BatB Chapter Three
Feb. 27th, 2015 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
youngarrowThe early days of April wasn't the best time of year to begin a journey of over a month, but it was what they had to work with. Despite the chilling, sometimes freezing rain that tumbled from the sky nearly every day, for any sort of security on the road they would need to travel in company, with plenty of time left in the year to establish themselves in their new home before the winter snows came and trapped them in one area for several months. Esgaroth wasn't unknown to any of them, including the children, but not even Thorin had been that far inland before and Dis was entirely unwilling to risk the safety of her boys more than was needed. So it was that they were to join the first team returning up the river after wintering in the city, their horse-drawn boats filled with more luxurious and unusual goods than the lumber they'd transported west in the late fall.
It was an ingenious system, really: the timber cut from the forests around Long Lake needed to reach the coast and the shipbuilders there somehow, and so years back several enterprising families had joined together to support the loggers by establishing a shipping business moving up and down the river. Long, narrow, shallow-bottomed boats had been constructed and rigged not with sails or oars, but with a clever system of rigging that allowed a horse or donkey to be hitched to the leading end and pull the barge up and down the river from a path on the bank. It was a much more efficient system than a team of wagons, allowing one horse to pull several times the weight than it would be able to on any sort of wheeled vehicle on the road, and accidents rarely happened on a river as sure and steady as the River Running usually flowed. The bargemen also didn't mind taking travelers along with their party, for a fee, of course, and were known to the family as taciturn but honest and fair men with careful, watchful eyes.
And so it was that a month and a half after the decision had been made to leave the city, Thorin, Dis, Fili, and Kili found the last of their belongings packed onto two of the barges and a light cart pulled by a strong pony which could easily keep up with the steady pace of the river caravan and still be useful for a smith in a new town.
It was an ingenious system, really: the timber cut from the forests around Long Lake needed to reach the coast and the shipbuilders there somehow, and so years back several enterprising families had joined together to support the loggers by establishing a shipping business moving up and down the river. Long, narrow, shallow-bottomed boats had been constructed and rigged not with sails or oars, but with a clever system of rigging that allowed a horse or donkey to be hitched to the leading end and pull the barge up and down the river from a path on the bank. It was a much more efficient system than a team of wagons, allowing one horse to pull several times the weight than it would be able to on any sort of wheeled vehicle on the road, and accidents rarely happened on a river as sure and steady as the River Running usually flowed. The bargemen also didn't mind taking travelers along with their party, for a fee, of course, and were known to the family as taciturn but honest and fair men with careful, watchful eyes.
And so it was that a month and a half after the decision had been made to leave the city, Thorin, Dis, Fili, and Kili found the last of their belongings packed onto two of the barges and a light cart pulled by a strong pony which could easily keep up with the steady pace of the river caravan and still be useful for a smith in a new town.
