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.”