The Kharsa is the interior of Kretavia — everything the green coast and the western mountains do not enclose, short of the deep south-east. It is the desert proper, and the larger part of the country by a wide margin. Most of what Kretavia sells abroad is made here, and almost nobody outside the country has seen it made.
The land
It is not all sand. Much of the Kharsa is flat stone pavement and gravel, hard going on the feet and easy going on a cart, broken by dune country in the west and by low ridges that run for days without offering shade. Summer heat is the obvious danger and the night cold is the one that surprises people; a caravan hand carries a blanket in July and is not being cautious. In late spring the ghubar blows, a dust wind out of the south that turns noon the color of weak tea, closes the roads for two or three days at a stretch, and gets into food, joints and the works of a lock.
The country is not dramatic. It kills the unprepared quietly, in ordinary weather, and usually because somebody miscounted water.
The cities
Zubara is the largest, an old city on a spring-fed oasis with palm gardens running out from the walls for an hour’s walk in every direction. Its smiths supply most of the metalwork that leaves the country. Umm Sadir, four days south, is a town of looms and dye pits, and can be identified downwind. Halwan sits where the two main roads cross and lives on that fact: caravanserai, brokers, a market for water shares, and the best courts in the interior.
There is no capital. The council of religious and military authorities that governs Kretavia keeps no fixed hall; it sits where its members are, which in practice means one of the great oasis cities in turn, and the city that has it spends the season feeding a great many important guests.
Water
Water in the Kharsa is owned, divided and inherited like land. A share is measured in time rather than volume — so many water-hours of a channel’s flow, counted by shadow, which is why arguments about the placement of a marker post can run for a generation. The well-courts settle these, and their rulings carry further than most of what a temple says. Well-keepers are appointed by the city and answer to the court, not to the family that owns the share.
Against all of this sits a custom nobody has ever seen broken: a traveler at a well drinks. There is no price and no exception, not for a stranger, a debtor or a Feldian. What the drinker owes is an account — where he came from, what the road was like, who he passed and what they were carrying. News moves across the Kharsa a great deal faster than goods do.
The roads
Two roads carry most of the traffic. The Slow Water Road follows the river down from the coast at Sabikha to Zubara, and can be walked by anyone with sense. The Ember Road runs east from Halwan through Umm Sadir toward the last wells before the Sundered Sand, and is not for the inexperienced. Distances are given in skins rather than in days — a four-skin stage is a four-skin stage whether you are fast or slow — and in summer the stages are walked at night.
Work
The forges and the looms are the point. Kretavic metalwork and cloth are as good as anything made in the north, and both are made in a country with no fuel: charcoal comes down the Green Water from the Old Wood and is hauled inland at a price that would astonish a Feldian smith. Salt is cut from the pans east of Halwan. Farming is confined to the irrigated ground — dates, grain, vegetables — and never produces a surplus worth exporting.
The standing army is quartered here, in garrison towns placed on the roads rather than on the borders, because in the Kharsa the road is the border. Soldiers dig wells, escort caravans and are visible everywhere, which is the intended effect.