Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  I did. And when she arched back her neck and cried I heard through it a rising shout, prolonged like surf, then crashing to a fall. It came from a distance, from a thousand throats, and it was real enough. Again she shuddered, and not from the ecstasy she had just experienced.

  We resumed our clothes and returned to the gardens and the pavilion in the noontide heat, where the white stone seared the eye and the black shadows drowned it. The songbirds were still and only white doves cr-cr-crooed in the eaves. Uma sat in a leather-slung chair, legs stretched out, head forward and to one side, resting on the palm and fingers of her right hand. The posture-was mannish and revelatory. I suddenly realised that this Buddhist monk was not Uma but Suryan, her brother. Or, rather, that she-adopted the disguise as Suryan or as a monk so that she could move about on her own, indeed travel to the ends of the earth, untroubled by the annoyances that crowd in on a lone woman.

  'I had,' she was saying, 'just come back from the impaling. I did not stay for the second lot – you heard the crowd shout just now when they were done.'

  My blood ran cold to think she had been to the place of execution and seen what she had seen.

  She went on, 'They were no good, you know. They wasted it. Such a waste.'

  I felt a glimmer of understanding. 'They were cowards?' I volunteered.

  'The worst sort. They screamed, they struggled, they shit themselves. They had the chance of the highest ecstasy, the greatest sensation. Through their agony they could have experienced, if they had been prepared to relish it, a moment of immortality. More than a moment. Instead they made it a village shambles.'

  I have lived in Misr-al-Kahira and in many other Arab caliphates. I had known what that shout had been: the public impaling of robbers in the execution square. Snake-shaped hooks like those butchers use to hang dead oxen had been slung over the parapet of the gaol. The criminals had been hoisted on to the upturned points, which had thrust up through their backs, their entrails and out through their stomachs, and there they had been left to die. And Uma, driven by her strange theology, had been there to watch, hoping to see souls as well as bodies transfixed with the spikes of ecstatic pain.

  Trumpets and drums. A week had passed. The hunting party was back. They came in through the big double gate, trying to look as if they had had the time of their lives – but nothing could disguise the fact that they were caked in desert dust, scratched and bruised from where they had taken tumbles, almost incapable of walking after being mounted on galumphing camels for hours on end, splattered with dried blood, their own as well as that of the animals they had killed, and weary to the point of terminal exhaustion. Behind the hunters came four carts that seemed to be loaded with heaped black flies; they trundled along beneath a buzzing, snarling haze.

  Even Prince Harihara, who had been determined that the trip should be judged a success, looked thoughtful as the carcasses – matted, shapeless, bloody lumps of fur and hair – were tipped out beneath spiralling twisters of insects into that peaceful, harmonious courtyard, lined with citrus trees and roses, its long rectangular pool running down the middle. He walked through the black cloud, which glittered in the sun, prodding the bodies with the butt of his hunting spear, his other hand resting on the silver hilt of a Malayan hunting-knife that was stuck in his jewelled belt. His long, normally glossy hair was matted and dirty, his robe was torn, and for once his chin showed signs of stubble. 'Two buffalo, Ali, fine beasts.

  Six desert foxes. Eight quail, four sand-grouse, three gazelles, a hippopotamus, a crocodile and, best of all, three lions. What do you think?'

  He didn't usually turn to me for praise – it is a commodity thought to be debased when offered by the lowly – but no one else was on hand to give it.

  Well. The buffalo were white, had spreading horns six feet across and huge dewlaps. I presumed they had not been pulling carts when his crossbow bolts struck home, though I imagine not many hours had passed since they had been. The foxes were dogs which, Anish later told me, had come bounding to greet them from a village they were approaching. The quail had been netted by local bird-trappers and the sand-grouse were poultry, though of a distinctive breed and plumage. Hippo and crocodile were babies, the adults having fled. One of the lions was a cub, the lioness its mother which, while trying to protect her young, had exposed herself to the hunting party's missiles; the male was mangy, old and toothless. The gazelle were genuine, having been shot from horseback with ordinary bows and arrows by an Ahl Bedu chieftain and his sons, in whose tents the party had spent a couple of nights after getting lost in the desert.

  'Truly, O Prince, you are a second Nimrod, and before Allah a great hunter.'

  'Nimrod, eh, Ali? Who was Nimrod?'

  'A great hunter, Prince,' I answered, risking a hint of impatience in my voice.

  ‘Ah’

  And he and the whole troupe headed for the baths, leaving them muddy, bloody and spoiled for a full twenty-four hours until the flow of water cleansed them.

  Later I stood with Anish, supervising the cleaning and repacking of the crossbows and the somewhat diminished supply of bolts. 'That,' he murmured, 'was about the worst experience of my life. Truly we have passed beyond the bounds of civilisation.'

  I thought about what he had been through and what was to come.

  'Anish-bey,' I said, giving him the Arab title since I am an Arab and we were in Arab country, 'I don't think we have passed the boundary. We are close to it, but I would say we are still in a country that may properly be called civilised."

  'With public executions? Impaling? To say nothing of this hunting business.'

  'Believe me. You have not seen anything yet.'

  Chapter Twelve

  That evening over supper, taken outside the pavilion with silver lamps hanging from its arches and in the trees, the song of crickets and a great orange moon above the minarets beyond, pretending to eat sand-grouse and gazelle meat (the rotten carcasses had been buried and what we had were chicken and goat from the market), the three of us discussed which route we should take to Ingerlond. I favoured running along the coast to Sebta, crossing the straits to the great rock called Jebel Tariq and making our way to Kaniatta-al-Yahud which, I argued, would prolong our stay in civilisation longer than any other route. Of course, I had in mind that that way I would be able to see Haree, though I kept that consideration to myself. However, Anish had done some homework on his own through an Indian merchant from Bombay he had hunted out, and had discovered that all commerce between the centres of civilisation and the western barbarians was done through the city-states of Venice and Genoa, that although there was always the danger of piracy the Venetians voyaged in convoys; moreover they used galleys with oars as well as sails, which precluded the delays that might attend calm weather or adverse winds. Consequently, I was commissioned next day to leave for Iskenderia, find a ship-broker and charter a galley to take us to Venice. My familiarity with the port stood me in good stead and I had no difficulty in finding what we needed.

  It was then that Uma took me to one side and asked me if I would teach her the Inglysshe language. I proceeded to do so, whenever the opportunity arose, and found her an apt pupil -more so than the Prince and Anish, who occasionally joined us and made a class of these lessons.

  Our induction into barbarity remained gradual. Venice, of course, looks to the east and has borrowed much of our glory in its own architecture, along with the treasures it has plundered from us. St Mark's not only looks like a mosque with a minaret, many of its stones were taken from Arab and Ottoman lands. The city-republic boasts painters of remarkable skill some of whom, had they not been fixated either on the infancy of their god and his mother or his ugly death, equalled – so Prince Harihara asserted – those of Vijayanagara. They seemed, too, to have a fair appreciation of the joys of what it is like to be truly human that we found only rarely the further we journeyed west and north.

  While we were there I went in search of the alchemist who had discovered such a signal w
ay of making an infusion out of k'hawah beans. He was still alive, though in straitened circumstances, and delighted to find we had brought two heavy sacks with us. We took a sample along to a Jew who traded in money from a house on the Giudecca. He sampled the drink and lent a considerable sum to my alchemist, who was able thereby to set up a k'hawah house once more in the Piazza di San Marco. The money we raised defrayed all the expenses of our expedition's stay in that watery city. This Jew, Shillem by name, had an interesting history: he had been forced to convert following a nit-picking judgement made against him by the supreme court of the city. However, he had got over this and had been back in business as a banker for a decade or more. I have to say he treated us fairly.

  In miles we were now well over half-way to our destination but not in time; in fact, it took us as long again as we hail already taken, and more, to find our way to Calais. The adventures and difficulties we went through are not germane to the main thread of my story so I will cut short the telling of them.

  Having hired mules and asses in Mestre. We followed the valley of the river Po across the north of Italy through Vicenza, Verona and Milano to Torino.

  There was much to admire in all these places but they were spoiled by the continuous state of warfare between them and even between rival parties within them. Often these fatal feuds were between families of merchants who, instead of competing in the marketplace by improving the quality of their goods or selling cheaper, resorted to swords, daggers and poison. The situation was particularly bad in Verona, which we passed through as quickly as we could after losing one of our cooks in a brawl between two gangs of unruly youths belonging to rival families. These youths even resorted to despoiling each other's tombs, but that's another story.

  It was now late summer, and quite hot so the change of climate did not much bother us until we began to climb the mountains north-west of Torino. Mere, at the top of a pass called Mont Cenis, which offered us majestic views of peaks near and distant the like of which I have only seen in the high Pamirs, we caught sight of distant snow. No one would believe it was other than outcrops of white marble and branded me a liar when I tried to tell them it was crystallised water.

  'Like purified sugar or salt?' Anish exclaimed mockingly.

  'Like purified salt in appearance,' I replied, 'but very cold.'

  Prince Harihara, however, supported me. He had heard of it but had never realised it existed in such vast quantities.

  We were to see a lot more before we were through.

  My companions felt the cold in the mountains and were glad to descend again into the wide valley of yet another great river, this nine the Rhone, where we found the peasants occupied with the harvest of grapes from which they made a fermented alcoholic drink that has a similar effect to bhang or rice wine, but leaves you sick and with a headache. Taken in excess over a long period, it produces fatal internal bleeding and even madness. So much were the people of the area addicted to it that they grew vines in preference to wheat, hemp and other wholesome crops.

  It was now that my inexperienced companions began to experience the phenomenon that over the next year and a half was to disturb them almost more than any other: the change of the seasons. In Vijayanagara there are two, warm and wet. and hot and dry, and they follow a pattern so predictable that you can tell to the day in advance when the rains will begin and at what time of day it will rain and for how long. My friends soon discovered that a day might begin warm and bright, but end cold and wet, and that as the months rolled by the leaves fell off most of the trees, that almost all growth failed so the people had to subsist on what they had stored in barns which, by the following spring, was usually rotten. We saw people dying of hunger – a sight to which I was no stranger, but which Prince Harihara and Anish declared was obscene, an offence against nature and the gods, which indeed it is.

  While I have a speculative mentality Anish likes to categorise, label, evaluate. Once, as we passed across a high plain where the crop of wheat had been burnt before harvesting rather than the stubble afterwards, where we saw the unburied corpses of women and children who had been raped and impaled, where we passed an open grave-pit filled with the blackened corpses of those who had died of plague, he said, 'Ali, you know if you said our Vijayanagaran commonwealth was the First World, and the Arab states we passed through the Second, then this surely is the Third and worst, a world where the evil hounds of famine, sword and pestilence range at will behind the god of war.'

  We made slow progress up the Rhone and then the Saone,.moss those burnt and ravaged uplands then down the Seine to Paris, passing through lands owned or ruled by the King of the franks and the Duke of Burgundy, who were rivals for supremacy in the area, and many other fiefdoms, principalities and duchies, seeing many skirmishes on our way. We also saw much repression and persecution of the peasantry, and of anyone who raised a voice against the abuses or irrationality of the Church; this resulted in frequent burnings and worse in public places. As foreigners who were clearly not Christians and, since our skins were dark instead of pale, cold and bloodless, possibly not fully human, we were in constant danger of being arrested and condemned as heretics, spies or aliens. However, these people believed above all in money and wealth, although they were loath to admit it, and we were always able to buy safe-conducts and even armed protection from the nobles whose land we rode across from the store of gold and jewels we had brought with us.

  Meanwhile the weather worsened and all were grateful for my foresight in this as in other things. Each person's small cache of pearls was sold in the city of Dijon, the principal residence of the Dukes of Burgundy, and soon every great lady of the court, and many of the men too, were vying with the rest in the splendour of the pearl heads they wore as necklaces, rings and earrings. By creating a fashion we turned what might have been a glut into a shortage, and the consequence was that our whole party left the walled city clad in the richest of furs and woollens, and well shod too.

  And so, without too much suffering or discomfort, we came at last, in the very depths of winter, to the shores of the sea again, but this time a cold grey sea, and the port of Calais. It was the month the Ingerlonders call January, approaching the turn of the years they number 1459 to 1460.

  PART II

  Chapter Thirteen

  The following day I arrived at the usual time, and was shown in the usual way through a shady flagstoned passage to the pierced stone screen that separated the vestibule of Ali's house from the garden beyond. As usual the light glowed fiercely through the lacy Stonework and I could hear the tinkle of water and the chirp of birds beyond. The cedarwood door creaked a little as his gatekeeper, a huge black Nubian with pantaloons, a turban and scimitar, pushed it open and ushered me through with his usual exaggerated obeisance.

  I climbed the two steps of black obsidian, the ferns brushed my shins, and I stood for a moment blinking in the hot sunlight before I realised that Ali was not in his usual place beneath the cardamom tree. I hesitated, but the gatekeeper urged me on. I crossed the flat, square stepping-stones and felt the welcome prick of coldness as drops of water fell on my feet, the furthest flung by the fountain. Ali's grey cat came out from under a bush and pushed herself against my hand as I stooped to tickle her behind her ear. Then I straightened and saw sheets of paper on the table where we normally sat. A jug of lemonade held them down, though indeed no air stirred to shift them. There was only one glass.

  The top sheet was pure white rag and seemed to throb in my eye, so bright was the sun on it in spite of the fresh black writing; the rest, and there was quite a stack, were yellowed and curling at the edges. I took the top sheet and read:

  My dear Mah-Lo,

  Today I am tired and it is too hot. About this time of year, although I know it will bring back my inflamed and swollen joints, I almost long for the monsoon. The heat brings on a dangerous flux from my bowels, a disease I first contracted in darkest Ingerlond and which recurs every three months or so. However, I would not disappo
int you and I have asked Murteza to lay out certain documents for your perusal which will carry the story forward, They are copies, made by Chamberlain Anish, of letters sent by Prince Harihara to his cousin the Emperor. Not all the originals made it to Vijayanagara, but Anish, as his duties demanded, made copies before sending them, and these are what you will read here. If they do nothing else they will corroborate for you the veracity of what I have told you so far, and of what I hope, Inshallah, or anyway if this filthy flux leaves me before killing me, I shall be able to tell you when I am fit enough to take up my tale once more on my own account. Yours and so on… Ali ben Quatar Mayeen.

  I took my place on the cushioned stone seat, poured myself a glass of lemonade, and began to read.

  Dear Cousin

  We have arrived in the Pale of Calais and it is time I began the letters I promised you to let you know how we are progressing with the various tasks we set ourselves for this expedition. I shall not take up your time, or indeed mine, with an account of the adventures we had on our way here, fascinating though many of them were, since they are not relevant to the purposes of our coming hither. They can wait for our return when, no doubt over many evenings, they will help pass the time between supper and bed.

  Calais is like an onion cut in half by the sea. It has many skins. First there is the Pale, a fortified frontier, enclosing a semi-circle of land, the second skin. The town walls make the third, near what would be, were it a whole onion, its centre. At its greatest distance the Pale is some twenty or more miles from the city walls and the fields and pastures between produce enough to feed the population. The fortifications that make up the Pale include ditches in front of low turf walls surmounted with a paling fence, which gives the name 'pale' to the whole area, two or three large forts built to cover the principal roads in and out, moats, canals, and where the natural rivers run in appropriate directions, they have been turned into obstacles.