"
"Then you had best make peace with the burbot-eating knights, my lord."
"But have they flesh-meat?"
"The isle is half of it a garden,--richer land, they say, is none in these
realms, and I believe it; but, besides that, there is a deer-park there
with a thousand head in it, red and fallow; and plenty of swine in woods,
and sheep, and cattle; and if they fail, there are plenty more to be got,
they know where."
"They know where? Do you, Sir Knight?" asked William, keenly.
"Out of every little Island in their fens, for forty miles on end. There
are the herds fattening themselves on the richest pastures in the land,
and no man needing to herd them, for they are all safe among dikes and
meres."
"I will make my boats sweep their fens clear of every head--"
"Take care, my Lord King, lest never a boat come back from that errand.
With their narrow flat-bottomed punts, cut out of a single log, and their
leaping-poles, wherewith they fly over dikes of thirty feet in
width,--they can ambuscade in those reed-beds and alder-beds, kill whom
they will, and then flee away through the marsh like so many horse-flies.
And if not, one trick have they left, which they never try save when
driven into a corner; but from that, may all saints save us!"
"What then?"
"Firing the reeds.
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