Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  'Eternity, long since the ultimate consolation of an alienated existence, was made into an instrument of oppression by its relegation to a transcendental world – unreal reward for real suffering. Now, here, at Easter, eternity is reclaimed for the fair earth – as the eternal return of its children, of the water-lily and the rose, of the lover and the beloved… The earth has all too long been a madhouse. We must reverse the sense of guilt; we must learn anew to associate guilt not with the affirmation but the denial of life, not with rebellion but with the acceptance of the repressive ideal.

  'It is no sad truth, but rather.I grand and glorious one that this earth should be our home. Were it but to give us simple shelter, simple clothing, simple food it would be enough. Add the water-lily and the rose, the apple and the pear, it is a fit home for mortal or immortal Man. Woman. Persons,'

  'What did you think of that, Ali?' 'Uplifting, though a touch confused.'

  'It's not easy to turn back the tide of a thousand years in a few pithy paragraphs.'

  'I can do it in one sentence." 'You can?'

  'As the Old Man in the Mountain said, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."'

  'That is the black side of my discourse, the far side of the moon.'

  'If you say so.'

  Brother Peter paused by the pond and looked at me, his pale-blue eyes suddenly sad, his posture briefly tired, perhaps from the strain of giving his sermon, perhaps because he had decided our separation was inevitable.

  'There is a small college of people,' he said, 'who have taken these thoughts towards a dark conclusion. They live in the north but to avoid persecution move about.'

  'The Brothers of the Free Spirit?'

  'I believe that's what they call themselves."

  'Just where are they?"

  'Try Macclesfield Forest.'

  But before I left I prevailed upon him to seek out the coded details of Roger Bacon's last experiments with gunpowder, and thereby. I think, did more to save the empire of Vijayanagara from imminent destruction than any of the rest of us.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Having found all this talk of Occam and Wycliffc deeply confusing,

  not to say boring and irrelevant, but with my mind concentrated

  again by Ali's last statement regarding gunpowder, I attempted

  to bring him back to what was germane.

  'But what,' I asked him, after a short silence had grown between us,

  of the Prince and Anish during this time? Were they still locked away

  in the Tower?'

  'I'm glad you asked. For, like you, I am now tired of my own voice. And, anyway, we have reached a point in our story where it is not out of place to return to the Prince's correspondence with the Emperor.'

  And he pushed a small pile of papers across the table. While I read, he slept.

  Dear Cousin

  We are still incarcerated, after several months, well, weeks anyway, in this monumental prison and, of course, I still have no way of knowing whether or not you have received my letters and, if you have, what steps you are able to take to arrange our release. I suppose, even though we have languished here for so long, it is unreasonable to expect an answer from you in less than twice the time it took for us to get here, so I must continue to be patient.

  Materially speaking things have not been as bad here as they might have been. Anish and I were given three small rooms to share in the central block or keep of this castle, which is known as the Tower of London, though it is in fact many towers linked by walls, or, like the central block in which we are living, free-standing. Everything is made of stone – either blocks of pale grey limestone or flint cores bonded with mortar – and roofed in lead or slate. The floors also are slate or limestone. There is almost no decoration apart from occasional tapestry hangings and only one of our rooms has a fireplace. Yet in spite of the primitive nature of our surroundings we are pestered to show gratitude for the comforts we have – and indeed, I have to say, our guardians fare no better than we do.

  The chief of these is Lord Scales, an old and irascible nobleman, who is governor of the Tower for the King. Occasionally he invites us to dine with him when he rails against the Duke of York and his affinity, and against the merchants of the City who, he claims, plot to starve him out by refusing the passage of food and other necessaries into the Tower. Occasionally he demands money from us for our keep, or a jewel, and either he is unaware of the true value of things or he is modest in his demands, for a pearl no bigger than a pigeon's egg keeps him happy for a fortnight or more.

  He has kept us up with the news too. The Duke of York is in Hibemia or Erin, an island to the west of Ingerlond, and smaller, but not much smaller, claimed as a domain of the King of Ingerlond, though his power extends only down the east coast and not far inland, the rest of the island or Ireland being occupied by savages. It is believed that Warwick has joined York there, in a port called Waterford on the southeast coast, where it is feared they are planning a joint invasion, York across the sea from Ireland and Warwick from Calais.

  In Calais the same stalemate as before persists. The Duke of Somerset is tied down by Warwick's army, and Warwick's men by Somerset. Neither can embark without exposing himself to attack from the other; neither is strong enough to risk an open battle.

  Of Eddie March, who is the cause of all our present woes (really it was a mistake on my part to hire him as a guide and protector, Ali was right about that, as about so much else), we have heard nothing certain. Either he is in Waterford with Warwick or he has made his way back to Calais. More important, the whereabouts of Ali and his companion, the Buddhist monk, remain a mystery and, perforce, Anish and I, Anish anyway, have been at some pains to mitigate the effects of his disappearance by learning Inglysshe. Oh, yes. That fakir who attached himself to us has disappeared too.

  So, dear cousin, the time has passed slowly but not without some benefits for our country and people, which I hope we shall one day be able to bring back to you. In spite of cold wet weather for most of the time Anish and I have been able to make, piecemeal to avoid suspicion that we are spies, a thorough examination of these fortifications, and particularly of their efficacy or lack of it against gunpowder and ball. To these ends we have had several conversations with the Under Master Sergeant of Ordnance. Bardolph Earwicca.

  The actual Master of Ordnance is, of course, a Norman of noble blood and therefore a fool, a young man called Guy Fitzosbern with no chin and a voice like a horse's, or should I say donkey? Certainly a donkey when he laughs, eeee-aw-aw-aw-aw. He knows nothing about his job except how to draw his salary.

  Sergeant Bardolph, however, is a master gunner. Thick-set like most Saxons, his ruddy complexion is further enhanced by carbuncles and boils, which glow like so many red-hot cannon-balls. Like many Saxons he puts the word 'fucking' into his speech wherever he possibly can, for no purpose at all that we can understand. The word refers to the act of' love-making, particularly those actions that lead to conception, and their use of it seems to imply they hold love-making in contempt.

  I began by asking Bardolph if he did not think the walls of the Tower, especially the outer ones, somewhat thin, lacking in substance. They would surely soon be breached by well-directed cannon-fire, I suggested. Would it not have been sensible, as mastery of the techniques involved in the use of gunpowder developed, to have strengthened them, thickened them?

  'Waste of fucking time, squire,' he said, having first sucked in his protuberant lips and then expelled the air thus taken in, with a noise like a fart. Meanwhile, I asked myself, did he mean waste of time that could be better spent in love-making? It soon became clear that he meant nothing of the sort, in fact he meant… nothing.

  'You see, squire,' he went on, 'there ain't no fucking wall yet been built can withstand the force of powder, no matter how fucking thick it is.'

  'How about thirty feet thick and made of solid rock?'

  'That ain't a fucking wall. That's a fucking mountain. But e
ven so, given time and loadsa powder, it'd go, it'd fucking go.'

  'So how, dear friend,' I asked, or rather Anish did on my behalf, 'can a town or castle be protected against cannon-fire?'

  'Simple, really, innit?'

  By now we were standing between two towers on a battlement, scarcely wide enough to allow two armed men to pass each other.

  'Come wiv me.'

  And he took us into a big round room, occupying the whole area of the nearest tower, about thirty feet across. Much of it was filled with a cannon twelve feet long and the accoutrements that went with it, videlicet a ramrod with an end like a giant mop, an open barrel of water, another of gunpowder, and about twenty spheres of stone laboriously ground to an almost perfect roundness, each about two feet or more in diameter. There was also a shelf on which was placed a Hint, a stone and a tinder-box together with a wick that had been soaked in solution of saltpetre and left to dry.

  'All present and correct,' Sergeant Earwicca shouted, 'and ready to blow the balls off of anyone who dares a misdemeanour directed against His Majesty's person or property."

  I marvelled he had put so many words together without a 'fucking'.

  'The art you see of protecting these 'ere walls against a gun, is be sure we have a gun here, and six more to be precise, bigger'n any they can fucking bring against us.'

  'I see,' I said. 'If I have it right, the aim is to cannon-ball the opposing cannon into silence before they can knock down your walls, and you are certain of being able to do this because this cannon is bigger than any that can normally be brought against you, and, because it is placed at a height, it has greater range.'

  The cannon in question, as I have already said, was uncommonly big, an iron tube hooped with brass at every foot or so of its length. It was mounted on a solid oak chassis, which in turn was laid on what I took to be a giant wheel laid in an horizontal plane. So, within the limits of the embrasure from which its snout protruded, the angle at which it tired Could be altered both from side to side and up and down.

  'For gen'leinen you got some fucking brains,' our friend remarked, and tapped the side of his huge fruit-like nose with his forefinger – a gesture I took to signify appreciation of our intelligence.

  So there you have it, honoured cousin: the way to make sure our fortifications are not knocked down by the Bahmani artillery is to make sure we are defended by guns bigger and better than any they might bring against us. I imagine we could have worked that out for ourselves without traipsing across half the world. However, there might be something to be learnt about the casting of large cannon, and that is something Anish and I will endeavour to look into. And maybe, too, there are ways of refining the exact constituents of gunpowder to gain optimum efficacy.

  I remain, dear cousin,

  Your devoted servant,

  Prince Harihara

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Dear Cousin Five months we have been here, and we are now approaching the end of the six month of the year 1460, Christian reckoning. Without the advice of our sadhus I can't work out what that makes it according to our more complicated lunar reckonings, but it's about a year since we sailed from Gové, Anish says two months more than a year, so I'm sure you'll get a rough idea.

  Effectively we remain prisoners. Though in tolerable comfort, there is no question of our being allowed out into the city which we can see from the walls, or indeed of trying to find our way home. Although not formally charged we are tainted with Yorkism, with collaborating with traitors and giving them succour, and Scales, when the drink takes him badly, making him bellicose and hostile, reminds us that he can get the paperwork done at what he calls the drop of a hat and our heads off quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

  'Here’ is, of course, this gloomy fortress-palace-prison called the Tower of London, though I have to say that, with the arrival of what they call summer, it is less gloomy than it was. Summer? A brief period when the sun shines rather more than it did, and the temperature is such that we need to ask to have the fire lit in our rooms only towards dusk, which I have to say now comes late in the day, the night being only about six hours long. You would think that with this amount of daylight it would be even hotter than our country, but no. The sun remains perversely low in the sky, even at noon, and the days are only rarely as warm as the coldest in Vijayanagara. Moreover, the weather remains wholly unpredictable: a week of cold rain may still occur, followed by a few days of warm sunshine though with a sharp breeze from the east. Then come cloudy, sultry days, even warmer, culminating in a thunderstorm, heavy rain, almost as heavy as our monsoon at times, and sometimes, even now, the raindrops are frozen into what they call hail. Then back to blustery winds with frequent showers.

  Nevertheless, the gardens here, which are quite extensive within the walls, are now pleasant for much of the time, with many tall rose bushes, lilies, peonies (though they arc now over) and many flowering herbs, particularly thyme, rosemary (also now over, it flowered earlier than the rest), and sage, dried sacks of which you will remember traders have brought us from time to time from the Himalayan foothills. Incidentally, they charge far too much for them.

  The fish-ponds, too, have lotus in them, would you believe it? which they call water-lily, smaller than ours but just now coming into bloom with flowers very similar, eight or sixteen petals in a mandala. Here they are a rarity apparently and are merely admired for their beauty and not at all for their spiritual significance. The sight of them tilled me with a sudden longing to be back home.

  What else? Fork-tailed birds, exactly like the swallows that haunt our temples from the end of the monsoons through to the hot season, arrived here a month or so ago and built tiny cement-like nests up under the eaves of all the towers and battlements, hundreds of them, and have laid eggs and arc-rearing chicks. You know it has long been a puzzle amongst those of us who bother to think about such things as to where our swallows go to breed: well, here, I think we have the answer. For reasons best known to themselves, and to Devi-Parvad who rules all things living, they fly north.

  That is not the received opinion in Ingerlond. Quizzing one of the gardeners on the subject, an old man with a red face, long white hair and with the knotted swollen finger joints that afflict most of the elderly in Ingerlond, he spluttered through broken teeth, 'Why, bless you, zurr, come Michaelmas they doos dive into the mud round ponds and sleeps out the winter in a state of intoxified slumber, waking only when they feels the regenerative power of the sun on their backs.'

  There are also ravens here in the Tower, again similar to those that dwell in the cliffs and crags of our highest mountains. These are almost tame and the guards of the Tower rear the chicks, which were hatched not long after we were incarcerated, feeding them scraps of liver and other offal. There is a superstition that as long as the raven flourish in the Tower, for so long will Albion (which is another name for Ingerlond) likewise flourish.

  Well, cousin, I am boring you with these snippets of natural history, but Anish and I have been so bored ourselves for most of the time that we have found ourselves pursuing such trivia. On now to weightier matters.

  Our gaoler here. Lord Scales, who prefers to call himself our host, came to us this morning, in the very garden I have been talking about. He's an old man too, bearded like a leopard, also with a red face (Anish says the preponderance of red faces amongst the elderly here is the result of drinking alcohol in excess since childhood), a bluff manner and filthy temper. He caught up with us just as we were contemplating the movement of a long-legged fly across the surface of the pond. Anish was musing on this phenomenon, attempting to find in it an example of the ephemerality of even great events in the flow of time. The significance he found arose from the fact that the fly left no footprints on the surface.

  'Here's a thing, then,' rasped Lord Scales. 'Here's a damned thing. Your Yorkist cronies from Calais landed at Sandwich late the day before yesterday, and they're already at Canterbury. That arsehole Bourchier, the Archbish, is ba
cking them, they've already doubled their numbers up to twenty thousand, and they'll be knocking on our door in a day or two.'

  'What's their purpose?' I asked.

  'They say to restore good government to the kingdom. They say they honour the King who they say is the rightful king. But these folk never say what they mean.'

  'And what do they mean?'

  'They mean to kick the King out. and put Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York – who, believe me, is an arrogant bastard – on the throne instead. But I'll stop them, see if I don't.'

  'But if they have twenty thousand…'

  He knew very well that I am well aware that he has only a couple of hundred garrisoned in the Tower.

  'I've got me cannon, haven't I? You've seen them. I'll blast 'em to bits, soon as they set foot in the city.'

  Anish piped up. 'Who leads them?" he asked.

  'Richard Neville – son of a bitch who calls himself Earl of Warwick because he married old Warwick's daughter – Salisbury, who is his father. Lord Fauconberg his uncle, who also got his title between the sheets, and Eddie March. Crooks. A gang. Gangsters.'

  'Not York himself, then?'

  'No. Got more sense. He'll hang on in Ireland until he sees how it all turns out. Well, it'll turn out badly for them all. Mark my words.'

  Arid he stumped away, huffing and puffing up the steep stairs no doubt to inspect his guns and make sure our friend Bardolph Earwicca had them in working order.

  'Could turn out all right for us,' said Anish, 'if March, Warwick and the rest remember who we are. And Alderman Dawtrey bothers to tell them where we are.'

  'Anyway,' said I, 'at least we'll see how well these pieces he's got up there work.'

  At this moment the long-legged fly came too close to a water-lily or lotus pad on which a small frog sat. A flick of its tongue and the fly was gone. 'Tell me, Anish,' I asked, 'just what part does that frog play in your miniature cosmology? Shiva the Destroyer?'