The Midnight Lading

The cove of the Willows was a backwater hidden among limestone cliffs, the weeping willows dipping their branches into the water. In there the roar of the river faded to a murmur that covered the hammering.

They worked all afternoon. Sira's bargemen and a dozen coopers Nuño had brought from Valdelobos along the bank path lashed the four Oakhaven barges together with crossed ash beams and tallowed hawsers, one in front and three behind, like an arrowhead. On the bow of the leading barge they fixed a squared oak timber sheathed in iron plates, a ram to take the blow of the chain and spread it to the sides. Eighty hundredweight of ore per barge. The water reached to a span below the rail.

Sira checked the lashings with a dark lantern. Nuño tightened the wedges of the stern rudder with a mallet.

The coopers from Valdelobos and the bargemen from Oakhaven didn't speak to one another. For three centuries they had dealt with each other only through tolls, and they eyed each other sideways, each group on its own barge, like dogs from two houses. In mid-afternoon, one of Sira's bargemen handed a cooper a hawser without anyone asking him to. The cooper thanked him. That was all. To Sira it seemed a great deal.

"The water's rising two fingers every hour," she said, feeling the mark against the hull. "The crest will come with the moon at its height. That's the moment."

"My coopers are afraid," said Nuño. "None of them has ever run the Friar's Leap at night. They say in the dark you can't see the rocks on the bottom."

"You can't." Sira set down the lantern. "At night you don't look at the river: you listen to it, and you feel it in the deck under your feet. If your men row when I say and you don't hesitate at the bow, I'll get you through."

At nightfall, Sira counted the men. Ten bargemen of hers. Eleven coopers. Before there had been twelve.

"Where's the one in the red cap?" she asked Nuño.

"Remigio." Nuño looked around. "He went to the other bank for more tallow two hours ago."

"Which other bank?"

"The one with the poplars. There's an inn."

Sira said nothing. She remembered the rider standing among the poplars that morning. She remembered that the inn on the right bank was where the barons' mercenaries drank on Sundays.

Nuño understood a second after she did. The color drained from his face.

"Remigio has been in my cellar fifteen years."

"And the guild voted sixteen to three." Sira spoke low, so the others wouldn't hear. "It isn't your fault. But if Remigio has told them about the wedge, the barons will be waiting for us at midnight with their matches lit."

"Then we drop it."

"Then we bring it forward."

Nuño stared at her without understanding.

Sira didn't tell him the rest: that the Friar's Leap with the water half risen was where her father had drowned, that she was twelve and watched it from the bank, and that for ten winters she had run it by day precisely so as never to have to run it like this.

"The crest doesn't come all at once," she said. "It comes over an hour. If we go at the start, with the water still rising, we go a little slower and a little lower. More risk at the Leap. But we reach the ford while they're still loading the falconets for the hour they've been told."

While the men ate jerky and passed round the skin of brandy, Nuño came to her at the stern. He took from his doublet a teardrop of polished amber set in silver wire and put it in her hand.

"It was my grandfather's. He was the first to bring timber down from Oakhaven to Valdelobos, before the long winter. He used to say amber keeps the sun even in the dark." He shrugged, awkward. "I want you to wear it at the helm. Since I don't know how to pray, it's what I have."

Sira hung it round her neck under her shirt. The stone was warm from having been against his chest.

"If we get out of this," said Nuño, "I want to take you to my cellar. I want you to taste the wine from the old vines and see the cherry trees bloom along the river flats. In three weeks."

"In three weeks I could be hanging from a holm oak."

"Then let it be an urgent invitation."

She laughed, and he took the chance to kiss her, quick, clumsy, tasting of brandy. They broke apart because the coopers were watching.

Sira raised the dark lantern three times. The bargemen cut the hawsers with axes, all at once. The wedge of timber, iron and ore slid slowly out of the cove, entered the main channel, and the river took hold of it like a hand.