The Last Tsar's Dragons Read online

  Praise for The Last Tsar’s Dragons

  “To include dragons in the Russian Revolution seems like the kind of inspired idea that, in lesser hands, could not possibly live up to a reader’s expectations; but Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple take that idea and soar with it, spinning a tale of alternate history that is both wondrous and sublime. The book is elegant, quotable, and at the end, I simply wished for more.”

  —James A. Owen, author of Here, There Be Dragons

  “Master fantasist Yolen (How To Fracture a Fairy Tale, 2018, etc.) and her son Stemple collaborate on a novella that merges dragons with the Russian Revolution. Cycling among the points of view of the last tsar, Nicholas II, his wife, the tsarina Alexandra, the notorious Grigori Rasputin, Leon Trotsky, and an unnamed court official, the story tells the downfall of tsarist Russia and the rise of the revolution—but if you think you know the story, think again. Because in this Russia, the tsar sends out flights of black-scaled, fire-breathing dragons to harass his enemies, especially the Jews, and Leon Trotsky (known in the book by his birth name, Bronstein) has managed to secretly raise an army of his own dragons—these are red and fighting for the revolution. Despite the high stakes, the story feels quite intimate as it leads us to gaze on each player in turn: the tsarina, a foreigner to her husband’s country, plagued with worry over her ill son and believing that only Rasputin can save him; Rasputin himself, driven by his madness, lusts, and ambition; Bronstein, who struggles to keep hold of the weapon he has given to the revolution; and our nameless court dignitary, whose hatred of Rasputin drives much of the action. The dragons themselves are never afterthoughts—their effect on the characters, even when they are not present, worms its way into nearly every scene—but they are also not the players of the drama. Like the impending revolution, their presence simply hangs over the characters with the shadow of brutal, impersonal violence. Where the characters end up is not surprising—we know the history, after all—but getting there is delightful, carried along by crisp, tight prose and the authors’ marvelous imaginations.”

  —Kirkus

  “Vivid, gripping and actually riveting as the Red Danger takes a whole new meaning here. Loved it.”

  —The Book Smugglers

  Praise for Pay the Piper by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple

  “Yolen and her son, a professional musician, have produced a rollicking good riff on the Pied Piper. . . . An entertaining as well as meaty read.”

  —Booklist

  “Jane Yolen, a mistress of fantasy, has teamed up with her rock-and-roll musician son to develop a series crossing classic tales with contemporary music. This debut effort is a thriller.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Veteran storyteller Yolen works with her musician son on this new interpretation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story that will intrigue those [who] enjoy retellings of familiar stories or are lured by tales of the Faerie realm.”

  —VOYA

  “[A] swift and entertaining read . . . skillfully blends ancient magic with music and contemporary teen life.”

  —KLIATT Magazine

  Praise for Troll Bridge by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple

  “Drawing elements from ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ and ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff,’ [Yolen and Stemple] give folklore a modern spin in an entertaining tale.”

  —Booklist

  “Fairy tale fantasy master Yolen teams up with her son Stemple to offer an entertaining and engaging story.”

  —VOYA

  THE LAST TSAR'S DRAGONS

  Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple

  The Last Tsar’s Dragons

  Copyright © 2019 by Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Cover art “Simplification Project” copyright © 2015 by Anabelle Gerardy

  Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editors: Jill Roberts and James DeMaiolo

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-287-6

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-288-3

  First Edition: 2019

  For Betsy, Ari, David: your kind of history—with dragons.

  For Jacob Weisman & Jim DeMaiolo & Jill Roberts, in gratitude.

  And Elizabeth Harding, for everything.

  —JY

  For Red Mark, comrade. —AS

  Your revolution is a lie.

  There were no heroes, no great causes. Just slaughter, suffering, death.

  And dragons.

  Oh, you thought those a myth? Tales your grandfather told you?

  No, the dragons were real. Bolvan, the dragons are why you won! The only reason there aren’t dragons today is that Uncle Joe slaughtered the reds during the Great Purge, and in ’23 a pack of larcenous Chinese eunuchs blew up the dragon barns in the Forbidden City while trying to destroy evidence of their embezzlement.

  I see you smiling, you indoctrinated young fool. You see a man who has turned against the revolution that employed him for nearly thirty years. A man convicted of corruption and treason and worse, and you think I would say anything to avoid the firing squad. But in truth, I am old and weary and no longer afraid to die. I just want someone to know the truth.

  THE DRAGONS were harrowing the provinces again. They did that whenever the tsar was upset with the Jews. He would go down to the dragon barns himself with an oversized golden key and unlock the stalls. He always made a big show of it.

  At his grand entrance, the dragons, black and shiny as bats, with the same kind of pinched faces, stomped about, stirring the dust, ’til the royal barns felt like a sandstorm. Bits of straw, dung, and gold dust filled the air. Saturated it. As the dragons were fond of the gold dust, the tsar had ordered thousands of coins ground on a weekly basis to keep them happy.

  That the gold dust—as opposed to the dung and straw—made the dragon handlers sick was never the tsar’s concern. Dragon boys could be found in every corner of the kingdom. Mujecks, peasants, vied for a place at the palace. They loved serving the tsar. Indeed, there were lines of them each morning trying to get in to see him for work, though he left their hiring to the man in charge of the barns.

  Dragon boys knew to walk quietly amongst the great creatures. Dragons might be big, but they were sensitive in their own dens, prone to fits of weeping globules of golden tears and spitting fire. Occasionally a dragon boy was caught trying to make off with one of the golden tears. For them it was a fortune. A vicious beating, and instant dismissal after, kept such thievery to the very minimum. Few tried it any more, ever since one boy—by all accounts quite popular—died from his beating. It hadn’t been a mistake but by the tsar’s insistence.

  The tsar was not a quiet man. He was used to being obeyed—by men and women, children, dogs, horses. Even his wife, the German woman, did what she was told. Well, most of the time. She was German, after all.

  He expected the same from the dragons. So he never bothered to learn to walk softly, speak in a hushed tone. Indeed, why should he? He was the supreme ruler of the Russians, the heir to fortunes, his name used in praise at all the Russian churches, next to God’s. Sometimes even over God’s. His priests cautioned about that, but the tsar didn’t worry.

  “God’s kingdom is
there,” he would say, waggling his fingers towards the sky. “Mine is here.” His hand indicated all of the earth.

  In the dragon barn, he called out to the dragons, flinging open their stall doors dramatically, the barn doors—cumbersome and heavy—having already been opened by his servants.

  “Go, my children! Go!”

  The tsar liked to call the dragons his children—peasants and dragons alike. The peasants seemed to respond well to that. The dragons? Well, as they say in the Caucasus, If your faithful friend turns into a flaming shirt—do not cast it off. Like most peasant sayings, they are competent metaphors.

  Tsar Nicholas flung his arm upward, outward, though having no sense of direction, he usually pointed toward Moscow. That would have been a disaster if the dragons had been equally dense. But of course they were not. Like birds, they were aligned to the air’s own map. They were never lost. Though, as the mad monk once said: Never lost, but perhaps bothered for a few days. They’d been trained on Jewish flesh, so unlike the hardy Russian stock. Jewish prisoners, mostly moneylenders and rabble-rousers, jailed for their sins.

  So the dragons took off, galloping out the door, filling the barn behind them with gold dust that left the dragon boys coughing madly. But the tsar—with the lack of care of all his kind—simply put a silken handkerchief over his sacred nose and mouth and headed back up the secret stairs that ran between his apartment and the barn.

  He hastened to look out of the windows in his study as the dragon horde rose into the air.

  So light, he always thought, for such huge creatures. Their bones must be as hollow as birds.

  The sky darkened as the vee of dragons covered a great swath of the heavens. Bits of golden-flecked dung fell like stars behind them. The peasants would rush to pick it up and cart it back to their holdings. It was said to be potent for growing both beets and babies. Gather a bunch of it and maybe the dust could turn into enough to buy a whole new garden. Or wife.

  Watching the dragons, the tsar smiled. He felt his heart beat to the rhythm of their wings. As he so often said to the tsarina—“It is as if I am there, flying aloft with them.

  “When I was a boy, we believed only birds and bats flew.”

  She always smiled when he said that, so unlike him, because Tsar Nicholas was not known for his imagination. “And butterflies and bees,” she teased.

  He smiled down at her fondly. “Oh my darling Sunny,” he said, watching his strong-willed wife melt at that pet name. It might have been because the words were so unexpected from someone who was known to be precise and punctual, in the extreme. But she also knew how much he valued her thoughts on important matters. She always gave him something to think about, something the generals or the councilors usually failed to consider. He didn’t tell the men that, of course. Or how much he relied on her. It was his little secret with the tsarina.

  As the tsar watched the lead dragon turn the vee toward the provinces, he did not notice the peasants below gathering the dung. Not until he heard them reciting the old rhyme,

  Fire above, fire below,

  Pray to hit my neighbor.

  It works, he thought, equally well for dragons as military planes and their munitions. And it certainly rhymes splendidly in the dialect.

  He turned from the fading scene of departing dragons and looked at himself in the full-length mirror along the far wall.

  Something was not quite right.

  He gave a little tug to the bottom of his tunic, then smoothed it with his right hand. Precision and punctuality had been drilled into him as a child. And, as expected of all the tsars, he was also full of batiushka and grozny. Batiushka—a good little father to his people, always ready to express interest in their welfare and problems. And grozny—yet larger than life, imposing, awe-inspiring, terrible, like the God of the Old Testament.

  Another tug on his jacket, as he thought: I labor hard to be both.

  But most imagination was beyond him. It had not been part of his upbringing. No tutor would have lasted who suggested he learn such a thing. As if imagination could be taught.

  “For poets, actors, and women, I suppose,” he told the mirror. “And Jews. I am the tsar. I need facts, not fairy stories. I outgrew those when I was still a young boy.” Then he grinned at his image. “Maybe not Kostchai the Deathless.” As he’d once said to his nanny, “A tsar should live forever.” She’d snapped back, “Not all tsars deserve it.” He never told his mother or father what she said, but he remembered.

  It was time to get ready for his trip. He hated to leave the family, his beloved wife, the dragons. But duty called. It was what he was born to, what he would die for. He promised himself he would wear it well to the very end.

  Or perhaps, I shall live forever. If I deserve it.

  The tsarina glanced out of the window as the dragons rose into their long, black line. She loved to watch them, too, but for reasons very different than her husband’s. So graceful, she thought. Ils sont si gracieux. Like geese going south, if you ignored the dragons’ long tails, the smoke that trailed behind them. If you didn’t try to change their grunting sounds into the hysterics of geese.

  She was well used to ignoring aspects of things she didn’t like. That was part of what a good ruler did. Hold one’s nose and think of Our Lord. She had done that enough times to have earned her rightful place in Eternity.

  She chuckled to herself. It was also how she had so many children. How she got through her days in court. Russian courtiers were not an easy crowd to swallow, jumped-up peasants, the lot of them. And their French—incroyable! She had tried to be interested in their problems, their troubles, but she’d made few friends. They spoke Russian quickly when around her, which they knew she didn’t know well. She could have understood them in German or English or French. Or if written, she had a good sense of Latin and Greek. But Russian—even after so many years—was often still a puzzle to her. And usually at the worst moments. She was too shy to ask the Russians to speak more slowly. Or to ask the meaning of a word. She hated feeling incompetent. Languages had always been her best subject. She was right to be proud of her way with many tongues. But Russian. . . .

  Yes, she greatly preferred the dragons with their grace and grunts to the Russian courtiers.

  There were many days when she longed for home. Her childhood home. The family castle in Darmstadt remained enshrined in her memory. She knew the court called her German Alix. They showed their hatred of her at every formal occasion. Whispering as she went past, never inviting her to take tea.

  But, she reminded herself, I am Tsarina, not any of you. Though of course Mother Dear, that witch of a mother-in-law, outranked her because of the barbaric Russian customs.

  She felt herself getting cold, and then her jaw began to ache again. A headache was starting, a clear sign that she needed another bit of her powder in its glass of warm water. Bless Father Grigori who had discovered the Veronal for her. This last year it had gotten her through many difficult days.

  Glancing once more out of the window, she saw the last of the black vee disappearing over the horizon. She shivered with some kind of unholy delight watching them on their way to harrow the Jews, those filthy carbuncles on Russia’s behind. Even worse than those in her beloved Germany. She remembered some of the stories dear Papa used to tell about them, though none she could repeat in polite society. Not as a woman. Not as the tsarina.

  But there was no need to. The stories—truths, really—were well known. Darling Nicky had even commissioned a pamphlet about it—their degradations, the murder of innocent Christian babies to use the holy blood to make their disgusting crackers. Matza, it was called. Silly word for such a foul deed. She crossed herself three times to get rid of the image of those poor babies, then shivered, and not from the cold. She hoped the dragons would manage to kill a lot of the Jews this time. The whole lot of them.

  There was a sudden, horrible cry from the nursery two floors above.

  An answering frightened scream, possib
ly one of the younger nurses.

  The tsarina turned sharply at the sound.

  Alexei must have fallen again.

  With dignified speed—she’d never been a fast walker, leg injuries as a child had defined her careful gait—she headed straight off to the nursery, two floors and a long hallway away from where she was now. The doctors predicted that Alexei would not die of his diseased blood. But what did they know? Her own brother had died of the same filthy illness. And German doctors, even the ones unable to save her brother, were much, much better than the Russians.

  This time I will persuade Nicky to bring German doctors here. Once she set her mind to it, she could always make it happen. But she always chose her battles carefully.

  There. One set of stairs done and no more screams.

  She stopped to catch her breath.

  And then she thought—as she often did—that there was no way they could let Alexei become the tsar. Even the smallest of arguments wore him down. His own baby tantrums could turn into days of distress. The stress of being tsar would certainly kill him.

  She would not, could not, think about the possibility of an early death for her son.

  She remembered hearing from her tutor how King Henry VIII of England’s sick son died very young and how his half sisters, Mary and Elizabeth had nearly ruined the kingdom, squabbling over who would get to rule after him. Would it possibly be the same if Alexei assumed the throne? When he assumed the throne. Only with three living sisters to squabble, not just two? Would the Russians—barbarians—accept the idea of a woman on the throne? Even with her own grandmother the longest -reigning monarch in the civilized world?

  She set off on the second set of stairs, wondering as she often did if she at this age might have another child. It would have to be another son. She sighed aloud. It was her burden and her duty.