Who was standing right here, denying that he’d ordered the arrest of the up-timer. Tim was fully aware that many of the orders that were given in the czar’s name were actually given by the Boyar Duma, but presumably the Boyar Duma was acting for the czar.
“You are under arrest by order of the duma! ” Cousin Ivan shouted. For once in his life, Ivan Borisovich Lebedev had made a quick decision. And it had to be one of the worst decisions that Tim had ever heard.
All of which left Tim with nothing to do but make a quick decision of his own. Who did Tim serve? The family or the czar? Clan or kingdom? And the answer surprised Tim as much as it did his cousin when Tim pulled his pistol out, stuck it in his cousin’s back and said, “I don’t think so.”
In a strange way, the up-timers really were a corrupting influence on Russia. Before the up-timers, Russia had been, in Tim’s eyes, anyway, an amalgamation of feuding clans. Now it was a nation. Becoming one, anyway. And it was that nation that Tim decided to give his loyalty to.
“Be careful, Cousin,” he continued. “If you say the wrong thing here and now, you will die with my bullet in your back. You do not arrest the czar of Mother Russia. To attempt to do so is treason. I am not a traitor.”
Cousin Ivan went back to not making decisions. Probably for the best.
“What do we do now, Your Majesty?” Tim asked, once all the armed troops had declared for the czar and Cousin Ivan was on his way back to the cell.
“There is a dirigible in Bor. We will take possession.”
“As you command, Your Majesty,” Tim said “And go where?”
“That’s a more difficult question,” Czar Mikhail said. “I don’t want to abandon my people. And the political consequences of my leaving Russia would be extreme.”
Tim nodded in understanding. Russia, in its way, was a very insular nation. Were the czar to move into exile in some other state, it would be awfully hard for him to ever come back.
“Well, that just leaves east,” Filip said. “Far enough east that it will be difficult for the Sheremetev faction to get their hands on you, but not so far that you can’t return when the time comes.”
They started looking at maps, trying to determine the best place to go. “What about the people of Murom?” Natasha asked. “Especially the guardsmen and the Streltzi, but, really, all the people, the factory workers and the servants. When we leave, will they be punished for letting us go?”
Tim wished the princess had asked that question when there wasn’t a mob of Streltzi standing around to hear it.
“Set them free and tell them to leave,” Bernie said.
“Order them to leave their homes and their town?” the czarina asked.
“Leave it up to them,” Bernie said. “That’s all you can do. You can’t order them to be free, only offer it.”
Filip was nodding. Tim remembered Filip, from his two visits to the Dacha, as a sort of silly fellow, always talking math and theory. Yet here he was with the czar, the princess and the up-timer along with the blond servant girl discussing… Discussing what? Tim wasn’t sure. The fate of Russia? The future of the world? Who were these people and how had Tim fallen in with them?
The blond servant girl, Anya, spoke up. “That’s the truth of it, Majesty. Freedom can be taken or it can be offered, but it can’t be forced on those not ready to embrace it.”
“And is Russia ready to embrace it?” the czarina asked.
“Russia is not all one mind, Majesty,” Filip said. “If offered freedom, some will accept, others will hide in their holes waiting for a new master to come along. Still others will take it as license, as the Cossacks do, and try to become those new masters. All you can do is the best you can do. But I have become convinced that the gain in liberty is worth the cost in security.”
The czar was looking at Filip speculatively. “I’m not sure what it is, but what you just said reminds me of a pamphlet I read once. I think it was signed ‘the Flying Squirrel.’”
Filip shrugged with a half smile. “I read a lot, Your Majesty. Perhaps I read that pamphlet.”
“Perhaps,” the czar agreed doubtfully.
“So,” Princess Natasha interrupted, “we offer those who wish to follow us to the east a drink of freedom, and see who drinks?”
“That’ll work,” Bernie agreed, “as long as we can figure out where we’re going. But it’ll mean we have to announce where that is.”
They went back to the maps.
The map they were looking at was a copy of one that had been sent to the Dacha, which was a copy of one in Grantville. They were fair copies, though. And features like rivers were clear enough. The place where the Ufa River…
Tim spoke up. “We have a problem, Your Majesty, and its name is steamboats. Steamboats in the last two years-but especially in the last year-have increased the goods transported on the Volga. They kept us supplied at Rzhev and by now they can move armies. Small armies, but still armies. If we go near a river, especially one that connects to the Volga, and most of them do, it will be easy to send an army after us.”
“We have two problems,” the up-timer said. “Contradictory problems. We want a place where those who want to can follow us and we want a place where the czar’s family can be safe from pursuit.”
“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.
