Half a mile north of the river weir, the sleet had turned into a thick, clinging river-fog that smelled of wet sedge, horse sweat, and the bitter wood-ash blowing eastward from the burning hay-ricks at Red Ditch.
Iven walked at the head of the winding column with freezing marsh water sloshing around her knees inside her greased carter’s boots, her left hand gripping the hemp halter of the lead pack-mule while her right hand swept a six-foot ash sounding-pole across the submerged gravel shelf three paces in front of her toes. Above the mist to the northeast, high on the black shoulder of the shale bluff, Tobin’s three whale-oil lanterns burned in a steady, horizontal amber line—ten paces apart, holding the range true against the night sky.
Behind her stretched a quarter-mile of stumbling, breathing human effort: forty-two conscripted border families and thirty-one Ash Host baggage carters and field cooks who had chosen to walk out into a winter bog rather than feed Marshal Ors’s catapults or watch their children roasted over the furnace vents.
“Left wheel hitting the soft clay—shoulder under the tailboard!” Moran Cole’s low, strained voice rasped through the fog twenty yards back down the line.
Iven drove the iron shoe of her sounding-pole deep into the gravel crown, looped the lead mule’s halter around the ash shaft to hold the animal stationary on the firm ground, and splashed back along the narrow file to the rear of the third baggage group.
