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.”
Father Yulian sighed at the inequities of the world and got back to business. “We have a good blacksmith. If we could get some iron…?”
“What do you have to trade?”
And they were off. The wagon train wasn’t overly well-supplied, but they had done some hunting enroute, so they had some meat. And there was the pony that the raiders had killed. On the other hand, they were in the market for a new pony.
Which, after some serious bargaining, they managed to buy. The local village would send a message to Moscow telling of a pony dying in a raid on the village. Elena’s jewelry box would be a bit lighter. The villagers were in no hurry to take the paper rubles. The Sheremetev faction was using them to pay its debts off, but not taking them when they sold something. In the days since the czar’s flight, the paper rubles were losing value all over Russia.
Izabella looked at her mother, who was sitting in the wagon staring off into space. At Gorki she hadn’t actually done anything to cause a problem, but she hadn’t been very helpful, either. And she was sitting there, with her hair undone, and not wearing any makeup. Izabella didn’t think she had ever seen her mother without makeup in the middle of the day before she had caught Izabella and Yulian in the wagon. She shook her head. “Mama, you have to snap out of this. You were no help in Gorki and if you keep this up, they are going to dump you on the side of the road and let the bandits have you.”
“What difference does it make? They could do no more to me than you have already done, you little strumpet.”
Izabella was tempted to leave her mother on the side of the road herself. Not that the others had actually threatened that, though there had been some grumbling. Everyone worked, even Izabella. And Mama’s job was to provide them with a reason for being on the road. She wasn’t doing it. “Did you ever listen to what Father Yulian said?”
“He said he loved me!”
“He said he loved us all. That it was our duty to love one another, and that the way to reach God was not to suppress our desires, but to sate them so that they wouldn’t interfere. Don’t try to pray when you’re hungry or when you’re horny. It gets in the way of caring for God and your fellow men. That’s what he said.”
That at least got Elena’s attention, in the form of a disgusted look.
“I know. I know. Yulian probably adopted that doctrine because that’s where his dick was leading him. But he never lied about what he was doing. And he never told you you were the only one, I bet.”
“He implied it.”
“You wanted to hear it.” Izabella shook her head. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. These people are desperate, Mama. We’ve lost a child to bandits, and we’re all risking our lives. And you have no right to endanger the rest, just because you’re upset.”
“After your betrayal, you think I owe you?”
“Yes! But never mind that. What about the rest? Stefan and Vera, Makar and Liliya, and the others? Especially the ones who have joined us on the road.”
“They’re serfs!”
“So what? If that means anything, it means you owe them more, not less.”
Nothing was really settled, but Elena did start taking a little better care of herself.
On the Volga, approaching Kazan
July 1636
General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev, known to his friends as Tim, looked out at his army and concluded that an army did not in fact march on its stomach. It slithered on its stomach like a snake. A particularly lazy snake. Not that what Tim commanded could within reason be called an army. Mob was closer. Aside from the core of troops that were Gorchakov retainers, Tim and Ivan Maslov had been picking up odds and sods since they left Bor after Czar Mikhail escaped.
“They aren’t that bad,” Ivan, the baker’s son, said.
“Yes,” Tim said, “they are, Captain.”
Ivan scratched his scraggly red beard in clear consideration. “Yes,” He conceded, “they are. But they aren’t as bad as they were.”
Tim nodded. It was true. The Gorchakov retainers were good troops, well trained, well supplied, and disciplined. To an extent that was rubbing off on the odds and sods. Especially the small contingent from Bor that had come with Ivan. They were soldiers, at least, though a large number of them were more technician than soldier. They were the people who had built the dirigible, Czarina Evdokia, some of them, anyway. Those who had declared for Czar Mikhail.
“We should have burned the dirigible works at Bor,” Marat Davidovich said again.
“We couldn’t. We would have lost half the soldiers who declared for Czar Mikhail and most of the techs. They may be loyal to Czar Mikhail, but they love the airships.”
Tim and Ivan watched as a family passed them on the road, walking beside a wagon. It was the family of a Streltzi from Nizhny Novgorod. After the battle, Tim’s force had gained a good chunk of the garrison, partly out of fear of Sheremetev’s response to their defeat. The Streltzi, a man of about forty, tipped his cap as he went by. Tim nodded encouragement. The Streltzi of Nizhny Novgorod had brought their families because it wasn’t safe to leave them, and the other groups they had picked up on the road had done the same. The camp followers outnumbered the camp by a considerable margin.
On a good day they would make five miles. On a bad day, two…or none. Tim wondered what was happening with Czar Mikhail.
Ufa
July 1636
Bernie looked down at the mirrored surface of the theodolite. It was made in the Dacha and had come on the first of the steamboats to arrive. It didn’t look all that much like an up-time theodolite, but it worked well. Bernie adjusted a knob till the poles became a single pole and looked at the number. Then he waved to the trapper they had recruited to hold the poles for them.
Bernie and Filip Pavlovich were outside the Ufa kremlin, surveying to find the right place to put the dirigible hangar.
“Steamboat coming!”
Bernie and Filip turned as one and looked upriver to see the smoke and steam.
They made their way down toward the docks and were in time to see the steambarge tying up. “Look! That’s Ivan Borisovich,” Filip said.
They trotted the rest of the way to the docks. “Are any more coming?” Bernie shouted.
“I don’t know.” Ivan Borisovich shook his head. “Things were still very confused when we left the Dacha and we were attacked by a steamboat out of Murom. Even if others left, I don’t know if they will make it.”
“Did you lose anyone?” Filip shouted.
“No. We had a couple of wounded, but Vitaly Alexeev managed to save them.”
Ufa was crowded, but that was because Ufa was small. There had been steamboats from Murom following their two and, at Olga’s insistence, most of them had been sent back to the Volga and south to buy supplies. But they had left their passengers, craftsmen and workers from the factories in Murom. Not all of the people from Murom, not even a very large percentage. But around five hundred, when you included families. There had also been individuals and small groups walking into Ufa, but even with the boats from Murom it had been a trickle, not a flood, so this wasn’t good news. They needed workers to build the new Ufa and they, more importantly, need skilled workers and the sort of experts that only existed in the Dacha. Men and women who knew how to make and use the modern equipment. They had only managed to get two Fresno scrapers built.
“I’m surprised that Sheremetev has managed to get a force in place to try and stop you at Murom,” Bernie said as Ivan Borisovich came down the gangplank with several other men and women from the Dacha. Most of them were Natasha’s former serfs, but there were a few professionals like Vitaly Alexeev, as well.
“The service nobility were not happy with Czar Mikhail’s emancipation of the serfs,” Vitaly Alexeev said.
“What about the serfs?” Filip asked.
“We didn’t see much, but it’s only been a couple of weeks since the radio messages went out,” Ivan Borisovich said. “And for most of that time we were on the river, so I don’t know what’s happening away from that. Besides, I’m not sure it was Sheremetev’s people, at least not exactly. They’re siding with him, but I think they were acting on their own. I don’t know. Maybe they called him on the radio for instructions or maybe he called them. But Murom was pretty much in ashes as we went by. From the radio telegraph traffic we picked up, we figure that there was heavy rioting after you guys left.”
“We heard about the riots from the people who followed us,” Bernie said.
“I’m guessing the attack on us was at least partly in response to that. Bor and Nizhny Novgorod paid us no attention. Same with Kazan. We didn’t stop and they didn’t try to stop us.”
“That could be just because they didn’t know where we were from,” Vitaly Alexeev said. “Or because the river was pretty wide around there.”
“So you don’t know what’s going on?”
“Not really. Where is the dirigible?” Ivan Borisovich asked.
“Scouting east right now.” Bernie waved them up the docks. “Until we get a hangar built, it’s going to be safer in operation than on the ground. So Nick is looking for a valley that is deep enough to be out of the wind. Then they are going to try and put a hangar there. Mikhail wants to put a hangar here, but that is at least partly because he wants to build more dirigibles.”
“Can you afford that?” Ivan asked as they approached the end of the docks. Stevedores were unloading the barge from the Dacha. Anya had shown up and waved at them as she passed with Olga Petrovichna in her wake. Anya would get the craftspeople from the Dacha situated.
“No. But you can tell him that,” Bernie said.
“I know we can’t afford it,” Mikhail said to Stanislav Ivanovich. “But we can afford to make a start on it, and we will eventually be able to pay for it.” Then the czar of Russia smiled. It was a friendly, open smile, not nervous or concerned. “Either that or we’ll all be dead. And they can’t collect from a bunch of corpses.”
Stanislav looked at Czar Mikhail and wondered what had happened to the famously timid czar. He wondered if perhaps Bernie Zeppi had truly cast a spell on him. Everyone agreed that the up-timer from the magical city of Grantville was a puissant mage or a witch from the magical town. And who, seeing the mighty dirigible Czarina Evdokia, could doubt the magic? Or, having met the real Czarina Evdokia, doubt that the magic had an effect on people? The czarina seemed to embody the power and majesty of the dirigible in her person. Frankly, she scared him. It never occurred to Stanislav even to consider the possibility that the czar and czarina were the way they were because everything they had was already in the pot and any future risks were meaningless. It didn’t matter, though. Stanislav was not going to argue with either of them. “Whatever you say, Czar Mikhail.”
The czar pointed to a place on the sandtable that would be about a mile from the Ufa kremlin. “We will put it there, and dig a channel up to the entrance so that we can use the steamboats for transshipment.”
It was insane. These were projects that would take thousands of people supported by tens of thousands. More even. Hundreds of thousands. Ufa’s entire population before the dirigible arrived was eleven hundred forty-three people. Half of them were farmers who worked in nearby fields. There were maybe another thousand hunters or trappers who spent a few weeks a year here, selling their furs and drinking the proceeds. The steamboats had added six hundred more people and Olga wasn’t sure how they were going to find the food for even that many extra mouths.
They had set up a radio here in Ufa, but it wasn’t close enough to contact any place but a riverboat that had a radio and was pretty close. Stanislav wondered how the rest of the world was responding to this.