The labor of dredging an underwater foundation in forty-degree spring water was not heroic. It was the brutal, unglamorous drudgery of the ditch-digger, measured in aching shoulders, torn fingernails. The bitter taste of cold mud splashed against the lips. For twenty-two minutes, Tomas Reed and Sile Rook worked in total, rhythmic coordination. Their breath mixed in a single gray cloud that hung beneath the low stone vaulting.
Tomas operated the wooden pump-lever of the canvas bilge bellows, his right arm working with the smooth, clockwork smooth speed of a cart driver who had spent nine years hoisting flour sacks into high warehouse lofts. His scarred left wrist, locked inside its stiff calfskin brace, bore the stabilizing pressure against the snake-like altar block, the copper studs biting cold through his skin. Beside him, Sile Rook was down on his knees in four feet of freezing water, his scarred hands guiding the copper nozzle of the suction hose along the sunken flat stone slab joints. It tore away the dense, compacted river clay that had settled between the hard black rock blocks.
Every stroke of the bellows produced a heavy, wet suction sound—THWIP-CHUG, THWIP-CHUG—as the canvas cylinders pulled hundreds of pounds of slurry from the stone face.
