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.