Dusk settled across the delta with the sudden, freezing chill of an iron door swinging shut.
The sun had sunk beneath the western salt-marshes in a brief, angry streak of bruised purple and rotten-egg yellow. That left the vast expanse of the lower reach wrapped in a creeping, freezing twilight. From the open estuary, a wall of cold, white sea-fog was rolling inland, swallowing the reed beds and mud-spits in total, milky silence.
Through the gathered gloom, the low, dark shape of The Iron Cormorant moved south along the navigable reach.
She wasn’t moving under steam. Tomas had forbidden lighting the boiler fires until the dredge was anchored in position, to avoid alerting the trade ring lookouts on the Black Shingle tower with smoke. Instead, she was being towed by thirty men of the Lower Delta Association walking in two files along the underwater dark rock raised stone road, their cart driver harnesses cross-strapped over their shoulders. She hauled on two sixty-fathom hawsers of four-inch tarred manila hemp.
Tomas Reed walked on the lead towing bridle. His boots were locked into the rhythmic, clockwork stride of a back-door porter.
His heavy cart harness was broad, made of three-inch harness leather lined with sheep’s wool to prevent chafing across the collar bone, the iron trace-hook clinking softly with every step against the bronze ring of his belt. His left wrist brace held the joint rigid. He took in the heavy, pulsating surge of sixty tons of oak barge sliding through slack water. Beside him walked Sile Rook, his hooked pruning blade strapped across his pack, his massive shoulders leaning into the leather trace with the unbending strength of an ox.
“Station Four-Eighty,” Nessa Vale’s voice called softly from the barge’s bow.
She stood on the foredeck beside the lowered bucket ladder. She held her brass sound horn to her ear. She listened to the sounding lead being dropped every twenty paces by Captain Miller.
“Depth is five feet two inches,” Nessa whispered down to the towing crew. “The keel has eighteen inches of clearance over the dark rock roadbed. Hold the port thick ship rope. Let the current swing her head ten degrees to the west.”
Tomas signaled with his hand. The wagon drivers on the left bridle leaned back, snubbing their line around an underwater dark rock curb stone, allowing the sluggish tidal drift to pivot the seventy-foot barge across the throat of the channel.
The physical labor of towing a seventy-foot steam dredge through tidal mud was an exercise in pure cart driver discipline.
The thirty wagon drivers walked in single file along the underwater dark rock raised stone road, their boots sinking two inches into the surface silt before striking the solid stone below. Every man leaned into his leather chest strap at a matching forty-five-degree angle, his arms hanging low, his legs driving down into the roadbed with a slow, steady beat that matched the breathing of his neighbor. If one man stumbled or broke the rhythm, the huge heavy rush of sixty tons of floating oak would tear the thick ship rope from the line, dragging three men off the stone into the bottomless sloughs beside the road.
“Keep the rhythm, brothers!” Tomas called back along the line, his own shoulder burning under the wool-lined trace. “Heave... Step... Heave... Step! Don’t look at the water. Look at the heels of the man ahead of you!”
The manila thick ship rope hummed between the lead harness and the barge’s bow bitts, throwing off a fine, stinging spray of salty water as the tension pulled the coils taut.
The position was critical down to the yard.
The Iron Cormorant was not merely being set to dredge. She was being deployed as a tactical high-pressure barrier. By anchoring the seventy-foot scow across the western mouth of the reach, three hundred yards above the sunken hulls of The Kingfisher and The Mallard, she would act as a massive bending weir. The Salt-Pan Scour Gate opened tomorrow morning. Then, the scow’s flat oak bottom would prevent the forty-two thousand tons of rushing water from spilling uselessly into the lateral salt ditches. That forced the entire moving head directly through the narrow gap over the silt bar.
“Drop the stern spuds!” Captain Miller called from the deck.
Two heavy upright timber beams—square balks of twelve-inch seasoned oak, thirty feet long, tipped with heavy forged iron shoes—slid downward through the internal spud-wells in the barge’s hull.
THUD. THUD.
The iron shoes bit four feet down through the soft silt. It struck the solid dark rock paving of the raised stone road beneath. It locked the seventy-foot barge immovably into the riverbed like an artificial stone island.
“Spuds are pinned,” Miller reported, dropping the heavy iron locking dogs into the timber racks. “She won’t budge an inch if three knots of tide hit her.”
Tomas stood upon the flat timber deck of The Iron Cormorant. He felt the subtle, rhythmic pulse of the river beneath the hull.
A seventy-foot flat-bottomed barge was not a ship. It was a floating stone terrace, broad and heavy, drawing three feet of water when light. When the river current struck her blunt bow, the water didn’t part smoothly. It bunched into a blunt, foaming cushion of pushback that sent a deep, shuddering hum through every oak timber, every iron angle-bracket, and every deck spike.
He reached down to touch the cold iron of the port spud-well. The square timber beam was locked into the guide frame by two four-inch forged iron dogs, each pinned with an ash-wood toggle. If a sudden flood wave struck the barge from upstream, the crushing force on those two pins would exceed twelve tons.
“The pins will hold, Tomas,” Nessa said. She stepped up beside him, her canvas coat stiff with salt rime. “The ash was seasoned under weight for five years in the naval sheds. It has a shear strength of twelve thousand pounds of pressure. You could anchor a royal war-galley to those pins and the wood wouldn’t cry a fiber.”
Tomas unclipped his harness, stepping up the wooden gangway onto the barge’s deck.
The air out here on the open water was freezing, soaked with salt mist that condensed on the iron railings in greasy, cold beads. In the waist of the barge, four wagon drivers were quietly laying the fire in the boiler box. Dry birch shavings, split pine faggots soaked in animal fat, and twenty bushels of hard Welsh hard coal carried down in sacks from Vance’s wagons.
“How long to raise steam once the fire is lit?” Tomas asked diver Brant, who was checking the boiler safety valves with an animal fat lamp.
“Forty minutes with the forced draft blower,” Brant replied, wiping grease from his thumb. “The coal is dry as bone. Once the chimney takes the draft, we’ll have forty pounds of steam before the tide reaches low slack.”
Nessa Vale stood upon the raised timber platform of the forward bucket ladder. She used her aimed sound tube to monitor the riverbanks.
In the freezing salt-fog, the human ear was easily deceived by echoes bouncing off the reed beds. But Nessa’s trained hearing senses could distinguish between the rustle of wind through marsh grass and the rhythmic, hollow plink of an iron oar-blade striking an underwater piling.
“The eastern levee is quiet,” Nessa reported down through the speaking tube to Captain Miller. “No horses. No wagon movement on the bluff road. But the water in the reach has an unnatural surface chop—about two ripples per second against the timber. Something with eight oars is moving against the ebb tide half a mile ahead.”
Miller glanced at Tomas, his jaw tightening. “They’re out there, Tomas. Waiting in the blind fog.”
A sudden sound cut through the heavy fog from the south—a faint, distant thwack-splash. It was followed by the sharp creak of a heavy oar.
Tomas froze, his hand dropping to the staff at his belt.
Nessa was beside him in an instant, her large brass sound horn pointed out into the blind white mist toward the Black Shingle.
She listened for five seconds, her head tilted, her brow furrowing in fierce concentration.
“Three boats,” Nessa whispered, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp rasp. “Coming up the eastern slough under muffled oars. Heavy timber hulls. They’re rowing in line abreast.”
Sile Rook stepped up to the foredeck rail. His oak tall body-shield slid onto his left arm with a dull, leathery clatter. His hooked pruning blade dropped into his right palm.
“Corve’s hired blades,” Sile rasped softly. “They saw the barge leave the creek at dusk. They know if The Iron Cormorant stays pinned across this reach, their toll-road is dead.”
Tomas looked into the swirling white fog. Out there on the water, three hundred yards away, sixty men with iron-shod bills, boarder’s axes, and fire-pots were creeping through the mist, intending to burn the barge down to the water line before dawn could break.
“Don’t light the boiler fire,” Tomas commanded quietly to Brant. “Keep the iron dark. Sile, take the port gangway. Miller, get your wagon drivers onto the deck with the twelve-pound sledges and the snubbing lines.”
He unslung twenty deep-water lengths of three-strand manila hemp from his pack, his fingers locking around the rough, tarred fibers.
“They want a fight on the water,” Tomas said, his voice flat as an iron plate. “Let’s see how their boats handle a porter’s rope.”