Document · Water nation
The realm of the four nations, of those who fit none of them, and of the single mountain they all place at the centre.
A Treatise Upon Devran
Those who hear of Devran for the first time take it for a country. It is not. It is a realm: a closed world with its own sky, its own water, its own measure. To one looking in from outside it has no border; to one living inside it there is a border everywhere.
It is customary to describe it by its four nations and by those who fit none of them. The division is not political but natural: water, air, fire and earth. Each nation lives by the measure of its element and errs by the fault of that same element. The one keeping this register is also the child of one of those elements; let the reader not forget it.
We love to know. We keep to what is right, we leave no one hungry at our table; the folds of the turban are not given at birth but earned. To determine who is in the right in a dispute is our work, and we believe we do it well.
Our fault, too, lies in knowledge itself: whoever wishes to know everything cannot abide ignorance. The unfinished places in this register are the record of that impatience.
They do build order, and the order they build does work; I do not make light of it. Their cities walk above the clouds, their laws are written plainly, their judgements are entered into record.
But that is not the whole of it. Their nature is pride; and because pride presents itself as justice, no one calls it pride — least of all themselves. They do not interfere below, and they call this impartiality. Seeing how quickly they interfere the moment their own interests are touched is enough to make one change the name of that impartiality.
As to right: Not to interfere is not the absence of a judgement. To withhold judgement is itself a judgement, and it is always those below who pay for it.
They bind not by love but by fear. Rank is not inherited but seized; the crown is taken from the head of the defeated. Where there is no trust every man is on his guard, and a man on his guard cannot be merciful.
Even so, their hardness comes not from ill nature but from barren ground. Plunder is not pleasure to them but livelihood. Writing this did not come easily to me; having our water and our ships, being just costs us little.
As to right: Hunger does not oblige the return of what was taken — but neither does it make a monster of the taker alone. The one who leaves another hungry is as much a monster as the one left hungry. Every judgement that fails to see both at once is incomplete.
I must also confess this: paper rots, ink fades, hide dries. What they write is cut into stone, into bone, into walls. And so our library holds more records, while their stones hold older ones. We take pride in being the nation that knows the most; yet the oldest lines are reachable only from the wall of our enemy.
They carry and they keep. They speak without noise, they think slowly, they remember long; and they are fixed in their thinking too. No one knows iron as they do. A master’s word is a bond within the guild, and the apprentice’s pen writes in the master’s name.
To keep what one has is their highest virtue — enough so that they would rather a thing perished as it is than survived by changing. Fire on one side, ourselves on the other: a country thinned between two neighbours.
As to right: To keep is a right. But when the thing kept no longer serves anyone, one must name the difference between keeping and burying.
At the centre of Devran stands a single mountain, risen above the clouds. The lands of the four nations resemble one another not at all, yet all four place this mountain in the same spot. From its skirts towards its summit the settlements are arranged along a spiral; each settlement sits upon a ledge, and each of these ledges is called an urf, all of them together A’râf. The people’s name for the mountain, the Mountain of A’râf, comes from this; in our registers its name is the Mountain of Being.
Those who live there come from all four nations and have fitted fully into none of them: some worn from within by the quarrel of two elements, some settled into no mould at all by the balance of four, and some who merely could not meet the expectation of their own people. They have one thing in common — belonging nowhere entirely. This, the scribe writes, is not a condition that later mends.
As to right: If no door will admit a person, the fault should be sought in the doors before it is sought in the person. Those who climbed the mountain were not cast out; no door was ever enough for them.
When one asks what stands at the summit, every nation gives a different answer. I do not write which of them is true, because I do not know.
What I have been able to write of them is little, and its littleness is no accident. They keep no written record; what is told passes from mouth to mouth and changes as it passes. The copies I gathered do not agree with one another.
This much I can say: the oldest story of every nation, followed far enough back, comes round to them. What that means I do not know. To write that I do not know is better than to appear to.
Translator's note. In their own tongue the plural is Hızırpareler. I use the singular as a collective — the Hızırpare — as English does with the Inuit or the Fremen. The word carries pare, a piece or a fragment; adding an English ending to it seemed to break something.
Devran takes its name from a word: to turn. Here nothing merely goes forward; everything turns, and turning it wears, and wearing it becomes something else.
For this reason the history of Devran is not a line but a spiral. Where the spiral began no one knows; I too have given up looking. This register was kept after I gave up looking.