The Last Tsar's Dragons

Chapter 5

The mad monk was not so mad as people thought. Calculating, yes. Manipulative, yes. Seductive, definitely.

He stared speculatively at himself in a gilded mirror in the queen’s apartments. His eyes were almost gold.

Like a dragon’s, he thought.

He was wrong. The dragons’ eyes were coal black. Shroud black. Except for the dragon queen. Hers were green. Ocean green, black underwater green with a lighter, almost foamy green color in the center. But then the mad monk had never actually been down to see the dragons in their stalls or talked to their stall boys.

He didn’t dare.

If there was one thing that frightened Rasputin, it was dragons. There had been a prophecy about it. And as calculating a man as he was, he was also a man of powerful peasant beliefs.

It was even stronger in the original Siberian.

Not that you can find anyone who speaks that here, he thought. Not even the peasants. But he’d not heard his native tongue for years, for he had chosen to be here in the center of the empire. Which is where I belong. He smiled at his reflection, his long eyeteeth lending him a wolfish look, which suited him. From a child, he’d known he was made for greater things than scraping a thin living from the Siberian tundra like his parents.

Or dying in the cold waters of the Tura like my siblings.

Or drowning on dry land from too much homemade vodka like my cousins.

He shook off the black thoughts—which came to him too often to be a coincidence. Prophecy, perhaps. One must always listen to prophecy. Then he made a quick kiss at his image in the mirror.

“Now there’s an enchanting man,” he said aloud, but in his own dialect, just in case he should be overheard and mocked. If he feared dragons, he hated mockery. And the court was very polished in its use.

Still, his own face always did much to cheer him—as well did the ladies of the court. The ladies of the court always took him out of his black moods. As did the ladies of the pantry. And the laundry. And the field.

To say the mad monk was fond of the ladies was to say that the salmon was fond of the stream. Or that the bear was fond of the salmon.

“Father Grigori,” said a light, breathy child’s voice from the region of his hip. “Pick me up.”

The mad monk was not so mad as to refuse the order from the tsar’s only son. The boy might be ill, sometimes desperately so. The skin stretched over his pitifully thin body was often covered with bruises, as if someone had beaten him. As if anyone would dare.

But one day, Rasputin knew, one day soon the boy would be tsar. The stars foretold it. And the Lord God— who spoke to Father Grigori in his dreams of fire and ice—had foretold it as well. And who am I, Rasputin whispered to himself, to argue with God? Though he’d done so since his own boyhood. Argued, wheedled, cajoled. And God had joined in the conversations with great enthusiasm, the monk’s high position being a sign of how much the Lord had enjoyed their conversations.

“As you wish and for my pleasure,” Rasputin said to the boy, bending down and picking up the child. He bore him carefully, knowing that if he pressed too hard, bruises the size and color of fresh beets would form and not fade for weeks.

The boy looked up at him fondly and said, “Let’s go see Mama,” and Father Grigori’s mouth broke into a wolfish grin. The boy was still too young to recognize what it meant. The tsarina was a tasty dish to be chewed slowly and savored, as the royals did their food, not bolted like the peasants would have done. He may have begun as a peasant, but he’d learned his lessons well. Moderation in all things. Well, at least moderation in most things.

“Yes, let’s,” Rasputin told the tsar’s son. “As you wish and for my pleasure.” He settled Alexei on his back, then practically danced down the long hall with the child riding him as if he were the tsar’s own steed and not the tsarina’s pet monk.