1637_The Volga Rules Page 6

  It had only been ten days since the czar had captured the airship, and no one knew which side most of the service nobility were going to come down on. In the meantime, the Sheremetev faction—which included the regiment’s colonel and Nikita Ivanovich—had been ordered to turn back the escaping serfs.

  So far it was mostly individuals or ad hoc groups. A single serf or a family would run. There was no practical way to drag them individually back to the farms they were supposed to be working. If they were to try, the regiment would be turned into individual soldiers, each escorting an individual serf back home. Instead, they were to terrorize them and run them back.

  Alexander wasn’t sure it would work. He wasn’t even totally sure he wanted it to, because Alexander wasn’t yet sure where he was going to come down.

  On the road northeast of Moscow

  July 1636

  “She’s not going to cooperate,” Vera said flatly, some days after the incident at Father Yulian’s wagon.

  Stefan lifted an eyebrow. “Did you expect her to?”

  “Everyone knows what Father Yulian is,” Vera said. “Expecting him to keep it in his cassock is like expecting sunshine at midnight.” She sighed. “Granted, the fact that Elena caught him with Izabella rather than one of the village women was probably upsetting, but really…after all, Izabella was willing enough to share.”

  Stefan just shook his head. The whole situation was both funny and tragic. But mostly, it was dangerous for the villagers. “We need her. We need her to stand out in front and tell people that we are where we’re supposed to be.”

  “We can use Izabella,” Vera insisted, but Stefan heard the doubt in her voice.

  “Perhaps. But you know it would be better with Elena. Talk to her again, would you?”

  “I told you, she’s not going to cooperate.” But at his look, she nodded. “It won’t work, but I’ll talk to her again.”

  Three days later, they arrived at a small village that had gotten considerably smaller since the stories about Czar Mikhail. “It’s been horrible, miss,” the village headman said, wringing his hat. “Half the farmers have run off and I don’t know how we are going to get the harvest in.”

  It probably won’t matter, Izabella thought. The village, Rogozhi, was part of the pay of the Slavenitsky family, who were deti boyars, clients of the Gorchakovs. So there was a good chance there wasn’t going to be anyone to collect the rents for a while. Then she had second thoughts. If this was happening all over, there were going to be a lot of crops not harvested. And that meant famine. So far, they had done all right, between hunting, gathering, and trading. They had enough to eat, but she didn’t have any idea what was going to happen when they got to the east. She commiserated with the headman and got permission for them to camp next to the village for the night. Her mother was in their wagon, with Vera watching her. Rogozhi was a little village that had moved a couple of times and merged with another village called Bogorodsk, and then separated again. Now there was argument about which village got which name. Nothing unusual. There were a lot of villages, and they lived and died and were reborn and renamed all the time.

  They left early the next morning, and reached the Klyazma River that evening. Across the river was the village of Vokhna.

  Leaving the wagons and most of the people in the forest, Stefan and Father Yulian rode up to the river to find out about the availability of boats, because it would do them no good to decide to use them if they couldn’t find any. They rode up to the edge of the river and waved to get attention. It wasn’t much of a river, more a creek, and looking over it, there were clumps of grass in the creek. After looking around a bit, they pulled up their feet and rode across the creek, which came almost to the bellies of the little Russian steppe ponies they were riding.

  “What brings you here?” asked a man in a cassock, as they rode up the opposite bank.

  “We’re looking for boats to travel downriver,” Father Yulian said forthrightly.

  “We don’t have any for sale, I’m afraid. We do a little fishing and a shallow draft boat can get you to the next village sometimes, but you’re going to have to go downriver a good distance before you can travel on it.”

  They had dinner in the village and got the news, then went back across the river and rejoined the wagon train.

  “Good morning.” Stefan snuggled closer to Vera and moved a hand around to cup a breast. She snuggled closer.

  “Hello in the wagons,” came a voice that Stefan didn’t recognize.

  “You’d better find out what that’s about,” Vera told him and Stefan groaned.

  Stefan tried to snuggle up again and Vera elbowed him in the ribs. It didn’t hurt. Stefan was a big man and Vera was not a big woman, but it did make it clear that the opportunity was gone.

  Still complaining, Stefan crawled out of the bed built into the wagon, and went to see what was going on. There was, about twenty yards from their camp, a farm wagon piled with boxes and barrels and two men, four women, and five children.

  Father Yulian was out of his wagon too, and Elena Utkin was peeking out the curtained window of the wagon she shared with her daughter.

  “What can we do for you?” Father Yulian asked as more people came out to look at the strangers. “Don’t I recognize you from Rogozhi?”

  One of the men nodded. “I’m Maxim Ivanovich, and this is my wife, Anna. We want to come with you.”

  “Is that legal?” Father Yulian asked, not sounding condemning, just curious.

  “Czar Mikhail’s proclamation says it is. Besides, our village is pomestie for the Slavenitsky family and Colonel Nikita Slavenitsky is the commander of the airship. So we are almost obligated to go.”

  Stefan almost wanted to smile, even if these people had ruined his morning.

  “You should be ashamed!” Elena Utkin came storming out of her wagon. “You are tied to the land, not to Nikita Slavenitsky, and you know it. You get back to your village before I have you whipped.”

  Their guests were starting to look frightened.

  “Oh, Mother, shut up!” Izabella came into the center of the camp, and Stefan didn’t see which wagon she was coming from. By now, Vera was out of the wagon and the children were peeking out of the windows. In fact, just about everyone in camp was watching. “You know perfectly well that Papa will kill you if he catches us. We’re all heading for Ufa and it’s pretty clear that— Ah, what was your name again?”

  “Maxim, lady,” said the man differentially. Running or not, they weren’t prepared to beard a noble in her lair.

  “Maxim and his family and, who are you?” She looked at the others.

  “I’m Oleg.” He pointed at one of the women. “This is my wife, Eva, and her sisters, Klara and Kseniya.”

  “Maxim, Oleg and their families want to go with us. And I for one think that if they can pull their own wagon they should be allowed to.”

  That set the pattern. They were joined by at least one or two people at every village they had contact with. People who hadn’t been willing to run on their own, but wanted to go if they had some sort of protection.

  The wagon train followed the river down a few miles before crossing it and heading east again. None of them knew the way to Ufa in any detail, so it was a case of scouting each day and looking for paths that could take the wagons.

  Goritsky Monastery

  July 1636

  Sofia Gorchakovna waved at Marta. Marta had been her maid for years and was—or had been—a serf of the Gorchakov family. Between Natasha and Czar Mikhail, she was now free. But she was in her fifties and was comfortable with Sofia. She made her own way to the monastery to take up her duties, and she was now being paid. Marta came over with the tea service.

  “What does Lev tell you?”

  Marta looked over at Sister Elena and hesitated, but at Sofia’s nod she spoke quietly, giving Sofia a rundown of the recent events in Russia. Lev was a Dacha-trained radioman, and he had strong sympathies for the Gorchakov clan. That
wasn’t at all uncommon. Almost all of the radiotelegraph operators had been trained at the Dacha and most of them had sympathies for the clan. That had come as something of a boon to the ladies of Goritsky Monastery. It gave them better access to the radio.

  Sofia listened to the reports and watched Elena nodding at the interesting bits.

  After dinner, Elena went back to her room. She then sent a note to Ludmila, who had ended up here after a rather torrid affair with a groundskeeper offended her husband. The groundskeeper, with her help, had escaped execution and run off to be a Cossack. Ludmila was a smart woman with a good grasp of the politics of Russia and little respect for them. A network was developing here in the monastery, not exactly secret, but certainly private. Women who knew Russian politics analyzing the events of the day, and trying to make predictions about what it all meant.

  CHAPTER 4

  Raid

  On the Road Again

  Pavel trudged along next to his big sister Irina. Pavel was four and a half and very proud to be trusted to help pull the two-wheeled cart with Irina, who was seven. They pulled the cart every day for an hour or so at a time, then Mama would take over while they rested. Then they would pull some more. This was their third time pulling the wagon today. And though Pavel was proud to be helping, it was boring.

  Suddenly Czar barked. Pavel looked around and tried to see what had the big dog upset.

  “Pavel!” Irina complained. “Watch what you’re doing.”

  Pavel turned his attention back to the cart, but answered, “What’s wrong with Czar Mikhail? He’s pulling a cart too.”

  “Not as big as ours is.” The cart he and Irina were pulling was just under three feet wide at the wheels and by now, twenty days after they left Ruzuka, they were quite good at pulling it. It was heavy, though. There were just over three hundred pounds of household goods on the cart. “How should I know what has the stupid dog up—” Irina stopped speaking as screaming men came out of the woods.

  Pavel looked around, trying to figure out what was going on. Had the colonel’s men caught them? No. These men didn’t look like the soldiers. They were scruffy and though they had knives, and some of them had guns, they weren’t the new guns that the colonel was so proud of. Pavel stopped to look and Irina kept walking and that jerked Pavel off balance. He fell, and that made Irina fall.

  The men came running out and got up to the wagons.

  Irina screamed, “Mommie!” and tried to get up. Pavel was too busy trying to get himself straightened out to scream, but he was whimpering a little. He couldn’t help it, even if he was four.

  One of the men came up to the cart and started pulling stuff out.

  Irina started yelling at him. The man was in trouble now, and he backed away.

  Then one of the other men laughed at him. “What’s the matter? You afraid of a kid?”

  The first man got all red. Then he raised his knife and stabbed Irina. She screamed and fell.

  That pulled Pavel down again. Irina was bleeding all over him and screaming.

  The other man stepped back and the one with the bloody knife waved it at him and said something, but Pavel was never sure what it was.

  Then everyone was running around. Pavel didn’t know what else to do, so he cried.

  Dominika tried to get out of the wagon, but it was hard and she was scared. Then the knife moved. She scrambled out of the wagon and ran to the little cart that the children pulled…and was just in time to watch her little girl die. Dominika wanted to scream. She wanted to run away, she wanted to kill the arrogant little snot who had stabbed her baby girl for no other reason than to prove he could. But she had a little boy who was still alive. She struggled with the harness and tried to get little Pavel loose from the cart. As she did, disjointed thoughts raced through her mind.

  The village of Ruzuka had not been large. It had had eight families of an average of eight people per family. The smith, Stefan, who had planned to run and been so vital to the preparations, along with his wife, Vera and their two children were a small family, generally. Vera’s widowed sister lived with them. That wasn’t unusual. Other families often had additional family members doing the same. The total when they started out was sixty-seven people, including Elena, Izabella, and their servants. Since Rogozhi, they had picked up a few more people every couple of days. Which made this all make even less sense. This was a really big target for a group of mostly poorly armed raiders to take on.

  Unfortunately, several of the men were out scouting for routes that would let them travel through Russia without running into the boyars’ sons and service nobility who were more of a threat. Maybe the few men in the train had made them think it would be easy meat. That would fit with the sort who would stab a little girl who was just trying to protect her family’s goods.

  She pulled Pavel up in her arms and looked around. Now the remaining men and the women were on the attack. They might not be good fighters, her neighbors, but Irina had been murdered. Clearly, rage had washed their fear away.

  Dominika saw the arrow fly into the back of the little bastard who had stabbed Irina, and then she saw Vera running by with a hammer of some sort.

  Vera, two wagons back from them, saw the whole thing. She squirmed into her wagon, looking for something to fight with. The guns were all out with the scouts, but she found Stefan’s hammers. She grabbed one of the smaller ones and one that had something of a point on the back side. Stefan used it to split wood into boards. She grabbed it up and went out the back of the wagon, then she turned and ran toward the murdering bastard who had killed little Irina.

  She was a little late. One of the men from a wagon ahead had a bow. He had gotten it and strung it. The boy was dead when she got there, and the rest of the raiders were running. They had grabbed some stuff and several of the small person-pulled carts, injured two more people, killed Czar Mikhail, the dog that was pulling a small wagon, and a pony. Then they ran back into the woods.

  Camped off the road that night

  “We’ll never find them,” Stefan said looking into the fire. “We don’t know this forest. They do.”

  “How could this have happened?” Dominika asked. She was sitting on a trunk, holding Pavel in her lap.

  “We worried about the nobles and soldiers, not about being attacked by our own people,” Stefan said.

  “We knew better,” Father Yulian added, “…or we should have.”

  “We should have kept a watch,” Stefan said, “and the next place we stop, we need to make some sort of weapons. We have those three chamber-loading AKs that the colonel bought, and I can probably make extra chambers for them.”

  “That will take time,” Father Yulian said. “We need to keep moving while the confusion lasts. You know that Sheremetev will try to stop us. He has to. All the land in the world is worthless without people to work it.”

  “Well, we have to do something about making sure this doesn’t happen again. So what do you suggest?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps we can find an abandoned village and stop for a few days. What can you do in a few days?”

  “Not much. I have some dies that might be useful, but the drop hammer itself was way too big to carry. It would take a couple of weeks to build a new one and that means I’m back to doing it the old-fashioned way. Which I can do, but it takes a lot of time to make each item. Worse, I don’t have any iron and I don’t know where to find ore around here.” There was a place near the village where Stefan had been able to gather bog iron for his smithy and that had worked well enough for most of his needs for the village. For the factory, the factory owner had provided the iron, apparently buying it and having it carted in from the river. Here, even if they found a village with a semi-intact smithy in it, he had no way of knowing where the local smith had gotten his ore to make iron. “We would have to buy iron and, in that case, why not just buy guns?”

  Father Yulian considered. “Find us a village and I’ll talk to the priest, see if we can buy some guns
or at least some swords.”

  Stefan snorted a laugh. “Swords! What use would we have for a sword? Find us axes if you can’t find us guns. At least we know how to handle them.”

  Finding a village didn’t prove particularly difficult. Gorki was on the Klyazma River, which was just a creek at this point, but it helped with the gardens. The village had a dozen households, not including the village priest and a summer house of the local nobility who were, at the moment, in Moscow. Or perhaps…nowhere. They had been associated with the Cherakasky family, who had come out on the bottom in the recent power struggle, so they might well be dead. If so, the village was at least potentially in a great deal of trouble, because they were likely to end up owned by the Sheremetev family. And the Sheremetev family was not known for the gentleness with which they treated their serfs.

  “We were attacked by some raiders yesterday, and madame has decided we need guns,” Father Yulian said, once they were seated with tea.

  “You won’t find them here, I’m afraid. We’ve had over a dozen young men and two families run off, and the only thing keeping the young women here is knowing how dangerous it is for a woman alone in the forest.”

  “What does that have to do with guns?”

  “What we have, we need. And it’s not like we had many to begin with.”

  “What’s the news?”

  “Sheremetev has announced that Czar Mikhail has been enspelled by Bernie Zeppi, who is a demon, and the new patriarch has confirmed it. But the new patriarch is in Sheremetev’s pocket and everyone knows it. Most of the monasteries have refused to acknowledge him. There are rumors that the Poles or the Swedes are getting ready to attack, but I don’t believe them.”