Luka kept the second copy of the Astrakhan complaint beneath the lining of his travelling chest.
The first had passed through the chancery and vanished. The second bore the same number, date and list of exactions: money demanded beyond the announced levy, labour with no end date, fines for clothing and beards, payment for the right not to be punished again. At the bottom were the names of people who had been denied a personal hearing.
While Moscow searched for the missing line, Astrakhan took up arms.
The voivode called every complaint part of the rebellion. The officers preparing the siege proposed taking the city first and finding out who had abused his power afterwards. The Book confirmed only the immediate result: once the heavy guns had been surrendered, resistance would become more difficult. What would happen after victory, it did not know.
Peter reached the city after both sides had already buried their dead. Fedot Lapin met him before the earthwork. After his resettlement he had served in Astrakhan, kept the accounts of the old service families and carried his father's schedule with him.
Fedot laid two sheets side by side: Stepan's pay had been missing from the old paper, and now the complaint itself had vanished from the new one.
"Back then, the colonel stole an empty line," he said. "Now the chancery has stolen a full one."
The town assembly agreed to lay down some of its weapons only on three conditions. Those named in the complaint would receive protection until a public hearing. The evidence of the exactions would be read before the town and the garrison. After the surrender, the assembly could not be dispersed on the voivode's word alone.
The military commanders demanded hostages. Ivan Naryshkin reminded Peter that yielding to armed petitioners would teach every town to shoot first and write afterwards.
Luka raised the copy. "They wrote first."
Peter understood the danger. If weapons turned a complaint into the shortest path to the sovereign, the next uprising would be more worthwhile than the next letter. But if, even after the copy had been found, he still responded with nothing but force, there would be no point in writing at all.
Peter proposed a procedure that had not existed in the first course of events. Three representatives each from the town and the garrison would sit at one table. Until the hearing was complete, none of the named witnesses could be secretly taken away. The town would surrender its heavy guns and open one gate; the garrison would not enter the slobodas until the first rulings had been read. Each side would name in advance the men personally responsible for seeing that the conditions were observed.
The assembly accepted the terms. The garrison commanders obeyed after Peter was the first to enter his own name on the list of those responsible.
The gates did not open at once. One lock had jammed, and the men on both sides were already convinced they had been deceived. Then the town blacksmith came out unarmed, lay down beside the gate leaf and knocked out the bent pin. The guards could have killed him with a single shot. They did not fire.
The first gate leaf moved. The townspeople carried out the cannonballs and piled them before the earthwork. The garrison remained where it was.
The Book reduced Debt by one point. Not because of the weapons, but because both sides had bound themselves by the same conditions for the first time and opened the way to a hearing of the complaint.
At the public hearing Luka showed where the complaint number had vanished. A scribe had been ordered not to transfer the line into the main book. The order had come from one of the voivode's men, who cited an exception from Moscow.
Ivan Naryshkin's signature stood on the document itself.
Peter recognised the hand before Luka named him. An identical exception had cleared the way for the supplier of bad metal. Ivan allowed his people to bypass the common record because he placed the dependability of kin above inspection.
Peter ordered preparations for the signature to be read publicly. By then Marta had taken a short-term paid post of her own accord with the common baggage train and had arrived at the Astrakhan camp with linen and medicines for the wounded. In the train yard, Luka recorded the term of her work and her pay.
Several days before the hearing, a bracket broke on a cart carrying dressing linen. Peter saw the delay, sat down in the dust and straightened the iron with a travelling hammer. Marta held the wheel and said that the hammer was small, but that was no reason to strike harder. Peter snapped that he had built ships. She replied that the cart did not know that.
The bracket slipped into place. Peter laughed first, Marta after him. From then on she did not fall silent when he appeared, left him a second hammer and argued whenever the tsar's hands got in the way of the work. Peter had not yet earned anything from her, but beside her he sometimes managed to stop before anger became an order. When his fingers began to tighten around the edge of a table, Marta silently set the warm stone nearby. The Book did not notice those moments.
Peter and Marta had several brief evenings together that had never existed in his first life. That was why what he said about the honey hurt more deeply.
A hot herbal infusion stood on the table. A servant reached for the honey.
"Don't add any," Peter said. "She drinks it without honey."
Marta looked up.
In his first life, she had pushed the honey away with that exact movement many times. Peter remembered her tastes, her weariness, her habit of counting cups and the way she fell silent before a difficult conversation. To him, the words had been almost an act of care.
To her, they were proof that she had been watched.
"Who told you?"
Peter could have blamed the servant, but she was looking at him with the same surprise.
"Nobody."
She pushed the cup away. "You know my face. You know what I drink. You called me by another name and caught yourself. What else has been written down about me without my knowledge?"
For the first time, Peter heard his own memory as she heard it: not as love, but as someone else's scrutiny against which no door could be shut.
Peter could not tell her about his death, his return and the Book. But any incomplete truth might drive Marta away for good.
"I was expecting another woman," he said. "You are not her."
Marta did not soften. "Then why do you keep waiting for me to become her?"
Peter had no answer.
Marta demanded a reckoning and the right to leave the service yard. The record allowed her to do so. She moved to temporary paid work at the stores supplying the wounded, where pay was issued at the stated time and no private master could claim her by spoken order.
Peter did not offer her the protection of his household or demand Trust in exchange for an admission. He ordered Luka to leave in the record only what Marta had agreed to disclose herself.
She chose work close to the affairs of state. She did not choose Peter.
The next day, Ivan Naryshkin entered the hearing chamber and saw his signature on the table.
He did not deny the handwriting.
"I was saving the men who uphold your power," he said. "Now choose: blood or the rule."
Ivan, whom Peter had saved on the first night, forced him for the first time to judge his own blood by the common rule.
Open in the reader