1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 64

Grantville

March 1635

“What’s up, dude?” Brandy asked. Calling Vladimir “dude” in her empty-headed surfer girl voice usually got a laugh and sometimes led to other things.

“Huh? What?”

But not this time apparently. “What’s wrong, Vladimir?”

Vlad sat down heavily. “I’m worried. There’s bad news from Moscow, but I’m not sure how bad it really is. Boris is being reticent. It could just be that he’s busy I guess… but it could also be that he’s distancing himself from the family. Father Gavril showed me some letters from his family which indicate that the dvoriane in the military are badly upset with Czar Mikhail and increasingly concerned with foreign influences on him.”

“Kseniya, could you puh-leeze explain all this to me?” Brandy ruffled her hair, looking like she was about to start tearing it out at the roots. “What’s going on in Moscow? Vladimir’s worried sick about Natasha, and Natasha is worried sick about, well, everything. But at the same time, Natasha says that the income from the lands is fine, higher than ever. And from sales of the farm equipment. That’s got to be helping.”

Home, Kseniya thought, was difficult to explain to an up-timer. They were so rich. They just had their brains in the wrong… no, that wasn’t right… they had their brains in a different place.

She held back the sigh, then said, “In the last years… so many changes. It’s hard to adjust to so many changes. You know, my father is Streltzi, right?”

Brandy nodded.

“ Streltzi means shooter. Mostly we are city guards, but we also guard caravans and when war comes the Streltzi are the infantry. But it is usually not war and being the city guards doesn’t take up all of our time. So most Streltzi have another job: merchant, baker, leatherworker or silversmith, something. My father is… like a sergeant major, but my family also owns a tannery. We’re Streltzi, but upper Streltzi. But, my father-in-law is dvoriane. The dvoriane are court nobles and army officers, sometimes bureaucrats, depending on what job is assigned. In fact, my father-in-law is an officer in my father’s regiment. But my father-in-law’s family is not as wealthy as my family. They receive thirty-five rubles a year and a… I don’t know a German word that fits pomestie. Pomestie is land given, or perhaps loaned, to the dvoriane as part, usually the larger part, of the payment for their service to the crown. The dvoriane get to collect the rent on the pomestie. But while my father-in-law receives pomestie lands enough to make him richer than my father, he doesn’t have enough tenants, ah, serfs, for more than half the lands and you can’t collect rent from serfs who aren’t there because they ran off to work for a monastery or high boyar.”

“Why do the serfs do that?” Brandy asked. “It seems it would just be trading one master for another. You would think that the small holders would be, ah, the good guys, here. That they would be the allies of other men, those who have even less.”

“They can’t afford to be,” Kseniya insisted. “Remember the expenses. They don’t have labor-saving devices. They need the serfs.”

“I bet there are a lot more of these small holders than there are high boyars and churchmen, aren’t there?” Kseniya nodded and Brandy thanked her and went off to do some thinking.

She remembered things said about the dvoriane in other conversations. And a quote from somewhere: “Never trust a banker.” There was more to that quote, but she couldn’t remember it. The thing was, the dvoriane sort of felt like the bankers from the quote. People who would cover themselves first, last and always. Who wouldn’t take sides, or would change sides as the wind shifted. Yes, she understood the predicament of the bureau men and soldiers of the service nobility. But that didn’t make serfdom right. She also remembered that Boris was dvoriane. And that letters written to Natasha went through the Grantville Section.

Brandy realized that Vladimir needed a way to get messages to Natasha that the Grantville Section wouldn’t see. A file baked in a cake. Brandy giggled. Everything old is new again.

Some days later, a serf named Yuri laid a bar of white-hot steel in the slot of a drop forge and waved. Another serf from his village pulled the lever and the hammer came down. The bar weighed fifteen pounds and the hammer, which had to be lifted by means of a crank, weighed over a ton. The force of the blow transmitted through the bar and the tongs hammered his arms. It was hard work. Not the sort of work Yuri enjoyed. It was hot and it was bloody dangerous. It wasn’t the sort of job that Yuri would have chosen. But Yuri was a serf. He wasn’t given a choice.

It was also, in Yuri’s opinion, stupid. There were a lot of things that needed doing in the village before spring planting. Instead, he was here making extra money for the lord and he knew perfectly well that neither he nor anyone in the village would see a kopek’s worth of the money. No. The money would go to the lord to pay the village’s debt and there would be more fees to make sure that the village never got out of debt. He wasn’t going to be able to buy off his ties to the land. He wasn’t even working in his home village. The foundry was fifteen miles away from home and he was being charged rent as well as everything else. There are limits to all things and Yuri had just about reached his.

Since he couldn’t hope to buy out, he’d just have to run. He didn’t want to, because it would stick the rest of the village with his debt. But he’d had enough. Yuri began to plan. He couldn’t tell his fellow villagers what he was planning; they would report him rather than being stuck with his debt. He’d need food, an extra set of clothing, one of those gold-mining maps.

Yuri didn’t particularly want to mine gold, but it would give him a direction to run to and even a reason for being on the road. Yuri pulled another bar from the fire and continued to plan.