Alexei gave him a faint smile, and her boy’s voice sounded suddenly full of conviction. “Of course I can read them. Even now I can hear them speaking to me from across the room.”
The man called the Mad Monk, demon, and spawn of Satan, bowed his head. He believed the boy. Hadn’t he only understood what herbs to mix when he thought of him? And the blood, its directions so clearly coming into his mind?
He watched the czarina slowly get to her feet. She looked at him. Slowly, she nodded.
Rasputin bowed to her. “It will be done. I will come to you at midnight.” He was aware the boy stared at the pages as he placed them back into his black bag.
It was only after Rasputin left that Alexandra explained to her son what Rasputin would give him. She’d fully expected him to draw back, horrified. To her shock, he had not. He leaned close. “The pages, Mother, they already told me what I must do. If the monk were to bring me a goat, it wouldn’t matter.” He smiled at her, took her hand between his thin ones. “I will drink the potion, I will drink the blood, and then I will be well, Mother. I trust the pages. I will be well.”
And she said nothing more, but he saw a tear running down her face.
“Mother, I know you do not wish to believe in magic, and thus you believe me mad to claim the pages Rasputin has brought speak to me.” He shrugged a thin shoulder. “If I hear the pages speaking, then they can hear me, they understand what is wrong with me. The pages tell me I can be cured.”
Still she fretted and paced, wondering how such a thing could be possible. Alexei hearing pages speaking to him? It was his illness, finally it was in his head, in his brain, yet he had spoken with such clarity of thought and so logically. Were the pages telling him what to say to convince her?
When she turned back to him, he said, “Mother, I feel so weak, I know I will die. How can I lead our magnificent country if I am dead?”
She had no more arguments. Though her fear, her revulsion, was great, at the appointed time, she took her son to a small room in the basement of the lodge, far away from the servants and the guards.
Rasputin was there.
The girl with him was pale as fresh cream, with dark hair and fear in her glazed eyes. Alexei stared at her, felt something deep inside him stir. He heard the pages, softly singing to him. He knew what he would do to her. And suddenly, he wanted it very badly.
He said in a formal voice, “Mother, I wish you to wait outside. When it is done, I will come out to you.” Rasputin opened the door, waited for her to slowly walk from the room, one last look at the girl and her son. When she was gone, the door locked, Alexei said simply, “Let us begin.”
Her blood was so warm, like heated silver and salt. Rasputin had fed her opium to keep her calm, and so she was. The very pretty young girl sagged against Alexei as he drank, and drank, and drank from the cut in her neck. The opium in her blood went to his head, making him dizzy with swirling colors bleeding into each other, colors so bright they burned his eyes, and suddenly he was flying in bright skies filled with lowlying clouds dripping golden drops of rain to the fields below. And birds, so many he didn’t recognize, in all colors and shapes, were all singing to him. And it was beautiful, and he was happy.
Just as suddenly, Alexei felt himself thrown from the present back, back, into the past, where a French soldier, no he was far more important than a simple soldier, he was a long-dead emperor and he was listening to an old man with a white mane of hair and brilliant blue eyes telling him a tale of two boys, twins, one strong and one weak with the blood disease, like him. And then he saw piles of dead and fires burning entire villages, heard screams and saw the emperor’s face, pale as death, and he was riding away, surrounded by soldiers.
Then he was thrown into the future, but he saw nothing at all, only whiteness, but he heard clearly the pages singing to him as he drank. Of life, of death, of simply being. And he rejoiced. It seemed to take forever, but perhaps it was only moments, Alexei did not know.
When it was done, and the girl was dead, Alexei didn’t want to let her go. She was part of him, her lifeblood filling him, giving him a future. He rocked her against him, kissed her white slack mouth. Rasputin finally pulled her away.
He studied Alexei. So little amazed him, but this did. The pages, the pages had wrought this miracle. The boy glowed with health, his cheeks were fuller, his eyes bright, his shoulders straight. He was weeping. “Please, don’t take her away, not yet.”
“I must,” Rasputin said. “I will see she’s properly taken care of.”
Rasputin then examined Alexei, listened to his heart and lungs, checked his pupils. He stepped back, nearly tripping over the girl’s body.
“It is good, Czarevitch. You are healed.” And he carried the young girl over his shoulder, past Alexei’s white-faced mother, through the back of the lodge, deep into the forest.
And for some time, Alexei was healed. He was strong and able to play without worry of falling and having blood flow out of him, and not stop.
Eventually, though, he sickened again. He came alone, not telling his mother. Rasputin brought another girl, a blond china doll this time, younger than the first. Alexei didn’t like the taste of her as much. He much preferred the third; even with the drug Rasputin had forced down her throat, she fought and screamed. He thought of her as the fighter, with raven hair and blue eyes. Rasputin finally bound her. She was helpless, and the horror of him and what he was doing made the blood taste tart and rich. And he flew again back, back to a long-ago castle in a faraway land and he saw two young brothers, one well and one sick, like him. And they had the pages. And they spoke to the pages, and the pages spoke to them, sang to them, and wept when they were parted.
And then he was flung into the future, only this time there wasn’t only blank whiteness. No, he saw a peasant boy kneeling by a rowan tree. He saw him pull out the pages from his shirt and wrap them carefully in a dirty woolen cloth. He dug a hole and buried them there, beneath the rowan, and he ran, never seeing the small girl from the nearby Gypsy encampment watching him.
* * *
Two years later, Rasputin, fearing the nobles had discovered what he had done, knew he had to rid himself of the magic pages. He was deaf to Alexei’s pleas that he have them. He sent them off with a young boy, an acolyte, cautioning him to take them away as far as he could and bury them under a rowan tree.
He didn’t have to tell Alexei what he’d done, the boy already knew, because he could no longer hear the pages sing to him. They were too far away. He was inconsolable.
When Rasputin finally met his end, his last thought was of the magic pages buried under the rowan tree, and the boy.
Without the potion given him to drink before he drank from a girl, Alexei weakened. He dreamed often of the now-silent pages, so far away from him, buried under a rowan tree. And he dreamed of the small gypsy girl watching, and wondered.
His end came on a hot evening in July.
His exhausted blood was no match for the bullets.
THE FOURTH DAY
FRIDAY
Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency with a mixed reputation. At worst, it’s the currency of hackers and criminals, at best, a lively new free market that allows anonymity, security, and lack of government oversight. With its value all over the map and raiders regularly stealing it from other “wallets,” this new digital currency has moved beyond a techie playground and is now a speculative investors’ nirvana.
—J.T. ELLISON
CHAPTER SIXTY
You don’t need to tie a big chunk of meat to the lure, a tidbit the size of the end of your finger will do. Start by putting your hooded bird on the floor inside the house. Put the lure, garnished with the tidbit, on the floor about a foot away from it, then pop the hood off.
—American Falconry Magazine
The Old Garden
Twickenham