one of the doors open than the crowd pressed backward. A half-dozen people were forced onto the shallow ramp leading up to Gravlos’s doors.
With his high vantage, Nikandr could see that the streltsi had fanned out around the royal wagon and were using their axes to ward off the crowd. Their breath, coming quickly, blew as smoke upon the cold breeze of the harbor.
“Back!” shouted the desyatnik.
“He stabbed me!” a man screamed. He was bent over, perhaps nursing his leg, but when he pointed to one of the soldiers, steam rose from his blood-coated hand.
Several women continued to shout, shaking their fingers right under the officer’s nose. The crowd pressed in. More joined in, demanding that the rest of the fish be left alone.
It was then that Nikandr realized that there were only five crates on the wagon. Five crates from a ship that would have hauled four dozen only a few years ago.
“Best we stay inside, My Lords,” Gravlos said as he began swinging the door closed.
As soon as he’d said the words, however, one of the streltsi fired his musket into the crowd. A young man with a barrel chest was propelled backward into the older man behind him, his face a look of shock and wonder.
“My son!” screamed the man holding the wounded one. It was a cry that brought the entire scene to a stunned silence.
And then the quay was madness.
CHAPTER 6
Peasants were a hard people, and they weren’t accustomed to asking for handouts, but eventually the strain had become too great, and once it had, they became insistent. They had asked, then begged, then demanded that the city’s Posadnik provide them relief.
With the farmers’ fields stricken as they were, and the fishing so poor, the obvious choice was to buy food from the Empire, but the grain and rice from Yrstanla was by common agreement spread among all the Duchies. Little enough was rationed to each of the nine Duchies; it was cut again for each of Khalakovo’s seven islands, and then again for each of the cities on those islands. Volgorod was Khalakovo’s largest city by far, and so it got the lion’s share, but still, the sacks went quickly as more and more families came for their dole.
The incoming aid-however inadequate it might be-stemmed the tide of discontent, but everyone knew that it would build again, however slowly. And now, here, as the peasants bore witness to the palotza’s hording, Nikandr could feel their anger bubble up and boil over. They stared wide-eyed at the strelet who had fired his musket into the chest of one of their own. They shouted, demanding he set his weapon down and give himself over. Those further back joined in, then further still, the sound of it deafening as the entire crowd began pumping their fists at the sky, screaming for justice.
The meager perimeter the streltsi had managed to maintain collapsed. The desyatnik ordered his men to hold fire, but as the shouting intensified and the man wailed over his dying son, two more shots rang out. One of the streltsi tried to stab with his berdische, but it was grabbed by a pair of men and he was pulled viciously into the crowd.
“Halt!” Nikandr shouted. “By order of your Prince!” But no one heard him. He nearly drew his pistol, but rejected the idea when he realized that firing it would only serve to heighten the chaos.
“Nikandr, come!” Gravlos waited at the doors, motioning for Nikandr to get inside. “There’s nothing we can do here!”
Behind Gravlos stood Borund, pistol in hand, eyeing the crowd warily.
Nikandr stood impotently as another strelet struggled to break away from two men who had grabbed his musket.
And then he turned to the weathered old tun.
“Help me!” he said to Borund and Gravlos as he pushed the left door open. He pulled at the edge of the tun, using all his weight, but it wouldn’t budge. Even with Borund and Gravlos helping, it was clear it wouldn’t tip over.
He ran into the workshop as another shot was fired and the excited commands of the desyatnik were cut short. He scanned the workbenches and the tools hanging on the walls behind them, knowing Gravlos had an axe but not sure where-
He spotted it on the far end of a long workbench. He grabbed it and sprinted back. The crowd was feeding on its own blood frenzy as he cocked the axe and swung with a heavy grunt. It cut deep, and a thin stream of water began leaking from the cut. He swung again and again, more water sluicing between the staves with each strike. On the sixth, three of the staves gave way, and water gushed out.
Along with the tarpfish.
The deluge splashed into the crowd, surprising many. A moment later, the fish was carried down the ramp, flipping and flapping as it swung its great bat-like wings about. The talons at the end of its wings sunk deeply into an old woman’s leg. She shouted in pain and fright as she staggered into two younger women. The fish hooked someone else with its other wing, and as the two separated from one another, the thing flipped, squirting brown ink. A moment later it was lost among a sea of legs.
“Back!” Nikandr shouted as he drew his flintlock pistol and fired it into the air. “Back, by order of the Duke!”
Borund followed suit. Finally some in the crowd recognized them while many more retreated from the putrid, writhing mass of skin and bone and teeth.
“Back!”
The crowd eyed him and the streltsi warily as the tarpfish flipped closer to the edge of the quay. Finally it fell into the water with a hollow splash.
It was with that one simple sound, from an animal few had ever seen, that the winds were released from the sail. Those at the edges of the crowd-the realization of what they’d done clear on their faces-retreated, and then ran. Soon the area was clear save for the wounded and the soldiers.
After reaching the Boyar’s mansion in the center of Volgorod, they spoke briefly with Ranos, but he soon put them off to deal with the wounded streltsi as well as two women who claimed their husbands had been shot “without provocation.”
“Wait here,” Ranos said as he grabbed his coat of office and opened the door of the drawing room. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m able, and then we’ll go to the eyrie together.”
Without waiting for a response he closed the door, leaving Nikandr and Borund in a room that held little to occupy their time. Ranos’s wife-cold in her choice of decor-had left it without so much as a deck of cards. By the time they had finished their second mazer of vodka, it was clear Ranos had been delayed.
Nikandr set his ivory mazer down with a clack and stood. He could feel his nose and cheeks and ears flush from the alcohol. “Come, good Vostroma, and we shall see what the eyrie holds for us.”
Borund, his rounded cheeks still red-more from the vodka than the cold-surveyed the room as if it were his last hope at warmth, but then he raised his lips in a wry smile and downed the last of his drink. “ Da. Fuck Ranos.”
Nikandr smiled. “Fuck Ranos.”
Soon they were back on their ponies and headed uphill from the city along Eyrie Road, the wide, gravel trail that climbed up to the highlands and then west to the eyrie. After they passed the first rise, the wind picked up, and both of them buttoned their long cherkesskas up to their neck. As the trail led them above the expanse of Volgorod, they spotted the tall white cliffs of the eyrie and the great pillared rocks that withstood the churning green seas to the south of them.
Traffic along the road was high. Laden carts and wagons clattered toward Volgorod, while empty ones returned. Far ahead, a wagon had pulled onto the grass. Two men were changing the rear wagon wheel.
“Don’t you think it’s time we discussed my sister?” Borund asked as he pulled the collar of his coat up.
Nikandr stared at the men repairing the wagon as their ponies trotted onward. “I’m sorry the ship was
