1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  “Got what?” General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev asked, looking up from the map table. It wasn’t a map of Kazan. Nothing was happening around Kazan except the cracking of the ice on the river.

  “The convention in Ufa. They have a constitution and the Kazakh khan has signed it. His whole army is heading this way.”

  Tim stared at the man. Then he got up and ran for the radio room.

  When he got there, they were busy. The whole constitution was being sent over the radio, one dot or dash at a time. It was going to take a while. But the initial message that the Kazakh army was coming to their relief, supported by a contingent of infantry from Ufa, was sitting on the desk. It didn’t give their route and Tim couldn’t tell them to sit tight and let the rivers melt. He had spent most of the siege arming and armoring a riverboat so that once the ice melted they would own the river, and the city bastions on the Volga River system would be able to support one another.

  Unless, of course, someone at what was now the Sheremetev Dacha instead of the Gorchakov Dacha thought of doing the same thing. Then it would depend on the quality of the war boats. That was why the whole project was the most closely guarded secret in Kazan. It was about then that his thoughts caught up with themselves. Ufa was three hundred miles from Kazan, and at this time of year it was going to take weeks to slog through the mud. The rivers might still be frozen on their surface, but the land was thawing into mud every day. Long before the armies of Burkin and Ufa met, Tim would be able to act. After that realization, Tim just waited to read the constitution with everyone else.

  Nizhny Novgorod

  April 17, 1637

  The city of Nizhny Novgorod received the news of the new constitution and the alliance—no, not simple alliance—the statehood of the Kazakh Khanate with mixed emotions. Not mixed in the sense that Ivan was of two minds about it or Boris was unsure. No, the problem was that Ivan wanted to cheer and Boris was ready to shit his pants. Fault lines in the city’s political structure had become much more evident in the months since Czar Mikhail had sailed by, waving to the men on the walls. The Sheremetev faction was in charge, but that was because of the supply garrison that General Birkin had placed in Nizhny Novgorod when everyone thought they were going to take Kazan and move on to Ufa.

  Some members of the city council had sent an observer to Ufa in secret. They wanted a seat at the table should the political winds change, and Czar Mikhail was offering seats at the table. On the other hand, they couldn’t acknowledge that they were taking that seat. Not with the Sheremetev supporters in control of the city, with a garrison of several thousand men to support them.

  The garrison was there because Nizhny Novgorod was way too close to the practical border between Old Russia under the director-general and the United Sovereign States of Russia under Czar Mikhail to be comfortable. Also because Birkin had filled the city with enough supplies to support a large army for a year. And the dirigible works just across the river in Bor meant they were a natural target. If Czar Mikhail—who seemed to be getting stronger every day—should decide to take someplace, this would be the place.

  Taking advantage of that garrison, the Sheremetev supporters in the city had held a little reign of terror. They had the power and used it to consolidate their positions and remove their rivals. It had gotten ugly, really ugly, around December. Prominent citizens of Nizhny Novgorod had been executed when they were denounced as “up-timer sympathizers.” There was now a violent Czarist underground that supported Czar Mikhail, mostly as an excuse to kill the people who had killed their friends and family. So Boris, who was in good with Sheremetev, was terrified. And Ivan, who talked about his loyalty to Czar Mikhail, thought he would soon have a chance to gut Boris like a fish.

  Nizhny Novgorod was of two minds all right, but the city was schizophrenic, not thoughtful. And the question on everyone’s lips was: “Why? What possible reason could Salqam-Jangir Khan have for giving up his crown to Czar Mikhail?”

  “It must be the up-timer magic,” claimed Boris, a little desperately.

  “It’s the righteousness of the cause,” Ivan crowed. Quietly, because Boris’ faction was still in charge.

  Army forming outside Ufa

  April 17, 1637

  “Why did you do it?” General Izmailov asked Salqam-Jangir Khan. They were sitting on their horses, watching the army as the junior officers tried to get it into shape to move. It would be a few days.

  Salqam-Jangir Khan looked back and didn’t pretend not to understand. “What did I give up?”

  “Your crown, your sovereignty, even if you did put sovereign in the name.”

  “Don’t underestimate the power of a name. The court whose job it is to interpret the constitution will see first that it is the Sovereign State of Kazakh that is bringing suit against the federal government.” The young man laughed an open, friendly laugh. “Besides, have you examined the state’s rights clauses in the constitution? I have. There are restrictions on my power within the Kazakh lands, but they are not extreme. And, in exchange, I get a major say in the federal government. But that’s not all. I get to make the laws of succession, so the possibility of rebellion from within is greatly diminished. Even should my nobles topple me, they must still face the federal government with its army. My nobles aren’t going to like this new nation nearly so much as I do. But it is, as Bernie Zeppi would say, a done deal. Already signed and sealed. Rebellion against me is rebellion against Czar Mikhail, and that’s not all. When I die, my son, who is now two years old, will be the khan. He will not be supplanted by a cousin because, again, rebellion against him would be rebellion against the federal government. ‘Uneasy lies the head beneath the crown,’ but mine lies a lot less uneasy than it did yesterday.”

  “And when serfs and slaves escape from Kazakh lands to the Cossacks?” Izmailov asked.

  “Then they will escape. How is that any different than it is now?”

  “The taxes? Import duties, export duties, much of your revenue?”

  “That was actually my greatest concern. But while I can’t tax trade with the rest of the USSR, I can tax factories that make things in Kazakh. And there will be more factories as the up-time tech and the New Kazakh Dacha get established. A richer Kazakh. A more secure Kazakh. I know that in that other history, eventually the United States of America became one nation, not a confederation. But who is to say the same thing will happen in this history? And even if it does, by then my granddaughters will be the mothers of the czar.”

  “Did Mikhail…?”

  “No. No promises were made. But why not? Kazakh is the first state of the United Sovereign States of Russia. It’s the Virginia of the USSR, whatever they might claim here in Ufa. Again, General, what have I lost against what I have gained? Consider that when you speak to General Shein.”

  General Izmailov bowed from the saddle. “I will remember all you have said, Great Khan.”

  “Good, then.” Salqam-Jangir Khan waved at the army. “When do you think we will be ready to move?”

  “A week if we’re lucky,” Izmailov said. “And, by then, it’s going to be marching through mud till the end of May. I don’t see any way to relieve Kazan before June.”

  “And General Birkin knows this?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will he do then? He is over a week out of Kazan, and if it will take us till June to get there, it will take him as long to get here. Do we meet him in the open?”

  “Tim recommends that we spend the time fortifying Ufa, but that we use the forest to make gulyay-gorod.”

  “Tim?” Salqam-Jangir Khan’s lips twitched in a smile.

  “Czar Mikhail sent him a radio message yesterday, asking for his recommendations.” General Izmailov tried not to let the resentment at that radio message show. In fact, he tried not to feel resentment. He failed, of course. He knew Tim and he had liked the boy when he was his aide. But sometimes he wished he had used the full Napoleonic technique. Medal, followed by firing squad. It was embar
rassing to take instruction from his twenty-year-old former aide de camp. And that embarrassment wasn’t helped at all by the fact that Tim had, in turn, consulted Ivan Maslov, also twenty. Still the advice was both deferentially worded and good. “Ivan Maslov thinks that the gulyay-gorod are the closest thing we can develop to a tank. And the tank was the technology that prevented trench warfare from dominating World War II like it dominated World War I.”

  “What about the up-timers’ APCs?”

  “Perhaps in a few years. We may even have some next year if we are very, very lucky. But not this year. Tim claims they have some project in the works that will allow them to break the siege, and if Birkin gets here, break that one too. But he won’t put what the project is over the radio, not even in code.”

  Kazan

  April 18, 1637

  General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev looked out at his relief column arriving. He could hear it. The cracking of the ice on the Volga. Spring had come to relieve the siege of Kazan and Tim was ready for the sally.

  He turned back to Abdul Azim, who was still frowning. “It’s going to be all right, Abdul.”

  “The commanding general of the czar’s army shouldn’t be on that boat,” Abdul said. “You have nothing to prove, Tim.”

  “No?” Tim said. “Well, maybe not. But I do need to get to Ufa and talk to Czar Mikhail and General Izmailov. And, believe me, I am a lot more worried about meeting Izmailov than I am about meeting Iakov Petrovich Birkin’s forces.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be,” Abdul said. “I don’t trust your angled walls and the steel is way too thin. Sure, it will stop an AK4 round, but it won’t stop a cannon round.”

  Tim didn’t sigh out loud, but he did lose his smile. United Sovereign States of Russia Ship Kazan, built on the hull of a steam boat that had been trapped in Kazan more by winter ice than the siege, was an experiment. It had slanted oak walls, sheathed in thin steel plates. It had two gun ports that each had a Kazan-made breech-loading cannon behind them, and it had a launch pad for mortar rockets. It had a periscope for sighting and a steam engine for propulsion. It even had a false keel to break up any ice floes they ran into, assuming they weren’t too heavy.

  And from his tower in the Kazan kremlin, Tim had placed the locations of most of the strong points of the besieging army’s fortifications. They could not be hit successfully from Kazan, but from the river, a lot of them were vulnerable. “I have to lead, Abdul. I can’t just order. It’s a matter of morale.”

  “And I say it’s not…” Abdul ran down quickly. “But you’re going to do it anyway, and my daughter Aamira will swoon over your courage and have palpitations over your danger, and I will be the one who has to put up with it.” Abdul paused. “You know, Tim, there are several vital matters that I must discuss with our representative to the constitutional convention.”

  Tim laughed then, full and loud. “Not a chance. If you go, the rest of the council will go, and Fedor will insist on bringing his wife and all three of his daughters and…No. The USSR Ship Kazan would sink just from the weight of the diplomats, who just want to get out of the city for a day.”

  “Hah, I knew it. It has nothing to do with courage or duty. You just want out of tomorrow’s reception.”

  “You’ve found me out, Abdul. But I will miss you while I’m gone.” Tim reached out a hand and grasped Abdul by the forearm, then turned quickly away and headed down the dock to the Kazan.

  Ten minutes later, the Kazan steamed out onto the Volga with Tim looking through the periscope at the army of Iakov Petrovich Birkin and waiting to take the fire that he knew would be coming. He didn’t have to wait long. The rifles started firing almost immediately, and it was like hail on a tin roof. They were fifty feet from the docks before the first of Iakov’s cannon started shooting. And they missed. They weren’t used to shooting at moving targets, and they over led the shots.

  The third shot hit, though, with a booming sound and a cracking of heavy timber. But by now the Kazan was behind the enemy ramparts and Tim ordered the gun port on the starboard side opened. And waited. The gunner watched and adjusted the gun, then fired. The shot missed. Not by much, but it missed. The gun crew started reloading and Tim ordered the gun port closed again. Reloading was fine, but they wouldn’t get another shot at that gun emplacement, not unless they wanted to stop, and they weren’t going to do that.

  In ten more minutes, they were beyond the siege and on the open river. There was still ice on the river, but it was open for miles at a stretch and once they got past the confluence of the Kama and the Volga, it was open all the way to the Caspian Sea. In half a day, they passed General Birkin’s “relief force” and sailed up the Kama River at full steam. The Kama River was a larger river than the Volga, and when the two came together became the Volga. The ice had broken up along the Kama a few days before it had broken up at Kazan. The ice downriver of the Kama had been broken up for two weeks. The siege of Kazan was broken, unless the cousins Birkin could get control of the river.

  Army camp on the Kama River

  General Ivan Vasilevich Birkin looked out at the armored steam boat that chugged up the Kama River and cursed. He didn’t have a radio with his army, but the dispatch riders had reported on the change of sides of the Kazakhs, and they had also carried as yet unconfirmed reports that Colonel Shuvalov was captured or turned over to Czar Mikhail, as well as the rumor that Sheremetev had sent him to recruit the Kazakhs. Nothing of this was confirmed, but the radio men had the information and that meant it would be all over Russia in days. The armored steamboat was just the punctuation at the end of the sentence.

  There was no way that Czar Mikhail was going to be killed in the fighting. It was at this point unlikely that Birkin’s army would get inside the walls around Ufa. And by now even an idiot should be building walls and ramparts about the city.

  A man in a red and gold jacket and white pants climbed out of a hatch on the boat and waved. There was quite a bit of gold braid on the red jacket, enough to indicate that Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev was wearing the new uniform that the ladies of Kazan had made him. He took off his hat and waved it. The hat was fur-lined with ear flaps and a brim like the up-timer “caterpillar” hats and it had some sort of inlay on the bill. Boris Timofeyevich then ducked down into the steamboat before General Birkin could order his riflemen to shoot. Not that he was going to, as tempting as the thought was. He knew what it meant, that steamboat.

  As of today, Czar Mikhail’s forces still held the Volga below Kruglaya Mountain. And as long as that held true, that boat meant no city on the Volga or its navigable tributaries could truly be besieged. It would be next winter before they could move with any real hope of success. That wasn’t all bad. Sheremetev’s forces held the Volga above Kruglaya Mountain, and if they got a blocking force in place, it was unlikely that Mikhail was going to be able to do anything till next winter either.

  The problem was that Birkin wasn’t convinced that time was on their side. The longer Czar Mikhail stayed Czar Mikhail out here in Ufa, the worse things were going to get in Old Russia.

  Birkin said one more unprintable word, then gave the orders that would turn his army around. All the while hating this new sort of warfare that was all shield and no sword, and wishing desperately that he had a radio.

  Tim climbed back down into the bowels of the USSR Kazan laughing, only to be given a hard look by his aide.

  His aide, Vasily Borisovich, was a grizzled captain of the Russian army who had served in Kazan for years before Tim arrived there. He also seemed oh-so-respectfully convinced that Tim couldn’t find his way in out of the rain without a keeper.

  “It’s all right, Vasily. I’ll stay inside where it’s safe,” Tim said. “I just wanted to make a point. General Birkin is a smart man. I knew him before all this, and my uncle has great respect for him. I just wanted to be sure he got the message.”

  “If the general says so. However, I would think that the Kazan was enough to get the message across, i
f anything would be.”

  “Yes, probably. But there was some—I guess you’d call it subtext—that I wanted him to get as well.”

  “What would that be, General?” Vasily sounded curious now and Tim blushed.

  “Well…” Tim hesitated, then blurted. “I wanted him to understand that I would be in Ufa before him, and there wouldn’t be any more screwups like Izmailov’s sally. Best to avoid battle if we can.”

  “How do you win a war if no one can attack?”

  It wasn’t a new question and it had been bothering Tim ever since the battle at Bor. No…ever since his time at the Kremlin academy before the Poles attacked Rzhev. He knew the answer in broad strokes—tactical defense and strategic offense. But the details were harder. You had to be able to break a hole in a line, or breach a city or town’s defenses. And they couldn’t make tanks; neither side could. “I think the gulyay-gorod will be the key, but in spite of Rzhev they haven’t been tested enough for me to be sure. And I am very much afraid that a great many people are going to die while we figure it out.”

  Grantville Section, Moscow

  April 19, 1637

  Boris Ivanovich Petrov read the dispatch from Nizhny Novgorod. The ice was broken up to Kazan. Combined with the new constitution and the Kazakh Khan signing on, it meant that Mikhail was, militarily, about equal to Sheremetev. Weaker if Shein stayed neutral, but actually stronger if Shein decided to join the USSR. That was fatal news for Sheremetev because it meant that the momentum was shifting against him. And that would make his coalition of boyars harder to maintain. In fact, Boris was convinced that the only thing preventing a coup now was the fact that no one knew where Sheremetev was to coup him.