The digging of the foundation footing of Pier Six began at dawn, beneath a sky the color of lead slate.
Tomas Reed stood waist-deep in a trench of icy black gravel on the downstream face of the pier, his boots sunk six inches into foul-smelling river silt. In his hands he held a heavy iron-bladed ditching spade. Its ash handle polished was dark by forty seasons of cart hauling and ditch-work. Beside him, Sile Rook was driving a six-foot steel pry-bar into the compacted riverbed, leveraging out heavy boulders of black limestone that had piled up against the stonework over a century of floods.
Nessa Vale stood on the edge of the trench. She held a tuned sounding rod and a carpenter’s level, recording the depth of the digging at three-foot intervals on her waterproof slate.
“We need to reach the original timber grillage,” Tomas said, his breath steaming as he threw a shovel-full of wet gravel onto the spoil heap. “A Roman-style arcade of this mass couldn’t be founded directly on fractured limestone. The ancient builders always drove a double row of seasoned oak piles, capped them with a timber platform of heavy heart-oak beams, and laid the first course of granite cut stone on the timber grillage.”
