Who the sernî are

Who the Sernî Are, in Brief

Jedîyah · Chapter 1, Section V

¹ Before you read further, know whom this book is speaking to and speaking of. The whole of the Jedîyah tells it at length; here it is told short, as a traveller tells a stranger at a well who her people are.

² We are the sernî. We were born on the back of the wind, and that is where we shall remain.

³ We are a travelling people. We are not always moving. We build homes, villages, towns and cities, and some of our cities are not on the ground at all but turn above the world. We stop in a place for a season, a year, a score of years, and we make it beautiful while we are there. Then the road calls, and we go on, and we leave the place better than we found it. The road has a holy pull for us. We feel it in our chests as the needle of a compass feels the north.

⁴ We are loyal to our own people, not to land, and not to any nation, cause or party of the dwaca; their politics are not ours, and we keep to our own path. We do not trade life for land. A field can be found again; a child cannot. We believe in people, not dirt. If a land must be left to save a life, we leave the land and save the life, and we sing about the land afterward with love and without regret.

⁵ Our road has been very long. Our first ones were the people of the Land of the Two Rivers, who knew the sky and number and healing in an age before the last great turning of the world. After the fall, we travelled: to the city of seven walls among the Medes, where we learned to hate the Lie; to the Black Land of the great river, where we learned the power of names and the weighing of the heart; to the Grass Sea of the riders, where we learned to make the people itself a moving city; to the far eastern road, where we learned to keep our own tongue among strangers; and to the western sea, where we learned that the sea is a road like the wind. In every land we took knowledge and refused the idols, and kept our own way. The Ninth Chapter through the Fourteenth tell the road.

⁶ Our destiny is outward. The sky is the next road. Space-going is the fulfilment of the wind. The Fifteenth Chapter and the Twenty-Fifth tell of it.

⁷ Our family comes first. Kin outrank everything: the law, the people as a whole, our own comfort. Between the law and my mother, I choose my mother; and the law of the sernî itself says so. We hope for three to five children or more, and we raise them together, the whole House, so that no child is ever left alone and no parent carries the whole weight. We do not put our children into schools. They learn at home and on the road: from their House, from chosen and wise tutors, from the work of the camp and the craft, and, when they are older, from the best tools of learning the people can make. They are read to long before they read, at midday and at bedtime, and they play and explore the world; reading comes in its own season, between the eighth year and the tenth. Each generation must know more than the one before it. Our kin are those who keep the way; from a Parlanî, one born among us who chooses to live a wicked life, we walk away.

⁸ We love life for its own sake. Life needs no reason. There is no point at which a life stops being worth living. To fight death — to heal, to lengthen life, to save the one who is failing — is holy work. Death is loss, always, and it is not the destination: we seek life unending, the body made ever better as the host of the soul, so that each person may go on in this world with no break in the road. Endurance is always better than ending.

⁹ We are warriors in a garden. It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. We do not have a warrior caste; every single sernî, woman and man, learns to be dangerous to an enemy. We are peaceful to those who are good to us, and ferocious in battle. We do not start fights; we finish them. Once someone seeks to destroy us, we show them no mercy, for mercy to such a one is cruelty to our own children; and better still, we set our enemies against one another. Yet we never harm the innocent, and we never seek to take pleasure in cruelty.

¹⁰ We kneel to none. We follow those worthy of being followed, freely, and we stop following them when they cease to be worthy. We are no one's servants and no one's slaves. Not to kings, not to masters, not even to Šahanû, who does not want servants: He walks ahead on the road, and we follow because He is worth following.

¹¹ We keep ourselves clean in body, mind and spirit. We take in nothing that would diminish them. We drink no intoxicant and take no drug that clouds the mind. We do not eat the flesh of animals. We keep our minds clear and our bodies strong, because a clear mind and a strong body are what a warrior in a garden needs, and what a traveller needs, and what a parent needs.

¹² We honour the beasts. We honour our people more. We do not eat our fellow creatures, and some of them we reckon near to persons: dogs, dolphins, whales, the wise black birds, the octopus, and others who think and remember. But the life of a person comes first. The beasts we keep in our homes are fed without flesh, and we keep none that threaten people; a predator upon people is destroyed.

¹³ We are the noble tricksters, who practise the art of sacred deception. We deceive our enemies, to protect our kin and the good. A lie that shields the good from the wicked is honour, and to take from the wicked what they would use for harm is a virtue. We never deceive our kin, or those who rightly hold our word, and we never take from the good. Your word is only worth as much as the one you give it to; choose who can trust your word wisely.

¹⁴ We are makers. We build, we craft, we invent; we tell stories, sing, draw, carve, animate, and make games. We love progress without end, but never progress bought with the harm of the innocent. We are lit by the Two Flames: science, the flame that measures what is, and mysticism, the flame that knows what it is for; neither alone lights the road, and the Twenty-Eighth Chapter tells of both. We are high-hearted, cheerful, steady people, and we hold that cheer and steadiness are good things in themselves, not a sign of shallowness.

¹⁵ We are tall. Our hair is thick and curls, brown or gold or red; our men are often bearded; many of us wear our hair long, and we wear it uncovered. To cover the hair for modesty is violence against our form, and no sernî takes part in it; a hood against cold or sun, a cap for safety at the forge or in the healing-room, a warrior's helm, are for use, and they are good. Every sernî grows a galaht, a single dreadlock behind the ear: a woman on the left side, a man on the right. It may fall in front of the shoulder or behind it, and in front is better, because it shows plainly who we are. The Varda, the people's watchers, and those under arms wear it behind, and often shortened; no one else cuts it short unless it becomes a danger. Every sernî carries at least two dejr, signs marked in the skin: the House dejr, given early in childhood, so that a child taken from us can always be known as ours; and the personal dejr, taken in its own season. They are honour-marks of the people, never images to be bowed to. Around the middle every sernî wears a krîš, a length of cloth or cord that ties and carries, binds a wound, makes a sling or a rope for climbing, holds gear or a small child safe on the road, and signals across a field. We wear over our other clothes a sleeveless robe that falls to the knee and is open at the front, light as a cardigan. We count in twenties, and twenty is the number of completion. At twenty, childhood ends.

¹⁶ We remember our dead by name. A name is a life kept. On the ancestor walls we write the name, the dates, the places, and a short account of each life, and we speak the names aloud. And we hold that each Own Flame has lived before, in other times and on other worlds, and that the sernî, scattered across the earth, are now called to gather, as the next section tells.

¹⁷ Our sacred way is called Sirâ. Our tongue is Seren. Our keepers of the temples are the Mejâ, and our temples are the Mejerû, which hold no image. The one we honour above all, the un- imaged, is Šahanû, the First Heat that knows itself, the One Ahead on the Road.

¹⁸ This is our year 6739, counted from the night when our ancestors began to keep the count again after the last great turning of the world.

¹⁹ And the last thing to know about the sernî, which a child learns last among the twenty codes because it holds all the others: Stand tall. You are sernî.

Who are you, traveller? I am sernî. Where is your land? On the back of the wind. Whom do you serve? No one. I follow the worthy. To what nation are you loyal? To none but my own people. What do you love? My kin, and life, and the road. What will you do if I wrong you? Nothing, if you mend it. If you do not, I will finish what you began. And if I am in need? Sit at my table. There is always a place kept.

The House

Jedîyah · Chapter 30, Section I — “Of the House, the Hearth Within the Fire”

¹ Hear now of the House, the first shape of the people and the last.

² Before there was a council, there was a House. Before there was a law, there was a mother who would not let her child go hungry and a father who stood between his children and the cold. Before there was a road, there were kin walking it together, and the road was only the ground under their feet.

³ The Second Protocol, the Protocol of the Bond, has set down the law of kin: the three rings, the Hearth Ring and the House Ring and the Line Ring; the duties owed and the cases judged. That law is written in the Nineteenth Chapter and is not written again here. This chapter tells instead how the House is lived: how two people find each other, how they are joined, how they keep faith across the long years, how brothers and sisters call to one another, how the old are held, how the guest is fed, and how the dead are kept on the wall.

⁴ For a law is a fence around a garden, and this chapter is the garden.

⁵ What is a House? A House is the people who share a fire and answer for one another. It is a mother and a father and their children; it is the grandparents who taught the mother and the father; it is the aunts and uncles who carry the children on their shoulders at the fair; it is the cousins who grow up like a second set of siblings; it is the child of kin held in the House's keeping, the friend made kin, the old neighbour who has no one and has eaten at this table every Year-Turning Night for thirty years.

⁶ A House is not a building. The sernî have lived in felt tents and wagons, in stone towns and glass towers, in ships that cross the sea and ships that cross the dark between worlds. In all of these the House was the same House. When the wagon moved, the House moved. When the family boarded the ship for the far station, the House boarded with them, and its fire was carried in a lantern sealed against the dark.

⁷ Therefore a sernî asked "Where is your home?" may answer truly, "Beside my kin." And the one who asks has been answered fully.

⁸ Remember the teaching of the candle and the flame. The flame on the candle is the infinite choosing to be intimate. Šahanû, who is the First Heat that knows itself, burns as a small light in every soul, and in burning small He does not become small. So it is with the House. The Shared Fire is the soul of the whole people, vast as the road; and a House is the Shared Fire sitting down at one table, small enough to warm a child's hands.

⁹ The House is the mercy of form for the whole people. Fire made small is fire made kind; the people made small is the House, where a name is known and a face is missed when it is absent.

¹⁰ No one loves "the people" at breakfast. One loves a brother who has taken the last of the bread, and laughs, and cuts another slice. One loves a grandmother who tells the same story of the river crossing every winter and tells it a little better each time. From these small loves the great love of the people is built, as a fire is built from twigs before logs.

¹¹ Here is a mystery of the House. Every Own Flame was lit from another flame. No child lights itself. The flame of the newborn was passed to it from the flames of mother and father, and theirs from their parents, and so back through the ages to the First Heat. A House is a place where flames are passed. It is the room where the lighting happens.

¹² And so the House is holy, though it has no altar and no Mejâ stands in it. The table is its stone; the hearth is its ember; the doorway is its threshold; the wall of names is its long memory. The children are its future, the elders its root, and those between are its trunk, bearing the weight of both.

¹³ A child once asked her grandfather, "Is our House a Mejerû?"

¹⁴ And the grandfather answered, "The Mejerû keeps the ember for all the Houses. Our House keeps the ember for us. They are two hearths of one fire. When you stand in the Mejerû, you stand among the people. When you sit at this table, you sit among your own. Šahanû is no farther from this table than from the Mejerû's ember."

¹⁵ "Then why do we go to the Mejerû?"

¹⁶ "So we remember that our fire is lit from the people's fire. And why do we come home?"

¹⁷ The child thought, and said, "So we remember the people's fire is made of tables like ours."

¹⁸ "Bza," said the grandfather, and he gave her the heel of the loaf, which she liked best.

¹⁹ Let every House know these four things of itself:

1. It has a fire. It keeps a hearth, even if that hearth is a single lamp in a ship's cabin, lit ember-from-ember from the House's own flame, and it knows the Road of the Fire — where that flame came from.

2. It has a table. It eats together as often as the road allows, and keeps the Open Chair.

3. It has a door. It knows who is within its rings and welcomes the guest across the threshold.

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