The lead weight at the end of Alden Bram’s linen plumb-line swung in frantic, shivering circles against the damp granite pier.
Bram crouched on the maintenance catwalk six feet below the roadway of the Old Bridge, his thick knees wedged into the stone drainage scupper, the freezing river spray soaking through his wool trousers. He did not look at the sky. He did not watch the arrows hissing through the black smoke above his head. His small, dark eyes behind his iron-rimmed spectacles were fixed entirely on the mortar joints of the eastern spring-line, where four tons of dressed granite joined the river footing.
A crack was opening.
It was not a hairline fissure from the winter frost. It was a jagged, black maw three inches wide, weeping grey lime powder like dry blood as the thermal shock from the burning naphtha tore the stone apart. Every time a trebuchet shell struck the upper roadway, the crack widened by the thickness of an iron shilling.
Above him, the bridge deck vibrated with the stamping of two hundred pairs of iron-shod boots and the frantic, screaming clash of blued steel against ash pikes.
Bram hauled himself up the iron maintenance rungs, his thick fingers catching the coping stones, hauling his sixty-year-old bulk over the parapet onto the roadway.
