The sappers came before the light was full, along the reed causeway, with their axes on their shoulders and a hide shield held up in front of them on two poles.
Bardo heard them before he saw them. The reeds were loud with the flood. It came down through the marsh-passes in small steady steps all night, filling the channels between the clumps and lifting the mud into soft grey ridges that gave under a boot, and the water had risen to the second mark by midnight and to a finger’s width past it by the grey hour before dawn. Under all that noise there was another sound, a slow squelching drag, the sound of heavy men walking in wet ground with their feet sinking and their breath short. Bardo had been listening for it since the mist came down. He had his cheek against the barrel-stave and one eye at the gap, and when the shield rose up out of the greyness on the causeway’s end he did not blink.
“Still,” he said, under his breath, to the men behind the barrels. “Still. Let them come close. A shield in soft ground is slower than a man who knows the ground.”
