'I'm not an idiot. Garter,' she said. 'I've got eyes in my head and, believe it or not, I know the royal arms when I see them.'
York now turned in his saddle, drew his sword and waved it at the troops behind him. The cannon fired once, but firing uphill their shot fell short. They began to move forward, away from the rivulet and uphill.
'All right,' said the Queen, and her eyes were now alight with satisfaction. She was riding side-saddle, a newish fashion, especially designed for ladies, I suppose to protect their private parts from unnecessary chafing, and was dressed in hunting gear, a long crimson velvet gown, black boots. She had on a crown. 'Tell Somerset he can go for it.'
And a page trotted along the line with the message.
And over the top they went, about six thousand, no great numerical advantage, but with the slope in their favour, good ground hardened by the frost but not so hard or slippery as to be a hazard, the lords and knights horsed but scattered throughput the body to provide leadership and rallying points, reined in to a slow trot so the men-at-arms, for the most part in full armour but on foot, could keep up. And just as the two bodies of men clashed the two wings of the Queen's army, with archers in the front on York's right, where they were not protected by their shields held on their left sides, came streaming out of the woods.
York's men would have run. But they had nowhere to run to. Even the castle was cut off from them as Trollope's troops, having come round the back, had already got between them and it. Moreover, no one had thought to raise the drawbridge or lower the portcullis and there was no garrison save potboys and kitchen hands to hold it. It was very soon in Trollope's hands.
York was pulled from his horse and killed almost straight away. Rutland, accompanied by his standard-bearer who was also his tutor, got away and over the bridge across the main river into Wakefield where he was caught by Lord Clifford, who had chased Eddie March out of Alderman Dawtrey's house in London nearly a year earlier. Salisbury, old man though he was, got clear away but Trollope saw him go and sent a troop after him. They caught up with him ten miles away just as he was about to get into another castle – Pontefract, it was called.
The upshot was that next morning, the last day of 1460 by their reckoning, the Queen was presented by Clifford with three heads. 'Madam, your war is done.' he said.
Some say she went white, but not that I saw. She slapped York's cold dead cheek, then ordered them to put a paper crown on him. 'Stick it on a pike and put it above Micklegate Bar at York,' she said, and her voice rang out. 'Let York overlook York.'
Then she paused, her mouth worked, and she spat at it.
Later that day she went over the list of all who had been caught and ordered more executions, beginning what became routine on both sides, the summary murder of all nobles and gentry taken, with their families attainted, that is all their lands and titles forfeit. She pricked the names, marked up on parchment. 'Chop his head off! Get the kids too. if you can. I want to see that one die myself,' and so on. She even extended the lists to include those who took no side and no part: 'For as Jesus said: He that is not with me is against me.'
All this and the battle before it made me wonder: just what is it makes a man get inside so much steel casing, and lumber down a hill to strike and be struck until one or another tails to the ground to be skewered through the interstices of his armour? Or, worse than that, hacked at with mace and axe until the steel casing crushes him? Fear that if he doesn't his lands and life will be forfeit anyway? Maybe. The hope of ransom or loot from a vanquished foe? Loot, perhaps, but not much, for who takes valuables on to a battlefield? And no ransom, not while neither side is taking prisoners. I noted, too, though, a strange sort of camaraderie amongst many of the men, an eagerness to band together and, in their words, 'go for it', coupled with a fear of being thought cowardly or idle by their fellows. Drink too. Both sides drank huge amounts of beer and wine before the battle started. Finally… being Inglysshe helps.
Your affectionate and obedient cousin,
Harihara Kurteishi, Prince of Vijayanagara
Chapter Forty-Three
It's all about contrast, difference, is it not?' Uma murmured. For next day she was back with us again. Her gentle but knowing eyes were unfocused by the power of memory. She sighed. 'He was the best, you know.'
Contrast and difference. Let's begin at the top and work down. His short white hair that I run my fingertips through and that strange black streak just long enough for me to wind once round my finger: my hair, almost back to its fullest length now, dark but hennaed to a red with occasional wires of bright gold in it and glossy, silky, fragrant. His chin and cheek, bristly with white above the coppery red, against mine, which has the bloom and colour of a ripe peach. His breath a touch sharp, like milk on the turn: mine like currants and honey. The squareness of his chin and the roundness of mine; the sinews and wrinkles in his neck – well, I have those now, but then… My shoulders creamy and smooth, rounded yet delicate: his twice as broad and white, with, I have to say, red spots to match the mole or two I have. My breasts like pomegranates, but soft and with large nipples that corrugate at his touch and even leak a sweet drop of ichor; his, massively wide and flat with nipples like pimples, which yet my tongue can raise so they feel hard as grain, and a mat of iron hair between. His anus like the roots of the banyan, strong and sturdy yet capable of grace in their slow yet greedy grasp; mine like the smooth branches of a tall aspen tree. My stomach a shallow dome with a whorled dent in the middle where Parvati pressed her thumb: his hard and six times ridged with muscle.
He has short, strong white toes that, even so, can grip a coin or feather while mine are long, with, when I can get the lacquer, painted nails. His ankles are finer than I would expect, which indicates nobility, but not as fine as mine, which put him in mind, he says, of things as fragile as glass. His calves are twin cords of muscle hazed with hair brindled grey and brown like a cat, and his knees, which he grumbles about at times, but nothing like as often as Ali does, are broad and strong, mine smooth like butter but as firm as apples. His thighs are pillars to support a temple, his buttocks like twin coconuts in a palm-tree; mine are like the mangoes he's never seen.
And our fingers, his short for the width of his big hands but strong with square ends, mine long and thin – what secret joys they find where thighs and torsos meet! His thumb runs down the crease and curves to cup the mound of bone, they part the wiry hair and probe the puckered lips; my thumb and forefinger ring the root of his prick while the other three roll his balls in their wrinkled sack. We play on each other as if on musical instruments smoothing the mucus between the pads on our fingers, teasing the tissue until his strengthens like timber and mine swells like a grape.
And now breath is taken by beauty, beauty of doing not seeing, of tasting and smelling and softly caressing. The longing now is nostalgia for a past that never yet happened, and I pull myself close to him, releasing his sex so I can hold his head and force my tongue and kisses on his neck and mouth, while he rolls us round and with one hand beneath me, in the small of my back, feeling out the cleft between my buttocks and with the other feeding his hungry pillar into me sends tides of hot joy up from my…
Well. Ali. You and I did it a couple of times, so you know what I'm on about, and you won't mind if I tell you that this Welsh chieftain knew what he was doing, was the best.
Summer drifts into autumn. Here the Welsh hills, which were a dull russet, slowly become lilac-coloured and then purple, spread with tiny bell-like flowers, so many millions of them it's like a
purple blanket and springy and soft so that with care, avoiding the bigger branches that hug the ground, one can lie on it and lose oneself in the sweet but light fragrance of it, gazing up into a blue like aquamarine and watch where eagles soar with necks collared in gold. And beneath these low bushes yet another bush hides from the snows and wind that howl across here in winter, blowing line powdery drifts, but now rich with small black berries, black that is until
Owen names them: then you see how they're really blue, a deepest indigo.
These hills are cleft and riven with valleys so narrow near the crests you don't really see them until the hillside suddenly fills away beneath your feet to brown rock and water clear as crystal but brown, too, from the gravel beneath or grey and flat where the water has rounded boulders through the millennia, bubbling and gurgling from pool to pool. Deep in these declivities the air is still and the sun hot. With our ponies grazing on the ridge above us (they'll move and maybe neigh if anyone approaches), we can strip off our woollen cloaks and trousers and, on cropped thyme-scented grass beside the stream, make love again, and yet again, or just lie in each other's arms, backs against a sun-warmed lichened rock and watch the brown fish browse the moss beneath the surface.
At such times Owen feeds my head with tales of ancient Wales such as those of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, and Branwen, daughter of Llyr and I tell him the tale of Rama and Sita. Then he sings the love-songs and laments of Dafydd ap Gwilym and Dafydd Nanmor, who, he says, is a living bard and may one day come himself to Dinbych to sing to us. And I teach him the lore of Parvati, the mother of us all, and Kali too with her necklace of skulls, whose avatars I sometimes am, and he calls her Rhiannon, who is both virgin mother and mare-headed eater of human flesh.
The frosts come, and then, as I hinted, the snow and gales sweep in out of the grey sea we sometimes glimpse from the higher hills. Wolves howl amongst the sheep-pens and one day early in December we ride out with great grey hounds, long-limbed so the snow is no problem for them, with massive necks as strong, I say, as Owen's. We take no wolves but drive them deeper and deeper and higher and higher into the mountains, seeing them always streaking ahead of us, loping and lolloping up almost vertical
steeps, then silhouetted against the darkening sky, three of them, to howl their praise at the moon and defiance at us below, freezing in a shepherd's hut beside a black tarn. But there's wood stored there, and candles too, and the five of us, for Owen has brought three huntsmen with him, dine off biscuit and salt-dried mutton, before sleeping beneath the fleece of a bear.
Christmas conies, which Owen and his clan or tribe celebrate with some solemnity.
Mah-Lo, you will have understood how in those climes far to the north of us and even of your own country, the steady decline of the sun towards the winter solstice is a matter of some significance. All people who live in those climes hope and trust that sooner or later it will be halted and when it is, when by fine calculation, based on careful observation of the sun in relation to tall stones set in circles like giant teeth on hill-tops for this very purpose, they can assert with certainty that the sun has risen at a point a little to the left of where it rose the day before and sets a little to the right, they declare that the goddess has conceived and borne a son, which they call Adonis or Adonai".
On that day, out of the hills and woods came priests called druids, not Christian. Their leader bears mistletoe, and they enact certain rituals using drums made from oak, which simulate thunder. The leader carries the ancient sword shaped like a sickle and made of gold with which he cut the mistletoe and with which he now guards it.
He personates in flesh and blood the great god of the sky who has come down in the lightning flash to dwell among men in the mistletoe, the thunder-besom, that grows on the sacred oaks in the deepest valleys of Gwalia, by the side of black and fathomless tarns. The goddess whom he serves and marries is no other than the Queen of Heaven… for she, too, loves the solitude of the woods and the lonely hills, and sailing overhead on clear nights in the likeness of the silver moon, looks down with pleasure on her own fair image reflected on the calm, the burnished surface of the lake, Diana's mirror.
Here, in this country-, we call them Shiva and Devi or Parvati. Thus with due solemnity, and joy, too, the marriage of the gods is celebrated and the birth of the sun, the new year, and the hope of lambs born, barley and rye in the sheltered valleys and fleshy salmon flashing silver up the rivers and streams.
Hut that year, before the twelve days are done, news comes that fills me with foreboding, though Owen says it is good, of the Queen's great victory at Wakefield and the death of York and his son Rutland.
'A nest of vipers has been rooted out,' my lover cries in his deep voice, like an organ. 'Maybe we can now live in peace.'
But as winter deepens, the couriers who gallop up to his gates carry reports and commands as bad as winter itself and most especially bad are those carried by his son.
One day, when we are riding down a long winding valley, under the rowan trees, which still bear the odd berry, not all have been stripped by the birds Owen calls redwings, he comes. No snow now – as always happens on this island it lasted a week and then melted away – but frost again and the ice crackling in the puddles beneath the ponies' hoofs. A couple of red. fork-tailed kites circle in the updraught from a shepherd's croft, wondering if a quick drop on a dead sheep nearby is worth the risk from a mountain cat that's crouched under a boulder with an overhang nearby. And I'm riding in front. Owen is the only man I've ever met who'll let me do that), when I see a couple of men breaking away from the castle wall a mile away, and coming at a steady gallop up the track towards us. Both in half-armour, the one behind carrying a standard – presumably that of the one in front.
I rein in, let Owen come alongside. His broad forehead furrows and he pushes that black lock back. Of course it falls forward again.
'Shit,' he says.
And he lets out a quick sigh, his shoulders sink, and his hands, holding the reins, drop on to the pommel. I sense some life has Leaked out of him and I feel ineffably sad. This man is old enough to be my grandfather, just; he is, well, an old man. As old men do he finds the bad moments, when they come, more and more difficult to cope with.
'What's the matter? Who are they?'
'It's my son. My younger son, Jasper.' You should be glad to see him."
'Of course, yes. But he's been raising the Welsh and the men of the borders for the Queen. He can only be here for one reason.' 'He wants you to join him.' 'Just so.'
The two riders come up with us, wheel, a clatter of metal on metal and this Jasper, whom I haven't seen before, reaches out of the saddle to embrace his father and shake his hand. He looks a little like Owen but fairer, and I can see in his eyes those of Catherine of Valois, whose portrait I have already described to you.
'This is Uma,' Owen says. 'A princess from India.'
I am about to make a disclaimer but catch a look from him. He wants to scotch the rumour that in his dotage he has taken up with a gypsy.
Jasper touches the top rim of his helmet. 'Ma'am,' he says, which is nice, but that's all I get from him.
‘I know why you're here,' says Owen, and it's a tired sort of growl.
'York's at Shrewsbury gathering an army out of the west of Ingerlond. He already has twenty thousand. When he has thirty and as soon as the roads dry out, he'll move on London. There's been a lot of rain in the south. If he gets there and links up with Warwick they'll have the beating of the Queen. Especially as they still have the King in their hands and can say they have his support.'
Well, even at the time I fidget at this and wonder, as no doubt you are too, but they're well into men's talk now as they turn their horses back down the track towards the castle.
'Where is the Queen?'
'After Wakefield she left her army at Hull while she went back north to Berwick-on-Tweed, which they say she'll give to Queen Mary of Scotland in return for more troops and funds. But even with these she and her captains doubt she has the beating of Warwick and York together."
Again I frown but they ignore me. Owen rides on ten paces past a giant yew that spreads its ancient shade, wide as a banyan, over the dry needles and fallen berries beneath it. These berries are cherry red but small, and hide a poisonous black seed in a tiny but fleshy cup. You can squeeze the seed up and it brings with it a colourless ooze like the bead you get on the tip of a… Ah, well,
it's a sad time I'm on my way to, I'm trying not to push on too quick from the happy times.
Owen rides on past the yew then turns to his son.
'So. She wants us to raise a power and get to London before York can.'
'That's it.'
At last I get a word in edgeways.
'But York, and his son, were killed at Wakefield and their heads placed on the gate at the city of York. That's what you told me.'
'He had another son. Older than Rutland.' It's Jasper who answers me. 'And though attainted he calls himself the new Duke of York. Duke and king too.'
'So,' says Owen. 'It's come to that at last.'
Candlemas. The day when the year in the north quickens. They take all the candles they will need in the church for the next twelve months and bless them, but really it's for the goddess whom they call St Bride. In the cottages they make straw dolls of her and lay them in a bed and burn candles round her all night. But that Candlemas was ruled not by St Bride, or Parvati, Deva or Uma, for in the evening of the day following the night of Candlemas, in a town called Hereford, they take poor Owen out into the market square. Poor soul, he cannot believe they will execute him. He has led his men for the Queen in the King's name. Surely that queen whose life I saved is Kali incarnate, a true avatar, dragging the deaths of thousands in her train.
Owen's crime, apart from leading an army against this second York, at a battle a few miles north of Hereford, and losing it, is that he is the stepfather of King Henry. An eye for an eye, is what the obscene scriptures of both Christians and Muslims call for, and so it is a case of a father for a father.
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