Nessa Vale stood atop the levee, her brass sound horn raised high in her right hand. She lowered the horn. Then, the sharp, clear blast of an iron boatswain’s whistle cut through the morning silence like a striking hammer.
“Heave!” Bram’s roar shook the damp gravel. “Pull for the delta, you beautiful beasts! Heave!”
Forty yoke of heavy marsh oxen leaned into their ash-wood collars, their cloven hooves digging four inches into the roadbed, their thick necks corded with tremendous, ancient traction. Beside them, eighty heavy cart horses dug their iron-shod shoes into the stone. Along the entire three-mile line, the eighty forged log chains snapped taut, throwing off showers of rust flakes, the links groaning under monstrous clockwork tension.
The twenty-foot hemlock and pine piles of the Great Palisade—twelve thousand trees driven deep into the mud a generation before—shuddered along their entire height. For five painful seconds, the timber resisted, the cross-wales creaking and groaning against the iron drift-pins.
Then, with a sound like a battery of artillery firing along a river, the cross-timbers snapped. The massive hemlock piles, their bases rotting in the damp subsoil, snapped and tore free from their clay sockets.
The first sixty-foot section tilted forward into the northern ditch. It gathered driving force. It fell with a bone-shaking, thunderous crash that sent a spray of black marsh mud and water thirty feet into the morning air. Section by section, down the line like falling dominoes, the great timber wall collapsed forward into the mire.
