The wind carried the canoe along the bank, watched by an apathetic Lawrence. Finally, he struggled to his feet and followed, eyeing up the distance, agonising over whether to swim out and retrieve it. What forced him was the fall of evening. That canoe had been won at great risk and he could not let it drift off into the dusk. This cornered him into the lunatic action of stripping naked and swimming out to retrieve it. Minutes later, he had the canoe ashore, his feet aching again from the brief swim. The air felt warm compared to the water, so balmy was it. That was the east of England for you—west winds brought wafts of the Caribbean, east winds ice fangs of the Arctic. Dressed again, he dragged the three very dead marsh warriors up and out of sight into bushes. He loaded his mud shoes, the last sock of mushrooms and the kettle of water, still half full. He left the bamboo spear behind, as it was too awkward to carry with the kettle. Under the grey screen of dusk, he paddled out into the channel.
*
He paddled half a mile northwards—the opposite direction of his plan—before going ashore and pulling the canoe a good fifty yards from the bank to hide it in a copse, going back to brush up the slight trail left through the grass. Any pursuing marsh people would now have to work hard to locate the canoe even if they found the bodies. He was thinking that with the evening now coming down, they would not be able to commence any serious search until the morning. Furthermore, he doubted they would pursue any trail far from the channel. This was based on a growing feeling the marsh people were averse to treks across featureless marsh, probably because travel by canoe was faster and navigation easier. That would explain why he had seen not a trace of their presence since leaving the Norwich to Nottingham drain.
In thinking that, as he was about to leave the canoe, he suffered another bolt of shock to see a canoe out on the channel sliding by going southwards. The view through the trees was too limited to follow its progress. He did note the canoe bore two warriors, and that they paddled at a steady, economical tempo. This area could be seething with the bastards! The only solution was to get away just as fast as he could, find the drain and achieve Peterborough before dawn.
The first half mile was a torture of suspense, scared by every creak or scamper of some little animal. Once, a startled pigeon gave him such a fright he sank down to all fours sobbing in hopeless despair, and it took all of his will, and the thought of real warriors coming after him, to get back to his feet and walk on. He maintained a heading of what he hoped was a little south of west. Under the clouds, his only navigational cue was the wind-bowed trees as before, and with darkness even that guide became problematic. He kept going at the risk of wasting time in the wrong direction, for it had become too cold to stop. Indeed, the fall in temperature now worried him more than the marsh people.
His next step dropped into thin air. He toppled into waist-deep mud and it took desperate groping at grass and reeds to writhe himself out, now soaked from the waist down again and filthy. In fright, he had thrown away the kettle, which meant the end of his water. For some time, he sat in the darkness, cold and getting colder, growing pessimistic. It was pointless to continue. But then, it was pointless to sit wet from the waist down. In the end, he continued on his hands and knees, too dulled by conflicting fears to grasp what he had been reduced to. And then, Fate smiled—the clouds slid away on the breeze! Now he had the moon to see by and the North Star to steer by. He kept near woodland as much as possible where the ground was firm, until the trees petered out and he was back to probing out over dark bogs, sinking, having to back-track and try again. The drag of the mud-shoes wearied his legs. The tediousness of this terrain weighed on him.
He gradually became aware of a background rushing sound, like a waterfall. After some minutes, he saw glimmerings ahead—moving lights. The noise was engines, not falling water. This told him he must be approaching the drain that was his goal. It did not solve the mystery of why trucks would be moving at night in winter. Only the direst emergency could prompt such an operation. As he got closer, he could distinguish the tiny red tail lights the drivers followed to stay on the drain. The lead vehicle probably had an infra-red lamp, with the driver using a viewer to see ahead. He counted twenty vehicles. In the darkness, there was no way of knowing what type they were. They left a potent reek of diesel fumes blown past him by the prevailing breeze.
After edging his way across some soft ground with the mud shoes, he climbed a firm embankment and at last stood on the hard gravel drain, a well-constructed artefact of the Public Era. He knew it ran clean and dry all the way to Peterborough. An astonishing victory! He jumped about, cheering and
