At three o’clock on Tuesday morning, the fog rolled off the Great River in thick, yellow blankets that smelled of sulfur coal and stale marsh-water, swallowing the street lanterns of Crown-Reach in a blind, freezing murk. Printer’s Alley was dead silent, save for the steady, muffled clank-rumble-chunk of Caxton’s four Stanhope presses working through the night behind barred oak doors.
At the mouth of the alley. There, the narrow cobblestone lane opened onto the High Exchange, the Commoners’ Working Watch had erected a tough defensive breastwork across the fifteen-foot gap between the tall brick printing houses. The barricade was not a chaotic heap of rubbish. It was a masterwork of cart driver building, built of heavy oak timber balks, iron-banded packing crates filled with river gravel, and five overturned heavy cart wagons chained together with three-quarter-inch mooring links.
Sile Rook stood atop the central wagon frame, his dark wool coat buttoned to the chin, his oak tall body-shield planted firmly on the floorboards before him. In his right hand, his iron-wood hooked pruning blade rested with its beak grounded. Beside him stood Tomas Reed, wearing his ash-wood pack frame and gray wool tunic, his scarred left arm resting in its calfskin brace, his dark-lantern shaded so that only a thin slit of amber light lit up the barricade crest. Behind them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in four disciplined ranks, waited four hundred journeymen blacksmiths, cordwainers, and river draymen, each man holding a four-foot wooden packing bat or an iron-shod heavy cart-spoke.
