1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  The Cossacks, who held strong views on freedom—which, in that other timeline, would be beaten out of them over the next couple of centuries—sided with the peasants. Yermak Fedov and Patriarch Matthew led the charge for a free Russia.

  For the first week or so, Czar Mikhail and Vladimir were convinced that they could bring the northern and western states around. Then General Izmailov made an effective speech and almost a third of the delegates walked out of the convention.

  They didn’t leave Ufa, but the message was clear. Serfdom would be legal and binding, and so would slavery, at least in some of the states of the New Russia…or there would be no New Russia.

  “We’re going to have to give it to them,” Vladimir said to Czar Mikhail.

  “No,” said Father Kiril. “Children yet unborn will curse our names if we give in and leave them chained to the land. Will you come before the Lord God with the enslavement of millions on your conscience?”

  “The Bible doesn’t forbid slavery. The Old Testament endorses it and Christ was silent on the matter,” said Patriarch Matthew. Then he quickly held a hand up as Kiril started to object. “I don’t disagree with you as a matter of personal conscience, Father Kiril. But politics is the art of the possible.”

  “It’s a blot on all our consciences,” said Brandy. “If we let the down-time Russian version of the ‘peculiar institution’ take root in the Russian constitution, it’s going to be a blood debt through the generations.”

  “Maybe so,” Anya said, “but we’ll be long dead and won’t hear a thing. You get what you can get in this world, and no more. What we can get is a mixed nation with free states and…”

  “And have a civil war in four score and seven years,” Bernie added.

  “That works for me,” Vladimir said. “Remember, we have a war to win right now. And if we don’t win, none of the rest of it matters. We need General Shein and the Siberian Corridor. We need support in the west. If we don’t get those, Director-General Sheremetev and his oprichniki are going to march right over us. If not this year, then next. What happens to the serfs then?”

  So they met with General Izmailov for the pro-slavery faction and Yermak Fedov for the anti-slavery faction, and managed to get the issue delayed.

  They went on to the next issue. At the insistence of the northwestern groups, they had to limit the upper house to nobles. States would have the right to appoint two lords to the house of lords. Bureaus would have the right to appoint one per bureau. No one could sit in the house of lords unless they were a lord. On the upside, it would be up to the czar to make any new lord. So unless the person a state or bureau appointed to the lords was already a member of one of the great houses, the czar would have what amounted to a pocket veto. He could prevent any commoner from joining the house of lords simply by declining to make them a lord. He couldn’t, for instance, keep Vladimir or even Brandy out of the house of lords, but he could keep Anya out of it by declining to make her a court princess.

  They were busy arguing over which house the prime minister/president would come from, when the attack came.

  “What is that?” Boris looked out at the horses. He was supposed to be working, but was pretty good at finding other places to be than work. And he had snuck away from the weaver’s shop where he was supposed to be working. What he was looking at was the lead element of the Kazakh army. Not that there was any way for him to know that. What he could see was a bunch of men in chain mail armor, with pointed helmets and swords and carrying bows. To Boris it looked like another delegation to the congress, except that they just kept on coming. There had to be hundreds of them.

  “Hey, Olga! What is that?” Olga was a forty-something woman who made a little money washing clothing in the river. Most of that money was spent on vodka the same night she made it. She looked up from her washboard and scowled at him. Then she looked the way he was pointing and went pale.

  Olga wasn’t stupid or even lazy. She was just beaten down by circumstances. She recognized what was coming, at least in general, and she took perhaps five seconds to take it all in. Then she turned around and started running for the town screaming, “Attack! Attack!”

  Ivan, the guard in the east tower of the Ufa kremlin, was drinking his small beer and eating a cheese sandwich as he stood his post. He didn’t hear Olga screaming, but dutifully looked around. He scanned the sky even, though the dirigibles were all gone. Then he looked out at the tree line and followed it around to the river, and saw the troops. He had never actually seen an army before. He was an escaped serf who had hired onto the city guard once he got to Ufa. He had dreams of someday being a great captain, but it took him some time to figure out what was going on. And even after he determined that the armored men on horseback might be an army, he didn’t realize that they might be an attacking army.

  But finally he called down to the sergeant of the guard. “Hey, Sergeant! Are we expecting a bunch of Mongols coming to the convention?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There are a bunch of Mongols in armor with bows, riding out of the woods next to the river.”

  “Why do you think they’re Mongols?”

  “They’re dressed like Mongols. Pointy helmets, bows, and stuff.”

  The sergeant shook his head. “How many?”

  Ivan looked out and tried to figure that out, but he lost count quickly. “A whole lot. Hundreds, maybe.”

  The sergeant wasn’t the sharpest tool in Czar Mikhail’s tool box. The sharp ones were out with General Tim or Colonel Ivan. But he had seen an army before and this didn’t sound good. So he climbed the stairs to get a look at what was going on. It took him almost a minute because the sergeant liked his sausage.

  By the time he got to the lookout, there were five hundred plus Mongols filling the fields between the forest and the outskirts of expanded Ufa. One quick look was all it took and he was screaming the alarm and causing the bells to be rung.

  Stefan Andreevich was in the large forging factory on the east side of Ufa when he heard the noise.

  He wasn’t using the stamp press. He was supervising the workers using it. Stefan had gotten the contract to make chambers for the AK4. He and partners, including Izabella Ivanovna Utkin, who had put up much of the original capital—her mother’s jewels and her father’s money that they had taken from the original Ruzuka. Father Yulian and Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov were also partners. It provided Stefan with a large enough nest egg to build a factory and hire workers, so he was turning out interchangeable chambers at a rate of hundreds a day, and had been for the last three months. Almost all of those had been sold to Czar Mikhail for credit in the Czar’s Bank in Ufa, but some had gone to making sure that the village of New Ruzuka and the staff for his factory were all equipped with AK4s, and even the AK4.7s, and had at least ten chambers for each rifle, extra caps, and reloading kits. The memory of coming back to the wagon train to find the dead child Irina still haunted Stefan’s dreams.

  He went to the door and out into the crowded, dirty street. On the street he heard lots of people shouting. The words “attack” and “Mongol” were common, but so were words like “bullshit” and “ridiculous.” Then he heard the bells from the kremlin. Stefan stepped back into the factory and shouted, “Everyone, stop work and get your guns.”

  “What?” “Are you nuts?” “You’re still paying me,” came from various people but as the noise of the stamp presses, drills and other equipment quieted, they began to hear the bells. And the responses shifted to “what’s going on?” In a surprisingly short time, Stefan’s work crew were armed and ready. Which left only the question of what to do with them.

  President of the Constitutional Convention Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov heard the bells. He motioned to the clerk of the convention. “Would you go see what’s happening? I don’t want to interrupt Sir William unless we have to.” He didn’t add, “because if I do, he’ll just start over at the beginning.”

  It took a few minutes for the
clerk to find out and by then the first arrows of the Kazakh army had been fired. There was no longer any room for doubt about their intent.

  The clerk, who had left sedately, returned at a dead run, screaming, “We’re under attack!”

  Stefan and his workers headed for the edge of town and the dirigible hangar. Seeing armed men moving in that direction acted like a lodestone. Other men, and more than a few women, made quick trips to their homes or workplaces, grabbed up a weapon, and rushed out to join the defense. Others, more cautious and perhaps wiser, headed for the kremlin walls and the safety they might provide.

  By the time Stefan got to the edge of the city, he had almost two hundred armed people with him, along with two other men who thought they should be in command.

  There wasn’t actually an edge to Ufa, not in the sense of a wall around the outer city. There was a preferred area between Hangar Road and the shore and between the kremlin and the hangar canal. Hangar Road was a mile long road that went east from the south gate of the Ufa kremlin to the dirigible hangar. It was a good road, raised bed macadam construction, and thirty feet wide with deep ditches on either side for drainage. Naturally enough, people who could afford it lived on Hangar Road. The most expensive properties were between Hangar Road and the river.

  The buildings were more dense in close to the kremlin and old city, and thinned out as they spread east along Hangar Road. The hangar canal was, at this point, a half-finished ditch that didn’t even have ice in it, much less water. It was muddy from melted snow, though, so acted as a barrier for attacking troops. Not a barrier that couldn’t be bypassed, but one that they would have to slog through under the guns of the defenders. There were also partially completed bastions farther out, but they were mostly just the preparations that would allow some basic defenses to be put in place if they had a few days notice of an attack.

  Stefan’s factory was on the north side of Hangar Road, about four blocks north and three-quarters of the way to the hangar. His trip to the hangar had left him on Irina Way, which was one block north of Hangar Road. They got to the vicinity of Hangar Road and Irina Way, went between two buildings—one of them a half-built warehouse where goods were stored in the open. Stefan saw the goods and started ordering his people to grab them and make a barricade between the two buildings. Someone quipped that Princess Irina was too young to let the Mongols in this way. Some people laughed, but Stefan paid no attention. He could see the troops out there, moving around. He didn’t know what the movement meant, but it looked like they were getting organized.

  “This is the wrong place!” shouted a man Stefan didn’t know, but had seen around.

  Stefan shouted, “Then go somewhere else!” He turned to two of his foremen. “Yuri, Petr, grab the barrels.”

  The man grabbed Stefan’s shoulder and tried to force him around.

  Stefan was terrified and busy. He was having flashbacks from the fights en route here, and he had never been comfortable with being manhandled. Stefan was a big man who had worked in a blacksmith shop from the time he was a boy. He always hated being handled, but put up with it most of his life. He risked his life and, more importantly, his family’s lives to insure that he wouldn’t have to put up with it any more. He didn’t move with the first jerk and the man jerked him again.

  That was it. Stefan turned and with all the strength of rage combined with the muscles of a wielder of heavy hammers, he punched the man in the chest, right over his heart. The man flew back and hit the wall of one of the warehouses, and then sank down to the earth. He seemed to be unconscious.

  Stefan didn’t have time for him. Not for regret or help or curses or anything. He turned away from the man. “Move those barrels!”

  They moved the barrels, and Stefan gave other orders. Those too were obeyed without hesitation.

  Colonel Leontii Shuvalov stayed on his horse with difficulty. He stayed up with the lead element of the army during the hellride of the last three days. So had three of his four aides. The khan was back with the main army, but with luck they would have taken Ufa and Czar Alexis before Salqam-Jangir Khan caught up with him. It would be best if Czar Mikhail were to die in the fighting.

  Togym, the khan’s cousin, waved a sword and a signal flag flew. The army pulled up and launched a flight of arrows at the small group of people who were trying to fortify a section of street between a couple of warehouses. It was stupid. The smart thing to do would be to bypass them, perhaps leaving a small force to pin them here and head for the kremlin. Either that, or just ride over them.

  Leontii muttered a curse under his breath and rode to Togym. “You’re wasting time. Ride them down. We need to get to the kremlin.”

  “They are armed.”

  “They’re peasants.”

  “You’re a fool!” Togym turned away and waved his sword again.

  Another flight of arrows came in and people were hit, but a bunch of warehouse workers joined in. Grain sacks were added to the barrels blocking the street. It wasn’t a great wall. It was about four feet tall with gaps where the fat part of the barrels kept the skinny parts apart, or just where the barrels had been placed sloppily. It was topped in places with sacks of grain. In spite of its flimsiness, a man behind it was safer from the flights of arrows than he would be standing in the open.

  Stefan started sorting his people into a line behind the barrels. And a third flight of arrows came in. One of them scored Stefan’s tunic and left a red line across his chest till it stuck in his bandolier. He looked back and forth. Mostly people were in line behind the barrels and it looked like the whoever-they-were were getting ready to charge. “Load your guns, boys!”

  Stefan was almost sure that there was some official way you were supposed to say that, but he didn’t know what it was—or at least couldn’t think of it right now. It didn’t seem to matter though. The guys from the factory were sticking clips of chambers in their AK4.7s. Not everyone in town was equipped with the AK4.7s. Quite a few had AK4.5s, AK4.2s, or even the many variations of the AK3s.

  “Is everyone loaded?” Stefan looked back and forth again and everyone seemed to be ready. “Then shoot those fuckers!”

  They shot, most of them. But at least two of his guys actually managed to hit the warehouses they were between, and one shot came uncomfortably close to Stefan. “Ivan, if you point that rifle at me again, I’m gonna shove it up your ass and pull the trigger.”

  Every one of Stefan’s factory workers equipped with the AK4.7s were firing as fast as they could. Clickity bang, clickity bang. The rest were taking longer, but in seconds they were firing into a dense cloud of gray-white smoke. That’s what happens when two hundred men shoot black powder rifles and fifty or more of them fire at a high rate.

  That’s part of what happens. The other part of what happens is that in the space of less than a minute close to a thousand rounds go down range. A thousand rounds against massed cavalry is murderous fire.

  The firing slowed as the slide-action AK4.7s finished their clips and had to be reloaded. But by then Stefan couldn’t see a thing beyond the smoke. “Stop shooting! Reload!”

  Everyone got reloaded and Stefan waited while the smoke cleared. Then he looked out at the Mongols. They weren’t just sitting out there shooting arrows anymore. The letup in fire seemed to have let them get organized. Even as Stefan watched they started a charge.

  The thing Stefan wanted to do more than anything was run away. But he couldn’t. Vera was back there in the kremlin. He looked around in desperation and saw Petr Yurievich starting to edge back from the barrels. “Get back in line, Petr!” he roared. “Now! And this time, aim, damn it! Everyone aim at one of those suckers!”

  Stefan looked back out at the charging Mongols and they were getting way too damn close. It looked like they would be riding his people down in another couple of seconds. “Fire!”

  They fired. And even if their aim wasn’t great, this was the next best thing to point blank range, and most of his people were pointing their
guns at the larger targets, the horses. A dozen horses along a fifty-foot front went down, and the horses behind them got tangled up and went down. The ones that managed to jump the tangle landed right at the barricade and didn’t have room to jump it. They knocked quite a few of the barrels over, but in the process they made the tangle worse.

  The Mongols were stopped and though they were out of sword range, they weren’t out of rifle range. Not even the range of poorly aimed rifles fired by terrified factory workers who would have already run away except for the ogre standing with them. The ogre who had killed a man with his bare hands and was standing there with an arrow sticking out of his chest, screaming at them to shoot. Then shoot again. And again.

  Shoot they did. The AK4.7s had a rate of fire that was frankly miraculous, even to the men using them. Even the AK3s had rates of fire that the invaders found hard to credit.

  It was hardly what even the worst professional soldier would consider a well-planned defense. And for organization, it lacked even more…from a purely military point of view. But there was a mass of dead and wounded horses and Kazakh warriors crushed under those horses, or dead from gunshot wounds that could testify to the effectiveness of that defense.