The splashing of horses’ hoofs in the melted snow was heard, the squeak of the sleigh runners on the bare stones, voices in the entrance, steps across the hall; the doors opened and in came a giant with a handsome stupid face, a strange mixture of a Roman soldier and a Russian, Ivan the fool. It was the Tsar’s orderly, Alexander Ivanovitch Roumiantzev, Captain of the Preobrazhensky Guards. He handed a letter to the Tsarevitch, who broke the seal and read:—
“Son, we order thee to come to-morrow to the Winter Palace.
“Peter.”
Alexis was neither frightened nor surprised; he seemed to have foreseen this interview and felt indifferent.
That night the Tsarevitch had a dream, which he often dreamt, and always in the same way.
This dream was connected with a story he had been told in his childhood. In the time of the executions of the Streltsy Tsar Peter ordered the body of his enemy, the chief rebel leader, Boyarin Ivan Miloslavski, who was a friend of Sophia, to be disinterred; it had remained for seventeen years in St. Nicholas’ Church; the open coffin was then drawn by swine to Preobrazhensky, and there placed in the torture chamber under the block on which traitors were beheaded so that the blood should flow on the dead man; then the body was ordered to be cut into pieces and buried in that chamber under the block—“so that,” ran the ukase, “the vile parts of the thief Miloslavski should be always watered by the blood of thieves, according to the word of the Psalmist: ‘The Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.’”
In this dream Alexis seemed at first to see nothing, but only hear that terrible song from the fairy-tale about the sister and brother, which his grandmother, Peter’s mother, the old Tsaritsa Natalia Kirilovna Naryishkin, had often told him in his childhood. The brother, changed into a goat, was calling his sister Alionoushka, but in the dream Alexis heard instead of “Alionoushka” his own name Alioshenka (diminutive for Alexis).
Alioshenka, Alioshenka,
Hot fires are burning,