The alarm bell in the mill tower began to clang with wild, irregular strokes that cut through the thunderous downpour. Within five minutes, thirty men from the Lowbank boat ramp had reached the mill yard, their woolen coats soaked through. They carried crowbars, logging chains, and shipwright’s adzes. Miller Tom was stumbling through the flour room, his face covered in white meal and tears. It screamed that his boys were drowning in the pit.
Eren Tal was the first through the smashed door of the wheelhouse, his four-foot pinch bar ready in his hand. Pella was right behind him. She held her animal fat lantern high above her head to cut through the swirling clouds of flour dust and steam that filled the lower vault.
The sight in the pit was horrific. The great oak main shaft, fourteen inches square and twenty feet long, had snapped like a dry pine twig three feet from the bearing box. The ragged, splintered end of the shaft was jammed diagonally across the pit, wedging the shattered carcass of the sixteen-foot wheel against the stone floor. Beneath that tangled mass of wet oak and twisted iron lay the two apprentices.
Bram was wedged under the outer rim of the wheel, his legs trapped beneath a fallen floor stringer. His head and shoulders were held above the rising water on a pile of broken meal sacks. He was crying hysterically, his young voice thin and high against the roar of the flood. ‘Get it off…
