TITLE: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVIII (ring of fire)

by Eric Flint

  ***

  "Ksenyia, 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? Vlad'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, Ksenyia 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, like musketeer. 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. 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?" Brandy thanked Kseniya 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 months later a serf named Yuri laid a bar of white-hot steel in the slot of a drop forge and waved. Another 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 harvest, things that couldn't be done over the winter because the ground was frozen. Instead, he was here making extra money for the lord and he knew darn 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. Heck, 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 it. 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. Not that he particularly wanted to mine gold, but it would give him a direction to run and even a reason for being on the road. Yuri pulled another bar from the fire and continued to plan.

  Early Fall, 1635

  "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 north west 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 real up-timer made equipment, 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 Muscovy, depositing sleet on fields and those crops that hadn't been harvested were going to get pounded.

  Five days later

  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, trashing 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. Half a ship load of potatoes had arrived in the spring of 1635. According to the captains, the potatoes were harvested from Chiloe Island in South America. The captains also reported that they weren't the only people sent after them. But they might have just said that because they had only delivered half a ship load when two full ship loads had been ordered.

  The peasants who had been assigned to grow them had not been pleased. But with the government promising to buy the potatoes as 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.

  ***

  "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."

  ***

  "Back," Boris hissed. "Get back."

  Pavel pulled his head away from the alley's mouth. "We can't go that way, Papa."

  "Then we'll turn back and try another. We've got to get home to your mother and get her out of here."

  Boris and Pavel rushed home, taking as many back ways as possible. There was danger on the major streets of Moscow, and it wasn't just the burning buildings. Gun shots were frequent.

  When they reached the house, Daromila had already packed. An old Moscow hand, she'd smelled the smoke and heard the shots. Fire was never a good thing in wooden Moscow, which had burned and arose from its own ashes numerous times.

  "What started it this time?" Daromila asked.

  "The new price controls," Boris said. "Too high for too many, or at least that's their claim."

  "Where are we going, Papa?"

  "You and your mother are going home to the village. On your way, stop by the Dacha and pick up Ivan."

  "You think it's that bad?" Daromila asked.

  "Yes. This isn't just a riot. This is politics." Boris said.

  "I don't understand," Pavel said, somewhat apologetically.

  "That's because you don't remember the Time of Troubles," his mother explained. " Dvoriane serve Russia and stay out of politics. Especially at times like these."

  "But surely not this time. This time the dvoriane are involved and the boyar's sons as well. This is about the serfs and the limited year. Our friends and our neighbors are involved. Many of them have lost everything when their serfs ran off looking for gol-"

  Suddenly Pavel found himself against the wall with his father's hand around his throat. Pavel was a fairly tall young man, taking more after his mother than his father. He was also fairly quick, but he had been looking right at Papa and hadn't even seen him move.

  "Yes!" Boris hissed. "And whoever wins, a lot of them are going to die in the next few days and weeks. The ones who have made too much noise. Someone is giving the dvoriane enough rope to hang ourselves. The bureaus are going to be purged. That includes friends of ours, people we have known for years. But it's not going to include your mother or your brothers or you. Not if I can help it. We don't stay out of politics because we don't care, boy. We stay out of politics to stay alive. And I'll tell you something else. Whoever wins, it won't be the serfs and it won't be the dvoriane, the boyar's sons or the streltzi. It will be a faction of the high families. And any dvoriane who gets involved will lose… even if they are on the wining side this time."

  Pavel looked at his mother but she was looking back at him just as hard-eyed as his father. "You don't remember what it was like when we had three czars in as many weeks, Pavel. But I do and your papa does."

  "Now, are you going to do what I tell you to?" Boris asked and Pavel felt his father's fingers tighten around his throat. Pavel nodded.

  Then his father released him and went on as though nothing had happened. "On the way, you pick up Ivan. Thank God that two of your brothers are in Germany already. If Natasha asks what's happening, tell her but don't dally to do it. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dacha is targeted in the next few days."

  Boris' estimate was off. When Pavel and Daromila passed the Dacha there were troops already there. In fact, there were troops at the Dacha before the riot was well started.

  ***

  After seeing his wife and son off, Boris went back to the office. This was a time to be precisely where you were supposed to be and easy to find-so people wouldn't think you were somewhere you weren't supposed to be, doing something you shouldn't.

  By the time he got to the office, several of his more experienced people were already there. "Gregory, I need you to sanitize our records."

  "You think we're going to get inspected?" Gregory asked, then blushed for such a silly question.

  "Of course we will. Every bureau in Russia is going to get inspected after this. Oh… and Gregory… not too sanitized."

  Gregory smiled. It was still a rather nervous smile, but at least it was the smile of a man who knew what he had to do. The way these things went, the inspectors would keep looking until they found something. It was best to leave them something minor to find.

  ***

  "I'm sorry," Colonel Shuvalov said politely. "But I have my orders from the Duma."

  From the Duma, Natasha noted. Not from the czar or from the Assembly of the Land. Just the Duma. The troops, she was told, were there for the protection of the Dacha. Natasha also noted that the colonel was a member of the Sheremetev faction at court. Which wasn't good news. The takeover of the Dacha was amazingly anticlimactic, certainly for most of the people living and working there. From the start, the majority of the workers and researchers had been from the dvoriane and the deti boyars. Including a couple of, literal, boyar's sons. Oh, there were a few peasants who had, through talent and work, made a place for themselves among the researchers. Anya and a few others. And more streltzi, especially where craftsmanship was needed. But the cultural outlook of the Dacha was that of the dvoriane: do your job and stay away from politics. At least court politics… the bureaus had their own.

  Unfortunately, that option wasn't really available to Natasha. What protected her was the value of the Dacha itself. That, and keeping her lip buttoned.

  ***

  Anya waited for her meeting with Colonel Shuvalov with some trepidation. He was interviewing the senior staff individually. The danger was that he would be upset that someone of her birth would be among them. And in her case a demotion, deserved or not, could potentially be fatal. Her other employer wouldn't care whose fault it was. But Colonel Shuvalov was friendly, asking her about her work, what they were accomplishing with the EMCM and its use in accounting.

  "It uses punched cards for input," Anya explained "Not because we can't make magnetic tape. We can't
make magnetic tape that stops and starts without tearing. People type one number at a time and the pauses aren't all the same length. It also lets us print out the figures and the codes before running them through the machine. That let's us catch errors."

  "Yes. I understand the exchequer has been asking for one. Or rather, for possession of this one."

  "Yes, Colonel. We'll be sending this one to them as soon as the next one is ready."

  "I'm sure they will be happy to hear it. Now, though… the prince has some instructions for you. A red report, please."

  Anya froze. "The prince" was the code name for her employer. That, combined with the phrase "a red report," meant that she was to give Colonel Shuvalov a full report. But the colonel wasn't a spy, not her sort. She couldn't be absolutely sure of course. It was possible that he was simply a better spy than she was… but Anya didn't think so. And if the colonel wasn't a spy, he was what he appeared to be: Sheremetev's man. Which meant that Sheremetev was the prince. Anya had never tried to identify the prince. Quite the opposite, in fact. Not knowing who the prince was meant she couldn't tell. Which meant, in turn, that he was much less likely to have her killed. Now she had effectively been told who he was. That didn't bode well for her long term survival.

  All that flashed through her mind in seconds and she came back to herself. "The new EMCM will have additional capabilities. An expanded command set. But the real key is less the machine than the input and output devices…" She finished a more complete description of what the new EMCM could do that the Dacha staff didn't really want known outside the Dacha. Then she started identifying the other spies that worked in the Dacha.