The first man blamed for the defeat was someone whose name Peter could not remember.
The baggage-train commander stood before the council of war, his eyes swollen from lack of sleep. Three reports lay on the table. In the first he promised to deliver the powder on time. In the second he reported that the horses had reached the relay station. In the third he insisted there was no delay. Every paper had been signed. Not one of them restored what the army had lacked before the assault.
Ivan Naryshkin demanded an execution. The contractors in his circle nodded so eagerly that one gallows might have raised a new baggage train, dried the powder and launched the fleet. The battery commander remained silent. The young gunner who had been first to admit the charge was damp stared at the floor.
Peter asked the Book for the quickest way to restore obedience.
The answer was simple: execute the baggage-train commander before the ranks. By sunset the other men responsible would become more accommodating and stop concealing delays. Debt would fall upon the executed man's family. Whether the horses, the powder and the lost days would return, the Book did not know.
Peter read the answer twice. In his first life he had valued such solutions for their clarity. One culprit, one rope, one lesson for a thousand men. All the sovereign had to do was not ask why every exemplary execution had to be followed by another.
"Who changed the delivery date?" he asked.
The baggage-train commander named a contractor. The contractor referred to one of Ivan Naryshkin's men. Ivan reminded them that he had vouched for the men's reliability, not for every cart. The scribe looked for the order and could not find it. Peter then commanded that all three books be brought: the military book, the contract book and the road book.
In the military book the horses were recorded as received. In the contract book they were still on the road. In the road book the same relay team was already supplying another of the tsar's baggage trains.
The baggage-train commander had lied. But his lie covered a hole made by men above him.
Peter cancelled the execution and ordered the papers read aloud before the same officers who had demanded a swift example. The commander was removed from his post and kept under investigation. The contractors were required to name every verbal postponement. Ivan Naryshkin turned pale when his name was read out beside two of them.
"You are humiliating your own family before serving men," he told Peter after the council.
"No. I am finding out how many times my family has already humiliated the service."
The slow inquiry exacted an immediate price: two contractors tried to flee, and one warehouse was emptied overnight. Several officers decided that the sovereign had simply lost his nerve at the prospect of an execution. The Book promised nothing and closed.
Peter retained his qualification as a bombardier. Might barely rose. He had learnt to hit a wall, but the state still did not know how to bring a cannonball to it.
After the defeat Peter left Azov for the Voronezh shipyards: without a fleet, another campaign made no sense. The river lay under ice, stacks of timber rose along its banks, and among them lived men whom no one had given a day for their return home. It was there that he first met Trofim Zhuravlyov.
A tally stick hung from Trofim's belt. One notch marked a week spent at the shipyard, another the pay he had been promised, a third a letter sent home. There were two notches for pay and nine for the weeks he had served. Trofim did not demand to be released at once. He demanded a date after which the state would cease to regard his family as an inexhaustible supply of hands.
Trofim did not know the sovereign by sight. He stood inside an unfinished hull with his ear pressed to a joint, tapping the wood with the handle of his adze. Hundreds of axes rang around him. His section was silent.
The contractor shouted that one stubborn man would make the whole ship late for launching. Trofim replied that the joint only looked sound. Set the mast in place and put the hull under load, and the seam would open below the waterline.
"Can you see the crack?" Peter asked.
"I can hear it."
The contractor laughed, but Peter inspected the joint himself all the same. The surface was clean and the treenails sat straight. He ordered the work stopped and took the adze, intending to prove that the craftsman was merely defending his own slowness.
Trofim stood his ground and demanded that the joint be dismantled, not patched.
The tsar's schedule was already behind. In his memory Peter could already see the second Azov campaign, the ships on the river and the fortress surrendering. He was three days short. Trofim proposed losing another day over a defect no one could see.
Peter opened the Book. It showed only the point of failure: the seam giving way under load. It offered no way to repair it.
Peter ordered the joint dismantled.
When the upper plank was removed, the inner treenail had snapped in two. A pale crack like lightning split the dark wood all the way to the edge. The contractor stopped shouting. Peter pressed a crowbar against the joint that had looked sound from outside, and it parted at a single push.
Trofim placed the broken piece of treenail in Peter's palm. What the carpenter had heard through a whole plank was now clear to the sovereign.
The Book showed the same level of Might. As long as only Trofim and Peter knew how to recognise a dangerous joint, nothing had changed for the other shipyards.
Luka Belyaev laid the schedules out beside one another. He linked every log to its cutting ground, every cutting ground to its contractor, every carpenter to a deadline and promised pay. Beside one unfulfilled contract stood the signature of one of Ivan Naryshkin's men. Beside a failed delivery of rope was a note of verbal instructions, copied down from the words of another relative.
Last of all they laid down a paper seized from a spy on the river. The interpreter read: the Russian vessels would not be launched before the river grew shallow, and the batteries would again wait for the convoy at the old channel. Yusuf Agha's name did not appear at the bottom, but the same scrap of red cloth was tied to the sheet.
It appeared that Yusuf Agha knew about the Russian delays before Peter himself.
Trofim named the last safe day for launching. According to the tsar's schedule, the fleet was to be ready three days later.
Peter ordered every task recalculated from the last safe launching day. Anything that could not be completed by then was transferred to other shipyards and other contractors. At the same time, Peter put in writing a craftsman's right to stop work when he could prove it was dangerous. If he falsely rejected sound work, the craftsman answered with his name and his pay. If proven defective work was forbidden to be rejected, the man who drove him to continue was answerable.
Trofim asked whether that right extended to an order from the tsar.
"That is where it begins," Peter answered.
No one applauded. The men simply returned to the hull and dismantled two more joints that they had meant to hide under pitch that morning.
To take Azov, Peter postponed his own victory for the first time on the word of a carpenter.
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