1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  It was all over very quickly. The Tatars were dead or fled and, aside from Father Yulian, only four arrow wounds in Ruzuka, only one fatal. Three of the four wounds weren’t even to the men on the walls. Liliya was one of the women loading chambers behind the wall, and was hit in the left leg by a blind shot. It wasn’t serious, but the Tatars had fired several flights of arrows before they broke. More than they should have, but it had taken them too long to realize just how one-sided the fight was. There were two more flesh wounds from arrows falling inside the walls, and one poor fellow who had raised up for a better shot and caught an arrow across the side of his neck. It cut his carotid artery and he bled to death before anyone could get to him.

  Proving once again that even very good cover is no guarantee of safety in a war zone.

  New Ruzuka wasn’t the only one of the villages surrounding Ufa that was attacked. Two were caught unaware, with no wall or defenses to speak of, and burned to the ground. Of the other five, most fought off attacks by small patrols, with some loss of life on both sides. All in all, supply by the raiding of outlying villages wasn’t working well for the Kazakh army. This was only partly because of the weapons of the defenders. It was also because the villagers didn’t have much in the way of food. No crops had been put in, and last year this had mostly been virgin forest.

  Ufa

  General Izmailov was confident, but not quite as confident as he would have preferred. His formations were ragged compared with what he had seen from the German mercenaries, but they went where they were pointed and shot what they were told to shoot. He wished he’d had more time to drill them, but the news had come in that the Kazakhs were raiding the countryside. Half the workers in Ufa had family in the outlying villages, and there hadn’t been time for them to gather in Ufa. Besides, they would need those peasants to plant the crops once the Kazakhs were sent packing. The factors that decide when to fight aren’t all military.

  Izmailov had six regiments of three battalions each. That gave him almost fifteen thousand men. Granted, less than a thousand of them had any experience, but they had done incredibly well defending Ufa against twice their number. And by now the Kazakh warriors had learned to fear the AK4.7s that everyone in Ufa seemed to own. Still, he wished he had the gulyay-gorod, walking walls, they had at Rzhev. But gulyay-gorod took time and lumber to build and no one had thought of them before the Kazakh army had shown up and separated Ufa from the forests surrounding it.

  That was another reason they had to take the fight to the Kazakhs. Ufa wasn’t prepared for a siege. It was the end of winter and the supplies were at their lowest point of the year. They were short on everything from apples to vodka, and they couldn’t use the ice-covered rivers to ship in supplies with the Kazakhs surrounding Ufa.

  Izmailov hadn’t studied at the war college in Moscow. He had been a general before it was set up. But he had listened to Tim while the lad had been his aide, and he was aware of the truism that generals always fought the last war.

  On the other hand, that put him about two wars ahead of the Kazakhs. Most of their army was still using bows and arrows. He also knew from the western European mercenaries that a pike and gun unit was proof against cavalry. If Tim had been here and told him the problem with his plan…

  Artemi Izmailov had a lively respect for Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev. Not enough to make him a nineteen-year-old general, but considerable respect nonetheless. Unfortunately, Tim was in Kazan with his own siege to fight. Besides, they had a general right here in Ufa. A real general, not a kid bumped up before his time. The general in fact that had commanded and won at Rzhev. Arguably Russia’s greatest general. Izmailov didn’t think he was Russia’s greatest general. That was General Shein. But he was a good, solid, workmanlike general who knew his business. He had talked to the commanders and to some of the men. Morale was good.

  Besides, being the general who beat off the Kazakh attack would be very helpful in advancing General Shein’s position in the congress. There had been plenty of time to think through this as his small army marched…well, walked…out of Ufa into the no man’s land between the barricades and the Kazakh army.

  It was cold. A little above freezing, but still cold. The ice started to melt in the day, then froze again every night. The no man’s land between the barricades and Kazakhs was stomped-on mud that was frozen into place. It still hadn’t thawed as they marched out. Stefan looked at his company. They were near the middle of the line and almost as soon as they had gotten out through the barricades, orders shifting them to the left came down. They were one side of an empty square. His boys were cheerful. They had kicked ass every time they were attacked.

  Stefan looked out at the Kazakhs and wondered what they were doing. They were sure active, whatever it was.

  “We will advance to bow range and shower them with arrows,” the khan ordered decisively and Colonel Shuvalov nodded in agreement.

  More orders were given and the host was organized. It would be a riding attack. They would fire while in motion, denying the enemy a stationary target. But it took time to organize, almost an hour, by which time the Russians were well out in the open.

  “They’re coming,” someone from Alpha Company shouted—Stefan didn’t know who it was. But it was true. Even obvious.

  Stefan turned to the Streltzi sergeants who commanded his platoons. “Have the front rank kneel and have them load their AKs. But no shooting till they get close.” The truth was, most of his men were not great shots. They got a lot more effective once the enemy was near. And Stefan wanted to pound the enemy once that happened. Really pound them. The chamber-clips he had been making had six shots preloaded, and each of his men had three chamber-clips. But he didn’t want to be changing chamber-clips when the Kazakhs arrived.

  The orders were given and Stefan looked over the lines then back at the Kazakhs. They had taken their time, but they seemed to be ready for the show. Oh, Lord, there are a lot of them, he thought.

  Then he moved out from between his company and the soon-to-arrive enemy. But they didn’t keep coming. They got to about a hundred yards away and turned right. Then they started shooting their bows. Great clouds of arrows flew up, and then a rain of arrows fell on his lines. His line was only four ranks deep and that was a good thing. It meant that a lot of the arrows overshot his lines and landed in the open space behind them. A lot…but not nearly enough. People were being hit, and these were not the hardened troops of the German pike regiments. These were farmers and factory workers. Not cowards, by any means. They had proved that. But not trained to stand in the open and take it.

  People were looking to Stefan for orders, but no orders were coming. Colonel Buturlin had been very insistent that everyone needed to fire at once in a massive fusillade. Someone shot in his company and that was followed by a crackle of other shots. His wasn’t the only company that was shooting without orders. There was crackling all up and down the line to no visible effect at all. “Hold your damn fire, you idiots!” Stefan shouted, though he wasn’t at all convinced that it was the right order to give.

  The crackling didn’t stop, but it did slow. Stefan didn’t see new smoke from any of his troops, but three more of them were sprouting arrows. Then the order came.

  “By battalions! Fire on the order.”

  “Battalion!” “Companies!”

  Stefan shouted, “Platoons! Ready! Aim!” He held up his AK like it was a baton, and looked to the battalion command group. When the flag came down, he shouted, “Fire!” and swung his AK down like it was an ax and he was chopping wood.

  “Company! Cock! Ready! Aim!”

  Stefan couldn’t see anything except white smoke between him and the Kazakhs. He looked over at the command group and couldn’t see them through the smoke. He waited. The smoke cleared a little, and he looked back at the Kazakhs for a minute and…nothing. Nothing at all. He couldn’t see any gap at all in their formation and they were still sending those flights of arrows.

  It wasn’t true
, what Stefan saw. The truth was that the massed fire had taken a toll on the enemy, especially on its horses. But they were the length of a football field from the guns and they were not tightly packed like infantry would be. There were plenty of gaps for bullets to pass through without doing any damage and that is precisely what the overwhelming majority of those bullets did. The Kazakhs took damage, but it wasn’t as bad as they were expecting to take, and they were doing a lot more damage to the Russians. Perhaps more important, they could see the damage. When they had attacked the barricades, they hadn’t seen the occasional hit they had made.

  It didn’t matter that what Stefan saw wasn’t the truth. What mattered was that it was what the whole Russian army was seeing. They were shooting…and nothing was happening. Meanwhile, they were losing men.

  It took General Izmailov a few minutes to realize just how corrosive to good order and discipline that appearance was. He had been so impressed by the way the peasants had held their improvised barricades against the Kazakh warriors, he had come quickly to think of them as seasoned troops. Seasoned troops could have taken this. Would have, and laughed it off, and kept right on pouring fire into the Kazakhs till they broke and ran. But these men didn’t understand that appearances on a battlefield could be deceiving. Horribly deceiving. And the deceitful appearances here were telling every craftsman and street sweeper in his army that the battle was lost and that the longer they stayed out here, the more likely they were to die. First one man, then another, then groups, then whole companies, broke and ran. Some carrying their AKs, some in blind panic, throwing their guns on the ground to run faster.

  Finally, though, he did see it. General Izmailov was a decisive general, and the truth was that he was quite possibly the fourth- or fifth-best general in Russia. Better, had he known it, than General Shein, if not as good as General Tim or the baker’s boy. He realized that he had, in Bernie Zeppi’s pithy phrase, “screwed the pooch.” And the absolute best he could hope for was a rout that left a mostly intact defending force in Ufa after it was over. He started giving orders to try to produce a semblance of order to the panicked flight that was going to come.

  There is a corollary to the axiom “never give an order that won’t be obeyed.” It’s almost never stated, but it goes something like this: “You can exert some control by ordering people to do what they desperately want to do.” It’s analogous to steering into the skid on an icy road. Sometimes it works. The first regiment was gone. Second seemed to be holding. He sent an order to Buturlin to hold as long as he could, and ordered the rest of his army to fall back to the barricades.

  Buturlin cursed Izmailov, but gave the orders.

  Captain Stefan Andreevich kept his company together by threatening to beat to death the first man who even looked back at the city. Company B held and Company A almost held, as did Company C. There was a clump of the army of Ufa, a clump of about four hundred men, who stood their ground because they were more afraid of their officers than Kazakhs. When the rest of the army started collapsing, the Kazakhs gave up their tactic of standing off and peppering the Russians with arrows. They charged in, lances lowered and flags flying. They charged right into the massed fusillade of the Second.

  “By the rank…Fire!”

  “Second rank…Fire!”

  “Third rank…Fire!”

  “Fourth rank…Fire!”

  “First rank…Fire!”

  A hundred at a time, with only as much time as it took for Buturlin and Stefan to growl out the orders.

  It wasn’t enough, not quite. But the defenders of Roark’s Drift would have recognized them and called them brothers.

  The Kazakhs rode them down.

  The last thing Stefan saw was a lance coming at his chest. He swung his AK like he was parrying a sword, but it was too little, too late. He felt the shock and then there was nothing.

  It bought time. Vital minutes of separation that let the army of Ufa get back behind the barricades in something almost like order. Close enough so that some of them were in shape to take position on the barricades. When the army marched out, the women of Ufa manned the barricades. Now they stayed and their presence stopped a lot of men who would have kept right on running without them looking on.

  It took a few minutes for the Kazakhs to exploit the sudden victory. By the time they did, there was enough force armed with AK4.7s to pour fire onto them.

  It was a near thing, and it took three more hours, but by the end of the afternoon, things were back to what they were before.

  Buturlin stood with his men to the last charge and was wounded, but afterward he made his way back to the barricades and slipped into the city while the Kazakhs were attacking another section of the barricades. He almost got shot by the women defending that section of the wall, but once they were sure he was Russian, he was rushed to the kremlin where General Izmailov was commanding the defense of Ufa.

  Izmailov turned to him and, clearly looking for men to man the barricades, asked, “Where is your regiment?”

  “Dead on the field, General! Dead on the field.” Buturlin spat the words. He once had such respect for General Izmailov. Such certainty that the man was a great general. And the cowardly son of a bitch had left him and his people out in the open while he ran back to the barricades. Hate was too mild a word. Much too mild for what Colonel Buturlin felt for General Izmailov now.

  But he was a soldier, and loyal to the true czar, and Czar Mikhail didn’t need the sort of incident that having one of his colonels shove a knife into the gut of Shein’s pet would cause. So he held his temper.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel Buturlin. But your regiment was the one that was holding together best, and it was in the best position to keep their attention while the rest of the army retreated. It was my mistake, but the mistake was to take them out from behind the barricades in the first place.”

  It was just so much meaningless noise. Only a puffed-up peasant, making excuses.

  Even Buturlin knew that he was being unfair, but he couldn’t not be. Not under these circumstances.

  CHAPTER 28

  A Change in the Weather

  Ufa

  April 7, 1637

  “That was stupid,” Czarina Evdokia said, talking about the fast one that the commoners had tried to pull over the votes on the Rukovoditel Prikaz committee’s report.

  “It was,” Anya agreed, “and they know it too, but that’s part of the problem. They know it, but they won’t admit it because they are convinced that if the nobles had pulled that sort of maneuver, no one would have gotten upset.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Vladimir said.

  “I’m not so sure, Vladimir,” Patriarch Matthew said, then quickly held up a hand. “I’m not saying that it’s unique to the nobility, but people are always more willing to forgive their own minor lapses than their neighbor’s. If nobles had pulled such a maneuver it would have been resented, but not as much as when the peasants tried it.”

  “You may be right, Patriarch,” Czarina Evdokia said, “but it doesn’t change the fact that the convention could crumble on this issue if it isn’t resolved. And the only way I see of resolving it is for the commoners to step back from their position.”

  “They won’t,” Anya said. “I agree with you, Czarina,” she added quickly. “I’m just telling you how Vera and the others are going to react. Vera especially, after the battle and Stefan being killed on the field while Izmailov retreated. She and a lot of the others are thinking that the high muckety mucks are perfectly happy to leave the peasants out to hang.”

  “What we need,” said Filip Tupikov, “is a new proposal.”

  “I propose,” Czar Mikhail offered sarcastically, “that we select one peasant and one noble, chop them each in half, and sew the two halves together, peasant to noble and noble to peasant.”

  “Ah, but then we have the issue of which end of each becomes prime minister. Shall it be the peasant’s head and the noble’s ass, or vice versa?” asked Filip, equally s
arcastically.

  There followed a short but pungent argument between Vladimir and Anya about whether peasant or noble were more natural asses.

  “Actually,” said Brandy Bates, looking pensive, “I think Czar Mikhail’s notion might be workable if the sharp objects can be removed. Didn’t the Romans use a consulship in the republic? I’m almost certain that Ed Piazza mentioned something about that in our discussions.”

  “Yes. The consuls were elected by the comitia centuriata of the republic,” Patriarch Matthew said. “But how…Oh, of course. One consul, a lord, elected by the house of lords. One a commoner, elected by the house of commons. And as the consuls of the republic, each would have veto power over the actions of the other. So that for the commoner to issue any directive, the noble consul would have to sign off on it. But the commoners would have a say because their consul would have veto power if the noble consul came up with something they didn’t like.”

  “And we would end up with power struggles and everything being vetoed?” Bernie asked. “Sounds like the Republicans and the Democrats back home.”

  “That’s what the czar is for,” suggested Vladimir.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Czar Mikhail said. “It’s nice to think that I might occasionally be of some use.”

  “You know, this can work,” Vladimir said. “The consuls together perform the function of the head of government. Chief of all the bureaus, but their actions even in concert, can be vetoed by the czar if he so chooses. But either consul, along with the czar, can issue a directive over the objections of the other consul, so that one holdout can’t bring governance to a halt.”