The trade ring’s revenge was silent, cowardly, and struck directly at the throats of children.
At the second bell after midnight, two hours before the morning tide, a party of five men in black grease-cloth hooded smocks slipped through the shadows beneath the wooden support posts of Sunken Pilings. They carried four heavy clay jars of soaked salt water, mixed with packed sulfuric iron burning acid from the coastal alum-works and two buckets of rotting marsh muck.
They reached the Town Cistern. The sole source of fresh sweet water for the three hundred families living on the platforms, an ancient, brick-lined holding tank sixty feet across, fed by a deep freshwater spring on the lower slope of the bluffs.
With cold, careful malice, they smashed the heavy clay jars against the inner brick coping. They poured forty gallons of poison into the clear mountain water, before melting away into the dark salt-fog.
By dawn, the horror had broken over the shantytown.
Tomas was awakened in the survey tent by Apprentice Olla’s wild, sobbing voice. “Carrier Reed! Sile! Come to the square! The well is poisoned! The water is yellow as bile!”
Tomas sprang from his cot, his boots unlaced, his coat thrown over his shoulders.
He ran down the wooden boardwalk to the central water tank platform.
The square was surrounded by two hundred wild river folk. Women were weeping, holding tin cups of cloudy, yellow-green water that gave off the sickening, pungent stench of rotten eggs and scorched copper. A young mother sat on a herring barrel. She grabbed a six-month-old infant whose lips were very thirsty and cracked, crying with a weak, rattling wheeze.
Old Elam Vance stood by the brick coping, holding an iron ladle filled with the water. When Tomas approached, Vance held the ladle out with trembling hands.
“Look at it, Reed,” Vance whispered, his voice shaking with total despair. “The only sweet spring within four leagues. They dumped alum and salt sludge down the throat. You can’t even boil it. The steam smells like burning sulfur. The children haven’t had a cup of water since sundown.”
Tomas plunged his hand deep into the yellow water of the water tank. His fingers scraped the slimy brick floor four feet down.
He drew his hand out. Then, his palm was covered in a thick, greasy paste of dark green sludge that smelled of rotten garlic and sulfuric acid. He held it out for Nessa Vale to examine.
“Heavy-duty sludge from the alum kilns,” Nessa pronounced, touching the paste with the tip of her knife and tasting the residue on the back of her hand with a sharp wince. “Iron burning acid and hardened sulfur. They used four jars of packed pickling liquor. It has soaked into the porous brickwork of the water tank. Even if we bail twenty thousand gallons out of this tank, the brick will continue to cry acid for three weeks. The water tank is dead until we chip away the inner lining and repoint the stonework with fresh volcanic cement.”
A woman in the crowd collapsed to her knees, clutching her hair. “Three weeks without water! Our beasts will be dead in forty-eight hours! We’ll have to drink the river mud!”
“Nobody drinks river mud,” Tomas said, his voice ringing across the platform like an iron chime. “Nessa, where is the nearest un-contaminated spring?”
“On the upper bluff, three miles north,” Nessa replied, pointing toward the green limestone cliffs. “The Saint Eleanor Spring. It flows at forty gallons a minute from a fissure in the limestone. Clean, sweet water, cold as snow.”
Tomas knelt by the water tank. He took a polished silver coin from his pocket, dipping it into the ladle.
The coin blackened instantly, coated in a thick, greasy tarnish of iron sulfide.
“Alum-burning acid,” Tomas said, his voice dropping into cold, lethal stillness. “Mixed with marsh gas slurry. If a child drinks two cups of this, the stomach lining ulcerates in six hours.”
“Corve,” Sile Rook rumbled. He stepped up beside Tomas, his hooked pruning blade in his hand, his eyes blazing with cold soldier’s fury. “The old devil knows he lost the court. He wants to force the wagon drivers to abandon the port before the circuit judge arrives.”
A man in the crowd—a salt-hauler named Gurney—slammed his fist against a timber post. “We have to leave! My girl is burning with fever! If we don’t have sweet water by noon, she will die! We’ll have to pay Corve’s factors on the bluff to bring water down in tank wagons!”
“How much are they charging on the bluff?” Tomas asked, turning to Gurney.
“A silver coin for two buckets,” Gurney yelled in despair. “A silver coin! It takes two days of shoveling salt to earn a silver coin! Who has silver to buy water for forty children?”
Tomas stood up straight. He looked across the sea of very thirsty, frightened faces. Working people who had spent their lives being squeezed for every copper bit they had ever earned.
“Nobody pays a silver coin for water,” Tomas announced, his voice cutting through the panic like an iron bell. “Listen to me! Every carter who has a team of oxen or horses, hitch your beasts! Every woman who has an empty salt barrel, roll it onto the carts!”
Elam Vance blinked, wiping his tears with a dirty sleeve. “Where are we going, Reed? The trade ring has armed guards at the bluff spring.”
“The trade ring doesn’t own the water,” Tomas said. His fingers locked around his walking staff. “Under Section Three of the Sovereign Water Rights Promise of Year 001, every natural spring flowing from crown bluffs is an open town common. Corve built a stone wall around the spring last winter. But the charter beneath the wall belongs to the people.”
He looked at Sile Rook. “Sile, take six wagon drivers with iron pry-bars and oak mauls. Miller, harness your four heavy cart horses to Vance’s flat wain. We’re taking twenty empty barrels up to the Bluff-End spring.”
“Corve’s court guards have crossbows on the spring wall, Tomas,” Sile warned, his scarred jaw tightening. “They won’t let you dip a bucket without a fight.”
“They won’t be fighting an uncalled porter, Sile,” Tomas said. He turned to the sixty wagon drivers who stood with iron bars in their fists. “They will be fighting thirty hungry wagon drivers whose children are thirsty. And there isn’t a wall on that bluff that can stand against thirty men with timber levers.”
The march up the bluff road was a display of pure, collective working-class defiance.
Sixty wagon drivers, bargees, and salt-haulers walked in double file beside the eight heavy freight wagons, their iron pry-bars, splitting mauls, and boat-hooks carried over their shoulders like axe-spears. They didn’t sing, and they didn’t shout. They moved with the slow, relentless driving force of an incoming tide, their boots grinding the white oyster shells into dust.
The column reached the crest of the bluff. Then, the private stone wall built by Factor Corve loomed across the road. An eight-foot low roof wall of dressed limestone, fitted with heavy iron-plated oak gates and loop-holes for crossbows.
Court guard Taggart’s five guards stood atop the wall, their weapons drawn, but when they looked down the road and saw sixty heavy wagon drivers marching behind Sile Rook’s four-foot tall body-shield, their hands began to shake.
Tomas didn’t stop until he reached the iron gate.
He stepped forward, unslung his ash pack frame. Then he pulled the approved copy of Judge Kroll’s injunction from his satchel. He thrust the thick parchment through the iron grille of the gate, directly into the face of the trembling guard captain.
“Order of Summary Injunction,” Tomas declared, his voice echoing off the stone wall. “The Saint Eleanor Spring is declared an open town common. Unlock this gate in three breaths. Or my men will put eight timber pry-bars under the hinges.”
The guard captain looked at the thick parchment, then at Sile Rook’s hooked pruning blade, and then at the forty men behind them holding twelve-pound sledgehammers.
“Get the keys,” the captain stammered to his men. “Get the keys and open the bloody gate.”
Within twenty minutes, a convoy of eight heavy farm wagons, carrying forty clean, scrubbed salt barrels, rolled off the timber boardwalks onto the dry shell ridge.
As the forty barrels were filled at the mountain spring, Tomas stood upon the stone water tank wall. He watched the clear, sparkling water cascade into the oak containers.
The spring water was sweet, tasting of clean limestone and melting snow, cold enough to numb the teeth. The wagon drivers worked with furious, joyous energy. Four men working the heavy ash-wood bucket sweeps, two men checking the bungs and oak hoops, and three men wiping the barrel rims with clean linen rags before pounding the wooden stoppers home with wooden mallets.
“We have two thousand gallons of sweet water, Reed,” Captain Miller said, his face shining with sweat despite the chilly wind. “Enough to give every soul in the port two gallons a day for a week. And by God, if Corve tries to block this road again, we’ll bring forty wagons instead of eight.”
“Corve won’t block this road again, Captain,” Tomas said. He looked down at the broad, clear delta reach below. “The paper in his townhouse is already burning in his mind. He has one day left before the circuit judge arrives, and he knows it.”
Tomas walked at the head of the column beside Vance’s wagon, his ash-wood pack frame strapped across his back. His lead-lined satchel held the Sovereign Water Promise.
Behind them marched sixty men, silent and resolute, their boots kicking up clouds of white shell dust into the bright morning air, marching toward the green limestone bluffs to claim the water that belonged to their blood.