So confident was his voice and so burning with excitement, that in one moment it lashed their cowardice away. Hyla sprung towards the stern pole and Gurth lifted the other, then, with hardly a movement save a few tiny splashes, the boat glided slowly away into the heart of the fen. The voices of the soldiers became fainter and more faint till they could hear them no more.
The ringing blows of the hammer pursued them a little further, until in a few minutes those also died away, and they were alone in the fen.
All round them the great reeds rose and whispered, enormous bulrushes with furry heads like young water-rats nodded towards them as they raced for their life down those dark mysterious water-ways. Deeper and deeper into the heart of the great fen sped the boat. Gurth and Hyla worked with the precision of machines. There was a wonderfully stimulating effect in the rhythm of the action. The water became a deep shining black, showing incalculable depths below. In order to propel the boat at all they had to skirt the very fringe of the morass, for there only could the poles find bottom. At each heave and lift, under which the punt kicked forward like some living thing, the poles came up clotted and smeared with stinking black mud, undisturbed before for hundreds of years. Sometimes, at a deeper push, the mud was a greyish white and studded with tiny shells, tokens which the great grey sea had left behind to tell that once it had dominion there.
All wild nature fled before their racing approach. A hundred yards ahead, even in those tortuous ways, fat unclean birds of the fen rose heavily and clanged away over the marshes. As the throb of the poles came near them, the fish shouldered each other in flight. Every now and again they rushed over a still, wicked pool teeming with fish, and the rush of their passage made white-bellied fish leap out of the water in terror. Once they saw a great black vole, as large as a rabbit, swimming in the middle of the water. He heard them coming, and turned a wet smooth head to look; then with a twinkle of his eyes he dived and disappeared.
Gradually the speed of the boat slackened as the two men grew tired. The excitement of the day began to tell on them, and they felt in their arms how weary they were. Cerdic, who perhaps by virtue of his years or personal magnetism seemed to be indubitably their leader, saw it in their faces. He saw that not only were they physically worn out, but that energy was going from their brains also.
"Stop you," said this shrewd person. "We are far from them now. It is time for rest and belly food." Nothing loth, they put down the punt poles, and pushed the nose of the boat into a little bay of reeds, out of the main water.
"Food?" said Hyla, "with all my heart, I did not know you had any. Where is it pight?"
Cerdic gave a little superior grin. He took up a skin wallet which lay by his side and produced the materials for a feast. Six great green eggs, stolen from a sitting duck which had belonged to the ill-fated Pierce, were the staple food. Boiled hard and eaten with black bread and some scraps of cold meat, they were a banquet to the fugitives. For drink they had nothing but marsh water, which they sucked up through a hollow reed. It was blackish and rather stagnant, but it refreshed them mightily.
"And how far have you got now, do you think?" said Gurth.
"Near half way," answered Cerdic, "but it has been easy going, and we shall not get such free water now. It is a back way to Icomb that we have come by up till now. Whybeare there was a broad passage, a great stretch of water, but that was in King William's time, when boats brought corn from Edmundsbury. Now the monks have corn-land of their own, and corn comes from Norwich also. The passage is all grown with weed and reeds, and no man may go up it in any vessel."