The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (9 page)

“Then why bother asking for opinions if the decision has been made?” Uchida mumbled.

“We are just discussing things. Ultimately, it is His Majesty’s call. We are just the Throne’s humble servants hypothesizing and fantasizing a bit together,” Shirokuchi said with a grin. “We are just a bunch of rambling geezers. We won’t make any decisions whatsoever.”

The supreme general was quite the odd man if you considered his stature within the Staff and the government. The vague and collectivized decision-making process made it hard to gauge the exact power relations, but he was certainly one of the nation’s more powerful individuals. Yet he was behaving like an eccentric in this small company. Sugahito wasn’t sure who was in charge, but some way or another, it was the Emperor’s decision. He was after all the fount of military authority. In theory, at least. In practice Sugahito was not quite sure. The Boys’ Club might make the decision, but all the Boys had been appointed and served at the Emperor’s discretion.

“We will produce a revised plan,” Shirokuchi said. “A good one. No, an excellent one. And we will present it to His Majesty, and He will make His decision.”

“Very well, my lord,” Hoshi said, surprising Sugahito by seeming a bit pleased by the idea. “I shall make all the arrangements.”

Was this really the collectivist, indecisive little Hoshi?

“We can’t expec
t everyone to fight,” Daryn whispered as he crawled up next to her to try to relieve her anger and soothe her foul mood.

Meryem
quietly nodded, wondering why those tribe elders hadn’t been swayed by his passion either. She had known him for so long that it was hard to see how anyone would be able to resist his silver tongue when he called out to their manly courage and honor. But apparently they had quite able, and they had added to the long list of cowards who would rather live as slaves than to risk heroic death like real men. Although she was not a man, Meryem pitied those men who were so void of courage. What was it like to be a man without any courage? It had to be a very sad existence. However, her pity was outmatched by her disdain for them.
Filthy, cowardly eunuchs
…

“They’re cowards,” she mumbled,
looking down towards her feet.

It was getting
even colder as it darkened, and they had prepared their primitive bedding with the skins they carried on their horses. It did make it very warm, but even so her exposed cheeks and nose were cold from the subzero night under the wind-break frame they had put up to keep themselves from getting frostbite.

“That’s just because you compare them to you,” he sai
d, gently pinching her nose.

She looked up at him, and when she met his eyes she looked down again, blushing.
Although she wanted to be close to him, he should be on the ball rather than her. When he didn’t make any overtures, her right hand carefully reached up to gently touch the slight sideburns that had sprouted up since last he had shaved.

“You should shave,” she said quietly.

“Don’t I look manly?” he asked, stroking his cheeks with the growing hairs from the last couple of weeks he had spent without shaving.

She reached up with her hand and traced a finger down from above his ear to his jaw.
It did not feel as bad as it looked; a man might look refined with a moustache, but just having hair sprouting everywhere looked untidy.

“I like it bett
er when you feel soft,” she whispered with a smile, hoping to poke him into action. “It looks more like you.”

“You have lived in the city for too long,” he chuckled, pulling her a bit closer to him
, and raising her hopes high.

She still looked as young and innocent as when he first saw her, bu
t that felt like it had been in an entirely different world. They had spent so much time apart before the war that he had at time thought that she would forget him. Their chance meeting and unlikely companionship almost made him believe in fate.
Almost
.

When he had been getting ready to leave Tekika for
Russia at the start of the war and had come around to sneak a letter to her, she had turned up at his doorstep and insisted that she had to come along. His warnings of the danger of going into enemy territory had only made her that much more insistent on it, and, that more than anything, had attracted him to her. Meryem was tall for a girl, although not as tall as Daryn. Apart from their wedding day after he had “abducted” her, Meryem did not dress remotely similar to Russian or even many Japanese Kazakhs but looked more like an Edo lady—except for her distinctly Kazakh face. In Tekika she had worn expensive silk kimonos, yet now he could hardly remember what she looked like when she wasn’t wearing Russian winter pants.

Daryn had been brought up in both worlds, both with his
nomadic family and at a military school in Tekika where he had been trained for a government career. Meryem and Daryn were very different in that respect. Meryem’s father was a magistrate, a respected senior government official high up in the hierarchy in the city. Daryn on the other hand was part of the first generation in his family to go into the service of the government, and what a choice he had made! He hadn’t worn his uniform in almost two years, and he had not even brought one with him when he had crossed the border into Russia. There was not a single scrap of paper that identified him as an officer, and only the leaflets, photos, and some other patriotic paraphernalia that were used as props to inspire the locals that Japan was their natural ally proved that he was something other than just an ordinary traveler. And his gun too was certainly evidence of some kind of mischief—Turks were forbidden from carrying handguns in Russia, and his handgun was a Japanese Smith & Wesson stamped by the military arsenal.

Meryem moved
closer to him under the warm fur blanket, her face just inches from his chin. She put her right arm over him underneath the heavy, warm skins and stroked her hand down his back. He felt so warm and good. Although she didn’t really have any references, she was sure he was uniquely soft, warm, and good to the touch. As if God had designed them to match each other perfectly.

“What are you doing?”
he asked, looking down at her.

She lifted her eyes up from his chest and looked back at him
, pouting childishly. Although she was confused that he had seemed so keen on her just a moment ago, he was suddenly acting like he hadn’t at all been approaching her. She would just have to crank him up a little.

“I’m cold,” she said with a sheepish
smile. “I want to be warmer. Make me warmer!”

Her hand slipped down over his side and roamed ov
er his belly down to his waist, and she giggled. When he turned over to face upwards, Meryem quickly pulled her hand back, the intimacy completely broken off.

“You should get some sleep,” he said.
“We’d better get moving at dawn.”

This was one of the few times the two had been alone
in a while, and she would have thought that he would be dying for some closeness by now. She looked at him as he faced up and away from her.

“You should look after your wife,”
Meryem said quietly, annoyed by what seemed almost like disgust on his part.

She could hardly remember the last time he touched her like a husband might touch his wife
rather than just rub a bit against her. It had to be at least a week since he last touched her, and it felt like she was long overdue for his care.

“We can’t think like that,” he sighed.
“We have to focus on doing our job.”

“I didn’t say that we should go home,”
Meryem objected loudly, her eyes tearing up as she turned over to face away from him.

Why did she have to act this way? He could hear her sobbing, and he still hated the cringe that sound evoked in him
—he was far too weak. Meryem should have stayed in Tekika and wait for him, but she had demanded to be allowed to go with him, and he had been—admittedly—too horny to reject her like he should have. Maybe this was the way he had known all along it would turn out. She had always been a bit selfish and not very mature, and he regretted going along with her insistent demands that he “kidnap” her and make her his wife.

“Please just go to sleep,” he said as he crawled up against her back
and put his hand up on her shoulder.

Meryem lifted her head up and turned it so that she strained to look at him lying right behind her.

“Don’t you love me anymore?” she asked, looking like she might start to cry.

“For God’s sake, will you stop that?” he exclaimed, givin
g her a push against her head with his hand.

If it hurt, she didn’t let it show.

“I want you to make love to your wife like you should,” she mumbled before she turned her whole body over to face him.

He wanted to take her home, but it would be risky to pass the frontlines and return to Japan, and he didn’t actually have time to do it since the major would be furious if he suggested that he would have to leave his mission to go and drop off his wife in Japan. It was probably some kind of miracle that she hadn’t had a child from her perverted desire throughout their journey, and he really tried to resist the urge to cause that sort of trouble. Why could she not just let him rub against her thigh or some other part of her? Surely that was better than running the risk of impregnating her? Damned impractical woman!

“Fine,” he sighed, forcing a smile.

He liked making love to her, and if it would make her stop being so childish, then he would be getting two birds with one stone.

“Well? Have the Turks made up their minds?” Pavel scoffed as he poured tea for his guest seated across from him.

“There has been no word to our office of any change, colonel,” Smirnin answered, taking a few more puffs on his cigar.

“That is good to hear,” Pavel muttered.

The outside temperature was quite endurable, and the winter months were spectacularly cool and pleasant. The city kremlin was situated outside the large city and away from the strait separating Asia and Europe. The small forts and emplacements that had been constructed on either side of the water and the barracks in the city had been meant to have the kremlin complex as the central annex of the garrisons, although the kremlin itself had not been finished by the planners who had been forced to abandon construction when the war began, and like most of the local forts, its artillery had been shipped out to go into war service, leaving only the great cannons of Saint Michael’s Battery overlooking the Bosporus in place.

Pavel had his headquarters in the Saint Alexander Nevsky Building that had been built as a temporary headquarters while the permanent kremlin was still under construction, but the Nevsky Building’s planned replacement had yet to be begun so it remained the central administration building of the regiment. His private office was a small room with unpainted walls amid the corridors where the staff officers had their offices and from where the garrison and its surrounding city was administered.

Smirnin was a regular visitor to Pavel’s small private office, despite having his own offices over at the consulate in one of the palaces inside the city proper, so it was a journey of a good twenty miles for him to visit the kremlin. He was an older man than Pavel, and he had taken part of all important negotiations with the Turks, albeit as a deputy diplomat before becoming baron and being appointed to represent the Russian government in Constantinople just after turning sixty as a reward for his services. He was also quite familiar with the Turks, so he was probably a good man to be the Tsar’s representative if the Turks would keep poking their noses on the wrong side of the London Line—the border between the Province of Constantinople and sovereign Turkey which the London Treaty had established after Russia and the allies had defeated the defunct Ottoman Empire and its successor rump state.

Pavel found the man quite pleasant, and he enjoyed his company even when there was no business to discuss. Captain Filipov, Lieutenant Markevsky, and the other officers working close to Pavel were good men too, but Smirnin and Major Volkhanyev were uniquely relatable. Major Volkhanyev was a count, and even before being titled baron for his services to Russia Smirnin had been an untitled nobleman from a family of officials who had served Russia for a century, and he was a well-educated and sophisticated man. Major Volkhanyev had his battalion to tend to and was not as ubiquitous around the headquarters as the rustic Filipov who was much too crass and boorish for Pavel’s taste, so Smirnin was the most available man of particularly excellent breeding and character.

“There have been no further demands at least,” Pavel said as partly a statement and partly a question.

If the Turks had made more demands on them he was under orders from Petersburg to do nothing, and he resented being told to act like he was afraid of the Mohammedan hordes—it was disgraceful and wrong that the conqueror should bow before the conquered. It still infuriated him that he had not been permitted to have Major Volkhanyev and Lieutenant Colonel Boyarsky plan an assault against Saint Michael’s Battery to either demolish the fort or raise the Russian tricolor again in defiance of the illegal order from the Turks that they should vacate the forts that controlled access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Boyarsky, Volkhanyev, and Lieutenant Colonel Goffman had all eagerly presented more or less thought-through plans of reclaiming Russia’s dignity in the face of the treacherous Turks. Boyarsky had even suggested launching a surprise attack with Goffman’s battalion to arrest the small detachment of Turkish troops stationed in the old barracks just off Saint Michael’s Battery and show the Turks what determined Russians could do—perhaps they should burn them and fire the ashes back to the Turks. Send the sons-of-whores back home! No, that was just fantasies. Pavel had no intention of starting a war. Not only would it mean defying his orders; it would put the Tsar and Russia in a quite difficult position. Even more difficult than it was with the war.

“I am very sorry for your treatment, Your Highness,” Vasiliy Smirnin said, genuinely troubled about the small garrison’s situation. “I really am.”

Not only was the garrison a shadow of its former self in terms of size, but since October last year, the Turks had forbidden them to access even Saint Michael’s Battery and the other forts that overlooked the Bosporus from the European side after they had forced the forts on the Asian side to be evacuated and the garrisons then replaced by Turkish troops. It was a gross violation of the London Treaty, and Vasiliy quite agreed with the officers’ indignation at the Mohammedan abrogation of something they had agreed to follow at the close of the war. The treaty had been supposed to be the end of the centuries-long string of wars between Christians and Mohammedans, yet as soon as they saw their chance the filthy Turks began to walk back the terms concerning the autonomous Province of Constantinople.

“I know that you can only do what Petersburg orders, Vasiliy Petrovich,” Pavel said, not blaming the ambassador the slightest for crawling before the ignominious Turks and giving in to their demands.

“We all have orders,” the old diplomat feebly mumbled, taking a sip of tea.

“Quite. Anyway, first the Germans, then we’ll right the wrongs with the Mussulmen,” Pavel said, hoping that perhaps now when the Turks had broken the treaty there was no reason for Russia to consider her word binding either. “There won’t be any more of this soft dicking around with them then. We’ll remind them what they are and who we are.”

If this was how the Turks treated the garrison, then Constantinople surely could have no future under even nominal heathen rule, and Russia might inevitably have to cut all the formal bonds between European Turkey and the rest of that heathen country. The treaty still held that Constantinople was an autonomous part of Turkey, but that could have easily been rectified if Russia was not busy fighting Germany.

“I hope that Her Highness is feeling better,” Vasiliy said, still a bit concerned about the grand duke’s wife.

“She is still tired,” Pavel answered quietly.

He never told anyone that he wanted her to return to Russia but that she was being much too difficult and adamant about staying. There was no reason matters between a husband and wife should be a matter for others, and Pavel would publicly defend her decision to stay to the death if he would come across any sort of complaint. Outwards: Total commitment and unyielding loyalty!

“I pray to God for your little ones,” Smirnin said.

“Thank you, I am certain she will be happy to know that,” Pavel said, not quite comfortable by the mention of Tatyana all of a sudden.

He did not mind that Smirnin inquired about her; Pavel had been concerned about her health as well as the health of the children and he greatly appreciated the man’s prayers for his wife. The doctor had said that she was merely exhausted and needed rest, but to Pavel it seemed like a reminder that she should have returned home. He could not abandon his post, but she had no reason to stay at the Constantinople Kremlin rather than at the family home in Moscow.

“If I may say so, Your Highness, I am sure that the princess must have a great constitution like her uncle.”

“Yes,” Pavel thoughtfully mumbled. “I heard that the gains in the Winter Offensive have been completely overturned,” he sighed, even more anxious about the war than about Tatyana’s exhaustion, and he was tired of talking about her for now.

The news of the fall of Grodno and the retreat of the army into Belarus left the prior gains wiped clean, and the frontier between Russia and Germany was probably in no place more than perhaps at most a hundred miles from the prewar border. And how many had died in all those back-and-forths? No, the war was a quite bigger concern than the health of Tatyana or the twins. Human mortality was much simpler and far much less emotive than the fate of nations. Although he had received letters from dozens of cousins and other relatives expressing their concern for Tatyana and the twins, the war was important to millions and a national matter unlike the health of mere individuals. There could scarcely be an event that deserved more concern in human history since mankind’s redemption and the inauguration of the Holy Church, and Pavel was locked away in Constantinople while Russia was embroiled in its greatest strife since the days of old Muscovy when Swedes and Poles had raped Russia for all she was worth. Teutons from the West, Mongols from the East; he had only stopped writing his cousin to ask for a replacement to let him receive a war commission because of the futility.

The Tsar had asked him to remain head of the garrison rather than serve Russia like his oldest sons, and he obviously had to obey. Vanya, Sasha, and Pasha did what they could to serve Russia at home. Sasha was staying at his home in Tsarskoye Selo to serve as an aide to the Tsar due to his poor eyes and Vanya served as an aide to a divisional commander in Romania. And all the while Pavel was trapped together with Kostya in Constantinople, far from either the frontlines or the Tsar. Pasha had been commissioned as a junior lieutenant in the navy and was stationed on the
Imperator Pavel II
up in the Baltic Fleet and could—if God willed it—be called to battle against the superior Teutonic fleet while his father and older brother Kostya could do nothing but to be humiliated by the Turks defying Russia’s treaty-guaranteed military supremacy of Constantinople. Disgraceful!

And what were the orders from Petersburg? Oblige the heathens! Do not fight, do not provoke, and do not give the shifty dogs an excuse to add a Southern enemy to the Western and Eastern enemies arrayed against the holy motherland. He wasn’t inflexible, and he did not want to make Russia’s woes greater by starting a war against the Turks. But their occupation of Russia’s Bosporus fortifications and the remilitarization of the Asian shore in violation of the London Treaty would make anyone wish that the war would be over just so the time and resources would be available to enforce the treaty and slap the uppity little Turks silly.

“Has there been any new instructions for the garrison that would be of interest for my office?” Vasiliy asked.

Although he and the colonel both served Russia, Vasiliy served the government through the Foreign Ministry while the colonel received his orders through the military command structure which was headed by the Stavka and through it the Tsar. The overall goals of the ministry and the Stavka might be the same for the most part, but they were not always so. One of Vasiliy’s colleagues in Petersburg had said that when the Turks had first asked for the Russian flag to be taken down from Saint Michael’s Battery, one general had suggested that Russia should reinforce the garrison by deploying a regiment to Constantinople and refuse to oblige the Turks at all. Ultimately, cooler heads had prevailed, and since that first demand back in November of 1934, the Turks had continued to slowly do away with the London Treaty’s Constantinople clauses. The clauses that had established the autonomous province had been intended to turn Constantinople into an unarmed city with the exception of the Russian garrison stationed at the Constantinople Kremlin just outside the city and the satellite forts and garrisons on both sides of the strait. The hope of Vasiliy and his colleagues had been to ensure that the new republic that replaced the defunct Ottoman Empire would be a minor country, but also that Orthodox Rome would be liberated from Turkish rule. The Russian delegation had primarily negotiated the exact terms with the French, the Japanese, and the British who had been fixed on dividing the Middle East between each other rather than discuss Constantinople. Nevertheless, the British had insisted in secret negotiations with Vasiliy’s superiors of Russian acquiescence on British domination of Persia in return for Britain backing Russia’s demands for military control over the sacred Orthodox city. Russia had secured Persian Azerbaijan, but Britain had been given the keys to the rest of that country.

The London Treaty had taken two years to settle before it had been signed by the Allied Powers and the little rump republic the treaty left behind after all the borders had been decided on by the negotiators. After all, what could the Mohammedans have done but to accept the terms dictated to them by the Allied Powers? Vasiliy missed that grand concert when Russia, France, Britain, Greece, Bulgaria, and the Mongol Empire had all joined hand in hand to disassemble the decrepit Ottoman Empire, and the greatest conflicts had been where the Mongols and the English would draw the lines between Mesopotamia and Bahrain or between France and Britain over the border between Palestine and Syria or just how big the sovereign state of Arabia should be. It had been an exhausting but a quite fascinating work of great international cooperation. Not since the Afghan Resolution a half century before that had Russian diplomats sat down together with foreign diplomats to measure, draw, redraw, and debate the proper delineation between different states and territories. Good times, good times…

“No word at all, but there is no real need, is there?” Pavel replied, thinking that Smirnin knew that whatever the Turks would ask, Petersburg was too late to begin to assert its legitimate claim as the military sovereign of Constantinople.