Trofim agreed to discuss surrender only after Gavrila's name was entered in the articles of inquiry.
He did not ask to be forgiven and did not promise to forgive Peter. He demanded a stated term of service for those who laid down their arms, pay for military work, local trials for proven crimes and a separate inquiry into the actions of the tsar's detachment beyond the white line.
The tsar's officers called it bargaining with a rebel. Some of Bulavin's men called it betrayal. Trofim gave them the same answer: vengeance without a term devours another man's life as quickly as service without a term.
Peter accepted the conditions where the stanitsas had not yet taken part in killings and agreed to surrender the accused by name. The gates were opened on the appointed day. Those who surrendered received a record naming the date of their next hearing. Breaches by the tsar's detachments were examined in the same way as crimes committed by the rebels.
One agreement did not make the revolt disappear. Detachments continued to fight, some of the leaders rejected the terms, and Kondraty Bulavin did not become Peter's man. But neutral stanitsas stopped feeding the war merely from fear of an indiscriminate search.
Gavrila was already dead, and no open inquiry could bring him back.
Peter summoned Alexei without witnesses.
"The boundary in your agreement was sound," he said. "I retained an exemption that destroyed it."
Eighteen-year-old Alexei waited for more: a public admission, the right to revise the agreement, or at least Gavrila's name in his father's order.
Peter added only, "But you still failed to secure the supplies."
"So you will admit I was right only where nobody can hear you."
Alexei left before his father could turn the admission into another lesson.
Together with Luka, he built another supply route for the northern army. Instead of a single general requisition, local people sold bread, horses and labour at a price announced in advance. Every record named the buyer, the payment deadline and the land from which nothing more could be taken. Military commanders could declare an emergency need, but had to leave their name and a separate receipt.
The new procedure was slower than the original order and required coin, honest scales and clerks. Merchants inflated the price; elders concealed their stores. One governor tried to buy up all the bread in advance through a kinsman. Luka caught such schemes by comparing the two copies, while Alexei learnt to distinguish a voluntary sale from a choice between selling and having soldiers seize the goods.
The army did not receive everything. But what was delivered no longer disappeared with yet another plundered sloboda.
Peter used local purchasing and at the same time retained the order for a scorched belt in the path of the Swedish army. If food could not be carried away, Charles XII's troops were not to have it.
In this new war, such an order reached Marfa Kruglova's farmstead.
Marfa had already given the army two cartloads of grain and received a proper receipt. Her farmstead stood beside a road that Swedish foraging parties might take. A Russian officer ordered everyone out and told them to carry whatever they could in their hands. The house and the remaining grain were then to be burnt.
Peter arrived as the soldiers were lifting the gates off their hinges. He was inspecting the execution of the scorched belt and saw the receipt in Marfa's hand.
"You have already taken the grain," she said. "Here is your man's signature."
The signature was genuine. Luka confirmed that payment was due for two cartloads. But the receipt protected the price of the grain that had been surrendered, not the house from the next military decision.
Marfa pointed to her son. Mitya stood by the porch steps with a sack of clothes almost larger than he was.
"Where am I to bring your payment if you burn the place where they are waiting for it?"
The officer proposed leaving the farmstead until morning, but Peter checked the map: a Swedish patrol might reach the road during the night. One farmstead left standing would give the enemy food and shelter; then there would be pleas to spare the neighbouring house, then the barn, then the village.
The Book could state the immediate result: burnt grain would not reach the enemy. It did not know whether Marfa would receive compensation before winter.
Peter left the order in force.
The soldiers carried Marfa's mother out of the back room. Marfa pulled a bundle of crockery down from the sleeping platform. Mitya went back to the door for a wooden toy, but smoke was already rolling beneath the roof.
"Come back!" his mother shouted.
The boy did not enter the house. He snatched up a fallen door hinge and dropped it at once. The metal burnt his palm. Peter knocked the hinge aside with his gauntlet, and a soldier wrapped Mitya's hand in wet cloth.
The edge of the roof caught fire. The flames ran across the dry shingles faster than any paper order. The receipt in Marfa's hand grew warm, then hot. She did not let go of the sheet.
Peter watched to the end. He did not call the fire a necessary sacrifice or promise that a future victory would make it just. He ordered Luka to record the house, the grain, Mitya's burn and the deadline for the first compensation on separate lines.
"You know how to write down a deadline," Marfa said. "Learn to meet one."
The house collapsed inwards. On the snow remained a hot hinge, a proper receipt and a family without shelter.
Debt rose. The scorched belt delayed the enemy, but the receipt did not protect Marfa from being ruined again.
By the summer of 1709, before the Poltava campaign, Peter had tested six systems that were meant to work even if the enemy forced him to change his plan.
Field commanders changed formation after two confirmed reports. Artillery units exchanged shot of the same calibre. Trofim's repair crews returned guns to service without waiting for the tsar's craftsman. Purchasing under Alexei's procedure brought bread from several places without requisitioning the same farmstead twice. Don service men serving under agreements retained their own commanders within the common order. Drummers and messengers repeated a change of command so that the neighbouring regiment heard a decision, not a rumour.
Any of these systems could fail. But the whole army no longer depended on a single memory of Peter's.
Might had recovered after Narva, then fallen again because of the Don. Trust, which had risen in Astrakhan, collapsed after the white line was breached. Debt climbed to a dangerous level: to the old accounts were added Gavrila, the ruined stanitsas and Marfa's farmstead.
The Book showed no new figures. All six systems had yet to be tested in a single great battle.
Peter's knowledge of the Swedish dispositions was out of date even before the decisive battle. Charles XII was changing his route because the Russian scorched belt and the new supply network had already changed what was possible for him.
A Russian forward commander saw the threat to his route. He did not send Peter a request for permission. He moved his men to another road, left the old route to a decoy supply train and only then sent his report.
The messenger laid the map before Peter.
"The decision has already been carried out."
For the first time, Peter went into a decisive battle with a plan that had been changed without him.
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