Skull and Hyssop

Skull and Hyssop

By Kathlen Jennings

The Hyssop limped over Poorfortune, ragged and battered, listing where gas cushions had burst, her spars and lines tangled, but still aloft and still bearing its crew – all bone-weary, save for the captain. He was exhilarated by survival and their neck-or-nothing passage through the great storm. When they cleared the last shreds of cloud and broke through into clear air, when Ivana – shaken – had silently pointed to the horizon while Cally corrected their course, he had wanted to take her by the shoulders and dance her in a circle. He had remembered in time that she was wounded and he could not dance, so had simply pulled out his pipe and folded his arms, grinning towards the distant port until Tomasch shouted for help with the most urgent repairs. Moon said, sadly, that he saw no need for efforts beyond those, and as Cally, given long acquaintance with Moon, had insisted on full pay in advance and suspected there was no future on the Hyssop, there was no objection from the crew.

When Moon returned to his cabin, he had found Ivana asleep on his bed, Alban watching anxiously over her. He dismissed Alban, and stood a moment looking down at his weatheerfinder. Her face was an unhealthy colour, but she was breathing and so he left her while he salvaged the few books and papers he could carry in a canvas matilda. He righted a chair and sat to compose a leter which would inspire the necessary curiosity and urgency in an ambitious journalist, and terror in distant corridors of power.

Skull and Hyssop. Photo by Elena

Once he looked around the cabin, and wondered if he would miss it. The thought of the use to which the ship had once been put made his skin crawl, but that was shadowed by the quiet company of the weatherfinder and the bond of the wild flight. Ivana was awake again and watching him with her long jaw set, but she did not speak.

As they worked their way in over Poorfortune at last, Moon dropped a package overboard carefully labelled with Eliza Blancrose’s name. The sprawling city had its own systems for such things – by the time the wounded Hyssop was in position to dock, the newsmongers of the Poorfortune Exclamation and the High Harbour Times, together with a bevy of Poorfortune police, were at the low docks crowding out a contingent of eager civil servants on the service of the Republic, and several alarmed gentlemen in dark suits whom Moon judged to be in Their Imperial Majesties’ emply. Somewhere beyond them, customs officeers gesticukated, disregarded.

Eliza was there with the linesmen, and first across to the Hyssop, helped willingly by an appreciative Tomsch. She held her hat on with one glovedd hand.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.