Six islands lie off Feldia’s west coast at the western edge of the Sea of Coin. They are the primary home of the Bagii, and they have no capital, no king and no interest in acquiring either. Charts made in Feldia number the isles rather than name them, which the Bagii find funny and have not corrected.
The islands
The chain is volcanic and warm — humid all year, with a wet season that arrives on schedule and floods the low ground for a month. Ilhogga, the largest, carries a live mountain at its center; the smaller isles are its cooled relations. The beaches are black and steep and the water is deep close in, so the anchorages are good and the surf is not. The main harbor at Ngiveh, on Ilhogga’s south shore, can take a Feldian merchantman alongside.
Fresh water runs off the mountain all year, which is the reason anyone settled here. Food is fish, pigs, root crops and fruit, supplemented with Kornfeld grain bought in bulk every autumn. There is no metal worth digging for and no timber worth the name. Everything the Bagii cannot grow, they carry.
The people
The Bagii are tall, heavy-framed and communal in a way that Feldian visitors consistently misread. A household is reckoned by hull rather than by roof: ships are owned in common by the crew’s kin, inherited collectively, and argued over for generations. There is no written record of any of this. The oral tradition is long, precise, and unavailable to outsiders.
The language is Bigihlog, built on clicking consonants and shifts of tone, and almost nobody outside the isles has ever learned to speak it acceptably. Bagii who deal with foreigners take a shore name in Feldish or Kretivic for the purpose and answer to it without ceremony. Trade is conducted in the visitor’s tongue, which means the Bagii always understand more of a negotiation than the other side does.
Sea and weather
Bagii pilots are the best in the Sea of Coin, and they are frank that most of the skill is knowing what the water is doing rather than where it goes. Some of that knowledge concerns the kraken.
Bagii crews describe it as the largest thing in the ocean and treat it as weather rather than as a monster. What they watch for is the aftermath: patches of sea that boil and go slick, dead fish rising in numbers no net earned, and storm cloud building over the spot within a day. An unearned haul of dead fish in a storm net means get out of the water, and Bagii crews leave it and go. Actual sightings are once in a generation, which is why Feldian naturalists have argued for two centuries about whether the animal exists at all. The Bagii have declined to join the argument. Southern and northern captains alike hire Bagii pilots anyway, and insurers in Seehaven quietly price the difference.
The mountain
Islanders say the mountain is watched over from a great boulder on its summit by something they name Matin-Rookie, and they leave oil, fish and small worked goods there in the ordinary course of a year. They call it a guardian. Pressed on what it guards against, they will say — with the flat cheerfulness of people who have told foreigners this before — that something considerably worse sits lower down, and that the boulder keeps it entertained. When the ground grumbles, islanders say the mountain is being teased.
The Feldian Church has classified all of this as paganism and manages the relationship diplomatically, because the alternative is losing the pilots. The theological objection is genuine and nobody on either side expects it to be resolved.
Trade and neutrality
The Bagii sell ships, crews and pilots, and they sell neutrality. Their hulls carry cargo that Feldian and Kretavian merchants will not trust to each other, and the route through the isles and across to the Bagii Atoll avoids the Seehaven canal and its politics entirely. It is slower and it costs more. A steady number of merchants pay for it every season.
Bagii crews are a constant presence in Seehaven’s ports and are almost never seen inland. That neutrality is maintained deliberately and at some expense — the Bagii have refused Feldian and Kretavian offers of alliance often enough that both powers have stopped putting them in writing.
Jrakvia
Ships put out of the far southern waters by the current sometimes make landfall in the isles with a crew who cannot explain how they got there. The Bagii feed them, repair what is broken, and send them east to Feldia. They will not discuss where those castaways came from, and they will not take a chartered hull south to find out. From people this hard to impress, the refusal says something. Nobody has worked out exactly what.