In summer the taiga stopped pretending to be empty.
The biting flies awoke. They hung over the party in grey columns, crawling into eyes, ears and collars, and Frol, who had not been surprised by anything in thirty years, admitted that he had seen nothing like them since the day he took the oath. By evening the horses were bloody. The men smeared themselves with tar and cursed in whispers, because they had no strength left to shout.
Prokop measured.
His belt ran east from the lake. Prokop laid it out more carefully than anyone else in the party. He set every marker before a witness, checked every reference point twice and signed every correction in the draft with his full name. At the slightest doubt about a measurement, he went back and measured again. Frol groaned, the flies whined overhead, and the chain was laid on the ground once more.
He did not measure this way for the general.
He measured this way because he believed that accuracy was in itself a defence against arbitrary power. If everything was measured and recorded without error, no one could distort the result for their own benefit.
Prokop considered this a mature and reasonable idea. It came from his former life, from a world where an accurate map and the law could protect the land from someone else's pen.
The day came at the end of summer, with the hunter Pankrat.
Pankrat had long lived by Black Mane. His winter lodge stood there, with traplines running out from it in three directions; nearby were his raised storehouses and smokehouse. Prokop faithfully surveyed the whole holding onto the sheet: the sound log building, the well-trodden paths and the hunting grounds. For two days Pankrat led him along the traplines, proud that an official sheet would at last confirm his right to these places. He showed him the bottom courses of logs, which his grandfather had laid on stones to keep them from rotting. He fed Prokop slices of frozen raw fish, poured him lingonberry water and kept asking: would he enter the storehouses and the smokehouse? Let the sovereign know that this place was not empty.
Prokop entered everything.
Now Pankrat stood before the party, holding a paper at arm's length as one might hold a viper.
"Read it," he said. "I can't read. They read it to me at the stockade, but I didn't believe them."
Prokop took it.
It was office paper, covered in an even clerkly hand. Mezhentsev's office hereby gave notice: surveyor Vershinin's sheet, number such-and-such, recorded upon the state belt a structure erected without registration or right, that is to say, unauthorised. The owner of the unauthorised structure was required to clear the state belt before the winter register was compiled. Or accept employment from the office on the usual terms.
Grounds: surveyor Vershinin's sheet.
"There is a mistake here," he said.
"Where?" Pankrat asked.
Prokop said nothing.
Formally, it all tallied. The winter lodge stood where Prokop had marked it. There was no written title to it: Pankrat's grandfather had built the lodge when no one yet divided the taiga by state records. Now the land counted as state property only because Prokop had drawn the belt across it with precision.
"I did nothing to your grandfather," Prokop said quietly. "I recorded that the lodge was there. That it was sound. That the traplines were yours."
"You recorded it," Pankrat agreed. "So they read that it was there. Before, no one saw me, and I lived. Now I can be seen, and they order me to clear the place." He took back the paper and folded it carefully along the old creases. "Don't be angry, surveyor. It isn't you I'm angry with. I want to understand: how is it that when I wasn't on paper I was a man, but once I got onto paper I became a trespasser?"
Prokop did not answer. He no longer had an answer.
The second surveyor, who had been listening from beside the fire, shrugged: the law was the law, and the survey was not to blame if people's papers were not in order. He said it without malice, between two spoonfuls of porridge, and felt no guilt at all.
Pankrat went away into the darkness, towards his winter lodge, which from that day stood on someone else's land without having shifted an inch.
That evening Prokop sat over his sheet and looked at the neat symbol beside Black Mane: structure, paths, hunting grounds. Everything was marked correctly, down to the last stroke.
Aiga came over and stood beside him. She rarely spoke to him now, so Prokop waited for her words.
"I told you about the knife," she said. "You did not listen to the end. Your honest sheet is more dangerous than a false one. A lie can be challenged. No one will check an accurate sheet twice."
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