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The Anaconda Project, Episode Four

Written by Eric Flint

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Krzysztof Opalinski was obviously puzzled by Morris' reference to himself as Gandalf. But, to Melissa's surprise, his companion Jakub Zaborowsky grinned.

"Not exactly, Herr Roth—at least, not from our viewpoint. You are more in the way of our Elrond. Perhaps Galadriel."

Morris gaped at him. Jakub made a modest wagging gesture with his hand. "I like to read. Although I must say that while I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, the premises are absurd. In that story, everybody loves the king except the forces of evil—and there are no rapacious great noblemen to be found anywhere. A fantasy, indeed."

Morris was still gaping at him.

"Close your mouth, dear," murmured Judith. She gave Zaborowsky a smile. "I'll admit the image of my husband as an elf is delightful, but . . . I don't really understand what you mean by it."

Jakub shrugged. "It is not complicated, really. Gandalf was the leader of the active struggle against Sauron. In Poland and Lithuania, at least—and certainly in the lands controlled by the Cossacks—Herr Roth cannot possibly play that role. The Poles are a fractious people, and the Lithuanians even more so. But if Wallenstein makes the mistake of trying to encroach upon their territory, they will unite against him. And they will have Hetman Koniecpolski leading their armies. He is not a general any sane person takes lightly."

Morris had closed his mouth, by now. "Well. No, he isn't."

"To put it mildly," said Melissa. Stanislaw Koniecpolski had pretty much fought the Swedes to a stalemate from 1626 to 1629, after they invaded Polish territory. In the end, Gustav Adolf had decided it would be smarter to sign a treaty than continue the fighting. "I have never been in such a bath," had been his comment after the final battle of the war near Trzciana, which was for all practical purposes a Polish victory. Stanislaw Koniecpolski could say that he had defeated Gustav Adolf in battle, a claim which precious few other men could make, if any.

It helped salve Gustav Adolf's pride, of course, that the ensuing Truce of Altmark was mostly in Sweden's favor. As was usually the case, Poland's strength on the battlefield was not matched by equivalent political cohesion. Koniecpolski himself was reported to have opposed the truce—but he'd been sent to the Ukraine to deal with a Cossack uprising.

For the past year and a half, the hetman had been fighting the Ottoman Turks. Again, Koniecpolski's ferocious skills on the battlefield had driven his opponent to seek a treaty. It has just been signed in September.

"As for the Cossacks," Zaborowsky continued, giving his companion Fedorovych a little nod that seemed half-amused and half-respectful, "I am afraid you cannot take Dmytro here as a valid sample of the lot. He has no animus against Jews at all, so far as I can tell. Not so, for the average Cossack. Even Jewish traders are at some risk in Cossack territory."

Naturally, that set Morris back to glaring. At the wall, however, since he couldn't very well glare at the only Cossack actually present.

Seeing the nod in his direction, Fedorovych asked for a translation. Once he got it, he grunted. Then, jabbered something that had to be translated back.

"What he says," explained Zaborowsky, "is that I am exaggerating some. Most Cossacks have no contact with the Jews in the towns and their villages. All they see are the Jewish rent-collectors and estate managers that exploit the Ruthenian peasants. So they take those as representative of the lot, when in fact they are a small portion. Dmytro's been in the towns, and he knows that most Jews are just as poor as most peasants."

Having finished, he shrugged again. "What is says is true enough. But Dmytro is such a good Christian under the Cossack bandit exterior—you understand, I am being very generous with the term 'Christian'—that I think he underestimates the force of sheer bigotry. Especially when it is reinforced weekly, sometimes daily, by priests of the Greek faith."

Melissa couldn't help but make a face. "The Greek faith" referred to Orthodox Christianity, which, in this day and age, was lagging centuries behind both the Catholics and the Protestants. Where the Roman church and any one of the major Protestant denominations could boast many accomplished and sophisticated theologians, the Orthodox church could count none. Where they were all vibrantly independent churches, even if they often had to tack and veer to deal with powerful secular rulers, the highest Orthodox prelates were under the thumb of either Istanbul or Moscow.

So, it was a church that relied almost entirely on ritual and custom. Good enough, perhaps, for the illiterate or semi-literate peasants of eastern Europe, and the Cossacks. But it had lost the allegiance of the native ruling classes of the vast Ruthenian lands. For all practical purposes, they had been Polonized. Ethnically still Ruthenian, they spoke Polish and practiced Catholicism or, in some cases, Protestantism. Very few of them even dwelt any longer on their Ruthenian estates. They left those to be managed by overseers—often Jewish—while they moved to Warsaw and Krakow and lived in city mansions. The last of the great Ruthenian magnates still of Orthodox faith, Prince Wladyslaw Dominik Zalaswski—perhaps the richest lord in the entire Commonwealth—had converted to Catholicism in the summer of 1632.

The end result was a "Commonwealth of Both Nations" that was actually a commonwealth of three nations—but the third nation, the Ruthenians, had no voice or say in the affairs of state.

Nor did the Poles and Lithuanians bother to be polite about the matter. Just two years earlier, a Cossack delegation had shown up at the electoral convention which chose Wladislaw IV as the successor to the Polish-Lithuanian throne, following the death of his father Zygmunt III. They claimed the right to participate in the convention, pointing to their frequent and valiant role in Poland's battles with the Turks and Tatars as their credentials.

The response had been blunt, and as rude as you could ask for. It was explained to the Ukrainian roughnecks that, yes, they were indeed part of the Commonwealth's body—just as nails are part of the human body, and need to be trimmed from time to time. And they were not welcome in the convention.

Leaving aside the arrogance and bigotry involved, it was hard for Melissa to imagine anything more stupid on the part of Poland and Lithuania's rulers. Bad enough, that they treated their Ruthenian serfs like animals. But to do so when those serfs had living among them a large and ferocious warrior caste like the Cossacks . . .

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They were practically begging for a social explosion, and, sure enough, it was on the horizon. In the universe she'd come from, the situation had finally erupted in the great Cossack revolt of 1648, led by the Cossack ataman Bohdan Chmielnicki. The revolt had shaken the Commonwealth to its foundations, leaving it wide open to the foreign invasions that would devastate Poland and go down in its history as "The Deluge." And, in the end, Poland would lose the Ukraine to Moscow. And with that loss, the power equation between the two great Slavic nations would shift drastically in favor of the Russians.

Morris was muttering something. She thought it was "I knew it."

"Stop muttering, husband," said Judith. "Say it out loud, if you have to say it."

"I knew it," he pronounced.

Krzysztof Opalinski frowned. "Knew what?"

Zaborowsky, whom Melissa had already pegged as the brighter of the two Polish radicals, gave him a sideways glance. "He means 'I knew the Cossacks would be useless. Probably enemies.'"

Fedorovych demanded a translation. Jakub gave it to him, and from the brevity Melissa was sure he pulled no punches. But instead of matching Morris' glare with one of his own, the Cossack just grinned.

He jabbered something. Jakub translated.

"He says he didn't mean to suggest anything would be easy. With Cossacks, nothing is easy. He says you should watch them quarreling over the loot. Worse than Jews in a haggling fury."

Morris looked to the ceiling. "Oh, swell."

* * *

Later that night, after they retired to their chamber—chambers, rather—James Nichols gave their surroundings another admiring whistle. Then, eyed the bed a bit dubiously, and the canopy over it more dubiously still.

"You realize that if that thing comes down and buries us, we'll smother to death. Damn thing must weigh half a ton."

"Oh, don't be silly," said Melissa. But her own gaze at the canopy was probably on the dubious side, also. The thing wasn't really a "canopy" such as you might find over a bed in a fancy hotel. It bore a closer resemblance to the unicorn tapestries she'd once seen at The Cloisters museum in New York. It certainly didn't weigh half a ton. That was just ridiculous. Still, it wouldn't be a lot of fun to wriggle out from under if it did come down.

Not that that was likely to happen, of course. The four corner posters holding it up didn't bear much resemblance to anything you'd see in a fancy hotel either. They looked more like floor beams, except they were ornately carved.

There came a soft knock at the door of the entrance salon they'd closed behind them. James turned and gave it a frown. The door was visible through the wide entryway connecting the salon with the bedchamber.

"Who . . . ?"

Melissa was already moving through the entryway toward the door. "That'll be Red, I imagine. At least, if I interpreted a look he gave me at the end of the meal correctly."

"Why would . . ."

Melissa paused at the door. As thick as it was, she wasn't worried about anyone standing outside hearing their conversation.

"Why? Because, knowing Red, I'm sure there are things he's not prepared to ask or say in front of anybody. Especially not someone like the Roths, whom he likes personally but are for all practical purposes in Wallenstein's camp."

The frown on James' forehead faded. "Ah." Then he grinned. "You don't seriously mean to suggest that a flaming commie like Red Sybolt isn't entirely trustful of the intentions of Albrecht von Wallenstein, mercenary-captain-in-the-service-of-reaction-par-excellance and nowadays a crowned king in his own right?"

Melissa smiled. "Not hardly."

She opened the door. Sure enough, Red Sybolt was standing there. To her surprise, though, he was accompanied by Jakub Zaborowsky. She'd expected him to come alone.

As she ushered them into the salon, Melissa pondered that for a moment. Why Zaborowsky and not Opalinski? She was quite sure there wasn't any mistrust involved. Having spent a very long dinner in conversation, much of it with the two Poles, she felt confident she had the measure of Krzysztof Opalinski. Allowing for the inevitable cultural variations you'd expect from the gap in time and place, Krzysztof reminded her of any number of student radicals she'd known in the 1960s. Sincere; earnest; filled with a genuine desire To Do The Right Thing. Whatever faults such people had, treachery was rarely one of them.

On the other hand . . .

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As a rule, they did have faults. The biggest of them—which Krzysztof Opalinski certainly shared, from what she'd seen—was a tendency toward certainties. And, still worse, simplicities. Revolution was not a complex and turbulent episode in human affairs, filled with contradictions and confusion. It was spelled with a capital "R."

Such people could be trusted not to be treacherous, sure enough. But they could usually be trusted to screw up, too, sooner or later.

Red Sybolt was a different sort of person altogether. He had the same strength of convictions—probably even stronger, in fact. But he was a man in his mid-forties, born and raised in a working class family, who'd developed his opinions and his political tactics dealing with coal miners in the gritty reality of working lives. Not from speeches spouted on college campuses, or late night talk sessions. And he'd held those convictions for many years, solid as a rock, where most student radicals shaded into comfortable liberalism within a short time after leaving the ivory halls.

So. If she was right, that meant that Red thought there was a lot more substance to Zaborowsky than to his companion. Which wouldn't surprise Melissa at all, since that was her assessment also.

Those calculations didn't take more than a few seconds, by which time they were all seated in the comfortable chairs and divans in the salon.

All except James, that is. He was still standing in the entryway that connected the salon with the bedchamber.

Red flashed him a grin. "Hey, you're welcome to join us, James."

"Just a country doctor, remember?"

"Oh, cut it out." Red jabbed a thumb at Melissa. "I know damn well she'll tell you anything important, anyway. And leaving aside the 'country' bullshit, you're a black doctor from one of Chicago's ghettoes, not some jerk MD who grew up in a gated community and thinks manicured lawns are a natural growth."

James smiled thinly. "True. But I spent no time at all meddling with black power ghetto politics in my youth, neither. Went straight from honest crime into the military." He waggled a finger at the three people sitting on the couch. "This sort of revolutionist caballing and cavorting is not my forte."

"Yeah, sure. But you're not given to blind trust in the good intentions of the high and mighty, either."

Nichols' smile grew even thinner. "True again. In those days, my opinion of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara was unprintable. To say nothing of my opinion of Nixon and Kissinger after they took over." His shrug was as minimal as his smile. "You could print them today, but only because I picked up an education afterward. So, these days, I know there are alternative terms for 'lying motherfuckers.'"

After a pause, he said: "Well, okay. Why not?" And took a seat next to Melissa.

Red now looked at her. And then jabbed a thumb at Zaborowsky.

"I want to know if you agree with him. About the Ruthenians, I mean. We've been arguing about it. Well . . . maybe 'arguing' is too strong a word."

Melissa looked at Jakub. He was giving her a look that was far more placid than anything that really belonged on such a young man's face. "Placid," not in the sense of uncaring; but in the sense that he was quite willing to entertain notions that he suspected were wrong, but wasn't sure.

Impressive. Most political radicals that age were sure of everything.

"Well . . ."

She thought about the problem. It was quite a tricky one, actually.

"The thing is, Red, I think Jakub's attitude is the right one to take." She made a little face. "Although I'd recommend keeping the wisecracks about illiteracy and drunkenness to a minimum. The reason being, that any Polish revolutionary movement that isn't prepared to let Ruthenia go if that's what the Ruthenians want, won't be worth a damn. Sooner or later it'll most likely collapse. It's like . . ."

Red waved his hand. "Yeah, sure, I agree. That's why the UMWA banned racial discrimination at its founding convention, way back in 1880. It wasn't because white coal miners were all filled with the milk of human kindness and absent of all prejudice. Not hardly. It was because they were smart enough to know that if they didn't let black men join the union, the coal operators would use them as scabs. Some members of my family were active in the populist movement, too, way back when. I remember my grandpa telling me that what killed them was that they just couldn't deal with the race issue."

The last analogy wouldn't have occurred to Melissa, and it wasn't really that exact. But . . .

Red understood the gist of the problem perfectly well, obviously. Any revolutionary movement that demanded an end to privilege while simultaneously insisting that other privileges had to stay in place, automatically gave itself an Achilles' Heel. They might get anyway with it, to be sure. The American revolutionaries managed to overthrow British rule while maintaining slavery. But they had the advantage of an enemy who was overseas and preoccupied with its own affairs. Polish revolutionaries would be dealing with an enemy right in front of them, whose considerable power was not distant at all. And who, unlike the British establishment, was faced with the prospect of losing everything instead of just some far away colonies.

Jakub spoke up, for the first time since entering the room. "Here is what they would do. The leadership of the Cossacks, except perhaps the Zaporozhian Host, is not at all interested in eliminating serfdom. Their grievance is simply that the Polish and Lithuanian szlachta won't accept the Cossack starytsa as their social and political equals. But if they do so, the starytsa will be satisfied. And even stupid, stubborn Polish noblemen—even Lithuanians, who are more stupid and stubborn still—can face reality if their backs are against the wall."

He jeered. "Besides, they wouldn't even have to carry it out. Those registered Cossack colonels and atamans are every bit as stupid. All the Poles and Lithuanians have to do is promise them they'll give them equality. And then we'll have thousands of Cossacks to deal with as well as the great magnates and their private armies. Whereas if we make clear from the beginning that we will let the Ruthenians decide their own fate, when we take the state power, we'll gain the support of many Ruthenians and the Cossacks will most likely spend all their time quarreling."

He jeered again. "They're very good at that."

The sarcastic jeer bothered Melissa a little. There was a hard edge to Jakub Zaborowsky that she hadn't detected in his companion Krzysztof. It was understandable, of course. Unlike Opalinski, who'd been born into wealth and privilege and had the relaxed cheeriness that often came with such a background, Jakub had been born into a hardscrabble szlachta family. There was no way he could have arrived at the conclusions he'd come to if, probably at a very early age, he hadn't come to loathe and detest the bigotry and narrow-mindedness he saw around him.

In most ways, in fact, that hard edge would be necessary. In the years to come, if he survived, Jakub Zaborowsky would have to deal with Polish and Lithuanian magnates who were as savage and ruthless as any rulers in history. Their standard response to rebellion was a bloodbath; treachery and double-dealing came as naturally to them as venom to a viper. No revolutionary leader who was soft and sweet could possibly defeat them.

Still, a revolution could turn very ugly, if the people leading it started crossing certain lines.

She shook her head, slightly. Such worries were very premature, after all. So far, from what she could see, the "Polish revolution" amounted to a small number of young szlachta radicals organized by an up-time labor agitator and allied only with a small sect of radical Christians and—maybe, down the road—with eastern Europe's Jewry, or at least a part of it. They were hardly on the verge of having to deal with the problems and temptations of triumph.

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Red cleared his throat. "To get back to the point. Leaving all that aside—yeah, sure, I agree nobody should try to force the Ruthenians to do anything—what do you think about the rest of it? What I mean is, do you think Ruthenians would be better off if they were part of Wallenstein's empire in the making?"

Melissa hesitated. Partly, just to ponder the question. Mostly, though, because she was feeling a little guilty. Morris Roth had asked her to come here in order to help her figure out how to do precisely that—absorb the Ruthenian lands and peoples into Bohemia's realm.

Which, she would do, and do faithfully, because anything was better than the situation that existed. But . . .

"Well, no, actually," she said. "Or, it'd be better to say, it depends. If the Poles straightened out their act, then I think the Ruthenians would probably be way better off as part of the Commonwealth than subjects of Wallenstein."

Zaborowsky was peering at her intently. "Why?"

"Because . . ."

She tried to figure out how to explain it, in a way that would make sense to a young man who came from this era and didn't the benefit of being able to look back on it from her vantage point centuries later.

"Because the worst thing about Polish history is that it was such a tragedy, what happened. It could have turned out completely differently. The potential that was destroyed was incredible. In the middle ages, Poland was as advanced as any European country, at least in most respects. And much farther advanced, in some. No other European country developed Poland's traditions of religious toleration and multi-nationalism, for instance."

Jakub grunted. "That was under the Jagiellonian dynasty. During the reign of Stefan Batory also. Those kings always favored the lower classes and the burghers, against the great lords. Just like the Vasas do in Sweden. But our branch of the Vasas, when they became Poland's ruling dynasty, did the exact opposite. Since they really only care about regaining the Swedish crown which they think belongs to them, they allied with the great magnates. It is ruining our country. Everything is now subordinated to the grain trade. The conditions for the peasants get worse every year, and the towns are shrinking. Even the richest burghers have no favor at all, any more, and while most of the szlachta—stupid bastards—bask in their official status as the equals of the magnates, the fact is they are becoming nothing more than lowly vassals."

That . . . was a pretty damn good summation of what had happened to the Commonwealth in the half century since the Poles and Lithuanians made the mistake of electing Zygmunt III Vasa to the crown.

The question was, could the situation still be turned around?

She returned Zaborowsky's gaze with one that was every bit as intense. And reminded herself, not for the first time since the Ring of Fire, what a terrible mistake it could be to underestimate the people of the seventeenth century.

"Yes," she murmured. "Hell, yes."

* * *

The next morning, when Melissa and James came down to the dining hall for breakfast, they found Morris Roth standing at the window with a letter in his hand. He has a very peculiar expression on his face.

"What's up, Morris?" asked James.

"Huh?" Roth looked at them, a bit startled. Then, looked down at the letter.

"I just got some news from Uriel. And I'm trying to sort out how I feel about it."

His eyes went back to the window and his gaze seemed out of focus. "He's one of the great arch-villains in Jewish history, you know. Not up there with Hitler and Himmler, of course. No one is. But he's solidly in the second rank. So I'm wondering why I'm not dancing with glee."

"What are you talking about?" Melissa asked, a bit exasperated.

Morris lifted the letter. "Bohdan Chmielnicki. Today, of course, still a relatively young man and just a minor officer among the registered Cossacks."

"And . . ."

"He's dead. He was assassinated two weeks ago, at his estate in Subotiv. Three men appeared to have done it. None of them were apprehended, because he was just a minor officer and wasn't surrounded by guards. The suspicion is that they were Polish, but no one really knows."

He gave James a wry little smile. "What was it you said last night? 'No virus or bacillus who ever lived is as contagious a vector as those fricking books in Grantville.' You sure had the right of it. Someone must have read the future history and figured they'd take out the leader of the 1648 rebellion before he got any further." He shook his head. "As if that'll really change anything."

Melissa took in a long, slow breath. "So. That means there's already at least one conspiracy afoot." She smiled wryly herself. "One other, I guess I should say.

Morris nodded. "Yes. It's starting."

* * *

Red Sybolt, the two Poles and the Cossack Federovych left less than an hour later. Their destination: the Zaporizhian Sich, the great Cossack fortress on an island in the Dnieper. It would take them weeks to get there, but Red didn't want to lose any time—and Dmytro Federovych was practically champing at the bit.

"You're sure about this, Red?" James Nichols asked dubiously.

"Oh, hell yes. In politics just like in war, Nathan Bedford Forrest's maxim applies, even if he was a stinking murderous racist bastard they shoulda hung after the civil war. 'Get there firstest with the mostest.'"

James looked at him, then at his companions. "I count four of you. As in, 'fewer than the fingers of one hand.'"

Red grinned. "So we'll make do. Get there firstest.'" He shrugged. "Look, James, the Cossacks will be boiling mad. By now, even the Cossacks—well, some of them, anyway, even if Chmielnicki himself seems to have been in the dark—will know the gist of that future history too. They'll figure it just like we do. This was ordered by one of the Polish magnates. Or, most likely, a cabal of Polish magnates. And if they don't know, by some odd chance—"

He bestowed the grin on Melissa, now. "I just so happen to have some copies of the relevant passages, from those books of yours I borrowed for a time."

"Swiped for a time," she growled.

"Whatever."

Melissa was just as dubious about Red's project as James was. "Fine, fine. But . . ."

She looked at Jakub and Krzysztof. "They're Polish. And while nobody is ever going to confuse you with a nobleman, Red, you're not exactly going to blend right in with Cossacks. Has it occurred to you they're likely to chop first and ask questions later?"

"I figure Dmytro can run interference for us. If we even need it at all. Cossacks aren't actually mindless, you know. They're also not going to confuse any of us with great magnates, either. And there really isn't that big an ethnic issue, in the first place. A hell of a lot of Cossacks are former Poles, and a good chunk of their officers are former szlachta."

James' eyebrows lifted. "Really?"

"Oh, yeah." His grin seemed insuppressible this morning. Red always did love a fight. "It's a complicated world, you know. Or hadn't you noticed already?"

"Be off, then, Red," Melissa said softly. "I'd add 'Godspeed,' but I'm an atheist. Still, the sentiment's the same."

* * *

After they were gone, James shook his head. "Do you think we'll ever see the rascal again?"

Melissa had been wondering the same thing. After a pause, she said: "Yes, actually. Coal operators have—had, will have, whatever—the same mindset as great Polish magnates."

"And . . . your point is?"

She nodded in the direction Red and his companions had taken. "They really, really hated that man, James. But he's still here, isn't he?" She burst into laughter. "Three and a half centuries earlier!"

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