On the last night of January in the year seventeen twenty-five the Winter Palace did not sleep. Candles were carried along the corridors, physicians argued in whispers in the next room, and at the bedroom doors the guard changed every two hours, as though what they guarded were not a sick man but the whole empire. At the bedside they waited for a last word. Peter heard the steps, the held breath, the drops of wax falling on bronze, but he could not answer. For forty years he had endured shipyards, winter marches and the roar of cannon. Now he could not lift so much as a hand.
On the little table at the head of the bed lay a sheet of paper. It had been brought in that evening, while the emperor still hoped he would have time to name a successor. The pen had reached the second word and stopped: "Give everything…" There the line broke off, and nobody in the room dared ask to whom.
Peter looked at the unfinished line and thought not about a successor.
He thought about his son.
Alexei had died seven years before, and on paper everything was in order: an inquiry, a confession, a sentence. Peter had put the questions himself, demanded the truth himself and himself permitted it to be got by pain. Then his son had died in the fortress without waiting for the execution, and the state had gone on working, as though a faulty part had simply been taken out of an enormous mechanism. At the time Peter had called it necessity. The word was solid and official, and anything at all could be covered over with it.
Now it no longer helped.
Instead of the white sheet a book was suddenly in front of Peter. Black, thick, like the chancery books of his youth: iron corners darkened by hands, uneven paper with streaks in it. Peter was not surprised. The dying see a great deal. But the letters on the page repeated his own hurried hand, the hand in which he had written decrees and sentences all his life.
There was a single line: "Debt collected. Heir."
He wanted to ask what debt and collected by whom, but he already knew. The knowledge came the way pain comes: at once and whole. His son's name stood before the next line, and there was no next line.
Peter tried to turn the page. His fingers did not obey. The last breath stuck in his chest, the room swam, and somewhere far off, in no palace manner at all, a drum struck. There was nobody in the palace to beat a signal, but the stroke came again, nearer and more insistent. The drum was calling a recruit into the ranks.
Peter drew breath.
The air came in sharply, painfully, as it had in childhood after an ice hole. He lurched, sat up and knocked his forehead against the low wooden edge of a bed. The bed was not his. The room was not his either: cramped, dark, with a small mica window beyond which an early morning showed grey. It smelled of wax, dust and warm bread. And on the blanket, where the heavy hand of a man of fifty-two should have been, lay the thin fingers of a child.
He looked at them for a long time without daring to move.
Beyond the wall a woman's voice told someone to bring water. An ordinary, domestic voice, a little hoarse after a sleepless night. Peter knew it before he had time to understand that he knew it, and for several moments he did not turn his head. He was afraid.
Natalya Kirillovna came in without knocking. One goes in to a ten-year-old son without knocking. Young, alive, pale, with dark circles under her eyes, a shawl thrown on in haste. His mother, who in his first life had died thirty years before this night, pressed a cool palm to his forehead and asked whether the fever had come back.
Peter did not answer. He was afraid he would not manage to say any of the things a child is supposed to say.
On the table by the window lay an open calendar. There were a few weeks left until his tenth birthday. Beyond the window began May of the year sixteen eighty-two.
Tomorrow the streltsy would burst into the Kremlin. He remembered it the way one remembers one's own scar.
Peter closed his eyes and called the Book. He did not yet understand how it was done, he simply reached for it the way one reaches for a sabre in the dark. It opened at once. Time did not stop: his mother went on calling the servant, the candle guttered, and the lines trembled in time with his breathing.
This time the page was ruled like a schedule. Three lines, three numbers, set down in his hand.
Might: twelve.
Trust: eighteen.
Debt: thirty-four.
Below, in smaller letters, like a note in a chancery book: "Inherited."
Peter read it three times. He knew how to read a schedule; he had spent half his life doing nothing else. Twelve meant a state that knew how to obey and knew almost nothing on its own. Eighteen meant people who carried out orders from fear and lied from the same fear. And thirty-four… He did not yet know what that number was made of. But the word "inherited" he understood at once: the account had been drawn up against another man, and it was he who would have to pay it.
Tomorrow he remembered more clearly than yesterday. The shout that the Naryshkins had strangled the tsarevich Ivan. The crowd in the square, who would be shown a living Ivan and for whom that would not be enough. The porch steps. The pikes. Artamon Matveyev, grey-haired and calm, raising his palms before the crowd. Uncle Ivan, who in two days would be led out of the palace and cut down. Uncle Afanasy. The smell of blood on stone, which he had carried through both his lives.
His mother took her palm from his forehead. Peter began to speak, because staying silent beside a living mother was beyond his strength.
"Tomorrow, when the noon bell strikes, they will shout in the square that my brother Ivan has been killed. He must be brought out to the people at once, alive. And Uncle Ivan and Uncle Afanasy must be hidden in the morning, before the shouting."
Natalya Kirillovna did not ask how her son knew the future. She asked something else: "Who taught you to speak the names of your own family as though they were already dead?"
Peter could have answered: "I did." I taught myself over forty years, in two wars and one torture chamber. But what sat before her was a ten-year-old boy, and a boy could have no such answer. And for the first time Peter felt the whole absurdity of his position: he knew more than anyone in this palace and weighed less than anyone in it. A junior tsar with no regiment, no treasury and no door of his own. Even the truth in his mouth sounded like somebody else's intrigue.
So he demanded the one thing a ten-year-old tsar could demand: a chancery clerk with the book of streltsy arrears.
The clerk was called Luka Belyaev. Young, thin, with an ink stain on his thumb that seemed not to have washed off in years. In his first life Peter had not remembered this man at all. Now he looked at the ink stain and thought that perhaps his second life would begin with it. Luka bowed, unrolled the schedule and began to read.
He read for a long time. Regiment after regiment, sloboda after sloboda: months without pay, bread issued by halves, disputed lands, money promised twice and never once paid out. By the third page it was all clear. Even if the treasury were thrown wide open, in one night it was impossible to find, count out and distribute what the treasury did not hold.
His first life had preserved for him the faces of the killers on the porch steps. The reason thousands of ordinary serving men had followed them it had erased. And the reason lay in front of him, ruled into columns and fastened with seals.
"Find at least the ones who can be paid now," Peter ordered.
Luka laid the names out in tens and came up against what he had evidently been coming up against for years. Pay one regiment, and the next would decide it was being punished for its patience. Hand out bread without a record, and the officers would take half. Announce a general payment, and by morning nobody would have time to check it. A promise not kept would be worse than silence. Every quick way out chose favourites and multiplied the number of the aggrieved.
And then Peter did what he had done a thousand times in his first life without noticing. He asked about the quickest move.
The Book opened in his hands. Luka, standing three paces away, did not raise an eyebrow. So the Book was visible only to Peter. The answer was written in that same hand of his, evenly and without pressure.
The quickest move: arrest by night. Peter named the officers he remembered as ringleaders, and the Book confirmed it: under guard these men would not come out to the regiments before dawn. Below, in the same even writing, stood: Debt will open for imprisonment without a proven act. What would happen after dawn the Book did not know. So it was written: "The rest is not shown."
Peter looked at the page for a long time.
The Book did not lie and did not command. It had answered the question honestly, and Peter had put the question so narrowly that arbitrary power turned out to be the only correct solution. For forty years he had asked such questions and received such answers. Only they had been written not in a magic Book but in investigation sheets, and the hand had not been his but the chancery scribes'.
He closed the Book without reading to the end.
Of the remaining ways out Peter chose the one closest to his heart and the most modest: to save the two men he could reach with his hands.
That night Ivan Naryshkin was taken out through the service passage, past the kitchens. Afanasy refused to go until he had seen with his own eyes that his brother was already beyond the wall. He had to be persuaded not by a tsar's word, which was worth little from a ten-year-old boy, but by particulars: which watch changed at the third hour, which door would be left unguarded, who held the key to the lower gate. Peter remembered all of it across forty years, and his own memory made his skin crawl.
Afanasy heard him out, looked at his nephew and said quietly: "If you are wrong about even one of them, we die in the passage."
"Then check every step I take," Peter answered.
Afanasy checked. Door after door, watch after watch. And so, in a dark passage between the kitchen and the wall, there happened what in his first life Peter had allowed almost nobody: a man did not take his sovereign's word for it, and the sovereign permitted himself to be checked.
The brothers were gone before daylight.
At dawn Natalya Kirillovna looked at her son in a new way. She was no longer looking for fever. In her eyes stood a different fear, an adult one: the boy had done the impossible and had not explained what had been paid for it.
By the noon bell the square was already humming, low and all of a piece, like water under ice before the break-up. Everything went as he remembered: the shout about the strangled tsarevich, the roar of the crowd. The living Ivan was brought out onto the porch steps and set before the people. For one short moment, for one heartbeat, Peter allowed himself to believe that this would be enough. That he had already changed something.
Then Artamon Matveyev came out onto the porch steps, raising his palms.
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