Alexei's report had two columns: promised and confirmed.
In the first, the allies supplied men, guides, grain and safe crossings. In the second stood the convoys that had arrived, the storehouses that had been inspected and the signatures of men who had actually seen the troops. The first column made the campaign possible. The second permitted the army to cover only part of the distance.
Peter read the figures and asked where the rest was.
"In the promise," twenty-one-year-old Alexei replied.
His son proposed keeping the main force close to confirmed supplies, sending out a mobile detachment and making the allies prove their support before any deep advance. Such a plan did not cancel the campaign. It merely refused to count someone else's promise as Russian stores.
Peter saw in this caution Alexei's old fear of every military undertaking. After Poltava, the army knew how to change routes, repair guns and find bread. If it were kept beside every reliable storehouse, its new strength would never become an advantage.
Catherine read the same report that evening. Since her baptism and her own decision at court, she had more and more often been called by that name, but Peter still heard in it the woman from his first life.
"Name the worst," she said.
Peter listed delays by the allies, the heat and the loss of several carts.
Catherine set the warm stone down beside him. "Those are difficulties. Name defeat."
He did not answer at once. A deep advance could cut the army off from water and supplies. Ottoman forces might close the way out before the promised allies arrived. Then even the sound regiments would be surrounded and would merely consume the last of the bread more slowly.
"Then do not go there," Catherine said.
"You are asking me not to trust the army I built."
"I am asking you to trust its figures."
Peter asked whether she would stay with him if he went anyway. Catherine replied that love did not oblige her to be silent and did not undo what they had both just named.
She went with the army. Peter took her presence as confirmation of his decision.
On the first stage the new rules worked: the forward detachment changed roads after receiving two reports, and repairmen returned carts to service. Stores were divided according to the confirmed number of men, not old lists. After each small success Alexei's warning looked to Peter more and more like needless caution.
In the second week a field clerk found flour missing from the accounts. Three regiments had all counted the same convoy as their own. In the past the shortage would have been hidden until the next halt to avoid delaying the advance. Now the clerk stopped the issue, had the seals checked against one another and named the sector that would be without bread in two days.
Peter ordered stores transferred and saw in the correction another proof of strength. Alexei saw something else: even the best schedule could not issue bread that had never arrived. Once again he asked that the deep advance be halted until the allied storehouses were confirmed.
Peter replied that a campaign could not be built around every hole they found. Thus a rule created to reveal unwelcome truths became his means of passing them more quickly.
He divided his forces and advanced deeper.
The promised allied detachments did not arrive on the appointed day. One storehouse proved empty because its existence had been confirmed by a man who had never seen the barn. The guides knew the road to the river but did not know that the enemy already held the crossing.
When the Russian army turned back, there was no open ground left.
Surrounded, the army did not lose discipline at once. The regiments obeyed orders, the artillerymen conserved their charges, and the repairmen mended axles. A well-ordered service merely allowed them to hold out longer after the tsar's mistaken decision.
At one well, the queue reached the last barrel. The quartermaster opened it before the soldiers and found warm, cloudy water at the bottom. An officer ordered him to fill his regiment's flasks first. The quartermaster showed him the common order of issue and refused. The men did not begin fighting, though every one of them could see the empty barrel behind him.
Trust was still working. It brought them no more water.
There was not enough water. Horses were slaughtered before they fell. Men stood in formation and looked at the river they could not reach. Peter rode around the positions demanding that they hold, and each time he saw confirmation: the army had not yet broken. Therefore, he told himself, his choice could still be called courage.
Catherine stopped him beside an empty wagon.
"The worst has already begun."
Peter wanted to answer that a way out would be found. She demanded that he name who was looking for it.
At her insistence, what remained of the same report was laid out before them. Alexei's people counted not promises but water, charges, hours and passages. One reserve calculation revealed stores in a sector the soldiers had already written off. It was too little for victory, but enough to buy time for the negotiators.
Three clerks independently calculated how many hours the army could hold its formation without fresh water. Their figures differed by less than the allies' promises differed from reality. Peter chose the worst calculation and, for the first time in the campaign, agreed to proceed from it rather than from his own desire to continue.
Alexei remained outside the encirclement and gathered information along both sides of the route. His clerks and soldiers named the price of escape: return Azov, demolish the fortifications at Taganrog and surrender part of the southern conquests. The soldiers called the terms a humiliation. But the map showed no other open route.
Peter agreed.
The negotiators were aided by precise information about the water and charges that remained. Peter accepted harsh concessions, and the army held out long enough for the agreement to be concluded and carried out.
The Russian units marched out of the encirclement. Behind them they left the dead, abandoned carts, Azov and the fortifications of Taganrog that had taken years to build.
The Book showed what had cost them Might. Eight points were lost for the encirclement, where sound regiments and services could not repair the decision to advance deeper. Two more vanished with Azov and Taganrog.
Trust fell because of an avoidable trap, the hidden cost of the campaign and the report already being prepared for rewriting. Debt rose for the dead, for the service lost and for Alexei, whose work was once again to be concealed.
Might: fifty-four. Trust: thirty-eight. Debt: ninety-two.
After their return, Peter allowed it to be proclaimed that the army had been saved by the sovereign's resolute will and the devotion of Catherine, who had accompanied him. The regiments and the negotiators disappeared behind two names. Alexei was denied even the faceless acknowledgement of "service" he had received after Poltava.
His son brought him an honest report. It listed separately the warning before the campaign, the decision to advance deeper, the actual stores and the price of escape.
"This paper will teach the enemy to calculate our limits," Peter said.
"He has already calculated them."
Peter ordered the report sealed. Luka Belyaev managed to send one copy to Moscow under the seal of the civil chancery.
In 1712 Peter and Catherine formalised their marriage openly. Before witnesses, she demanded that they record not only the union but the standing of the children, her maintenance in the event of Peter's death and the place where the second copy would be kept.
Peter gave a wry smile. "You do not trust me?"
"I do. That is why I do not want everything to die with you."
Luka read the articles aloud. One copy remained at court; the other went to a separate repository. Catherine accepted her husband, but would not allow love to become permission for a lie of state.
Peter saved the army by treaty, then declared dangerous the only document that set down its price.
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