Beyond Pereymishche, the party entered the taiga, and the road quickly vanished behind them.
They followed a winter road, then crusted snow, then a corduroy track remembered only by old men. At least the biting insects had not yet awakened. The horses broke through the crust; the chain iced over. Zotik carried the journals against his chest under his greatcoat, taking more care of them than of any other load.
On the third day of the journey, the trail forked.
The direct route crossed the moss bogs and took half a day. Going around by the firm bank would take a day and a half.
Frol, of course, argued for the direct route.
"We are making three versts a day, and here is half a day for free," he boomed. "The bog is frozen. We will cross it like a bridge."
Kapiton said nothing, looking at the moss bogs. The decision was his.
Then Prokop heard his own voice:
"We should take the bank."
Everyone turned. A porter was not supposed to choose the route.
"The bog is frozen only on top," Prokop said. "Under the moss, the water is still moving. The bank is drier."
That was only half true: at the end of winter, the moss bogs could bear heavier convoys. But the very thought of the short road across the bog brought fragments of the past back to Prokop: someone else's hand holding out a spice cake, a boy's pride at being praised, a surveyor hurrying to finish his work on time. He told no one how that haste had ended.
Kapiton looked at him, then at the moss bogs, then at the sky.
"By the bank," he said.
Frol spat and shifted the chain to his other shoulder.
"A porter who likes extra versts," he said. "Thirty years in the service, and I have never seen the like."
Prokop said nothing. Let them think him an eccentric, so long as they did not ask about his past.
They hired their guide at Dry Portage, in the last winter settlement whose inhabitants still appeared on Kapiton's lists. Beyond it lived people whom official papers no longer counted.
Her name was Aiga.
She entered the winter settlement in a man's reindeer-skin coat, her face darkened by the wind. Aiga cast a quick eye over the people, horses and baggage, as if already judging which would be the first to fail on the road. Behind her stood a silent old man of her clan and a boy of about fifteen, who stared at the surveyor's compass as though he had never seen anything more precious.
"The Sayur clan," Kapiton said, consulting his paper. "Contract of hire as far as the watershed. Who will guide us?"
"I will," Aiga said.
Frol gave a snort. Aiga did not turn her head, and for some reason Frol did not snort again.
The bargaining was brief. Aiga asked about the pay, who was responsible for the horses and whether they would be placing ranging poles along her trails. She asked the last question casually, but Prokop understood: she had come for the sake of its answer.
"We place poles wherever the survey requires," Kapiton said.
"Then take your survey wherever I require," Aiga said, and it was impossible to tell whether this was a joke or a condition.
They set out the next morning. Aiga walked ahead, never losing her way and hardly looking back. At the third bend in the river, she waved towards the white slope of a hill:
"The locality of Bald Brow. Use that name from here on."
Zotik wrote: Bald Brow.
Prokop looked at the hill. It was not bald: young pines, some twenty years old, stretched along its crest. Aiga had given the strangers a convenient, invented name that told them nothing about the place.
He said nothing. Only during a halt, when Aiga passed with the cooking pot, did he ask quietly, without raising his eyes from the fire:
"Does the Brow have a real name?"
Aiga stopped.
He felt her gaze before he looked up. Now Aiga regarded him not as some chance porter but with wary interest.
"It does," she said.
And walked away.
She did not tell him the name, smile or threaten him. But Prokop understood: Aiga had noticed that he recognised the deception.
They found the blind ranging pole at Dry Portage.
The old marker from the previous survey stood on a knoll: a notched post, grey and leaning. According to the journals, a reference line ran from it half a verst downstream to the ford. Kapiton set up the telescope, checked the bearing and frowned.
"The ford is not there."
They checked twice. The sheet was wrong by half a verst: on paper, the ford lay upriver in a rapid where even a boat could not pass.
The second surveyor spread his hands. "An anomaly. The needle wanders in these parts."
"The needle wanders by a degree," Kapiton said. "This is half a verst."
The party gathered around the post. The previous surveyors had made the mistake, but unless it was corrected, it would pass onto the new sheets as well.
Prokop walked around the post. The notches were correct, the official pattern, but the place had been strangely chosen. A local witness would usually place a ranging pole by a ford, a trail or a winter settlement. From the bare knoll, neither ford nor road could be seen, only a broad bend of the river. So the previous surveyor had chosen a convenient point himself and consulted none of the local people.
"The ranging pole is blind," Prokop said.
Kapiton turned.
"Make your case."
"The post was placed without a local witness. There was a winter settlement by the ford for generations. You can see the foundation logs sticking out of the snow. Its owner would have known where people crossed the river and would not have pointed to this knoll. Under the second rule, the ranging pole is blind, so the reference line can be challenged."
It grew quiet. Frol stopped chewing.
Kapiton went over to the foundation logs, scraped away the snow with his boot, then looked at the river, the post and Prokop.
"Aiga," he called. "Where is the ford?"
Aiga pointed downstream with the butt of her whip, to where the river spread across a shallow.
"People cross there. Always have."
Kapiton opened the journal in the freezing air, removed a mitten and made a detailed record of the old reference line, the discrepancy they had found, the guide's testimony and the rule of the blind ranging pole. Then he struck through the previous line with a single stroke, leaving it legible, and wrote a name beneath it.
Prokop expected to see: Yezhov.
Kapiton turned the journal towards him.
"You found it. Your name."
In the space for the person making the correction stood: porter P. Vershinin.
"That is not permitted," Zotik said quietly. "A porter holds no rank."
"Journals contain names, not ranks," Kapiton said. "The man who finds it answers for it. That is the rule."
Prokop looked at his surname in the official journal and did not understand at once what he felt. For twenty years it had appeared only beneath petitions that were refused. Now his surname certified a correction, while the erroneous line had been struck through.
There was one false line fewer.
He raised his eyes and met Aiga's gaze. She stood by the horses, looking not at the journal, which she could not read, but at him. Now there was curiosity in her eyes.
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