1637_The Volga Rules

by Eric Flint

  “Any of them, surely?”

  Vladimir shook his head. He didn’t want to disagree with this man to whom he owed so much. But Ron had never dealt with a society that truly had slavery, or even serfdom as it was practiced in Russia or Poland. “There is a term Brandy’s mother told me about people who have been incarcerated for long periods of time. ‘Institutionalized.’ Russian serfs have, for the most part, been serfs their whole lives, and their parents were serfs before them. They know no other life and the notion of freedom, of having to decide for themselves, is terrifying to them. That is not always the case, and is probably less common than I would have imagined before the Ring of Fire. But don’t fool yourself. It is much more common than most of you up-timers believe.”

  Ron nodded, but the nod seemed to be dragged out of him. “Yes, you’re probably right. But you do realize that makes the whole institution of serfdom even worse, don’t you? If it’s evil to put chains on someone’s body, how much worse to put chains on their minds?”

  “I don’t disagree, Ron,” Vladimir said, thinking not after years in Grantville. At the same time, he understood much better than Ron Stone ever would how good people raised to believe it could see serfdom as the natural order of the world. “And neither, it seems, does Czar Mikhail.” Vladimir pulled out a sheet of paper. “This is a proclamation by Czar Mikhail. It’s in Russian but it amounts to Russia’s emancipation proclamation.”

  Ron looked at it for just a second and Vladimir passed over another sheet with the proclamation translated into Amideutsch. He didn’t have a version in up-timer English. “I’ve already given copies of the Russian and Amideutsch to the Daily News and the Grantville Times. It will be all over Germany by tomorrow, and all over Europe in a week.”

  Ron had been reading the Amideutsch version while Vladimir was talking. “Isn’t this a bit self-serving? They have to run away east to get their freedom?”

  “Yes, it is,” Vladimir acknowledged. “But it’s no more self-serving than the up-time Lincoln’s ‘Emancipation Proclamation.’ Probably less. And what about my sister? At least I am no longer faced with Jefferson’s quandary, abhorring slavery and serfdom, but still having my own serfs. I no longer have any serfs.”

  Ron looked at him. “How do you feel about that, Vladimir? Honestly.”

  Vladimir found himself smiling. “Poorer. But pleased, actually. Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. Natasha’s life is certainly in danger, and the better part of our fortune is gone. Almost all of it in Russia, if the truth be told. But our sacred honor? That’s doing just fine.”

  “Yes, Prince Vladimir Petrovich Gorchakov, your honor is intact. So let’s see about keeping your sister alive…and perhaps even keeping you from ending up begging on the street.”

  “I don’t see how. The Swedes control the Baltic ports, true enough. But Sheremetev controls the surrounding territory and he controls Archangelsk.”

  “Well, what doesn’t he control?”

  “You mean ports? I honestly don’t know.…Wait. There is one. Or at least, there was one. Mangazeya. On the northern sea route, it was called. A trading city. It got very rich and trade through there was forbidden in 1619, if I remember properly.”

  “Any reason why the people of Mangazeya are going to have warm fuzzy feelings for Czar Mikhail?”

  “Everyone knows that Mikhail had very little power back then. His mother’s relatives, the Saltykov family, had power until Mikhail’s father got back from prison in Poland. Then it was Filaret who had the power. Mikhail is actually fairly popular. Probably everyone in Russia has heard that he cried when told he would be czar. I don’t know the details. My father had some dealings with the merchants of Mangazeya, but he also had dealings with the people that wanted them shut down. Mostly because Mangazeya wasn’t paying taxes, but also they were cutting into the trade of…”

  “So you’re saying that there is a route from some place that Czar Mikhail can control to Hamburg by sea?”

  “I’m saying there might be. But if there is, it’s only going to be good for a couple of months out of the year. And we won’t be able to use it this year.”

  “Do you think your sister and the czar will be able to hold out for a year?”

  Vladimir lost the last of his smile. “I want to think so, but I doubt it.”

  “Let me think about it. Meanwhile, see what you can come up with that we might be able to buy from your people.” Ron Stone pointed at the sheet of paper that held the Emancipation Proclamation of Czar Mikhail. “I want to help. I really do. But there needs to be something profitable in it.”

  Nizhny Novgorod

  July 1636

  The steamboat Danilov was tied up at the dock and its paperwork said it was owned by a merchant from Samara. Which everyone in Nizhny Novgorod knew was nonsense. But it was nonsense that gave them cover, as the men on the boat sold furs and bought grain, cabbage, and beets.

  A few hundred feet away, in a bar just off the docks, Petr Viktorovich sat with the first mate of the steamboat and bargained for a copy of the latest dispatches from the radio-telegraph network. Each radio station was equipped with a typewriter, and Petr was using his as a profitable sideline. Petr set down his wooden mug and tapped the leather bag on the table. “That’s right. It’s transcripts of everything that’s gone through the station in the last week. Even the coded commercial stuff. Not that I have the keys for any of that.”

  “That’s fine,” said the first mate. “What do you want in exchange?” Then he took a drink of the potato beer.

  “Twenty rubles.”

  The beer spewed across the table, and everyone in the bar looked around. Wiping his mouth on an already dirty sleeve, the first mate glared at the radio man. Who had the grace to look at least a little embarrassed. Twenty rubles was enough to buy out a serf’s debt.

  “Don’t get excited. Make a counteroffer?”

  “Two kopecks!”

  So it went. The first mate ended up paying three rubles, and the sniveling little thief of a radioman insisted on real silver. No one was taking paper rubles since the czar ran to Ufa and the printing presses were left in Moscow. No one trusted paper money. That in itself was important news. Loaded with news and food, both of which they had paid too much for, the Danilov headed back to Ufa.

  On the Volga River, between Bor and Cheboksary

  July 1636

  “Look over there,” said the first mate.

  “Well, if it isn’t General Tim and his army,” said the captain.

  “Should we stop and say hello?”

  “Frankly, I’d just as soon wave as we go by,” the captain said. He was a forty-year-old who had been on the river since he was twelve, and didn’t have much use for a teenaged general. But he was loyal to Czar Mikhail and to Princess Natasha so, somewhat disgustedly, he pulled over to the shallows close to the riverbank and used the engine to keep station on the small mob while the baker’s boy, Ivan Maslov, rode out on a pretty fair horse.

  “Is there any place nearby where you can dock, Captain?” asked the redheaded youth.

  “What for?”

  “We have some injured.”

  “We don’t have room.”

  “Captain, I can see that you’re loaded, but surely you can find a place to put four people so that they can get to Ufa and decent medical care.”

  The horse was walking along in the river, keeping pace with the slow-moving riverboat.

  There was a cough from behind him and the captain looked around at his chief engineer, another of the youngsters who seemed to be taking over the world. But it was a reminder that even if he didn’t say anything, Princess Natasha would hear about it. “Oh, very well. Up about half a mile, we can anchor in close and you can bring out your injured.”

  While they were stopped, Ivan got a chance to read most of the unencoded messages that the captain had bought. The army also managed to get a couple of wagon loads of beets.

  After the riverboat was gone, Tim looked over
at Ivan and said, “I think Czar Mikhail made a mistake. Four men injured in falls, no supplies worth mentioning, more camp followers than…”

  “No, he didn’t,” Ivan said. “Look, General…”

  “Call me Tim, for God’s sake,” General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev said.

  “No, General, I don’t think I will,” Ivan said. “I grant that you never learned to be a lieutenant all that well, and you’ve never been a captain or a colonel. But you were in the Kremlin studying to be a general for over two years, then you were a general’s adjutant. It’s true that for the last few months before this you were your cousin’s keeper in Murom, but even there, with your cousin drunk most of the time, you basically ran the city guard.”

  Tim started to interrupt, but Ivan pushed on over him. “You don’t know as much as Shein, but that’s not all bad. A lot of what the old generals know is wrong, or at least outdated by the new weapons. Besides, you have me to advise you and I’m much smarter than you are.”

  That at least brought a smile to Tim’s face.

  “All right, Ivan. Let’s see about getting this—” Tim looked around “I have no words.”

  “Cluster fuck!” Ivan offered. “That’s what Bernie Zeppi would call it.”

  “Fine. Let’s get this cluster fuck moving.”

  Ufa

  July 1636

  “We have a steamboat in from Saratov,” Olga said. “It’s loaded with food stuffs, but they want assurances that the money will be good.”

  “That’s an increasing complaint,” Natasha added. “We have steamboats on the river and we can use them to access the products of the Volga River system as long as we can hold it, but we have to regularize the money supply.”

  “We know there is gold and silver in the Ural Mountains. We even have a decent idea where to look. We can give them gold if that’s what they want, or at least we will be able to.”

  “For as long as we control the river,” Bernie said, looking at the map.

  “Can we hold Kazan?” asked Evdokia.

  Mikhail listened as the discussion wound about him. All his life he had been a quiet person who was surrounded by powerful and forceful people. In a way, he still was. His quiet wife, out from under the protocols and threats of life in Moscow, was blooming into a forceful person. So were Natasha, Anya, Bernie, Filip, and even Olga, now that she had gotten a little used to the invasion by the imperial court of Russia.

  “I’m not sure we could take it in the first place,” said Natasha. “Much less hold it. Besides, it’s on the Volga, and that means Sheremetev would have to take it back.”

  Mikhail looked down at the map on the table as he continued to listen. Kazan was a city on the Volga, a major trading port about forty-five miles north of the confluence of the Volga and the Kama rivers and just about as far east as the Volga went before that confluence.

  “All the more reason to take it and hold it, if we can. If we held it we would control the lower Volga, all the way to the Caspian Sea. If we can hold it through the harvest, we can get enough food up here to make it through the winter.”

  “I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice,” Natasha said with some asperity. “I just don’t see any way we can do it.”

  “Well, I think we should try,” Evdokia insisted. “Mikhail, you’re always talking about how that baker’s boy is such a military genius. Surely he can work out some sort of defense of Kazan that will let us divert enough food to see us through the winter.”

  That was a serious problem. Mikhail looked out the window and saw a great deal of forest, but not much in the way of plowed fields. And if they were to build a manufacturing and political center here in Ufa, they would need food and raw materials. “Ivan is a bright young man and I am greatly impressed by Tim’s decisiveness in difficult situations. Both because of what we saw in Murom and General Shein’s private report to my father on the battle of Rzhev.” Mikhail was referring to Tim’s taking the initiative, even as little more than a military cadet, to order splat guns moved to attack the Poles on the flank. It had been a decisive move and one that had saved the day. But it had not been made public, because to do so would have been detrimental to good order and discipline in the Russian Army. An army that had little enough order and discipline to begin with. That report, along with the fact that he hadn’t had anyone else to appoint at the time, had been a big reason that Mikhail had made Tim a general. “But in spite of Tim’s decisiveness, there are only so many bricks you can make with no straw and darn little mud. I don’t want to lose Tim by asking too much of him.”

  “Leave it up to Tim,” Bernie suggested.

  “You think he’s up to it?” asked Filip Pavlovich Tupikov.

  Bernie looked back at Filip, then turned to look at Mikhail. “Your Majesty, I think that if he’s not up to it, we need to find it out now rather than later.”

  “That’s hard, Bernie,” said Anya.

  “But he’s right,” Mikhail heard himself say. “I may have made a mistake promoting Tim so high so fast. And I admit that I did it simply because I had nothing else to give the boy we were leaving in Bor while we escaped in the dirigible.”

  “He knew that, Your Majesty,” said Anya. “He understood.”

  “He also survived. At least, he has so far. And that makes his rank much more real. It’s not something we can ignore.”

  “Why not?” asked Olga. “I mean, if you…” She trailed off.

  “The illusion of imperial infallibility,” Mikhail said with a foul taste in his mouth. This, as much as anything, was why he didn’t want to be a ruling monarch. “I can punish Tim for failing to live up to my expectations, but I can never admit publicly that the expectations were in error. Especially since, so far, he has lived up to them. He’s alive, the force we left under his command is still intact and has grown to over five hundred men, mostly Streltzi, but some minor nobles. So far, in fact, he’s doing better than we had any right to expect.”

  Filip explained, “If Tim had died at Bor or a day or two later, fighting the Nizhny Novgorod Streltzi or a force sent by Sheremetev, then everyone would have understood that Czar Mikhail had known it was a forlorn hope and given Tim a great honor. Tim would be remembered much as Ivan Susanin is.”

  Not that Mikhail wanted that. He already had the original Ivan Susanin on his conscience and way too many others like him. People he had never met who had died for him or because of his decisions.

  “But now,” Filip was saying, “since Tim won at Bor and pulled a fair chunk of the Nizhny Novgorod Streltzi into his army and has been growing it as he moved south and east along the Volga, it looks like a real appointment. Like Czar Mikhail truly thought that a nineteen-year-old boy was the second coming of Alexander the Great, with the loyalty of Belisarius. If Tim falls it will be tragic, but just one of those things. But if Czar Mikhail demotes him or even just sticks him off in a corner somewhere to age, it will be seen as Czar Mikhail going back on his word. A betrayal of Tim and all the others who might be tempted to come to Czar Mikhail’s colors.”

  Mikhail looked at Olga, expecting to see confusion or perhaps disgust, but what he saw was dawning understanding…and even approval.

  Mikhail still felt like he had when they forced the crown on him when he was seventeen. Like Jesus at the garden of Gethsemane, desperate to have the cup taken from him. Ever since then he had sipped of that dreadful brew as little as possible. Yet here it was, still before him. Over the years since the Ring of Fire and the knowledge of that other history that it brought with it—and especially in the last few weeks as he had run for his life with his wife and children—he had come to accept that the cup could not be taken from him. He would have to drink it to the dregs. Mikhail looked out at the forest again. “Send a message with one of the steamboats. We leave it to General Lebedev’s discretion, but if he feels he can—and for as long as he feels he can—we wish him to take and hold Kazan and deny the lower Volga to Sheremetev.”

  On the Volga, near Kazan


  July 1636

  Tim’s force didn’t have to signal to get the steamboats to stop this time. After reading the message from Czar Mikhail, Tim wished the boats had just gone on by. “Look at this, Ivan.” He handed the message over.

  Ivan read it and said, “Well, he leaves it up to you.”

  Tim turned in his saddle with all the grace that might be expected in a Russian of aristocratic lineage. “That makes me feel so much better. I get to lead these men into what is probably a hopeless defense, or I get to leave the Volga open to Sheremetev all the way to the Caspian Sea and cut us off from our best source of food to last out the winter.”

  “Well, that’s why you’re the general,” Ivan said, with a smug smile.

  For just a second Tim wanted to hit his friend. Then he had a better idea. “That’s right. I am the general, and you are only a captain.” Tim smiled, then waved Marat Davidovich, the commander of Princess Natasha’s guard, over. “Marat, Czar Mikhail has sent us new orders. It’s up to me whether to try and take Kazan and block Sheremetev, but his imperial majesty would really prefer if the food they grow down near the Caspian Sea were to find its way to Ufa to feed all the freed serfs.”

  It was clear from Marat’s expression that he didn’t find this a good plan, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “I’ve decided to send Captain Ivan Kuzmanovich Maslov here to look over the situation in Kazan and advise me of the practicality of taking and holding the city. I was wondering if you thought you could keep him out of trouble while he’s looking around.”

  Marat didn’t say, “Do I have to?” in the whiny tone of a five-year-old told to clean out the chicken coops, but it was clear that he thought it.