The Sluice Trench

My right shoulder throbbed with every step, bruised deep from where a flying bronze chariot axle had clipped my collarbone. I dragged my ash pry-bar through the yellow floodplain weeds, keeping low beneath the lip of an abandoned overflow channel. The ditch had been dug two centuries ago by canal guilds long turned to bone, lined with cracked, weed-choked brickwork that kept me hidden from the main dike road.

Behind me, two miles back toward Sluis-Dijk, the three crumpled chariot hulls sat cooling in the mud. More horsemen would come soon. A squadron commander in the God-King's vanguard did not misplace three scout teams without sending out the heavy lancers to comb the flats.

I dropped onto a dry shelf of silt beneath a collapsed stone culvert. Sitting down pulled hard across my ribs, making my breath hitch in my throat. I unslung my oilcloth tool satchel and set it beside my knees. The ash bar clattered against the brick wall. Inside the satchel, my iron dredge-shoe, three spare hemp cords, a tin pot of tallow lard, and a scrap of coarse linen remained intact. The black precursor whistle lay safe in my inner tunic pocket, cold against my sweaty skin.

I dipped a corner of the linen into the lard pot and rubbed it across the raw skin over my collarbone, working the grease into the purple bruise until the stiff muscle loosened. Then I tore a strip of hemp cord with my teeth and bound a pad of cloth tight against my side. Ditch work taught a man early that an untended rib would put you flat on your back before sundown.

My wagon was gone. The ash tongue had snapped clean at the kingbolt when the beasts bolted, leaving the dray overturned in the marsh slime with two shattered wheel-strakes. I could replace a dray with three weeks of winter timber-hewing, but I could not dig a foot of silt without my oxen. Roep and Bruin were out in the northwest reed-marshes, two ton-weight beasts loose in country crawling with imperial forage parties.

I crawled to the western edge of the culvert and peered through the tall sedge.

The marsh stretched out for miles, a gray-green expanse of waist-high sawgrass, salt-pools, and willow scrub. There was no sign of horns or gray hide among the thickets. Calling out with my lungs would carry across the flat water straight to the high dikes.

I reached into my shirt and pulled out the black whistle.

The metal stayed cold despite the heat of my chest. If I blew a sharp whistle note, the air would carry the shrill acoustic ring across five leagues of open peat. But the tube had three small side apertures near the base, the ones that controlled the pitch of the silt when I had bridged the suction-bogs.

I knelt down in the dry ditch bed, clearing away dry dead reeds until I reached the underlying layer of compacted gray river sediment. I pressed the lower rim of the whistle directly against the clay, sealed two of the side holes with my thumb and knuckle, and blew a slow, steady pulse of air into the mouthpiece.

No sound escaped into the open air. Instead, the whistle vibrated violently between my teeth.

The dry clay beneath my knees shuddered. A low, rhythmic thrum traveled through the earth, vibrating down the length of the brick trench like the purr of a massive subterranean cat. Five paces away, pebbles in the ditch danced in small, tight circles. Ten paces out, the standing water in a ditch puddle rippled into neat concentric rings.

I paused, caught my breath, and pressed another three short pulses into the ground.

It was the same bone-deep shudder the whistle had made in the Great Swale, tuned low enough to bypass human ears while rattling the stones beneath the soil. An ox felt earth-tremors through the broad pads of its hooves better than a dog heard a horn. For eight years, Roep had always turned back to the barn whenever the spring floodwaters began to rumble five miles upriver.

I waited, keeping my head below the ditch rim.

Two minutes passed. The wind hissed through the brittle marsh reeds. A marsh-snipe took flight from a clump of dwarf alder fifty paces away, flapping noisily toward the clouds.

Then the sawgrass parted.

A broad, blunt snout covered in gray mud thrust through the reeds. Roep stepped into the shallow ditch, his heavy dewlap swinging, a clump of wild marsh-parsley hanging from his yellow teeth. Behind him, trailing five yards of snapped harness leather and broken ash trace-chains, lumbered Bruin. The dark ox shook his head with an irritable snort, his broad horns clicking against the brick wall as he dropped down into the dry channel.

"You miserable, thick-headed louts," I whispered, relief washing over my tight chest.

Roep huffed, blowing warm, wet air against my torn sleeve, smelling of sour grass and pond silt. He nudged my shoulder with his wet nose, nearly knocking me off my heels.

I reached out and ran my palms down their forelegs, feeling for heat, swelling, or splintered bone. Roep had a superficial scrape along his left flank where a bronze spear-tip had grazed his hide, but both beasts stood square on all four hooves. Their hocks were clean. Their breathing came steady and deep.

"Stand," I muttered, digging a handful of fresh marsh greens from the bank to keep Roep occupied while I went to work on their gear.

I pulled my skinning knife from my belt and sliced away the tangled remnants of the shattered cart traces. The ash yoke was gone, abandoned with the overturned dray, but the thick ox-collars and broad hemp chest-bands were still fastened securely around their shoulders.

I knotted the trailing hemp ropes into short lead-halters, looping the excess cords across their thick withers. I tied my oilcloth satchel and the heavy iron dredge-shoe across Bruin's broad back, balancing the weight so the pack would not slip into the bog. Without a cart, we moved half as fast and carried a third of our provisions, but two draft oxen on lead ropes could cross marsh berms and narrow sluice crests where no two-wheeled dray could ever roll.

With the beasts secured, I climbed the crumbling brick steps of the sluice gate to get our bearings.

To the west, the low scrub gave way to the endless reed-seas that led toward the mountain foothills, thirty miles of trackless bog and hidden precursor canals. To the north ran the deep drainage reservoirs, guarded by provincial garrisons. To the east lay the open floodplain, the smoking chariot wreckage, and the great dike that ran straight back to Sluis-Dijk and my home parish of Veenhuis.

I looked eastward toward the morning sun.

A dark smudge stained the pale horizon. Three tall, greasy pillars of black smoke were rising into the sky, thick and heavy with the reek of burning thatch and green timber.

The smoke rose from lateral nine. It rose from the center of Veenhuis.

I looked down at the lead ropes in my fist, then reached out and caught Roep by the horn, turning both beasts around toward the east.

"Come on, boys," I said, stepping off the brick wall and into the mud. "We're going back."