The Dragon Book (15 page)

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 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 them, but there were many.

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

THE monk carried 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 him, 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.

Rasputin went through the door, carrying the sleeping child.

The five ladies-in-waiting scattered before him like does before a wolf-hound. Their high, giggly voices made him smile. Made him remember the Khlysts, 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 Tsaritsa’s inner rooms, the door snicking quietly shut on the last of them.

After a moment, Alexandra came through the same door by herself, her plain face softened by the sight of the child in the monk’s arms.

“You see,” he told her, “the child only needs sleep and to be left alone, not be poked by so many doctors. Empress, you must
not
let them at him so.” He felt deep in his heart that he alone could heal the child. He knew that the Tsaritsa felt the same.

He handed her the boy, and she took the child from him, the way a peasant woman would take up her child, with great affection and no fear. Too many upper-class women left the raising of their children to other people. The monk admired the Tsaritsa, even loved her, but desired her not at all, no matter what others might say. He knew that she was totally devoted to the Tsar, that handsome, stupid, lucky man. Smiling down at her, he said, “Call on me again, Matushka, Mother of the Russian People. I am always at your service.” He bowed deeply, his black robe puddling at his feet, and gave her the dragon smile.

She did not notice but tucked the boy away in the bed, not letting a single one of her ladies help her.

As Rasputin backed away, he instinctively admired the Tsaritsa’s form. She was not overly slim like her daughters, nor plump—
zaftik
, as the Jews would say. Her hair was piled atop her head like a dragon’s nest, revealing a strong neck and the briefest glimpse of a surprisingly broad back.

Some peasant stock in her lineage somewhere?
he thought, then quickly brushed the ungracious thought aside.
Not all of us have to raise ourselves from the dirt to God’s grace. Some are given it at birth.

The rest of her form was disguised by draping linens and silks, as the current fashion demanded, but the monk knew that her waist was capable of being cinched quite tight in the fashions of other times. Her eyes, the monk also knew, were ever so slightly drooping, disguising her stern nature and stubborn resolve—especially when caring for her only son.

She turned those eyes on him now. “Yes, Father Grigori? Do you require something of me?”

The monk blinked twice rapidly, realizing he’d been staring and that perhaps “desiring her not at all” was overstating things a touch.

“Only to implore you once more to keep the bloodsuckers away,” he managed to say, covering his brief awkwardness with a bow. The Tsaritsa nodded, and the monk shuffled quickly out of the chamber.

Where is the girl with the swan’s neck?
he thought.
I should like to take these unworthy feelings out on her.
He rubbed his hands together, marveling at how smooth his palms had become during his time at court.
Perhaps it is not too late to find a whip.

“WHERE did you get them? Where did they come from? What do you plan for them?” Borutsch’s voice trembled slightly on the last phrase.

Bronstein felt a sudden urge to slap Borutsch. He’d had no idea his friend was so woman-nervous.

“Quiet yourself. We approach the shtetl.”

Borutsch didn’t answer, but took another quick sip of the schnapps.

“And if you say anything about … about what I have just showed you … anything at all …”

Bronstein’s voice trailed off, but there was a hard edge to it, like nothing Borutsch had ever heard from him before. He took another sip of the schnapps, almost emptying the flask.

“I’ll not speak of it, Lev,” he said quietly. He tried for the schnapps again, but sloshed it over his shirtfront as Bronstein grabbed him roughly by the shoulders.

“You won’t!” Bronstein almost hissed. His eyes seemed to gleam. “I swear to you, Borutsch. If you do …”

Borutsch bristled and shook himself free. “Who would I tell? And who would believe an old Jew like me? An old Jew with fewer friends in this world every day.” He peered up at Bronstein and saw the manic light slowly dim in his eyes. But suddenly Borutsch realized that he feared his friend more than he feared any dragon. It was a sobering thought.

“I … I am sorry, Pinches.” Bronstein took off his glasses. Forest dirt was smeared on the lenses. He wiped them slowly on his shirt. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“They say that caring for dragons can make you
think
like one. Make you think that choosing anything but flame and ruin is a weakness.”

Shaking his head, Bronstein said, “No, it’s not that. This world is untenable. We cannot wait upon change. Change must be brought about. And change does not happen easily.” He frowned. “Or peacefully.”

Borutsch took a deep breath before speaking. What he had to say seemed to sigh out of him. “The passage of time is not peaceful? And yet nothing can stand before it. Not men, not mountains. Not the hardest rock, if a river is allowed to flow across it for long enough.”

“You make a good, if overeloquent point.” Bronstein sighed. “But
he
would disagree.”

Borutsch frowned as if the schnapps had turned sour in his mouth. “
He
is not here.”

“But he will return. When the dragons hatch …”

Borutsch looked stunned. “You have shown him the eggs, too?”

Shaking his head, Bronstein said, “Of course, I have shown him the eggs.”

“
If
they hatch, Lev. Do you know what this means?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Of course I know what this means. And they
will
hatch. And I will train them.”

Neither one of them had spoken above a whisper, as all the Jews of the area had long been schooled in keeping their voices down. But these were sharp, harsh whispers that might just as well have been shouts.

“What do you know about training dragons?”

“What does the Tsar know?”

“You are so rash, my old friend.” It was as if Borutsch had never had a drop of the schnapps, for he certainly seemed cold sober now. “The Tsar has never trained a dragon, but his money has. And where will
you
, Lev Bronstein, find that kind of money?”

Bronstein laid a finger to the side of his nose and laughed. It was not a humorous sound at all. “Where Jews always find money,” he said. “In other people’s pockets.”

Bronstein turned and looked at the morning sun. Soon it would be full day. Not that there was that much difference between day and night, this far north in the Russias in the winter. All was a kind of deep gray.

“And when I turn my dragons loose to destroy the Tsar’s armies,
he
will return.”

“If
he
returns,” Borutsch shouted, throwing the flask to the ground, “it will be at the head of a German column!”

“
He
has fought thirty years for the revolution!”

“Not here, he hasn’t. By now, Ulyanov knows less about this land than the Tsar’s German wife does.”

“He is Russian, not German. And he is even a quarter Jew.” Bronstein sounded petulant. “And why do you not call him by the name he prefers?”

“Very well,” Borutsch said. “Lenin will burn this land to the ground before saving it, just to show that his reading of Marx is more
oisgezeihent
than mine.”

Bronstein raised his hand as if to slap Borutsch, who was proud of the fact that he didn’t flinch. Then, without touching his friend at all, Bronstein walked away down the hill at a sharp clip. He did not turn to see if Borutsch followed or not, did not even acknowledge his friend was there at all.

“You don’t need to destroy the army,” Borutsch called after him. “They’d come over to us eventually.” Bending over, he picked up the flask. Gave it a shake. Smiled at the reassuring slosh it still made. “Given the passage of time,” he said more quietly. Bronstein was already out of earshot.

Borutsch wondered if he’d ever see Bronstein again. Wondered if he’d recognize him if he did. What did it matter? He was not going back to the shtetl; not going to cower in that burrow ever again; not going to drink any more cheap schnapps. “If there’s going to be a war with all those dragons,” he said to himself, “I will leave me out of it.” He’d already started the negotiations to sell his companies. He’d take his family into Europe, maybe even into Berlin. It would certainly be safer than here when the dragon smoke began to cover all of the land. When the Tsar and his family would be as much at risk as the Jews.

I took the stairs two at a time. Coming around the corner on the floor where my apartments were situated, I told myself that it no longer mattered who was there with Ninotchka. Out they would go. I would send her to her room. Though I rarely gave orders, she knew when she had to listen to me. It’s in the voice, of course. After I locked her in, I would send out invitations to those I knew were already against the monk. I counted them on my fingers as I strode down the hall. The Archbishop, of course, because Rasputin had called rather too often for the peasants to forgo the clergy and find God in their own hearts. The head of the army, because of the monk’s antiwar passions. To his credit, the Tsar did not think highly of the madman’s stance, and when Rasputin had expressed a desire to bless the troops at the front, Nicholas had roared out, “Put a foot on that sacred ground, and I will have you hanged at once!” I had never heard him be so decisive and magnificent before or—alas—since.

Perhaps,
I thought,
I should also ask Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Pavlovich, who have their own reasons for hating him. And one or two others.
But another thought occurred to me.
Too many in a conspiracy will make it fail. We need not a net but a hammer, for as the old
babuschkas
like to say, “A hammer shatters glass but forges steel.”