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CHAPTER 5

Kazakh


Ufa Kremlin

September 10, 1637

The war room in the Ufa Kremlin had electric lights and phones, but Bernie insisted it was still like something out of an old movie. It had a series of maps on pull-down rods so that they could go in moments from a map of all of Russia from Poland to northern China to a map of the entrenchments around Kazan. The map table was completed but at the moment didn’t have a map on it. And everything was moving in advance of the October rains. Farmers and armies both needed to get things done now before the land turned into freezing mud.

After five days of carrying fuel to Alty-Kuduk, the Princess Anna was back on its main mission, which was to fly around high enough to be out of range of anything on the ground and take pictures. Pictures of troop movements, pictures of the Volga and the Kama rivers and the boats on them, pictures of the fortifications around Bor and Nizhny Novgorod.

Tim was back here in Ufa for the moment, with twenty thousand men, most of them streltzi or peasant volunteers designated Second Army. This was the relieving force for the state of Kazakh. They were forming up and marching out as soon as Tim got them organized to be trained on the march. Not that they were entirely untrained. There were a lot of streltzi and quite a few deti boyar officers. Many had served with him over the winter in Kazan.

And every man jack of the army had an AK4.7 with at least ten chambers, and a new pair of boots. In fact, each man had a complete outfit in green and tan camouflage patterns. The green and tan was a compromise and the staff had almost gone with white. Had, for the great coats that each soldier had to go with their uniforms. The idea was that the green and tan would provide some concealment in summer, and in winter they’d be wearing the great coats anyway.

The factories of Kazan had been busy last winter and this summer, and not just the factories of Kazan. Murom was still turning out steam engines and plows and all sorts of things, and after the riots following Natasha’s freeing of the serfs, they had rebuilt. Not that the Sovereign States got most of its output. Most of its output went to making the Sheremetev clan wealthier, but after a few months of Sheremetev administration, the city’s loyalty had shifted back to the Gorchakov family and quite a lot of its production found its way to Kazan and Ufa. That wasn’t only true of Murom. There were mica capacitors in most of the radios in their radio network and pretty much all of them came from the mica mines in northwest Russia. There was a great deal of wealth flowing into the Sovereign States from Muscovite Russia and a lot of the soldiers in the Second Army, who had never owned a new outfit in their lives before they joined the army, were now well clothed. Even more of them had never owned the good canvas boots that the army issued.

Morale, according to Tim, was at dangerously high levels.

Mikhail’s morale wasn’t nearly so high. With the news from Kazan about Birkin’s secret orders and word from the radio network that Shein was shifting troops south away from Verkhoturye, it was starting to look like Uncle Ivan was planning a northern strategy and Shein was playing right into it. If Ivan Romanov could take Shein’s Siberian state while the United Sovereign States of Russia was busy fighting the Zunghars in east Kazakh, then he might well be Czar Ivan Romanov of Northern Russia by spring of next year. Yet Mikhail had to defend Kazakh.

Mikhail walked over to the map of Kazakh and touched a spot on the map. Vladimir should be just about there.


In the air, over the Syr Darya River

September 10, 1637

The radio crackled. “Scout One to Big Mama.”

Vlad grinned. “Cut it out, Brandy.”

The radio in the Scout plane was loosely modeled on up-time ham rigs, but only loosely. In spite of the need for it to fly, they’d focused on sturdy over lightweight. The darn thing weighed thirty pounds when you included the battery, which also powered some other instruments. The radio on the Nicky was even heavier, but it was also tunable and could be used to direction-find if there were two known radio sources on the ground. Which there weren’t, this far from “civilization.” They’d been flying by a combination of compass and landmarks for about three hours.

The Scout’s airspeed was seventy-two MPH and they’d picked up a southwest head wind of about fifteen MPH. What that meant was the two planes weren’t going exactly the way they were pointed at their proper cruising speed. In this case, to travel at 123 degrees southeast, they were actually on a heading of 112 degrees southeast and their ground speed was closer to sixty-eight MPH.

“The Scout’s getting a bit hungry. We need to set down so Big Mama can feed her.”

At this point, and pretty much all the way from the Aral Sea, the Syr Darya had been a broad winding river with plenty of room for the two planes to land.

Ariq Ogedei pointed to the southeast, a fairly straight section. And Vlad nodded. “Okay, hon. Follow us down and we’ll feed the baby bird.”

Ariq Ogedei was acting as navigator because he knew the terrain. Well, knew it from the ground. From the air was a whole different story. But they were using the complex workaround that had been worked out by the designers of the Jupiter series back in Amsterdam. And, by now, after several trips back and forth from Ufa to Alty-Kuduk and back to ferry fuel, Ariq had the routine down, and was doing a decent job of mapping their route. There were lists of landmarks and distances to tell future pilots where they were, as long as they were in the area where the Nicky had flown.

“Bringing engine speed down,” Vlad announced before he decreased the thrust on the props gradually. That was to warn Vasilii of what was going on so that Vasilii could shift steam pressure to other systems as it was pulled from the steam turbines that were the Nicky’s four main engines. Right now, he fed the excess steam into the generator.

“Deploying skirt,” Vlad continued and flipped the toggle that loosened the straps that pulled the air cushion skirt up tight against the Nicky’s short, broad lower wings. Then he started the fans that would force air into the skirts to expand them. Unlike an inflated tire, the Nicky’s skirts didn’t have to actually hold pressure. They were designed to leak and were more about directing the airflow than containing it.

“Flaps at fifteen,” Vlad continued as they neared the river. No one really needed to know that but him, but Vlad had been drilled and announced his actions on landing, takeoff, or maneuvers as a matter of course. He was also teaching Vasilii, Miroslava, and Ariq how to fly, which made stating his actions a part of teaching them what to do.

Vasilii was okay as a pilot, and Ariq was quite good, but Miroslava simply couldn’t relax. Vlad liked the woman, but sometimes her condition made him uncomfortable. The thing about flying is there were times you had to be on—takeoff, landing, in-flight emergency—but most of the time it was just dull. Much duller than, say, driving a car. Especially in this time, when there generally were no other planes in the sky, or as now, just one that was flying with you. Miroslava was in emergency mode from sitting in the seat to exiting it and you couldn’t fly that way, not for any extended period of time. You needed to be able to turn it down to a state of relaxed readiness and Miroslava wasn’t relaxed at all.

They got down and switched Ariq and Yury to give Ariq stick time and Yury practice on the Nicky navigating. Ivan Maslov took the navigator’s seat for the next leg.

Thirty minutes later, the Scout fueled and crews having had a break, they were back in the air. And five minutes after that they got a radio message that wasn’t from Brandy. They had caught the khan.

“Salqam-Jangir Khan to aircraft. Come in. Over.”

“That’s Salqam-Jangir Khan’s voice,” Vasilii said.

“I recognized it,” Vlad said.

“This is the Nastas’ya Nikulichna en route to Shavgar. Over.”

“Can you land?” A short pause. “Over.”

“Where are you?” Vladimir asked. “Or where are we relative to you, direction and distance? Over.” Though the radios used different frequencies to transmit and receive, if both were transmitting at once you could get a feedback loop that would blow your ears off. So best practice was the old “over and out” system.

“You are south-southeast of us, and I’m not sure how far out. At least miles.” Another pause. Vlad clicked the transmit button to remind the khan, then, “Over.”

“Wait one. Will be talking with the Scout accompanying us and will call you back. Out.”

“Brandy, you get all that? Over.”

“I copied, Vlad. Slow left turn till we’re pointing their direction. Over.” And without waiting for Vlad to agree, the Scout banked into a left turn until it was pointing north-northwest. Vlad followed suit and they saw the troop of horsemen in the distance. The troop of horsemen didn’t, at this distance, look all that different from a herd of horses. Or, for that matter, a herd of cattle. And the flight had flown over any number of those on their trip.

Just minutes later, they landed on a wide plain filled with scrub grass. The Scout scared the horses. Its engine was louder than all the props of the Nicky. It took a few minutes for the horses to be settled. Then Salqam-Jangir Khan examined the Nicky .

After inspecting the plane, Salqam-Jangir Khan wanted them to take him and twenty of his troops with them to Shavgar. “I know it will be crowded, but the men can stand.”

“It’s not the room. It’s the weight, Salqam-Jangir Khan,” Vasilii said before Vladimir had to, and Vladimir was reminded that Vasilii and Miroslava were both nobles of the state of Kazakh and knew Salqam-Jangir Khan better than Vlad did.

“Well, how many can you carry?”

“Considering the fuel and equipment we’re taking, you and two others.” That would make a total of seven on a plane that was designed for sixteen, including twelve passengers and four crew. But the Nicky was loaded down with extra fuel and a deaeration unit, so that they could deaerate river water to top up their water tanks as needed. The steam system leaked. Not a tremendous amount, but more than the design had allowed for. Enough so that they needed to add water after every flight.

“Very well. Togym, you and Aidar Karimov will come with me. On Vasilii’s mythical airplane.” The khan grinned at the older sultan. Aidar had proclaimed that there were no such thing as airplanes the last time he and Vasilii had spoken about it.

“Why is the bottom wing shaped like that?” Sultan Karimov asked in quite good, if accented, Russian. “I sort of understand the shape of the upper wing. It’s a bit like a soaring eagle drawn by a child, but the lower wing is strange.”

“This is copied from the design of the Model Five Jupiter,” Vladimir told him. “The lower wing is essentially a flarecraft wing.”

Which produced nothing but a look of incomprehension on the face of both sultans and the khan.

“I’m not an aircraft designer and Vasilii could probably explain it better, or at least more accurately. But, in effect, the upper wing is for flying and the lower wing is for landing.” Vlad looked at Vasilii’s expression and laughed. Because it was clear that Vasilii found his explanation lacking. “There was, up-time in the future that my wife came from, a kind of aircraft called a flarecraft, because it operated on something called the flare effect, which happens when a plane gets close to the ground. The flare effect allows a plane to use less energy to fly if it’s very close to the ground.” Vasilii was still looking at him like he was the slowest kid in math class, but Vladimir didn’t care. “The flare effect lets a plane get more lift out of shorter wings and, in this case, that’s expanded to give the air cushion more area.”

“And why is it important that the air cushion have more area?”

“The more area, the less pressure you need. So the slower you can be going when you take off and land.”

“Don’t let him fool you, Salqam-Jangir Khan,” Brandy said. “Vladimir is a technical semi-literate.” She shrugged. “So am I, truth be told. But we’re decent pilots, and Vladimir is quite a good spy.”

“You admit he’s here to spy on us?” Sultan Karimov demanded.

“No. As it happens, I’m mostly here to spy for you,” Vladimir said. “And to help with that, we have with us Yury Arsenyev and Ariq Ogedei. For military advice, we have Brigadier General Ivan Maslov.” He waved at the young redheaded man with the short red goatee. “Between us and the planes, we will be trying to locate the Zunghar forces for you and help you get in position to mousetrap them.” Then Vlad had to explain mousetraps, which Salqam-Jangir Khan agreed might be of great use in cities.

Finally, they got the khan and the two sultans onto the plane and up in the air. At which point Sultan Karimov discovered that he loved to fly. Togym agreed that it was an interesting view out the windows and certainly faster than the fastest horse, but was otherwise not that impressed. The khan, too, could take it or leave it.

For most of the rest of the flight, Togym, Ivan, and the khan were discussing the military situation and the use of maps with movable tokens on them in keeping track of military situations. Now all they had to do was land safely.


Shavgar, outside the walls

September 10, 1637

As the Nicky and the Scout circled the city before landing, Brandy saw that it was walled and about the size of Magdeburg’s Altstadt and Neustadt combined, i.e., quite a bit smaller than Greater Magdeburg. And on either side of it up- and downriver there were large rich green and brown fields.

After a circle around the city, Vlad radioed and told her to follow him down. Then he landed on the river and taxied up onto the bank of the Syr Darya, just downriver of the city wall. Brandy waited until the Nicky was down, then followed and pulled up next to the larger plane.

As she cut her engines, Salqam-Jangir Khan was stepping out onto the lower wing of the Nicky and waving at the crowd that had gathered. He called some names, and men in dress that was more Arabic than Kazakh came forward. Their clothing was more cotton than wool, with little fur.

But they came equipped with swords and armor. With a few quick phrases, Salqam-Jangir Khan put guards around the two planes. They had outrun their fuel. It was still on the river, though it had left before they had. They weren’t empty, but they didn’t have enough gasoline to send the Scout home. Brandy and Yury climbed from the Scout and went over to the Nicky, where they were blocked by the city guards until Salqam-Jangir Khan spoke again, at which point they were let through.

Then, in a combination of Kazakh and Arabic, Salqam-Jangir Khan made a speech. He talked about the constitutional convention, his agreement for Kazakh to become a state in the United Sovereign States of Russia, the rights of citizens, even slaves, to vote and be equal before the law. And especially he talked about Brandy Bates, now Brandy Bates Gorchakov, who was an actual up-timer, a woman who along with her fellows in the town of Grantville had been moved from the future and the other side of the world to central Germany. Final incontestable proof that the Ring of Fire had happened.

The response was subdued. Brandy was getting many less than friendly looks from parts of the crowd. The crowd was mostly, but not entirely, male. The western Kazakhs that she’d met before now were different than this crowd. The women among the herders were out and about with the men, but this was a city, and a Muslim city. While there were some women in the crowd, it was mostly men. And a number of them didn’t much care for Brandy Bates up-timer, that was for sure.

✧ ✧ ✧

Erzhan watched the people come out of the plane and he was furious. Erzhan was not a fool to believe in djinn or fabled folk from the future, and he’d said so, and continued to say so even as the evidence of strange things in the west mounted. Yes, he had his doubts as word of the so-called up-timer Bernie Zeppi and his miracles in Moscow grew. He was sure that at least most of the tales had to be spread by charlatans using the legends to sell snake oil to the unwary.

They had to be.

There was no Ring of Fire, so there couldn’t be up-timers and people couldn’t fly. The stories of flying whales and the like, were nothing but tales told by the gullible, repeating and expanding on what others told them. He’d been telling people that for years.

And now, right out there in the field next to the town, were two airplanes. They weren’t the flying whales that the legend talked about, but they had flown in, landed on the river, and then moved onto the field.

That had brought the whole town out to see. Then the khan had gotten out, and, standing on the platform that was part of the plane, he made a speech harping on this woman who was supposedly an actual up-timer.

“No one can doubt now.”

Erzhan snorted. He could doubt now. Erzhan wasn’t a rural bumpkin herding his cattle between grazing lands. He was a wealthy landowner who grew cotton, wheat, and rye. And his enterprises used quite a lot of slaves. Unlike others, he wasn’t one to run off to the hinterlands because the boy khan believed Russian liars about a new kind of musket. And now here was the boy khan stepping out of a flying machine before the whole city and insisting that this proved that the Ring of Fire happened.

Well, it didn’t.

It was just a trick that someone had come up with in the west. They probably stole it from China. That was where the west got most of its innovations. Gunpowder, clocks, who knows what. In fact, now that he thought about it, there had been some Chinese scholar who had made himself some wings and jumped off a building. He died, but a bit of practice, and who knows? But it was just a trick, not proof that Allah had actually transported a town full of Christian heretics from the future.

If Allah were to do such a thing, it would be a Muslim town, not Christian.

✧ ✧ ✧

After the speech, they were taken into the town and given rooms in the khan’s palace. Brandy and Miroslava, but not Vlad and Vasilii, were introduced to the khan’s wives, Damira, Evnika, and Lunara, and son Bahadur. Bahadur was a cute two-year-old. Damira was senior and about five years older than the khan. Evnika was insistent that she learn to fly, and Lunara wanted to know how paper money worked and how it could be introduced into Kazakh.

The harem wasn’t a cage. At least, Damira, Evnika, and Lunara didn’t see it as such. They saw it as a protection against the dangers of the outside world. And Brandy had to acknowledge that those dangers did exist. But the price was too high. She preferred the option of facing those dangers on her own.


Shavgar market

September 11, 1637

The capital of the state of Kazakh was a city. Brandy had noticed it yesterday, flying over the place. It was even more evident now, as she, Damira, and a small army of guards wandered the market stalls. This was a new thing for Damira. Based on what he’d seen in Ufa and on the practices of the herder Kazakhs, Salqam-Jangir Khan was leading by example, and with appropriate guards was allowing his wives to leave the harem. Damira had, as senior wife, insisted that she be first.

“Timur the Lame,” Damira explained, “rebuilt Shavgar as one of his northern outposts of ‘civilization.’”

They were on a paved plaza with a stone-lined pool in the center. The pool was kept filled by slaves with buckets and, in turn, emptied by other slaves with buckets who took the water to homes and stalls, and used it for washing or making tea. Alcohol wasn’t completely unavailable in Shavgar, but it wasn’t as common here as it was among the more tribal Kazakhs to the north and west. The new state of Kazakh was large and diverse. Much more diverse than Brandy had imagined.

Damira pointed out the ornate tomb of an Islamic scholar from a century ago and some madrasas, and Brandy noted that much of the construction of the city was stone, including a fair amount of marble.

From the flight in yesterday, Brandy knew that the city was surrounded not by open plains holding cattle herds, but by farmland growing rice and wheat and an amount of cotton, as well as other crops. And this city had slavery, out-and-out slavery, and a lot of it.

Kazakh was huge. And it wasn’t all one sort of place. Yes, it had the herders who traveled with herds from grazing land to grazing land, where the women were often riding the herds right along with the men, but it also had this place and the surrounding farms which were, when it came right down to it, plantations not that different from the ones in the antebellum south. And Brandy realized that the same thing was almost certainly true back up-time in places like Texas and California, part one thing and part something else. She snorted a laugh, realizing that the same thing was true in Virginia at the time of the Civil War, or there wouldn’t be a West Virginia.

The market square they were visiting was full of shops and the shops full of craftsmen and women.

That morning early, the muezzin had called the faithful to prayer. And it was clear from the looks she was getting that the arrival of the Nicky and the Scout had hit the town like an earthquake.

“In spite of the innovations that had seeped through to us,” Damira explained, “and in spite of the Jahangir making the deal with your Czar Mikhail, about two thirds of the people of Shavgar don’t believe the Ring of Fire actually happened. At least they didn’t before yesterday. Before yesterday, I was one of the ones that didn’t believe.

“It was a legend, a tale of far-off lands to fool the gullible. ‘Allah wouldn’t do such a thing, and he certainly wouldn’t do it in Christian lands’ is the opinion of most of the scholars and religious leaders in Shavgar.”

“They don’t seem happy to see us,” Brandy noted as someone made a warding gesture at her. Word that Brandy was an actual up-timer was out and in spite of the airplanes, a fair percentage of the mullahs were insisting that the Ring of Fire was a lie, and Brandy was a fraud.

“They’re embarrassed,” Damira said. “And they’re too stubborn to admit they’re wrong. Some never will and will insist that you are a liar until their last breath.”

“Will they believe our reports on the placement of enemy forces?” Brandy asked.

“Jangir will, and that’s what matters,” Damira reassured her. Damira liked the khan in a sort of big-sisterly way. She was older than him and remembered his early fumbling, but was very proud of what he had accomplished. Especially now. Jangir’s son was her child, and would be khan after him, not replaced by the son of one of his other wives when they had them. That took a lot of the pressure off her, and made her position a lot safer.

There were silks from China in the marketplace. Shavgar was actually a stop on the Silk Road, and the road hadn’t closed when Henry the Navigator had passed the Cape of Good Hope. It was still operational, even if by now it had shrunk to a back road of commerce.

“Tell me about the railroad,” Damira demanded.

Brandy tried. They talked about the route and the use of the river and the steam-powered riverboats. And while they talked, the guards and people listened. And the notion that Shavgar might again be a stop on the restored Silk Road flowed out from their conversation to the town.

✧ ✧ ✧

While Brandy and Damira were spreading the word about the economic boom that was about to happen, Jangir, Vladimir and Ivan Maslov were discussing the military disaster that had already started.

“Grantville didn’t have a complete history. The Zunghar weren’t even mentioned, not in the 1911 Britannica or any of the others. At least, I didn’t find them. Who are they?” Vladimir asked.

“They are four tribes who have joined together under Khara Khula, who died three years ago. His son, Erdeni Batur, took over, but at first his rulership was weak. He wasn’t his father. Like me, he’s young. He needs victories to prove to the other tribal leaders that he can lead them to greatness. We are all descendants of the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan, and several of the Zunghar tribes are led by literal descendants of Genghis Khan.” Salqam-Jangir Khan laughed. “Martial tradition doesn’t cover it. Half the tribal leaders believe that they are the natural heirs to Genghis Khan, and Erdeni Batur isn’t an heir to Genghis Khan, at least not on the right side of the blanket. But that doesn’t make him weaker, not exactly. It makes his rule more fragile, but what will shatter it is a lack of victories more than defeat. Even Genghis Khan lost battles.”

“I know he lost the Battle of Samara Bend to our Bulgarian ancestors,” Ivan Maslov agreed. “But he still took Bulgaria and Russia. That’s something he had in common with Tim. He understood that a battle is just a battle, not the war.”

“I thought your General Tim never lost.” Togym grinned.

“Most of Russia thought Tim had ‘lost’ while Birkin had Kazan invested last year,” Ivan said. “But we all saw how that turned out.”

“So Erdeni Batur can afford tactical losses, but what he can’t afford is to be seen as too cautious,” Vladimir said. “Do you think that’s why he hit Almaliq?”

“No. He hit Almaliq because it’s a rich prize with a lot of loot and it puts him in place to take Almaty, which is a stop on the Silk Road, and which the railroad would make much more valuable than it is right now. I don’t think Erdeni Batur knows what he’d have if he took and held Almaty, but he’d learn about it.”

The khan, using his finger, drew a line on a map that went from central China to the Aral Sea. It passed through Almaliq and Shavgar. “The amount of wealth that will fall off the steamboats on that route will be phenomenal. Not soon, but we could, with the trains, steamboats, and airplanes, compete with the trade around the Cape of Good Hope.

“We have to protect Almaliq,” the khan finished, looking at Ivan. “Have to!”


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