The Song Guardian

The Black Ship

"The World's Great Age begins anew,

The Golden Years return

The Earth doth like a Snake renew

Her Winter Skin outworn:

Heaven smiles, and Faiths and Empires gleam

Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream."

H.G. Wells

In The Days Of The Comet

It was the simple fact that most of the very few people who even knew of The Black Ship's existence, Danthrey thought. He didn't even regard this as a vessel, not in the normal sense of the word. The ship was just a ship, no name, no sulls, sprits or booms and precious little understanding. Which was why the ship was the greatest secret ever engineered and the reason it was known only as, the Black Ship, for black in was, invisible as it was indestructible with few left around to tell of it at all.

Concerning the ship, what was it like? The bow was curved, but not in the way bows were usually curved. It did not curve outwards, to break through the waves like a knife: It curved outwards, so the bottom project farther out than the top, not cutting, but parting the ocean with a slicing action, as one does cutting a large piece of canvas with the upward turned greater blade of a pair of iron shears.

'And like a pair of shears bigger than any other shears ever devised, this vessel pushes through the material of the sea so the blade cut through the surface, parting it easily – instead of chopping it by downward application,' the Master Of Books concluded.

The Master of Books was a quite unusual office, it being recumbent on the Master to not only have access to the rarest and most knowledgeable of books, but to be able to render them useful, in one fashion of another, to such an extent that new inventions could be invented or created. Danthrey waited, just long enough to see the Master accede the spontaneous round of applause from the gathered faces of the favored members who had been invited aboard the Black Ship on it's maiden voyage.

Danthrey watched the Master bow, as was to be expected, since his manners today would go some distance in determining the nature of future commissions. What they intended to do with such a mammoth, he really had not the faintest idea. Where they had found the financing for such an undertaking was also something he did not spend time reflecting on. For his was a simple undertaking: Design and engineer a vessel bigger and mightier than anything ever conceived or built in the past, and provide enough hold space for enough coal to drive the vessel for a period of three months, three months being the time-based distance the Counsellors had perceived to be the maximum required. But why anyone would sail this vessel for three months, or where indeed it would possibly go, was something he did speculate upon, knowing as everyone knew, that there was nothing beyond the blue horizon but more... blue horizons.

He was just glad he'd been invited along for the ride. Little did he know it would change his world, and theirs, the world that officially, and he doubted the words of officials as much as he did sailors, had yet to be discovered. But he did know it was a dangerous course they were set, on one that could involve the ending of their lives if the rulers had their way. Still, they had agreed they had to try. At least they had to try.

***

https://voyagersandkings.wordpress.com/