At eight in the morning on the twenty-third day, the manufacturing crisis for the flexible spreading sleeves was laid out on Master Sailmaker Dima’s cutting floor. Dima, an elderly craftsman with fingers stiffened by fifty years of pushing copper palms through heavy hemp canvas, unrolled his final bolt of woven reed sailcloth.
‘Forty-two yards, Pella,’ Dima said, shaking his gray head. ‘That’s every inch of heavy six-ply reed cloth between here and the High Dock. You need three hundred and twenty yards to build the twin spreading sleeves for the Third Gate bypass. If I don’t have the cloth on these frame stands by noon, the cutting shears will sit idle. Meanwhile, the flood crest comes down the gorge.’
Pella knelt on the floorboards, examining the weave. The reed canvas was a marvel of traditional Lathmerian textile craft. River reeds split into paper-thin ribbons, boiled in lye, and woven with coarse flax yarn in a dense, linked herringbone pattern that became almost fully watertight when soaked in pine tar.
‘Can we bring modern canvas across the Courtesy Bridge from Harrowby?’ Eren Tal asked, leaning against a stack of timber ribs.
‘No,’ Pella answered, consulting the transit rules. ‘Jo already checked with Imran. The Courtesy Bridge cap is seven pounds per person per day. Three hundred yards of heavy canvas weighs more than six hundred pounds. It would take forty separate transits across two weeks to import the fabric. Every yard would have to be tested against river lime. We must…
