Night fell over the Weeping Delta like a sodden woolen blanket soaked in cold river water.
The sulfur fire bowls atop the wooden wall towers flared with an ugly, orange-red glare. It cast long, twisting shadows across the black mud of the holding pens. In the distance, the wind whistled through the gaps in the sharpened oak timbers, sounding like the wheezing breath of an old man dying of lung-rot. A cold, fine mist drifted in from the eastern marshes. It settled on Tomas’s gray wool coat in thousands of tiny, oily droplets that smelled of bog-iron, wet peat, and burned brimstone.
Before they left the shelter of the levee, Tomas sat on an overturned herring cask to attend to his gear. He unbuckled the stiff calfskin brace from his left wrist. The scarred flesh along his inner forearm was white, shiny, and cold to the touch, the gristle pulling tight where the under-road drain glass had torn the tendon sheath months ago. He warmed three fingers of sheep fat and bitter pine-resin between his rough palms, working the grease step by step into the rigid scar tissue until the fibers loosened. He forced his fingers through five hundred deliberate extensions—thumb to index, thumb to middle, thumb to ring, thumb to little finger—breathing through his vinegar-soaked linen mask in slow, measured counts until the dull morning ache subsided into workable numbness.
