The Clash in the Rapids

The Friar's Leap wasn't heard: it was received. It was a roar so huge it erased the shouting, and the wedge went down the middle of the channel among two-vara waves of white foam that broke over the gunwales and soaked the rowers to the bone. It was riding lower than Sira would have liked. She felt the bottom of the barge brush something, once, twice, like a hand groping in the dark.

She worked the long tiller with all her weight, barefoot, her feet wedged against the deck battens. She could see nothing. She read the river through her feet: a dry tremor was a rock near the surface; a long pull to the left was the deep vein of the channel. When the tremor came she shouted a number, and the rowers to port or starboard drove their blades in together. Nuño stood at the bow, on the ram, with a double-bladed axe and his legs braced against the lurches.

The wedge came out of the last bend an hour before anyone expected it.

The ford of the Mills appeared under a moon that was still low. The barons' two pontoons, the chain gleaming at the waterline between them, and, on the right bank, lantern light moving fast around the falconets: half-dressed men, unlit matches, a voice shouting orders no one had rehearsed. Remigio had told them midnight. Sira was arriving at eleven.

The alarm bells rang. The first arquebus shots came blind from the pontoons, splintering timbers and throwing up spouts of water. A falconet finally spat fire, too late and too high; the grapeshot whistled over the second barge and was lost among the poplars.

"Hold the benches!" shouted Sira. "Nuño, don't let the ram shake!"

The iron bow struck the middle of the chain.

The blow was as if the whole river had run into a wall. The rowers were thrown from their benches; Sira slammed her chest against the tiller and lost her breath. The links groaned, the pontoons' capstans moaned like animals. And the chain held.

It didn't break. It stretched downward, dragged by four barges of ore, and the wedge stayed stuck on it, shuddering, with the river pushing from behind and climbing over the gunwales. If they stayed there, the water would sink them.

Nuño didn't wait for orders. He ran along the ram to the tip, where the chain was scraping the iron, and began to strike with the axe—not the link, which would never have given, but the shackle that joined it to the left pontoon's capstan, a piece of cast iron, brittle, that someone had fastened badly. Once. Twice. Arquebus balls hummed past a span from his head. On the fifth blow, the shackle burst.

The chain came free on one side with a whiplash that split the water. The wedge shot forward, ran down the left pontoon through the middle and threw its marksmen into the river. And the lash of the chain swept the ram from end to end.

Nuño vanished.

Sira saw him fall. A dark shape sinking into the foam ahead of the bow, right where eighty hundredweight of ore was about to pass.

She threw the tiller hard to starboard. The wedge turned heavily, like an ox that obeys late, and the bow swung half a length away from the dark shape. Sira let go of the tiller, shouted to her bosun to hold it and ran along the gangway with an oar in her hands. She threw herself flat on the gunwale. She plunged the oar into the black water.

"Nuño!"

A hand came out of the foam and grabbed the blade. Sira pulled with her whole body. She pulled until her palms split against the wood, until two bargemen came to help her and the three of them hauled him aboard like a soaked sack of grain, coughing up river water, with a gash on his forehead and the axe still in his other hand.

"I didn't let go of it," he said, looking at the axe, and threw up half the Arlanza on the planks.

Behind them, the ford of the Mills lay open: one pontoon split, the other listing, the chain hanging from a single capstan like a dead snake. Ahead, the river widened into calmer water. Sira went back to the tiller with bleeding hands, straightened the wedge and didn't stop shaking until the last falconet was out of range.

Then she knelt beside Nuño, who was still sprawled on the deck, and gave him a kiss that tasted of river, and then a punch on the shoulder, a weak one, in case it ever occurred to him to do something like that again.