and he is well, if sleeping.”

They danced to his bidding, as they always did, disappearing one at a time through the door into the tsarina’s inner rooms, the door snicking quietly shut after the last of them.

It is the sound of a latch on a box of jewels. Meant to keep you out, but if you had the key…. He paused and let a momentary smile ghost across his face. Alexei is the key. The only key. His right hand, under the blanket, made a motion as if it held a key and was unlocking something.

After a moment, Alexandra came through the same door by herself, her long face softened by the sight of the child in the monk’s arms. She was a handsome woman, knew how to dress, but he suspected she was cold in bed. He’d known a woman like that back in the village, found a way to warm her to life. She’d wept when he became a monk, but he guessed she now lived contentedly with a strapping young husband who was reaping the hours of Rasputin’s instruction.