1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  And now this…

  They were looking at ice too thick for their ship to penetrate.

  Ice so thick that the bow had ridden up onto the ice without breaking it. They had backed off and tried again three times, but it looked like they were going to have to try what John Adams called “the snowmobile feature.”

  They carried two ice boats, as was standard on a koch, but their ice boats were of mostly up-time design. Three skates and a sail, with a good cargo capacity. They used the winch to set one of them on the ice and had it pull a heavy line out a hundred meters ahead of the Catherine, then anchor the cable to the ice. That took hours, while the Catherine moved back and forth to keep from getting frozen in.

  Finally they got the thick cable anchored in the ice. They attached it to the electric winch with a block and tackle and pulled the Catherine up onto the ice.

  But that was just the first step.

  Once the Catherine was on the ice, it was tilted over on its side, but not all that far. The hull was rounded, but on the ice the Catherine wasn’t at more than about a fifteen degree angle. It made going from port to starboard an uphill climb and made working more difficult, but that was about all.

  Guy tossed a line to Valeriya and she pulled it over to a spot about thirty feet off the port side and tied it to a piton driven into the ice. Guy pulled the line over to a set of pulleys connected to the foresail lifting motor and tied it off. Then he called down to the engine room and asked for power to the motor. The line tightened and slowly the Cath righted herself. Just before she was fully upright, Guy had them stop the motor. She was balanced on her keel, held in place by lines.

  It took them days to remove the paddles and replace them with the hardwood treads that they hoped would power the Cath over the ice.

  First they disconnected the power chain, then they cranked the treads down using a set of winches. Then they reattached the power chain with the tensioning wheel adjusted to the new configuration.

  Halfway through the process, the storm hit. For two days, everyone who could huddled inside. Guy and Valeriya spent the time talking about the engineering systems on the Cath and the difference between sailing in a ship and flying in a dirigible. It was during the snowstorm that Valeriya decided they should huddle together for warmth. Her argument would have made more sense if it was actually that cold in the ship, but the designers had done quite an effective job of getting all the use out of the steam they could. The interior of the ship wasn’t toasty by any means, but it was hardly freezing either. Guy didn’t argue, though. Partly because one didn’t argue with Valeriya, but mostly because he rather liked the idea.

  Once the storm passed, they continued with the work, but now had to do it under the cover of a coating of ice and snow that the storm had left behind. Three days later, the continuous tracks were on the ice.

  Altogether, it took over a week. There were four cases of frostbite, and these were men who had experience working and living in these conditions. Vladimir, Brandy, and little Mikey stayed inside. So did most of the surviving crew of the Czarina Evdokia.

  They finished the reconfiguration, and fed power to the treads. Nothing happened. The treads were frozen up. Literally. Boiling water and steam were used to weaken the ice enough to let the treads start to move. And now they were in what amounted to a huge snowmobile. Huge, but incredibly underpowered for its weight. And also fragile as hell for its size. There were massive timbers holding everything in place, but they almost might have been toothpicks. Still, once it got going, it could make a steady three miles an hour across the ice.

  “We’re going through the coal fast,” John Adams said.

  “How fast?” Vladimir asked.

  “Faster than we prepared for. Besides, we ran into thick ice sooner than I expected, and it has lasted longer.”

  “So what you’re saying is we’re going to run out of fuel before we reach Mangazeya?”

  “Yes.” John nodded. “Unless we run into much weaker ice, weak enough for us to get back in the water and use the sails.”

  “How likely is that?” Vladimir asked.

  “Not very.”

  “So what do you recommend?”

  “We could use the ice boats to get the crew to safety, but that would mean abandoning the Catherine. By the time we got back to her, who knows what would have happened to her and her cargo?”

  “What about sending the ice boats to gather wood?”

  “That’s a long trip,” John Adams said. “And it would be easy to get lost.”

  “Where are we, Captain?”

  “Assuming the inertial compass is right, we should be right about here.” John pointed at a spot on the chart.

  Vladimir examined the map. “Where are the nearest trees?” He ran a finger along the chart where the shore was marked.

  “There should be some forest there.” John pointed. It was almost due south of their position and they needed to be traveling northeast from here.

  “Turn us south, Captain. Get us as close to those trees as you can,” Vladimir said. “Then we will send out crews to cut us firewood, and bring it back to the ship, get a full load of firewood and go on.”

  It was another delay in a trip that had already been delayed overlong, but Vladimir wasn’t going to put Brandy and little Mikey to any greater risk than he could avoid. Czar Mikhail and the constitution would just have to wait a while longer.

  Part Four

  The Wild, Wild East

  CHAPTER 20

  North to Mangazeya

  The sleigh didn’t have bells, but it did have a team of four horses and the bone-shod runner cut through the frosting of snow that had settled on the frozen river. The sleighs were surprisingly fast on the iceways of Russian winters. It helped too that their party was relatively small, three sleighs and a dozen riders. The other two sleighs held goods. One had the tents and camping gear for the party, and the other had bribes for Shein. Officially, the goods were gifts. But what they were, were bribes.

  The very good news, so far as Bernie was concerned, was that while he and Natasha weren’t alone in their sleigh, they were under a thick layer of fur blankets. They couldn’t do much, but at least they could snuggle. They had been on the road for almost a month, and in a way the trip was reminding them both of the trip they had made to pick up Bernie’s Dodge back in 1632. The bad news was this time they wouldn’t be picking up anything as valuable as the Dodge had proven to be. The good news was that they wouldn’t be picking up Cass Lowry.

  “Riders ahead,” shouted Marat Davidovich, the commander of the guard detachment.

  Bernie reached over and opened the panel. It was a wooden frame with two sheets of goat intestine stretched over it, with a one-inch gap between them. It let only a little light through, but it was a good insulator when closed. Now Bernie opened it and shivered at the cold air. “What have we got, Marat?”

  “I’m not sure yet, sir.” As Bernie’s relationship with Natasha had become more public knowledge, the people around them—especially those in Natasha’s service—had become less and less comfortable using Bernie’s first name. There had also been some resentment directed at Bernie. Apparently they felt he was getting above himself. Marat was not the worst about it, but he wasn’t happy with the situation. Czar Mikhail had considered the possibility of ennobling Bernie, but there were issues of family status involved and more than a little resentment of Bernie—and up-timers in general—among the nobility of Russia.

  Besides, Bernie was uncomfortable with the idea. Bernie wasn’t overly enamored of the idea of nobility in general. In fact he didn’t like it at all. Up-time, before the Ring of Fire, when Bernie had thought about nobility—not often—he had thought about the princess and the pea or Snow White, or maybe Charles and Diana, or Elizabeth II. Maybe Grace Kelly. But his attitude had been basically neutral. Down-time, on the other hand, he had run into the real thing, seventeenth-century Russian style. He had come to despise the whole structure. He was fond of ce
rtain members of the nobility. More than fond, in the case of Natasha. But he despised the system itself. However much he would like to have gotten rid of the whole thing, his discussions with Czar Mikhail, Filip Pavlovich, even Anya—and most of all the reaction of the service nobility to Czar Mikhail’s emancipation proclamation—had convinced him they couldn’t. That the people with the guns wouldn’t stand for it.

  Bernie stuck his head out of the small window and saw a troop of perhaps twenty men at arms riding up. He slipped back in and pulled out his Dacha-made Colt. It was a caplock and he had a spare cylinder for it. He left his up-time rifle in its case. He only had seven rounds left for it. “Stay—” Bernie started, then seeing the expression on Natasha’s face, he shook his head and said, “Never mind.”

  When the sleigh stopped, he opened the door and stepped down, then held out a hand for Princess Natasha to alight from the sleigh.

  The riders looked like Cossacks, but they were carrying AK3s and wore bandoliers of chambers.

  “What are you doing here?” asked one with ice on his thick black beard.

  “I am Princess Natalia Petrovna Gorchakovna, Ambassadress from Czar Mikhail to General Shein. This is the up-timer, Bernie Zeppi.”

  “What an amazing thing,” the big man said with a grin wide enough to be clearly seen through his beard. “You don’t look a thing like the Bernie Zeppi who came through here in August, selling magic up-timer beans.”

  “It’s worse than that. I don’t have any magic beans.”

  “Neither did he.” The smile was gone from the big man’s face, and the AK3 was tilting ominously in their direction. It wasn’t aimed at them yet. In fact, it was still pointing at the sky. But it was getting close to pointing at them and Marat was shifting his AK4 too.

  “Everyone, calm down,” Bernie said. “We have a bunch of documents for General Shein and he, at least, will recognize both Natasha and me.”

  The big man tilted his head at Bernie. “What about General Izmailov? Will he recognize you?”

  “He should. I’ve met him a few times. I wish we had Tim with us, but he’s busy holding off Sheremetev’s army in Kazan.”

  “So we heard,” the man with the icy beard said. He waved over another man. “Ivan, here, will guide you in.”

  Solikamsk

  General Izmailov bowed gracefully to Princess Natasha, then gestured them to chairs in a large room that Bernie took to be some sort of reception hall. It had glass windows, though they were the small diamond-shaped panes. Russia was still very short of large panes of glass. The chairs were padded, and the room was painted a sort of ivory white. “Welcome to Siberia.”

  Natasha grinned and Bernie felt his own lips twitch. Izmailov wasn’t giving any ground at all. His greeting established that he felt that this was a different country than Russia.

  “Thank you, General,” Natasha said. “Czar Mikhail is pleased that General Shein has not thrown his support to the usurper.”

  Here we go, Bernie thought. Shein is looking for recognition of Siberia as a separate nation and Czar Mikhail wants Shein to acknowledge his authority as czar over all of this territory.

  Over the course of the afternoon those two positions went from implicit to explicit, but were not resolved. Then they got down to practical business. Shein, though personally loyal to Patriarch Filaret, didn’t feel nearly as much personal loyalty to Czar Mikhail. Mikhail was already doing what Shein wanted from him, because as long as he survived, he would be the primary focus of Sheremetev’s ire. And his armies…which was buying Shein time to build his Siberian realm. And Czar Mikhail was going to keep right on doing it, because his alternative was to be imprisoned or executed.

  “So what can Mikhail do for General Shein that he isn’t doing already?” General Izmailov asked, and Bernie noted that even now it was “General” Shein, not “Czar” Shein. There were many political reasons for that, both in Siberia and in the rest of Russia. But the most important of the reasons was that until Shein took the title he could change his mind and become the loyal general again. Once the title attached to his name, there would be no going back. Bernie wasn’t surprised. Shein was a good general but he was, at his core, a cautious man. He was more comfortable on the defensive, especially now that he didn’t have Patriarch Filaret pushing him.

  Bernie and Natasha spent two days in Solikamsk, then took the Babinov Road to Tobolsk, where they met with General Shein and learned that he actually controlled less territory than they thought. He controlled most of the Ob River, and had a more limited control over the land around it, but he didn’t control Mangazeya.

  Mangazeya was effectively an independent city-state and it—not Shein—controlled access to the Kara Sea.

  Russia was even more fragmented than they thought back in Ufa. Relations between Shein’s Siberian state and the Mangazeya city-state were cordially tense, if that wasn’t too much of a contradiction in terms. And it wasn’t. Both Shein and the city council of Mangazeya wanted stable and friendly relations, but Shein wanted an open route to the rest of the world through the Arctic Ocean, and Mangazeya wanted to control that trade. Shein could take Mangazeya and both he and they knew it, but he didn’t want to. It would cost him and it would mean moving his troops away from the Babinov Road, which would open the way for an attack by Sheremetev…or even Mikhail.

  “We need to go to Mangazeya!” Natasha said. They had been in Tobolsk for three days, and had a read of the political situation that was much improved. But if Vladimir’s strange contraption was going to be coming this way, they needed to arrange passage for it. Besides, Tobolsk had proved just as crowded and interruption-prone as Ufa.

  Bernie was afraid that he and Natasha would have to go all the way to Alaska before they got a chance to go all the way.

  The trip to Mangazeya was going to take upwards of forty days if it went well, so it would likely be sometime in April before they got there. And there was a real chance that Vladimir would get there before them.

  Ufa kremlin

  “It’s a petition from the villagers of New Ruzuka asking for—no, demanding—a seat in the Ufa duma. Not the Zemsky Sobor. The duma,” Czarina Evdokia said as she read the document.

  “That makes a certain amount of sense,” Czar Mikhail told his wife. “We haven’t called a Zemsky Sobor since we got here.”

  “I know,” Evdokia said. “We need a constitutional convention, not a series of pronouncements made by the Zemsky Sobor and duma under the influence of the bureaus.”

  This wasn’t a new argument.

  When Mikhail had been given the throne, his “absolute” power had been diluted by a series of things that he couldn’t do without the consent of the Zemsky Sobor and the duma. That had necessitated the calling of the Zemsky Sobor every year to officially approve the actions taken in his name by the government. But when Sheremetev sent Mikhail into seclusion—for his own safety, of course—the role of the Zemsky Sobor had been usurped by the newly formed Director-General’s office. The Zemsky Sobor, under Sheremetev’s eye—and under his guns—had signed off on the change in authority. It could be argued that everything that Sheremetev did was legal. In fact, he had—again under his guns—had Mikhail sign off on the change as well. The issue then became whether Sheremetev’s proxy for Mikhail’s authority was revocable by Mikhail. Mikhail held that it was, Sheremetev held that it wasn’t. Neither Sheremetev nor Mikhail had called a Zemsky Sobor to confirm their position.

  Mikhail had wanted to call a Zemsky Sobor, but Evdokia had argued against it. At a minimum, the Zemsky Sobor would insist on veto power, and Evdokia pointed out that it was unlikely to willingly replace itself with an elected body. Mikhail guessed that Sheremetev’s reason for not calling it back was similar to his own. Mikhail being on the loose meant the Zemsky Sobor would be in a much stronger position and would demand concessions that Sheremetev was unwilling to grant.

  All of which meant that petitions like this one were becoming much more common. The manufacturers of
Ufa and Kazan were each asking for a representative in the duma. So were monasteries, other villages and towns, riverboat owners and riverboat crews. It was all Bernie’s fault. Mikhail had made Bernie a member of the duma, a dumnyi diak, the lowest rank on the duma. Which, while a high office, wasn’t at all the same thing as a noble title like prince. More like appointing him secretary of agriculture than knighting him. Bernie had been made one because Mikhail wanted the up-timer perspective in his councils, but the official reason was as representative of the Dacha and technology. So now everyone wanted a seat in Mikhail’s duma for their group.

  Then, of course, Bernie was sent off to Tobolsk so he could be alone with Natasha. And from the latest letter, they were probably halfway to Mangazeya by now.

  En route to Mangazeya

  February 1637

  They were pulling up again. Bernie opened up the shutter on the sleigh window to see a group of riders in heavy cloaks and furs. They looked somewhere between Native American and Asian, but some of them were redheaded. One of them spoke accented Russian and the rest spoke a language that Bernie had never heard but would later learn was called Khanty. However, one of the guides Shein had provided them with spoke the language, and it quickly became apparent that Bernie was invited to visit. Even here they had heard of up-timers and since there was apparently one handy, they were going to bring it back to be looked over by their tribal elders.

  “Right now, it’s an invitation. But if we don’t go along, it’s going to turn into an order.”

  “In that case, tell them we’ll be happy to visit.” Bernie waved at the Mongols and climbed back in the sleigh. But before he got the door closed, there was a shout. More discussion followed, in which it was determined that one of the Mongols would be riding in the sleigh with them. Again, no choice was really offered unless they wanted a fight. Bernie almost went with the fight option, but decided against it.