The Last Tsar's Dragons

Chapter 16

Bronstein was exhausted. The dragons were needy, greedy things, big as cattle now but with the manners of kittens. Soon that last would change. He had to train them before then.

And they were so endlessly hungry!

He spent most of his days gathering food for them: scraps from the fishmongers, offal from the slaughterhouse, bones from the butcher. Even chickens, alive or newly dead. His excuses were varied: hounds to feed, dinner parties, food for the poor. A few of the butchers may have guessed at the truth, but it was too outlandish an idea to be believed. A Jew raising dragons? Now tell us about the German who hugged his children, or the Cossack who hated vodka. So what if it was the only answer that made sense? It still made no sense at all. So to stamp out any last doubts, Bronstein had to make some of that true so as not to start even more rumors. He made sure to be seen throwing parties and feeding the poor—but never so much that there wasn’t anything left over for his dragons. And once he was even seen running a pack of hounds—stolen of course, and fed to the dragons after—like some English lord a-hunting. It seemed endless, the subterfuge, the drudgery, the fear, though he knew it was not.

The dragons honked at him when he returned and butted him with their bullet-shaped heads. After feeding them, he had to fix the fences they’d trampled or burned and collect the larger dragons who had wandered off. He had a few boys from the village who helped him, but it seemed that the only ones trustworthy enough to recruit were mostly useless when it came to the actual work.

And there was so much work!

Bronstein was not afraid of work. But this wasn’t his kind of work. Writing, editing, running a newspaper—he could do that for sixteen, eighteen hours a day. But this was peasant’s labor, all sweat and slop, so much heaving, hoisting, and hosing down… it was really too much!

But help is on its way, he thought, taking out his watch and checking it. In fact, I have just enough time to clean myself up before meeting their train.

Bronstein rode to the station in his second-best suit, his beard trimmed, his eyeglasses wiped clean as laboratory glass. When he reached the city, and the smell of coal and crowds hit him, he suddenly realized how much he missed the big cities of Europe.

I was happy in Vienna. In London.

He would have stayed in either place, writing his stories, running his newspapers. Stayed but for the lure of dragons and the power they brought.

He wondered if there was something to what Borutsch had said. That men who stayed too long around dragons started to think like them.

A man would surely know if he had changed so much.

But he was not so sure he remembered what he’d been like before Siberia. Before leaving his wife and child behind to ride a hay wagon through the snow to freedom. If he hadn’t believed the stories of a lost brood of eggs that old Chinese man had drunkenly spilled, would he even now be living in such a harmonious and pastoral—if a bit frozen—land?

The screech of the steam train braking brought him out of his reverie, the cloud of smoke not unlike that which dribbled out of the young dragons’ noses.

He realized with sudden clarity that it didn’t matter what choices he might or might not have made. Lenin’s lieutenants had arrived, and it was time to be about the work of the people.