Pereymishche stockade stood on a headland where a dark river met a light one. Timber was floated down both.
The party of the senior topographer, Kapiton Yezhov, spent three days assembling by the warehouse. Prokop carried crates: a surveyor's compass in a leather case, a plane table, a mirrored fathom rod, a heavy coiled measuring chain, ranging poles, axes, hardtack and lead seals for the journals. In every crate, each object had its appointed place.
The chain was carried by a soldier named Frol: broad-shouldered, no longer young and solidly built. Frol counted aloud everything that could be counted: versts, pieces of hardtack, mosquitoes, days until retirement.
"I have one thousand two hundred and forty versts left until retirement," he would say. "The survey covers eight versts a day when there is no bog. Three with bog. That is all the arithmetic I need, lad."
The party's clerk was named Zotik. He was young and quiet, and even on the road he somehow managed to keep his hands clean and the entries in his field journal flawlessly even.
Kapiton Yezhov took Prokop on without discussion, on the strength of his papers. He asked only:
"You are literate and can count. Why become a porter?"
"The pay," Prokop said.
Kapiton held his gaze for a moment but said nothing.
That evening, by the warehouse, the survey regulations were read to the party. Kapiton himself recited them from memory, looking into the fire rather than at the paper.
"Rule one. The baseline is measured by two men, and both sign the journal. One man may make a mistake. Two check each other's work."
"Rule two. A ranging pole placed without a local witness is called blind. A blind pole may be challenged by anyone who produces a living person with knowledge of the place."
"Rule three. Nothing is erased from the journal. If you make a correction, strike out the old entry and put your name beneath it. A journal without names is not a journal but gossip."
Frol yawned: he had been hearing this for thirty years. Zotik wrote it down, although the regulations were not supposed to be copied into the journal: his hand simply did not know how to lie idle.
Prokop listened as he had listened to his father in childhood.
The three rules sounded simple. But Prokop already understood: they could be used both to protect people and to deprive them of their land.
A woman named Sekleta kept lodgings in the stockade.
Prokop recognised her before she recognised him: by the tilt of her head and the way she cut bread towards herself rather than away. In Burn, Sekleta had lived two houses from the Vershinins. After her husband died, she worked at the mill and brought the schoolmaster cabbages so that he would teach her son for nothing.
Sekleta set a bowl before him, peered closely, then suddenly took his face between her palms.
"The schoolmaster's son," she said.
No one had called him that in twenty years. At the chanceries he was Vershinin the petitioner; in the villages along the road, merely a passer-by. But at this stranger's stove he became the schoolmaster's son again, and the words caught in his throat.
"Your father taught everyone in Burn their letters," she said, setting a second bowl before Prokop although he had not asked for it. "Our school was better than the district one."
She said "in Burn" as if the village still stood in its place with its stoves lit.
Prokop asked quietly:
"Do you know it isn't in the register?"
Sekleta wiped her hands on her apron.
"I haven't read your register. But my stove stood there, and I know where it stood. If you like, I'll show you, before the bog swallows it."
She went back to the other lodgers, broad and upright, and Prokop watched her go. To this woman, Burn was not a case but a home.
The work began with the baseline.
They measured it along a level stretch of bank, laying out a straight line one thousand two hundred fathoms long. The entire triangulation of the belt was to proceed from it. The chain rang, Frol counted, Kapiton recorded, the second surveyor checked. By the evening of the second day, the ends did not meet.
The discrepancy was small, no more than the breadth of a hand. But on a map, an error like that could become versts.
The party searched for the error until dark. They measured three times. They checked the chain against the official fathom. They changed counters. The hand's breadth remained.
Prokop stood to one side with his crate and saw the error.
He could not explain how he knew. Prokop looked at the slight slope towards the water and at the place where, after the two-hundredth fathom, the chain crossed the young ice of an oxbow. An old riverbed lay hidden beneath the snow. The chain bowed over the ice, just enough to throw the measurement out by the breadth of a hand. Someone else's memory showed him the whole dark curve of the oxbow, though the sheet showed dry land there.
A porter was not supposed to see.
He said nothing. That night he dreamed of rivers. From above, he saw old channels and new branches as clearly as his father had seen letters on a page. In the dream, it seemed not a miracle but familiar work.
In the morning Kapiton Yezhov walked the line himself, step by step, and stopped at the oxbow.
"Ice," he said. "The chain is humping. Move the line twenty fathoms higher."
They moved it. The ends met.
Kapiton rolled up the journal and looked not at the line but at Prokop. The glance was brief, businesslike, without a smile.
"You were standing here yesterday," he said.
"I was."
"Looking at the oxbow."
"I was."
"Porters watch their feet," Kapiton said, and walked towards the ranging poles.
There was neither praise nor threat in Kapiton's words. He had simply remembered what he had seen. Prokop picked up the crate and followed, cursing himself for revealing that he understood more about surveying than an ordinary porter.
It was dangerous for a man whose home had been erased from the map to draw attention to himself.
The crate on his shoulder weighed no more than it had the day before. But now Prokop knew: this road led east, towards the watershed, the old cutting and the white field of paper where he had no village, no rights and no name.
He had only the eyes that could see where the sheet lied.
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