The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (10 page)

The Stavka would not suddenly change its mind; unless they could afford to send a sizeable force to show the Turks they meant business it was unlikely that there would be a reversal to the deliberate policy of appeasement.

“I suppose not,” Smirnin sighed.

“Perhaps if the Turks will harm the Hagia Sophia things will change,” Pavel said with a wry grin.

The barracks outside the great basilica were manned by a platoon that served as the ceremonial guard of the Ecumenical Patriarchy. The first time Pavel had visited the reclaimed ancient church had been surprisingly uninspiring, perhaps because it had been used as a heathen temple by the Turks for centuries before the patriarch could begin the process of consecrating it as a temple of Christ on Earth rather than whatever barbaric deity the Mohammedans worshipped. Pavel’s immense distrust towards the Turks made him suspect that not just the naval defenses overlooking the waterway were on their list of things they wished to reclaim, but the entire dominion of the garrison. The London Treaty recognized Constantinople as being under the military defense of the Russian garrison which was to be housed within the zone in perpetuity, and as commander of the Constantinople Regiment, Pavel was supposed to keep the city safe from being raped by the Turks like it had been back in 1453 when there had been no Orthodox Empire to protect the holy city from ravenous Mohammedans. The liberation of the city had not only been a holy event; it had marked Russia’s great ascendancy as the undisputed guardian nation of Orthodox Christianity—the only proper Christianity there was.

His only solace amid the indignation of surrendering Saint Michael’s Battery and the other actual military fortifications—the city kremlin and barracks lacked all serious combat application—was the comfort of knowing that like Hannibal’s Carthaginians, the Turks would suffer the same ultimate end, even if they could make Petersburg accept their blatant disregard for the treaty in the short term. Russia would never forget humiliations, and the Turks would have to answer for all their trespasses. Let them have their bloodless Cannae; like Hannibal they would not see a final victory.

“I think that it would be most unsettling to see the Mohammedans return to this city,” Vasiliy said, knowing that the officials in Petersburg had reached out to Britain as guarantor of the London Treaty to pressure the Turks to not ignore the provisions regarding Constantinople.

Vasiliy was himself a bit of an infidel in practice since his days as a student, although he could see the importance to Russia and Europe, and he was accustomed to the language and rituals of the Russian Faith. Rome and Constantinople had fallen, but Moscow—Russia—could still bring order, justice, and peace to Europe. He had not really lost his faith—he never had one to lose. Culturally he was a literate Christian, but he could never remember actually believing that there was a God. Beside the nationalist argument for Russian domination, the utilitarian argument for Russia to rule over Europe east of Austria as the peacekeeper seemed persuasive to his calm, rational mind. Vasiliy had been a member of that small minority of the Foreign Ministry that had believed in a three-way division of Europe into a French Western Europe, a German Central Europe, and a Russian Eastern Europe with Britain to the side off the continent to help balance the three blocs against each other. Now, all hopes of an understanding like that between Russia and Germany had been lost, and even a man of pacific leanings like Vasiliy was devoted to keeping Russia from being exposed to any new fronts that it could not easily afford.

The Mongol declaration of war only hours before they had launched themselves across the border in the Far East had taken the Foreign Ministry by surprise despite decades of tensions that had flared up again after the Afghan Resolution, and from what Vasiliy could understand, the military leadership had been devoting itself to beating the Germans so the armies could be shifted to the Far East. Even a weak country like Turkey would require substantial forces to be diverted to the Caucasus to protect the gains from the last war, and with things going the way they were, another front would be the last thing Russia needed to get itself into.

“The dirty Turks won’t take the city,” the colonel said in a tone of calm conviction, like a father reassuring his son after some very bad news had broken.

Was it just his belief that the Turks would not try? Or did he believe that if he would his small remaining garrison that had not been pulled back to be attached to frontline units fighting the enemy would be enough to hold back all the armies Turkey could raise? There was hardly a thousand men under his command, and that included every military man in uniform, regardless of whether he was a rifleman, a cook, or a drummer.

“There hasn’t been any indication that the Turks—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Pavel gently cut in. “If they do attack we will fight them, and we will beat them just like we have in the past.”

Was he putting his faith in God or in reality? Far too many men seemed to confuse the two, and Vasiliy was not quite sure about the colonel. He seemed like an intelligent and thoughtful man, but even those could lose their heads to wishful thinking.

The town
was situated not that far from Verniy—about 120 miles—and it was a welcome sight as Meryem’s butt was feeling a bit sore from the long ride. The past twenty months or so of horseback riding had not made her immune to needing to let her buttocks off once in a while from the ache of the saddle. They were supposed to meet up with Daryn’s superior in the small town, and she looked forward to maybe a day or so of relief from the cold steppe. Because of the increased army patrols this close to the frontier, Meryem and Daryn had been taking care to not arouse suspicion. They had practiced on a big cover story, and Meryem had almost pushed her real life out of her mind entirely, pretending like she was an uneducated Kazakh girl who had never been anywhere near Japan—never nearer to it than she was right now that is. So far, they had not been questioned by soldiers more than a superficial questioning at the occasional checkpoint when Daryn had shown his fake passport. Since they were both born and raised with a dialect that no Russian would question and few Kazakhs could exactly pinpoint, they could pass as distant travelers from the large homelands of their race that was not all that well-defined in the first place. They dressed more like Russians than old time Kazakhs, so their appearance further made them a plausible couple from outside Orenburg to the west compared to the way many of the Kazakhs dressed out here.

The last few weeks had been
profoundly disappointing, and Meryem didn’t want Daryn to be criticized by his superiors. January had come to an end with not a single man committing to actively support the Imperialist cause. Even if the weather was slowly becoming a little warmer, most of the tribal leaders had become even colder. After they had failed to convince any tribes to help them more than to provide tidbits of information about Russian troop movements, they had focused entirely on the information gathering aspect of their mission to deliver at least something to the commander of Daryn’s special unit to radio home.

It was clear that t
his was not the time for revolt. As every city from Shymkent to Verniy had become increasingly fortified and the countryside had grown infested with Cossacks and Russian camps, Central Turkestan had become a military country, and the Kazakhs were not stupid enough to miss the large military forces moving around in their homeland. The countryside was teeming with soldiers especially this close to Verniy, and everyone seemed to anticipate a resumption of the war in earnest here, like how it was fought down to the southwest and in the more distant reaches of Russian Asia where news were indicating that the Japanese armies were pushing back the Russians and had completely overtaken the Russian Pacific coast, raising the Imperialist flag all across Yakutia. She wasn’t sure what exactly Yakutia was, but Daryn had said it was far up to the north, and she was very pleased to hear about great victories of the Imperial Army against their white enemy.

A small inn that was loca
ted on the outskirts of the sleepy town was frequented by outsiders who came for a cooked meal and a drink of vodka. Meryem didn’t approve of immoral drinking, yet she did not mind when Daryn would take a drink once in a while. He deserved to drink nasty things if he really wanted, and as long as he didn’t drink too much it was all fine. He was the one who kept all the compromising papers on him, so she had to forgive some small sins now and then. In case they were caught he had made her promise that she would pretend that she did not know anything about what he was doing. She was supposed to just have married him without knowing anything about his work on behalf of the Imperial Army’s Intelligence Department and that she was just his ignorant wife. She was just supposed to be an illiterate girl he had bought as a companion, in case things blew up in their faces. Secretly, she had vowed to God that she wouldn’t do it. A wife should be loyal. She had just been a child when she had read a famous short story about a brave and noble woman who stayed inside a burning castle with her mortally wounded warrior husband for the flames to eat her as well, and that seemed like the thing a loyal wife should do rather than abandon her post and run away. She wasn’t sure why she remembered that particular story, but it was one of the literary examples she had inside her head that served as great moral guides.

The small township
was a mining town, and the majority of the population were poor Kazakhs and Kyrgyz who had escaped the increasingly barren outside and try to make a living digging for coal for the Russians. There were plenty of mines of different kinds across the mountains of southern Turkestan from Persia in the southwest and all through western Japan and into the desert south of her home city of Tekika. The big railroad connected the small mining town with Verniy and—ultimately—Moscow and the big industrial cities of Russia where the coal was shipped to make weapons for the white colonialists. Cities like Tsaritsyn, Nizhny Novgorod, Tula, Vitebsk, Kiev, and dozens of other manufacturing cities were in dire need of coal, and the big mines of Turkestan did their part in supplying the factories. Maybe if the poor Kazakh miners understood that they indirectly helped to arm the colonialists they would refuse to work, but she was reluctant to suggest to Daryn that maybe trying to tell them about how they were helping the enemy would make them go on strike—for Asia.

The b
uildings in the Russian heart of the town were built of brick, stone, and colorful wood, but much of the outskirts consisted of yurts along with buildings of clay and more rugged wooden structures—even simple shacks with little more than scrap wind-breaks to keep alive the workers who passed by to work only temporarily in the town. At some places, such as by the small workshops and factories, yurt slums had grown up close to the places of work where young men worked either seasonally or all through the year to make money.

Meryem
wasn’t blind or stupid; she knew that life in Tekika was no way near perfect. The rapidly-growing Tekika had slums of rundown wooden tenements teeming with poor people too, but Shinkyou was for the most part virgin land that had grown exponentially during her short lifetime, so it wasn’t strange that the city was so crowded. There was no settlement like the kind the Russians had undertaken where big European churches had sprung up and the cities restricted residential permits to people of the right kind who humiliated and debased the people who had lived in these lands since the time when Europe was just a big primitive dump. Europeans were cruel occupiers, and she was sure that if they would be given the opportunity, they would depopulate all of Russian Asia and replace the people with ugly white devils.

The inn was built
of wood and seemed bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. The patrons wore a mixture of Russian work clothes and traditional Kazakh dress, but there was not a single white devil face to be seen, and that was always a welcome sight. The men with more elaborate and ornamented clothing probably regretted not getting drab clothes as dust and dirt had made most colors almost indistinctly gray, and even if they washed themselves and their clothes, they still had noticeable stains from the coal dust. The decreasing possibility to live off cattle and by other traditional means, most of the people outside the Russian settlements had had to find employment wherever they could for a ruble or some in-kind payment that would feed them and their families. The restrictions on movement meant that they could not leave westward, and even if they could it was doubtful that there were any greener pastures there anyway—and with the Russians stealing animals there wasn’t that much livestock to take there.

Daryn took care of the business of renting one of the tiny rooms
while Meryem glanced around the ground floor where groups of men were drinking vodka and nibbling on snacks, and she didn’t mind leaving the crowded downstairs when Daryn gestured for her to follow him up the stairs. The rooms were barely more than closets, but this was the place where they were supposed to meet Daryn’s superior so he could hand over his notes, and Meryem didn’t mind being free to get out of her coat for a bit.

The room was relatively warm as it was heated by the
inn’s central furnace and the pipes passing hot air through the walls, and there was a small kerosene lamp on a table opposite one of the three small bunks. A small window offered a narrow view of the dark street outside, but there was nothing much to see there, and she pulled the drab curtain to isolate the room from any really tall, giraffe-like passerby who might somehow be able to peek inside the room.

After she had covered the window, Meryem
removed her coat and laid it out on one of the bunks, wincing when she saw just how dirty it looked. She would have to wash it! Because of the way they were moving around she wore a pair of Russian padded cotton pants for warmth with strips of cloth inside them that helped to insulate her legs, and she undid the belt but let the ends hang down—just letting out the pressure against her waist was enough of a relief. The pants were surprisingly warm and offered a very comfortable degree of mobility, and she had become very used to wearing such a hideous garment despite not being a man.

After releasing the belt on her pants, she reached down inside the baggy pants to unclasp the other belt and she felt even more liberated when that pressure against her body was released.
She put the belt along with the attached holster underneath her coat out of habit, knowing that there was no reason why she would leave her gun where someone might see it. Untying the scarf she wore over her head she let her hair out, and she ran her hand through it after it was free from being tucked away—she had become very used to wearing a headscarf. Her hair had gotten a bit dirty from not being cleaned in a while, but that was one of the inevitable results of living the way they did. The last time she had properly washed her hair was when she had cut it down further several months ago when it had seemed like it had been growing too long. While living like they did, she kept her hair even a bit shorter than the women in magazines and on posters she had grown up around whose hair—when let down—went down their backs at least one or two feet, sometimes even more. It was still longer than the hair of a man, and she kept it tied together with a ribbon closely behind her head beneath the scarf. She untied the ribbon to completely free her hair, but just as she did she jumped from Daryn’s hands sudden touching both her shoulders.

“Come on,” he said, and she had barely registered what was
going on before he kissed her.

She was taken by surprise by his sudden attention; and she liked where this was going.
Whatever had happened out on the steppe a few weeks prior, he had changed and begun to show her the kind of attention that married people did. Maybe it was just a realization that they had a lot of catching up to do, but she enjoyed being treated like more than just a comrade and companion. He should treat his wife like a wife, and she enjoyed it very much, and she was smiling while she pretended to try to push him off her.

Once Daryn detached from her
when he was done, Meryem tugged on her shirt to conceal her exposed breast. It was embarrassing to lie around uncovered, and she reached down for her underpants to at least pull them back on again. Daryn looked about ready to fall asleep, and she could hardly blame him. He exerted himself every day, and the short nights and long, fruitless days had to take its toll on him.

When she felt childish she would picture them living an ordinary life in one of the big, fancy
modern apartment complexes in Tekika. Maybe he could work for the Gendarmerie or maybe the city police and she would be at home, waiting for him to get back so they could... She had always sort of imagined that her life would be the kind of life people like her would end up living. Her oldest little sister had married a schoolteacher just some months before Meryem had Daryn “abduct” her, and she had probably given birth her first time sometime when Meryem was out sleeping under the clear sky. Maybe she was pregnant with a second child by now.

Mom
had married Meryem’s father when she was thirteen and Meryem’s father had been a young up and coming civil servant. Meryem’s maternal grandfather had been a cattle owner moving around western Shinkyou, and apart from being good with cattle, he had had several beautiful girls like Mommy. He had ended up moving to Tekika with his children after he had become too old to herd animals, and Mom had been born after moving there and had been engaged to Meryem’s father as a young girl and had since had eleven children of her own—at least Meryem had had only ten siblings when she had left home. Meryem was the third child, and the first daughter of her father. Her oldest brother had been sent to university like their father, right on the path to become a civil servant like him. Father always said that nothing was impossible, and that as long as a man studied Japanese, the classics, history, and legalism he could be anything. Naturally, Meryem had high hopes for her brothers to be as great men as their father, but she could never have imagined that she would be traveling across Russian Turkestan like a heroine from an old folktale rather than breastfeeding her first or second baby at her age. She wondered whether Sezim had married yet. Her sister Ariya was obviously too young at seven and the little baby too, although she had to be a small girl rather than a baby by now. Sezim had been engaged to a relative of one of their father’s colleagues when she was four, and she would be fourteen now, so she should probably be a wife if all had gone well.

Sometimes things just ended up different than yo
u would expect. As a child, Meryem had imagined marrying a fearless soldier and settling down in a military town somewhere exotic like Punjab Province or even Africa Territory or the Hejaz. When she had let her imagination run wild she could see herself living in a big, mysterious city like Hokukei, Edo, Osaka, or any of the other cities she knew from stories, drawings, and pictures or perhaps even a town close enough to visit the holy city of Mecca and see the same things God’s Great Prophet had seen. The biggest city she knew was Tekika, and while it was big to someone like her, it was nowhere near the size of the big cities far away by the coast which she knew from only films and pictures, and her own wild imagination.