The next day Trofim did not touch the repaired joint.
He set two apprentices before it. The first hurried and drove the treenail at the wrong angle. The second heard a dry crack, stopped his companion and pulled the fastening out before the wood split. They did the work again from the beginning. Trofim checked the seam, handed them the adze and went to another hull.
Might rose by one point.
Peter was not accustomed to seeing work proceed without him. Yesterday he could have believed he had saved the ship through his own magnanimity. Today the apprentices repaired the joint without the tsar's hand and even without Trofim's help.
Luka introduced a single system of accounts for timber, money, men and deadlines. A log could no longer be recorded at two shipyards at once, nor one horse promised to three baggage trains. Within a week deliveries became steadier. Within two it was clear that an exact book could not only find what had been lost but also make requisition more efficient.
The scribes knew in advance which districts still had horses. The commanders could see which family had two grown men and took one without asking who would sow in the spring. The old confusion had at least sometimes allowed a man to hide. The new order found him by name.
Luka brought Peter a list of complaints. "We recorded who was taken and until what date. But we did not record whom a man can tell that without him there is no one at home to sow."
Peter ordered the complaints kept beside the requisition records. He did not abolish the levy. The fleet needed timber, iron, rope and men now, while the right to object existed only so far as it did not stop the war.
Debt neither rose nor fell. Trofim was given a term of service and promised pay, but his family still lived without him.
During those same months Alexander Menshikov appeared at the shipyards. He did not yet hold any rank of note, but he proved useful at once. Menshikov found missing carts, came to terms with merchants and obtained rope where chancery correspondence had yet to settle the price. Every solution came with a personal debt: favour for favour, a gift for silence, a verbal exception made for the sake of a deadline.
Peter liked such speed. Ivan Naryshkin liked it even more, because wherever everything was settled by word of mouth, a family's guarantee once again mattered more than the common record.
Peter then permitted exceptions on one condition: before evening Luka recorded who had authorised each one, its price and its term. Menshikov smiled and replied that paper could not pull a cart out of the mud.
"But it remembers who pushed it in," Luka said.
By spring the vessels began to take to the water. Each part was tested separately: the hull under load, the crew in a turn, the battery while changing targets, the baggage train over the final stretch of road. Peter took part in every test and directed none of them from beginning to end. If he seized the tiller, the helmsman had to demand a sounding. If he hurried the loading, the senior gunner showed him the quality of the powder. If he changed the route of a baggage train, Luka named the record and the signature that would cease to apply.
The second Azov campaign began not with confidence but with tests. Yusuf Agha had also changed his procedure. First, light vessels bearing a scrap of red cloth appeared on the river. The Russian battery turned towards them, but the first convoy carried neither powder nor men. It was a decoy.
The real vessels came later by another channel. Peter was at the battery and did not see them. The signal was given by a Russian helmsman who had been authorised in advance to shift the blockade according to depth and current. The baggage-train commander held back the last cart so that it would not block the passage for his own sailors. The gunners moved two guns without an order from the tsar.
By the time Peter saw the scrap of red cloth above the second channel, the Russian vessels had already cut the convoy off from the fortress and were forcing it to turn back. One caique ran aground and another was trapped. A third broke through to the walls, but it carried too few men and too little powder to resume regular supplies.
Peter made no decisive manoeuvre. All he managed was not to overrule other men's decisions.
The siege continued. The batteries pounded the walls, the fleet blocked the river, and the baggage train arrived at the appointed time. When a contractor tried to substitute inferior rope, Trofim's apprentices rejected it without summoning the craftsman. When an officer demanded that an overloaded vessel be sent through for the sake of an impressive report, the helmsman laid its draught measurement before him.
The fortress was cut off from supplies. The garrison agreed to surrender. Yusuf Agha came out with the other defenders, retaining his weapons under the terms. As he passed Peter, he looked not at the tsar's kaftan but at the Russian helmsmen.
"Last year you had one eye," the interpreter translated. "Now you have many."
The scrap of red cloth remained on the mast of the surrendered caique. Peter took it down himself and handed it to Luka together with the captured paper. The enemy was no longer a faceless obstacle, and victory no longer proved that the enemy was a fool.
Before the ranks Patrick Gordon presented Peter with a captain's insignia. Not for firing the first shot or because the sovereign had stood closer to the wall than anyone else. The order listed what he had managed to put in place: the vessels, batteries and baggage train had carried out one task without waiting for the tsar's command in every detail.
Might rose by seven points at once. The apprentices at the shipyard repeated Trofim's work, the baggage trains arrived to a common schedule, and the system for recording timber, money and deadlines worked in several places at once.
Trust rose as well: Trofim had identified a danger and had not been punished; the crews had accepted a verifiable procedure; the fleet and overland supply had submitted to a common system of checks.
Debt remained unchanged. Azov did not give families back a winter without husbands and a spring without horses. The victory proved that the state had learnt to reproduce force. It did not prove that the state had learnt to pay.
At the celebration Ivan Naryshkin called the capture of the fortress a victory for the family. Peter asked Luka to read out the names of the craftsmen, helmsmen, baggage-train men and gunners. The list was longer than the toast. Ivan listened to the end, but did not abandon his belief that these men had acted thanks to the personal protection of the sovereign's relatives.
Peter understood: the next step could not be taken at the Voronezh shipyards. If the fleet was not to rot away with its first generation of craftsmen, the country needed knowledge from elsewhere and Russian apprentices capable one day of arguing with the masters who had brought it.
The following year Peter went abroad and entered a shipwright's workshop under the name Peter Mikhailov. The tall Russian carried himself as though he already knew the answer to every question. The master handed him a measuring instrument, showed him a new joint and asked him to explain how the load would change after launching.
Peter explained the construction of a ship he remembered from his first life. The master listened and pointed out one error in the measurement. Then a second. After the third, he took the instrument away.
The tsar's name remained outside the door. Memory did not qualify him either.
Peter offered money for the plans. The master refused. Peter then offered him a contract: he would teach not only Peter but Russian apprentices as well, up to a public examination; payment would be divided between his arrival, the teaching and proven replication. The master would receive the final part only when an apprentice solved a new problem without his hand.
The foreigner read the terms and added a line of his own: he retained the right to declare Peter Mikhailov unready at the same examination.
Peter signed.
Across the sea he bought not the secret of a ship, but a master's right to tell him that he was not ready.
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