1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  “And there’s not going to be anything you can do about it, either. We’re taking him with us,” Stefan said, pointing at Alexander. “We’ll let him go once we get to Ufa, if we don’t run into any problems along the way.”

  “Maybe even before that,” added Father Yulian. “We’ll see how things go.”

  “In the meantime, get off this dock and stop threatening our women, or I’ll shoot you,” said Stefan.

  The Ruzukans finished the loading and set out, being pulled by the burlak. And as the docks receded, Boris Petrovich took back the dock, and standing on the end of it shouted, “You’re murderers and thieves! Kidnappers too!”

  As soon as the pirates left, Boris Petrovich sent a runner to the nearest radiotelegraph station, but it would take the boy a while to get there. The boy who was given the message wasn’t in any great hurry to deliver it, so once he was out of sight he stopped running and made his way at a “brisk” stroll. Nikita hadn’t been popular in the village, and there was something romantic about Czar Mikhail, even to those who didn’t go off to Ufa.

  The radio man sent the message, but there were a lot of messages these days and he wasn’t all that fond of Nikita, having met the young punk. So he managed to send the message to the boy’s father in Moscow, rather than to the commanding officer in Bor or Nizhny Novgorod. It took some time for the message to reach the colonel and more time for it to get to Nikita’s commanding officer. Meanwhile, the sun was setting and the boat that the pirates had stolen—with the help of a lot of the burlaks—was floating down the Volga at about eight knots, mostly by virtue of the river’s current.

  The sun had set and they pulled the boat over to the side and loaded on the burlaks. Then they pushed the boat back out, and raised the sail. There was a breeze, but not much of one and the ship barely had enough way for steerage. It was dark, but not dark enough for comfort, as they sailed down the river, past the mouth of the Moscova River, past Nizhny Novgorod, then a few minutes later past Bor.

  Stefan looked over the deck with their wagons disassembled and people sleeping. There was still close to a thousand miles to Ufa by river. But they were on their way and there was no going back.

  Perhaps there never had been.

  Part Two

  Russia, East and West

  CHAPTER 11

  The Problem with New Lands

  Ufa

  September 1636

  Czar Mikhail rubbed his hands over the fire and considered. The great houses of Muscovy were dividing up, but in new and surprising ways. Before the Ring of Fire and even after it, the politics of Russia had been clan politics, not much affected by agendas like those that had ruled up-time political debate. In the last few years, there had developed several…call them parties. There were people who wanted to clamp down even harder on the serfs. There were the people who wanted to loosen the restrictions. There were those who wanted to modernize and those opposed to modernization. However, the factions weren’t consistent. A lot of the people who were quite happy to adopt new tools and machines still wanted to clamp down on the serfs and peasants. Even wanted to restrict the Streltzi or use the new weapons to bring the Cossacks into line. And many of those who were in favor of lightening the leash on the peasants were not happy with the new tools, because they could be used to make the already hard lot of serfs even harder. In fact, that was a fairly major concern among several of the monasteries, and Metropolitan Matthew was fairly strongly in that camp.

  What’s worse, Matthew had a point. Too many of the nobles thought of serfs as not much different from other livestock. Their response to a tool that decreased the amount of labor to accomplish a task was to put the serfs to more tasks. Matthew was constantly dragging some peasant who had lost a finger, a hand or an eye to one of the machines before Mikhail. “It’s not the tools! It’s compassion that we need,” Matthew would say.

  The truth was they needed both. But Mikhail wasn’t at all sure how to introduce compassion. It wasn’t like Metropolitan Matthew had managed to do so.

  “There you are!” Evdokia said. “You can’t hide up here brooding all the time, Mikhail.”

  “Brooding seems to be all I can do.”

  “That’s not true. You are the standard. You are the beacon that calls out to a freer Russia.”

  Mikhail smiled. He had never seen himself in the role of hero, but it still felt kind of good to have Evdokia see him that way. “How was your talk with the ladies?” The ladies, at the insistence of Princess Natasha and Tami Simmons had placed themselves in charge of sanitation for the rapidly expanding town of Ufa. It was an issue of disease. They recruited Evdokia, Anya, Olga Petrovichna, and several of the other women. All of them had other jobs, but they met every couple of days to discuss waste disposal.

  Evdokia lifted a hand and wobbled it back and forth in a gesture that she had gotten from Tami. “We make progress, but slowly. We have the honey wagons and the urine is being stored for tanning and the collection of saltpeter. Most of the solid waste is being sold to farmers. But the new arrivals have often not heard of the up-time notions of why disease happens and some of the priests are actively opposing our sanitation campaign as an affront to God.”

  “In other words, nothing new.”

  “Not in general. There are some new specifics, but Olga is going to take care of them and it would probably be best if you didn’t know any more than that.” Olga Petrovichna was fond of direct action, and she had a crew of mountain men who were not squeamish in the least. Evdokia continued. “How did your meeting with Bernie and Filip go?”

  “Nothing much new there either, I’m afraid. We brought equipment from Murom, but it was only a fraction of what was there. We’ve gotten some more from the Dacha and from some of the wealthier groups that have joined us, including the two monasteries that have decided to move their factories out here. But it’s still barely a fraction of what is available in Russia. We had four years and more of development, and now we’re back to the days right after Bernie got here.” It wasn’t that they couldn’t build anything. It was that they couldn’t build anything in large amounts. They could make a radio, but not radios—or at least not many. They could convert muzzle loaders to chamber-loaders but they would have to do it one at a time and each one took time. They could hand build steam engines and boilers, but there had been a steam engine factory in Murom. Not a big one, but a factory nevertheless. As bad as losing what they had left behind was, worse was that most of it had fallen into Sheremetev’s hands.

  “Iakov is arguing that if I don’t reinstate serfdom, I at least have to put some sort of restrictions on the peasants. Otherwise, they’ll be running out on their debts and generally running amok.” Prince Iakov Kudenetovich Cherakasky was a relative of Dimitri Mamstriukovich Cherakasky, who had seen the writing on the wall when his kinsman was murdered. He wasn’t in love with Mikhail’s reforms, but he did bring, at least potentially, a good size force to Mikhail’s side. “But I don’t think he really cares all that much. He’s giving me grief over it because of Tim.” Iakov had some military experience, but it was all before the Ring of Fire and he hadn’t been involved in the study of war at the Kremlin. In essence, he could lead a cavalry charge and that was about it. But partly due to age and partly due to rank, he had arrived asking to be placed in command of the army. To avoid a confrontation, Mikhail put him in charge of the Chancellery Bureau. And Iakov was now trying to keep Mikhail from overturning the rights of the upper nobility. There was no one to counterbalance him. So far, he was the highest ranking person to come to Mikhail’s colors, at least by the way Russia counted such things.

  “We’re building a new city here, Mikhail. And, in a way, it’s a good thing that Ufa was so small. There is much less in the way of property rights to step on while we do it. Bernie and Filip are building good roads and arranging things so that we’ll be able to put in sewers once the brick works gets going. We can build a modern city here in Ufa. The only way to do that in Moscow would be to
burn the place to the ground first.”

  “Even that won’t do it,” Mikhail said. “Moscow burns regularly, but everyone still owns their little chunk of it and it gets rebuilt the same way it was before. You’re right that here we have more opportunity to build a modern city. But I am worried that I may be focusing on that because I can’t do much about the rest of it.” They had talked about the great building projects of banana republic dictators over the last few months and Mikhail was worried that “modern Ufa” might turn out to be that sort of monument to ineffectuality.

  On the Volga

  “How did you end up here?” Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov asked.

  “How do you mean?” Izabella replied resentfully. Her pregnancy was clearly showing and she was feeling ugly and fat.

  “I mean I understand why the serfs ran away, sort of. But what about you? For that matter, we turned back a lot of serfs in the last couple of months. How is it that you people are so well supplied? Your wagons are loaded with threshed grain.”

  In a sudden mood swing that made no sense even to her, Izabella found herself on the edge of tears. “I don’t know,” she said, answering Alexander’s first question and ignoring the rest. “I saw my mother with Father Yulian and decided that if she could, I could. Then I got pregnant, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a convent. And now I’m the size of a dirigible and I have to pee all the time.”

  She looked over at Alexander and belatedly realized that she was providing more information than he really wanted. She managed to backtrack to the rest of the questions he asked. “Papa…my father…is evil, I guess. So was my brother. And, I guess, so was I. After I got pregnant and Father Yulian got me to look around and see what my father was doing to the serfs of our home village, I realized how bad things were. And they were bad.” She found herself looking at Alexander like it was his fault.

  He held up his hands and said, “I’m not doubting you.”

  “The children were on the edge of starvation because the men in the village had been forced to work in a neighboring factory for nothing. Since I was already pregnant, they brought me into the escape plan. Father Yulian and Stefan and the rest. Well, Father Yulian did. I don’t think Stefan knew anything about it till Czar Mikhail escaped. But we were already pretty close to ready. We had been planning to run once the crop was in, but we rushed to get ready and ran for it.”

  “How have you managed to keep all the serfs with you?” Alexander asked and Izabella wanted to laugh because she understood the question perfectly.

  “I didn’t. I couldn’t possibly have kept them together. Father Yulian, Stefan, and Vera are the ones keeping all of us together.”

  She saw him try to assimilate that and she had to give him credit for really trying. Last summer she wouldn’t have. She simply would have assumed that peasants would scatter like dust in a wind without a noble to keep them working together. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to consider any other possibility. She looked out at the river, flowing black beside the boat in the night. She could hear the ripple of waves as the Volga flowed past the stationary boat. “They don’t need us, you know. They don’t need us at all. Not you or me or Papa or Nikita. None of us. Do you realize how terrifying that is?”

  Izabella looked back at Alexander saw him watching her. Considering what she said, but mostly looking at her. She felt herself start to blush.

  Then his expression changed. “You really think that the peasants—serfs—can get by without the nobility?”

  “We still need them,” Stefan said. “At least till we get to Ufa.”

  At the other end of the riverboat from Alexander and Izabella, the council of the runaways was in session. It included Father Yulian, Stefan and Vera, Anatoly and Zoya, Dominika, and Afanasy, the leader of the burlaks. The rest of the people who had joined them, either singly or in small groups during the course of their travels, were not represented directly. The council members were seated on the deck, chatting quietly.

  “No, we don’t,” said Anatoly. “We have the boat and we have guns. We snuck past Nizhny Novgorod. Word is that Czar Mikhail is holding much of the Kama River.”

  “We will still have to get past Kazan,” Father Yulian said. The Kama was the main eastern tributary of the Volga. It connected the Belaya River to the Volga river system and so put the town of Ufa on the Volga system. It joined the Volga a few miles southeast of Kazan. None of them, not even the burlak, knew how many miles. The burlak knew the river intimately. They were, after all, the people who had to pull the boats off sandbars when they got stuck, which they did with depressing regularity. Something that had already happened to the Liberty twice since they had stolen it. “With Alexander and Izabella fronting for us at Kazan, we should be able to get past the town. Perhaps even stop and do some trading. The people we picked up in Balakhna don’t have much, even if we give them the Liberty once we get to Ufa.”

  “They also don’t have much money,” Anatoly said. “I don’t see why we should be supporting all these late additions. We were the ones who prepared.”

  “That ‘we’ includes Izabella,” said Vera.

  “And we are working our way. You would still be stuck on that sand bar not five miles past Bor without us,” Afanasy said.

  “I’m not talking about you,” Anatoly said, rather unconvincingly Stefan thought. “I’m talking about all the villagers who joined us in dribs and drabs as we went along. There are more of them now than there are people from Ruzuka, and they all seem to think they are entitled to a share of what we built and brought. As to the colonel’s little slut, we got her out—”

  “Anatoly, your greed is blinding you!” Father Yulian said, hotly.

  “Calmly, all of you,” Stefan said, not feeling all that calm himself. “We don’t want to draw a crowd.”

  “In fact, Izabella is a fairly accomplished young woman. She can read some and she understands politics.” Father Yulian said, but in a quieter tone. “We are going to have to deal with Czar Mikhail’s representatives once we get to Ufa and we don’t know what we are going to find there. It may be that we will need her even more once we get to Ufa.”

  “Czar Mikhail said we would be free, not serfs.”

  “Fine. If we are free, not serfs, what will we do for land?” Vera said. “The czar is just going to give it to us?”

  “That’s what his proclamation said.”

  “No. He said new lands would be granted,” Father Yulian pointed out. “He didn’t say to whom. It could mean us, or it could mean the service nobility. It could be dependent on service in the army or the paying of taxes. Who knows? And we can work with Izabella. Don’t burn our bridges, Anatoly. We may need to cross the river again. We don’t know what we will find downriver.”

  Kruglaya Mountain, Sviyazhsk, confluence of the Volga and Sviyaga Rivers

  Major Ivan Maslov looked out the window, then back down at the map. The czar’s army didn’t have very many cannon and none of them were breech-loaders, so none of them would have great rates of fire, even if he could get new carriages for them. Also, none of them were rifled, so they weren’t going to be very accurate. Worst of all, most of them were in Kazan or on their way to Ufa. Here on the mountain, he had just two of them. And he was supposed to interdict the Volga river with that. Since Metropolitan Matthew had persuaded the local garrison to side with Czar Mikhail last month, several river boats had passed in both directions. And all Ivan had been able to do was send out small boats to ask them for news. He needed a new weapon, something that they could make here. He thought of rockets, but those needed venturi. It said so in all the books and Ivan didn’t have a way of making venturi. He wasn’t even sure what they were or what they did.

  The truth was that Ivan was in here working on the problem of interdicting the river mostly because he didn’t want to be out there being scowled at by Captain Sergei Viktorovich Lagunov, the commander of the garrison. He was a member of the service nobility who was loyal enough, but not hap
py with Czar Mikhail’s policies in regard to serfs…or Ivan himself. Captain Lagunov had objected to Ivan being put in command over him because of birth and experience. He was, or had been, of the same military rank, a captain, and of nobler family, being of the service nobility while Ivan’s father was a baker. And he had been a captain longer. So, by all the rules, he should be in command.

  Tim had promoted Ivan to major right in front of Captain Lagunov. In essence, telling Sergei to shut up and soldier. It was pretty threadbare, especially considering the issues of mestnichestvo, but unless Captain Sergei Viktorovich Lagunov wished to complain to Czar Mikhail, he was stuck with Major Ivan Maslov. And Ivan was stuck with a resentful staff.

  There was a knock on the door, and after no appreciable delay the door was opened, and Lieutenant Vadim Viktorovich Lagunov came in. Vadim was twenty-three and owed his position to the fact that his brother commanded the garrison. He, even more than his brother, objected to having to deal with the son of a baker on anything like equal terms. Also, he had never been to the Kremlin or seen the war games played there in the last few years. Like his big brother, he didn’t imagine that they could be of any use. He had a thick black beard and beady eyes. “So have you figured out how to interdict the river yet?”

  “Not unless you can make venturi.”

  “I’m not a smith and they wouldn’t work anyway. What we need is a galley with a strong force so that we can get out and board ships that pass us.”

  “Fine,” Ivan said. “Do you know how to build a galley full of soldiers?”

  “Well, I know how to make the soldiers. It takes girls and about twenty years. The galley? You put the serfs to work on it.”