Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  Meanwhile, the city of Oxenford loomed nearer through the gathering river mists. Soon we were picking our way through a muddy, wretched shanty-town that huddled around the low walls, which enclosed spires and towers in some numbers, almost as many as there had been in London, but for different reasons. Here they marked the prison- or barrack-like tenements occupied by communities of monks, friars and clerics: Oxenford, it seemed, was not only a prosperous town at the head of the navigable reaches of the Thames, communicating by ancient Roman roads with the middle and northern parts of the country, but also a centre of religious learning and other studies too.

  It was not into the city that Enoch led us but to a Franciscan friary outside the city walls, indeed on the southern side of the river and to the west of the main town. We thus passed in front of the main gate, which was protected by a small but ancient castle, and moved on, through a ribbon of tightly packed huts that lay between the wall and the river, until we came to a small ferry- station.

  Here we divested ourselves of our leprous disguise, smearing the white clay into an even mask and casting aside our clappers, for Enoch managed to make it clear to us that the time had arrived when we should aim to be welcomed rather than rejected by our fellows.

  The river was now flowing briskly, brown and with scurrying eddies, and our passage across it was terrifying, bringing us nearer to a watery death than the typhoons I have lived through in the China Sea. Our craft was a tiny round boat like a cockle-shell made of woven willow branches smeared with a black sticky substance, which was meant to render them sound. However, it let in water quicker than a young lad dressed in rags could scoop it out while his father paddled us across.

  We were now on a long island called Osney lying between the main river and one of its tributaries and largely filled by the Franciscan friary. Enoch knew that Oxenford was a good place for us to separate since we wished to head north and he west, and also because we would find here Wycliffites and Lollards, who were in sympathy with the Brothers of the Free Spirit, amongst the Franciscans.

  The buildings in which the Franciscans lived and studied were attractive and modern. They were mostly of brick, a recently discovered material amongst these people, two storeys in height with rows of stone-framed windows, built round two squares or quadrangles. The first of these was planted with herbs in formal rows; in the second, there was a fish-pool. From this they took the large black carp that supplemented their Lenten diet. Two larger buildings, whose pitched roofs were a storey higher than the rest, separated the quadrangles. One was a chapel, the other a refectory. On the ground floors to the sides there were also a library, kitchens, stalls for domestic animals, and above, reached by a narrow stone spiral stair, the rooms of the Prior and a council chamber. The rest was made up of the cells where the friars slept and studied, tiny rooms reached by separate staircases.

  The Brothers wore coarse brownish-grey gowns, belted with a rope and with hoods or cowls. Often they wore these up, not, we were told, for warmth, but to signify to their brethren that they were deep in thought, meditation or prayer and did not wish to be spoken to. When the hoods lay on their shoulders, their heads were revealed as shaven, not all over like our Buddhist monks, but in a circle leaving a ring of hair above their ears. All priests, and men intending to be priests, monks or friars, wore their hair thus, but the Franciscans' bald patch was larger and more noticeable than that of the rest.

  We were given a warm welcome, for it is a part of the duties demanded by the rule of their founder that travellers, especially poor travellers, and we were certainly that, should always be given what they require. Warm, that is, in feeling, though plain and meagre as far as food and lodging went. We were given a broth made from stewed chicken bones, carrots and cabbage, but at least it was hot, served with black rye bread, and a thin beer to drink. Our beds, however, were nothing but sacks filled with straw laid on prickly, if springy, pallets of dried heather in a long, communal dormitory set apart for visitors. At least we had it to ourselves – few poor people travelled by choice at that time of year.

  Just as we were preparing for bed, and wondering how we would keep warm through the night, one of the Brothers knocked at the door and told us that the Prior would like to have conversation with us. Leaving Enoch, Uma and I followed our guide across the quadrangle and up to the Prior's rooms, the principal one of which served as his study. In it there were a hundred books or more, a desk to read them on, a large table, several chairs, and a steadily burning fire.

  Prior Peter Marcus, the kindest, most considerate man I have ever met, was small, completely and naturally bald, with mysteriously piercing blue eyes beneath bushy eyebrows, a small snub nose and full lips that creased almost too readily into a broad smile. His fingers, too, were extraordinary: short and almost stubby, very pink, but strong with square-cut nails that were almost white. As soon as he saw us he rose from the largest chair, crudely carved (truth to tell almost all the carving we saw north of Venice was crude, whether of stone or wood), and almost rolled round the large table in front of him to take both my hands in his.

  'Brother Ali, my poor brother in freedom, Ali, what a state you're in!'

  Well, as you know, dear Mah-Lo, at the best of times I cut a sorry

  figure, but the privations of our journey had taken their toll too. I had, for most of the time since we had arrived in that benighted isle, suffered from an almost continuous flux – initially of fecal matter, latterly of blood and black water. The failure to retain fluids had caused a terrible thirst which, of course, I attempted to assuage at any wells we passed and the cleaner-looking rivulets. I had also taken to eating melting snow and ice until the thaw removed their passing solace. No doubt, I looked even more cadaverous than usual.

  The cause? Well, of course, the absence of sanitation in London, I suppose, produced a constant presence of pestilential air, coupled with our hosts' readiness to eat and serve meat that had been left to hang for several days, even weeks, before eating it.

  Prior Peter asked a few pertinent and succinct questions then rang a small handbell. One of the brethren appeared almost immediately and received from him a short list of herbs, some to be picked fresh from the garden we had crossed in the first quadrangle, others to be found pressed and dried in the friary's herbarium, yet others reduced to tinctures or essences from the apothecary. 'However, we shall resort to essences only in extremis,' he giggled, 'for such is the advice of one of the greatest of our alumni.'

  Weak though I was, I was able to cap his little joke. 'You will, I hope, shave all the ingredients with the sharpest of razors.'

  And thus began one of the longest, most rewarding conversations I have ever had, stretching as it did over several months, broken only by sleep and my new friend's administrative duties. These included putting on a show of appropriate devotion at the appropriate times, since disguised emissaries of the Bishop of Winchester, in whose diocese Oxenford is situated, often slipped into monasteries and friaries checking that the daily offices were said or sung in a proper and seemly manner and that no heresies were heard, spoken or taught.

  Uma tired quickly of this, both the offices and our conversation, and soon went temporarily out of our lives, practising what we merely preached to one another, and no doubt having an even better time of it for, as Peter was wont to say, quoting Aristotle, 'It is not gnosis but praxis is the fruit.' Or, knowledge is nothing without action.

  However, on this first occasion gnosis went hand in hand with praxis, and within half an hour or so my new friend had prepared, largely with his own hands, an infusion, whose main flavours were peppermint and aniseed, not unpalatable. 'This,' he said, 'will work in two ways. Immediate relief will come in the form of a deep warm sleep, induced by the presence of tincture of opium dissolved in distilled alcohol according to an Arab receipt. We call it laudanum. The opium has the opportune double function of inducing not only the rest you need but a temporary cessation of the peristalsis of the lower bowel. Then there is peppe
rmint oil and oil of aniseed, which, although not as quick acting, will ensure that the cure is prolonged after the effects of the opium have worn off. The mixture was invented by a doctor of medicine here at Oxenford named Collis Browne. Now, look, I cannot send you back to the dormitory, which is cold and uncomfortable. Drink up first, then you must have my couch…'

  I protested, of course, but willy-nilly he, with Uma's encouragement, led me into a tiny cubicle behind the big fireplace, on the other side of its chimney-piece. Being thus heated it was already comfortably warm. They laid me on Prior Peter's bed, which, though narrow, was mattressed with swan's down, he said, and fragrant with dry lavender.

  There followed an interlude as blissful as any I have experienced for first they divested me of my clothes and then, bathed in warm air as I was, they cleansed my tired, soiled body with sponges soaked in perfumed water. It produced a warm glow over my body, which penetrated to my aching bones. Meanwhile, the laudanum had a similar effect on my soul for behind my closed eyes I entered a world hung with crimson drapes and furnished with gilded chairs, a sort of womb-like place where I fancied myself an unborn babe, about to be born into a future of unlimited powers.,.

  Ali's voice jaded. A deep breath, a sigh, a little bubble of saliva in the corner of his mouth and he was asleep. I tiptoed away.

  PART III

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I returned three days later, business had kept me away, to find Uma again at the table, sharing a jug of k'hawah with Ali. I tasted it, found it too bitter without sugar, too sweet with. Once we were settled Uma took up her shuttle and began once more to weave her scarlet thread into the fabric of Ali's tale – a magic carpet which had already transported me to the ends of the earth.

  I see Ali, who seems very poorly, his face ever greyer, the sinews in his neck like the thinner branches of holly trees, comfortably established in Prior Peter's cot, with a good fire to warm him. and I decide to move on.

  It is less than a week since I embraced Eddie March, and already I miss him: his palms squeezing my buttocks, his fingertips stroking my perineum, his breath hot in the crook of my neck and the thrust of his prick inside me but, of course, I have no idea as to where he might have gone. Without much thought I leave the island of Osney, with its priory and rows of pollarded willows, and head up lanes and byways through the fields and woods in a roughly southerly direction. But presently I sit on a milestone marking the road to Swindon and give the matter some consideration.

  Eddie is on the run from the King and Queen who are his enemies. The King and Queen are in the middle of Ingerlond in a town called Coventry. Therefore that is the last place he will be. Until he's caught.

  But… They, the King and Queen, will have ordered their people to search for him, hunt him out and, if or when they catch him, they will take him to Coventry. At all events news of him, if he is seen and recognised, as he was in London by the legless beggar, will be drawn towards that city like iron filings to a lodestone. Thus, by a pleasing paradox, the one place where I may discover his whereabouts is the one place he would rather not be… Having worked this through. I get up from my milestone and head back to Osney and Oxenford, skirt them and continue heading north, sleeping that night in a sheltered ditch.

  In the morning I fall in briefly with a pompous young man leading his mule up a hill from which we can still see the spires and towers of the city behind us dreaming in the dawn sunlight. He carries a pouch embroidered with a shield bearing gold lions running across a red ground in two of its comers and silver floral shapes on a blue ground in the others, and as we near the crest of the hill the following conversation takes place.

  'Pray tell me, sir,' I ask, 'are we on the road for Coventry?'

  'Why, yes, indeed." he replies. 'It lies some fifty miles north at the end of this very road. I am on my way there myself," he continues, 'being an equerry of Their Majesties, returning from delivering letters to the notables of the city,' and he gestures back over his shoulder.

  We are close to the crest of the hill.

  'Reverend Brother,' he says, then looks more sharply at me, frowns and looks away, 'you are welcome to ride pillion behind me when the road is flat or downhill. But up the slopes we must walk for my beast is tired after making such good speed with the letters I delivered.'

  'I think not.' I say. 'I shall only delay you when I say the Daily Office.'

  For that is what monks, friars and so forth are supposed to do,.it least six times a day, the Daily Office being prayers and verse directed at the Christian God.

  He shrugs, this lean and spotty youth, whose breath smells of bacon and onion and the clove he has chewed to hide them or perhaps to ease the toothache he must have from his bad teeth. Since we are now at the top of the hill, he mounts his mule and sets it into a trot. I continue behind him and am thus well placed to see what happens next.

  At the bottom of the hill, a small group of men in dark cloaks and large floppily brimmed hats, sidle out from behind a ruined sheepcote. Their leader has a small firearm placed across his shoulder. His mate touches the end that protrudes behind with a smouldering fuse and, pop!, they blow my young equerry's head off. He remains seated for a moment with blood pumping from his neck and then his trunk slips sideways and he tumbles out of the saddle. I wait long enough to see that their interest lies in the pouch, embroidered now with blood as well as silks and precious thread, before leaping the ditch and hiding in a thorny thicket.

  The day lengthens, the shadows shorten and the traffic on the road increases. Most travellers are accompanied by armed men. It is, after all, the link between the city in which the King and his court reside, and the one where the wisest men of his realm, known as dunces, carry out their business. Yet, as I have seen, one fraught with danger – hence the fact that all but a few, like my unfortunate acquaintance, travel with bodyguards, sometimes in quite considerable numbers. I reflect on the presence of footpads, murderers and the like hidden in the coverts near the highway, and decide to move off a mile or so to the west and pick my way to Coventry by lanes and byways, even if it means taking four days to get there instead of two or three.

  It is a bright day with a gusty wind, and grey clouds roll intermittently across the sky. There are occasional splatters of rain, but it is never bad enough to obscure the position of the sun, and I am able without difficulty to maintain my northerly direction. Occasionally, too, from the top of a hill I can see the main road winding up hill and down dale over to my right, and the chain of villages it threads. With my senses alive and alert to all around me, not out of fear but because I feel they should be for every second of our pilgrimage across this planet, I begin to appreciate, as I could not when distracted by the company of Enoch and Ali, the tiny beauties of this country'. With none of the splendours of Vijayanagara, for which I still hanker; none of the awesome crags, the deep forests, the rich plantations and the cities scrubbed and jewelled, the white-sanded shores and emerald seas, my eyes, ears and nose seek out smaller glories.

  These include yellow flowers, extended like the grubs of small butterflies, hanging from thin leafless branches. When they catch the wind they dance and tiny puffs of gold powder float from them. In clumps at the roots of these trees or bushes, for they are not big at all. I spy small white stars, not pendulant like the flowers we saw when the snow melted. Then there are elegant trees with drooping black twigs in their crowns whose trunks art-covered with a silvery-grey bark which peels off like fringed paper when I pull it. These often have quite large leathery fungi growing on them shaped like the swollen ears of baby elephants. A brilliant green moss, whose foliage is made up of tiny emerald stars, whose points touch each other to form a fine lacework covers rounded banks where the earth is moist. When I look closely I see that many plants and trees have tiny swollen buds, but none yet show any sign of bursting into leaf. There are birds jewelled with blue and yellow, and one with a red chest and jet-like beak, needle sharp, but all very small. They do not sing but chirp and m
ew plaintively as they scavenge for particles of food.

  All in all I get a sense of life not burgeoning, far from it, but struggling against the cold, the ice and snow, which still linger in patches of shade. It seems it will be a long, hard battle and when a flash of white draws my eye and makes me stoop. I find the fragile skull of what I take to be a rodent from its two sharp incisors: clearly Parvati must wait awhile yet – Kali still rules in these hushed woods.

  Towards dusk a winding descent through woodland, with a little brook chattering along beside me, takes me into a wide but meandering valley where the trees have been cleared and a rough sort of cultivation has taken place. In front of me, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, is a village much like those we passed on the way to Oxenford: twenty or thirty hovels, each with a tiny garden and a fruit tree, cluster round a handful of larger buildings – a church with a squat tower and a large barn. But even now and at that distance I am aware that something is going on: I can hear a primitive raucous music emanating from a selection of untuned drums and wailing pipes, punctuated by high screams – whether of pain or pleasure it is impossible to say.

  Then, just as I approach the settlement and the sun is dipping behind the hills to the south-west, a crowd of people stream out of the big bam, the music becomes louder, and I can see that amongst them the musicians have come as well, and all are dancing, or at least flinging themselves about in a bizarre way around a large-pile of brushwood, holly branches, ivy, broom, brown gorse and prunings. I am now in a small orchard of lichened apple trees, which, in common with most trees I have seen, look dead or nearly so. Since there is a certain wildness in the antics of the people in front of me, which makes me nervous, I hoist myself up into the lower boughs of one, hoping thereby not to be discovered at least until I am satisfied I will be welcomed with friendliness.