Along the west coast the towns are roofed with ships. The fleet came home from 2135, after eight centuries at sea, to a coast that had been overrun; Saegate alone had stood, and it is built in stone. The returners built with the timber they had, which was their ships: the crews ran their hulls up the beaches and broke them into houses. Inland, where no hull was ever hauled, the towns are timber and stone.

A hull laid keel-up is a roof: the keel its ridge, the ribs its rafters, the planks still overlapping the way they did at sea. A town is about forty roofs. The small ones are fishing boats, and the hall in the middle is a whole carrier.

The roofs come in two colours. The isiler hulls from Three Pines stand black and need nothing, since isiler keeps no rot. The home-built hulls take pit-red, a paint ground from the spoil of the red lakes, and so a ship-town seen from the water is black and red.

Each ship-town keeps its ship's bell on a frame in the square, the ship's name cut round the rim; it rings for a boat coming in and for the tide. Each house goes by its ship's name, and so does what it makes, and the ship's figurehead hangs over the door.

Under the Golden Empire this was the crown heartland, held by the throne directly. The imperial capital, Hyseat, stood in the northern mountains among the mines; Saegate, on the point, was the Empire's sea-gate, and the emperor's fleet was built in its yards.

In 1321 MR the miners under Hyseat broke into something deep below the mountain, and the Corrupted God's first spawn came up through the capital. The heartland was overrun first. The emperor's fleet sailed from Saegate that year with as many as it could carry; others fled east, into Haraour through Jaurei. Saegate held behind its walls. By 1325 the Empire had fallen.

For eight centuries the people lived at sea. The fleet's command held them together. It found harbours along the Hafra, borrowed or bought, and its crews became the Hafra's carriers, so that a Dominion quarter grew in port after port. Burdineyja's islands sheltered the fleet in the worst years. Every carrier still called at Saegate.

When the Corrupted God was wounded in 2135, the fleet came home. Its crews beached their hulls along the west coast and broke them into towns, and the country was won back from what held it: the spawn and their nests, and the mortals who had moved in, squatters, wreckers and holdfasts. Some of those were entered on a muster and stayed, and are Reds now. In the 2140s the returners sealed Hyseat. About 2300, when the first cloudship's binding took Auran's silver, Dominion carriers brought the silver to the mainland.

The line runs unbroken from before the breach, and what it carries is the Dominion. The Reds claim the crown land the Empire held directly and nothing else of the Empire's, neither its throne nor its wider ground. They have no emperor. The navy holds the Dominion.

Every house of the Dominion is entered on a ship's muster roll, and the ships are the state. A ship-town is a ship on the roll, and its harbour-master is that ship's officer; a quarter abroad is the shore-berth of a ship that still sails; the farms of the south stand on rolls too. Entering a muster is joining the Dominion, and the squatters and holdfasts of the return joined that way. A house taken off its roll is struck, and a struck house is Dominion no longer.

Rank is office. A captain governs a ship, its muster, and the town it came ashore as. A commodore governs a coast, or the quarters of a stretch of the Hafra. The flag officers sit together at Saegate as the Admiralty and choose from among themselves the Admiral, who serves until she strikes her flag or the board removes her. Her flag flies from the Embrace in Saegate's harbour, and she strikes it there. The Admiralty commissions its captains from examined officers with sea-time, and by interest, a senior officer's backing, about as often as by the examination. Admiral Vailea Ballast Fetu, of the Fetu, holds the flag now.

An envoy abroad deals with the Admiralty's port-officer, who keeps the Dominion's berths and tolls in that port; at Saegate, with the Admiral, who signs the Dominion's treaties. A mole or a bridge is built by the Admiralty's yard, with labour mustered from that coast's ships as service, and the yard is paid from the share the Dominion takes of every cargo carried under its flag.

To govern, a Red must have served at sea. A farmer in the south is on a roll and is asked, and holds no office. Ground a crew has cleared belongs, by one reading, to the ship whose crew cleared it, and by another to the Admiralty, and both readings are argued before the board.

A Red carries a rating, a given name, a sea name, and a ship: Admiral Vailea Ballast Fetu. Everyone is on a roll, so everyone is rated: Land from birth until the first voyage, then Hand, Able, Mate, Captain, Commodore, Admiral. One who never sails is Land for life, and a farmer who sailed once at fifteen is Hand for life.

The given name is Folau and is the one used at home. The sea name is Talanese, and a crew gives it when something earns it, a deed, a habit, a look, on the first run or years later; it is kept for life, whatever rank follows, and it is the name used aboard and in the ports. Many Hands carry none for years, and some never do. A Land rarely has one: the usual way is to stow away, since the crew that finds a stowaway often names them, and they come home still Land. The ship comes last, and changes with the muster.

Saegate stands on its rock at the end of the country, walled down to the water, with its harbour inside the walls and the town above in stone. It is the fleet's home port, about 30,000 people, and every Dominion carrier calls there. Its yard is a foundry, a rune-shop and a refit yard in one, working in shifts, and rust is on everything iron in it.

The flagship is the Emperor's Embrace, on the roll in full and the Embrace in speech, and the houses of her muster go by Embrace.

The held country is the coast and the south, about 40,000 square miles. North and east of it the Vaota covers the old heartland's fields, and beyond the Vaota lies the scar country around Hyseat: the nests, the old galleries, ground still healing. Clearing the Vaota is the reclaiming. A frontier town clears by day and keeps the watch by night; the cleared timber goes down to the coast for hulls, and the burns send smoke over the country inland. The ground under the forest is red, and the red dust gets into the clearing crews' hems and the creases of their hands.

The Dominion lives by freight, and the Dominion goes to its trade more than its trade comes to it. Its carriers take a share of every cargo under its flag, and the partners are fixed by the sea:

The home makes timber, the everyday trade, and iron, the prize. It buys grain in a lean year, finished goods, and hulls. In an ordinary year it feeds itself: fish all along the coast, the farms of the south, and the fields reclaimed behind the ship-towns. In a lean year the coast still eats, and the frontier towns go short first.

The few who come from outside come for the scar or for the guns. There is no rail; a line would have to cross the scar country, and the sea is the Dominion's road. Ashore there are cart roads in the south, the coast road with its milestones, and the scar road; coast boats run between the ship-towns.

Most Reds live abroad, about 1.35 million of them in the quarters of the Hafra's ports. A quarter is a street or two by the berth: the warehouses, the chandlery, the carriers' cargo, and the houses of a ship's muster that has kept its shore-berth there for generations. Inside, the speech is Folau; outside the door, the port's own. A quarter's year runs by its ship's comings-in, and when its ship comes in, the quarter goes down to the berth.

The quarter at Ontzola, on Three Pines, has berthed the houses of the Foki for four generations. The Dominion's long-haul carriers are isiler hulls, and a Three Pines hull is ordered at Ontzola in person, so the Dominion keeps its people where the order book is.

The port a house lives in changes nothing on the roll. A house changes muster only by being entered on another, and its people answer at their own ship's call wherever they live. What holds a quarter to the Dominion is the carrying itself: its berth, its convoys and its cargo all run under the Admiralty, and a quarter that broke away would lose all three.

The frontier has reached the edge of the scar, and the clearing wants hands. Under the rule that a coast's ships owe the Admiralty labour as service, the Admiralty has begun to call service from the quarters abroad: houses that have lived in Ontzola and other Hafra ports for four generations, most of whom have never seen the point, called home for a season to clear the Vaota. Each quarter's captain must put the call to the muster before answering it.

Most of the home lives inland, in the held south: farm country on the old crown land, market towns of timber and stone, barns and doors painted pit-red. The plough still turns up imperial roof-tile. On the coast the ship-towns fish on the tide and work the boatyard to the bell. At Saegate the yard and the foundry run in shifts under the Admiralty's windows. On the frontier the day is the clearing, the burns and the night watch, and the open pits at Anokula.

The coast smells of tar, the red rivers of iron, and the country inland of smoke from the burns. The coast eats fish, and the south its own bread. Kept food in sealed jars is the carriers' food and the quarters'. Every crew sings the same shanty, every quarter has its own third line, and two crews at neighbouring berths stop at the third line to argue it.

A Red asked where they are from names a ship: which ship? is the question. On the roll is one of us; struck is gone from the Dominion; I was asked is I had my say. The Reds' vice is the odds on the parties at Tuta.