A load carried up a thirty-one-degree incline can’t be trusted to brute muscle alone.
On the slanting granite floor of the upper sally port, Nessa Vale stood with her boxwood folding rule in her teeth, marking the wood slot notches on a sixteen-foot heart-spruce spar. Behind her, wagon driver Kester and young Darrow were driving hardwood trunnels through the cross-braces of a huge A-frame derrick. Their rawhide mallets struck with steady, rhythmic thuds that echoed out across the misty bog.
Tomas sat upon a dry nail firkin five paces away, his left leg stretched straight out before him on an oak stacked timber frame block. His trousers were rolled to the thigh. Sile had wrapped his bruised knee in four layers of raw, unwhitened linen soaked in cold vinegar and boiled willow bark, binding the dressing with an elastic rawhide bandage to keep the swelling from locking the kneecap.
Tomas held his work ledger on his lap, checking the rigging counts Nessa had drafted that morning.
“The physical problem is the transfer at the doorstep,” Tomas said. His bone metal pen tapped the thick parchment margin. “When a crate clears the surface of the water, its floating weight vanishes. Under water, a hardwood crate weighs one hundred and ten pounds because of the shifted weight of the wood. The moment it breaks the air, its weight jumps to one hundred and eighty pounds. If the wagon drivers on the rope aren’t braced, that seventy-pound shock will jerk the haulers off…
