The Fire Ship

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She came down from the horizon burning, pulled south across the wind by the current. She came like a ghost through a haze that the monsoon could not move. A haze that twisted her, made her seem liquid, like a slow drop of tar in a furnace running over corrugated iron.

She belched smoke and the monsoon pushed it back along her track. Every now and then it would settle wearily, to lie black and oily on the upper ocean, leaving an ugly, unnatural wake stretching roughly northward, up toward Socotra, mile after mile. Such were the vagaries of that thick wind that the smoke stayed low, as if forbidden the upper reaches, so that from a distance it remained invisible and the one thing to be seen coming over the horizon, looming out of that silver haze, was that implacable black hulk, burning, oozing southward, moved by the current alone.

“There she is!” called Robin, who had the keenest eyes of the four of them. Then, “No, but…”

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