The west wall of Harth did not sit behind a broad belt of flooded rye pasture like the south gate. Built across a rising shelf of grey river-shale between the old stone bridge and the north-west bluff bastion, its defense relied on a twelve-foot dry masonry base topped by a double-planked hoarding of cured oak and salted pine timber. Because the shale shelf rose twenty feet above the level of the mill race, Alden Bram’s diversion flumes could not flood the ground in front of the wall; instead, Bram and Marris Gault had spent the afternoon wedging heavy timber rakers against the inner face of the stonework and lining the parapet walk with long wooden troughs packed with wet river sand, slaked lime, and soaked bull-hides.
Jon Hale climbed the wide timber scaffold ladder behind the west palisade with two oak buckets of wet sand hanging from a carved ash neck-yoke across his shoulders. Each bucket weighed forty pounds, and the iron hooks of the yoke bit through his quilted wool jerkin into the trapezius muscles at the base of his neck. His boots slipped half an inch on the fourth rung where sleet and spilled tallow had glazed the rough-sawn pine, before his heels caught the cleat and he heaved himself up onto the fighting platform.
