Eight hundred pairs of arms moved in a relentless, clockwork rhythm that transformed the Black-Willow Swale into a huge open-air quarry of burning earth. The trench was laid out in three stepped benches. The first rank of wagon drivers hacked through the dense, matted surface turf of heather and gorse roots with sharp ditching axes. The second rank sliced out twenty-pound cubes of dark, stringy peat with curved spades. And the third rank stood at the bottom, scraping down to the dense, slippery blue clay floor.
Tomas Reed worked at the center of the cut. His heavy steel ditch-spade rose and falling with the measured economy of a veteran cart driver. His oilskin jacket was stripped away, his gray woolen work shirt soaked through with sweat and black soot. The heat rising from the southern peat bank was choking, baking the front of his legs through his calfskin trousers like the radiant mouth of a brick kiln.
Every breath sucked through his vinegar-soaked mask was hot and sour, tasting of copper and scorched roots. His left forearm, scarred to the bone from Dren’s hooked blade in Bellwether, burned with an excruciating, throbbing fury. The torn tendon sheath, tightly packed beneath the three-inch iron buckle of his brace, seized with violent muscular spasms each time he leveraged a sixty-pound spadeful of wet sod onto the southern embankment.
