Stroev received the sheets for the belt beside a large fire, at the camp where the party joined the general's wagon train.
It was a vicious autumn: at night the puddles froze over, and by day icy pellets sifted down. The general sat on a saddle chest with the sheets spread across his knees, reading every line closely by the firelight.
Prokop waited three days for his chance. On the fourth evening, when the wagoners had fallen asleep, he approached the fire and laid before the general everything he had gathered.
Extracts from Mezhentsev's ledger, showing prices for unsurveyed land. Yevstignei's recorded testimony describing how the register had returned a sheet with ready-made wording. Pankrat's paper, which cited surveyor Vershinin's sheet as its grounds. And his own petition: to halt the distribution of unsurveyed and disputed lands until a review established who had entered the disputed wording in the register.
Stroev read it all. Slowly, twice, with the same attention he gave the survey sheets. Then he stacked the papers, squared their edges and said:
"It is all correct. Mezhentsev is buying up emptiness before the register is complete. The office supplied weary surveyors with ready-made wording. Your Burn was entered as waste ground at someone else's prompting. Now they are using your sheet to try to drive out a hunter. But I have not found a single error in your papers, Vershinin."
Prokop waited.
"And what do you want me to do?"
"Stop it."
"What exactly?"
"The grants. The office. The ready-made wording they write in advance without seeing the land."
Stroev nodded as though he had heard a reasonable practical request, and took from beneath his greatcoat a large composite sheet showing all the belts of the eastern survey. He spread it across his knees. A drop fell from the canopy above the fire, and the general brushed it away with his sleeve before the water reached the ink.
"Look here," he said. "This is the register. Forty districts, eleven belts, three years' work. Do you know what there was before me? Forty maps. Every district had its own, every clan its own, the monasteries had theirs and the offices theirs. And on every boundary where two maps disputed, bones lay in the ground. I saw the boundary massacre near Spozhinki: men from seventeen households came at one another with axes over a hayfield marked on two maps. One map, Vershinin. One. Or forty wars over boundaries. Now you choose."
Stroev spoke of the massacre calmly, without emphasis. But at the word 'Spozhinki', his fingers began once more to square the already straight edge of the sheet.
"I am not against one map. I am against the man who enters land on it before the survey."
"Mezhentsev."
The general pronounced the name with disgust.
"I will reach the register and cancel half his dealings with one stroke of the pen: purchases of unsurveyed land will not be recognised. He knows this, so he buys everything in advance and accepts his future losses. Do not concern yourself with him."
"And Burn? And Pankrat? And the clan's route?"
Stroev was silent for a moment.
Then he took a pencil, his usual graphite stick sharpened at both ends, and laid it flat across the composite sheet, beside the old cutting.
"Here is your Burn at my scale," he said. "Look: the pencil covers it entirely. You cannot see the eighteen households beneath it, or the school with its bell. I was told who you were back in spring, if you had not worked it out for yourself."
"At any scale, details have to be left out, Vershinin. If the whole register were drawn household by household, the province would not fit on it, and soon the wars over boundaries would begin again. I choose the map that will end disputes between districts, even if individual households are lost from it. I make that choice every day. And I will go on making it, because no one else wants to take such responsibility upon himself."
The general lifted the pencil from the register. The old cutting became visible again, but Prokop had already understood how easily one pencil could hide an entire village.
"This clan's route will be surveyed in winter," the general continued. "It is not punishment but procedure. The nomads are in the rut in autumn; we cannot gather people to bear witness. And the law requires a local witness. You were the one who insisted on that rule. In winter there is no one on the routes, and measuring is easier."
"In winter the route is under ice and snow," Prokop said. "In winter it cannot be proved. By the deadline it will be recorded as empty."
"It will be recorded as whatever it proves to be."
"You knew that when you postponed it."
Stroev looked calmly at him across the fire. There was neither triumph nor mockery in his gaze.
"You will not catch me in a lie, Vershinin," he said. "I do not lie. I choose when to measure. Those are different trades."
Prokop gathered his papers and rose. When he was already walking away, the general added quietly something Prokop did not understand until they reached the stockade:
"Take care of your papers. Bring everything you have gathered to the review. I need an open review, Vershinin: before witnesses, with evidence. Shout if you must. A register no one dared challenge to my face will be challenged in corners for twenty years. A register challenged before everyone but not disproved will stand for a century. Your anger will be useful to me at the review. Do not thank me."
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