Stroyev caught up with the party at the start of the spring thaw. The roads had brought the work almost to a halt, but no one extended the deadline.
The general arrived in the same two sledges, bringing post, fresh register sheets and an order. Looking unusually grave, Kapiton read it aloud to the party:
"Porter P. Vershinin, having been found fit for the work, is to be promoted to surveyor of the strip and issued with a seal, plane table and provisions according to rank."
Frol was the first to clap Prokop on the back, so hard that the chain rang.
"Porter to surveyor, lad! Thirty years in service and I have never seen the like. We ought to celebrate, but you don't eat sweet things and I'll take care of the bitter myself."
Prokop took the surveyor's oath beside the plane table, bareheaded, using the old guild form, which Stroyev ordered him to read in full, without abridgement.
To measure the land as it lies, not as profit dictates.
To set a marker in the presence of a witness.
Not to hide his name from a correction.
Not to submit a sheet containing a lie, though it be the last sheet due by the deadline.
"Mark this," Stroyev said when Prokop had finished. "The oath is older than the Unified Survey. I devised the Survey. The oath was devised by men who knew their own weakness. It was not written for honest men, Vershinin. It was written for tired ones."
The seal was small and made of pewter, with the number of the strip. The real plane table, with its planed board and leather straps, smelled of new leather. Prokop took it in his hands and felt joy and shame at once: he had received exactly what he had long dreamed of.
Prokop would not have admitted even to Aiga that after the chancery he had wanted more than justice and revenge. He had dreamed of gaining the right to draw lines and correct entries himself. Now what appeared on the map depended on his hand.
Stroyev administered the surveyor's oath himself. Then he spread a fresh register sheet on the table and ran a dry finger across it.
"Your strip, Vershinin. From the lake eastwards, through the pinewoods, to the river."
Prokop looked and saw.
The line from the lake through the pinewoods to the river crossed the autumn argish four times, exactly as Saltu's needle had shown. Prokop had been given the most disputed section of the eastern register: here every marker would have to be agreed with the clan or set against its will.
"These are nomadic hunting grounds," he said evenly. "The clan's route. The survey cuts it four times."
"I know," Stroyev said. "That is why I am giving it to you. Listen to me, surveyor. I will find a liar on this strip myself: liars leave traces, and I have been reading them for thirty years. But no one can survey the truth in my place. I give the most disputed sheets to an honest surveyor: even the man cut by his figures will believe them."
Stroyev was not mocking him or trying to deceive him. That was precisely why refusing the assignment was so difficult.
"First baseline tomorrow," Stroyev said. "You and Yezhov will measure it according to the rule: two measure, two sign. After that you will lead on your own."
The next morning he and Kapiton measured a baseline of a thousand sazhens from the lakeside marker. The chain rang, Frol counted, and beneath the high sun the last crust of snow quickly softened. Two signatures appeared beneath the figures in the journal: Yezhov and Vershinin.
Kapiton blew on the ink and said without raising his head:
"Congratulations, surveyor. Now the paper has your name. Watch what it does with it."
Prokop returned to the sledges for the telescope, and then he saw Aiga.
She stood by his saddle, examining the plane table strapped to it: the planed board, the official stamp, the rolled sheet for the strip. Her calm face gave no sign of what she felt.
"Aiga."
"Surveyor," she said instead of his name.
"The strip will be surveyed regardless. If not by me, then by another man. Another man will measure it falsely. At least I…"
"I know," Aiga said. "I know everything, man of paper. You will measure honestly. That is the trouble."
She turned, walked towards the horses and added without looking back:
"Hill by the lake is called Where-the-Doe-Lay-Down. Write on your sheet: Lakeside Hill. I give you no more true names."
That evening Prokop sat over his first sheet.
The clean white sheet was ruled with a grid. Beside it lay a sharply pointed official pencil. Prokop picked it up and made the first marks: the baseline, two signatures, the lakeside marker.
The pencil moved easily.
He entered the hill as Lakeside.
The plain name fitted easily into the grid. Prokop felt uneasy: this was exactly how true names disappeared. Not through malice, but because a name strangers understood could be written more quickly and approved more easily.
He reached for the rubber to erase the invented name and write the true one: Where-the-Doe-Lay-Down. Let at least one living name stand in the official grid.
And stopped.
The true name on an official sheet would be read by more than honest men. The office would learn at once where the camp stood, where the reindeer passed and what both were worth. The invented name guarded the secret better than the truth.
Prokop set down the rubber.
He put the pencil aside and stared for a long time at the almost empty sheet, afraid for the first time to draw the next line.
His dream had come true: he held a pencil like the one that had once erased his village.
Now he had to put the clan's route on the map.
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