1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  Father Yulian sighed at the inequities of the world and got back to business. “We have a good blacksmith. If we could get some iron…?”

  “What do you have to trade?”

  And they were off. The wagon train wasn’t overly well-supplied, but they had done some hunting enroute, so they had some meat. And there was the pony that the raiders had killed. On the other hand, they were in the market for a new pony.

  Which, after some serious bargaining, they managed to buy. The local village would send a message to Moscow telling of a pony dying in a raid on the village. Elena’s jewelry box would be a bit lighter. The villagers were in no hurry to take the paper rubles. The Sheremetev faction was using them to pay its debts off, but not taking them when they sold something. In the days since the czar’s flight, the paper rubles were losing value all over Russia.

  Izabella looked at her mother, who was sitting in the wagon staring off into space. At Gorki she hadn’t actually done anything to cause a problem, but she hadn’t been very helpful, either. And she was sitting there, with her hair undone, and not wearing any makeup. Izabella didn’t think she had ever seen her mother without makeup in the middle of the day before she had caught Izabella and Yulian in the wagon. She shook her head. “Mama, you have to snap out of this. You were no help in Gorki and if you keep this up, they are going to dump you on the side of the road and let the bandits have you.”

  “What difference does it make? They could do no more to me than you have already done, you little strumpet.”

  Izabella was tempted to leave her mother on the side of the road herself. Not that the others had actually threatened that, though there had been some grumbling. Everyone worked, even Izabella. And Mama’s job was to provide them with a reason for being on the road. She wasn’t doing it. “Did you ever listen to what Father Yulian said?”

  “He said he loved me!”

  “He said he loved us all. That it was our duty to love one another, and that the way to reach God was not to suppress our desires, but to sate them so that they wouldn’t interfere. Don’t try to pray when you’re hungry or when you’re horny. It gets in the way of caring for God and your fellow men. That’s what he said.”

  That at least got Elena’s attention, in the form of a disgusted look.

  “I know. I know. Yulian probably adopted that doctrine because that’s where his dick was leading him. But he never lied about what he was doing. And he never told you you were the only one, I bet.”

  “He implied it.”

  “You wanted to hear it.” Izabella shook her head. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. These people are desperate, Mama. We’ve lost a child to bandits, and we’re all risking our lives. And you have no right to endanger the rest, just because you’re upset.”

  “After your betrayal, you think I owe you?”

  “Yes! But never mind that. What about the rest? Stefan and Vera, Makar and Liliya, and the others? Especially the ones who have joined us on the road.”

  “They’re serfs!”

  “So what? If that means anything, it means you owe them more, not less.”

  Nothing was really settled, but Elena did start taking a little better care of herself.

  On the Volga, approaching Kazan

  July 1636

  General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev, known to his friends as Tim, looked out at his army and concluded that an army did not in fact march on its stomach. It slithered on its stomach like a snake. A particularly lazy snake. Not that what Tim commanded could within reason be called an army. Mob was closer. Aside from the core of troops that were Gorchakov retainers, Tim and Ivan Maslov had been picking up odds and sods since they left Bor after Czar Mikhail escaped.

  “They aren’t that bad,” Ivan, the baker’s son, said.

  “Yes,” Tim said, “they are, Captain.”

  Ivan scratched his scraggly red beard in clear consideration. “Yes,” He conceded, “they are. But they aren’t as bad as they were.”

  Tim nodded. It was true. The Gorchakov retainers were good troops, well trained, well supplied, and disciplined. To an extent that was rubbing off on the odds and sods. Especially the small contingent from Bor that had come with Ivan. They were soldiers, at least, though a large number of them were more technician than soldier. They were the people who had built the dirigible, Czarina Evdokia, some of them, anyway. Those who had declared for Czar Mikhail.

  “We should have burned the dirigible works at Bor,” Marat Davidovich said again.

  “We couldn’t. We would have lost half the soldiers who declared for Czar Mikhail and most of the techs. They may be loyal to Czar Mikhail, but they love the airships.”

  Tim and Ivan watched as a family passed them on the road, walking beside a wagon. It was the family of a Streltzi from Nizhny Novgorod. After the battle, Tim’s force had gained a good chunk of the garrison, partly out of fear of Sheremetev’s response to their defeat. The Streltzi, a man of about forty, tipped his cap as he went by. Tim nodded encouragement. The Streltzi of Nizhny Novgorod had brought their families because it wasn’t safe to leave them, and the other groups they had picked up on the road had done the same. The camp followers outnumbered the camp by a considerable margin.

  On a good day they would make five miles. On a bad day, two…or none. Tim wondered what was happening with Czar Mikhail.

  Ufa

  July 1636

  Bernie looked down at the mirrored surface of the theodolite. It was made in the Dacha and had come on the first of the steamboats to arrive. It didn’t look all that much like an up-time theodolite, but it worked well. Bernie adjusted a knob till the poles became a single pole and looked at the number. Then he waved to the trapper they had recruited to hold the poles for them.

  Bernie and Filip Pavlovich were outside the Ufa kremlin, surveying to find the right place to put the dirigible hangar.

  “Steamboat coming!”

  Bernie and Filip turned as one and looked upriver to see the smoke and steam.

  They made their way down toward the docks and were in time to see the steambarge tying up. “Look! That’s Ivan Borisovich,” Filip said.

  They trotted the rest of the way to the docks. “Are any more coming?” Bernie shouted.

  “I don’t know.” Ivan Borisovich shook his head. “Things were still very confused when we left the Dacha and we were attacked by a steamboat out of Murom. Even if others left, I don’t know if they will make it.”

  “Did you lose anyone?” Filip shouted.

  “No. We had a couple of wounded, but Vitaly Alexeev managed to save them.”

  Ufa was crowded, but that was because Ufa was small. There had been steamboats from Murom following their two and, at Olga’s insistence, most of them had been sent back to the Volga and south to buy supplies. But they had left their passengers, craftsmen and workers from the factories in Murom. Not all of the people from Murom, not even a very large percentage. But around five hundred, when you included families. There had also been individuals and small groups walking into Ufa, but even with the boats from Murom it had been a trickle, not a flood, so this wasn’t good news. They needed workers to build the new Ufa and they, more importantly, need skilled workers and the sort of experts that only existed in the Dacha. Men and women who knew how to make and use the modern equipment. They had only managed to get two Fresno scrapers built.

  “I’m surprised that Sheremetev has managed to get a force in place to try and stop you at Murom,” Bernie said as Ivan Borisovich came down the gangplank with several other men and women from the Dacha. Most of them were Natasha’s former serfs, but there were a few professionals like Vitaly Alexeev, as well.

  “The service nobility were not happy with Czar Mikhail’s emancipation of the serfs,” Vitaly Alexeev said.

  “What about the serfs?” Filip asked.

  “We didn’t see much, but it’s only been a couple of weeks since the radio messages went out,” Ivan Borisovich said. “And for most of that time we w
ere on the river, so I don’t know what’s happening away from that. Besides, I’m not sure it was Sheremetev’s people, at least not exactly. They’re siding with him, but I think they were acting on their own. I don’t know. Maybe they called him on the radio for instructions or maybe he called them. But Murom was pretty much in ashes as we went by. From the radio telegraph traffic we picked up, we figure that there was heavy rioting after you guys left.”

  “We heard about the riots from the people who followed us,” Bernie said.

  “I’m guessing the attack on us was at least partly in response to that. Bor and Nizhny Novgorod paid us no attention. Same with Kazan. We didn’t stop and they didn’t try to stop us.”

  “That could be just because they didn’t know where we were from,” Vitaly Alexeev said. “Or because the river was pretty wide around there.”

  “So you don’t know what’s going on?”

  “Not really. Where is the dirigible?” Ivan Borisovich asked.

  “Scouting east right now.” Bernie waved them up the docks. “Until we get a hangar built, it’s going to be safer in operation than on the ground. So Nick is looking for a valley that is deep enough to be out of the wind. Then they are going to try and put a hangar there. Mikhail wants to put a hangar here, but that is at least partly because he wants to build more dirigibles.”

  “Can you afford that?” Ivan asked as they approached the end of the docks. Stevedores were unloading the barge from the Dacha. Anya had shown up and waved at them as she passed with Olga Petrovichna in her wake. Anya would get the craftspeople from the Dacha situated.

  “No. But you can tell him that,” Bernie said.

  “I know we can’t afford it,” Mikhail said to Stanislav Ivanovich. “But we can afford to make a start on it, and we will eventually be able to pay for it.” Then the czar of Russia smiled. It was a friendly, open smile, not nervous or concerned. “Either that or we’ll all be dead. And they can’t collect from a bunch of corpses.”

  Stanislav looked at Czar Mikhail and wondered what had happened to the famously timid czar. He wondered if perhaps Bernie Zeppi had truly cast a spell on him. Everyone agreed that the up-timer from the magical city of Grantville was a puissant mage or a witch from the magical town. And who, seeing the mighty dirigible Czarina Evdokia, could doubt the magic? Or, having met the real Czarina Evdokia, doubt that the magic had an effect on people? The czarina seemed to embody the power and majesty of the dirigible in her person. Frankly, she scared him. It never occurred to Stanislav even to consider the possibility that the czar and czarina were the way they were because everything they had was already in the pot and any future risks were meaningless. It didn’t matter, though. Stanislav was not going to argue with either of them. “Whatever you say, Czar Mikhail.”

  The czar pointed to a place on the sandtable that would be about a mile from the Ufa kremlin. “We will put it there, and dig a channel up to the entrance so that we can use the steamboats for transshipment.”

  It was insane. These were projects that would take thousands of people supported by tens of thousands. More even. Hundreds of thousands. Ufa’s entire population before the dirigible arrived was eleven hundred forty-three people. Half of them were farmers who worked in nearby fields. There were maybe another thousand hunters or trappers who spent a few weeks a year here, selling their furs and drinking the proceeds. The steamboats had added six hundred more people and Olga wasn’t sure how they were going to find the food for even that many extra mouths.

  They had set up a radio here in Ufa, but it wasn’t close enough to contact any place but a riverboat that had a radio and was pretty close. Stanislav wondered how the rest of the world was responding to this.

  CHAPTER 5

  News from Home

  Russia House, Grantville

  July 1636

  Fedor Ivanovich Trotsky handed over the bundle. It was from Moscow, and the news from there had been chaotic, at best, for the past week and more.

  “Is it as crazy as the rumors?” Vladimir Gorchakov asked.

  “The messages to me were, Your Highness.” Fedor Ivanovich had been in Magdeburg to meet the message boat. Vladimir had sent him there as soon as the first rumors began filtering over the USE radio-telegraph system. “Boris Ivanovich Petrov had nothing but the first reports when he prepared the messages. He sent one to his son in Magdeburg, one to me, and one to you. I suspect that they all say basically the same thing.”

  Vladimir doubted that. He was pretty sure that Boris had sent his sons additional information and instructions. But he didn’t correct Fedor Ivanovich. Instead, he took the packet of letters to his desk and sat down to read.

  Two hours later, he was still confused. But it was now more a question of why than what. He was also cursing himself for ever having sent Cass Lowry to Moscow. He should have sent the car by itself.

  He got up and called in his staff, and his wife Brandy. Especially Brandy. He had come to rely on her advice even before he married the up-timer girl. And now that he and all the Russians he brought to the USE were facing their own political Ring of Fire, cutting them off from all they knew and depended on, her advice would be all the more important.

  Iosif Borisovich Petrov brought his own letters to the meeting. He was nineteen, a squat, solidly built young man whose placid, even bovine, expression hid a solid and surprisingly creative brain. For the past year and more, he had been coordinating the information from the Dacha and was responsible for several industrial patents based on work done there.

  “Father says I should stay here for now,” Iosif said placidly. “He doesn’t exactly think that this will blow over, but he does want me and Viktor out of the line of fire for now.” He placed a sheet of paper face down on the table and passed it over to Vladimir.

  Vladimir took a quick look and nodded. The sheet said what Iosif just said, but it also instructed him to change to the third code set and to arrange a new pad to be sent to Moscow. Vladimir put the sheet back on the table, still face down, and passed it back.

  “I never should have…” That was as far as Vladimir got before Brandy interrupted.

  “Don’t be silly. It wasn’t Cass. It was Sheremetev, and you had no say in putting him in Russia. All that bastard Lowry did was bring things to a head, and get shot for it.” Brandy paused a moment then continued. “I’ll need to tell his dad, and we’ll need to write to his brother. There are a couple of the guys who were on the football team with him that we’ll need to talk to. I don’t want this to turn into a feud, and it’s going to get out that he got himself shot while trying to attack your sister.”

  “I will be willing to pay reparations within reason,” Vladimir said, “but we will not take the blame for what happened. Not me, you, or Russia. From what we know so far, his killing was a fully justified act.”

  “That is, I think, a minor issue compared to the financial situation this puts us in and the political ramifications,” Iosif Borisovich said. “Father would prefer it if we were to keep our relations with Moscow as cordial as we can manage.”

  “In other words we should let Sheremetev screw us with our pants on,” Brandy Bates said. Sometimes, in moments of stress, her habits from Club 250 and similar places came out. It was rather less upsetting to the down-timers, who had little difficulty with profanity but were deeply uncomfortable with taking the Lord’s name in vain.

  “Well, we should at least let him think we will,” offered Iosif, placatingly.

  “Frankly, at this point I’m more concerned about Ron Stone than I am about Sheremetev. Ron had every expectation that we would be getting supplies from Russia eventually. Now it looks like that’s not going to happen. And totally aside from the fact that Sheremetev is in Russia and can’t hurt us nearly as much as the Lothlorien Farbenwerke could if they wanted to, Ron has dealt fairly with us and we have an obligation to deal fairly with him.”

  “You’re going to have to go have a talk with him,” Brandy said, “and see what we can work out.
”

  Vladimir sighed. That would mean another trip to Hesse-Kassel. But there wasn’t the same rush, this time, so he wouldn’t need to pay a small fortune to the airship company. Even on horseback, Kassel could be reached from Grantville in a few days, at least in mid-summer.

  Iosif left, and Vladimir started reading the personal letter from Natasha. All the packets of letters had arrived on the same ship from Nyen. The rumors had come from the sailors of that ship talking before the letters could make their way upriver. They had received Boris’ version of events at the same time they received Natasha’s and Czar Mikhail’s. Suddenly, Vladimir stopped reading. “Bernie Zeppi?”

  “What about Bernie?” Brandy asked. She had been reading a long letter from Czarina Evdokia.

  “Natasha wants to marry him!”

  “Bernie?” Brandy shook her head. “Well, from all reports, he’s changed a lot. He’s probably not the same failed football jerk I remember from before the Ring of Fire. After all, look at me.”

  “Yes, perhaps. But the political consequences…Bernie’s a peasant, even if he is an up-timer.”

  “You do remember I used to be a barmaid, right?” Brandy’s voice carried a chill.

  “That’s different. You’re a woman.”

  Brandy blinked. For the moment, her anger was drowned in confusion. Why on Earth would it be worse if a princess married a peasant than if a prince did? It made no sense.

  That slight pause gave Prince Vladimir time to realize that his foot was lodged in his mouth with the leg poised to follow it down his throat unless he started extracting right now. “I’m just concerned about the political consequences.”

  “What political consequences? Czar Mikhail is in Ufa, which is so far east that I had never heard of it. And Sheremetev is probably raising an army right now to go fetch him back, dead or alive. And you’re worrying over the political consequences of your sister marrying a peasant?”