Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  Nevertheless this Juggernaut has timed its arrival precisely at the right moment to get me into the city. Imagine a giant log in a storm-swollen stream – as it passes on its way so it will suck in behind it the turbulent water and all the tumbling flotsam that rules on it. The guards do their best to close in and shut off the flow as the pointed black teeth of the portcullis grind slowly down above us, yet as many as thirty get through, and I am amongst them.

  A moment's hesitation then, like the others with me, I choose a side alley and rush off clown it between high gabled houses that block out the sunlight and the sky. After a minute or two I slow, stop and look around. The winding dark place I am in is chill, as if the sun never reaches the cobbles and flags beneath my feet, there are few people about, and there is a dank, deep, near perfect silence, quite different from the bedlam I have left. Looking behind me I see no sign of pursuit, yet I feel I am a trespasser, that I have reached a place where those in charge would prefer me not to be. I take a winding course through a warren of similar narrow streets to get away from the gate with its guards. Presently I glimpse the slim spire soaring like a steel poniard into the grey sky, with a flash of gold from the cross or weathercock at its summit, and I bend my steps towards it.

  Less than an hour later I am in prison.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Uma sighed, Her eyes unfocused. Then she shook herself smiled at me with a tenderness that was inspired not by me but by her memories, and gathered together the small items she always carried with her.

  When she had gone Ali took up his tale – and thus it was for the next few days: turn and turn about they told me their stories to the point where, almost at the end, they merged again into one.

  My convalescence was slow, Ali resumed, my body weakened, so Peter Marcus said, not only by the flux, not only by the privations endured over the months of travel compounded by forced reliance on unaccustomed food and drink, but also, of course, by a constitution compromised in early childhood by the terrible blow administered by the Sunnite's scimitar. Since I prided myself that, for nearly sixty years, perhaps more. I had maintained through constant privation and travel a lean, wiry fitness in spite of my disadvantaged frame, I took leave to doubt this – indeed, I almost suspected that some of the potions Prior Peter gave me were designed to make me feel weaker and more wearied than I was. The fact was, as he often repeated, he rarely had the chance to meet and converse with someone who had seen as much as I, who had experienced so much, and studied both from books and at the feet of some of the wisest men who have lived during our times.

  We spent six weeks together, right the way through the period of Lent, never leaving the friary and its gardens, but talking and reading together whenever his duties, which he carried out as I have said with some diligence but not out of devotion, allowed.

  'You see, my dear Ali, my situation here places me in an awesome position as the successor and inheritor of the three greatest Inglysshemen who have ever lived and who between them, one after the other, created a tradition of thought, and action, too, which will, I believe, be hailed in time as the greatest gift our nation has bestowed on mankind.'

  I knew enough to be sure that the Inglysshemen he referred to were Roger Bacon, William of Occam (to whose apophthegm, Occam's razor, concerning entities or essences we had jokingly alluded when Peter was preparing the potion that cured me) and John Wyclifle. I was quite conversant with their teaching and knew of their connections with Oxenford and the Franciscans. All three had made Oxenford their home and their principal place of study, and had been protected from persecution by the university.

  It was Brother Peter's aim and ambition to collect, collate and draw together the teaching and praxis of these three men and out of the consensus, the accord and harmony between them, build a unified philosophy of life that would be the foundation stone on which mankind could move towards a millennial perfection. It was a matter of great pride to me, first, that he acknowledged how much of their knowledge represented in turn a growth from the great philosophers of my own Arab nation, particularly Ibn Rushd, known to the Christians as Averroes, and second, that he valued my own insights into and experiences arising from the hermetic teachings of Hassan Ibn Sabbah. Whether he knew I was an initiate because Uma had told him so before she departed, or whether he deduced it from the presence of the thin steel dagger they found in my loincloth when they bathed me, whose scabbard or sheath is marked in Arab calligraphy with the central tenet of our denial of faith. I did not ask.

  The snowdrops, which was the apt name Peter gave the tiny white bell-like flowers we had seen in the hills, gave way to daffodils, which we call jonquils, celandines, anemones, love-in-idleness, with, beneath the russet brick walls, gillyflowers, forget-me-nots and even some tulipans. The bulbs of the last named had been a gift from the Ottoman Sufi Grand Imam of the dervishes' mosque in Iconium, who had enjoyed philosophical discourse with some of Peter's brethren. My the middle of March the gut problems I had had, a particularly vicious and persistent form of dysentery, had responded to Peter's potions and we spent much of another warm spell in the gardens, sitting in simple double seats made from dressed planks. The backs of these commemorated in carved lettering the wise men who had meditated so fruitfully in the past in this same garden, amongst them the three who were the subjects of most of our conversation,

  All was tidy and orderly here; even the paths were gravelled with small round stones like peas, and behind us on the walls, following the custom of the Arab gardeners in Spain, the espaliered apples, pears, and even a vine began to push out tiny buds. The air was fragrant with the smell of the daffodils and their narcissistic cousins.

  Our conversations followed patterns and routes dictated by the logic or fancy of our thoughts, which pursued concepts and conclusions rather than the chronological track dictated by the three lives, the three bodies of work, which we picked at and attempted to unravel. Our aim was to weave all into an intricate but self-sufficient garment of thought that might clothe the bewildered minds and souls of men against the cold winds that blow out of the darkness that surrounds our existence. But, for the sake of clarity and brevity, dear Mah-Lo, I shall now take them in order.

  First came Roger Bacon, who flourished some two hundred years ago. Nothing in the world of learning comes from nothing, and Roger based his thought on that of the great Arab thinkers, going back not only to Avicenna and Averroes but to Abu Yusuf Ya' Qu Ibn Ishaq al-Kindl and Albumazar. From the former of these last two he learnt much about optics and was thus able to invent, or at any rate vastly improve, spectacles, without which we would all, as scholars, be as helpless as blind mice, and from the latter mathematics and the faith in mathematics that decrees they are as reliable a source of truth as revealed scripture.

  Hut even more important than spectacles were the principles on which Friar Bacon based his study of optics, which were mathematics, of course, but also observation and experimentation.

  You ask what I mean by experimentation [and I have to say that at this point Ali became more animated than I had yet seen him, at any rate when his philosophical fit was upon him]. You observe a phenomenon – say, the way sunlight may be focused through a lens to a fine point on a surface set in a plane perpendicular to the sun's position in the sky. and you discover that the distance between the lens and the surface on which the point of light appears at its smallest and brightest varies according to the thickness of the lens. From these phenomena you produce a mathematical, algebraic formula that allows you to predict what thickness of lens will require a certain distance between it and the surface for it to achieve perfect focus, or knowing the thickness of the lens, you will predict the distance. Now. You test the validity of your algebraically expressed formula by using it repeatedly to predict thickness of lens when you know focal length and vice versa. Algebra? A mathematical methodology discovered by Muhommad ben Musa al-Khwarizmi. When an experiment, which can be repeated, or controlled observation of phenomena, thus suppo
rt the mathematically-based hypothesis one can be sure that a truth has been arrived at. Knowledge or scientia has been acquired.

  Friar Bacon believed that knowledge so attained was the only knowledge worth more than a groat (a small sum of money, dear Mah-Lo, in Ingerlond a skilled manual labourer's daily wage) but, of course, he could not declare this publicly. Why not? Because to do so would be to deny the certain truth of God's laws and will as bequeathed to us in Holy Writ and interpreted by Mother Church. These are jealous gods and would have burnt him alive if he had spoken against them.

  He did indeed go as tar as he dared in naming tour causes of ignorance: one. the example of frail and unsuited authority; two, the influence of custom; three, the opinion of the unlearned crowd; and four, concealment of one's ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom. When you think about it, Peter asserted, three of these four come pretty close to describing the processes by which both Scripture and the Church arrive at what they would have us believe…

  Somewhere at about this point I asked Brother Peter what he thought of the myth of the Brazen Head that Bacon was reputed to have made and which he bade speak forth prophecies, but which produced only the banality of 'Time was. Time is. Time's past' before exploding into atoms, the atoms Democritus took to be the building blocks of matter. My new friend's voice dropped, he glanced about him to be sure no one was near enough to hear what he said, and then he murmured, 'Gunpowder. Gunpowder used as such to fire a gun, to project a cannon-ball. He was the first to do it, and he did it using a huge church bell, made of brass, with a huge bell mouth, and with those very words inscribed around its lip.'

  'But why whisper? There is no secret about gunpowder now. It is used in battle and in sieges from Bristol to Bombay.'

  Brother Peter kept his voice low. 'Why do you think his brass cannon blew up?'

  I thought for a moment. 'Because Friar Bacon's gunpowder was better than he thought it would be?"

  'Precisely. Through experiment and mathematics he arrived at the receipt, correct to the last scruple, that produces a powder more powerful and certain in its effect than any other.'

  My heart quickened. At last it seemed I might be on the point of achieving one of the aims that made up the purposes of our expedition across the world to this barbarous island, namely to seek out the latest in military technology.

  'Do you have the receipt here in Oxenford?'

  'Here in Osney. But… coded. Of course.'

  'Why coded?''

  'His superiors in the order were not unsympathetic to his enquiring mind; for much of his life he was allowed to speculate and experiment without interference. The condition imposed, though, was that the records of his work should be hidden from the gaze of those who might lack the discipline to treat them with the care and respect they deserve. In other words to prevent their exploitation for personal gain or power, or to subvert the teachings of the Holy Church. So. Code.'

  'But you know the key?'

  Peter touched the side of his nose with his index finger. 'Trust me.' he said. 'Roger had no inclination to hide his light under a bushel. His code demands little of the cryptologist's art to unravel. He left a thread-end protruding: one good pull and it all falls apart.'

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  A penitential Lent I am having of it, and no mistake, most of it spent in this tiny cell, no more than five by three feet across, four feet high, with a vault rising to a foot beyond that. There is a grating of wrought iron for a door, which leads on to a passageway lined with numerous other cells like mine. The walls are rough, undressed stone held together with slapped-on mortar, of which more in a moment. When it rains a sheen, almost a curtain of water, tainted only with the musty stoniness it picks up on the way, runs down them, forms a pool, and trickles away under the bars and into the corridor. There is a heap of straw on the floor, which is changed weekly.

  I am of course alone. There was a family of mice, but I have eaten them. This was silly. If I had let the pregnant females come to term, there would have been more. Perhaps I could have husbanded them, and continued for longer to supplement a diet of rye crusts, a handful of which are thrust under the grating on most evenings. The straw, too, has seeds of grain in it. occasionally a whole ear.

  The mortar. It was mixed, I would guess, with too much sand, and is further weakened by the presence of flint shards. I managed on the second day to liberate one of these, about an inch long and with a sharp point, and I have been using it and its successors to grind, pick and poke through the mortar. Today, four weeks later, or thereabouts, I achieved daylight, the first I have seen for nearly five weeks, through a hole, a passageway with a slight angle in it, just big enough to take my hand and forearm, up to my shoulder, right through to the outside. Impossible to exaggerate the lift this has given to my spirits: the first two joints of my index finger are in the sun!

  I imagine what this must be like from the outside: the blank wall at the back of an annexe to the Guild Hall; a sudden trickle of sandy mortar from a point where three corners of stone do not quite meet as they should, a small brown finger poking through and waggling. At what height is this happening? A foot above the floor of the alley? Six feet up? Even higher? Will it be seen? What will happen if it is? I twist and pull and extricate my arm. Knowing these people, I should not be surprised to have my finger bashed with a stone, slashed with a knife, or even bitten off. Instead I put my eye to the hole and, in spite of the bend in my tunnel. I can sense that sunlight. And then, with my ears against it, I can hear a distant bell, the clatter of hoofs on cobbles and, nearer, a hoarse voice, a woman's, insisting that the cabbages she has for sale are spring cabbages, new season, freshly pulled, buy them here.

  So. After all, this cell may be a womb rather than a tomb and the naked child within may yet contrive a birth canal. Why not? In the darkness, virtually complete even after my eyes became adjusted to it, I have yet been able to work out the extent of the patch of mortar I have been working at and it is at least as big as the circumference of my head – and, as every magician knows, if your head will go through the rest will follow… if you know how. I scrabble about, find the latest of my flint tools, and set about enlarging what I have begun. It is, of course, dull work, scrape, scrape, twist, twist, and then dragging out the dust and grit I have loosened with my lacerated fingertips. Occasionally they bleed, and now I can see the blood. Previously I could only taste it. But it is not work that requires mental concentration and my mind can wander freely.

  Or it can, even here and in this situation, do what I like best and dwell, with reverence and relish, on every sensation that racks my body: the ache in my thighs, the cold in the soles of my feet, the stiffness across my shoulders, even the dry, sharp, coarse unpleasantness of hard sand, cement and crumbs of flint beneath my fingers. And hunger. Like a cancer gnawing my entrails. It is only through the senses that we know we are alive, only through the senses that we can make the best of being alive.

  However, right now, I muse on the stupidity that brought me to this tomb-womb.

  I wandered into an open space. One side was filled with a tall church, perhaps the most elegant I have seen on my travels. Smaller than St Paul's, not as noble as Notre-Dame of Paris, it soars perpendicularly with high bridges of flying stone shaped like the bones in the breast of a bird, which balance in equilibrium the forces with which the weight of the roof pushes the walls outwards, walls pierced with windows so it seems there is no wall, but pillars and glass only. It carries the eye and the people who built it would say the soul too, to the tower and then the steeple amd so to the heaven where these people believe their three gods, which they will insist with absurd lack of sense is one god, and his mother loo, all dwell.

  The big doors at the west end were open and people were wandering in and out, so out of curiosity I joined them. Inside tall thin pillars climbed to galleries stacked on each other, the stones mostly a pale soft grey but some black marble, pillars which branched out into a grand foliation in the roo
t, like huge tan-shaped leaves, veined with ridges of stone. There are such giant leaves in the forests above our Coromandel coast, but I have never seen anything like them in Ingerlond or Francia. And the wonder of these is that, considering how high they are, they are painted in glowing colour, blues, reds and gold for the most part rather than the greens of the leaves they echo. They are almost as grand as the paintings, tiles, inlays and enamels that adorn our own temples.

  The walls of glass beneath and between are all coloured too. some in patterns, others in pictures depicting the lives of their godmen and Sadhus; but the most glorious windows, the most wonderful, are big round rose windows set high in the end walls where the predominant colour is blue, an awe-inspiring deep, resonant blue, and the subject matter the life and glory of Mary who, no matter what these Christians think, is surely an avatar for Parvati, or, as she is sometimes called, Uma, and for whom I am named is her servant.

  But for the most part it is not Parvati but Kali who rules, even if she is never seen, for Death is everywhere: in the man torn and bleeding, nailed to his cross, in the depiction of martyrdoms, or at least in the way the sadhus clutch like badges the implements by which they were tortured to death – Catherine with her wheel, Lawrence with his roasting rack, and hundreds more. And finally Kali stalks the arcades and ambulatories below, for here are the tombs of bishops and nobles, with statues of their corpses laid on top, some in armour, some in the vestments of their office. And on one at least is depicted, also in stone, a gruesome skeleton over which the worms still crawl.