Sserrin

Origin

Bred from Irugaine and sea-serpent stock, with the strain of Alverian all the lesser peoples carry, for open-water patrol: the Alverian age moved enormous tonnage by sea and could not garrison the sea, so it grew a garrison that lived in it. The Sserrin escorted convoys, boarded and sank what was not theirs, and drowned runaway cargo that went over the side. When the age ended the convoys did not stop; only the ownership changed. The Sserrin simply began charging.

They have never been conquered, because nobody has ever found the thing to conquer. They have no capital, no fleet and no army in the sense any admiralty understands, and the standard method of dealing with them is a treaty that every maritime power denies having signed.

Body

Ten to eighteen feet of serpent, flattened toward the tail into a vertical paddle, with a narrow Nu'umanoid head, a heavy jaw and eyes set for depth. Two short arms, forearm length, set high on the body and folded flat when swimming; these are the one thing that separates them from the Sarpaen on sight and the reason they can work a rope, a knife and a line. Weight two hundred to seven hundred pounds. Colouring is counter-shaded, black or olive above and yellow, white or pale grey below, so that they vanish from above and from beneath both. They breathe air and hold it for two hours; they can be drowned and they know it, and that knowledge sits under their whole culture. Lifespan is two hundred and fifty to four hundred years.

The two hours are engineered and the engineering shows. The blood carries a great deal more oxygen than any land creature's and the muscle holds a private store of its own, so the body can run for a long time on what was in it when the head went under. On a dive the heart drops to eight or nine beats a minute and the blood is shut out of everything except the brain, the heart and the swimming muscle; a diving Sserrin's arms and gut are, for an hour, not really alive. The lung runs most of the body and the rear third of it is a trim tank rather than a breathing organ, so a Sserrin sets its depth by how much it holds and can hang motionless at any level without a movement, which is why a Sserrin negotiator arrives at a ship's rail already at eye height and has been there for some time. Under the tongue sits a salt gland that spits brine in a fine jet every few minutes; they never drink fresh water and could not keep it down. Sailors know the spit and read it correctly as boredom.

Their sense of the water is the thing that makes the trade possible. Down each flank runs a line of pits reading pressure, and it reads a hull the way an eye reads a face: the displacement, the speed, the trim, the number of men moving on the deck and whether the ship is riding heavy or light. A line can tell a ship's tonnage from a mile off in darkness and has never once been argued out of it, which is why the fee schedule is by tonnage and why no master in four thousand years has successfully understated a cargo. A wake is also a taste. Bilge, tar, sweat and galley smoke hang in the water for the better part of a day, and a Sserrin can follow a crossing that finished yesterday, which is why nobody outruns the invoice; a ship that slips a lane at night is met at the far end by somebody who knows what it did.

Underwater their hearing is superb and directional, taken through the jaw, and they can hold a conversation across two miles of open sea. In air they are close to deaf, which explains a great deal about them: the Common Tongue as a Sserrin speaks it is loud, flat, oddly paced and much too close to your face, and this is the reason ports think of them as rude and lines think of ports as mumblers.

Their eyes are built for blue and green and are blind to red entirely. That single fact has drowned crews. Every signal they use is a knot, a shape or a motion, the lane cord is knotted and not coloured because colour means nothing to them, and a ship's master flying a red pennant to warn a Sserrin off is flying a flag the colour of the sea.

Life

They bear live young in the open sea, four to nine at a birth, and the young swim from the first minute. There is no nest and no shore. What there is instead is the raft: a Sserrin mother near term is joined by six or eight of her line, who swim a slow circle around her for the three days of the birth and for a month afterwards, keeping the young inside the ring and everything else outside it. To be born in a small ring is a poverty a Sserrin never quite lives down, and the size of the ring is remembered as other peoples remember a title.

The stages are counted, as everything of theirs is counted. The Ring is the first month, inside the circle. The Loose runs twenty years, the young swimming with the line, learning the stretch fathom by fathom and being taught the reef by being made to name it in the dark. The Cord begins at the first lane work done alone, boarding, escorting or collecting, and it is the coming of age; a Sserrin of the Cord may hold a fee and may be spoken to as a person by a ship's master. The Holder is one who holds water, which most never become, since a stretch is inherited and there are only so many. The Weight is the old, who stop working the surface, go down to sit in the reef holds and the deep, and are asked about the water as it was two centuries ago.

They eat fish, squid and whatever else the water gives, and they eat sailors, which they do not advertise and do not deny. What they eat most of, and what actually feeds a line, is the reef: they plant it, weight broken hulls into the sand to grow it, guard it from netting fleets, and crop it on a rotation that no port has ever bothered to notice is a rotation. A lane held by the same line for two centuries has more fish in it than any unheld water on Nu, which is a fact the ports enjoy without connecting it to the fee they resent. A lane that loses its line loses its reef inside thirty years, because the first thing that arrives is a netting fleet and the second thing is nothing.

The dead are not buried and not burned. A dead Sserrin is taken down by its line to the deepest water they can reach and released, and the line stays with it as far down as they can follow, which for the Sserrin'mor is very far. The custom is called the Letting Go, and the depth reached is the measure of the respect. What is not said at the surface, and is entirely the point below it, is that the Sserrinvor take the names of the let-go into the songs, and a family that hears its own dead sung back in a liturgy nobody taught has had the doctrine proved to it personally.

Frailty

The killer of working Sserrin is the shakes, and it is a disease of coming up. A body that has spent an hour deep carries something in it that must be let out slowly, and a salvage crew that rises fast comes up with joints locked, blood in the eye and a stagger that does not clear; the bad cases die within the day, and the survivors are crooked for life. Every deep line therefore ascends on a counted rope, knots at intervals, a hand on each knot and a held breath between, and the counting is taught before swimming is. It is the root of the whole Sserrin reverence for slowness. A line's most respected person is not its strongest; it is the one who has made the most descents and has never hurried one, and the Sserrinvor doctrine that the god is reached by going down and not by coming back is a religion built directly on an occupational injury.

They drown. This is the fact underneath everything else about them, and it is why a people who own the ocean fear the net above all things. A netted Sserrin fights, and fighting is what kills it: the oxygen store goes in ninety seconds of struggle and a serpent that could have held its breath for two hours is dead in four minutes because it panicked. Every Sserrin child is taught to go still in a net, and almost none of them can. Netting is therefore the one weapon that works on them, every admiralty knows it, and the lines have made the possession of a boarding net by a merchant ship a matter that ends the cord. Among themselves, nets are not used, not made and not spoken about, and a wrecker who uses one is hunted by lines that were not even involved.

Fresh water ulcerates them. A day in a river estuary leaves sores at the jaw and the vent, a week disables, and a month kills; no Sserrin has ever gone upriver and the whole species's northern and inland boundary is drawn by rainfall. This is the actual content of the arrangement with the Torksash extortion houses, which both sides call an alliance: the Torkan cannot wait in salt water and the Sserrin cannot enter fresh, so the boundary between a river people and a sea people has been fixed by physiology for a thousand years and neither has ever had to keep a promise.

The old crust over. A growth of shell and weed takes hold on the back of a Sserrin past three hundred, cannot be reached without arms long enough to scrape, and is cleaned by younger members of the line as an act of respect, which is the most affection the species publicly shows. A Weight whose crust is not being cleaned has been abandoned, and everyone in the hold knows it.

Bad years are known by the rings: pups born in open water in a year of storms and thin fish are born to small rings, and a line that has run three small rings in a row will be swallowed by a neighbour within a generation, which is how lanes change hands without a fight.

Country

The Deep Realm and the surface of it. They hold the warm-water lanes, the straits, the reef country and the deep-water crossings, and their fixed places are reef holds: worked caverns in reef walls and drowned rock, air-pocketed at the top, where a line keeps its old, its young and its share of what it has taken. There is no Sserrin city above water anywhere, though there are Sserrin quarters in a dozen ports, one street deep, where the lane business is done with people who cannot swim.

A century of a line on a lane leaves the water richer and the coast poorer in one specific way: the ports on a Sserrin lane do not build navies, because for four hundred years they have not needed one. They build warehouses instead, and counting houses, and they grow fat and undefended, and the arrangement is perfectly stable until the line is broken. Two ports have found out what happens next. Both had ten years to build a fleet and neither managed it, and one of them is now a fishing village with a very large customs hall in it.

Society

Lines, not clans. A Sserrin line is everyone descended from one grandmother and it holds a stretch of water, and the stretch is the whole of its wealth, standing and identity. The lane trade is conducted with a formality that surprises everyone who meets it: a ship's master who wishes to cross pays at the last port before the lane, receives a knotted cord, and flies it; a ship without a cord is boarded, and the boarding is no fight, because the boarders come up through the hull. Payment is in metal, in salt, in glass and in news, and news is worth the most, since a people with no borders and no couriers is starved of it.

The cord is knotted in a pattern that states the line, the season and the tonnage paid for, and it is read from the water by pressure and shape rather than by sight, which means it can be read at night by a serpent that has not surfaced. Forging one is possible and is attempted about once a decade, and the knot has been altered forty-one times in four hundred years, each alteration announced at every port on the lane by a Sserrinae who swims in and shouts it at the harbour wall.

They wreck as well. A line that is not being paid will take a ship apart on a reef it has known for two centuries, and the two trades sit together without strain: the lane fee is for protection from the sea, and the wreck is the sea.

Their dress is worked shell and glass and the coin of a dozen nations bored through and strung, worn heavy, since weight is nothing to them; a Sserrin negotiator arrives wearing several kingdoms. Their oath is sworn on breath: the swearer goes under and stays under while the oath is spoken above them by another, and comes up to affirm it, and the oath holds only for as long as they can prove they could have drowned for it. Their taboo is the cut cord: to take a paid ship is the one crime the lines execute for, because the cord is the only reason any of it works. Alongside it sits the net, which is not a crime with a punishment so much as a thing after which a person is no longer of any line.

Faith

Orton, and Orton alone, under the name Orruthaan, the Weight Below, the ocean god as the pressure and the dark under the surface. Their doctrine is the Descent: that everything falls eventually, that the god is what it falls into, and that a life is judged by how deep you were willing to go and for whom. Their clergy are the Sserrinvor, who go deeper than any other strain and come back up singing. There is no temple and no altar; there is a depth, and each hold has its own, and going to it is the whole of worship. Their afterlife is that the Weight Below keeps what reaches him, and that the deep is full of everyone. It is not. Orton keeps no realm and no dead; Sserrin souls go to the auction of the star gods with all the rest. What is actually down there is silt, pressure and the drowned realms, which is enough to have built a religion on.

Tongue

Common Tongue at the surface, learned from four thousand years of shouting at ships. Under water they use the shift, a compressed clicking speech that carries for miles and that no air-breathing people can produce, and the songs of the Sserrinvor are sung in it.

Naming convention: a given name plus the water. A Sserrin is its stretch, and to say a Sserrin's name is to say where you would find them, which is the whole of their social order in a phrase. Those without water are named for the wreck they were born over.

Ysselvaa of the Long Strait. Sserekh of the Broken Reef. Nammuth of the Black Crossing. Oorvessa of the Two Shoals. Thennisai, born over the Corn Ship. Kaalsurr of the Warm Deep. Ivesshen of the Narrow Water, who holds four lanes. Marrusai of No Water, a wrecker.

Regard

Every sailing people on Nu knows them and no landbound people has heard of them. To a harbourmaster they are a line in the accounts. To a crew they are the reason the crossing is survivable and the reason the crossing is dangerous, in the same breath. The insult is toll-worm. The compliment, which sailors use seriously, is that a Sserrin has never yet lied about a cord.

The Shrakur are the enemy that matters: a shark people that owns a deep ravine and a war it will not admit ended, against a serpent people that owns the lanes above, and neither can finish the other. The Torksash extortion houses have an arrangement with them that both call an alliance. The Omari they avoid and revere, and the Sserrinvor songs are full of them, which the Omari have never commented on. The Wolken loose in the ocean are avoided by everyone including them. The Aiekah they eat, which has never been raised at any negotiation.

Harvest

Sserrin venom is the most efficient marine poison known and is bought by every admiralty that denies buying it.

Their oil, rendered from the layer under the skin, burns bright, burns wet, and will not extinguish in water, which makes it the standard incendiary of naval warfare and the single largest source of Sserrin wealth, since they render and sell it themselves from their own dead and will not permit anyone else to. The grades follow depth. Surface oil from a Sserrinae is good; Sserrin'mor oil is better; Sserrinvor oil is the best there is and is almost never sold, since the deep strain's tissue is loaded with a light oil in place of any gas, which is what lets it live under a pressure that would crush the others and what makes it burn the way it does. A Sserrinvor body that comes up is a fortune, which the lines know, which is why no Sserrinvor body ever comes up.

Their skin makes waterproof cordage and cloak. Taking any of it from a living Sserrin is not illegal anywhere; it is simply not done twice, since the lines know the flag of every ship that has tried.

Remembered

Ivesshen of the Narrow Water. Holds four lanes at once, which no line has done before, and is negotiating with two kingdoms simultaneously in the knowledge that neither will admit to it.

Kaalsurr of the Warm Deep. Three hundred and eighty years old, the last Sserrin who worked a convoy under Alverian contract, and who still uses the old signal cords nobody else can read.

Marrusai of No Water. A wrecker who takes paid ships, hunted by every line in the warm latitudes, and alive after nine years, which is beginning to be a problem of a different kind.

Kin each has a page of its own

Three, divided by depth. One works the surface and the ships on it, one works the reef holds and the wrecks below them, and one lives its whole life beneath the reach of light and cannot come up.