The Last Tsar's Dragons

Chapter 27

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 ’til Lenin gave the word.

The man in question, who had arrived just the night before, stood watching the dragons. His eyes were closed almost to slits, as if he stood in full armor, assessing the troops through the slot in his visor.

Bronstein knew 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. Somehow, that unnatural calm made the man seem even more dangerous.

At last he turned to Bronstein, the eyes no longer in slits, just a bit tired, with bags under them as if he didn’t get much sleep. “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 boy’s game. Such silliness.

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

“I… I do not know for sure,” Bronstein said too quickly, knowing he should have lied and said he was certain. Knowing that he had little capacity to say something was true if it was not. “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 ’til he’d worn through three shovels and done what he was sure was irreparable damage to his arms and shoulders. Dug ’til the sun scorched the Russian pall from his face and turned it to dragon leather. Dug ’til the desert night froze him colder than any Russian would ever care to admit.

Dug ’til he found the first new dragon eggs in more than a hundred twenty 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 brought forth young.

Dragon eggs weren’t like other eggs. They didn’t need warmth and heat to produce 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 brought them home in giant wooden boxes and planted them on the hillside overlooking his town, doing all the work himself.

And 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 to 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 Lenin let Koba loose the men before he—Bronstein—launched his dragons, then he had lost. There would be no place for him in that 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 leapt 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.

The last of the beasts to take flight was the first hatched and the largest, the leader of the brood. Dragons, like modern man it seemed, led from the rear. As the beast stood poised on an outcropping, wings outspread and testing the night air, it craned its long neck back to look directly at Bronstein, who felt a wave of heat and fury wash over him, through him. The heat was the dragon’s, but he recognized the fury as his own. He wanted to burn the country as badly as the dragons did. He wanted to punish them for Siberia. For his people. For himself.

The dragon bared its teeth in a reptilian smile and leapt into the air.

Bronstein suddenly knew that he had indeed spent too long a time with the dragons. I have become them. Their rage. Their fire.

He looked over to Lenin and saw hot fury in his slitted eyes as well.

But he has spent so little time with them…. Another thought, more profound, pushed that one away: Some men are born dragons, and some become them.

And the rest flee or are burnt to ash.

He watched in horror as 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 was a disaster. Borutsch had been right all along.

It will be years before we struggle out of 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 realized 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. For if the Russian winter cannot quell the hot fury in me, perhaps some southern heat can mask it.

The dragon wings were but a murmur now. And the shouts of men.