The Dragon Book (13 page)

One of the most distinguished of modern fantasists, Jane Yolen has been compared to writers such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Perrault, and has been called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America.” Primarily known for her work for children and young adults, Yolen has produced more than three hundred books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry collections, picture books, biographies, twelve songbooks, two cookbooks, and a book of essays on folklore and fairy tales. She has received the World Fantasy Award, the Golden Kite Award, the Caldecott Medal, and three Mythopoeic Awards, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as winning two Nebula Awards, for her stories “Lost Girls” and “Sister Emily’s Lightship.” Her more adult-oriented fantasy has appeared in collections such as
Sister Emily’s Lightship and Other Stories, Once Upon a Time (She Said), Storyteller,
and
Merlin’s Booke.
Her novels include
Cards of Grief, Sister Light/Sister Dark, White Jenna, The One-Armed Queen, Dragon’s Blood, Heart’s Blood, A Sending of Dragons, Dragon’s Heart, Briar Rose, The Devil’s Arithmetic,
and
Sword of the Rightful King.
She edited
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy for Teens
with Patrick Nielsen Hayden. She lives part of the year in Massachusetts and part in Scotland.

A relatively new author—with four published novels (one of which won a Locus Award), a dozen music books for young readers, plus about a dozen published short stories (several of which have been on Year’s Best lists)—Adam Stemple has been a professional musician for more than twenty years as lead guitarist for such Minneapolis bands as Cats Laughing, Boiled in Lead, and the Irish band The Tim Malloys. He is best known for his fantasy novels
Singer of Souls
and
Steward of Song
for Tor. With Jane Yolen, he has written the novels
Pay the Piper
and
Troll Bridge
and an upcoming novel about a boy, a bar mitzvah, and a golem.

In the story that follows, they join forces to show us some desperate people caught between a rock and a hard place—or between a Tsar and a dragon.

THE dragons were harrowing the provinces again. They did that whenever the Tsar was upset with the Jews. He would go down to their barns himself with a big golden key and unlock the stalls. Made a big show of it.

“Go!” he would cry out pompously, flinging his arm upward, outward, though, having no sense of direction, he usually pointed towards Moscow. That would have been a disaster if the dragons were equally dense. But of course they are not.

So they took off, the sky darkening as their vee formation covered a great swath of the heavens. And as they went, everyone below recited the old rhyme, “Bane of Dragons”:

Well, it rhymes in the dialect.

Of course, the Jews were all safe, having seeded their shtetls with a new kind of drachometer—an early-warning device that only they could have invented. The Tsar should have listened to me when I told him to gather the Jewish scientists in one place and force them to work for him. Away from their families, their friends. Use them to rid ourselves of the rest. But no, once again I was not heeded.

So deep inside their burrows, the Jews—safe as houses—were drinking schnapps and tea in glasses with glass handles … which always seems an odd combination to me, but then, I am not Jewish, not even seven times down the line, which one must prove in order to work for the Tsar.

Balked of their natural prey, the dragons took once more to raking the provinces with fire. This time, it cost us a really fine opera house, built in the last century and fully gilded, plus a splendid spa with indoor plumbing, and two lanes of Caterina the Great houses, plus the servants therein. Thank the good Lord it was summer—all the hoi plus all the polloi were at their summer dachas and missed the fun. The smoke, though, hung over the towns for days, like a bad odor.

I pointed all this out this to His Royal Graciousness High Buttinsky, but carefully, of course. I know that I’m not irreplaceable. No one is. Even Tsars, as we all found out much later. And I wanted my head to remain on my shoulders. At least until my new wife wore me out.

Bowing low, I said, “Do you remember, gracious one, what I said concerning the Jewish scientists?”

The Tsar stroked his beard, shook his head, mumbled a few words to the mad magician who danced attendance on the Tsaritsa, and left abruptly to plan his next pogrom. It would have as little effect as the last. But he was always trying.

Very trying.

Have I mentioned how much Tsar Nicholas is constantly upset with the Jews?

Now the mad magician and I had this in common: we did not think highly of the Tsar’s wits. Or his wishes and wants. This did not, of course, stop us from cashing his chits and living at court and finding new young wives at every opportunity, our own and other men’s. But where we differed was that Old Raspy thought that he knew a thing or three about dragons. And in that—as it turned out—he was terribly, horribly wrong.

SOME twelve feet below the frozen Russian surface, two men sat smoking their cigarettes and drinking peach schnapps next to a blue-and-white-tiled stove. The tiles had once been the best to be had from a store—now long gone—in the Crimea, but in the half-lit burrow, the men did not care about the chips and chinks and runnels on them. Nor would they have cared if the stove were still residing upstairs in the house’s summer kitchen. They were more concerned with other things now, like dragons, like peach schnapps, like the state of the country.

One man was tall, gangly, and humped over because of frequent stays in the burrow, not just to escape the dragons either. He had a long beard, gray as a shovelhead. With the amount of talking he tended to do, he looked as if he were digging up an entire nation. Which, of course, he was.

The other was short, compact, even compressed, with a carefully cultivated beard and sad eyes.

The taller of the two threw another piece of wood into the stove’s maw. The heat from the blue tiles immediately cranked up, but there was no smoke, due to the venting system, which piped the smoke straight up through ten feet of hard-packed dirt, then, two feet before the surface, through a triple-branching system that neatly divided the smoke so that when it came into contact with the cold air, it was no more than a wisp. Warm enough for wolves to seek the three streams out, but as they scattered when there were dragons or Cossacks attacking the villages, the smoke never actually gave away the positions of the burrows.

“You ever notice,” the taller man, Bronstein, began, “that every time we ask the Tsar to stop a war—”

“He kills us,” the other, Borutsch, finished for him, his beard jumping. “Lots of us.” Bronstein nodded in agreement and seemed ready to go on, but Borutsch didn’t even pause for breath. “When he went after Japan, we told him, ‘It’s a tiny island with nothing worth having. Let the little delusional, we’re-descended-from-the-sun-god-and-you-aren’t bastards
keep
it. Russia is big enough. Why add eighteen square miles of nothing but volcanoes and rice?”

Bronstein took off the oval eyeglasses that matched his pinched face so well and idly smeared dust from one side of the lenses to the other. “Well, what I mean to say is—”

“And this latest! His high mucky-muck Franz falls over dead drunk in Sarajevo and never wakes up again, and all of a sudden Germany is a rabid dog biting everyone within reach.” Borutsch gnashed his teeth at several imaginary targets, setting his long beard flopping so wildly that he was in danger of sticking it in his own eye. “But why should we care? Let Germany have France. They let that midget monster loose on us a century ago; they can get a taste of their own borscht now.”

“Yes, well—” But Borutsch was not to be stopped.

“How big a country does one man need? What is he going to do with it? His dragons have torched more than half of it, and his ‘Fists’ have stripped the other half clean of anything of value.”

“Wood and grain,” Bronstein managed to interject.
The only things worth more than the dragons themselves,
he thought.
Wood in the winter and grain in the spring—the only two seasons Russia gets. The nine aggregate days that made up summer and fall didn’t really count.

“Yes. So he sends us to fight and die for a country we don’t own and that’s worth nothing anyway, and if we happen to survive, he sends us off to Siberia to freeze our dumplings off! And if we
complain
?” Borutsch pointed his finger at Bronstein, thumb straight. “Ka-pow!”

Bronstein waited to see if the older man was going to go on, but he was frowning into his schnapps now, as if it had disagreed with something he’d just said.

“Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Pinches.”

Borutsch looked up, his eyes sorrowful and just slightly bleary from drink.

“I’ve got an idea,” Bronstein said.

Borutsch’s lips curled upward in a quiet smile, but his eyes remained sad. “You always do, Lev. You always do.”

THE mad monk was not so mad as people thought. Calculating, yes. Manipulative, yes. Seductive, definitely.

He stared speculatively at himself in a gilded mirror in the queen’s apartments. His eyes were almost gold.

Like a dragon’s,
he thought.

He was wrong. The dragons’ eyes were coal black. Shroud black. Except for the dragon queen.
Hers
were green. Ocean green, black underwater green, with a lighter, almost foamy green color in the center. But then the mad monk had never actually been down to see the dragons in their stalls, or talked to their stall boys. He didn’t dare.

If there was one thing that frightened Rasputin, it was dragons. There had been a prophecy about it. And as calculating a man as he was, he was also a man of powerful beliefs. Peasant beliefs.

It is even stronger in the original Siberian.

Not that you can find anyone who speaks Siberian here in the center of the Empire,
the monk thought.
Which is where I belong. In the center.
He’d long known that he was made for greater things than scraping a thin living from the Siberian tundra, like his parents.

Or dying in the cold waters of the Tura, like my siblings.

Shaking off these black thoughts, he made a quick kiss at his image in the mirror.

“Now
there’s
an enchanting man!” he said aloud.