1636 The Kremlin Games (49 page)

“I wish my friend Ivan were here. He’s better at this than I am,” Tim said. “He’s stationed at Bor where they’re building the dirigibles.”

“Then we’ll be seeing him fairly soon,” Czar Mikhail said. “As I said, it is our intent to take possession of the
Czarina Evdokia
.”

“Well, then he will be able to help us. But what do we tell the people here?”

“Send them to Ufa, those who aren’t going with us. There’s a fort there, built by Ivan the Terrible in 1574 and a town that grew up around it. It may not be where we end up, but it’s a place to gather,” the czar said. “The steam barges can get there I know, because I took one to see it last year.”

“Which means that Sheremetev can load an army on steamboats and take it there,” Czarina Evdokia said.

“There is that, but I think we must take the chance,” Czar Mikhail said. “Perhaps Tim’s clever friend, the baker’s son, will have a better option.”

Tim just listened as much as anything, shocked by the fact that the czar knew who Ivan was.

*     *     *

Natasha left them to work out the details and called for her factor, who was supposed to have been managing this part of her family estates.

“So, Pavel.”

“Princess.” Pavel looked uneasy, as well he should.

“You turned my estate over to the Sheremetevs. I’d like to know why. Did they pay you?”

“Your Highness, they had all the proper forms endorsed by the
Boyar Duma
. To disobey would have been treason. They threatened me,” Pavel said. “And my family. What was I to do? Your brother has been gone from Russia for years and . . .”

Pavel hesitated and Natasha thought that he was about to complain about her not taking a husband to manage the family’s wealth properly. It was a complaint he had made before, several times. Pavel was a very capable man who had been quick to adopt the innovations and new industries made possible by the Dacha, which was why he still had the job despite Natasha’s annoyance at his attitude.

But instead he just said, “You were out of touch. And the work must go on. I had no instructions to the contrary.”

“Very well. Give me a report on what has been happening since we last talked,” Natasha said.

It was a long report and much of it wasn’t very pleasant hearing. Many of the reforms that she had made under the influence of Bernie, and increasingly the influence of Anya, Filip and Father Kiril, had been reversed. The bonuses for good work and good ideas, the improved working conditions and pay, had been stopped and some of them had even been backtracked, treated as though they were loans, not payment, making greater debt that the serfs owed her. Then there was the diversions of funds, prices much too high paid to the Sheremetev clan for too little goods of too little quality and goods produced here sold to Sheremetev connections for kopeck’s on the ruble. “Director-General” Sheremetev and his greedy family hadn’t chopped off the head of the golden goose, but they were halfway to strangling the poor bird in trying to squeeze extra eggs from it.

As she listened she was forced to a realization. She couldn’t save it. The industrial base that she had been working to build here wasn’t something she could defend from Sheremetev. Even the estates and lands that had been her family’s for generations would be lost, at least temporarily, and the knowledge of that loss almost ripped the heart out of her. At the same time, this was strangely liberating. The family lands were gone, the serfs and other workers who made those lands productive would not be owned by her family, no matter what she did. The only question was who would get them. When it finally came, the decision to free her serfs from their ties to the land was easy. Better they should belong to themselves than Sheremetev, much better.

“Very well,” Natasha said. “There is a proclamation I must make and legal documents that I need drawn up.”

When the nature of those legal documents was made clear to him, Pavel had a fit. He explained that Natasha was a spoiled little girl and that no man would be so foolish, not even her idiot of a brother who married a peasant. He was, in fact, so angry that his thoughts about the innovations, at least the nontechnical innovations came boiling out. That she was wasting her family’s heritage was clear. That the peasants that she showered useless and expensive gifts on would work harder with a touch of the lash instead. Natasha was tempted to give Pavel a touch of the lash, but she restrained herself. She needed to hear this. She especially needed to hear who else among her factors and agents felt this way.

So she listened meekly, like a school girl taking her deserved scolding. And Pavel, in his anger and desperation, poured out quite a bit she needed to know.

Then she had him arrested.

Another clerk was called and the proclamations were drawn up. All the serfs on all the Gorchakov lands had all their debts to the Gorchakov family forgiven. They were, if they chose to be, released from their bonds to the land and were asked to join Natasha in the east where they would build together a new land of free people. Those who chose to stay on her lands were welcome to do so, but should be warned that those who would likely seize her lands were less likely to respect her decrees in regards to the serf’s debts. Having had her documents written up, she took them off to be examined by the czar.

*     *     *

Meanwhile, the clerk who had taken down the documents took himself off to repeat their contents to anyone who would listen.

*     *     *

The czar, the czarina, and his ad hoc
Duma
of Bernie, Anya, Filip, Kiril, and Tim, listened to her plan with varying degrees of shock. Tim was flabbergasted and honestly thought it was a horrible idea. Not without reason. The serfs would run, some to the east following Natasha sure enough, but others into banditry among the Cossacks. And as word spread of what she had done, other serfs would run, hoping to hide among hers. The nation would collapse. Anarchy would rule and Russia would burn.

“Perhaps,” said Filip. “In fact, I suspect you’re quite right. But it won’t be better for waiting. Serfdom eats at Russia like a tape worm, sapping the nation’s strength and killing its greatness unborn. And the longer we wait before seizing freedom, the less we will know how to handle it when we finally gain it.”

He smiled, then. “If nothing else, Your Majesty, you can form a legitimate Cossack state.” Filip waved his hand toward the east. “Somewhere out there.”

Mikhail Romanov looked like he’d eaten something profoundly distasteful. Cossacks were outlaws, bandits, renegades.

On the other hand . . .

*     *     *

The czarina, it turned out, agreed with Natasha and Filip. So, that possible obstacle eliminated, the czar cosigned and endorsed her proclamation and did her one better. He invited all the Russians who would be free to join them in the east at the fortress at Ufa. Then, for almost the first time in his tenure as czar, Mikhail made a speech. In the speech he didn’t command, didn’t even implore, but simply offered. “Come with me to the east and freedom,” Mikhail said. “Come with me if you dare. Take every steam engine you can find and put it on anything that will float and follow me to Ufa. Help me build a Russia free of serfdom.”

It wasn’t a great speech. But it was the best Mikhail could do on the spur of the moment. Then they loaded up all the troops they could on the two steam barges that happened to be in town and headed for Bor.

Chapter 80

“We forgot to destroy the radio,” Anya said as the barge was steaming down the Oka toward the Volga and Bor.

“You can’t think of everything. It was pretty wild in Murom when we left. It was looking like war was going to break out between those who wanted to follow us and those who didn’t want to lose their homes and their businesses.”

“Besides, Sheremetev knows we didn’t try to go west, so he’ll be coming after us and there aren’t a lot of directions we can go on the river. If we ain’t going upriver, we’re going downriver.”

*     *     *

“Sir, sir! We need help!”

Captain Ivan Borisovich Lebedev struggled out of his drink-sodden daze, trying to understand what this idiot was talking about. “What? Let Tim handle it.”

“But he’s not here. He left with Czar Mikhail and all those people. And we’ve got fires in the city! There’s fighting.”

“Fighting about what? And why aren’t the
Streltzi
doing anything about it?”

“But the
Streltzi
are gone. Most of them.”

“Is anybody still here?”

“Well, you are.”

And that’s when it finally penetrated. Ivan Borisovich Lebedev was in charge. Really, honestly, in charge. The thing he had tried to avoid his entire life had come upon him. He needed instructions. There was no one here to give them. That’s when Ivan thought of the radio room.

Half an hour later, in the radio room, still hungover, with a half-dozen of what passed for the “leading figures” of Murom, all of them shouting at him to do something, Ivan told the radio man, “Just report to Moscow what has happened here.”

The key started tapping. The locals kept yapping. And Ivan’s head kept pounding.

“One at a time! You, what’s your complaint?” Ivan said to a short, balding man with a pot-belly.

“The servants raided my shop and ran off! I want my goods back. And my servants back! What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to have you thrown in the cells if you don’t quiet down. Were these your servants?”

“I was renting them,” pot-belly said. “From the Gorchakov clan.”

“So these are some of the serfs that Princess Natalia . . . oh, my head . . . that Princess Natalia freed or whatever. What was all that about?”

An older man with graying hair said, “Yes, they were. About half the work force in this town were serfs of the Gorchakov clan that were shipped in from their estates to work in the various shops.”

“So, basically, they had a perfect right to leave,” Ivan pointed out.

“Of course not. We had a contract. The Gorchakov factor signed it.”

About this time there was an explosion outside. Ivan went to the window and looked out on a small town in flames. “We’ve got bigger problems than missing serfs.” He turned back to the radio operator. “What does Moscow have to say?”

The operator shrugged. “The message probably hasn’t even gotten there yet. It has to go through seven stations to get there.”

*     *     *

Back in Moscow, Director-General Sheremetev was having his own problems. He had orders out to arrest Princess Natalia and Bernie for treason, and, thanks to the new patriarch, heresy. However, even four years after the up-timer’s arrival, a single station going off line could stop the word from going out. Some of the steam barges and boats on the river system had spark gap transmitters or crystal receivers, but not all of them. Not even most of them. Which meant he had no idea where they had gone once they left Murom. And he was beginning to wonder if they had gone after the czar. Meanwhile, he hadn’t heard anything from Murom in the last few hours and they weren’t answering their radio.

Murom was over two hundred miles from Moscow by road and almost four hundred by riverboat. Cavalry would take at least four days, more probably a week, to get there. Riverboats would be faster but would leave them stuck on the river once they got to Murom. Meanwhile, the Gorchakov girl was running around Russia, spreading disaffection.

*     *     *

“Meanwhile,” Colonel Shuvalov suggested, “we should order the Nizhny Novgorod
Streltzi
to arrest Princess Natalia and the up-timer.”

“Are they dependable?” Sheremetev asked.

“I don’t know,” Shuvalov admitted. “I don’t know who the commander of the local
Streltzi
is and we haven’t appointed a political officer to Nizhny Novgorod yet. We should have, but we’ve been stretched very thin. We have one in Bor just across the river, but that’s because of the dirigibles. There may be some loyalty to the Gorchakov clan since the industry that is developing there comes in large part from the Dacha. How much loyalty that will buy is anyone’s guess.”

“Well, find out who is in command of the
Streltzi
there. That should tell us something.”

It took Colonel Shuvalov a few minutes to find out and it turned out that the
Streltzi
commander at Nizhny Novgorod was a bureau man, not a
deti boyar
. Just a bureaucrat trying to keep his head down.

“Send the orders under the authority of the
Boyar Duma
and the director-general, acting for Czar Mikhail, as usual,” Sheremetev said. “That should give us the far end of the pincer.” Sheremetev drew a line on the map with his finger going from Nizhny Novgorod up to Kineshma then sweeping the whole hand back toward Moscow. “Meanwhile, we need to get troops on their way from here. I want you to lead the cavalry contingent. And find me somebody trustworthy to take a couple of companies of infantry by riverboat.”

Sheremetev drew his finger along the map again, this time tracing the Moskva River to where it joined the Oka, and on up the Oka to Murom. “The riverboat will probably get there before your cavalry does. They will have farther to go, but steam engines don’t get tired.”

“I’ll be on my way at first light then,” Shuvalov said. “Soonest started, soonest finished.”

*     *     *

Dawn came and the cavalry and the riverboats left, and still no word from Murom. They weren’t answering their radio nor forwarding messages in any direction. That, unfortunately, wasn’t that unusual. The radio telegraph links were new and didn’t have nearly enough redundancy. Well, Murom did. It was the hub for its area because it had the greatest range and because it was the Gorchakov family seat. Which meant that as long as Murom was down, messages would have to go a long way around. So why was the Murom station not active? Sheremetev wondered. It made no sense. Had they gone back to Murom for some reason and if so why hadn’t they been arrested?

Sheremetev didn’t expect to hear from Colonel Shuvalov for four days. But, worried over the silence at Murom, he gave orders that all messages be brought to him immediately. He didn’t think to mention that the
Boyar Duma
no longer needed copies of the messages. And, honestly, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if he had. Selling copies of message traffic to interested individuals was a pretty obvious supplement to a telegraph operator’s pay, and in Russia of the time a telegraph operator who wasn’t selling copies was more likely to get fired than one who was.