Rasputin's Bastards

RESURRECTION

Darya Orlovsky spun and reeled in the perfect winter’s light, long braids of dark hair trailing over her shoulders like lariats. Her eyes were fixed on a place in her dreams: the City of New Pokrovskoye, the greatest port in the Empire. Snow fell like flakes of gold in a winter afternoon. Godly white horses that pranced in front of a sledge bearing lovers snuggled in thick grey furs. The girl laughed, and spun, and thought to herself with desperate joy:

Bullshit. Bullshit metaphor.

She whirled then, prancing down a long flight of stone steps to the Square. Her father was there — playing an accordion festooned with jewels, in the midst of a circle of girls who danced as though with one mind. His teeth flashed beneath his thick moustache. His eye twinkled. “Darya!” He called. “My little petrushka! Join the dance!”

“Papa,” she called happily. But that is not what she thought.

She thought: Killer.

A cold, soul-dead killer who came north with a baby daughter and wife in tow; who took hands that had stabbed and strangled and squeezed triggers and brought them to a fishing village — washed them clean in brine of ocean and blood of cod. And now whose hands played over the keyboard of the accordion, making it sing a song that no one could resist.

Darya lifted her skirts and spun back the way she’d come, up the stairs and away from the square. As she turned, she looked over the rooftops of this place. They were high-peaked, shingled in fine slate pulled from quarries at the Empire’s southern mountains. They overhung houses and apartments and in the distance, a long low palace surrounded by gardens where the Tsarina, the Babushka held court in the summertime but now —

Now is summertime, she thought.

And then she thought: How did I know this?

And then she whirled again along a broad platform on the edge of the cliffs that surrounded New Pokrovskoye — and she beheld the fountains and the Parliament House and the port, and the great curtain wall where in direr ages there patrolled the Tsar’s guard. Now, the people of New Pokrovskoye danced along it, moving in a great human wave in the afternoon light — praising—

—praising—

Darya spun and turned and felt her knees buckle. And for a moment, she stopped dancing.

The world grew dimmer then and the snow faded, and for a moment she blinked, for the light had vanished. And she thought about the man who’d taken her in the Museum of Family History. She remembered the touch of his hand on her bare thigh and the feeling of his lips as they brushed her mouth, the scraping of his tongue against her teeth, and as she did she blinked again.

She was standing in a crowd, in the darkness of the true New Pokrovskoye, near the pier where her father tied up his boat. The crowd was swaying back and forth and humming, and she felt a touch at her shoulder and she turned — in time to see two figures, the only two who did not seem to be keeping a rhythm. Darya took a breath. For one of them —

—one of them was he. He moved with a hunter’s ease. The other, a small man with slicked back hair, followed nervously. “These fuckin’ zombies give me the creeps,” he whispered. And the big man, Darya’s hero, muttered something low. Darya spun closer to hear the end of the sentence.

“—no waste,” he said. “We die soon.”

Darya didn’t care about dying soon. She wanted to follow him. Ignoring the call of the song, she elbowed her way through their fast-closing wake.

He was a hero — one who would not succumb. That was why she’d picked him. She had a sense of these things.

“There you fuckin’ go, ‘we die soon.’ We’re not goin’ to die soon. This is some fuckin’ kind of dance.”

“Not we. We.”

“What the fuck?”

The two were heading back toward the store that she’d managed all these years. They were moving quickly — quicker than Darya herself could. She stumbled through the crowd of strangers here in New Pokrovskoye — the people who had come heeding the call. There were so many of them — people who had come like invaders — eating their food and drinking their tea and sleeping in their homes.

The man and his friend were gone and she stood amid a forest of strangers. They moved and swayed rhythmically under the sky — and in spite of herself, she found that she was doing the same. It was a tempting thing to do — to fall back into the magnificent dream that they’d concocted for themselves, an amplification of the game that had played itself out in her dreams when she was just a little girl. She remembered those dreams fondly — sitting at Babushka’s feet in the school house, the old woman beaming down at them and beginning: “Have I told you the story of the two stallions, my Children?” and then beginning with a whistling of wind, and transporting them all to such a wonderful place — a place like the Empire.

Babushka died too soon, she thought, and let a hint of sadness creep into her.

But she quickly disciplined herself. Babushka had died. Her stories ought to be finished.

Grimly, Darya set off for the store.

The only narrative that she would inhabit would be the one that she had made for herself today. The one with the man from Russia.

She moved more quickly once she made it past Harbour Street. There were only pockets of people here — heads upturned, swaying back and forth. She elbowed between a thin balding man and a woman with flowing mascara who seemed to be in her sixties. Her shop was in sight.

She fished in her skirts for the key, and rushed up to the door to turn the lock. Her man had made it to the store — she was sure of it. The first place they’d met. In New Pokrovskoye. There was no Empire here and it was summer and —

She opened the lock and stepped inside.

“Hello, my child.”

She frowned. The voice was coming from everywhere.

“Who is it?”

“You should have to ask. Tell me — why are you not dancing?”

“What?”

“Why are you not dancing?”

She froze, and whispered:

“Koldun?”

The Koldun stepped out from behind a rack of liquor. He was carrying something in his hand.

“Everyone dances,” he said. “That is why we went to such trouble — to create a world for you, one you might all share. A world of treasure and gold and magic.”

“P-programming,” said Darya. Her hands scurried across the counter behind her — seeking some kind of a weapon. “There’s no world.”

The Koldun shrugged. “All right,” he said. “Programming then. And you, little Darya, have managed to figure a way around the programming.”

He looked at her more closely. “But you’re not that clever.”

He sniffed the air. “Kilodovich,” he said. “Alexei Kilodovich has touched you.”

Darya backed away. The Koldun moved closer.

“What a thing he is, this thing our Babushka has found. The power to free a girl. Hah. Where is he now? He cannot be far.”

“I — I don’t know who Alexei Kilodovich is,” said Darya — although she thought she might know who the Koldun was talking about. She felt a sliver of fear through her — and suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to return to the Empire — to the beautiful dream her beloved Babushka had crafted in her, with stories and the museum and a lifetime of programming.

The Koldun smiled sadly and shook his head. He raised the thing in his hand — Darya’s eyes widened as she recognized it for what it was.

“You can never go back, my little puppet,” he said softly, aiming the machine pistol at her middle. “Babushka would know everything then.”