by Eric Flint
Natasha felt like burying her head in her hands. Or possibly screaming at the top of her lungs. Instead, she took a deep breath, and said, “Gentlemen, this isn’t a productive conversation. Can we get back on topic, please?”
“It will make Czar Mikhail even more popular than the win at Rzhev,” Anya pointed out.
The presence at the meeting of Bernie’s former leman-or, rather, Anya’s ease at speaking in the meeting-was an indication of just how much Bernie’s presence had affected the Dacha. Bernie was blind to class and it was rubbing off. It had been rubbing off now for three years-on Natasha herself most of all, she sometimes thought.
Anya had started off as a cook’s assistant and with help from Bernie had become the Dacha’s household accountant. In the process she had become involved in the development of the EMCM, Electro-Mechanical Calculating Machine.
“Popular with whom?” Filip asked. “Serfs don’t have weapons, unless you count an ax as a weapon. The service nobility does. And so does the Streltzi. And it’s they who will be most affected. When your Czar Lincoln talked about limiting slavery, not abolishing it, it caused a revolution and that was in a country where only a third of it had slavery in the first place. In Russia, serfs are everywhere. I’m not saying serfdom is a good thing, Anya. But it’s too soon to do this.”
“More money for Vladimir,” Bernie said. “Reapers and threshers are going like hotcakes. What’s weird to me is that you-” He pointed at Natasha. “-aren’t freaking out about losing serfs. You’ve got all these lands to take care of.”
“I,” Natasha said, “can afford to hire help. And people want to work for us, because we can afford to take a smaller cut, because we have more people. Most of the truly wealthy are the same way, you know. As is the church. We can make a deal, attract more of the labor force. It’s the service nobility, people like Boris and Filip, who need the serfs tied to the land. That’s what concerns Patriarch Filaret. Ill as he is, he counseled the czar against this move. And Czarina Evdokia is very, very worried. But the boyars and Duma men are all for it. It will make it much easier for us to poach serfs from the service nobility. There’s a lot of nervousness in Moscow right now.”
“And it won’t take much to start a firestorm,” Filip said. “It’s not like we haven’t had them before. Or wouldn’t have them in the future. Remember Peter the Great. For that matter, remember 1917. That’s why I said it’s too soon, Bernie. There aren’t enough plows and reapers yet to make much of a difference in overall production. And members of the service nobility like me mostly don’t have them.”
Anya sighed. “I understand your point, Filip. But already serfs are being put to work in factories. Rented out, or close enough to make no difference, to make their lord extra money. It will never be the right time! Slavery and serfdom don’t just fade away. No oppression does. It takes people standing up and saying ‘enough, no more!’ And making it stick.”
Natasha knew that was true. Evdokia had discussed it with Mikhail. Bernie was wrong. It was probably true enough that people worked harder when they were working for themselves. And the evidence was pretty clear that societies without serfs were, over all, more productive than those with serfs. But that extra productivity didn’t go into the pockets of the lord. It went to buy the former serf a new suit of clothes or an extra room of the house, maybe some toys for their kids. Which worked just fine for society as a whole, but very badly so far as the lord was concerned, since he now had to pay for labor that he used to get for nothing or at least a lot less.
Meanwhile, Bernie was grinning. Natasha raised an eyebrow in question.
“It’s just that it’s the poor middle-class getting squeezed between the rich liberals and the poor, just like back in the twentieth century.”
Anya shook her head. “Yes, but your middle-class didn’t keep slaves, Bernie.”
Chapter 64
Grantville
March 1635
“What’s up, dude?” Brandy asked. Calling Vladimir “dude” in her empty-headed surfer girl voice usually got a laugh and sometimes led to other things.
“Huh? What?”
But not this time apparently. “What’s wrong, Vladimir?”
Vlad sat down heavily. “I’m worried. There’s bad news from Moscow, but I’m not sure how bad it really is. Boris is being reticent. It could just be that he’s busy I guess… but it could also be that he’s distancing himself from the family. Father Gavril showed me some letters from his family which indicate that the dvoriane in the military are badly upset with Czar Mikhail and increasingly concerned with foreign influences on him.”
“Kseniya, could you puh-leeze explain all this to me?” Brandy ruffled her hair, looking like she was about to start tearing it out at the roots. “What’s going on in Moscow? Vladimir’s worried sick about Natasha, and Natasha is worried sick about, well, everything. But at the same time, Natasha says that the income from the lands is fine, higher than ever. And from sales of the farm equipment. That’s got to be helping.”
Home, Kseniya thought, was difficult to explain to an up-timer. They were so rich. They just had their brains in the wrong… no, that wasn’t right… they had their brains in a different place.
She held back the sigh, then said, “In the last years… so many changes. It’s hard to adjust to so many changes. You know, my father is Streltzi, right?”
Brandy nodded.
“ Streltzi means shooter. Mostly we are city guards, but we also guard caravans and when war comes the Streltzi are the infantry. But it is usually not war and being the city guards doesn’t take up all of our time. So most Streltzi have another job: merchant, baker, leatherworker or silversmith, something. My father is… like a sergeant major, but my family also owns a tannery. We’re Streltzi, but upper Streltzi. But, my father-in-law is dvoriane. The dvoriane are court nobles and army officers, sometimes bureaucrats, depending on what job is assigned. In fact, my father-in-law is an officer in my father’s regiment. But my father-in-law’s family is not as wealthy as my family. They receive thirty-five rubles a year and a… I don’t know a German word that fits pomestie. Pomestie is land given, or perhaps loaned, to the dvoriane as part, usually the larger part, of the payment for their service to the crown. The dvoriane get to collect the rent on the pomestie. But while my father-in-law receives pomestie lands enough to make him richer than my father, he doesn’t have enough tenants, ah, serfs, for more than half the lands and you can’t collect rent from serfs who aren’t there because they ran off to work for a monastery or high boyar.”
“Why do the serfs do that?” Brandy asked. “It seems it would just be trading one master for another. You would think that the small holders would be, ah, the good guys, here. That they would be the allies of other men, those who have even less.”
“They can’t afford to be,” Kseniya insisted. “Remember the expenses. They don’t have labor-saving devices. They need the serfs.”
“I bet there are a lot more of these small holders than there are high boyars and churchmen, aren’t there?” Kseniya nodded and Brandy thanked her and went off to do some thinking.
She remembered things said about the dvoriane in other conversations. And a quote from somewhere: “Never trust a banker.” There was more to that quote, but she couldn’t remember it. The thing was, the dvoriane sort of felt like the bankers from the quote. People who would cover themselves first, last and always. Who wouldn’t take sides, or would change sides as the wind shifted. Yes, she understood the predicament of the bureau men and soldiers of the service nobility. But that didn’t make serfdom right. She also remembered that Boris was dvoriane. And that letters written to Natasha went through the Grantville Section.
Brandy realized that Vladimir needed a way to get messages to Natasha that the Grantville Section wouldn’t see. A file baked in a cake. Brandy giggled. Everything old is new again.
Some days later, a serf named Yuri laid a bar of white-hot steel in the slot of a drop forge and waved. Anot
her serf from his village pulled the lever and the hammer came down. The bar weighed fifteen pounds and the hammer, which had to be lifted by means of a crank, weighed over a ton. The force of the blow transmitted through the bar and the tongs hammered his arms. It was hard work. Not the sort of work Yuri enjoyed. It was hot and it was bloody dangerous. It wasn’t the sort of job that Yuri would have chosen. But Yuri was a serf. He wasn’t given a choice.
It was also, in Yuri’s opinion, stupid. There were a lot of things that needed doing in the village before spring planting. Instead, he was here making extra money for the lord and he knew perfectly well that neither he nor anyone in the village would see a kopek’s worth of the money. No. The money would go to the lord to pay the village’s debt and there would be more fees to make sure that the village never got out of debt. He wasn’t going to be able to buy off his ties to the land. He wasn’t even working in his home village. The foundry was fifteen miles away from home and he was being charged rent as well as everything else. There are limits to all things and Yuri had just about reached his.
Since he couldn’t hope to buy out, he’d just have to run. He didn’t want to, because it would stick the rest of the village with his debt. But he’d had enough. Yuri began to plan. He couldn’t tell his fellow villagers what he was planning; they would report him rather than being stuck with his debt. He’d need food, an extra set of clothing, one of those gold-mining maps.
Yuri didn’t particularly want to mine gold, but it would give him a direction to run to and even a reason for being on the road. Yuri pulled another bar from the fire and continued to plan.
Chapter 65
“We need more reapers,” Anya said.
“Well, we don’t have them,” Natasha told her. “And we aren’t going to have them before the harvest is in.”
“What about renting yours out after you have your crops in? With the serfs that have headed for the gold fields, there are a lot of people, even some of the boyars, who still won’t have their crops in by that time. We could probably rent them for near the cost of buying one and still not have enough to supply the demand.”
It was a good plan. It probably would have worked except…
It was mid-afternoon when Peter Boglonovich plotted his measurements. The thermometer was dropping and the barometer was rising; the winds were from the northwest and strong. The front had passed through and was on its way south. And Peter couldn’t tell anyone. Peter had an excellent clock and a small wind-powered generator to power his equipment and provide some creature comforts. What he didn’t have was a radio. He had maps-good ones-and he knew how to use them, having been trained at the Dacha. He received weather data to plot on those maps from other stations once a week and sent his data off with the same messenger. The messenger was due in two days and Peter figured that the cold front would be halfway to Moscow by then.
“What’s the use of a weather station if it doesn’t have a radio?” Peter muttered. He knew the answer. He was up here to provide a plot, a record of weather conditions, that could be used to make the predictions more accurate when they got the radios installed and could do real-time prediction. Establishing a baseline was all well and good, but if Peter’s calculations were right, real-time weather prediction was going to come too late. This storm was going to sweep over Russia, depositing sleet on fields and those crops that hadn’t been harvested were going to get pounded.
Ivan looked out at his fields and saw death. Death for crops under a sheet of ice and sleet. Death for his family this winter as they ran out of food. Ivan lived on a farm forty miles northeast of Moscow and the storm still raged, beating down the stalks and turning the ripe grain to mush. He wasn’t the only one by any means. The storm ripped through Russia’s heart, ruining a full quarter of the expected grain crop for the year-and it could have been much worse.
On a farm thirty miles to the east of Ivan’s, Misha went to the family altar, knelt down in front of the icons and thanked God and his ancestors that he had spent the money to use the reaper, in spite of his wife’s complaint of his spendthrift ways. His crop was in the barn. All of the village crops were in the barn, safe from the storm.
For Misha the storm was good news. Amazingly good news. It meant that the price he could get for his crop would be considerably higher. Even after the taxes and tithes were paid, which would take more than half his crop, he would have grain to sell for the new paper rubles. Perhaps enough to pay off his debt, which would allow him to leave. At least if he promised to go to the gold fields.
Other farms had been missed by the storm or hit only by the edges. Then there were the potato fields. It wasn’t just the potatoes from the Ring of Fire. The patriarch and czar had both read the histories and put in a large order for potatoes with English merchants. It had taken a while, but the merchants had delivered. A ship load of potatoes had arrived in the spring of 1635.
The peasants who had been assigned to grow them had not been pleased. But with the government promising to buy the potatoes at a fixed price per pound, and threats about what would happen if they failed to follow instructions, they had grown them. The peasants were going to be displeased again. Fixed prices worked both ways.
Still, it wasn’t enough. Not with the number of peasants who had managed to buy out or simply run off. That move had delayed the harvest in a number of places and that delay had been crucial. It had destroyed millions of rubles worth of crops. The bureaucratic service nobility placed the blame for the disaster at the feet of the czar. And though they were unlikely to actually starve because of it, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them had been ruined.
“There is grain aplenty in Poland. The storm missed them and they got their harvest in with little damage,” Patriarch Filaret said. The Little Duma, Privy Council, was meeting to discuss the response to the storm and its effect on the price of grain.
“We don’t have the money to buy Polish grain,” Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev countered.
“After what they did to us during the Time of Troubles, they owe us a little grain and Rzhev showed we have the might to take it.”
Mikhail wished he could be somewhere else. The meeting had been going on for hours, mostly in a deadlock between his father and his cousin. Sheremetev wanted to stop the contributions to Gustav Adolf and try for a closer alliance with Poland. The patriarch wanted to keep relations with Sweden good and coordinate with them in attacking Poland from two fronts at once. Mikhail was leaning toward his father’s side, mostly, because he agreed with Sheremetev that Gustav Adolf was, in the long run, the greater danger. But to Mikhail that meant that Gustav Adolf was the one who needed to be wooed, not the one to attack.
Let the Swedish king rule western Europe. He’d earned it. Russia would expand to the east, into territory that they already tacitly owned. A transcontinental railroad from Moscow to the Pacific would give Russia half a continent of growing room. In spite of his respect for the charismatic Emperor Gustav Adolf, Mikhail thought he would prefer to be remembered as a builder rather than a conqueror.
“Given the effects of the storm, we will have to, at least for now, curtail the shipments of grain to the Swedes. But General Shein will prepare the army for the possibility of action between our realm and Poland.” Mikhail raised a hand as Sheremetev started to speak. “Just in case.”
If this were a story they would all shut up now that he had made his royal ruling. But, of course, they didn’t shut up. They kept right on arguing back and forth for another hour. Eventually, after they had forgotten who had suggested it, they agreed on Mikhail’s plan of action. Mikhail would have liked to be satisfied with that, but he wasn’t, His power over the boyars and church were both getting weaker, not stronger, as time went on. When the meeting finally broke up, he happened to see Sheremetev’s expression. It worried him.
This was a disaster, Sheremetev thought as he left the chamber where the Little Duma met. War with Poland would be a disaster for both countries, no matter who won. It would be a disas
ter for the Sheremetev lands and for both nations, leaving them open to the ravages of the Swede. Russia needed Poland as a buffer against the west. It needed a Poland strong enough to fight off the threats from central and western Europe. And the patriarch was going to destroy that buffer even if he won. There was no other choice. Filaret has to go.
“Natasha, you see Czarina Evdokia often, do you not?” Boris asked.
Natasha, hearing the tone of his voice, took a long look at him. Boris was always a bit pasty-faced, but these days he was dreadfully pale. And had dark circles under his eyes. Which, oddly for the current situation, almost made her laugh. He looked so much like Bernie’s cartoon. “Yes, I do, Boris. Why?”
“I’m worried,” Boris said. “I know there’s something going on. Something bad. But I’m excluded. The word is out that I’m too close to the Dacha to trust.” He sighed. “It’s to be expected, of course. Nevertheless, I do hear rumors. One is that the strelzi are angry, and are making alliances with a number of men in Moscow.”
“What do you want me to tell Evdokia?” Natasha asked.
“To be careful. Very careful. Even to get out of Moscow, if they can.”
Chapter 66
September 1635
“Zeppi seems to think so, but our research has shown that you spend much more in fuel for moving the same weight with heavier than air craft,” Gregorii Mikhailovich explained rather more fully than Colonel Shuvalov thought was really necessary.
“Zeppi?” Lufti Pasha asked.
“A member of our staff hired from, ah, central Germany,” Colonel Shuvalov said. The Ottoman sultan, Murad IV, insisted on maintaining the pretense that the Ring of Fire was a hoax and that up-timers didn’t exist-while he sent his agents everywhere to learn whatever they could from that nonexistent future lore.