No doubt we shall be reunited under happier circumstances. Please accept my best wishes, and give my deepest affection [heavily crossed-out] respects to your reverend companion.
Harihara, Prince of Vijayanagara, cousin and accredited plenipotentiary of His Heavenly Eminence the Emperor Mallikarjuna
This was what Chamberlain Anish had written on the back of an old bill of lading the Alderman had found for him in the midst of the scramble that had taken place in the few minutes Lord Scales had allowed before he marched them all off to the Tower.
I turned to Brother Abraham, who had accompanied us back to East Cheap from the churches of Sts Benet Sherehog and Pancras, and did my best to ignore Mistress Dawtrey, who was shouting and squealing in her determination to get us off the premises.
'Can we get them out of the Tower?' I asked.
'No,' he replied, 'No one escapes unless they have the help and collusion of one of the gaolers.'
'Gaolers? It is a prison as well as a palace?'
'Yes. And for traitors most especially.'
'Are the Prince and Anish in mortal danger?'
Abraham thought for a moment, again caressing his top lip. 'Not for as long as their gaolers can be persuaded that there is something to be gained from keeping them alive,' he said at last. 'They have ransom value, no doubt, and they might be exchanged for prisoners the Yorkists hold. They might even be perceived as the means whereby a lucrative trade in spices and gems could be developed. For all these reasons they are probably worth more alive than dead. This being the case it is likely too that they will be kept in tolerable comfort.'
'What should we do, then?'
'You and Uma are in far greater danger. It is you who helped March escape, and as mere servants you have no value if you arc-captured. The Queen is a merciless enemy and delights in the blood of all who oppose her – Lord Scales will gain merit if he has you publicly dismembered
I recalled the quartered, eviscerated bodies fixed above the gate to London Bridge and shuddered.
Abraham continued. 'I think it best that you leave the City as quickly as you can and head up Watling Street for those parts of the country where the Yorkists still hold sway. Enoch will guide you. But I think, too, you should go disguised, at least until you are several leagues away.'
'Disguised? How?'
'You could… um, white-up.'
Mistress Dawtrey was becoming unbearably importunate, so, blocking my ears to the noise she was making, I got myself upstairs, found my way to the room Prince Harihara and Anish had occupied, burrowed around in and under the mattress and came up with two soft leather drawstring bags, each the size of a fist, which chinked solidly and satisfyingly as if loaded with small pebbles. I fingered one and identified the two large kurundams, with their sharp pointed pyramidal ends, and wondered what possible use they could be to us since, with their size and colour, they were fit for a monarch's sceptre and worth far more than we could ever need or, indeed, gain from them. But then, perhaps, I thought, that was precisely what Prince Harihara had had in mind: faced with the greatest magnates in the land and a queen profoundly jealous of her status, he might be forced to part with them, either for nothing or for a sum well below their worth. By leaving them with me he was assured I would keep them secret and not part with them except under the direst necessity.
I stuffed the bags in the deepest recesses of my loincloth beneath my cape and furs, and hurried back downstairs to find Uma undergoing a transformation. Enoch the fishmonger had arrived and was smearing her face with a mixture of pig's lard and chalk dust, converting her physiognomy into that of a clown or juggler. Just as I was about to remonstrate, believing that this would attract attention rather than deflect it, Abraham drew in his breath sharply, moved forward and, with an edge of his robe, smeared the paste into a thinner film revealing the copper-brown skin beneath.
'There,' he cried, 'that's much better. She looks like a leper.'
Enoch nodded enthusiastically and began to alter his handiwork in subtle ways to produce the effect we wanted.
Enoch was a mute. He was a small, round little man, about forty years old, nearly bald, with a thick black moustache and a stubbled chin. He had become mute, Abraham told us, some thirty years earlier when forced to witness the execution in the customary barbaric way of his fishmonger father and his mother too, for sheltering an antinomian priest. All this was part of the Purges that followed the burning of Lord Cobham.
The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers had taken on the orphan and charitably arranged that he should be apprenticed to one of their guild, but for reasons of safety in London, not in the northern fishing village where his parents had worked. He had proved a good pupil, quickly becoming adept at identifying good bargains when the fishing-boats tied up at Fish Wharf, well able to spot spoiled or stale fish, and knowledgeable to the point of erudition in all the species that can be found in the Thames estuary and the North Sea. He was also remarkably adroit with the big, triangular knife the fishmongers use for filleting and trimming the larger of their wares. However, his inability to speak had precluded him from becoming a master and full member of the guild and he was forced to hire himself out. Perhaps he bore a grudge because of this, or had inherited some of his parents' nonconformity, but at all events he was an independent soul, had travelled a lot and worked in most of the larger Inglysshe ports when the fancy took him. Moreover, he was willing to help any he perceived as being, like his parents, outcasts, non-believers, recusants or dissenters.
Wherever he went he took his sharp, shiny knives, the tools of his trade, the second one being a thin blade of grey steel about nine inches long, worn down by constant sharpening to the likeness of a blade of coarse grass.
'He'll go anywhere, so long as he is close to a supply of fresh fish by Ash Wednesday.' Abraham told us.
'Why is that?' I asked.
'For forty days after that day we eat no meat, only fish. It is the busiest time of year for fishmongers. They make a lot of money during Lent. And when is Ash Wednesday? Why, in ten days' time.
Through Lent he'll be able to hire himself out for threepence a day, maybe more.'
Such was Enoch, who now worked away with grease and chalk to turn Uma and me into lepers whose white skins had been corrupted with brown patches by the disease.
But first we lacked the necessary adjunct of the trade, wooden clappers, one each, made from a small plank attached loosely to a sounding-box which, when shaken, emitted a loud crack or snap. These we were required by law to use whenever we came close to company as a way of keeping people away from us and infection. We, or rather Enoch, procured them from a tiny shop close to Ludgate, at the bottom of the hill between the gate and the bridge over the river Fleet. It was no more than a hovel but stacked to the rafters with chairs, saucepans, broken kitchenware, broken arms and armour, just about everything you can think of but old and broken – apart from our clappers, which were in working order. A curious place.
Thus equipped it became clear how inspired Abraham's choice of a disguise had been. The moment anyone came near enough to recognise or question us, a brisk clap or two sent them scurrying away. We also found that shelter was frequently available when we needed it in the form of lazar houses along the way: these were built on the outside of many towns and larger villages and consisted of a small bam-like structure large enough to accommodate twelve people sleeping together on the floor. Usually they had a little land attached in which vegetables often still grew, with pens for animals. And graves, for the lepers were often left to bury their own dead.
We were not afraid to use these places for they were almost always empty, and when they were not we moved on, cither making shift in other ways or walking until we found one that was. We attempted to question Enoch as to why such provision had been made for so many lepers when there appeared to be remarkably few. He struggled with his affliction in his attempts to tell us, but whether or not he had it right we never found out, because any matter that requi
red more than a basic understanding, anything involving speculation or theorising, was beyond us – he through his muteness, we through our lack of anything beyond basic Inglysshe. Months later I was able to question a learned friar, of whom more later, on the subject but even he was uncertain, so short is the memory of a people when civil disturbance and lawlessness stalk the land: the clear reduction in the numbers suffering from leprosy had begun before he was born and was complete before he grew to manhood. However, he speculated that plague was at the root of the matter: lepers, he guessed, were peculiarly susceptible to it, and while one in three of the population had been wiped out in the plague years, the epidemic had taken almost all the lepers.
Meanwhile, Enoch's first priority was to get us to the western coasts of the island before Lent began so that he could hire himself out to a master fishmonger, practise his trade, and earn enough money to see him and his family through the leaner months of summer when fish goes bad quickly and fish-eaters rely on fish smoked, dried, pickled or salted during the winter months. For this reason we headed more west than north.
It's not my intention, my dear Mah-Lo, to give a minute account of every step of our travels, but I must dwell for a moment on a school or college we passed since it represented the first solid evidence we had of the King's madness. Set outside a large village, in the midst of a water-meadow, at the time partially flooded and frozen, was a pair of large red-brick buildings, each forming a square, the south side, nearest the river, of one of them being a big barn of a church, not yet fully finished.
The road we were on passed between the church and the water-meadow, and was tilled at the time with an unpleasant mixture of frozen, dirty snow and hard, churned-up mud. Pollarded willows, their stubby branches like clenched fists against the stone-like sky, edged the river. On the further bank beyond the wide, full, slowly swirling grey stream, there was another small village, but this one was huddled around a castle, quite a large one, with weighty towers that looked like drums. The cawing of rooks floated across the icy spaces between. There was a bridge but whether or not it was in a good state of repair we did not stay long enough to discover.
The first thing that happened was that our ears were assailed from the interior of the church by a mournful chanting, very high, produced by unbroken voices, a sort of continuous wailing, like the keening of distressed women. We paused to listen to it and were standing thus when a cloud of young boys, about twenty of them, in black velvet gowns, with white collars on their shoulders and velvet caps on their heads, came streaming round the far corner behind us.
'I say, chaps, look at this,' a slender but tall fifteen-year-old called. 'Three lepers by the look of it.'
In common with most people we met he had taken Enoch for a leper too, perhaps only in the early stages of the disease and his blemishes not yet significant, for why else would he remain with us and risk infection?
'Look here,' he yelled at us, 'just you clear off, if you know what's good for you. Come on, get a move on, show us your heels.'
Not understanding clearly what he was saying we did not move quickly enough for him. He picked up a handful of grit and snow, compressed it into a ball and hurled it at us. Clearly he had been trained to throw balls accurately for it struck me hard on the side of my face. Involuntarily I raised my staff and moved towards him. Uma stretched out a hand to restrain me but then she, too, received a snowball in the face, flung by another boy from behind the first. This incensed me further. I snarled, and pressed on.
For a moment I thought he would run, but his friends were all behind him and I could sense that he durst not appear a coward in front of them. Instead he stooped and picked up another ball of snow, hurled it. This one hit me full in the chest, and since I was at that moment crossing a frozen puddle, my feet shot out from under me and I went down on my backside in a fall heavy-enough to knock the breath out of me. Now all of these young hooligans followed their leader, picked up snowballs and hurled them at me, and at Uma and Enoch, who would have run had I not been grounded. Some even, wishing to show bravado in front of their companions, found sticks with which to prod me, and, once I was on my feet again, trip me too, so I tumbled back into the snow and mud. And all the time they shouted, 'Dirty old man, take that! Come on, you nasty bag of bones, get a move on. Unless I'm not mistaken he's some sort of darkie, a gypsy perhaps. Filth like that always catch diseases…' and so on, mostly in high voices like those that still sang on within the church.
Well, no harm came of it in the end. They chivvied us as if they were dogs and we sheep until we were clear of the buildings then took themselves off back inside, leaving us to examine ourselves to see if we had sustained any real hurt, which we had not, and recover our breaths and tempers.
Now, Mah-Lo, this incident had its interesting side, which Uma and I pieced together later. It was indeed a school, but an odd one. First it was only open to the so-called best in the land, judged by birth. The rest were excluded. Next, the pupils were torn from their families at a tender age and made to live there for the best part of the year, sharing large dormitories, eating together, the young made to serve the older like slaves, and frequently beaten by both older pupils and the adult masters; not only beaten, but often forced to submit to all sorts of cruelty including anal rape. I repeat, this was a school! Not a barbaric prison or a barracks. Finally, the strangest anomaly of all, this place had been founded and funded by none other than the King himself, as a place where the offspring of the best families might learn how to behave properly and assist him and his successors in the governance of his country! This, as I have said, was the first and by no means the last example we came across of his madness, and although we had had no choice in the matter and it was no concern of ours at all, I was glad we had found ourselves allied to the faction dedicated to depriving him, if not of his crown, for these people were superstitious about crowns believing they came from God, then at least of the power and rights that went with it.
The river now took a loop to the north-west at the top of which we came to a small town called Marlow! Just like your own name. No, dear friend, I am not making this up. Here, having seen the name on a signpost, Enoch got it into his head that he wanted to go to Oxenford. He tried to explain why but we could make nothing of his grunts and retchings. However, we were in his hands, and since this meant leaving the river and heading north-west we were happy to comply – at least we would be going more or less in the direction we wanted.
After walking through hills and woodlands for a day the landscape suddenly opened out in front of us below a steep hill, which dropped again into the wide river-plain of the Thames – the same river, but it had apparently taken a wide loop to the south-west before turning back north, making a quarter-circle across whose arc we had walked. And far in the distance, lit by the last shafts of golden sunlight making a fan-spread of beams from behind a low bank of cloud, we could see a city of spires and towers, which seemed to hang like a dream of the lost city of paradise above the mists rising from its river. Then the sun was obscured and all turned to black like the cutouts in a shadow play.
Uma squeezed my less functional hand, which she was in the habit of holding as we walked, 'A place of some ambivalence.' she murmured. I nodded, and the three of us began the long descent into the plain.
Chapter Twenty-Three
We continued down the Hills through the rest of that day, often with the distant city in sight beckoning us on, into the wide river-plain, and as we walked a thaw set in around us. Rivulets formed and tinkled as the snow continued to melt, birds sang, and presently in a copse of thin, elegant trees with patchy silvery bark we found clumps of tiny white flowers, shaped like bells. The track we were on became muddy and our feet crackled in what was left of ice as thin as paper. We saw deer, small and reddish brown with white bellies and tiny antlers, not unlike those that live in the deepest thickets of our mountain forests. Indeed, they put me in mind, almost for the first time since we left London, of Prince Harihara
and his penchant for hunting. I wondered what had happened to his collection of crossbows and bolts, and for the life of me I could not recall seeing them unloaded from the donkeys' backs at Alderman Dawtrey's house. I supposed they must have got there and were stored somewhere – in his cellars, perhaps.
These deer were browsing on holly until they caught our scent when they melted away from us almost magically and certainly without a sound and probably before they would have been within easy range of the Prince's weapons. Once, beneath a grove of bigger, heavier trees, we saw wild pigs rooting away in the mast that littered the woodland floor. They would have been easier prey.
As we drew nearer the river, we found small settlements of human habitation, though to our eyes, mine and Uma's, most of the dwelling-places seemed less than suitable for domestic animals. They were mostly round, made from woven lengths of willow, the cracks between filled with mud, straw and what was clearly dried dung, with roofs of dried grass or reeds, and high enough in the centres only for a man to stand in. Spirals of bluish-white smoke rose from the centres of these tiny domes, smoke which was aromatic enough and filled the air with a not unpleasant pungent smell, but they must have been hell to live and breathe in. By far the greater part of the Inglysshe people live in huts like these, since those who did not collaborate with their Norman conquerors were enslaved by them.
In the afternoon the track we were on returned to the riverbank, whose serpentine course it followed with an almost continuous line of small, stunted trees, from which the thin branches had been sliced, leaving knobbly lumps like rough boulders at the tops of the trunks. These thin willow branches were used in many ways: woven, they formed the walls of the hovels, or were used m sections called hurdles to make fences. The thinner ones were made into baskets.
Kings of Albion Page 17
