An eight-hundred-pound timber doesn’t forgive a careless foot.
Tomas stood at the threshold of the sunken sally port. His boots planted was wide on the wet hemlock raft. The rain had settled into a steady, piercing drizzle that turned the peeled bark of the corduroy logs slick as wet lard. A hundred yards back along the floating road, wagon driver Kester led his shaggy black work-pony, its head down, its steam-breathing nostrils flared with effort as it leaned into the heavy rope harness.
Behind the pony, dragging on two peeled birch skids, came the first heart-oak balk. It was ten inches square and twenty feet long, rough-hewn from the heartwood of an ancient upland oak, dark as cured ham and smelling of bitter wood tannin and boiled pine tar.
“Hold the pony, Kester!” Sile shouted from the ditch bank, his ash truncheon raised. “Let the roadbed settle before you cross the trench under-road drain!”
The wagon driver hauled back on the hemp reins, planting his heavy boots in the gravel. The pony halted with a grateful snort, its iron-shod hooves sinking an inch into the packed sedge.
Under the weight of the timber, the floating spruce raised stone road groaned and bowed. A ribbon of dark, oily bog water washed over the stringers. It bubbled through the birch brush with a wet, sucking sound. Nessa knelt on the road margin with her boxwood survey staff. She measured the bending of the logs against an anchored stake.
