I had assumed, from the way he'd spoken of Cygnus Point, that it was somewhere in Hegemony territory. That they tolerated it the same way they tolerated the Villa itself: a compound behind walls, watched from every side. I asked Sertorius, on the first full day out, how many Hoplite garrisons still stood between it and us.
"None, if this goes right." He didn't turn to answer. "Cygnus Point is on the edge of the Hegemony. The Imperial Compound was the one Legion boot the Strategoi ever allowed on their own ground. The original treaty barely allowed that. All other Imperial boots have to stay on our side of the treaty's boundaries. Cygnus Point is along this stretch of it."
"That isn't the edge I crossed to reach Spartova."
"No. You came in from the Red Sand Sea, southwest of here, through a fortress that answers to nobody but the Hegemony itself. This border touches ground the Legions are willing to die over." His eyes had gone back to the ridge ahead of us. "I'd be surprised if you've ever seen it drawn on a map. I'd be more surprised if Ruvuk let you see one that had it."
I thought back to the world map that I had looked at with Ruvuk. It was the floor of a circular room in the fortress, no furniture in it and barely windows enough to light it, the whole known world carved into stone and painted in fading pigment, spread out under both our boots at once. Spartova's own territory was highly detailed. Heliqar was just a spot between mountains.
Ruvuk wanted approaches. He always wanted to know the routes an army could use to enter a country or leave one. If a name like Cygnus Point was on that floor, it had very likely passed under his boot at some point. I hadn't known to look for it.
I told Sertorius as much, the shape of it if not the memory itself. "I may have seen it. I wouldn't have known to notice it."
He didn't slow his stride to answer. "There's a standing order tied to any Key that surfaces outside its proper custody. A Legion element deploys to confirm the breach and contain it. What I didn't tell you is what happens if that element doesn't come back to confirm."
"Tell me now."
"If I don't walk into Cygnus Point and say the tower's down, with my own mouth, to the right ears, Command has exactly one assumption left available to it: that it isn't down, that a working Key is sitting somewhere in Hegemony hands, and that the treaty covering this entire border has already failed in the one way it was never permitted to fail. They will not wait for a second dispatch to be sure. They'll march, whatever number it takes, with orders to go into Spartova itself and take that tower apart until they've confirmed it with their own hands, treaty or no treaty, whoever's left holding any throne in that city by the time they arrive. Nothing like it has happened since the Third Empire finished conquering this planet. Every other country on it went down inside a season or two. The Hegemony took two decades of open war and another ten years of siege against Spartova itself before the city gave, and it came close to bankrupting the Empire outright to make that happen."
"So we aren't walking only for our own sake," I said.
Sertorius moved up, and I kept walking.
I did not know this road, but it was similar enough. Dark volcanic soil. Mineral-rich. Terraces of petow catching the light on every south-facing slope, levet crowding the higher, colder shoulders where petow wouldn't take.
Sertorius solved it by learning the pattern well. Helot labor worked the fields at fixed hours by fixed gangs walking fixed routes between fixed tasks, overseers posted at the junctions those routes actually used and nowhere else, because nowhere else needed one.
Sertorius watched a single morning's traffic on a single terrace from cover and had the whole day's rhythm worked out by noon. We moved in the hour before dawn and the hour after dusk, when the gangs were being mustered or already dismissed. During the day we hid wherever we could.
Food was the one piece even his patience couldn't stretch indefinitely. We had left Spartova with less in our packs than an emergency reserve. By the fourth night that was long gone. Bastien took Davan and two of our men down into a terrace we'd watched from cover since dusk, while the rest of us lay flat along the ridge above it and I discovered exactly how loud my own heartbeat could get in a silence I wasn't allowed to break.
They didn't touch the counted rows. They took from the margin growth at the base of the terrace wall, the smaller, irregular plants that grew where the administered rows gave out, stalks nobody had ever troubled to count because counting them had never been anyone's job. Petow from one wall, levet from the next, a double armful of banar from a strip too narrow to have been worth plowing properly.
They were back over the ridge in no time, and nothing in that field would look wrong.
I said nothing to Bastien when he dropped my share of it in front of me, and he said nothing back. Whatever we'd taken would be missed from some Helot's own ration long before it was ever missed from a Hoplite's table; that was how this country had always run. Bastien knew what I was thinking. "You'd rather we asked the Legate to go hungry to prove a point," he said and went back to eating before I'd decided whether I actually disagreed with him.
Marcus rode most of that stretch slung between Tullus and one of the garrison men. By the fifth day, the wound in his side had gone a frightening color. There was nothing to treat it with; they could only clean it and hope the fever broke. The Legate's clerks, who had never walked farther than the distance between one office and the next, were having a hard time. The Spark Gap men walked together, saying little. Even the centurion had gone gray-faced and quiet in a way that had nothing to do with his stubble.
Bastien found me at the fire that night. Sertorius allowed small fires now, screened behind rock. The cold was bad and had to be balanced against the threat of being found. Bastien didn't say anything when he sat next to me. We had run out of the energy for conversation sometime around midday. Exhaustion did the same work cold had done. It pushed us together because it was easier to stay upright together than alone. I don't think either of us was fully awake after that. I know neither of us moved before Sertorius roused the column at first light.
On a morning that had stopped feeling different from the ones before it, past a shoulder of bare rock, the ground finally fell away in front of us, and there, small and pale in the early light and still the better part of two days off by any honest accounting, was a wall.
Sertorius didn't stop walking. Nobody else did either.