Sahalim is the northern coast of Kretavia: a green strip a few days deep, pressed between the Sea of Coin and the desert behind it. It holds every harbor the country has. If a northerner has been to Kretavia at all, they have been here, and usually no further than the dock.
The land
The weather belongs to the sea rather than the desert. Rain comes in winter and stops in spring, and nothing falls in between. Two rivers reach this coast. The Green Water runs down fast out of the mountains of the Old Wood, cold enough to be worth remarking on in a hot country. The Slow Water comes up out of the Kharsa — brown, sluggish, heavy with silt — and in a bad summer it reaches the sea as a marsh rather than a mouth.
Everything grows between the two. Dates, citrus, olives, barley on the terraces, vegetables under netting, all of it irrigated and all of it worked hard. The green ends abruptly. Ride a day inland from any port and the ditches stop, the last village turns its back on you, and the Kharsa begins without ceremony.
The ports
Tannurah sits at the mouth of the Green Water and is the largest town on the coast: shipyards, ropewalks, a salt-fish trade you can smell from the roadstead, and water deep enough for northern hulls. Sabikha, at the Slow Water, is a barge town — dates and grain come down from the river villages and go out by sea. Marisim, furthest east, exists mostly for the run out to the Bagii Atoll, and empties by half when the season closes.
Every port keeps the cistern share. A hull takes on no cargo until it has put fresh water into the town cistern, measured against its tonnage. Crews complain about it. Harbormasters observe that the alternative is a coast dry by August, and the conversation ends there.
People
Three calls order the day — dawn, noon, dusk — and work stops for all of them, including an unloading, including a tide. Foreign captains learn this once.
The coast is the least severe part of a severe country and knows it. Inland Kretavians say Sahalim has been softened by the sea and by too much conversation with strangers. Sahalim points at the tithes it pays and at the missionary companies that sail from its quays, and declines to continue the argument. Those companies embark here, priests and soldiers in the same hulls, and the ports fit them out without comment.
Trade
Foreign merchants are not welcomed so much as accommodated. Each port keeps a strangers’ yard: a walled compound with its own well, its own gate and its own hours, where a northern crew that wants to sleep ashore sleeps. Few want to. Most northern business is settled out at the Atoll and never touches the mainland at all, which suits everyone involved.
What lands here is grain from Kornfeld, iron, timber, wool and northern cloth. What leaves is dates, citrus, oil, salt fish, and the fine metalwork and textiles of the Kharsa cities, hauled down the caravan roads and loaded by Sahalim crews. The coast owns almost nothing that crosses its wharves and takes a share of all of it.
The season
The sea closes. From late autumn the gales make the crossing a gamble, and by midwinter the roadsteads are crowded with hulls waiting out weather. The yards work straight through; that is when keels are laid and old hulls refitted, and it is not much of a secret which of them are being fitted for a raiding season rather than a trading one. Sahalim profits from the raids on the northern coast and does not advertise it. Ask a Tannurah shipwright who bought the hull on the far slip and he will tell you that he builds boats.