Blood Red, Snow White Read Online Free Page A

wicked ways. Or so he said.
    He went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, though he never got there, joining the streams of other holy men and wandering prophets who trailed from one corner of Russia to another, each seeking some hidden goal known only to them.
    Until, finally, he walked into this story and into the heart of the Tsarina.
    *   *   *
    Now the Tsar was more worried than ever.
    Rasputin was wild. He was illiterate, he was unwashed and smelled like a goat, and a dirty one at that. He dressed in a peasant’s baggy trousers and loose shirt, and his greasy beard was always speckled with bits of food, or crusted soup. His only redeeming feature, it seemed, were his eyes, which could still a room of a hundred voices.
    The salons and drawing rooms of the wealthy were already drenched in bizarre practices, occult dabblings, theosophy, and spiritualism. Séances were all the rage; the Tsar even suspected the Tsarina had toyed with a Ouija board in an attempt to obtain supernatural aid for her son. And now a wild monk had set up home under his very nose, and there was nothing he could do about it, for Alexandra insisted that God had sent Rasputin to cure her son, as no one else had been able to do.
    And even the Tsar had to admit that there was something in it. Whenever the boy grew ill, or hurt himself, Rasputin was called for, and the bleeding would stop, or slow much quicker than usual.
    On one occasion, when Rasputin was out of the city, Alexei was injured by a bumpy carriage ride, and a painful tumor grew in his leg. The court doctors told the Tsarina to prepare for the worst; he was going to die. In desperation Alexandra sent a telegram, begging Rasputin to return to the palace. Rasputin did not return, but instead sent a telegram of his own, telling the Tsarina that the tumor would disappear at six-thirty that evening.
    At six-thirty that evening, the tumor disappeared. Rasputin’s reputation was sealed, and nothing that the Tsar, or anyone else, could say would change the Tsarina’s mind about him.

 
    INCIDENCES OF THE BIZARRE
    STORIES TWIST AND TURN and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.
    This was something that Arthur, the young writer, had learned. He read his fairy tales in Russian, and saw the same figures pop up here and there, first in this story, then in another. That’s why, when he came to write the stories into English, for English children to read, he created three characters who walk through the forest of the whole book, as guardians and guides to every tale. We’ve met them already. In creating them, they became real, and their names are Peter, the grandfather, and Vanya and Maroosia, his orphaned grandchildren.
    As in fairy tale, so in real life, and this is how it was with Arthur, too, for he himself was about to walk from one place, and one story, into another.
    *   *   *
    One day, Russia went to war.
    It had been several years since the Tsar last went to war, and it had ended badly that time. But the Tsar’s cousin, the Kaiser, had declared war on the countries surrounding his own. So here was another Caesar flexing his muscles, and the Tsar had to send his troops out to stop him.
    The Kaiser’s men sat in the middle, and the Tsar’s armies fought him on the East, and the armies of the Tsar’s other cousin, George, on the West. And for years it stayed that way.
    The soldiers sat in long holes in the ground, and pointed their rifles over the top from time to time, and sometimes would even try to attack each other, but apart from that nothing very much happened. The soldiers were good soldiers, and did what soldiers usually do, which is to say they made friends with each other, squabbled a bit, got very bored sometimes and very scared other times, and died when they were supposed to.
    The young writer knew all about this, and wondered