“Like, say, he’s a prince?” Brandy tilted her head to the side.
“No.” Prince Vladimir got a bit red in the face. “I was talking about his rank in the bureaus or the army. Say a colonel in command of a battalion . . . a captain with the higher family rank could not be placed in command of one of the companies of that battalion because that would put him under the orders of the colonel. If the colonel was also a prince, it would be all right because his personal rank would trump the family rank, sort of. It gets a bit complicated. It’s the rank of the family as much as that of the individual. The family’s situation must be considered first. Before individual wants. Which is one of the things that has made it so hard for our people to accept your innovations. It’s common knowledge that you’re a ‘peasant village’ from the future.”
“We’re not, you know,” Brandy said. “I know that’s the way we have been portrayed and even how we tend to present ourselves. A village from a nation that didn’t have nobility. In a way, it’s true, but it would be just as true to say we were a nation of nothing but nobility. What we really don’t have, Vladimir, is the distinction.”
“And that, Brandy, is even harder for my people to accept,” Vladimir said, though in his heart he had accepted it. Accepted it because he had to. The proof was here before his eyes and before his heart. In the person of Brandy Bates who was as noble as anyone he had ever met and as common as the barmaid she had been before the Ring of Fire. All classes, all in one beautiful young woman.
Chapter 32
The Kremlin
April 1633
“Death and taxes,” Bernie muttered as he fell into the chair. “I’d really prefer a visit from the tax man.” It was April 15 and Bernie was in the Kremlin. Not because he was really needed but because he was the up-timer and the Muscovites believed that his presence was a shield against the slow fever. Typhoid, that was, in up-timer English. So he went through the hospices where the people who had gotten typhoid fever this spring were being treated with down-time made Gatorade. At least this year they had real instructions on how to make the stuff, not just what Bernie could suck out of his thumb. And they were making their own aspirin for the fever even if they couldn’t make chloramphenicol yet.
“It really does help, Bernie,” said Father Kiril. “You up-timers even tested it and gave it a name. Not that they were telling any down-time doctor anything they didn’t already know. Or any priest, either, when you come down to it. The placebo effect, they called in your future, and you, Bernie, are a very effective placebo.”
“Yes, everything’s great,” Bernie said sourly. “Natasha, Anya, Filip the whole staff of the Dacha, the mayor of Moscow, the rich and powerful, and the poor and huddled all agree. It’s likely that this spring’s outbreak of the slow plague will kill fewer than a hundred people. Which is great, if you don’t happen to be one of those hundred people. Sorry, Padre. It’s just that I know that we could cure this if we had the right antibiotic and we knew how to make them up-time. We even had the knowledge in the Ring of Fire, but we haven’t been able to make it. And ‘sorry, kid, maybe next year . . . oh yeah, you’ll be dead next year’ just doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“All we can do is the best we can do,” Father Kiril said. “The Ring of Fire didn’t change that. I suspect that nothing ever will.”
* * *
Guba Ivashka Kalachnikov was very interested in the knowledge from the future. He hadn’t been last year, much to his regret. He had found the up-timer uncultured and rude to people who had practiced the healing craft for decades. It wasn’t that Guba had any profound objection to washing his hands. True, it wasn’t a lot of fun in icy water and heating water was expensive. Boiling it, as the up-timer wanted, was even more so. But he had seen the results. He had seen patients that he would have said would die, live. If the Gatorade had that effect, what about the hand-washing? Since spring of last year Guba had been trying to learn more of the up-timer knowledge so that he might determine how much of what the up-timer said was knowledge and how much ignorance.
“Quicksilver, mercury,” he whispered, “is a poison?” He wasn’t that concerned about the lead that the ladies used in their makeup. There were other things that would work as well for that. He was busily trying to integrate the things that were coming from the Ring of Fire with his experience. He had a lot of the latter; he had been a healer for over forty years.