Free Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison

covered in real horse hair, with a real mane and wheels where its hooves should be and a saddle big enough to sit on, and I looked at the three things, each with its four wheels, and felt what I couldn’t yet identify as pity. I was so overwhelmed by all of what was around me—the riches, the servants, the vast number of rooms—I had no idea what I felt, other than outrage at the wanton wickedness of taking pieces of a real horse to make a plaything. What kind of family would provide a child such a toy? I missed my horses back home—I think I missed them more than I did my mother—but I wouldn’t have touched that false steed, not if it had been the last suggestion of an equine specimen on earth.
    In truth, I didn’t dare touch any of the toys. Not while the screaming continued. The longer it went on, the younger I became, whittled down from ten to a baby of five or six, prey to morbid imaginings and sure such sounds could only be the work of malevolent Ivan, who had bewitched the nursery, stunned and stilled each toy. Any doll that could lie down and close her eyes had done just that. The ball and hoop rolled back to their places in the cupboard, and the mechanical wonders that entertained the tsarevich—railways and factories, fleets of ships that sailed, battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—remained motionless, waiting on the fate of their bedridden owner, a boy who would have traded everything he owned for the one pleasure denied him, the gift for which he begged every Christmas and every birthday: a bicycle.
    So I gave one to Handsome Alyosha.
    “What color is it?” Alyosha wanted to know.
    “Red, of course.”
    “Tell me what it looks like.”
    “You know what a bicycle looks like.”
    “I want to know what his looks like.”
    “Handsome Alyosha’s bicycle is red,” I told Alyosha, “but the handlebars are chrome.”
    “Does it have mudguards over the tires?”
    “It does.”
    “Well, why aren’t they chrome too?”
    “Who said they aren’t?”
    “Is it a Raleigh or a Triumph?”
    “Neither.”
    “Royal Enfield?”
    “No.”
    “It has to be an English bicycle.”
    “Says who?”
    “I don’t like American ones as well as I do English.”
    “It’s not American or English or French or anything else. It’s magic. Handsome Alyosha can pedal it on water and above the clouds. He’s ridden it through the heavens. Every new moon there’s a race around the largest of Saturn’s rings, and Handsome Alyosha always wins.”
    “Who else is in the race? Who comes in second and third?”
    “Hermes and Chronos. God of travel and god of time.”
    “What about Zeus?”
    “He watches. The race is meant to entertain him.”
    “How can it be entertaining if it always turns out the same?”
    “Because Zeus and all the others never believe Handsome Alyosha will win. No matter how many times he comes in first, they think it will be different the next time. After all, they’re gods. They don’t understand how a boy on a red bicycle can win, especially not against Chronos, who can slow the hand of a stopwatch, or Hermes, with his winged sandals.”
    “Are all the gods there watching?”
    “The men, yes, but not all the women. There’s a grandstand and clubhouse built on one of Saturn’s inside rings, just as at a horse race. Dionysus runs the concession and all he serves is champagne, fois gras, and caviar. Toast points, of course, for the pâté and the caviar. Demeter won’t come, because she’s always quarreling with her father—he’s Chronos. And Artemis hates cycling. She disapproves of everything except bows and arrows. That’s as much technological advancement as she tolerates. But Hera and Aphrodite are there, and Athena, of course. Hestia sometimes, but she’s a homebody. She never feels she has the right clothes for going to the races.”
    Sitting by Alyosha’s bed, I could invent this kind of nonsense for hours, so Handsome Alyosha never lacked for adventures, but the