Wager of Battle: A Tale of Saxon Slavery in Sherwood Forest

by Henry William Herbert

Ere long, the sun rose clear above the eastern fog-banks, and all seemed still fair and tranquil; the sands, dry as yet, and firm, smiled golden-bright under the increasing warmth and lustre of the day, and the little rivulets, by which the fresh waters oozed to the deep, glittered like silver ribbons, checkering the yellow expanse.

The very gulls and terns, as they swooped joyously about his head, screaming and diving in the sunny air, or skimmed the sands in pursuit of such small fry as might have been left by the retreat of the waters, seemed, by their activity and happiness, to give him fresh hope and strength to support it.

Occasionally he turned, and cast a hurried glance toward the hills he had just left, down which the slant rays were streaming, to the limit where the green grass and scattered shrubs gave way to the bare sea-sands; and, as from each anxious scrutiny of the ground, he returned to his forward progress without discovering any signs of peril, his face lighted up anew, and he advanced with a freer and a bolder foot.

Still so weary was he, and so worn with his past toils, that he made but little real progress; and when he had been already an hour on the sands, he had accomplished little more than three miles of his route. The sands, from the point at which he had entered them, over against the city of Lancaster, and almost due west from that city to the nearest accessible headland of the opposite shore, were not less than nine miles in extent, the deepest and most dangerous parts being those nearest to the farther coast; but, measured to the place for which he was making, a considerable distance up the estuary of the Kent, they were at least three miles longer.

Two or three channels the fugitive had already crossed, and was rejoiced at finding the sandy bottom, over which the fresh water flowed some two or three inches deep, perfectly hard and beaten; at the end of his third mile he reached a broader expanse of water, where the sands were covered to the width of a hundred yards, and where the current, if that might be called a current which had scarcely any perceptible motion downward, took him nearly to the midleg. The foothold was, moreover, less firm than before, and his heavy brogues sank to the latchet in the yielding soil. This was the course of the first and smaller of the two rivers which fall into the eastern side of the bay from the county of Lancaster, and at about two miles distant, he could see the course of the second, glittering blue among the low sand-rollers which divided them.

Here he paused, undecided, for a few moments. He knew not what should be the depth of the water, or what the nature of the bottom; yet already he almost doubted, almost feared, that the time was passed, and that the tide had turned.

He looked southward, in the direction of the sea, which lay broad in view, though at many leagues distance; and, for the first time, it struck him that he could hear the moaning roll of its ever restless waves. He fancied, too, that the sands looked darker and more plashy, and that the silvery line which marked the margin of the waters, where the sun glinted on their quiet ripples, appeared nearer than when he had descended from the solid strand.

But, on the other hand, the sun-lighted slopes and crags of the opposite Lancastrian shore, near Flockborough Head, and the green point of Westmoreland, between the mouths of Windermere and the river Kent, lying in the full blaze of the unintercepted morning, looked much nearer than they really were, and seemed to beckon him forward with a smile of welcome. "Even if it be that the tide is turning," he thought, "I have yet the time to outstrip it; and, the quicker it mount, the wider the barrier it will place between me and my enemies."

Almost as these ideas passed his mind, a sound came to his ears, which banished in a moment every thought of the time, the tide, the peril of the sands.

It was the keen blast of a bugle, clearly winded on the shore from which he had just departed, but at a point a little higher up, to the northward, than that at which he had himself left it. In an instant, before he had even the time to turn round and take observation, a second bugle, yet farther to the north, took up the cadence, and, as that died away, yet a third, so faint, and so far to the northward, that it seemed like a mere echo of the first, replied.