The guard led me through the inner ward to a covered walkway that opened onto the upper level of a training yard, a place I hadn't been before. It reminded me of the walkways in our palace that looked down on the garden where the walls were high enough to block the wind and allow our most delicate flowers to grow.
The yard below was covered in impeccably raked sand without a green thing in sight. At its center, a line of boys stood in silence.
The youngest were seven or eight. The oldest were eleven or twelve. Still early in the process that would make them into Hoplites when they were twenty. They were dressed in short wool tunics without cloaks, though the morning air was quite chilly. Their feet were bare.
Ruvuk awaited me silently at the railing, watching the yard below.
The walkway ran the full length of the yard's northern wall. Two guards stood at the far end. They could watch both us and the yard. The walls were smooth-faced, impossible to climb.
An instructor with four studs on his shoulder strap wore full bronze armor. He moved along the line, spacing the boys into pairs. He carried a staff with an iron covered end. Once the boys were paired off, he stepped back and commanded them to begin. The boys raised their staffs and began to spar.
The crack of wood on wood was the only sound. When each conflict ended, the loser went to the far wall and lifted one of the stones stacked there. The granite blocks would have been heavy for a grown man, but the boy would hold it above his head.
While I watched, one boy's arms failed. The stone slipped from his hands and struck the sand. The instructor came to his side. The boy stripped off his clothing entirely and dropped to his hands and knees.
The instructor threw sand onto his back and then pressed the iron end of his staff between the boy's shoulders. The point of the staff drove him to crawl forward. Each movement would cause the staff's point to grind into the same spot on his back. Based on the other marks on his back, this wasn't his first time. By the time he reached the far wall, his new wound was raw and bleeding. He crawled back the same way. And the session continued around him as though he were not there. None of the other boys dropped their stones.
When it was done the boy was given a rake and began bringing the sand back to the pristine condition it had been in when they arrived.
Some pairs were well matched. They had been doing this long enough to have developed instincts. Some were mismatched. The larger boy would drive the smaller back across the sand. The boys at the wall kept their eyes on their own stones, arms shaking. Each knew what the sand looked like up close.
"They begin at seven," Ruvuk said. "By twelve they will have been in more physical confrontations than most Imperial soldiers see in a career."
"How many complete the Agoge?" I asked.
A slight pause, as if he hadn't expected the question. "About half."
"The ones who don't," I said. "They know the odds by the time they're old enough to understand them. That's a lot of boys who understand they are likely in the wrong half. Does that become a problem?"
Ruvuk hesitated again. "You assume that knowing the odds produces resentment. It produces vigilance instead. Every boy in that yard believes that he will be in the right half. If one senses otherwise, he redoubles his efforts. The only opportunity he is given is his next trial."
"And when the next trial comes and he fails?"
"By then he has learned that failure is weakness. He saw what happens to the weak. When his time arrives, he understands what must happen."
"He believes he deserved it," I said.
"He knows he deserved it," Ruvuk said. "That is a more durable outcome than anything your system of letters and councils produces. You produce men who are surprised by hardship. Pain produces men who are not."
Below, the instructor reset the pairs and the yard began again. I watched the boys at the wall. Each of them was still holding. Each of them was still in the right half, for now, and they knew it, and that knowledge was the system working exactly as designed.
Near the center of the yard, a compact boy had driven his opponent to the sand with a sharp sweep of his staff. The fallen boy tried to rise, but it was over. The victor planted his staff on the shoulder of the fallen boy and began leaning in. Thinking of the bruising made me wince. But then he stopped leaning so hard, just hard enough to hold the other down.
It was a brief moment. He knew what was expected of him, but he didn't do it. He looked around, as if trying to make sure no one saw what was happening.
The Hoplite bounded across the yard. He took him by the collar, forced him down onto his hands and knees in the sand, and hit him on the back of his neck with the iron end of the rod. The boy's arms buckled and his face went into the sand and he lay still for a moment while the yard continued around him.
The back of the neck was was painful, but not particularly damaging. A sudden impact there did briefly unmade the connection between intention and posture. The boy was momentarily unable to hold himself up. Less humane handlers used the technique on animals. The instructor demonstrated, in the most direct mechanical terms available, what hesitation cost.
Once both of the boys were on their feet, the instructor pointed at the wall. They wordlessly went over and lifted their stones.
The instructor's voice was directed at no one in particular. "Mercy is weakness. Weakness is poison. You must purge it from your heart."
I had seen my father deal with many hard things. He kept his face still through all of them. I strove to keep my face from betraying me.
The Agoge had been running for millennia. Yet this correction was still required. The instructor's rod was maintenance. The inclination the boy had displayed kept occurring. The system had to fight against human nature. The Hegemony had kept suppressing mercy, generation after generation, at considerable cost.
"You find this disturbing?" Ruvuk asked flatly.
"It's methodical," I said. "And expensive."
He turned to look at me. "Expensive?"
"The Agoge runs thirteen years per cohort. The instruction ratio, the feeding and housing, the attrition. It is a significant investment for a state that could conscript adults. It suggests what you are producing here cannot be produced any other way."
He studied me with the attention he had given the stone at the gate.
"A scholar of your training would call this an argument for determinism over liberty," he said.
"A scholar of my training would call it an argument for a particular kind of efficiency," I said. "The distinction matters."
"And to you, personally?"
"I am trying to understand what the Hegemony needs that the Agoge is the answer to. That is a different question from whether I approve of the method."
"The Iron Code institutes the Agoge. Third article," Ruvuk said. "Xondor understood that a system that depends on its citizens to create virtue will produce variable outcomes. The Agoge is the solution to that problem. It builds strength into a child. Choice is no longer necessary."
I thought about the compact boy. There had been something in the moment before the rod came across his neck. The Code's answer to that something was to strike it out of him. The Code had been striking it out of boys for ages, and the moment still occurred, in this yard, this morning, requiring the same correction it had always required.
A system in permanent tension with a quality it couldn't get rid of permanently was a system with a permanent cost. That cost was the beginning of the question I had actually come here to answer.
We stood there until the session ended.
Ruvuk left me at the door of my quarters without further conversation. Inside, my meal was already on the table. On the table beside it sat a codex I had not seen before. No title on the cover. It was bound in iron-laced leather. Heavy.
The title came on the first page: "The Iron Code of the Hegemony of Spartova. As dictated by Xondor the Great, Emperor."
I set it down and ate first. Then I turned the lamp to full, and opened the book from the beginning. I hoped to find an assumption that was wrong. A gap between claim and reality.
Article 1 stated that the purpose of the State was the expansion of power by conquest. Everything followed from that. Perfectly coherent and carefully built.
Article 4 explained the political system. The Council of Strategoi, elected by the Hoplites of each region. The High Tribunal, a judiciary that served for life. And beneath them, the Grand Assembly of delegates from every garrison in the Hegemony. The Assembly's votes on proposed laws was binding.
Three bodies, each with a different source of authority and interests. Ruvuk was a Prefect, which placed him inside the military structure under the Strategoi. Whatever Ruvuk was doing here, he was doing it within, or possibly against, an institutional framework that had its own priorities. Certainly the institution would not tolerate a Prefect acting too independently.
I kept reading.
Article 5 covered the legal status, obligations, and total subordination of Helot serfdom. Perhaps Serf was too generous a word. It appeared to offer a level of autonomy the people in brown clearly did not have.
Helot labor was the keystone that made the Hegemony work. The Agoge, the food supply, and the entire economy depended on Helots who could not own property or bear arms: conquest produced Serfs, and Serfs produced Hoplites, and Hoplites produced conquest.
I thought of a possible argument: Heliqar's value was in its knowledge of the desert and its ability to maintain that knowledge. Every route needs upkeep.
But what would prevent Heliqar from being conquered and those same services performed by Helot Heliqaris? It was clear that Spartova didn't just use Helots for hard physical labor. They were used for absolutely everything the war machine required except the Hoplites themselves.
Article 6 explained the family structure. The State was organized to produce the maximum quantity of male offspring. The arithmetic I had seen showed it clearly. If half the boys died in the Agoge, each Hoplite needed to father twice as many children as in a stable population. Two women for every man were required. The women in a Hegemony Citizen's household were in an unnamed category between citizens and Serfs. Their only stated function was to produce sons.
The raids on caravans were a structural necessity to compensate for Helots who needed to be made an example of. Surely, having many children was desirable for a Helot household. But apparently they were destroying more than they needed. They wanted warriors and corpses but nothing in between. That was possible leverage.
Continuing through the book, I noticed a passage on the philosophical foundation of the Agoge. A single line, attributed to Xondor directly: "The child who is permitted to remain soft will, in maturity, build institutions to keep him so, and call them civilization."
Elias had a set of notes on the First Empire's collapse. His published history treated the period with confidence, but his private notes told a different story. The last entry was two pages of unanswered questions, ending with a marginal annotation: "sources unreliable, oral tradition only, do not cite."
The Book of the Eternal Sun called the same period the Great Ingratitude. A general from the mountains who called the covenant a cage. Ruvuk called that man a liberator. The early Third Empire must have spent generations trying to eradicate the Spartovan version of these events, but it had survived. The Scholarchy in Thensapolis would hold the best accounts in the world about this, but since the Third Empire was calling the shots there, they were no doubt kept under the highest secrecy. Allowing the true account to get out might undermine Imperial Religion. Spartova held its Codex. Spartova was not a place anyone would go looking for history. If they did, they would not return.
When I pointed out the discrepancy between the Iron Code and the Book of the Eternal Sun, he wasn't disturbed. It was merely a question he hadn't revisited in many years. He had continuous records from before the Dark Age. Whatever those records said about Xondor's final years, Ruvuk had them and I didn't.
Two problems running in parallel. First, the treaty. The constitution showed a possible gap between the Strategoi and Ruvuk. Water moved in gaps between stone and those gaps could be widened. The Strategoi had their own interests in Imperial relations, whatever they were. Using those interests against Ruvuk's was a different negotiation than the one I had planned for.
And if the negotiation failed entirely, the fracture was still there. The same gap that might give me a treaty might give me an exit.
The conclusion of the Codex was short. The language was different: "Thus it is written."
Four words in the voice of Xondor himself. Closing a legal document the way a dictator forecloses input rather than inviting it. They were the words of a man who needed the argument to be over.
I set the book on the table and turned the lamp down. The stones were still in my pocket. I lay hands at my sides, and kept working.
Heliqar needed a treaty. The Hegemony had a fracture in it. Somewhere in the records Ruvuk had built his certainty from, there was a version of Xondor that the institution had decided needed to stay buried.
Sleep came late, but eventually it did.