Isoult, seated on a bundle of straw in the bottom of a wagon, saw
stretching for more than a mile behind her an undulating mass of
marching men, a veritable river of humanity oozing with mud-brown eddies
through the green of the June fields. The oxen harnessed to the wagon
went at a stolid walk, and the wagon itself, with its creaking wheels,
seemed to float on this river of bobbing heads and swinging legs. On a
plank laid across the side rails sat John Ball and Merlin the
Franciscan, each holding a wooden cross above the dust and the smell and
the heat of all these herding peasants. Isoult could watch the faces of
those who marched on either side of the wagon—the coarse,
weather-stained faces of workers in the fields, all straining forward
with fanatical and greedy eyes staring at something a long way off.
Pikes, scythe-blades fastened to poles, pitchforks, bows, flails, axes,
and old swords were carried on the shoulders of this marching multitude.
For the most part these peasants plodded along in silence, a silence
that licked its lips and thought of the morrow. Thousands of feet
hammered the road, and an indescribable, harsh roar, blended of many
sounds, suggested the rushing of water over a weir. Now and again a man
would throw up his head like a dog baying the moon, and howl out some
catch-cry.
“Death to all clerks and lordings!” “King Richard and Goodman Jack!”
The single howl would be caught up, and carried in a roar, like a
foaming freshet along the surface of this flowing multitude. The sound
was stunning, elemental, horrible, the bellowing of some huge monster,
the reverberations of whose belly made the whole land tremble.
Isoult, sitting on her straw, with a face that looked straight over the
tailboard of the wagon, felt that she had sat all day close to a great
water-wheel that rushed round and round and never slackened. The June
day was a blur of sweat, and dust, and movement. She had ceased to
notice things very vividly. Sometimes a big man on a white horse would
ride up to the wagon—a man with a square black beard and teeth that
showed between hot, red lips. She knew him to be Wat the Tiler, the
master beast of the sweating herd, for the men roared his name whenever
his face swam near above the dust of the tramping feet.
More than once he dropped behind, and rode at the tail of the wagon, and
Isoult felt his round eyes fixed on her. Hers had met his but once, and
the gloating curiosity in them had seemed part of the sour smell of the
cattle who kicked up the white dust on the highway. Sometimes Merlin
spoke to her, glancing back over a bony shoulder, and his sneering voice
was full of an ironical fatherliness.
“Courage, my daughter. In three days you shall sing to King Richard.”
She did not trouble to answer him, but let herself be carried along on
the tide of all this rage and exultation. A sense of the immensity of
all that was happening round her made her feel that she was but a blown
leaf being hurried along with thousands of other leaves. What did it
matter what happened to her, that she was alive, being kept like a bird
in a cage at Merlin’s pleasure? She knew in her heart of hearts what all
these men desired, and what they purposed, and that her pride would be
torn from her even as many a fine cloak would be torn from the shoulders
of the rich. Yet somehow she did not care. The savage eagerness of this
plodding multitude, the noise, the sweat and dust, the roar of their
voices when they cheered, made her feel that she was watching the
workings of an inevitable doom. What could stand against this brown
flood of men, this whole people that had risen to smother the hated few?
She knew that the whole land was moving on London, that these Kent and
Sussex men might be but one multitude among many. It was like all the
forests of the land plucking themselves up by the roots and rushing to
fall on the few woodmen who had ruled with the edge of the axe. Who
could stop them? And as for their being fooled by promises, the men who
led them were too shrewd and desperate to be tricked by promises.
Of Fulk she thought vaguely with a distant tenderness that looked back
at a fragment of the past, and asked nothing of the future. What had
become of him? Did he believe her dead? Or had he guessed that she had
lied to save him, and pretended that she had come by her death wound
when an arrow had done no more than pierce the flesh of her flank? She
could not have run with that arrow in her side, and Fulk would have been
taken with her had she not acted a lie. What had become of him? What
part would he play in this savage overthrow that threatened a kingdom?
What could a thousand such men do to stay it? The valour of a prince’s
bastard seemed to her a mere thread of steel set to bear the blows of a
thousand bludgeons.
The day’s march ended upon Blackheath, and the peasants of Kent and
Sussex camped there to the number of some sixty thousand men. The oxen
were unyoked and the wagon left standing on some high ground close to
the road, and so placed that Isoult looked northward towards where the
great city hung upon the silver thread of the river. The sun was low in
the west, and through the haze of a June evening she fancied she could
see a distant glimmer of vanes and steeples, a something that looked
like a forest touched by the long yellow rays of the setting sun.
Fifty yards away, John Ball, mounted on a barrel, was preaching to the
people. The crowd was very silent, and his voice came to her with the
sound of bells ringing in the distance. She saw his arms waving
exultantly as he flared like a torch burning in a wind. Hundreds of
intent, hairy, and fresh-coloured faces looked up at him, open-mouthed,
with eyes that glittered. And away yonder lay the great city, dim in the
yellow light, like a dream on the uttermost edge of sleep.
Isoult heard a man’s laughter, and, turning about, saw a face with a
forked red beard look at her over the tailboard of the wagon. It was Guy
the Stallion, gorgeous in a red camlet coat with a silver baldric over
his shoulder, his bassinet polished till the pits of rust had been
rubbed away. He rested his elbows on the tailboard of the wagon, and
cleaning his teeth with the point of his tongue, stared at Isoult with
an insolent relish that made his red-brown eyes look like points of hot
metal.
“Ha, Madame Isoult, it has been a great day, surely!”
She felt all her pent-up scorn flash up at the sight of this absurd
boaster’s arrogant face.
“A great day indeed for the cattle who go to the shambles.”
He opened his mouth wide and cawed like a bird.
“Tell me, fair one, where now is the gentleman? Our great barons have
fled out of the kingdom, to make war on Spaniards, since it is safer. We
shall march down yonder, and eat up all the King’s creatures, all the
fat merchants and clerks and moneylenders. John Ball will be our
archbishop, Wat our Lord Marshal, Merlin our Chief Councillor.”
“And you, Master Chanticleer?”
He spread his shoulders.
“I shall be a great captain. I shall march to and fro, hanging the
gentry and storming their castles. I have seen more war than any lord in
England. Yes, I shall be a great captain, with ten thousand bows and
bills at my back.”
The fellow might be contemptible, but it was such as he that led the
Blatant Beast by the nose, and it is always possible to learn something,
even from a Welshman with a red beard.
“Will it be so easy to eat up all the nobles and their people?”
He was very ready to prove to her how the kingdom would be won.
“See now, how can one knight in full harness fight a hundred ploughmen?
Why, they have only to tumble him over, and beat him with hammers like
any old pot. I know what I am saying; the lord on the high horse is only
good to fight his peers. We have only to hamstring their horses, pull
them down like big beetles, and then use the knife. I have seen it done
in the French wars. Besides, half the lords are out of the country, and
the rest shivering in their skins. The King’s but a boy, and most of the
Londoners are with us. The whole country’s up, and we mean to have the
King in our hands and to use him. By cock, what can a few hundred
lobsters in steel coats do against so many?”
He pulled his beard, and looked at her with half-closed eyes, convinced
that he was a devil of a fellow, and ready to challenge her to pose him
with her questions. And for once his swagger had a fierce reality behind
it. Even his boasting seemed to fall short of the truth.
“No doubt you will be a great captain,” she said; “and, my God, what a
country it will be to live in!”
“We honest fellows are as good, and better, than the fops and
squirelings.”
“Better—oh, far better.”
She spoke half in a whisper, and with an irony that went over his head.
“When are we to be in London, great captain?”
“In three days.”
“So soon?”
“We want to be in, and to have the glory, and some of the pickings,
before the easterlings and the midlanders come up.”
“To be sure.”
She smiled at him as she might have smiled at some extravagantly bitter
jest. He leant over the tailboard, and his eyes leered.
“Isoult, you shall be a great lady.”
“I shall be nothing, my friend, just nothing.”
“Wait till some of us have our castles and our lands.”
“What, some of you mean to be lords in the places of—these gentlemen?”
He gave an inimitable shrug of the shoulders.
“Bah! these sheep! One must let them bleat. But the shepherds know
whither they are going.”
She rested her chin on her hands and stared at him till he began to
blink.
“You are not such a fool, then, lord Guy! You have caught the twist of
Merlin’s tongue. Oh, these honest firebrands! Always the sheep—always
the sheep!”
She saw the sun go down behind the swashbuckler’s head, so that it
haloed him and the red tusks of his hair that stuck out so jauntily. He
frothed for a while and then took himself off, kissing the blade of his
sword to her as though he were to carry her favour in the lists.
Isoult smiled bitterly, glimpsing her own helplessness.
“To have to listen to such a jay! Where is the hawk that should tear the
heart out of such creatures? Friend Fulk, if you were King—ah, things
might happen!”
Dusk fell, and the heath became one great uproar, a kind of huge playing
field for all these rough men of the fields. They sang and hooted and
hammered on pots and pans, danced, wrestled, rolled over each other,
played leap-frog, giving each other huge smacks and buffets.
All their elemental grossness seemed minded to express itself in an orgy
of physical delirium. They mocked Nature, and made a jest of her, and
the close June night was full of the sound of their horse-play.
Isoult sat and listened, her hood pulled down over her face. These
cattle! They whinneyed, squealed, grunted, blew wind between blubbering
lips, pranced, butted each other. And in the midst of all this obscene
clowning there were three faces that haunted her—Wat the Tiler’s,
Guy’s, and the face of Merlin the Priest. She had seen the same
elemental hunger in the eyes of these three men, a lust that watched and
waited to seize on the thing that it desired. A sudden loathing of her
own body rose in her, a loathing of a thing that might be carrion, to
judge by the crows that watched and waited. And mingled with this
loathing was all the horror of helplessness that overtakes one in the
midst of an evil dream.