The Dragon Book (19 page)

Prince Yusupov made it to his parents’ apartments and locked the door after him, but the mad monk, maddened further by all that had happened to him, went straight out the front door. The rest of us followed him to see what he would do, Dr. L. muttering all the while that he was a devil and would probably sprout red wings and fly away.

But he was not flying; he was running across the snow-covered courtyard towards the iron gate that led to the street, shouting all the while, “Felix, Felix, I will tell everything to the Empress.”

At last, Purishkevich raised his gun and fired.

The night seemed one long, dark echo. But he had missed.

“Fire again!” I cried. If Rasputin got away, we were all dead men.

He fired again and, unbelievably, missed once more.

“Fool!” the Grand Duke said as Purishkevich bit his own left hand to force himself to concentrate.

When he fired a third time, the bullet struck Rasputin between the shoulders, and he stopped running though he did not fall.

“A devil, I tell you!” cried the doctor.

“I am surrounded by fools,” the Grand Duke said, and I was inclined to agree with him.

But Purishkevich shot one last time, and this one hit Rasputin in the head, and he fell to his knees. Purishkevich ran over to him and kicked him hard, a boot to the temple. At that, the monk finally fell down prostrate in the snow.

Suddenly Yusupov appeared with a rubber club and began hitting Rasputin hysterically over and over and over again.

The Grand Duke took hold of Yusupov’s shoulders and led him away.

Only then did I take out my knife and plunge it deep into Rasputin’s heart. I wanted to say something, anything, but there was nothing more to say.

A servant came out a little later with a rope, and we pulled the body to the frozen Neva and left it there.

“Should we find a hole and push him in?” I asked.

“Let the world see him,” the Grand Duke said. “Dead is dead.”

I looked at the mad monk splayed out on the ice and wondered at that. By my count, he should have died five times tonight before my knife decided the thing. But, “Dead is dead,” I agreed with the Grand Duke, and left him lying there.

I went home but could not scrub away the feel of my hand touching his back, the knife going deep into his body.

“It is ended,” I told my image in the mirror. But it had only begun.

THE mad monk lay on the ice. His back hurt abominably where the knife had plunged in. He couldn’t move.

“I curse you,” he muttered, or tried to. His lips were frozen shut, and anyway, he wasn’t sure whom he should be cursing, not knowing who had set the blade deep in his back. Instead, he cursed his old drinking companion, his betrayer.

Felix, may you lose all that is dear to you.

His shoulder and the back of his head hurt, too, though not as badly. Oddly enough his stomach and throat were burning as well. He wondered if the cakes—how many had he eaten?—had disagreed with him.
Trust the
prvidvorny,
the courtiers, to make stale and rotten cakes.
His own mother could have done better.

He was cold, but he had been colder. The Lord knew how cold a
muzhik
from Siberia could get without succumbing. He was wearing his charm, so men couldn’t kill him. Nor women, it turned out. The whore who had slit him from stem to sternum had learned that. He would survive this.

But he could not move.

How long till the full moon?
he thought.
How long till that fool Lenin arrives and lets the dragons out of their hole?

Dragons, when caught in their lairs, can be drowned, starved out, slaughtered by massed rifle fire—in fact, killed in any number of ways. It was why the Tsar’s dragons’ stables were better guarded than his own home. In the skies, they were unstoppable: swift fire from the night skies and death to all who stood against them, like Jews and revolutionaries. But not now.

The fools haven’t killed me. But if I don’t recover before the moon is full, they will have killed Russia.

He tried to twitch a finger, blink an eyelid. Nothing.

I must rest. I will try again in the morning.

The moon rose over the frozen Neva, a near-perfect circle.

I have perhaps two days,
he thought, his mind perfectly clear.
Maybe three.

THE red dragons were no longer restless, because, for the first time, they’d been led up into the night air. Long noses sniffed at the sky; wings unfurled and caught the slight breeze. But they were not loosed to fly. Not yet. Not till Lenin gave the word.

The man in question, who had arrived just the night before, stood watching the dragons critically. Bronstein knew that the Bolshevik leader had never seen dragons before tonight, but he was showing neither awe nor fear in their presence. On the contrary, he was eyeing them critically, one hand stroking his beard.

“You are sure they will function, Leon?”

Lenin meant him, Bronstein. He insisted on calling Bronstein by his revolutionary name. Bronstein realized just now that he didn’t much care for it. It was an ugly name,
Leon. And Trotsky sounds like a town in Poland.
He wondered how soon he could go back to the name he’d been born with. And he thought at the same time that taking revolutionary names was like a boys’ game.
Such silliness!

“Leon!” Lenin snapped. “Will they function?”

“I … I do not know for sure,” Bronstein said, too quickly, knowing that he should have lied and said that he was certain. “But they are the same stock as the Tsar’s dragons,” he added. “And those function well enough.”

Bronstein was certain of that at least. He’d traced the rumor of a second brood bred from the Great Khan’s dragons with the thoroughness of a Talmudic scholar. Traced the rumor through ancient documents detailing complex treaties and byzantine trades to a kingdom in North Africa. Traced it by rail and camel and foot to a city that drought had turned to desert when the pharaohs were still young. Traced it with maps and bribes and a little bit of luck to a patch of sand that hadn’t seen a drop of rain in centuries.

Then he’d dug.

And dug.

And dug some more.

He dug till he’d worn through three shovels and done what he was sure was irreparable damage to his arms and shoulders. Dug till the sun scorched the Russian pall from his face and turned it to dragon-leather. Dug till the desert night froze him colder than any Russian would ever care to admit.

Dug till he found the first new dragon eggs in over 120 years. The Tsar’s dragon queen hadn’t dropped a hatch of eggs in a century, nor was she likely to anytime soon. And even if she did, it would be years before the eggs would hatch.

Dragon eggs weren’t like other eggs. They didn’t need warmth and heat to bring forth their hatchlings. They were already creatures of fire; they needed a cool, damp place to develop.

Nothing colder and wetter than a Russian spring,
Bronstein knew. So he’d brought them home in giant wooden boxes and planted them on the hillside overlooking his town, doing all the work himself.

Another thing that set dragon eggs apart: they could sit for years, even centuries, until the conditions were right to be born.

“And some would say,” Bronstein said to Lenin, “they should be more powerful, having lain in their eggs for so much longer.”

Lenin stared at him blankly for a moment, then turned to Koba. “Are your men ready?”

Koba grinned, and his straight teeth reflected orange from the fire of a snorting dragon. The handler calmed the beast as Koba spoke.

“Ready to kill at my command, Comrade.”

Lenin turned a stern gaze at the moon as if he could command it to rise faster. Koba glanced at Bronstein and grinned wider.

A dragon coughed a gout of flame, and Koba’s eyes reflected the fire. Bronstein looked into those eyes of flame and knew that if he let Koba loose his men before Bronstein launched his dragons, then he had lost. There would be no place for him in the new Russia. The land would be ruled by Georgian murderers and cutthroat thieves; new
kruks
to replace the old, and the proletariat worse off than before. Not the Eden he’d dreamed of. And the Jews? Well, they, of course, would be blamed.

“Lenin,” Bronstein said, as firmly as he could. “The dragons are ready.”

“Truly?” Lenin asked, not looking back.

“Yes, Comrade.”

Lenin waited just a beat, nothing more, then said, “Then let them fly.”

Bronstein nodded to Lenin’s back and practically leaped toward the dragons. “Fly!” he shouted. “Let them fly!”

The command was repeated down the line. Talon boys dashed bravely beneath broad, scaly chests to cut the webbings that held the dragons’ claws together.

“Fly!” Bronstein shouted, and the handlers let slip the rings that held the pronged collars tight to the dragons’ necks before scurrying back, as the beasts were now free to gnash and nip with teeth the size of scythe blades.

“Fly!” the lashers shouted as they cracked their long whips over the dragons’ heads. But the dragons needed no encouragement. They were made for this. For the night sky, the cool air, the fire from above.

“Fly,” Bronstein said softly, as giant wings enveloped the moon, and the Red Terror took to the skies.

Fifty yards away, Lenin turned to Koba. “Release your men to do their duty, as well.” And Koba laughed in answer, waving his hand.

Bronstein saw Koba’s men scurry away and knew for certain that Russia was lost. Releasing the dragons was a mistake; releasing Koba’s men a disaster. Borutsch had been right all along.

It will be years before we struggle free from these twin terrors from land and sky. What I wanted was a clean start. But this is not it.

He shivered in the cold.

I need warmth,
he thought suddenly. By that he did not mean a stove in a tunnel, a cup of tea, schnapps.
I want palm trees. Soft music. Women with smiling faces. I want to live a long and merry life, with a
zaftik
wife.
He thought of Greece, southern Italy, Mexico. The dragon wings were but a murmur by then. And the shouts of men.

IN the blackness before dawn, the mad monk’s left index finger moved. It scraped across the ice and the slight
scritching
sound it made echoed loud and triumphant in his ears.

He’d lain unmoving for three days.

A peasant child had thrown rocks at him on the second day, trying to ascertain whether the drunk on the ice was alive or dead. The mad monk was surprised when the child didn’t come out on the ice and loot his body. But then he realized why.

The ice was melting.

The days had grown warmer, and the ice was melting. Soon, the mighty Neva would break winter’s grip and flow freely to the Baltic Sea once more. Icy water was already pooling in his best boots and soaking his black velvet trousers. It splashed in his left ear, the one that lay against the ice, and he thought that he could feel it seeping through his skin to freeze his very bones.