Sael'mund

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with Irugaine and salamander, and the Irugaine strain is what lets the flesh regrow. The Alverians ruled many slave-cities and needed a word carried between them that every side would believe. They bred the Sael'mund as envoys and arbiters, and built the impartiality into the body. A Sael'mund cannot feel the pull of a faction; the place where allegiance sits in other peoples is, in them, a made absence, and what they feel instead is loyalty to the accord itself, the written thing. What the makers put in the mind they backed in the flesh: a Sael'mund who acts on partiality loses the regrowth, and the wound of the act stays open for life. The Alverians could maim an envoy from either side of a quarrel and have it walk back whole, and so could not be told it had been intimidated.

When Alveria fell the envoys had no one to carry words for and went on carrying them, since it was what they were. The peoples that came up out of the ruin found that a Sael'mund would hold a treaty between them and could not be bought by either, and the Sael'mund became the scholar-knights: keepers of accords, arbiters between peoples, and knights, because an accord that cannot be enforced is a rumour. Their oldest houses still hold the Alverian originals, which no one else can read and which they will not translate.

Body

Four to seven feet by kin. Smooth, moist, cool skin, coloured after the kin: black with yellow marks, pink-white, wrinkled brown, translucent green, blind white. The face is broad and flat with a wide lipless mouth and eyes that are dark, round and seem never to blink, which other peoples find unreadable and which is the point; there is a fixed clear film over the eye and no lid worth the name. The hands are long-fingered and unwebbed. The Sael'mundae weigh a hundred and forty pounds and a Sael'mundmor three hundred. The Sael'mundae live a hundred and fifty years, the Sael'mundmor four hundred, and the Sael'mundvor longer than anyone has watched.

A lost finger regrows in a month, a hand in a season, an eye in a year; the new flesh comes in paler and stays so, and an old Sael'mund is a map of what has been done to it. The regrowth runs off a bank: a seam of unformed tissue laid along either side of the spine, drawn on and rebuilt slowly out of what the body eats. Regrowing a hand costs a season's food and a quarter of the body's weight. A Sael'mund who comes back from an errand gaunt and ravenous has been maimed on it and healed on the road, and every Accord House keeps a larder for exactly that arrival. The makers built the regrowth so that an intimidated envoy would arrive looking untouched, and four thousand years of houses have learned to read the weight instead. A thin knight is seated at the head of the table and served first, and the parties to the accord are told nothing and understand everything. The Alverian design failed by a quarter of a hundredweight.

The made absence is real and a healer of another people can find it. Where other peoples carry a dense knot of tissue that answers to kin, banner and country, a Sael'mund has a smooth place and nothing in it. What fills the gap is the written accord. A Sael'mund feels for a document what a soldier feels for a flag, and that is the whole architecture of their loyalty: they cannot love a country, they marry by accord, their children belong to the house, and a Sael'mund handed a treaty it did not agree with will still defend the paper.

The partiality wound has never been explained by any healer of any people, and the houses do not require an explanation, having four thousand years of entries and the Marking at fifteen. What is known is only the shape of it: a wound taken in an act of partiality does not close, and the bank does not draw for it, and nothing else about the body changes.

They see slowly. The eye is superb in low light and poor at speed, and a fast movement arrives as a smear with no detail in it. An Accord House is lit low and everything in it is done at a deliberate pace, not as ceremony but as courtesy to the eye; a visitor who moves quickly in a hall is being rude in a way that takes explaining. And a weapon drawn fast is, to a Sael'mund, invisible. The absolute taboo against carrying a weapon into a hall where an accord is being made is not a symbol of peace. It is the one rule that keeps arbiters alive, and it is why the Tusiva are the enemy they take most seriously.

They have no hearing in air worth the name. There is no eardrum; sound reaches them through bone and through water, and a Sael'mund listens by putting a hand or the underside of the jaw flat against a solid surface. The whole custom of the Reading is built on it: every party to an accord lays both hands on the table while it is read aloud, because that is how the Sael'mund present are hearing it, and a hand lifted from the table during a Reading stops the Reading. Three of the Surface Realm's more famous treaty scandals are arguments about whose hand came up and when.

They are cold to the touch and cold-blooded in fact. In winter the body slows and the mind with it, and no house holds a Reading in the deep of the year; an accord broken in winter is answered in spring, and "a winter's grace" is a phrase used from the wetlands to the coast by people who have no idea it is a description of an arbiter's metabolism.

Life

They breed as salamanders do. In the cold of early spring a male dances in shallow running water, the Slow Dance, and sets down a packet of seed on the stones, and the female who has watched the whole of it takes it up into herself, and nothing about this is hurried. She lays in cold running water and the eggs are guarded by whichever of the house is not away carrying words. The larvae are gilled and swim for a year; this is the Gilling. Then the Turning, the change to the land form, except in the Sael'mundvar, who never turn and are not meant to, and the Sael'mundvor, who are born blind and stay so.

A child is raised in the Accord House by the whole house and is taught to read before it is trusted to walk far. At fifteen comes the Marking: the child's palm is cut across before the house and watched. If the cut closes, the child is Sael'mund and is given a sword and a first accord to learn by heart. If it does not close, the child has already broken a word somewhere, and is kept and loved and never sent out. The Sending is the first accord carried alone and is the beginning of the long middle, which is most of a life.

They die of age with all their wounds closed. The last stage is the Stillness, and it is the cruellest thing in their law. The tissue bank empties in the last years, and an old Sael'mund simply stops regrowing: a cut on the hand of a knight of three hundred and eighty stays open, and to every eye in the world that is the mark of a broken word. A house that did not have an answer to this would tear itself apart once a generation. The answer is the Question, held before the whole house, in which the old one is asked once whether it has been partial, answers once, and is believed, and the matter is closed and entered. It is the only proposition a Sael'mund house accepts without evidence, and they accept it because the alternative is to call every elder a perjurer at the end.

The body is laid in the river below the house and every accord the dead one carried is read aloud over it, which for an old Sael'mundmor can take a week. They eat fish, river insects, eggs and small things, and they eat enormously after an injury and sparingly otherwise; a Sael'mund has never been known to refuse a meal or to enjoy one.

Frailty

The regrowth is not free and it is not endless. Each rebuilt limb comes back a little worse than the one before it: paler, weaker, slower to feel. A hand regrown four times is a poor hand, and a Sael'mundae who has served in a bad region for fifty years is a patchwork of fourth-growth flesh that can hold a pen and cannot hold a sword. The houses track it, and a knight is moved from enforcement to witnessing when the count gets high, and takes the move badly every time.

The skin is the other limit. It must stay moist and it breathes, and a Sael'mund cannot cross dry country at all; a day of hard sun ends one. Every Accord House stands at a confluence because the arbiters cannot travel away from water, and the whole map of enforceable law in the Surface Realm is therefore the map of the river systems. In a dry decade the accords of the high country go unenforced, and the Torgai baronies, who read weather better than anyone, know exactly which summers to break a charter in.

A skin that breathes can be stopped. There is a grey fungus of slow water that grows over the back and closes the skin, and it kills over a year, and it takes the old before the young because the old sit still in the cold baths where it grows. Two houses have been emptied by it within memory and the Deep Ledger keeps their accords.

What they fear is none of this. It is being made to be partial: drugged, bound, deceived into carrying a false word, and left with an open wound that says to everyone who sees it that the oldest impartial thing in the world has been bought. The Tusiva have done it twice. Lisvaeth the Open-Handed carries such a wound honestly, having struck a baron on her own judgement, and is sent where a warning is wanted, and the two who were tricked into theirs are not spoken of at all.

Country

The Surface Realm, at the places where waters meet, and the Under Realm for the Sael'mundvor. An Accord House is built at a confluence, half in the water, with a hall for the making of accords, a library for their keeping and a cold bath for the house. Three houses are named. The House of Meeting Waters is the oldest and holds the Alverian originals. The Salt Accord is a coastal house that keeps the fishing treaties of three peoples and is hated by all three. The Deep Ledger is a house of the Sael'mundvor in the Under Realm, where the accords no one on the surface remembers are still read once a year.

The hall is stone and the table is stone, because the house hears through it. The library is above the flood line and the baths are below it, and the whole building is set so that a body in the cold bath can feel a cart arrive at the gate.

They take very little from a country and give it something it cannot get elsewhere, which is enforceable agreement. A river with an Accord House on it has settled fishing rights, settled tolls, settled marriage between its towns, and a hundred years of records of all of it, and the difference between such a valley and one without shows in the grain yield. When a house fails, the valley's quarrels come back within a decade, and there is always a stretch of river somewhere with a ruined confluence hall on it and three villages that will not speak.

They farm nothing, keep nothing and hunt nothing. They eat out of the river they live in and the river notices them no more than it notices a stone. Nothing preys on an adult; the larvae are eaten by everything, which is why the eggs are guarded, and the guarding of eggs is the one duty a house will recall a knight from an accord to perform.

Society

Each house is led by its Reader, the eldest who can still read the Alverian hand. Beneath the Reader the professions are the kin: the Sael'mundvar write, the Sael'kael witness, the Sael'mundae and the Sael'mundmor carry and enforce, the Sael'mundvor judge. They dress in undyed grey with the accord-sash, on which the seals of every word a Sael'mund carries are sewn, so that a knight with a heavy sash is one to be careful of. They drink water and think less of peoples who do not. There is no music in a house; outside it, they listen to everyone's without preference, which is easy, since in air they hear it only as a pressure and have no opinion available to them.

The great custom is the Reading: once a year every accord a house holds is read aloud in full, with every party's hands flat on the stone, and the parties are invited, and the ones who do not come are noted. The oath is sworn on still water with a cut palm, and the cut is watched. Taboo: to carry a weapon into a hall where an accord is being made; to say aloud which side is in the right; to translate the Alverian originals; and to lift a hand from the table during a Reading.

Faith

The Sael'mund hold to Nunamnir, the world herself, the ground that carries every side of every quarrel with the same indifference, and they name her the Underneath. They have no clergy and no temple; the rite is the Standing, at dawn, barefoot on bare earth, when a Sael'mund says over the accords it carries, so that the ground has heard them too. They pay the star gods and the void gods the courtesy of witnesses, and take no side between them either.

They believe the dead go into the Underneath and become part of its stillness. The soul goes where all souls go, to the star gods' auction, and a Sael'mund who learned of it would call it a breach of an accord no one signed, and would write it down.

Tongue

Common Tongue and many others, since an arbiter must read every people's treaties in the hand they were written in, and the Readers know Ancient Alverian. Among themselves they speak Saelic, a wet, soft tongue with few hard sounds, which is said to be impossible to shout in, and which is true; the voice of a people that does not hear in air was never built for volume.

A name is given at the Marking, in Saelic, and the house is added after: Oruvane of Meeting Waters. The names run: Oruvane, Ithlemar, Vesselan, Aumrel, Thessily, Ondramar, Lisvaeth, Corumel.

Regard

"A salamander's word" is, in most markets, the name for a promise that will be kept. They are trusted by everyone before a judgement and despised by half of everyone after it. The insults are "wet-hand" and "sitter," the second for a people who will sit through any quarrel without taking a side in it. Scholars confuse them with the Squeesh, since both are cold, damp and full of books, and both peoples resent it equally.

The Bogish are friends, one people that remembers everything and another that writes it all down. The Torgai barons hire them to witness charters and hate them for remembering the terms. The Librar and the Sael'mund lend to each other and to no one else. Their enemies are whoever last broke an accord, and the Tusiva, who can wear a Sael'mund's face and have, and who are the reason every house cuts a stranger's palm at the door.

Harvest

Mend-flesh: the pale regrowing tissue of a stump, cut and pounded to a paste that closes wounds in other peoples for a night. Taken from the dead, or from the living by those who know a Sael'mund will grow the hand back, and the cutters take it from the spinal bank where it is richest, which empties the bank and leaves the arbiter unable to heal anything for a year. Illegal within a day's ride of any Accord House and sold everywhere else.

Glass-skin: the translucent hide of a Sael'kael, cured thin for lenses and for the windows of reliquaries; legal, rare, and a Sael'kael's family will know the piece.

Sael-sash: the accord-sash of a dead knight, with its seals, which is worth nothing and is stolen constantly by those who think the seals can be used.

Remembered

Ondramar of Meeting Waters. A Sael'mundmor who carried the same accord between two Nu'uman crowns for two hundred and eleven years and outlived both houses.

Lisvaeth the Open-Handed. A Sael'mundae whose palm did not close after she struck a baron who had not yet broken his word, and who carries the wound and the sash together, and is sent where a warning is wanted.

The Reader of the Deep Ledger. A Sael'mundvor whose name no surface house has been told, who is said to have read the Alverian originals aloud once, alone, in the dark.

Kin each has a page of its own