The bulk of the park was a long strip, more than a hundred feet wide and almost six hundred long, on the huge body of an ancient steamer whose nameplate had long been effaced by nature. The greenery spread across broad, swaying bridges to two old schooners lined up back-to-back, almost parallel to the great ship. Fore of the steamer, it extended onto a hunkered little sloop with long-dead guns, part of the fabric of Curhouse riding, sharing the park between the two boroughs.

Bellis and Silas wandered tangled pathways, passing the granite statue of Croom, the pirate hero from Armada’s past. Bellis was overwhelmed.

Unknown centuries before, the architects of Croom Park had set to covering the fabric of the war-shattered steamer with mulch and loam. Eddying on ocean currents, there was no ground for Armadans to till or fertilize and, like their books and money, they had had to steal it. Even that, even their earth, their mud, was plundered over years, dragged in great trenches from coastal farms and forests, torn from bewildered peasants’ plots and taken back across the waves to the city.

They had let the ruined steamer rust and rot, and had filled its holed carcass with the soil they had stolen, starting in the forepeak and engine rooms and the lowest coal bunkers (deposits of coke still unused, packed once again in seams below tons of dirt), piling the earth around the moldering propeller shaft. They filled some of the big furnaces and left others half empty, encased them, metal air bubbles in the striae of marl and chalk.

The landscapers moved up to decks of cabins and staterooms. Where walls and ceilings had escaped injury, they perforated them raggedly, rupturing the integrity of the little rooms and opening passageways for roots and moles and worms. Then they filled the scraps of space with earth.

The ship was low in the water, kept buoyant by judicious air pockets and by its tethering neighbors.

Above the water, in the open air, layers of peat and dirt spread out and reclaimed the main deck. The raised bridge, the aftercastle and observation decks and lounges, became steep knolls skinned in topsoil. Abrupt little hills, they burst in tight curves of earth from the surrounding plateau.

The unknown designers had performed similar transformations on the three smaller wooden boats close by. That had been much easier than working on iron.

And then there was the planting, and the parkland had bloomed.