Chapter 506: The Bronze Bell on the Beam

The gallows beam jutting from the dark rock bridge pillar of the old Lowbank ferry boat ramp was twelve inches square, cut from greenheart timber that had seasoned in river salt water for forty years before Hal Rook had notched its mortises. It stood twenty-four feet above the slack-water apron, its outboard end bleached gray as driftwood by rain and winter frost. But the heartwood remained hard enough to turn the edge of a carpenter’s chisel. Eren Tal stood on the second stage of a rolling timber scaffold, his boots braced against two three-inch ash planks lashed to the uprights with tarred hemp. His leather apron was stained with dark blotches of sheep fat and iron filings. He held an auger with a two-foot T-handle, its spoon bit seated in the rusted pivot hole where Hal’s original bell hanger had been bolted fourteen years ago. The autumn river wind swept across the Gray Rush. It carried the smell of wet soot, rotting marsh weeds, and the sharp, stone tang of cold mountain silt. Below them, forty paces downstream, the confluence of the two rivers boiled in brown eddies, churning against the cutwater piers of the Lower Bridge with a steady, underground drumming that shook through the riverbank cut stone into the bones of their legs.

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