Hey guys, I'm working on a sci-fi/historical story that involves the Romanov family. After some googling, this forum seems like the best place to put it up for some historical and literary feedback. Many thanks in advance!
The air tasted like charcoal.
"Yesterday I saved a lady from rape," Ben heard a guard say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd outside the station.
"How'd you do it?"
"Well, I just persuaded her."
It was a Cossack voice and a Cossack joke. The town had filled with soldiers in the past month; the men of the Ural Revolutionary Committee were taking no chances. Chelyabinsk, not two hundred kilometers to the south, had just fallen to the Whites, and without officers or steady pay, loyalties amongst the local garrison troops were decidedly mixed. Still, Ben was surprised that some of the famous horsemen had ridden this far from their homeland, and even further from their oaths of service to the Tsar.
Under a tent across the street, Brodsky tended a long outdoor bar occupied by more soldiers, one empty sleeve flapping in the wind as he ladled kvass into bowl after bowl of okroshka. He saw Ben from under his tent and smiled, his teeth a webwork of gold and brown decay. Ben found a place between the centimeter-thick powder on one of Karchenko's girls and a fidgety soldier in a foreign uniform. "Misha was in here earlier, with two 'friends'," Brodsky said, shoving a glass across the table with his good hand. "Maybe some business with you, Ben?"
Ben shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of local legend. Even among the dozens of injured veterans that now prowled the streets, there was something heraldic about catching a German artillery shell and somehow living to tell the tale.
"You are too much the artiste, Herr Ben." Brodsky grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with his remaining good arm. "You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal."
"Sure," Ben said, and sipped his kvass. "Someone has to make the soldiers laugh around here. Unfortunately, you're only around from sunup to sundown."
The whore's giggle went up an octave.
"Isn't you either, miss, so please excuse us. Karchenko, he's a close friend of mine."
She looked Ben in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.
Ben's eyes followed her out into the crowd, then turned back to Brodsky. "What kind of a place is this town turning into? A man can't even have a drink in peace."
Brodsky grunted again, swabbed the battered woodwork with a rag. "Karchenko gives me a cut. You, I let drink here for entertainment value."
Ben shrugged, then took another sip. Around him, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as the conversation at the other end of the bar drifted to Ben and his foreign-looking neighbor.
"Hoy! You, in the Austrian unform, why are you in our fair town?"
A sneering response in heavily-accented Russian. "I'm from Hungary, idiots, and I'm part of a special detachment of the Cheka."
The soldiers instantly apologized, chastened into sipping their okroshka in silence. The Hungarian left, dropping a heavy gold piece on the table and shaking his head. It took five minutes before one of the other soldiers mustered the courage to turn to Ben.
"You, the one with the Mongol face. Why are you here?"
"I don't remember," Ben said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile. "I really don't."
Ben had awakened in Canton over three years ago, wearing a coat patterned like leaves scattered over mud, a strange-shaped rifle slung over one shoulder and a folded-up family photograph in his back pocket.
The coat didn't make much sense. Ben didn't know why someone would make a coat that looked like it was still stained with mud even after it was washed, but it was all he had at the time. The rifle was better--it kept firing when he held down the trigger, but after the long, curved magazine emptied, Ben couldn't find any more rounds that fit the chamber.
The photograph, however, made the least and yet the most sense of all. The most sense, because after asking around for half a day, Ben was redirected to the Russian legation, and found an easy match: the imperial family of Russia. But it made the least sense because Ben couldn't understand, for the life of him, why he had it.
And, more than why--who? Who was he, really? Ben spent the first day in Canton asking that to himself, then spent the next three weeks wandering through the dusty streets around the foreign quarter, living on handouts. Somehow, he discovered he could speak, read, and write both Chinese and English, and found work drafting letters for Sun Yat-sen's Constitutional Protection Army. Then, one day, he'd taken his rifle to an artillery captain, who promptly praised it as revolutionary and suggested setting up a factory to mass produce them.
Ben got a third of the shares in the resulting Canton Repeating Arms Company. Ongoing war in Europe made him and his partners wealthy. But the dreams came in on Pearl River breeze like wispy dragon-tails of opium smoke, and he'd wake up, clawing at the pillow, searching for memories no longer there, and that quite possibly would never arrive.
So when he heard that the Russian Empire was descending into revolution, he set out to find the family on the now-faded photograph. The gold he brought with him paved a trail of answers from Vladivostok to Yekaterinburg, but then his trail ran cold. For two months, he'd hung around Brodsky's place, hoping to catch an answer. No luck, mainly because Ben figured asking anyone the question directly in the Ural Revkom's home base would get him shot.
The only man he'd mentioned his quest to, after a rare bottle of absinthe colored their night, was Brodsky, and he'd laughed it off as the ravings of someone tripped on the green fairy. Now Ben was down to just enough money for the train and steamship tickets back home.
The soldiers had left. Ben sat with an empty glass, alone.
"I saw your girl last night," Brodsky said, passing Ben another one.
Ben shook his head. "I've never asked Karchenko for one," he said, and drank.
"She belongs to the guards, if you catch my drift."
Ben froze. "What?"
The bartender's small brown eyes sank deeper into his scarred face. "The Ipatiev House, on the edge of town. And if anyone asks you who--"
"I know." Ben finished his kvass, paid, and left, lanky shoulders hunched beneath a simple black jacket. Threading his way through another Red Army detachment, he beelined for his rented shed on the edge of town.
