The morning wind scoured the northern wagon ring with blinding sheets of white bitter salt dust as Tomas Reed, Nessa Vale. Sile Rook approached Well Number Three. The wellhead sat in a barren depression between two rows of tattered canvas tents. It was surrounded by twenty refugee women holding cracked clay pitchers and wooden buckets.
The well had no stone coping, no dressed dark rock lining, and no iron hoists. It was a crude, jagged hole five feet across. It was surrounded by crumbling mounds of gray clay and braced with rotted pine pit-props that were buckling under the pressure of the shifting soil. A squeaking wooden crank winch of rough cedar rested across two notched posts, wound with a frayed hemp rope that was white with crusted salt.
Tomas set down his ash pack frame and stepped to the edge of the pit. Beside him, Nessa uncoiled a tuned sounding line. A hundred feet of braided flax cord weighted with a five-pound tube-shaped plumb-bob of cast lead, notched at every royal foot with brass wire tags.
Old Kaelen Brant stepped forward, his weathered face tight with bitter memory. “This is the main well for four hundred souls, Tomas. When the bucket comes up at noon, it smells like rotten eggs and bitter lime. We let it settle in clay pot crocks for two days, skim the yellow scum off the top, and drink what’s left. It burns the tongue, and after five years of drinking it, a man’s shins…
