“ 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.
Chapter 65
“We need more reapers,” Anya said.
“Well, we don’t have them,” Natasha told her. “And we aren’t going to have them before the harvest is in.”
“What about renting yours out after you have your crops in? With the serfs that have headed for the gold fields, there are a lot of people, even some of the boyars, who still won’t have their crops in by that time. We could probably rent them for near the cost of buying one and still not have enough to supply the demand.”
It was a good plan. It probably would have worked except…
It was mid-afternoon when Peter Boglonovich plotted his measurements. The thermometer was dropping and the barometer was rising; the winds were from the northwest and strong. The front had passed through and was on its way south. And Peter couldn’t tell anyone. Peter had an excellent clock and a small wind-powered generator to power his equipment and provide some creature comforts. What he didn’t have was a radio. He had maps-good ones-and he knew how to use them, having been trained at the Dacha. He received weather data to plot on those maps from other stations once a week and sent his data off with the same messenger. The messenger was due in two days and Peter figured that the cold front would be halfway to Moscow by then.
“What’s the use of a weather station if it doesn’t have a radio?” Peter muttered. He knew the answer. He was up here to provide a plot, a record of weather conditions, that could be used to make the predictions more accurate when they got the radios installed and could do real-time prediction. Establishing a baseline was all well and good, but if Peter’s calculations were right, real-time weather prediction was going to come too late. This storm was going to sweep over Russia, depositing sleet on fields and those crops that hadn’t been harvested were going to get pounded.
Ivan looked out at his fields and saw death. Death for crops under a sheet of ice and sleet. Death for his family this winter as they ran out of food. Ivan lived on a farm forty miles northeast of Moscow and the storm still raged, beating down the stalks and turning the ripe grain to mush. He wasn’t the only one by any means. The storm ripped through Russia’s heart, ruining a full quarter of the expected grain crop for the year-and it could have been much worse.
On a farm thirty miles to the east of Ivan’s, Misha went to the family altar, knelt down in front of the icons and thanked God and his ancestors that he had spent the money to use the reaper, in spite of his wife’s complaint of his spendthrift ways. His crop was in the barn. All of the village crops were in the barn, safe from the storm.
For Misha the storm was good news. Amazingly good news. It meant that the price he could get for his crop would be considerably higher. Even after the taxes and tithes were paid, which would take more than half his crop, he would have grain to sell for the new paper rubles. Perhaps enough to pay off his debt, which would allow him to leave. At least if he promised to go to the gold fields.
Other farms had been missed by the storm or hit only by the edges. Then there were the potato fields. It wasn’t just the potatoes from the Ring of Fire. The patriarch and czar had both read the histories and put in a large order for potatoes with English merchants. It had taken a while, but the merchants had delivered. A ship load of potatoes had arrived in the spring of 1635.
The peasants who had been assigned to grow them had not been pleased. But with the government promising to buy the potatoes at a fixed price per pound, and threats about what would happen if they failed to follow instructions, they had grown them. The peasants were going to be displeased again. Fixed prices worked both ways.
Still, it wasn’t enough. Not with the number of peasants who had managed to buy out or simply run off. That move had delayed the harvest in a number of places and that delay had been crucial. It had destroyed millions of rubles worth of crops. The bureaucratic service nobility placed the blame for the disaster at the feet of the czar. And though they were unlikely to actually starve because of it, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them had been ruined.
