By the fourth hour of the afternoon, the sixteen-foot-wide trench had reached its full two-point-four-mile arc, severing the clinic knoll from the southern bogs with a clean, six-foot-deep gap bottomed on slick blue clay. But Nessa Vale was not satisfied.
She stood on the spoil bank, her sound horn tilted toward the crackling roar of the approaching fire. “A dry trench is an invitation to failure, Tomas. Look at the wind: the updraft from the burning peat is creating twelve-foot fire-whirls. Burning moss and dried gorse seeds will be lifted sixty feet into the air and blown across our ditch like arrows. If a single ember touches the dry grass on the clinic knoll, the archives will burn from the inside out.”
“What’s the solution, Nessa?” Tomas asked, his voice hoarse from smoke.
“We must flood the cut,” Nessa replied, unrolling her high-pressure survey sketch. “Four hundred yards to the west runs the Old Provincial Drainage Canal, fed by the tidal salt-fen. The water level is three feet lower than our trench rim, but with four rotary pumps, we can lift enough head to fill the bottom of this trench with two feet of salty mud slurry.”
Tomas didn’t hesitate. “Bram, take forty men to the abandoned drainage pumping stations at Sump-End. Dismantle the rotary wooden marsh pumps and bring them here on the ox-sleds.”
