Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  As we walked between the low cropped hedges, and breathed in the fragrances released by rain and a sun suddenly warm, I attempted a summary.

  'Without this…' I searched for a word and made one up

  '… introjection of belief, on what grounds would a person offer his consent to be ruled?'

  'He, or she, would use observation and analysis as nearly mathematical as may be, to work out who or what system would best suit his own interests and those of his fellow men. By fellow men I mean the men and women he works with. Clearly the people he works for are a different class of person altogether and will think in a dialectically opposed way. He and his fellows would employ a hedonistic calculus. And he would eschew any pre-given ideas about the commonwealth of men said to be based on the essences that exist in God's head.'

  I savoured the subtle sharpness of a needle of rosemary, pinched between my teeth. 'Just now you brought in John Wycliffe, the last of your three Inglysshe Franciscans. There must be more to be said about him.'

  But Brother Peter had had enough. Scattering some breadcrumbs on the surface of the first of his ponds (the fish recognised his shadow as it fell on the water and came to the poolside before he threw them), he said, 'You may not have noticed, dear Ali, that we are now approaching the end of Lent. Yesterday was the day of the Crucifixion of Jesus, which we call Good Friday, three days of tasting that last through till the first meal after Holy Communion tomorrow when we celebrate his apparent return from the grave. At that celebration I shall give a talk based on the teachings of Father John Wycliffe, which, if you'll forgive me, I shall now set about preparing. You will be very welcome in our church tomorrow at eleven in the morning.'

  Chapter Thirty

  I'll get the fucker out if it's the last thing I do. If I don't then trying to may well be the last thing I do. I've torn a nail and it's bleeding. Hurts like snake-bite too.

  Oh dear, oh me, they piled up so much against me at my trial. Trial is hardly the word but it is what they called it. Many wise judges heard the case, even the King and the Queen, whose shrill voice I got to know well. First, I had disobeyed my lord of Somerset by taking a boat from Calais to Ingerlond. Next my skin is what they call black so I am a pagan heathen and possibly not a person at all but a monkey. It seems that, unlike us, they feel no kinship or respect for monkeys. Next it was known from Lord Scales in London that I had consorted concupiscently with my lord of March. They must have meant Eddie – lust for whom I admit was the reason I had come to Coventry, but lord? I didn't know he was a lord.

  At this, some of my judges realised that I might not be a boy. None of us is perfect, I pleaded. And I am indeed a woman. None had doubted that Eddie might go in for buggery with boys, but best to be sure. Just for the record. They soon made sure I was female, by the usual method. I was therefore a witch, as well as everything else.

  The Queen especially now went berserk with fury. She screamed at me, circled me in that cellar that had been made to store wine – it stank of it as if a couple of barrels bad burst there – and came at me with long scarlet nails, which she dragged down my cheeks. 'You bewitched young Eddie,' she screamed. 'No Inglysshe nor Frankysshe man, either and Eddie is both, could look on your dusky skin without revulsion. Confess you consort with the Devil, who has given you charms to ensnare young men.'

  Yet above all I was a Yorkist and possibly privy to that faction's plans. It was known Warwick was in Ireland with York. Was he planning to return to Calais? What were York's intentions? And where was March? And so on and so forth. They applied various means to extract from me what they thought I knew, mostly involving hot irons, pincers, and some stretching, especially of the spaces between my legs, but since I could not tell them what I did not know they soon gave up. The John Clegger and Will Bent I named earlier as the Queen's stewards took their turn in all this, though most of the examination was carried out by the city's executioner, a foul man, a blacksmith by trade, with a deep scar down his right cheek, and always the hot smell of burning metal about him. He and his apprentices did unspeakable things to me. Unspeakable? So why speak of them.

  All that remained was to decide how I should die. They could not decide. The Bishop wanted me burnt for a witch, the Lord Chief Justice wavered between beheaded as a traitor, or hanged and drawn. And that's how matters stand. Executed I must be. Only the means remain to be decided.

  Ouch! Fuck, shit and bugger it all. It came out, but dropped on my toe. Not so much a giant's tooth as a cannon-ball or anyway, a melon. But, you know, I really think I might be out by nightfall. My rock has brought down a shower of rubble inside the wall, it all seems loose and all I have to do is scoop it out. But minding where it falls.

  Standing in the moonlight, in a litter of cabbage leaves, I find I am bothered by my nakedness. Not because it is cold – it is no colder in the alley than it was in my cell. Nor do I feel shame at being naked as these Christians are said to. But because I am a mess. My body is slimed with my own excrement and that of the slugs I have shared my tiny tomb with. It is also scabbed and ill-looking, though a month has passed since it was seriously abused. Worst of all, it is now thin. Well, I might not have got out so easily had I been rounded, glossy and full, though not what you would call fat, in short a worthy temple for the goddess within me. But all the same I do not like to think I might be seen so scrawny and poorly looking. So I head for where I know I shall find clothes.

  But first, on the corner of the alley where it feeds back into the square, there is a pump, a public supply of water. I crank the lever a few times and get a great gobbet of water followed by a steadier rhythmic flow, and I contrive to get most of me beneath it while still cranking with my right hand. Then I take turn about and do the other side. Finally I sluice the sheets of water off each arm in turn, my thighs and hips, my stomach, or rather the hollow where my stomach once was, and my shrivelled breasts. The water flashes silver in the moonlight. It is very, very cold, but that makes it feel all the more cleansing. Then walking briskly and trying to control the convulsive shuddering that has seized me, I make it down the arcades by the shops and into the church.

  Yes, there are people about. A very large number, filling the wide central nave, many kneeling, some standing, some praying with their eyes shut passing the foolish beads they use to pray with through their fingers, almost all with bowed heads, and those who keep their heads upright have their eyes fixed forward on the high altar beyond the choir, where all is a blaze of light from a thousand candles, some very big indeed. Clouds of incense fill the air, choirs chant that wretched rising and falling wail, bells chime, the chains on thurifers clank, jewelled vestments flash back the lights, and, happy Easter, no one has eyes for the naked wench who strides down one of the side naves, past the chancel and choir and so to the ambulatory and, at its apex, the lady chapel. I suppose if anyone does see me they put me down to hallucination produced in a dirty mind by the devil.

  Here, behind the rood-screen, all is almost dark, and certainly deserted. I climb on the small altar and reaching up take her ladyship in my arms and, with a muttered apology, I hoick her down to the floor. She has a gold crown with a sunburst behind it which is not gold at all but leafed wood. She is a wooden doll, quite well carved and painted where her face and hands are visible to her worshippers, but left rough and unfinished where the cloth of her robes covers her. Her face and hands are polished oak, a little darkened with age, and not far off the colour of my own complexion. Her robes are a woollen blue mantle with a hood, a long black dress, and an underskirt of white linen trimmed with lace, which turns out not to be a skirt at all but merely an apron. I prop her against a pillar and climb into these clothes. They are not a bad fit, though I think I would have more than filled them had I not been starved for so long.

  I tuck my wet hair up under the hood. The shudders recede. I almost feel warm. And, of course, hungry too. Well, I have learnt enough of the rites of this strange cult to know what lies in the little walled box behind its glowin
g oil lamp, and I make a very brief and inadequate snack of the dried while biscuit and the small silver cup of wine I find there. It's not a lot, but certainly I feel better for it. Time to go. I pause. Then, why not? I turn back, pick up the gold crown and place it on my head, over the hood, and then the jewellery – her rings, her ear-rings, and so forth.

  Still clutching the bunched-up apron in my hand, I head for the transept doors that will take me back to the square and, in one of the darkest comers of all, find myself faced with none other than old Scar-face himself, my evil-minded torturer, of whom my last memory before I fainted was of him bringing himself off with one hand while poking a stick up my cunt with the other. A stick with thorns, a pruning from a rose perhaps.

  I recognise him, he recognises me. 'By Our Lady…' he begins, and 'Yes, indeed,' I reply. For all I have been weakened old skills remain and I have surprise on my side. Furthermore the old fool drops to his knees, crossing himself as he does so. Quickly I wind the lacy apron round his neck once and still holding both ends of the scarf I have made of it, brace the sole of my right foot on his forehead, and… Snap!

  Unwrapping the scarf and murmuring a Thuggee prayer to Kali, I run out into the square. There I stop, and look around. My breath returns to normal, my heartbeat steadies, the glow that took fire in my womb and spread to my furthest extremities when I straightened my knee begins to fade, and I look about me with a curse on my lips for all that this wretched city has done to me.

  'Burn,' I say. 'Burn.'

  And I know one day it will.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Interlude

  Brother Peter Marcus preaches in the church of St Francis, Osneyy, on Easter Morning, 1460

  'Everywhere on your road preach and say, "The kingdom of God is at hand". Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out devils, freely have you received, Freely give. Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor start", for the workman is worthy of his hire." The seventh to tenth verses of the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.

  'Dear children of God, my sermon this Easter morning will be a very simple one. All I aim to do is remind you of the teachings of Father John Wycliffe, the kernel of his thought at any rate, and suggest how his teaching points down paths we should try to follow.

  'First, at the centre of his thought was poverty. In this he followed in the footsteps of Francis, our founder, who heard the words of the Gospel I have just read to you at the moment of his conversion. From this came the certainty that righteousness has nothing to do with power or dominion or possessions or property. To own something is to take it from someone else. He who has a penny more has caused another to have a penny less. Nor does true righteousness confer power or the right to power, dominion or the right to dominion. John believed that dominion and power were the prerogatives of the civil authority, and not of the Church or churchmen. But even this he saw was a standby, a provisional thing, until all men and women, all people, should live together in harmony, all equal, and come together as the Israelites did in every jubilee year and hand back to all, to the people as a whole, all personal property.

  'Next, Father John believed that the central thing in every man's life was the immediate dependence of the individual Christian upon Cod, a relation which needs no mediation of any priest, and to which the very sacraments of the Church are not essentially necessary. Indeed, he went so far as to assert that round the sacraments, which are but signs and symbols, a dreadful and harmful habit of superstition has grown up, later hardened by the closed minds of the so-called fathers of the Church into dogma and doctrine. And by these means, by making the sacraments the prerogative of the priesthood, to grant or withhold as their fallen natures dictated, power and dominion over the gates of heaven and hell were seized by the Church, Thus no one can go to heaven unless they have received the body and blood of Christ and only the anointed priest has the power to magic the bread and wine into the body and blood. Brethren, I tell you, following the teaching of our Father John, this doctrine of transubstantiation is a blasphemous folly, a deceit which despoils the people and leads them to commit idolatry. If sacrament there must be, then let it be the sacrament of sharing the good things of life, the bread and wine, in good fellowship, as we have just done in our Easter Communion, and remembering as we do so the teachings of Jesus and his example, as he bade us.

  'Brethren, these doctrines of the sacraments as laid down by Rome, Avignon or wherever the Pope is these days, deny the true Church that is in all of us and especially when two or three are gathered together in His Name. That is the Church our Lord left us with, the Church John lived and breathed for. The true Church consists solely of the community of the righteous, and its only authority is the teaching of our Lord as left to us in the New Testament. The supreme authority, the only authority, is Holy Scripture and particularly the actual words of our Lord as recorded in the Gospels. Which is why John Wycliffe devoted so much of his life to translating and disseminating the Gospels in our own tongue. It is for these and like reasons that after his death his hones were dug up and burnt for a heretic, as if this mean, malicious act could in any way diminish the power of his thought.

  John's wisdom was not a homely stuff woven together on the loom of mere common sense, though there is much of that in it. It was far more, drawing together the threads left by his two great predecessors. Roger Macon and William of Occam. The first found truth in what he could see, feel, touch, hear, smell and measure. The second showed how the teaching of the fathers and the schoolmen has dragged us away from experience to speculation, from the particular to the general, from fact to essence. John began to see how all this provided the foundations for the tyrannies that spoil us all. It behoves us to continue down the road these three have shown us.

  'It is my belief – no, my certainty, grounded in experience as well as logic, that we can use their teaching as stepping-stones, as stairs to a height from which, looking back whence we have come, we shall see exposed the gigantic fallacy on which our philosophy and morality were built – namely the transformation of facts into essences, of historical into metaphysical conditions. The weakness and despondency of man, the inequality of power and wealth, injustice and suffering are attributed by the Church and its thinkers to some transcendental crime and guilt. Rebellion, disobedience against God, became the original sin that tainted us all. and the striving for gratification which is life was stained with the sin of concupiscence.

  'This departure into metaphysical realms culminated in the deification of time: because everything in the empirical world is passing, man in his very essence becomes a finite being, and death is in the very essence of life. Madness preached, "All things pass away, therefore all things deserve to pass away! And this is justice itself, this law of Time, that it must devour its children."

  'And again this madness pronounced as doctrine that only the higher values are eternal, and therefore real: faith and a love which does not ask and does not desire became the goals to which we should all aspire. And why? By these means the Church seeks to pacify, justify, compensate the underprivileged of the earth, and to protect those who made and left them underprivileged. These doctrines have enveloped the masters and the slaves, the rulers and the ruled, in an upsurge of repression which has caused the increasing degeneration of the life instincts and the decline of man.

  'Traditional forms of reason, as exemplified in the real thought of Aristotle, the peripatetics and the empiricists of ancient times, are rejected, and experience of being-as-end-in-itself- as joy, lust (I use the Teutonic word, which combines desire with joy), and enjoyment were thrown out with them. To return to the path we have been led from, to descend on the other side of the mountain not into the Valley of the Shadow of Death but into the land of milk and honey, to come to ourselves in a world which is truly our own, we must struggle against the dominion of time, against the tyranny of becoming over being. As long as there is the un
comprehended and unconquered flux of time – senseless loss, the painful 'it was' that will never come again – being will continue to contain the seed of destruction that perverts good to evil and vice versa. Man comes to himself only when transcendence has been conquered, when eternity has become present in the here and now.

  'Before I came here to speak to you I took a turn about our garden. The cherry tree is in blossom, our cherry tree, the only cherry tree in the whole of creation to be just as it is at this very moment. Next to it the lilac tree our brothers in Anatolia sent us is in bud, just about to open buds already white at the tips, and in its branches a bullfinch sang, its black cap burnished so blackness shone almost like the sun and its red breast glowed like fire. No other bullfinch in the world but this one graced this morning a lilac tree like ours.

  'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not neither do they spin. At this time of Easter, of blossom on the cherry tree, of the scarlet and black bullfinch in the lilac tree, of birth and resurrection, let us remember that if all things pass, all things return; what goes round comes round; eternally turns the wheel of Being. All things die, all things blossom again, eternal is the year of Being. All things break, all things are joined anew; eternally the house of Being builds itself anew. All things part, all things welcome each other again.