Bardo pulled the barge out of the Lantern Ford reeds with his pole-men on the oars and his own hands on the rudder, and he did it the way he did everything, which was fast. He did not glance back at the causeway while he worked. He had seen the captain lay his bow down on the stone, and he had seen the Warden on his knees in the mud, and he had seen the grey thing crawl off into the reeds with its jaw broken and its eyes open, calling in that small thin voice like a lost child. He had seen all of it. He had decided, somewhere between the first pole-stroke and the third, that he would tell the story at every landing between here and the sea, and that he would tell it straight, and that nobody who heard it would ever again be able to say a Hunt-Warden had been brave.
“A causeway is not a bridge,” he said, to nobody, as the barge swung out into the channel. “And a marsh is not a road. Somebody should have told the Chancellor that before he built a gate in the mud.”
Nobody answered him. His men were too busy. The water was high and brown with the last of the melt, and the barge wanted to drift toward the reeds on the left bank, and it took both of them on the poles to hold it in the channel. Ottilie sat in the bow with…
