Dawn broke across the lower delta not with sunlight, but with a sickly yellow glare that seeped through a thick wall of low-hanging sea clouds.
Tomas was checking the lashings on his ash pack frame outside the survey tent. Just then, a wild, distant scream echoed across the tidal flats from the south.
It wasn’t a bird cry. It was the desperate, high-pitched shriek of a woman. She was followed by the violent, splashing struggle of panicked livestock and the wild crack of a bullock whip.
Sile Rook appeared instantly at the tent flap, his hooked pruning blade in his hand, his eyes tracking the sound through the swirling ground-fog. “The Silt Ford,” Sile rasped. “Three-quarters of a mile south. There, the refugee track crosses the mud spit.”
Tomas didn’t waste breath on questions. He snatched a thirty-fathom coil of tarred three-strand manila hemp rope from the gear pile, looped it across his torso like a courier sash, grabbed his heavy ash-wood staff. Then he broke into a dead run down the shell ridge.
Behind him, Sile Rook pounded across the gravel in his heavy boots, his tall body-shield clattering against his shoulder. Meanwhile, Nessa followed with her survey rod and two split-oak lever bars.
They reached the Silt Ford in six minutes, their breath burning their throats in the raw salt air.
The scene in the slough was a nightmare of mud and panic.
A heavy four-wheeled freight wagon, loaded with eight families of salt-pan refugees and all their worldly possessions—bedding rolls, iron pots, bags of dried oats, and two crates of squawking chickens—had veered off the narrow corduroy track into an un-flagged mud pocket.
It wasn’t ordinary delta silt. It was an active tidal quicksand hole—an underground pocket of liquid gray sand, melted by the incoming tide, known to local wagon drivers as a ‘boiling eye.’
The wagon was already sunken to the floorboards. The left rear wheel had vanished fully into the gray morass. The entire wagon box was canted at a thirty-degree angle, threatening to capsize into five feet of liquid mud at any moment. On top of the tilted cargo, five young children were screaming, clinging to the hemp cargo netting, while three women waist-deep in the freezing sludge were desperately trying to pass an infant up to the dry levee.
In front of the wagon, four heavy brown draft oxen were thrashing in terror.
Two of the beasts were mired to their bellies, their nostrils bubbling in the gray sludge as they threw their heads back, bellowing in agony. The wagon driver—a gaunt, gray-haired man in a tattered leather tunic—was waist-deep in the mud beside the lead yoke, wildly hacking at the wet rawhide traces with a dull skinning knife, his face smeared with black muck and tears.
“Help them!” the wagon driver screamed, seeing Tomas crest the bank. “The tide is in the ditch! In ten minutes the salt water will be over their heads! The mud is pulling them down!”
Tomas dropped his staff, throwing off his pack frame with a single violent shrug.
He assessed the shape of the disaster with the rapid, disciplined eye of an experienced cart driver. “The oxen are pulling against each other,” Tomas barked to Sile. “The right pair is on firm clay. The left pair is in the boiling eye. Every time the right pair lunges, they drag the left pair deeper into the suction.”
“We need an anchor!” Sile shouted, his boots sliding in the slick mud at the edge of the ditch. “There’s no timber on this spit! No trees, no posts!”
“The dark rock curb!” Nessa yelled, her wicker mud-pattens slapping wetly as she ran along the edge of the slough. She drove her iron sounding probe into the mud.
CLINK.
“Here!” Nessa shouted, pointing to a spot four paces behind the wagon. “Dark rock slab Two-Fourteen! The stone curb is eighteen inches down! It has a mooring ring cut into the margin!”
Tomas dropped to his knees in the freezing mud, his hands tearing into the silt beside Nessa’s probe.
The mud was freezing, slick as lard, smelling of sulfur and decaying ditch weed. His fingers scraped against the cold, dressed stone of the ancient raised stone road curb. He felt along the margin until his knuckles struck cold iron. A heavy forged mooring ring, three inches across, set into a lead-filled socket by royal masons sixty years ago.
“Ring is sound!” Tomas roared.
He uncoiled the three-strand manila thick ship rope. With rapid, deft fingers, he passed the bitter end through the iron mooring ring, tying a double round-turn and two half-hitches—the iron-hard cart driver’s tie that wouldn’t jam under dynamic strain.
He threw the coil out over the mudflats toward the mired wagon. “Sile! Catch the eye-hook! Loop it under the rear axle-tree!”
The mud around the mired wagon was not merely wet clay. It was an active thixotropic slurry.
When the oxen thrashed, the physical shaking melted the silt specks. That turned the solid ground into a bottomless soup that sucked at the beasts’ bellies like a high-pressure pump. Sile Rook had to throw two six-foot split-pine hurdles under his boots just to keep from being drawn down into the morass as he struggled toward the rear axle.
“Don’t let the beasts stop pulling!” Tomas yelled to the wagon driver. “If an ox stops straining in delta quicksand, the slurry settles around the hocks and sets like drying plaster! Once the silt packs around the knees, you have to dig them out with hand spades or break the leg bones!”
The wagon driver cracked his whip with desperate, ragged fury, his voice breaking into raw sobs. “Up, Broad-Horn! Up, Red-Star! Heave, you bastards, heave for the children!”
Sile Rook plunged waist-deep into the quicksand, his massive shoulders plowing through the gray sludge like a bull buffalo. He ignored the mud that splashed into his eyes and beard. He reached under the tilted wagon box. He felt beneath the murky water until his scarred hands locked the heavy forged iron hook around the heart-oak rear axle.
“Hook is home!” Sile bellowed, his voice cutting through the children’s screams.
Tomas stood on the firm dark rock curb, his boots locked against the stone. He took the tension on the standing part of the thick ship rope.
Beside him, Nessa and the old wagon driver grabbed the coarse rope, setting their heels into the clay.
“We need the oxen cut free from the wagon!” Tomas shouted to Sile. “Cut the left trace! Leave the right yoke on the bank to haul!”
Sile drew his hooked pruning blade. With one powerful, sweeping blow of the razor-sharp inner edge, he cut the two-inch hemp trace connecting the mired oxen to the tongue. Relieved of the forty-ton drag of the sinking wagon, the two lead oxen on the firmer bank lunged forward onto the levee, bellowing with renewed strength.
“Now!” Tomas roared, his back muscles bunching under his linen tunic. “All together! Heave!”
In his left forearm, the gristle of his scar burned as if branded with a hot iron. The calfskin brace groaned, the leather stretching taut against the buckles as four hundred pounds of tension surged through his wrist. He didn’t let go. He locked his elbows to his ribs, using the dead weight of his hips and legs, driving his heels backward against the dark rock curb.
“Heave! Heave! Break the suction!”
For three terrifying heartbeats, nothing moved. The gray mud held the wagon wheels with the unbending grip of a high-pressure vise. Then, with a huge, wet sucking gasp that sounded like a horse pulling its foot from a bog, the left rear wheel broke free of the boiling eye.
The wagon box lurched upright, its iron-banded wheels rolling onto the underwater dark rock roadbed with a heavy, grinding crunch.
The women on the levee cheered, weeping with relief as Sile and Tomas hauled the wagon five paces forward onto the dry crown of the raised stone road. Just then, the first gray, foaming wave of the tidal surge rushed down the ditch.
Nessa had already brought up two heavy timber stacked timber frame blocks from the supply cart. Twelve-inch squared blocks of seasoned elm fitted with iron rope handles. The rear wheel rose out of the suction. Then, she dropped to her knees in the mud, shoving the elm block directly beneath the axle-tree with a sharp, heavy thud.
“Block is set!” Nessa cried, wiping mud from her face with a soaked sleeve. “The axle can’t sink back into the hole! Throw the second block under the front blade collar!”
Tomas shoved the second elm block into the slurry with his boots. He locked the wagon frame above the liquid mud. The four oxen, feeling the dead weight suddenly lift from their yokes, found traction on the firm dark rock roadbed beneath the surface, lunging forward with a collective, bellowing surge that dragged the entire wagon six yards onto the high crown of the raised stone road.
Tomas fell back onto the shell gravel, his chest heaving wildly, his left arm trembling with utter tiredness. He lay there on the cold ground, staring up at the yellow sky, his fingers slowly uncurling from the manila rope.
Beside him, the refugee wagon driver fell to his knees in the mud, clutching Tomas’s boots with trembling, mud-caked hands. “God bless you, porter,” the old man sobbed. “God bless your back. You saved my grandchildren from the salt.”
Tomas sat up slowly, wincing as he cradled his aching wrist against his ribs. He looked at the eight children huddled in the wagon, then at the deep dark rock road beneath their wheels.
“The road saved them, carter,” Tomas said quietly, his voice hoarse with mud and salt. “The King’s road. And nobody is going to bury it again.”