by Eric Flint
“That still leaves a question to answer,” Anya said. “At what rank are you qualified to become the noble consul, and at what rank are you disqualified from being the commoner consul?”
“I would think the same social rank that would allow appointment as dumnye dvoriane in the duma,” said Czarina Evdokia.
“That would work for the Russians, but what about the Cossacks and the tribes?” Vladimir asked.
“Leave it up to the house of lords or the courts,” Anya said.
They wrote it up and offered it to the convention the next day, making very sure that it was introduced as a single proposal, not something which could have parts of it voted on separately. It let everyone save face and, after half a day of debate, was passed by a narrow margin.
Kazakh camp, outside Ufa
April 7, 1637
Salqam-Jangir Khan walked through the tents where the wounded were being cared for. He was looking at the broken and mangled bodies of his men and the Russian prisoners who had been brought in because they might bring a ransom or a good price as slaves. He stopped as he saw a veritable giant of a man on a pallet. The man had bandages on his head, his left chest and left arm. “Who is that?”
“I don’t know, Great Khan,” the doctor said. “But he was a captain, so we assumed he was noble.” The man pointed at the silver pin on the man’s collar. “I’m told that denotes a commander of a hundred.”
Colonel Leontii Shuvalov, who was following along at Salqam-Jangir Khan’s heels nodded. “Not exactly, but close enough. It’s one of the new rank insignia introduced by the up-timers.”
“Is he an up-timer, then?”
“No. There are only a couple of adult up-timer males in Russia, and I have met them both. This will be a dvoriane or a deti boyar noble, but not high nobility.” Then, looking at the long-healed burn scars on the man’s arm, Shuvalov reconsidered. The man looked like a blacksmith. He might be Streltzi. Leontii decided not to mention that possibility, as Salqam-Jangir Khan was talking again.
“No matter. If he doesn’t have a ransom, he will make a strong slave.”
The man stirred and the doctor touched his forehead with the back of his hand.
Kazakh camp, outside Ufa
April 8, 1637
Stefan opened his eyes again, then closed them to slits. “Where am I?”
“In the war camp of the Kazakh army outside of Ufa.”
Now he remembered…the horse, the lance…he had thought he was dead for sure. After a minute or so, he got his eyes working and looked at the man who had spoken. He was well dressed in the Kazakh manner, which was similar to the Russian, but with its own flavor. He held a winesack to Stefan’s lips but it wasn’t wine or beer. There was a bitter taste to it.
Stefan’s mind was sort of vague. He hurt, but it was a distant thing and everything seemed a step removed. “Why am I here?”
“You were wounded and captured. Now you must pay a ransom or be enslaved. Can you pay a ransom?”
Still vague, but starting to get worried, Stefan answered, “I don’t know. How much ransom?”
“A thousand rubles,” the man said judiciously.
“Not a chance,” Stefan said.
“Too bad. Well, you’ll make a good slave in the mines. Big man like you will bring a good price.”
The next time Stefan woke, his mind was clearer. He remembered the ransom of a thousand rubles and was terrified. Almost as terrified by the amount of the ransom as by the prospect of slavery.
Stefan understood mechanical things. A drop hammer was a simple and clear thing to him. So was a drill press. Even the induction coils and alternators made a kind of sense to him. Induction heating was, when you got down to it, just friction inside the iron. But Stefan didn’t understand money. The rent on a serf’s plot in old Ruzuka had been less than fifty rubles a year, and no one ever made the full payment. Fifty rubles would buy a good horse. A thousand rubles would put the whole village of New Ruzuka back into serfdom. At least, it seemed that way to Stefan’s still somewhat opium-befuddled mind.
Concepts like economic boom and inflation were so much esoterica to Stefan. Even if they hadn’t been, the factory on Alexis Street was gone now—even if they did get most of the equipment back into the city. The fact that the company still owned the land and had a good credit rating with the Czar’s Bank never entered into his thinking.
Esim, the well dressed Kazakh, came to see him again and check his bandages. He learned that Esim was a doctor and knew a little—but only a little—of the up-time medicine. Mostly he knew down-time medicine from Arabia and China. He did look forward to meeting the famous up-time physician to the czar’s family, Nurse Tami. “In fact, with any luck, I’ll be able to buy her after the khan’s warriors take Ufa.”
He said it quite cheerfully, like he was hoping to be able to afford a prized pig. In a way it was shocking to Stefan, but the most shocking thing about it was its familiarity. It was as though the whole escape and trip to Ufa had never happened. Even more, it was as though the up-timers had never come and he was still pounding out iron nails one hammer blow at a time, and bowing and scraping to Colonel Utkin and that little bastard Nikita. Stefan wanted to feel rage, but as he thought of his wife and children in Ufa, any rage was buried under terror. He tried to think but nothing was clear, and he didn’t know what had happened after the battle. Had the Kazakhs marched into Ufa? Stefan’s heart was racing and his hands were sweating. And finally it penetrated, the tense of Esim’s comment. He will be able to after they take Ufa. So they hadn’t yet. And if they hadn’t yet, why hadn’t they? “How long?”
“How long what?” Esim looked at him for a moment. “Oh, you mean how long since you were taken? The battle was two days ago.”
“What happened?”
Esim looked at him, then gave a shrug. “Well…your ‘regiment,’ is it? Your unit, in any case, held while the rest of the army ran back to the walls. And by the time you were ridden down, much of the army was back in its hole. But don’t you worry. We’ll dig them out soon enough.”
“Not likely.” Stefan was thinking now. Not as clearly as he would like, and his habit of reticence seemed to have deserted him just when he most needed it. Stefan still felt woozy, but he realized that if the army was back within the walls…the Kazakhs didn’t have cannon. Hell, they didn’t even have catapults. With the barricades to fight behind and the gunpowder in the Ufa kremlin, there was no way a cavalry force that size was going to take Ufa.
“You know war then?” Esim asked. “Someone said you were a blacksmith.”
“That too. No. That first. War too.”
“What?”
“Smithing first. War later. Not that I know much about war. Just what I heard in a few conferences. But General Izmailov doesn’t think you can. Then again, Izmailov led us out there, so what does he know? I wish we’d had General Tim here. He wouldn’t have screwed up that way. Met him, you know, once on our way through Kazan with young Alexander. Wonder where the boy is now? Oh, yes. He’s the president of the convention.” Then, with pride, “My Vera, she’s a delegate.”
“Your Vera?”
“My wife. She’s a delegate to the constitutional convention.”
“Really? Who is your wife?”
“Vera, I told you. Vera Sergeevna.”
Esim nodded then, and went away.
Constitutional Convention, Ufa
“The delegate from the Tangu has the floor,” Alexander said, and banged the gavel for emphasis. The delegate from the Tangu was trying to get Tangu declared a state, and get every square inch from Mangazeya to Tobolsk and from Moscow to the Bering Straits included in his tribal territory. He was being shouted down by the other delegates. Two days after the battle on the field, General Izmailov and the whole delegation from South Siberia were much weakened. Up until now, North Siberia had been respectfully yielding to South Siberia on most issues, and so had the tribal delegates from that area. But the coalition was showing cracks.
“These are the traditional lands and come down to us from the great Genghis Khan.”
Alexander had to bang his gavel a lot that day, but he wasn’t displeased. He wasn’t nearly as rabid as, say, Anya or Princess Natasha about the freeing of the serfs. In fact, he could see the point delegates from the north and west made, that without serfs they would be left destitute. His family was likely to find itself in a similar condition if they lost their serfs. Still, the representatives from Siberia and points west had been playing the civilized westerners looking down their noses at the barbarian easterners, and it had gotten old fast.
Alexander was probably the closest in the convention to a moderate. He understood everyone’s point of view, and mostly wanted to find a way where everyone could get enough of what they had to have to keep the wheels from coming entirely off. After the delegate from the Tangu finished his speech, Alexander called for a vote and the proposal was resoundingly voted down. The delegate didn’t seem very displeased. He had to have known it wasn’t going to get adopted, but he had managed to get his starting bargaining position on the record.
The day continued till the bells rang and they called the conference for today. Now the real bargaining would begin.
Vera poured wine for Colonel Buturlin and tried not to think about Stefan lying out there in no man’s land. This was the hardest thing she had ever done, but she had to keep going for the sake of the children. “Yes, we have the chamber factory sort of up and running. Not at full capacity, and we’re stuck in a small building down by the river. But we are turning out chambers.” It was important. Despite the soldiers’ best efforts, the expensive chambers had a tendency to get dropped and lost in combat. With Stefan dead and so many of the factory men with him, the shortage of chambers was only going to get worse. But she couldn’t think about that. She forced her mind back to the political maneuvering. “How do you feel about Natasha’s amendment to the…”
Buturlin held up a restraining hand and shook his head. “I know Izmailov is weakened, but the issues that caused the delegates from Chudstok, Cherakaskistok, Novgorodstok, North and South Siberia to walk out have not disappeared. They won’t give up their serfs. They can’t. To do so would be to face utter and complete ruin.
“I saw Stefan hold his company together to the last, Vera. He was no man’s serf. Even more than talking with you and Anya, what I saw Stefan and his workmen do has convinced me that serfdom must end. I have come to realize that serfdom is an evil that deprives us of the abilities of men like your Stefan. It must pass away if we are to ever become the great nation that both you and I wish us to be. But it’s going to have to be a gradual thing. To try and—” He stopped and shook his head. “Right or wrong, if they take a constitution that abolishes serfdom back to their principals, it will be rejected.”
Vera knew he was right. She knew it clearly in her mind, but she also knew that it was wrong. She turned away, trying to hide her anger and her fear. Fear for her children’s future. Anger over the loss of her husband, who Colonel Buturlin had left on the field. The anger wasn’t at Colonel Buturlin. The colonel had still been with them when the Kazakhs rode Stefan down. She knew that, but still…
CHAPTER 29
Buying Kazakhs
Kazakh camp
April 9, 1637
The level of opium in Stefan’s system was almost enough to counteract the pain. The lance had broken three ribs and ripped open his left arm from shoulder to elbow. He was bandaged and his left arm was held immobile in a splintlike arrangement. He looked up as Esim came in, leading a man much better dressed than he was.
The new man was dressed in red velvet with gold embroidery and lined with fur. He was introduced as Prince Togym, a cousin of the khan.
Stefan listened as the prince, in accented Russian, explained that he had been in command of the first day’s attack. “The first attack, the one that struck between two buildings on the street you call Irina Way. That attack met powerful resistance from well-armed defenders. It would have been pushed back no matter how swiftly we struck, would it not?”
It was pretty clear that the only acceptable answer was that it would have been, though Stefan didn’t have any notion of why that might be.
“Well, once we had the barricade up.”
“So it’s true you were in command of that defense.”
“Yes,” Stefan agreed hesitantly. The only reason he hadn’t been executed for punching Ivan Petrovich Choglokov was that it was determined he was in command. But he wasn’t at all sure that his having been in command at Irina Way would make him popular with these people. And at the moment he wasn’t even in command of his own body.
“You did very well and must be a skilled soldier. You had more forces than we could see, did you not? Else you never could have held against so many.”
Again it was a question whose answer was expected to be yes, and again it was clear that any other answer would not please his questioner. But the fact was that he hadn’t had that many people. The rate of fire was because the AK4.7 had a tremendous rate of fire. “Well, we had a lot of good men and it was a limited front,” Stefan equivocated. He was willing enough to lie, but he was starting to get the feeling that if he said something that he couldn’t step back from, someone—not this guy, but someone else—would call him on it. This was sounding way too much like an argument between a couple of nobles, and the smart serf stayed out of those, because they never ended well for the serf. Stefan assumed that what went for serfs went double for a prisoner about to become a slave.
He was right. Prince Togym kept pushing to get him to say that attacking the gap before softening it up with arrow attacks would only have made things worse.
Stefan equivocated, but he wasn’t good at it. He was forced into making increasingly firm statements and, in desperation, finally said, “The whole attack was stupid. Why attack Ufa anyway?”
“Because Sheremetev promised us guns. Ten thousand AK3 wheel locks with a hundred thousand chambers.”
“Why not just buy them from us, then?” Stefan said disgustedly, “I had a factory that made chambers. It would have cost less than sending your troops up Irina Way.”
“You had a factory?”
“It was a ways out, and when you attacked we gathered up what we could and moved it behind the barricades. I think your men burned the building we were in to the ground.”
“So you know how to make the AK3s?”
“Well, of course.” Stefan cut himself off, suddenly realizing that just like always, he had said the wrong thing. He had just made himself too valuable to give back. Not that they were going to give him back anyway, but now they were probably going to make his ransom even bigger and it would be harder to escape with them watching him. He had known since he was a kid that talking just got him in trouble, and here he had gone and done it again.
As he left the tent, Togym decided to keep this slave for himself. He certainly had enough rank for that. Only the khan could gainsay him. But as he walked a bit more, he had another thought. What about the attack? If they had sent a mission to talk to Czar Mikhail, they might have gotten the guns with a lot less bloodshed. They might even have gained an ally and a buffer between them and Moscow. If he could paint the whole attack as a mistake instigated by Colonel Shuvalov and offer the prospect of…
No. It was too late. Blood had been spilled. A lot of blood on both sides. It was too late for peace.
Or was it?
He turned back and went to have another little talk with Doctor Esim. He found the doctor checking on one of the other patients. “Doctor, have the captives questioned. I want to know everything about this Stefan Andreevich.”
It wasn’t hard. Quite a few of the prisoners had been from Stefan’s company. There were even some who had been with him at Irina Way. The consensus was that Stefan was scary. The story of his killing a man with one blow was repeated and embellished. The story of his trial, ennoblement, and appointment as captain came out. The
re were also stories of how he held the army together when the Kazakh warriors had overridden them. There were stories about the factory, because three of the prisoners were actually workers at the factory and Vera and Izabella were better known in Ufa than Stefan was. All of which was recorded and reported, and made Stefan look more dangerous as a slave.
And, perhaps, more useful as an emissary.
Togym listened to the doctor as he retold the stories about Stefan, Vera, Izabella, Father Yulian, Alexander, the factory, and the village of New Ruzuka.
It all made Stefan seem a very important man. The president of the constitutional convention was one of his partners and his wife was a delegate. So were two other of his partners.
“You should have attacked sooner,” Colonel Shuvalov said yet again. “All the casualties we have taken were because of your hesitation.”
Togym gritted his teeth. He knew that the khan was getting tired of hearing this, but he also knew that Shuvalov’s tactic was still working. He stopped the spoon halfway to his mouth, and said as calmly as he could manage, “The issue isn’t when the attack was made, but whether it was necessary at all.” This was a dangerous counter because it had the risk of seeming to make the khan look bad as well as Shuvalov, but Togym was getting desperate. “We could, you know, have simply bought the guns here in Ufa.”
“They don’t have the facilities to produce them here,” Colonel Shuvalov said.
“How strange, considering how many of them they have. Also, there is a prisoner in our medical tents who owns a factory to make them right here in Ufa.”
“Can’t be!” Shuvalov said, just a touch too emphatically to be completely believable.
Prince Togym smiled. “Why, then, don’t we go see? The man is quite impressive, I assure you, Great Khan. He commanded the defenders at Irina Way, and killed a man with a single blow of his fist for disputing his commands. I dare say it was him, not the barrels, that made the difference there.”