Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple
THE LAST TSAR’S DRAGONS
For Betsy, Ari, David: your kind of history—with dragons.
For Jacob Weisman & Jim DeMaiolo & Jill Roberts, in gratitude.
And Elizabeth Harding, for everything.
For Red Mark, comrade.
Prologue
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.
Chapter 1
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,
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.