As far back as Old Earth, a body of law took shape that every Cossack serving the Hetmanate — and every pospolyt who wishes to begin serving — must follow. The Cossacks themselves call them simply the Words, and the whole body the Twelve Words, or the Cossack Truth.
The customary laws are not kept by the Sich as a single official document. They are learned by heart among the plastuny, read aloud at the council before a campaign, and passed from atabai to jura — and have been for over a thousand years, from the time the Cossack-Kozars settled beyond the Dnieper rapids (~-600 SE) to today’s kurins on planets hundreds of light years from Old Earth.
Custom and Code
Two separate legal systems operate in the Hetmanate Federation, and they barely overlap.
The Code is the Federation’s written criminal law. It counts guilt in labour-days, it is applied by a judge assisted by artificial intelligence, and it governs the pospolyti. Its heaviest penalty is slavery.
Custom is the Twelve Words. It counts nothing, it is applied by living people in council, and it governs the Cossacks. This is the origin of the rule that a Cossack cannot be reduced to the status of a slave: a Cossack is judged not by the Code but by the Word, and the Word knows nothing of labour-days.
The essential property of custom, however, is that it does not belong to the state. The Hetman, elected for a single year, has no right to add a Word, to repeal one, or to soften one. Only a general council of the entire registered Cossack host may amend the body of law, and in the whole history of the Federation such a council has been convened four times. The Hetmanate therefore lives under a law older than the Federation itself and stronger than any elected officer — and every Hetman remembers it.
The Twelve Words
I. The Word on Comradeship
Do not abandon your comrade, neither in the steppe nor in the void.
The first and the heaviest of the Words. It stands behind the principal ground for nullification — “abandoning a comrade in danger”. The second half of the Word (“nor in the void”) is a later redaction adopted in the Stellar Era; before that the Word ended at the steppe.
II. The Word on Battle
Stand facing. He who shows his back is a Cossack no longer.
The model the Cossacks hold to this Word is the death of Colonel Mykhailo Lavrynovych Khmil, father of the first Hetman: taken prisoner at the Samara crossing, he was executed by a Turkish elephant that slowly crushed his limbs, and he did not utter a single sound. Its breach — “conduct unbecoming during battle” — is punished by nullification.
III. The Word on the Oath
Give your word and keep it, even if you gave it to an enemy.
The strangest of the Words to outsiders. Its model is not a Cossack one: the Tatars, drawn by the Turks into the last campaign against the Sich (~-570 SE), came out from beyond Perekop but honoured the peace agreement concluded between Sahaidachny and Girey III, and did not set foot on the lands of the Zaporozhians — while marching in a war against them. The Cossacks recorded this as the standard, and have ever since judged an oath separately from the question of whom it was given to.
The loudest breach of this Word in recent history was the Muryid Uprising, when the sheikhs of the system renounced an oath their ancestors had given the Federation eight hundred years earlier.
IV. The Word on Treachery
Do not betray your own. And do not touch a traitor with the sabre.
The heaviest of all breaches, and the only one for which custom permits execution without a council hearing, provided the treachery was witnessed by at least three.
The second half of the Word is not mercy but contempt. After the betrayal by the Commonwealth and Lithuania (~-570 SE), captured Poles were punished by water: a noose on a long pole, led to the nearest river and held under the pole until they stopped struggling. Asked why they did not simply cut a throat, the Cossacks answered that the holy soil of the Wild Fields must stay clean. The sabre is for an enemy; a traitor is drowned, hanged or put out of an airlock, but never cut down.
V. The Word on Captivity
For their own, they always come.
Ivan Sulyma and Bohdan-Zynovii Khmelnytsky spent five years on Turkish galleys, and the whole subsequent history of the Hetmanate came out of that. Since then the Sich does not count the cost of a rescue: a Cossack in captivity is not considered discharged, his pay continues to go to his family, and his share of the spoils is held until he returns.
It is this Word, and not military expediency, that explains why serdiuks mount plainly unprofitable rescue raids on khartsyz asteroids again and again.
VI. The Word on the Council
At the council, speak. After the council, be silent.
Every office in the Hetmanate is elective for a term of one year, from desiatnyk to Hetman. The Word grants a voice to every registered Cossack regardless of rank, and at the same time forbids re-litigation: once the council has decided, carry it out to the end of the term and bring your disagreement to the next council, not back to the kurin.
VII. The Word on Merit
A father’s glory does not serve his son.
Neither rank nor military achievement is hereditary. Property granted for service passes only to those children who have themselves become Cossacks; if none has, the Sich takes it back.
VIII. The Word on Blood
Cossack blood is not sold, and a Cossack brow is not branded.
From this comes the direct prohibition on reducing a Cossack to slave status and on branding him with an article number and QR code. The only mark custom permits over a Cossack at all is the shaved chub and mustache at nullification. And even that is temporary: hair grows back, a brand does not.
IX. The Word on Teaching
He who has taught no jura has not served.
The duty to pass on the craft stands in the body of law level with the duty to fight. A Terminator of the fourth level, the highest rank, is obliged to take one or two juras before discharge; a Cossack who has served a full term and left no one behind him is held by custom not to have served at all, however many campaigns he has to his name.
X. The Word on the Share
Spoils are divided in front of everyone.
The council distributes booty openly, before the whole desiatok or sotnia. A fallen man’s share goes to his family; a captive’s share is set aside until he returns (see the Fifth Word). A secret division of spoils by the starshyna is equated with theft from the comradeship and punished by loss of rank.
XI. The Word on Silence
What you heard in the kurin stays in the kurin.
The secrecy of the campaign, the council and the kurin. The Word shields a Cossack from denunciation — and it is also what makes possible the existence of things the Sich officially knows nothing about.
XII. The Word on Lineage
Leave behind more than a grave.
The youngest and most practical of the Words. Constant exposure in open space causes Cossacks in combat specialties — the terminators above all — to lose reproductive function over the years despite anti-radiation drugs. Custom therefore obliges a man to start a family as early as possible, before the heaviest service, and the Sich supports this with an allowance to the family.
How the Words Are Taught
The Twelve Words are memorised among the plastuny from rank zero — earlier than a boy is taught to hold a weapon. Over the five years of training a plastun must be able to give any Word by its number, any number by its Word, and cite a model from the chronicles for each.
Beyond that the Words are passed on by the atabai — not by recitation but by example: for five years the jura watches his mentor keep them, and it is this, not the examination, that counts as the real teaching.
Before every campaign the sotnyk or kurinnyi reads the whole body aloud before the formation. This is called laying down the Word. A Cossack who stood in the ranks during the laying down of the Word can no longer plead ignorance of custom — and the council takes that moment as the start of his liability.
Court and Punishment
A Cossack is tried by a Cossack court, not by a judge of the Federation. By custom the jurors are drawn from retired Cossacks: they stand outside the service hierarchy, live on a lifetime stipend, and can be neither promoted nor demoted — and therefore cannot be bought with rank.
Punishment follows a fixed gradation:
- A word from the starshyna before everyone — the lightest punishment and the most memorable; pronounced before the formation.
- Forfeiture of service pay, reduction of the land allotment.
- Loss of ranks — how many is for the council to decide.
- Nullification — total loss of rank, payments and the right to hold command positions, with the chub and mustache shaved off. Imposed by the kurin council.
- Striking from the register — the Cossack is transferred to the pospolyti together with his family. Imposed by the regimental council or the Sich.
- Execution — only by decision of the Sich, except in the case of treachery under the Fourth Word.
Halving stands apart: it is a punishment not of a person but of a unit or of the population of an entire system, applied when the guilty cannot be identified by name, or when the Sich holds everyone guilty.
Interpretations of the Stellar Era
Custom took shape in the steppe and fought on horseback. In space some of the Words came into conflict with survival itself — most sharply the First: in a decompressed compartment, “do not abandon your comrade” meant dying two instead of one.
In the year 118 SE, a generation after the founding of the Star Sich, the general council adopted not a new Word but an interpretation of the first — the so-called Airlock Word:
- only the senior man in the compartment may seal the airlock, and only when there is no longer anyone behind the comrade to save;
- whoever sealed it is obliged to name before the council every man he left beyond the bulkhead, and to answer for each name separately;
- whoever sealed an airlock and said nothing is nullified as one who abandoned a comrade.
The interpretation pardoned no one: it shifted the weight of the Word from the act itself to the accounting for it. Formally, custom has not been softened once in a thousand years — and the Cossacks take pride in that.
Contradictions
The most interesting thing about the body of law is not the Words themselves but the places where they fail to meet.
Haidamaks. Cossacks who, with the Sich’s approval, do what the Federation cannot do de jure: raids on foreign colonies, seizure of resources. Custom is circumvented by a formality — a haidamak is struck from the register for the duration of the campaign and reinstated on his return. For those months he is, by the letter, not a Cossack, and so the Words do not stand over him. Old Cossacks call these “dead rolls” the gravest sickness of the Hetmanate, but no council has yet dared to forbid them.
Characterniks. The order stands against half the body of law: its members vanish from every official register, lie to their comrades for years about who they are, and pass death sentences without a council. The order invokes the Eleventh Word and the fact that its founder was Ivan Sirko. The Sich says nothing to this, and by custom the silence of the Sich is construed in favour of whoever acts.
Halving and the “To the Last” Rule. A lot in which every second person dies is a direct breach of the First Word by the hand of the Sich itself. This is precisely why units facing halving quite often go over to the khartsyzy: the man who goes is not scum but a Cossack who has chosen one Word over another. It also explains why khartsyz bands can never be stamped out for good in the Hetmanate — they are fed not by greed but by a claim of right.
Male. All Twelve Words speak of the Cossack, the son and the jura. Women of Cossack families stand under custom as part of the lineage but not as its bearers: a woman does not lay down the Word, does not sit on a Cossack court, and cannot be nullified. This is raised at councils more and more often, especially in the frontier kurins, where women have long run the households of whole desiatky while the men are away on campaign. So far the Sich says nothing.
The Words and the Slogans
The slogans of the Federation are the popular, compressed form of the body of law — what is left of a Word after a thousand years of repetition:
- “One for all and all for the Kish” — the First Word.
- “My planet is on the edge, I meet the enemy first” — the First and Second Words together.
- “Be self-reliant, work together with others” — the Sixth Word.
- “Space and Liberty” — the whole body of law.