The Definitive Country Almanac: The Rovessa Caravans — Part 1#

Kethra Almanac • Approved 19 September 2026 • drafted 18 September 2026 • Sections 1–4 (Sections 5–8 are in Part 2)

Status: approved. Briana approved the whole almanac on 19 September 2026 (the Almanac Approval Decision). Where this file calls something a proposal, read it as approved, except the open points that decision lists.

Status before approval:

• Established in earlier files, and taken as given here (proposals there too, unless the spine's canon table covers them):
  • Trading families living aboard great sea-carriers, neutral carriers across the Line, with their home harbour at Saltline.
  • About 6 million Rovessa live afloat.
  • Carrier Houses, one family per great ship, with captains and crew-kin; the rank that matters is berth. Matters between Houses go to the Captains' Table.
  • Linecant; the Line mark on their hulls; the Line-oath; burial at sea with the phosphorus repaid; Beaching; children apprenticed on deck by 10.
  • The carriers are up to 1.4 km long, built in the Saltline yards, and carry about 70% of all sea cargo across the Line. The Houses arose in the AL 900s.
  • Neutrality is their life.
  • Internal split: established Houses protect their contracts, while younger captains challenge exclusionary deals.
• Proposal: everything else. It is built on the spine, the chapters and the other almanacs.

Reading note. The Rovessa are a nation without land. Their country is the Carrier Roads: the sea routes they sail, the berths they keep in other people's ports, and the decks they live on. This almanac answers every section for a people who are always moving. Every berth, tower and carrier named here is in the interactive Atlas, where the routes are drawn in blue. The carriers' positions are a snapshot taken on 1 Sowing AL 2314. The complete list is the generated Register of the Rovessa Caravans.

Section 1: National Overview & Identity#

Official Name & Etymology#

• Formal name: The Carrier Houses of the Line, sitting at the Captains' Table
• Short name: the Rovessa, or the Caravans
• Adjective: Rovessa. People: Rovessa; a single person is a Rovessa or road-kin.

Where the name comes from. Rovessa is Linecant, the sea-trade pidgin (Chapter IV). It joins rove (to travel round) with an old Line ending, -essa, meaning "the people of". The Rovessa are "the people who go round". The word was first written down in the Crown's treaty with the carrier Houses under Idris I (AL 900–927). The Crown's clerks spelled it four different ways, and the Rovessa have never cared which.

What others call them:

Greeting: "Fair tide." Reply: "Fair tide, and a berth." (Chapter IV.)

National Symbols#

Anthem, first verse (original lyrics, sung in Linecant and translated here):

The road goes west and the road comes round, Salt on the rope and no flag on the ground; Heave for the Line and the berth that you keep — The road goes west, and the sea is deep.

The State Profile#

Chronological Timeline#

Section 2: Geography & Environment#

Physical Geography: the Carrier Roads#

The Rovessa have no land. Their geography is the sea, and three facts rule it (Introduction):

The routes (all drawn on the Atlas, all computed to stay at sea):

Topography & Landforms#

Climate & Weather#

• Tropical at sea on the Line Road: warm, wet and stormy in each hemisphere's late summer.
• Red nights at sea are brighter than ashore: there is nothing to block Hyperion. Old sailors say they can steer by it now.
• The rising sea (about 0.3 m a century, the spine) matters to the ports more than to the carriers. The Rovessa note, not unkindly, that they will float.

Flora & Fauna#

• Reefstone: vast, living native structures, like coral (Introduction). Burned for reefstone lime (Chapter III).
• Tidehounds follow the carriers. They are never harmed.
• Native sea life is mostly indigestible (Chapter I). The Rovessa eat Earthkin food from their garden decks and bought grain, with fish from stocked Earthkin shoals round the Line Isles.
• Kelp and iodine salt from Ambergate.

Natural Resources#

The Rovessa own no mines or fields. Their resources are the ones the relationship register names:

Section 3: History & Chronology#

Before the Table#

As the Kindling spread along the Stair coast, boat families learned that the equator's current and the Line Isles' harbours made a road around the world. In the AL 900s some of them built ships big enough to live on, and stopped coming home. Each ship was a family, and each family was a House (Chapter II).

Founding & Sovereignty#

The Salt Wars (1180–1242) made the Houses rich and nearly destroyed them. They carried for everyone, and every side called them traitors. When the Line ports won their freedom in 1242, the Houses met at Saltline in 1244 and swore the Carriers' Compact:

1. Carry for all who pay and keep port law.
2. Carry no soldier under arms and no weapon of war. In war, carry food and medicine to every side, under the Grain Flag.
3. Fly no flag but the Line.
4. An attack on one carrier closes the attacker's berths to every carrier.

The fourth article is the Rovessa's only weapon. It has been used four times; the last was the Year of Empty Roads (2283).

Modern Era#

The Settler Crossings and the Exile Runs. From the 1620s Rovessa decks carried the settlers who seeded Eldvang, and the Line-oath sworn on those decks became the frontier's rite of passage. Until 1809 they also carried the Crown's exiles. The Rovessa remember both.

Engines and size. Thorium-fission carriers, under Ilyr licence, arrived in the 1960s. The largest now pass 1.4 km and carry 15,000 people.

The High Houses. From 2092 a few Houses took to the sky: lighters between the Saltline Tether Yard and Vesper's docks, and later haulers to the Cinderbelt. They are few (about 11,000 people), and the sea Houses treat them as eccentric cousins.

The Corridor War. The Imperium's "emergency charter" of three carriers at Marrach in 2282 was the thing the Rovessa fear most: a contract that quietly becomes requisition (the register). The Table closed every Imperial berth for a year. The carriers came back paid in full. In 2291 both sides signed the Armistice on the Captains' Table, because nowhere else was neutral.

The New Keels. The Unbeholden, launched in 2291, is the first of about 140 carriers built since the war by younger captains. They have no share in the Settled Routes: the old contracts, such as the Stair Crossing grain contract and the Phosphate Road, that the Old Houses have held for centuries. That is the register's "younger captains challenge exclusionary deals", and it is the argument of AL 2314.

Historical Rulers & Leaders#

Helms of the Captains' Table (complete)#

133 Helms since the First Sitting of 1244. The Helm is elected by the Standing Table for a five-year voyage and may be re-elected. (All proposal. Generated from a fixed seed with mixed name pools, so that no single Earth culture owns the Rovessa; see the naming principles.) House Adebayo has held the Helm for four of the last five voyages, which is exactly what the New Keels object to. The current Helm is in bold.

Figures every deck child knows#

Section 4: Demographics & Society#

Population Metrics#

Working. 5.07 + 0.62 + 0.30 + 0.011 = 6.00 million. 618 carriers × about 8,200 = 5.07 million.

Berth: rank aboard#

The rank that matters is berth: which deck you sleep on (Chapter II).

Crew-kin are not born into the House, but they belong to the ship. A crew-kin family can rise to the upper berths in a generation. Only the House family sleeps on the bridge. Changing that is one of the New Keels' demands.

Language & Descent#

• Linecant, "a sea-trade pidgin with a large, shifting vocabulary. Every carrier House has its own words" (Chapter IV).
• Line-born: mixed ancestry, "the most varied population on Kethra" (Chapter I).
• Names: a given name and the House: Serafine of House Adebayo. Crew-kin take the ship's name as a surname while aboard: Maris of the Saltwife.

Religion & Belief Systems#

Rites every Rovessa keeps, whatever they believe:

• The Line-oath, sworn on deck at the first crossing of the equator by sea. The person is marked with the Line mark. Crossing by air counts for nothing (Chapter V).
• Returned to the Line. The dead are buried at sea, the one accepted exception to the taboo on wasting the dead. Their phosphorus is weighed and repaid to a Line port farm by their House (Chapter V).
• Beaching, the worst punishment: set ashore at the next port and never taken aboard any carrier again (Chapter V).

Public Health#

• Every great carrier carries doctors and a sick bay. The largest have hospitals.
• Quarantine at the Line (Chapter I): carriers that bring sickness are held at anchor off the free ports.
• Deck injuries and drowning are the great killers of the young. Rustlung is rare at sea.
• Licensed therapies are bought through the Ilyr Legation. House Oda has a standing welcome at Castaly's clinics.

Education#

Every deck child learns to swim before they can read, and to read a storm before they can write.