As many wealthy world-buyers did, they recruited craftsmen, farmers, and skilled workers of all kinds who were willing to immigrate in return for employment and land. Young, healthy candidates for wifehood were also recruited, and the world, named Haven, was thus furnished with useful citizens and several social classes even prior to occupation.
Haven, the world, was profoundly wet. Haven, the larger continent, was a great basalt pillar jutting above the worldwide ocean like a titanic tub, its walls feathered with sea birds whose ancestors had escaped from the sinking Ark ship, its rim raised above the reach of the wildest storms. The western half of the continent cupped to hold a huge freshwater puddle filling what was left of the ancient caldera. This lake, soon named Havenpool, was deep and fertile and full of fish, the extensive swamps and mires along its eastern edge serving as a nursery for all kinds of water creatures, native and introduced.
Havenpool was ringed about with mountain ranges. A man on the north-westernmost of the Seawall Mountains could stare northeastward across the Great Fall, where Havenpool fell into the sea, to the heights of the Northern Knot and, if he turned clockwise, he would see mountains on every horizon, all of them formed by that ancient mother-of-all-volcanoes that had become the continent itself.
Haven’s provinces were Upland, northernmost, atop the high cliffs, south of that was High Haven, the Royal holding that included the seat of the Lord Paramount at Havenor, Dania like a fat “}”hung below High Haven, with Langmarsh to the west along the shore of Havenpool, and Merdune to the east. Sealand stretched along the west shore of Havenpool to the cliffs above the world-ocean, Barfezi ran along the south of the continent, with the province of Frangia sticking out below like a rude tongue. Merdune was on the eastern side of Haven, where the land sloped downward from the Eastrange Mountains to the very edge of the sea, as though an enormous tooth-grooved bite had been taken out of the continent. Merdune boasted the only real seashore on Haven, one that stretched the length of shimmering Merdune Lagoon, a saltwater bay almost as large as Havenpool.
Very early after settlement, a dispute had arisen between a particular nobleman and the Covenant Tribunal, the ultimate religious authority of Haven. Though many considered this a minor matter, a question of interpretation, the nobleman had subsequently marched with all his followers down the land bridge to the smaller landmass, which he named Mahahm. As the polar ice continued melting, a process that had been going on at least since the planet was discovered, the isthmus became a widely separated string of rocky islands, the Stone Trail, and regular contact between the two landmasses was lost. Though the Lord Paramount at Havenor was still titled “Ruler of Mahahm,” the Mahahmbi were known to refer to him less cordially.
The thousands of islands scattered singly and in clusters all around the globe were entirely unexplored by the Havenites. The seas were dangerous and there was little reason to go seeking out relatively small specks of dry land, many of which had been covered by the sea since colonization. According to the surveyors, the Inundation should have finished long ago, but seemingly there was still ice to melt, as the rising shorelines of the Stone Trail and the Merdune Lagoon well certified.
All native animals were amphibious. There were no native birds, though the so-called siren-lizard soared and sang, filling a bird’s ecological niche. The only purely land-dwelling creatures—as well as real birds— were exotics brought in by the settlers, everything from cattle to lap dogs to butterflies and peacocks.
The men who purchased Haven desired a world of privilege, culture, and peace. Technology had facilitated the total urbanization of Old Earth, an event which had only briefly preceded its strange demise as a viable world, and technology, the settlers felt, should be eschewed in the interest of tranquility. In tranquil societies, nothing changes very much or moves very fast, if at all, and the buyers yearned for this leisurely pace. They deified tradition. They forbade invention. They adopted an hereditary monarchy and, for the nobility, a state religion: pseudo-Judeo-Muslim-Christian-monotheism with accretions. The wealthiest man among the settlers became the first Lord Paramount, his colleagues became the lesser lords, the dukes of the seven provinces. Their children became the earls and viscounts of the counties within those provinces, and their children became the barons of the estates within those counties. Each county—some forty of them—was allowed an assembly of citizens, variously constituted, who elected or selected a minister to the provincial council, and the provincial councils elected representatives to the Lord Paramount’s Council of Ministers, a group charged with oversight of inter-provincial matters such as the maintenance of roads and bridges or the location and support of schools and medical services for the million or so citizens of Haven.